Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  Inertia waved his arms, wanted to call out to her, but knew that it was too late. All he could do now was be ready to carve a path for them to escape.

  A flash of light startled him – looking to the source, he saw Force shaking her right hand as if in pain. Two of the nearby aides in the loose cloaks turned to her, and clearly saw her. They both screeched – loud, piercing wails that seemed to shake the very walls of the chamber.

  “So much for careful,” Force said, clapping her hands together towards the machine. Sparks erupted from the device, but the latticework shell around the gem held. “Damnit!” she swore, doubling up her fists and driving them both into the shell. The explosion threw her back across the room. Inertia was just barely able to slow her momentum in time to avoid her slamming into the wall behind them.

  “We have to go!” he said, aware that doing so shattered his own camouflaging spell. He took her by the wrist and they moved quickly up the stairs. The door they had entered earlier had closed again; Inertia, no longer concerned with silence, flat-palmed the air, creating a shockwave that tore the door, the frame and the hinges free from the stones.

  Chaos erupted in the main courtyard as they sped from the central hall, and Inertia dropped an unseen blanket of stasis over the soldiers, freezing them all in their steps. The portcullis was already dropping; Inertia pointed to the nearest section of wall and formed a frictionless tunnel connecting the two of them to that portion of wall, enlarging the end closest to them.

  As Force clapped her hands against the air, the reverberating wave narrowed as it approached the far end, focusing it until it sheared cleanly through the rocks of the wall. Inertia instantly extended the tunnel further to hold the stones in place long enough for them to rush to safety. Once outside, he released the tunnel, letting it all collapse behind them.

  Up on the ramparts, the soldiers were firing arrows and stones at them. Inertia tripled their relative mass, dropping them instantly to the ground well short of their targets, and Force gathered a tremendous ball of energy between her hands.

  “Ready?” Inertia said, flicking a cannonball from the sky.

  “Now!” Force yelled.

  He created the same sort of energy conduit as before, but this time segmented it into a dozen individual tunnels, all in different directions along the top of the wall.

  When Force released her shockwave, twelve separate explosions rocked the upper layers of the castle barrier.

  They had only a moment to celebrate their minor victory before the ground exploded around them.

  “Time to go!” Inertia yelled when he gathered his senses, blinking the dirt from his eyes. Looking around, however, he saw Force lying motionless on the ground several meters away. “Force!” he yelled.

  Another explosion shook the ground, but Inertia was prepared now, and the impact only scattered uselessly around his feet. He made his way quickly to Force’s side, kneeling beside her. She would be fine, he knew – it was impossible to die in this realm, but it was possible to be wounded or have one’s energy drained away to leave them weak like a kitten – but she was presently unconscious.

  He lifted her over his shoulder, mentally preparing himself for the acceptable apology he’d have to give her later for this indignity, and glanced quickly around.

  He finally saw her at the topmost tower of the castle, standing upon a balcony. He didn’t need one of Force’s spyglasses to read the hatred on Artifice’s otherwise lovely face. It did, however, leave him with a problem. If he shifted his energy to allow him to speed quickly from their range, he would have to drop his protection, leaving him vulnerable. But if he maintained his protection, he wouldn’t be able to walk very fast with Force over his shoulder, and Artifice or her soldiers could quickly overtake him.

  He began to walk, backwards, over the fields surrounding the castle. Once, twice, three times again, Artifice blew up the ground beneath his feet. She’s testing my fields, he realized, hoping to catch me as I prepare to fly away.

  A few moments later, the portcullis of the castle rose, and he could see dozens of the soldiers flooding down the ramp in pursuit. Inertia was a good enough runner – he was confident he could have easily gotten away without the weight of his friend; but he likewise could not leave her.

  He growled. “Come on, Force, you need to get up now, love.” He was walking as fast as he could, but the soldiers were closing in rapidly. They would be upon him in only a few more moments. The ground erupted again. And again. Still, it found no purchase, and he was able to continue slowly on.

  At last, the soldiers were close enough that he could see the blank pits of their souls through the eyeholes of their masks, and he knew he must take the chance or risk both their captures.

  He dropped the defensive field and turned to fly them both away but the ground exploded again around them. Concussive waves knocked him to the edges of sense, and several smaller bits of soil and rock struck him before one of substantial mass found purchase at the back of his head. Where it hit him, he felt both cold and heat, but then he felt nothing.

  In the ringing darkness, he reached for Force, and could not find her.

  Chapter 24: Following the Path

  Rom opened her eyes – in spite of her troubled heart, she’d still managed to get at least some small quantity of sleep before Mulligan awakened her with a gentle but insistent nudge. Once awake, however, she could feel it: something was coming.

  He nodded to her. “I sense it as well,” he said, reading her expression. He hopped across the room to nudge Kari. “Rise, little smith,” he purred. Looking back over at Rom, he stepped towards the door. “I will tell the others.”

  “No need,” answered a voice from outside; it was Favo. “Our visionary friend here had something of a dream in the urgent variety. It would appear we can expect company, and a good deal of it. I would suggest we be conspicuously absent when they call.”

  Rom and Kari quickly gathered their things and opened the door, revealing the consistently composed Favo standing beside an anxious Cousins. The younger man looked like he expected an army to break through the doors downstairs at any moment.

  “Good morning, ladies,” Favo said with a flourish. Catching Mulligan’s stern gaze, he added, “And good morning, milord Cat,” he grinned.

  “Feranzanthum,” Mulligan corrected with a hiss.

  “Alas, we haven’t the time for a satisfying debate,” Favo teased.

  Cousins elbowed the taller man. “No, we don’t. We need to go - now.” He put a finger to his lips for silence and led them from their room into the hallway. At that moment, a loud echoing boom sounded from the main doorway in the great foyer below them. Cousins lowered his Looking Glasses to his eyes and scanned the room around them, one hand adjusting the lens aperture as he did so. His lips pursed as he regarded the main entryway.

  “We can’t go that way,” he whispered. They’ll be through those doors in another fifteen minutes. Looking back up to the stairway leading up from their present walkway, his frown changed to a slight grimace. “We’ll have to go up and try to find a way around them.”

  Favo noted the shift in expression. “What is it?” he asked.

  Shaking his head softly, Cousins lifted the glasses back to his forehead. “Don’t know,” he confessed. “I can only see into the future what I can see in the present. But there’s something up there – something powerful, with energy stored up like a pressure tank.”

  Shrugging, Favo half-smiled. “Truly, it’s a choice between the two Reapers, as they say.” Winking at Rom, he amended, “No offense.”

  Rom had heard the expression more than once, but only now did it occur to her that the statement reflected people’s feelings about…her. She arched an eyebrow at Favo. “Funny.”

  “Up, then?” Kari asked. The others nodded. They took the stairs two at a time as the relentless impacts resonated through the hall with their anonymous pursuers’ efforts to break in, eventually coming to another landing with another pai
r of massive doors. These, too, were locked.

  Cousins pulled out his secondary card deck, quickly thumbing through the various spells etched or written on them. Frowning, he closed and replaced the deck into its pouch at his side. “I only had the one - - I don’t have the original spell template with me, so I can’t reproduce it now, either. Ideas?”

  While he and Favo examined the door’s edges and hinges, Kari’s eyes focused on a pair of stylized handprints clearly visible in the center of the door’s design. Something in the way the lines and sigils interwove their way through the hands’ outlines seemed familiar to her. Without thinking, Kari drew her gauntlets from their case and slipped them on. She placed her gloved hands against the corresponding outlines, noting that the gauntlets themselves were only slightly larger than the outlines.

  She had toyed with the gloves often, using the tiny dials and gears that lay beneath the small metal plates that covered the gauntlets, hoping to explore other functions besides the massive strength with which they mysterious endowed her while she wore them. So it was a simple matter to know which gears adjusted which portion of the gloves, and within moments altered the gloves’ size to perfectly match the imprinted outlines. This time when she placed the gloves against the designs, the doors opened.

  Grinning, Kari restored the gauntlets to their original settings as Favo and Cousins stared at her with unconcealed bewilderment. “After you,” she said.

  They pulled the doors closed behind them; heard the dull, rhythmic pounding from below fade to silence, unable to penetrate the new set of doors. Kari studied the gearworks visible on this side of the doors, and spun a central controlling dial which re-engaged the locks. Four central metal cylinders slid across the doors, fitting into respective holes in the stone doorframe. Kari nodded in satisfaction.

  “That should do it,” she said, “I don’t think they’re going to be getting in here any time soon…” Her voice trailed off as she turned around to see the room in which they now found themselves.

  The room itself was nothing special – a simple, perfectly circular space whose only features (aside from the door Kari had just locked) were a smaller circular indentation at the center of the floor which mirrored one on the ceiling and a pedestal which bore a striking resemblance to the one they had found in the Seeing Room downstairs.

  “Perhaps congratulations need be shelved for the moment,” Favo muttered. “Unless you see another way out, that is.”

  “How much time do we have, Cousins?” Rom asked.

  He slipped back on the glasses, dialed into the future. “Maybe an hour, give or take, before they come through those doors.” Turning in place, he shrugged. “But we aren’t here when they do; that’s something, I suppose.”

  Kari stood by the pedestal, examining the strangely familiar symbols etched into small geometrically-shaped tiles that were embedded into its surface. It seemed to whisper to her, drowning out the rest of the room. It was a puzzle, a mystery. It meant something.

  She traced the tiles with her fingers – the tiles themselves were placed on the pedestal, and had a bit of play in them. They were attached, but could be moved. Intuitively, Kari resisted the temptation to press them, however. She’d seen locks like this in the college of Atmology: the patterns themselves were the key to unlocking them. Learn the reason of the riddle, and you solve it.

  All the tiles were the same sandstone color of the pedestal, floor and walls, save for two patterns comprised of overlapping triangles. Centered between upward-pointing triangles, additional triangular tiles lay adjacent to each side, and again on each side of the triangle formed by the first four tiles. Each had additional hash marks on the interior of the triangular tiles, but the pattern on the right had a circle in the middle of each individual tile as well.

  “Hmmm,” Kari whispered. “I know these.”

  Rom looked over her shoulder. “Looks like a lot of diagonal lines and triangles,” she said. “Can you read it, Mully?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not a language,” he said. “It’s a code, I think.”

  Kari snapped her fingers. “The Path of Elements!” she exclaimed. “Remember, Rom, from the classes Professor Theremin taught? About steam and air and fire and water…” her voice trailed off, seeing Rom’s blank stare. “Oh, right. You usually slept through that class.”

  Favo and Cousins moved closer to look at the symbols on the pedestal while Kari continued. “These symbols, I think, are all to represent the parts of the Path – Air, Water, Soil,” she said, indicating the three tiles with single diagonal and horizontal lines. “See, you put those three lines together to form this, the Path of Elements.” She pointed to the central triangle which, per her logic, represented the symbol for the core element of fire.

  “If those are the Path of Elements, then what are those tiles for?” Rom asked, pointing at the flower-like pattern of tiles on the right side.

  “I don’t know, that’s something else – but see here,” the atmologist pointed to the central tile on the right hand design. “These tiles are connected to this one, I think, just like the other three connect to the element of fire. But I don’t know why they’re different…or what they mean.”

  Favo leaned over, pointing to the external sets of three tiles that sat upon the midpoints of the larger sides of the inverted triangles. Three of them also had the familiar hash marks outside of each of the straight lines. “And these would be the corner angles of the triangles, right?” When Kari nodded to confirm his question, he added, “What might those represent, then?”

  “Well, the junctions of the Path of Elements are oil, steel and steam,” Kari explained, pointing to the lower right corner, lower left corner and upper corner angles in turn. “So that must be it.”

  She shook her head. “But even if I knew what these symbols meant, I don’t know what they’re for, or if they even do anything at all.”

  Cousins, still wearing his goggles, was now looking at the floor – specifically, at the circle which surrounded the pedestal. “Strange,” he muttered. He turned from the others and knelt on the floor, leaning down low to the dust-covered stone tiles. “I can see words here, below the dust.” Taking a deep breath, he blew out across the floor, sending a puff of dust floating into the air. Sure enough, below the dust could now be seen a few characters, lightly etched into the floor.

  “Those are scientific symbols!” Kari exclaimed. “It’s one of the first things they teach in the college, how to read the old science tomes. Are there more symbols there?”

  Cousins’ face bore the look of satisfaction as he stood up and dusted the legs of his pants. He pulled one of the decks of cards out and quickly found the one he was looking for. “You never can tell how these spells may come in handy. Better to be prepared than penitent,” he ruminated, casting the card down at his feet. As it vanished into a tiny wisp of smoke, a wave of invisible energy swept across the floor, dissipating the dust until the room was completely clean in the space of a single breath. A contiguous ring of runes could then be seen carved into the floor within the periphery of the circle in which they stood.

  He flipped the glasses again onto his forehead and pointed to a break in the glyphs. “I think it starts there,” he said.

  Kari nodded, reading it aloud:

  “Um Aertho respis, par Aquos bespis, e dan Terrum crescas…” she began. “This is the old language of the order of Makers, we studied this in the college. It means ‘We breathe the air, drink the water and grow from the soil.’ But there’s more here, too,” she said, pointing to the next curving line of text. “e fina nostrum ostor Ignum. That means ‘and our end is through fire.’”

  “Pleasant poets, those Makers,” Favo mused. “Sorry, do go on.”

  “This next part I’ve never seen before, but I can translate it. ‘Un Minthe revelo, par Vinthe sobrela, e dan Agtum prosedas, mas epro Vorunta elevas.’” Her eyes sparkled in the light that emanated through the iridescent mortar. “It means ‘the mind uncover
s, the heart survives and the faith continues, where the will is raised.’”

  She pointed enthusiastically at the tiles. “That’s what these others are - - it’s like some other path, not the path of elements but like, I don’t know, like it but not like it. You know?”

  “A metaphor?” offered Favo.

  “Yeah! That!” Kari pointed to the similar lines, calling out their elemental counterparts. “If this is Air, then the one with the dash and the circle must be Mind. And that means Water is Heart and Earth is Faith – so Fire is Will. Got it!”

  Rom looked nervously back towards the door. “But how does that help us get out of here?” she asked.

  Kari chewed on her lower lip. “Well, I’m not sure. But I think maybe these little tiles can move – like those ones we saw downstairs. So maybe these are controls that open a door somewhere here.”

  “Which one said the word ‘through’?” Favo asked.

  Pointing uncertainly towards the symbol for fire, Kari shook her head. “It says our end is through fire.”

  Favo let a small breath out through his lips. “Not that one, then.”

  “I would concur,” Cousins said. “Perhaps the symbol for Will, then? If it is the counterpart to fire, and fire is our end, perhaps Will is our salvation?”

  Kari agreed. “But it can’t be that simple – they talk about these as the Path of elements. This other, I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s probably a path, too. So it can’t be so simple as just one symbol.”

  “A path is meant to be followed,” Favo quipped. “How might we follow this one?”

  “According to the poem, it goes Air, Water, Soil and Fire – and Mind, Heart, Faith and Will,” Kari repeated.

  “And we don’t want to go to fire,” Rom reminded her.

  Cousins patted her shoulder, eliciting a glare. “No, we have established that,” he grinned.