Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  She walked directly in Rom’s path, not even seeming to notice the girl – Rom was forced to stop in her tracks to avoid a collision. Rom considered briefly tripping her, but instantly thought better of it. She couldn’t help her lips curling in a slight frown after the woman had passed, however.

  As the woman descended the stairs to the street level, Rom’s eyes were then drawn to a group of six people, all dressed in white cloaks and white masks covering their faces. They also wore hoods, gloves and white boots – none of their skin was uncovered – and wore black belts with a variety of devices and pouches. On each of their shoulders was the only obvious mark of their identities – a patch indicating their rank and allegiance to the royal family.

  The men in white were well known to all in the city – they were called the Induru Il-Faraon, but were publicly called by their official title of The Whitehold – they were the supreme magistrates for law and order in the city, answering only to the Queen herself. To raise a hand against them was considered raising one’s hand against the royal family itself – an act punishable by death or life imprisonment, the distinction only being noteworthy were the royal family to have any use for the guilty party. Rom tried to avoid them as much as possible – they gave her the shivers.

  The men stood in a soft semi-circle, each one’s face pointing in a different direction. One in particular was looking directly at the finely-dressed woman Rom had just been watching, and another glanced briefly at Rom before continuing to look at the other people standing or moving in her general direction.

  Rom recognized the look all too well – it was the look a predator gives its surroundings: looking for prey or other, competing, predators. Rom lowered her head slightly – assuming the illusion of a non-threat, and masking it as the simple pretense of watching her feet as she walked down the stairs.

  At the base of the stairs, the simple direction she needed to take brought her within arm’s length of the group of men. The woman was standing before them while the main figure spoke with her. What they were saying was not clear – their voices were deliberately lowered – but Rom could hear a distinctly recognizable quality to the cloaked person’s voice – a gritty, gravelly tone that was unmistakable. Her eyes flashed to the patch on his shoulder – it wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough to the patch she had found last night on that sand-man she’d fought.

  She stumbled – she’d been so distracted by the tone of the person’s voice and the patch that she’d almost walked into another one of them. Recovering awkwardly, she took a slight breath and got her first real smell of them. There was a strong masking scent in the fabric which all but countered their own aroma, but now that she was so close, she could practically taste it.

  She tried to maintain her composure, but she was certain of it – the Induru Il-Faraon, whoever they were, were the same kind of creatures like the one she’d fought last night. But why? What were they? Who else knew? And why were these in the employment of the Queen?

  Her eyes automatically returned to the Spires of the Royal Palace – designed to be present in almost all perspectives of the city – and then she knew. Of course! She mentally growled at herself. It wasn’t just a Queen and a Sheharid she was dealing with; Rom had to face a Sheharid who was a Queen. Having all the power of a Reaper and the resources of the Queen, why wouldn’t she be capable of generating an army of undead soldiers? An army, Rom thought, feeling the blood rush from her face. An army.

  Rom kept walking, forcing herself not to run. One of these sand-men was nearly too much for her, how much harder would six be? How could she even dream of stopping an army of them?

  * * * * *

  She managed to get to her post without running. The members of the Mechanical Union had their own entrances, several levels below the Administrative Guild or any of the other higher-grade supervisory staff. The doors were all made of the same quality steel – just pure enough to stay solid, but still inexplicably managing to acquire a certain amount of rust at the edges. One of her first overseers used to make the joke, “only an engineer would build a metal city next to an ocean.” She hadn’t gotten the joke then, but she’d remembered to laugh anyway.

  Inside the small chambered entrances were stairways going either up or down or both, depending on the need. Rom’s team worked out of a pillar one mile from the Palace grounds, and several hundred meters straight down.

  She took the stairs down five flights, her boots ringing mechanically against the metal plates with each step. On the fifth floor landing, she entered a side room with a sign upon which was etched the word “Communications”. Inside was an old man with a haphazard and grizzled beard and a pair of glasses which were slid back up on the top of his mostly hairless head. Behind him was a governing box from which exited four different aether tubes, all pointed in different directions. On his desk was a stack of cartridges – some opened, some closed, some empty and some full. As she entered, he was simultaneously removing one new arrival and plugging in an outgoing tube, keying in the destination code and ratcheting back the launch pressure. With a slap of the brass “Send” button and an accompanying explosive hiss, the tube steamed up for an instant as the cartridge was sent speeding away towards its recipient.

  “Hello Galden,” Rom said cheerily. It had been Galden who’d been her strongest advocate for the “ratcatcher” position – although the official title was Bio-logical Hazard Wrangler, everyone just called them ratcatchers. To Rom, it reminded her too much of “ratgirl” – the name Milando had always called her back in the orphanage. But at least with this title came a generous allotment of salary, and overall a lot less actual work.

  Galden dropped his head forward, causing the glasses to drop down onto his beaklike nose. “Oh, Rom, you’re here! That’s just fine, dear, they’re waiting for you down on platform Horun-Twelve. It doesn’t look like anything too nasty, but it’s fast like lightning – got them all up in a tizzy.”

  Rom smiled, and nodded, heading back towards the door.

  “Hold up, Miss,” Galden called. “Forgot your work token.” He tossed a blank disk at her, which she caught and glanced at. Made of a grey soft metal, it had a large empty space framed on one side, with the union insignia stamped into the back.

  She nodded at Galden, tucking the disc into one of the pockets of her uniform. “Thanks!”

  Out in the stairwell, she sighed. “Horun-twelve? It’s gonna take me a half hour just to get down there.” She leaned over the railing into the column of darkness below her. Horun-twelve was the lowest of the tunnel corridors they managed – it was used mostly for runoff from the central sewage and connected to the industrial centers of the city. It also smelled pretty awful. Rom breathed through her mouth, trying her best to fight her way past the nausea.

  The underground service access tunnels were a dizzying maze of conduits and corners, stacked one atop the other. Each section had initially been named for a renowned member of royalty, but after the first twelve levels it had occurred to someone that naming a sewage access network after a member of one’s social elite might be cause for offense. Following the execution of the then-authorized head of the Subterranean Services Guild, a new order was applied of naming the successive levels after the former head of the SSG. Horun was the thirty-fifth and most recent former appointee.

  If there was any amusement to be found on the long stairway down, Rom had exhausted it by the second go-round. She paused on a single stair and stilled her breathing, making no noise. Above and below her, there were only a few random yellowish lights, evenly spaced along the stairs, but leaving the center itself black, like the pupil of a great beast. The entire stairwell was perhaps twice or three times as deep as the wall was high – which was as high as she’d ever jumped. The stairs on the opposite side were only a dozen meters away – a simple distance for her – but the railing matched the stairs, meaning that it was a constant sloping angle. She might be able to hop down, crossing over the central abyss one flight at a
time, but there was a clear chance of making an unfortunate landing on that angled rail. The sum of which meant, unfortunately, she’d have to walk down.

  Rom sighed again. What good is it to have really amazing powers if you never get to use them?

  Resigned, she started walking down the stairs. After five minutes which felt like forty, she began to take them two, three, four at a time, at which point her momentum began to get the better of her. Before long, she was taking the stairs in straight lines and careening off the walls to ricochet along the next corner. When she passed Intom level, she ran up along the wall itself and vaulted herself straight over the rail to land far down, below in the center of the arrival platform of Horun. Belatedly, she breathed a sigh of relief to see no one there to observe her unorthodox arrival.

  In spite of the nagging understanding in the back of her mind as to the potential risk of discovery had someone seen her (in a voice very specifically reminiscent of Mulligan), her face was split in an enthusiastic grin. She looked back up into the darkness above her. Going back up wouldn’t be as much fun – or as quick. But she could worry about that later, she told herself. The best thing about worrying, she always said, was that it was never something you needed to do right now.

  * * * * *

  Talbon and Rian, the group chiefs, were waiting for her at the channel conduit for Horun-twelve. Half the group was there, as well – most were eating lunch, while the team medic was tending to Grapp, their pipe cutter. He was big, but slow – the perfect set of attributes one sought in a cutter. Cutting pipe needed to be done meticulously and carefully, lest cracks form in the cut ends and split open later under pressure.

  Rom handed Talbon the coin she’d been given by Galden and pointed a thumb toward Grapp. “He see it?”

  Talbon nodded, placing the coin into a hinged press and stamping it. Rian placed a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “He didn’t get too good a look at it, but he’ll tell you what he knows. And thank you for getting in so quickly, Rom.”

  Rom beamed. Rian and Talbon were good people. They’d apparently been unable to have more than one child of their own due to some event Talbon had been associated with in University, but Rian’s family caste was enough to make them eligible for two additional press-children. Considering their current status as group managers, it was almost unheard of to be allowed three children, but with the additional government stipend to assist with child care, they did quite well for themselves regardless. It was the most interaction Rom had ever had with actual parents, and it was a bittersweet process of revelation to her.

  She’d romanticized the notion of a family, from her earliest memory until even after she’d discovered what she was. There had been no actual substance to her imaginings – just many smiles and kisses and hugs and meals eaten without the likelihood of being hit by a well-thrown piece of cornbread. Or the simple pleasure of having her own room, or having, really, anything to call her own. She’d found an old pair of glasses when she was very young and had imagined they had belonged to her own father, but had been heartbroken to learn they had simply been left by one of the children who’d been at the orphanage prior to her arrival.

  Aside from a pocket watch and her staff-summoning bracelet, she’d had nothing to call her own – not until living here in this city. Now, she had at least earned a good deal of tradable chits, but aside from food, rent and clothing, she could never decide on what she wanted to purchase. Property and family – two things she still did not completely understand, and yet Talbon and Rian seemed perfectly comfortable with.

  Rom couldn’t bring herself to ask more pointed questions, however, fearing that too many questions might again establish her relative ignorance to things which might be completely common bit of knowledge to the average citizen of Aesirium. So, Rom had tried to absorb all she could by more passive means. From the non-verbal clues of a silent glance or a soft touch upon her husband’s shoulder, Rian told Rom quite a lot regarding familial affections. Talbon’s determination to remain on schedule with a slight talent for making adjustments in the face of unforeseen circumstances was illuminating with respect to his work ethic and ability to find solutions in the midst of challenges.

  What she realized in time was that Rian and Talbon, aside from being managers and parents, were people. Just ordinary people, with the skills and flaws of any other person, but with a focus towards the protection and care for their children above all. Rom sighed without realizing it, then turned away to conceal her blushing cheeks.

  She looked down at Grapp’s ankle, which was getting a thick layer of bandages. “Well, big guy, you find something that could take you down?”

  Grapp coughed nervously, and cleared his throat. “No, no,” he said, letting his voice dip down into his lowest register. “Just fast and… well, bitey.”

  “Bitey?” Rom asked with a smile. “Good to know,” she nodded, pulling a pair of thick gloves out of her bag. They’d been reinforced along the backs and first knuckles with metal and were used by maintenance lifters to keep heavy objects from crushing their hands. Rom had found they worked very well for her, too; the only trouble had been finding a pair small enough to fit her. “What else? Color? Size?”

  “It was pretty dark when it got me – but it couldn’t have been too big, it was just there and gone before I had a moment to see it.”

  Rom nodded. “Fair enough. Where were you?”

  Grapp pointed down one of the two tunnels with an open hatch. Counting the open tunnel Rom had followed to get to Horun junction twelve, there were three main leads, with three smaller mechanical lines interspersed between them. Each main tunnel was color coded, but the paint had been applied so long ago that it was mostly just steel with flakes of something resembling pigment. The hatch Grapp pointed to might have been yellow at some point.

  “First right, pass straight – straight – straight and then left at junction twenty-seven. The first junction after that.”

  Rom made the image in her mind, and nodded. “I’ll see if I can find a nest or something in the area and either chase it out or kill it. Preferences?” She looked from Grapp to Talbon and Rian, who all shrugged. Talbon nodded. “Your call, Catcher. Just try to be done in two hours, we’ve got to clear the tunnels for tonight’s purge.”

  Rom made a face. The purges were the main run of sewage or industrial waste that flooded the lowest tunnels each week; these heaviest flows were followed by a cleansing burst of high-pressure water and a high-temperature blast of steam to scour and purify the walls. It would probably be simpler to just leave the creature in here to get cleaned out by the purge itself, but if Grapp had been caught in the middle of a maintenance project when he’d been bitten, then it made sense to get the area secured so he could patch everything up before it was hit with the elevated pressure that came with a system purge.

  She nodded again and pulled out an expandable baton from her belt, snapping it to length. “Be right back, everyone.”

  Chapter 6: New Friends in Dark Places

  The tunnels were completely eerie when empty. Tinny-sounding echoes of bits of conversation followed her down as she made her way, but she caught herself starting at innocuous shadows that seemed to fold and bend as she passed them.

  Mulligan had taught her how to extend her senses when hunting – in addition to sight (which was all but useless down here under the flickering yellow waterproof lights), smell (a sense she was doing her best to ignore) and hearing, she could sense life itself. More specifically, she could sense the absence of life – a facet of the creatures that frequently had attacked Oldtown up until the great battle she’d been instrumental in ending prior to her arrival here in the city.

  A creature dead but whose soul, for whatever reason, failed to move into the world of spirit generated a feeling in Rom that felt like the first cold breeze of autumn. It felt out of place, drawing her attention to it like bugs to an open flame.

  She wasn’t sure that this thing – whatever it was – was non-de
ad, but she reached out in her mind to see if she could feel it if it was.

  Almost instantly, an echo returned to her. It was small, and definitely fast. It was emanating waves of fear and chaos from it. Certainly, not evil but intelligent. Which meant its attack on Grapp was most likely a defensive response.

  Rom tapped her bracelet and felt the cool reassurance of her staff rest in the palm of her hand. With her left hand, she reached into another of the pouches at her belt and drew out a thick tube and shook it a few times, quickly. The chemicals inside snapped and combined, emitting a cool pale blue glow. She held the tube over her head, getting a better look into the spaces untouched by the tunnel’s fixed lighting. The result was to cast the major part of the tunnel in a sickly green tint.

  It was getting closer now, moving, she supposed, to investigate this new source of light. Ahead of her in the tunnel, she saw a flash of movement. Wow, he really is fast. I’m going to need help.

  She lowered her left hand to tap one of the two gems in her forehead – a purplish light flashed across the hall before her, and, when it cleared, Terenaa was standing, looking about. The faint stripes of her hair seemed to move like countless tendrils emerging from the scaly skin beneath. In her life, she had been mostly nocturnal, and her eyes gleamed, gathering what light she could from the relative darkness of the tunnels. Below the single horn atop her snout, her nostrils flared, taking in what details her eyes could not perceive.

  Terenaa’s nose wrinkled. “This smells like Horun,” she whispered.

  Rom apologized. “Something’s down here – small and fast. It’s scared, and it bites.”

  Terenaa rolled her eyes. “Fabulous. A wild one.”

  “Maybe,” Rom conceded. “I can’t tell.”