by J. S. Morin
Rynn opened the door a crack and watched the unlucky kuduk worker who had drawn guard duty as he ambled over to the washroom door. She smirked as he tried the switch and couldn’t get the lever to fit between the contacts.
“You all right in there, Naul?”
When the worker leaned his head into the darkened washroom, Rynn made her move. She snuck out into the hall and onto the stairs. She spread her feet wide, keeping them to the far edges of the treads, but each step protested even her paltry weight.
“Naul?”
“Huh? What?”
Shit!
She had hoped that Naul’s snoring meant he was a sound enough sleeper to remain slumbering through her escape. Not only would his waking spoil the ruse of Naul perhaps being hurt inside the washroom and unable to respond, it would also draw attention back to the landing, where Rynn’s door stood wide open.
Rynn stopped trying for stealth and aimed for speed. She leapt down the steps three at a time and hit the bottom ready to run. She paused just long enough to get her bearings in the workshop, then headed for the packing area.
She ran among the machines, heedless of what might be on the floor. If the mechanics and metalworkers had been lax in their nightly tidying, she would have to live with whatever happened to her feet. She stubbed a toe on the leg of a workbench and unleashed a Kheshi curse that no kuduk words could match for vitriol.
Rynn heard the shouting above as her absence was noted. There were thundering steps on the stairs, heading her way. She found what she was looking for: the shelf where the day’s production was stored, ready for shipment. The wire-metal shelves were stacked with lightsteel cases, each with DANGEROUS CONTENTS stenciled on the side. She tried the clasp on one and found it stuck. She moved to the next, and it was the same.
Damned kuduk fingers. There was nothing wrong with the clasps, she just lacked the strength to pry them open. She scanned about, and in doing so saw the kuduk night watchman making his way across the workshop.
“You, stop that! Get away from those!”
Don’t put coin on that happening!
Rynn found a screwdriver and used it to lever a case open. There were six of her coil pistols inside, neatly resting in cradles, packed around with straw. She pulled one out and spun, leveling it at the worker.
“Bolt your feet down!” Rynn shouted. She was short of breath and panting. It felt good to be holding a gun.
The kuduk worker slowed, but shook his head. “Ain’t loaded, girl.” Rynn had a moment to take stock of her adversary. He was thick, even for a kuduk, with a black beard trimmed so short it would pass for stubble on some. He was a metalworker, one of the brutes who did the coarse work before the artisans took over to finish.
“Oh yeah?” Rynn replied, feigning a bluff.
“You should know. Those take half-inch ball bearings as bullets; we have an order due for ‘em in two days. Ain’t got one that size in this whole place. That ... and you ain’t turned the dynamo on.”
Without taking her aim from the kuduk’s chest, she reached over to the shelf and retrieved the screwdriver. She shoved it into the open barrel of the coil gun until the handle stopped it.
The kuduk chuckled. “Hand it over, girl, and lemme take you back up to bed before we have to get the bosslady involved.”
“Catch,” Rynn said. Instead of tossing the gun, she pulled the trigger. Spark arced from runes on the barrel and the gun grew heavy. She never saw the screwdriver go; it just disappeared. The click and spark happened simultaneously, and before she could even flinch, there was a horrendous crash from the far end of the workshop.
It took a second for her eyes to register the scene. The kuduk slumped to the floor. The workshop was misted with red, as if someone has burst an oil line, but that line had been filled with blood. Rynn’s initial plan had involved stealing clothes from the worker on duty—something with pockets and any sort of footwear—but she ruled that out instantly. The kuduk’s boots might have been intact, but his clothing was in ruins, and she suspected that the boots would be both grossly oversized and grossly soaked with blood.
The gun had returned to its normal mass before it had a chance to tear itself from her hand and smash to the floor. Aside from an instantaneous weirdness to the feel of it in her hand, she hadn’t noticed the effect at all. Increasing the apparent mass of the thing worked as well to handle the recoil as fixing it in place, and didn’t get stuck that way. The lightning runes had worked to specification. She had no way to measure the output, but she suspected it exceeded what her dynamo design had been capable of.
Having bought herself time, Rynn searched among the clean workbenches on her half of the workshop until she found the tools she needed to remove the dynamo from the coil gun. The resulting weapon was lighter in her hand, and easier to handle. She tossed the tools in the case where she’d found her gun, along with a spare screwdriver.
She found a bin of nuts that were nearly a half inch and loaded them into the magazine. They’d scratch up the insides of the barrel something awful, but they’d serve for the time being. Rynn juggled two cases of the guns, the coil gun she’d modified, and the detached dynamo, and made her way upstairs. She kept her gaze well away from the ruined wreck of kuduk meat on the floor, and threw down a few bars of steel to bridge the spray of blood.
Upstairs, she found Naul sitting on his bed, knees pulled up to his chest. “What are you going to do to me?”
Rynn wondered the same. “Despite what you tried to do the other night, I’m still willing to take you with me. You’re human. You can learn.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“Naul, listen to me. The guard is dead. The racket downstairs wasn’t loud enough to draw knockers’ attention; it was just someone knocking over a table of hardware for all they know. We can get away.”
Naul shrank even farther into the little ball he was curled into. “I don’t want to run away.”
Rynn studied him a moment. Shadowed by the light pouring in from the landing and the pale glow of the gas lamps outside, he resembled a corpse: a hollowed out shell of a human, devoid of spirit. That’s what Naul was.
“Fine. I still won’t kill you. But you’ve got to do something for me.”
“What?” he whimpered.
She held out the dynamo. “Take this, and give it to Delliah and Ordy.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a dynamo that I modified to give a message. It acts like a music box, but it can only play once. Make sure they’re both there to hear it.”
“A music box?” Naul asked. “I’ve never heard one.”
“Well, if you’re not going to run away, you get to hear one when you deliver this.”
“Thank you, Rynn,” Naul said. He gazed up at her with such a pathetic look in his eyes that Rynn hesitated. She handed him the dynamo anyway.
“It acts like a regular dynamo until you turn it all the way. That’s what starts the message. You understand?”
Naul nodded.
“You know where Delliah lives?”
Naul nodded again.
“Then get going.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“But—”
The barrel of Rynn’s coil gun cut short Naul’s reply. Rynn preferred to win arguments based on the merit of her words, but she’d never heard of a gun losing a debate.
Naul slunk past her on his way out the door. She heard the steps creak as he went down, and the girlish shriek when he reached the workshop. She stood at the top of the stairs until she heard the door close behind him.
Rynn took her improvised toolbox and set to work on the lock to Delliah’s office. She could have blasted her way in, but she was more interested in looting than outright vandalism. Still, she ended up using one of the sturdy metal cases as a hammer to drive the screwdriver into the lock.
Rynn threw the light switch just inside the office door, then set about ransacking the room. Amid correspondence, ledgers, invoices, bills of
lading, and other mundane paperwork, she found a stash of tenar notes—the workshop’s petty coin. She also found Delliah’s rain slicker, a knit vest with two small pockets, and an antique letter opener. She donned the first two and added the last to the case.
The shoulders of the rain slicker dropped down to her upper arms, and she had to cuff the sleeves for her hands to stick out the ends; Rynn felt ridiculous. The saving grace was that the collar of the slicker could turn up to hide her slave collar.
Rynn ventured back down to the workshop and opened the floor hatch that led to the service level. The hatch took all Rynn’s effort to lift, and she worried that if she dropped it, it might cut clear through her foot. The stairway it revealed was metal grating, the sort she was used to in most of Eversall Deep. If the poured-stone of the workshop was cold, the stairs were like ice. Rynn winced and pulled her foot back, then gritted her teeth and forced herself to go down. She stashed the two cases, put the coil gun in her pocket, and ran back up the stairs. Rynn let the hatch slam shut, jumping back to keep her feet clear of the human-sized rat-trap.
The streets of Grengraw Sky were just pockets of light around gas lamps—they didn’t even have civic spark lights like a proper city—all else was darkness. Rynn felt like a street thug from Darkport or Marker’s Point, dressed in black and stalking the midnight alleys of a slumbering city in Tellurak. Of course, her cloak was actually an ill-fitting rain slicker, reeking of linseed oil.
She wished she had asked directions from Naul before chasing him off. Useless as the boy was, he had lived in Grengraw for years. He had to know his way around at least a little. Rynn stopped and slumped against the wall of a public house that had closed for the night. She looked up at the soot-blanketed sky and hoped that Naul would run. Much as she despised the boy, he was the creature that Delliah had molded him into. He was shackled more tightly than Rynn had ever been, because they had him by the spirit; a leash that never gets tugged on can never be broken. If he could tug just enough to realize they weren’t even holding the other end, he could run any time he wished.
Rynn forced herself to start walking again. She had business to attend to and no time for introspection. She could afford guilt once she was safe. She turned down a side road, reading store signs as best she could in the dingy light from the gas lamps: Rikado’s Meat & Sausage, Tannik Candles, Tick Stop Timepieces, a place called Honofoke and Sons that didn’t indicate their trade, and a number of other unhelpful businesses.
At last she came to a shop that looked promising: N.K. Faimes, Work Outfitters. There was a gas lamp illuminating the faded paint on the wrought iron sign. Rynn looked both ways for a trolley—an old Eversall habit—and scurried to the door as she noticed a figure in the gloom.
“What’s a rat-eater doin’ out this hour?” a male kuduk voice grumbled. Rynn glanced over and saw the kuduk pick up his pace and head her way.
Instead of answering, Rynn finished her crossing of the street and ducked into an alley. It was totally dark and she swore softly as she kicked a metal can and sent it clattering. She ducked low and crouched against the wall of the clothing shop.
“Human, I said what’s yer business—”
Rynn allowed the head-knocker two steps into the alley, so that the backlighting from the street framed him before she pulled the trigger. Click. Spark. Thump. A second passed before the head-knocker’s body collapsed to the cobblestones, causing another, louder thump. Rynn couldn’t see the damage the nut had done, but she had to imagine it left a cleaner hole that the screwdriver had. She didn’t stop to check. She hurried back out to the street before the blood spread to cover the width of the alley.
The street was quiet. She had tried to angle her shot upward to avoid loud collateral damage. The nut might have landed outside Grengraw Sky for all she knew.
The door of N.K. Faimes was old-fashioned wood; a stenciled glass window bore the company name and a hammer-and-wrench emblem above a pair of boots. The lock looked just as old as the wood, but unfortunately, Rynn had only brought one tool. She pressed the barrel of the coil gun against the lock and shielded her face with her free arm.
The jolt shattered the glass and tore the door open. Rynn winced at the noise, but knew that any knocker that heard it was at least the next patrol zone over. She had time, even if there was someone who was going to come investigate another knocker’s beat.
Rynn’s took a step. She had forgotten that her feet were bare. Shards of glass sliced open the sole of her foot.
No ... no ... no ... Not now! I don’t have time for this.
Rynn slumped back and plopped down outside the carpet of broken glass which littered the shop floor. She pulled her foot up into her lap and removed a pair of bloody shards. Panic set in as she realized she was on a countdown, both to dawn and to Jamile’s anticipated arrival. She needed to get moving. She needed to figure some way to do it with a bloody foot, since there was no chance of finding a doctor if she still wanted to escape.
Rynn let the foot bleed and squirmed her way out of the rain slicker. She stood, hopping on one foot with just a tiptoe’s support from the other, and spread the slicker over the glass in the entryway. She had sweat beneath the stifling oiled cloth, and the night air made her shiver. Rynn walked over the slicker, putting as little weight as she could on the injured foot, hearing the glass crunch beneath each step.
The insides of the shop were worth the effort. It was filled with shelf upon shelf of work clothing, from aprons to work boots. The first thing Rynn sought out was a flimsy garment meant for tavern workers; she tore a sleeve off it and turned it into a bandage for her foot. It was a temporary measure, but it was comforting nonetheless to not be leaving a trail of her own blood with each step.
Rynn scanned the shelves until she found mechanics’ coveralls. They weren’t in short supply, but she was lucky to find a set that would fit her. She imagined that the tailor who made them had a young apprentice lad in mind. Rynn wriggled out of her dress in the chilly air that blew in from the shattered door. The coveralls fit ankle to wrist just fine, but ballooned around her torso. She had envisioned it fitting tight in the chest and loose about the waist, but her meager curves did nothing to fill it out.
A pair of solid work boots was Rynn’s next purchase. The smallest pair in the store fit her feet, but they left enough width that the bandaged foot was the better fit. They laced halfway up her shin and had metal reinforcement in the toes; they’d be perfect if she needed to kick someone.
By the time she found a tool belt to hug the coveralls to her body, Rynn was feeling positively human again. Not just human, but Tellurak human—the free sort. She tucked her coil gun into a loop designed for a hammer, and limped around the shop, both to test her foot and to look for anything else she’d need. She took a fur-lined field-workers’ coat and tucked a pair of thick leather work gloves into the pockets. The trigger guard on the kuduk-made coil gun was large enough that she could easily fit a gloved finger on the trigger. She browsed the shelves until she found goggles that were meant to fit over spectacles; not every mechanic ground theirs for vision correction. She also found a few breather cloths—it was a wonder that anyone walked the streets of Grengraw without them—and tied one on immediately, covering her nose and mouth and securing it around the back of her head. Almost as an afterthought, Rynn found a scarf and looped it twice around her neck, once beneath the collar, once around to obscure it. The wool felt like silk against her skin compared to the bare iron.
Rynn had entered the shop. Chipmunk walked out.
Back at Slatemore Rune Services, Chipmunk dragged a table in front of the door. Putting the strain on her injured foot reminded her that the bandage wasn’t a cure-all, but she was able to get around well enough on it. There was no sign that Naul had returned, which was just as well. His fate was in his own hands.
There were cabinets scattered about the workshop. Chipmunk raided them systemically, carrying out jugs of acetone, rubbing alcohol, and a variety of lubrica
nts and oils. She opened each and spattered the contents around the ground floor. She also took the two remaining cases of her coil guns down from their shelves. The first she took upstairs with her and pried it open it on Delliah’s office desk. She took one of the weapons out and twisted the dial on the bottom of the dynamo all the way. The runes glowed an angry blue and the gun quivered in her hands. Rynn dropped it back in the open case and ran, pulling the door shut behind her. Her foot stabbed with each step, but it seemed a scant price to pay when the floor jolted beneath her feet. The shock wave from the explosion sent Chipmunk stumbling against the stair rail, but she kept moving.
When she reached the bottom, she opened the second case. There were only two guns inside. Chipmunk left them for a moment and found her sketches and schematics scattered around the workshop. It was the hardest thing she’d done all night, but she threw them to the floor and watched as the acetone soaked them through.
Opening the hatch felt safer with a pair of gloves and steel reinforced work boots on. She scratched a few runes on the underside, runes that hadn’t worked out well on gun barrels, but seemed better suited to cover an escape. She looked down into the darkness below and had one final thought.
Chipmunk ventured back upstairs to find the landing in shambles. She picked her way across smoking rubble, thankful for the breather cloth. Delliah’s office was open to the outdoors, but it was Naul’s room that interested her. The boy’s piecework was still strewn on the floor; Chipmunk picked up two pair of the goggles and pocketed them, then made her way back downstairs.
Outside she could hear shouting. The door muffled the words, but the thumps against the door told her she had only moments before the head-knockers or the neighbors or whoever had come to investigate the explosion were about to gain entrance.
Rynn took a few deep breaths, staring into the case. First one, then the other dynamo she twisted to its full extent. She threw them out into the workshop: one toward the door, one to the pile of documents with her weapon sketches. I can make more. The next ones will be better.