by Chad Huskins
Thryis smiled and kissed his forehead. “How did you sleep?”
“Very well.” He lied for her sake. And she knew it. “Very well, yes…” He coughed into his hand again. His coughs sounded worse each day, and with each day it seemed to come from somewhere deeper in his chest. “And you? How did you sleep?”
“Perfectly,” she lied right back.
“It’s cold.”
“I know. The Festival of Hyra is soon to happen, so it’s only likely to get colder. But I started a fire.”
“Good girl.”
“Someone said it might snow tonight. Some augurs say a fellstorm may be brewing. It would be an early winter indeed. I wish I could stay with you all day, and build snow fortresses.” Like we used to do, she thought.
“I know, but…it’s time to go, Thryis girl,” he croaked. “Time to—” He broke into another fit of coughs. On bad days his coughs brought blood. Today was a good day. “Time to do as the machine does,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze.
She nodded. She knew what that meant. The weather wasn’t going to relent any time soon, but neither was the work. And the work was all that was left to them. To them, and to all others who had suffered so much from debt they’d been forced to work for the Steamwright Collegium for criminally small pay.
“Can I get you anything before I go?” she asked.
“No, pet. No. I’ll be fine. You know me, you know how I am.” Thronis smiled bravely for her.
Thryis nodded, and gave his forehead another kiss. “I’ll be back when the work’s done.”
“I know you will. And remember,” he added, giving her a serious look. “Keep your wits about you.”
She winked at him. “I will.”
There came a knock from the front door.
“That’ll be Durugi,” she said.
“Best not keep him waiting, Thryis girl.”
Beside the front door were Thryis’s tools. Tools that, in her previous life, she had had no use for. Few people had any use for them, in fact, before a few years ago. But now they were essential, for the world was on the march, as people liked to say. And Drith was leading that march with its technological advancements.
The bag of tools that Thryis prepared included wrenches, hammers, wedges, tongs, pry bars, and turnscrews—all tools that held no place in her vocabulary just a few years ago, but which now were helping her to pay off her family’s debts. Maybe someday, by the power of these tools, they would be free again.
Maybe.
It was a far hope, but even a far hope was better than no hope.
She rushed out the door and faced Durugi. The large, rotund, red-faced man was a Collegium taskmaster, and he had the job of going around and knocking at doors to rouse the workers. “I sent the rest ahead. Go on and join them. I’ll gather one or two more from the rookeries.”
“I’ve said that you don’t have to wake me. We’ve got a clock inside.”
“We’ve all got our jobs. Waking workers up for the work cycle change is mine.”
Thryis watched him go, then headed up the Street of Steel, which, despite the cold, was a lot livelier with work and commerce than one might expect.
Smelters were chugging away hard, pumping out columns of noxious fumes from their flues while apprentices stoked the red-hot coals underneath with tongs.
More than one smithy was at work at their forge, their boy apprentices holding white-hot steel with tongs, pressing it into the anvil. They tapped it with a small pin to show their masters where to strike next with the hammer, a second before the hammer itself came down.
All this work created a song of steel and iron, a loud, one-note tribute to the industry of Drith.
Everywhere a person looked, they saw jingling pieces of steel sitting on shelves or hanging from hooks. Many swords were packaged and awaiting to be taken away to the Avenue of Trade, where they would then be shipped off to the soldiers fighting the border dispute with the Isthysian cannibals, or help invade the lands of the Fortress Kings of Yvulk.
All those events were happening hundreds of miles away, so distant that, to Thryis, they were scarcely more than a legend.
The heat of so many forges on the Street of Steel was a blessing on a cold day like this. Passing between them, Thryis felt somewhat rejuvenated. This was the best part of her morning walk. It was also the worst part, in a sense, because she had to fend off the stray hands of men that reached out to pinch her, or gave her inquiring, lascivious looks.
This was what her father had warned her about. Keeping her wits about her and all. Before they had lost all their businesses to the Collegium, the Ardenkus women had not had to suffer the indignity of walking such streets without male escort.
But now, things were different. The world was on the march, and House Ardenk had been trampled beneath its feet. Thryis and her father were now a part of the machine pushing Drith on, spreading its Empire. All their work was helping to bolster the soldiers and generals a thousand miles away, invading foreign shores and taking treasures to send back to Drith.
Thryis and her father saw none of that. As indentured servants, all they could hope to do was maybe—maybe—pay off the debts her father had been unable to pay when the Steamwright Collegium began to spread, the giant company absorbing all the business in and around the city, making it impossible for independent business owners to thrive.
As she walked, though, Thryis’s mind was less on the failure of her House and more on her dear friend. Drea had suffered much, and Thryis wanted nothing more than to be with her, comfort her, and let her know that not everyone had abandoned her.
It must be easy for her to think that the world has forgotten her and House Kalder, Thryis thought. She imagined Drea locked away again, just as she’d been while an in-waiting bride. Just thinking about it made Thryis want to spit.
She recalled when Drea had lost her father. A madman had approached Imperator Fedarus in a parade, and came at him with a knife, screaming, “Foreign dog! You’re no Drithean!” He’d lunged at the Imperator, but Drea’s father had flung himself bravely in front of Fedarus and taken the knife to his gut.
Drea had been watching in the crowd, and had rushed out to cradle her father’s head as he’d bled to death in the street. Thryis had been with her, and had felt positively useless. Unable to staunch the bleeding, Lord Kalder had died in his daughter’s arms.
Thryis knew that Drea did not like to think of that day, but Thryis recalled it vividly.
The night after her father’s death, Drea had wept uncontrollably, and had only fallen asleep once Thryis had come over and taken her in her arms and laid down with her. Months later, Drea’s mother had killed herself. That had nearly broken Drea, and it might’ve done, if not for Thryis being there.
“She needs me,” Thryis said to herself, resolutely. “Without me, she has no one. No one left to listen to her, to tell her it’s going to be all right.”
She remembered the night they kissed. Perhaps she ought to be ashamed of it—certainly society said it was unladylike—but still, just the memory gave her a thrill. Thryis recalled the confusion felt in both her heart and her mind. A confusion that had also been shared by Drea, apparently, by the look on her face that night. They hadn’t spoken of it since, and Thryis scarcely knew what to think about it.
All I know is she needs me now.
Thryis’s thoughts were interrupted when suddenly, a strange man reached out to pinch her backside. Thryis quickly turned and swatted the hand away. “Smack your bottom!” she shouted loud enough for others to hear, fixing the man with a look. “If you want a piece of meat, there’s a market.” She pointed west, towards the Avenue of Feasts.
The man, who had a face horribly scarred by fire, chuckled to his friend walking with him, who was missing an arm. Then the scarred man opened his purse to show he had a few small coins. “A moment of your time, little girl?”
“You don’t have enough in your purse to afford even another insult from me,” Thryis said.
“Perhaps we have more back at our home,” the one-armed man said. “Perhaps you would like to come and see?”
Thryis turned and walked away.
One of the men called, “We’ll be waiting for you after work, little luv! We know you work on the Great Generator, and we know when you get off!”
Do as the machine does, she thought, fighting to keep her calm. She left the two brutes where they were, and turned towards the steps to the major industry side of the Street of Steel.
Do as the machine does. This was her and her father’s constant reminder to themselves to keep going no matter what, whether through sweltering summers or wilting winters.
Because that’s what they had learned about machines in their time as indentured servants: Machines were dispassionate, machines were dependable, and, as long as you maintained them, machines did their job without complaint until the job was done.
Machines were loyal.
Thryis certainly felt part machine sometimes. Every time she took a step, the gears in her leg clicked and whirled, snapped and clacked. It was a rhythm she’d grown accustomed to. A part of her identity. As much as the daily grind of work in the warehouse had become her identity.
Thryis paused at the Temple of Yanuus to send a prayer up to the Architect God. She knelt at the altar outside, and asked for the patience to make it through another day of dangerous work. She asked for the protection of tenda, spirits of the light, and then dropped two copper coins into the pan of a priest standing nearby.
Thryis reached into her bag to withdraw a small dead rat, which she’d killed the night before. She presented it to the priest, who looked at it and said, “What’s this?”
“You’re a priest, what does it look like?”
The priest’s upper lip curled. “A small sacrifice.”
“Mine is a small prayer. Now take it inside to the altar or I’ll have my coins back.”
The priest shrugged, rolled his eyes, and took the rodent. Thryis continued on to work.
Not too far away, a city crier stood atop a wooden box, announcing the daily news for all to hear.
“Hearken all you! Hearken! Be certain to mark your calendars for next three-moon day, when Lords Syphen, Dustrang, and Det, our holy Triumverate, will become the official ruling body of all of Drith! The ceremonies will take place at the Den of Beasts, at the Hour of the Wolf, during the most exquisite, lavish, and exciting gladiatorial event ever beheld! Hearken all!”
A Triumverate to rule all of Drith, Thryis thought. The fools. Every last Drithean. They’re handing over the keys to the city, giving them straight over to a band of murderers. How do they not see?
At the end of the Street of Steel was the warehouse belonging to the Steamwright Collegium, the largest company in all of Drith, and hence the world. This place was also a part of her identity now.
Even before she stepped inside the warehouse, Thryis felt the heat. She could smell oil, gas, and burning coal, which had once been harsh on her throat but now wasn’t so bad. And she could hear the work chanties the men were singing inside.
“You can work all night and then all day,
You can work those damn shoals of Funnel Bay,
And when you’re tired of hard work for little payyyyyy,
You can work a real job the Steamwright way!”
Thryis loathed those songs. She had to hear them all day long. Mindless, tuneless chanties about how terrific it was to be working for the Collegium. She would rather listen only to the screeching of pistons.
When she walked inside, Thryis checked in with Sylaz, the work foreman. “I’m here,” she panted.
“You’re late,” he grumbled, scratching his bald, angry-red scalp and jotting something down on his wax tablet.
“No, I’m not.”
Sylaz looked at her. He wanted to make her feel guilty, he wanted to take advantage of her noble upbringing that told her never to disagree with a man—it was rude to do so. If he could quell her, make her admit she was late, he could dock her pay.
Sylaz checked his timekeeper bracelet. “It looks to me to be half beyond the Hour of the Rat—”
“And it looks to me,” Thryis said, pulling out her own pocket watch, “like yours isn’t synchronized with the Grand Chronometer in the North Square like mine is.”
He gaped at her. “Where did you get that? You can’t afford—”
“Having my time wasted? I agree. Nor having my punctuality called into question every day,” said Thryis. “That’s why I made this investment, so that I’m not docked any more pay. Now, where am I needed?”
Sylaz eyed her like he would backhand her. “You know, you’re not a noblewoman anymore, little girl. You’re not protected by any special etiquette laws—”
“I’m not protected by anything. You think I don’t know that? I ask again, where am I needed?”
After a few more breaths, Sylaz finally turned his smoldering eyes away from her, and jutted a thumb. “On the tender team. Where else?”
“Thank you, Sylaz,” she said sardonically. “But do you know if they’re still having trouble with the boiler specifically, is what I’m asking.”
“They’re always having trouble with the boiler,” he grumbled, and dismissed her with a wave.
Thryis headed to the back of the warehouse. She passed the smokebox teams, then the air-pump teams, then the turbine teams. She stepped up onto the catwalk and nearly bumped into Vann, the Throttle Captain, who said, “You on my team today, Thryis?”
“No, Captain,” she said. “Unfortunately not. Sylaz says I’m on the tender team today, smack his bottom.”
Vann took off his sweaty hat and ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. “Again? Gods above and below, does he mean to work your other leg to the nub?”
“Probably, if he has his way,” she said with a shrug. What else could she say or do? This was the way of things now.
“Try to be careful back there.”
“Thank you, Vann. You too.”
Thryis walked up a flight of stairs, wincing with the effort of each step. Her clockwork leg worked fine when walking on level ground, but stairs were a chore.
She walked up another flight, then another. She passed by workers sleeping in hammocks—some slaves lived their entire lives in small hovels built into the Great Generator itself, and never saw outside this place.
Higher and higher she climbed. Soon she was looking down on the Great Generator, the Steamwright Collegium’s greatest contribution to Drith, the immense steam engine that now took up the entirety of the Warehouse District.
It looked like a two-story building, with levels upon levels of serpentine pipes, wooden stairwells snaking around its every corner, and exhaust ports that were as large as the entrance to a house. Three times as large as any temple in the city, it was a machine of unprecedented complexity. At each level, cleaners and machinists dangled like daredevils from rope ladders and bosun’s chairs in order to get to those hard-to-reach places.
Light bulbs jutted out of almost every edge, their luminosity telling the maintenance workers how well the electricity was being channeled through a vein. Occasionally, arcs of jagged blue light popped out the side of a control panel like tiny lightning bolts.
A latticework of ropes and structural supports kept this whole machine from collapsing. Portions of the machine looked like something that had become trapped in the web of some colossal spider.
Once brought to full power, the Great Generator would be the next biggest engineering achievement in the world, surpassing even the Aqueduct, which brought water to every home in Drith and fed the Great Generator. The Collegium claimed it would bring electric lights to everyone in the city. At the moment, it had only provided that service to the wealthier neighborhoods.
Thryis made her way down the winding walkways. The warehouse was a cacophony, where all day a welter of screaming voices combined with the drone of slogging pumps and pistons. Even in the confined corridors, where you co
uld hear none of the ongoing work, the walls hummed and the pipes constantly dripped.
And, of course, the men sang.
“So bang those hammers and sing all day,
You’ll see danger almost every day,
And when you’re workin’ hard the people sayyyyy,
‘Hey, you know he’s working the Steamwright way’ ”
She joined up with the tender team at the back of the warehouse, which was made up of a dozen men and women of tiny stature. Everyone with the misfortune of being short and thin eventually found themselves on tender duty.
Each tender was a giant steel barrel roughly the size of her old house, which contained both the water for the boilers and their fuel. Most steam engines used one of three kinds of fuel: wood, oil, or coal. The Great Generator was built to use all three. The intense heat brought the water being filtered into each chamber of the barrel to a boil, and more than ten thousand steel pipes funneled that steam towards the pressurizer.
When Thryis reached the boiler, she didn’t even give Edwon, the team’s leader, time to say good morning. “Where’s the leak?” she shouted over the high-pitched squeals of steam being forced down pipes. There was always a leak.
The skinny old man jumped. “Gods above us! Good to see you, Thryis my girl. Number forty-seven, she’s come loose again. I sent Sysa in, but the heat got to her, she had to be dragged out.”
“I’ll fix it,” she said, peeling off all her clothes except for her boots and her shabby stola.
Thryis made her way over to the giant barrel of cold water, which the Collegium provided at every workstation for workers to dunk their heads and cool off. The Great Generator produced crushing amounts of heat, and just being near it had made workers pass out on their first day.
She quickly pulled her blonde hair back in a bundle before dunking her head. It was going to get disgustingly hot the deeper she went into the tender’s pipe labyrinth.
When Thryis pulled her head back out, she started splashing all her clothes with cold water, soaking herself thoroughly. Then, she pulled on her leather gloves, and turned to face the crisscrossing matrix of pipes.