Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  Kari looked at the pattern of triangles on the right. “These are the tiles we want to use, then. Mind, heart and faith,” she repeated. She touched one fingertip against the tile she assumed to be “Mind”, and it depressed with a soft click of stone against stone. She then touched the other triangles that lay against the central “Will” triangle – “Heart” and “Faith” – and these, too, clicked into place, recessed slightly beneath the surface of the other tiles. Her finger paused above the “Will” triangle, about to depress it as well, but then she checked herself.

  “No,” she corrected, “where the will is raised.” With the other three adjacent triangles depressed, she could now grasp the “Will” triangle with her fingertips and pull it up. It rose slightly, snapping and locking in position.

  With a low rumble, the circle upon which they stood began to rise from the floor, even as the stone circle within the ceiling rolled up and away, revealing a larger chamber above them. The slab paused long enough for them to step off into the new room before dropping back down into its original room and the hole being sealed up again.

  Once the room was again sealed, it was filled with a warm light – Kari put a hand on Rom’s shoulder to steady herself.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “So…much…sound!”

  Cousins stepped quickly beside her, concern evident on his face. She waved her hand, blinking her eyes to help regain her focus. “I’m okay, I’m just… wow.” Her eyes looked past Cousins to rest upon a large object which sat in the center of a dizzying construct of cables and large copper gears. Though it had apparently been inert only a moment before, the gears and pistons slowly began to move in turn with tiny, whispering clicks and clacks as the cogs snapped into place. Within a few moments, all the parts of the great machine were moving in a dizzyingly synchronized mechanical ballet, like the audible crescendo of a swiftly moving storm. The four of them paused to look on in incredulous wonder at this construct which had clearly not been witnessed by anyone in some time.

  The machine itself was the size of a small house, so dense that they could not see space between any two of the pieces. But it was the object in the middle of it all that was visible from any location in the room that held all their attention. Though it stood nearly three meters tall and was easily more than one and a half meters across, the object glowed, gently and warmly, as if politely welcoming them to its home. It looked like a giant deep yellow colored egg, semi-translucent with the organic cracks and imperfections visible through the surface.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Cousins gasped. “I didn’t know they were ever that big!”

  Kari’s head bobbed. Every magically-endowed item possessed a certain harmonic resonance – to some rare individuals, this translated to a tangibly audible structure, described by most as a kind of music. Kari was notable among these few, having unlocked the inverse comprehension of this. She was far more sensitive to the resonant energies found in magic – but the sheer amount of magic stored in the object before her was nearly overwhelming. She took a deep breath and stood straight, staring into the heart of it, even as her mind was attempting to calculate how much time and artistry it must have taken to build this.

  “That’s a Morrow Stone,” she confirmed. Just, the biggest one that’s ever been made, she added silently.

  Chapter 25: The Construct

  While Kari’s attention was fixed upon the machine’s countless moving parts and radiance, Cousins and Favo took a quick survey of the rest of the room.

  The impressively sizable machine was dizzying enough by itself, but was dwarfed by the even more breathtaking room in which it had been constructed. From the inside, it was now obvious that the mountainside itself had been used as a source for the building’s materials – the smoothed walls ran almost imperceptibly into the interior of the natural stone, extending into the depths of the cliff far past range of the glow generated from the enormous Morrow Stone.

  “Hmm,” Favo frowned. “No obvious exits, save for that grand and gaping hole into darkness. And of course it has to be grand and gaping; if all exits were beautiful, we’d all be nomads.”

  “Assuming it has an exit,” Cousins mused, skepticism evident in his voice. He peered for a moment though the Looking Glasses, but gave up and slipped them back up onto his unruly blond tangle of hair. “It goes fairly deep into the rock, I can’t see the end from here.” He sighed, adding, “But I don’t see any other option, either.”

  “Perhaps you should peer through those wonderful lenses of yours and tell us which way we will go,” Favo offered. “It would certainly resolve any indecisiveness on our parts.”

  Cousins frowned. “They don’t quite work like that – a lot of things are out of focus, like they haven’t quite been decided yet. Some things are definitive, and those I see.” He glanced around the room. “I couldn’t see how we leave here, for example.”

  The older man clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, then. Let’s go for a quick explore while we wait. Perhaps there’s a path in there yet. If we find an exit, we’ll have the girls follow after.” Favo tossed a small clear vial to Rom. “It’s a Summon Solution – I’ve got the mate to it. When it starts to glow, it means we’ve found a way out and to come follow us. And if you need us, shake yours and the one I have will glow. Got it?”

  Rom peered curiously at the vial of otherwise nondescript liquid. “Okay,” she said. “But if they catch up to us, we can always just fight them. They’re strong, but I beat them before.”

  Favo arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps so, but we don’t yet know of their numbers. And personally,” he added with his characteristic lopsided grin, “I’d like to face them on a terrain of my choosing.”

  Kari was too engrossed with the intricate workings of the machine to see Cousin’s concerned expression as he and Favo turned and walked off into the natural cave at the end of the large room.

  For several moments, Rom stood near Kari while her friend leaned her head against a smooth panel of the machine, with only the sound of the clicks and gears to break the silence. Eventually, Rom stepped closer and tapped her friend on the shoulder. “You still alive in there?”

  Kari nodded. “Wow. It’s so….shiny.”

  Grinning at Kari’s enchantment, Rom asked, “So…what’s it do?”

  “I’m not sure. But,” the young smith added with a sigh, “I think it does… everything.”

  “Everything?”

  She nodded, and took a deep breath before explaining. “Remember how the Morrow Stones we made for the machines have that music in them? Every kind of music has its own song, and I can hear songs in here. So many songs: songs about Machines, and other things too.” Kari looked at Rom through half-closed eyelids. “It sounds like it can do almost anything you tell it to do. Like,” she explained, “I think maybe the Morrow Stones weren’t just for making the machines work, I think there are different stones with different songs that work for different kinds of magic. And I can hear them all inside here. It’s just…” she closed her eyes to focus a moment before continuing, “there are so many layers, it’s hard to make sense of them all.” As she listened, Kari began to softly hum some of the songs she heard, deep within the stone, struggling to track the melodic lines and arcane phrasings.

  Rom leaned her staff against one side of the machine while she pressed her knuckles into her lower back and stretched. Sleeping on the ground last night left her achy and grumpy. Mulligan was somehow managing to rest while they waited – he possessed the very catlike ability to nap with little preparation or warning – occasionally, like now, while draped over Rom’s shoulders. She wished she had someplace soft to sleep right now. Reaching back out, she took the shepherd’s crook back in her hand, but for a moment, it would not move.

  “Hey!” she said, pulling it harder. A shiver of cold passed through the staff and down her hand to the bracelet on her wrist. When the chill reached the bracelet, the black gem flashed white like a brief and distant ball of lightning. Rom nearly
dropped the staff in surprise.

  Kari spun towards her. “Wow, did you hear that?”

  Rom clutched the crook protectively. “Hear what?”

  Squinting, her friend huddled nearer to the large machine, pressing her ear as closely as she could. A smile crept across her face as she raised one index finger triumphantly. “There it is, I can hear it in there now, too.”

  “Hear what?” Rom’s whisper echoed eerily across the room.

  Kari drew herself away from the machine, sighing softly to organize her thoughts. Rom had a fleeting image of the orphanage’s science teacher, Professor Theremin. He always took a long pausing breath to get the class’ attention before launching into a long speech. Rom chewed on her lip to keep from grimacing at the memory.

  “Well, your staff has a song in it, too – it’s just very complex and soft, so I don’t always hear it,” Kari explained. Pointing her thumb back towards the large stone, she added, “This stone just learned your staff’s music. Or its magic. Or something. I can hear some of that music in the stone, now.”

  Rom’s eyes widened. “It can do that?”

  Nodding absently, Kari’s scientific mind was already exploring other options. She pulled her gearworks gloves and slipped them over her hands. Taking a slow, calming breath, she placed her gauntleted hands against the side of the machine. Her eyes widened, and a smile crept across her lips. “I can hear them,” she whispered. Softly, she began to whistle a tune she alone heard, emanating from the gauntlets.

  “What are you doing?” Rom asked, taking a step closer.

  “Just…checking a theory,” came the answer. “Hmmm,” Kari mused. “That’s weird.”

  Rom could see the small metal plates shaking on the gloves, flickering and shivering. “What?”

  “Well, I can hear the song from my gloves – they were made with a bit of art as well – but now there’s something else. It’s like the stone is…” Her forehead furrowed.

  Taking another step closer, Rom placed a hand on Kari’s shoulder. “Kari?” She asked, concern mounting in her voice. “Your gloves, they’re…”

  Kari nodded. “Yeah, they’re moving,” she said, pleased that her concern didn’t make its way all the way up to her voice. Inside the gauntlets, she could feel the countless gears moving randomly within the layers of steel plates that formed them. Faster and faster they moved, eventually causing her anxiety to grow past her scientific curiosity. She flexed her fingers to release the machine, but the gloves would not move. Struggling another few moments, she then relaxed her hands and tried to slip her fingers out of the gloves themselves.

  “Rom?” Kari’s voice trembled. “I can’t pull my hands out!”

  Nodding curtly, Rom reached out to grab her friend around the waist and tugged. Seeing no results, she moved quickly to stand closer to where the gloves met the machine and gripped them at the wrists. She looked towards Kari and waited for her nod to proceed. But though she pulled as fiercely as she could, Rom could not pull the metal gloves from the machine.

  Rom looked from her staff to the machine to Kari, and back to the staff. Tapping the gem on her bracelet, she shifted the shepherd’s crook to its most durable form: the large two-handed sword.

  Kari’s eyes widened fully. “Rom, what are you doing?”

  Rom nodded towards the machine. “I’m going to hit it until it lets you go,” she explained matter-of-factly.

  A low mechanical hum began to flow from the gloves as the previously disorganized gears spun and fluttered beneath the metal scales; now they pulsed and vibrated in tandem. Under it all, Kari heard a slow melody developing beneath the cacophony. “Wait a moment,” Kari cautioned. “I…don’t think it’s going to hurt me.”

  “If it does,” Rom began to warn, though she wasn’t entirely sure how she could follow up with an effective threat. “Well, I’ll think of something.”

  After several minutes, the music reached its apex and then, slowly, faded back into silence. The gears of the gauntlets also lessened in movement, gradually falling completely still. Kari took a slow, calming breath, and flexed her fingers – the gloves responded, releasing the machine. She frowned slightly, shaking her head.

  “What?” Rom asked her, still on her guard.

  “I’m not sure. I think…I think it’s done now.”

  “Done with what?”

  Kari shrugged. “I don’t know. But,” she added pensively, “I think they learned something.”

  Favo slid a specially-designed tube into a slightly curved mirror, sending an amplified cone of light against the far wall. They’d left the tiled floor and walls several turns back, and no illumination made it this far on its own. Cousins shifted the lenses on his Looking Glasses into a filter that allowed him to see even when almost no light was present.

  Pointing to a large but uniformly excavated area to their right, Favo explained, “It looks like they used that whole area as a quarry or something. The stone there looks the same as the interior of the last couple rooms we saw.”

  Nodding, Cousins added, “Fairly old, by the looks of it. The ceiling isn’t perfectly flat, though: those smaller stalactites are almost a meter long. That would indicate almost a millennia of growth to reach their current length.”

  Favo glanced at him over his shoulder. “Your glasses told you that, didn’t they?”

  With a brief chuckle, Cousins shook his head. “No, that would’ve been before these were made,” he explained, tapping them lightly on the right side. “Just doing the math. A cousin of mine used to go exploring in some of the caves and tunnels beneath Oldtown, told me you could tell the older tunnels by the growth of the roots of the Aerthian tree, as he called them.”

  The older man considered Cousins for a moment before moving on. “You know, chap, one thing has always puzzled me about you.”

  “Only the one?”

  “No, certainly,” Favo conceded. “But this nonsense about you and your mythological relations. You have no actual family per se, and yet you do enjoy inventing these nameless cousins of yours.”

  Laughing, Cousins moved cautiously around a slick-looking flowstone in the uneven floor in front of him. “Well, it occurred to me when I was quite a bit younger that the people of Oldtown do not easily lend themselves to trusting others. Especially not ones who comes from the other side of the Wall.”

  “Ah,” Favo said, realization dawning on him. “So you invented a family to give yourself the appearance of trustworthiness.”

  “I resent the implication,” Cousins smirked into the darkness. “I do have a family.” After another moment to look around for the most logical route through the increasingly dense layers of tooth-like deposits, he added, “I simply don’t know who they are.”

  “Perhaps I could help with that,” Favo replied. “I’ve developed a fair network of information within the city, and I could possibly help track them down for you, if you were interested.”

  Cousins considered this for a moment, but shook his head. “Maybe later,” he decided. “I’ve grown rather fond of the embrace of the illusory, if that makes any sense.”

  Favo’s laughter echoed through the cavern. “You well know it does,” he answered. “But this I can attest, my friend: an illusion will only last so long. At some point, you must confront your own demons, or one day they will consume you.”

  “Speaking of demons,” Cousins said, suddenly intent on shifting the subject to something less uncomfortable, “Whatever happened to Molla? The last time you passed through, you said something about her, and it sounded decidedly past tense.”

  It might have been the engulfing darkness compelling him to honesty, but Favo heard himself explain it as if it had come from another person’s lips. “I killed her,” he said. “I tracked her down in the city not long after Rom took off – shadowed her for a few days and caught up with her, alone outside her private quarters, and pushed her off the platform onto the streets below.”

  Uncertain of how to respond, Cousins said
nothing.

  “I cleaned out her rooms of as much as I could get my hands on, and stored it away until I could get a habitation of my own and laid low until the general excitement following the news of her death had faded.” His voice had taken on a distanced quality, less melodic than the tones in which he usually spoke. “And, as things have a way of doing when you live among so many other people, the loss of a single life simply fades into the deep, and you are forgotten.”

  “She…meant a good deal to you,” Cousins said, more as a statement than a question, “didn’t she?”

  Favo nodded, a gesture Cousins could only see due to the filter of his glasses. “The honeyed poison does not always kill; but it always leaves a wound,” Favo said, breaking the long silence that came after with a short sigh. “This is going nowhere,” he said at last.

  “Beg pardon?”

  Favo shone the light in a full circle. “The only way from this room is where the floor disappears under that low ceiling – and I hear rushing water through there.”

  Crouching low, Cousins looked into the depths of the shadows and confirmed the older man’s assessment. “Yes, I can see it, far off. Even if we could fit through there, which we can’t, we’d have to swim for most of the way.”

  “Let’s go back. Perhaps the girls have found another door.”

  “Knowing them, they’ll have already taken it, if they found one.” Though they both laughed at this, they both subconsciously quickened their pace, deciding it was better to be prompt than let Rom or Kari grow bored in their absence.

  Chapter 26: The Consideration of Alternatives

  Pleased to see them both where they’d left them, Cousins and Favo described the caverns. “We went into the mountainside pretty far,” Cousins explained, “but there doesn’t seem to be a path out.”

  Favo added, “After a good ways, it becomes too narrow to proceed.” He tapped Cousins on the shoulder, pointing back towards the way they had originally come up into the room with the large Morrow Stone. “Any new chance of our friends finding us?”