Steelhands (2011)

by Jaida Jones

  Except if I’d had hot chocolate up in the air, I’d probably have gotten the lot of it on my face instead of in my mouth.

  “That sounds fine,” Adamo agreed. “If it’s all right with your ladyship, of course.”

  I grinned into my cup, blowing on it to let off some of the steam. Somehow, no matter how long I waited, I ended up too impatient and I always burned my tongue. Despite that, it was delicious, not too sweet but not too bitter, either. Adamo downed half his paper cup in one big swallow, then grimaced.

  “Don’t like things sweet,” he explained, when he caught me staring at him.

  “Guess I’ll just have to make sure that coffee I buy you doesn’t have any milk or sugar,” I said.

  “Bastion bless,” someone said from behind us. “Owen Adamo, what are you doing?”

  It was a man with a posh kind of voice, though it wasn’t so snooty that I took an instant dislike to him. He didn’t have a look on his face like he was smelling something bad all the time, either, and he had nice eyes above a big nose. My first impression wasn’t all bad—just that he was a little too citified for my tastes. Standing next to him, just a shade taller, was someone I did recognize: the lecturer’s assistant Toverre’d taken it into his head to fall in love with for no reason other than his sky-blue eyes and glorious freckles, which in my opinion weren’t all that glorious, anyway. At least the situation with Gaeth seemed to have distracted him from that nonsense of late, though I had my own private assumptions about why. Hal stamped his feet and puffed into his hands with the cold, offering Adamo a small wave.

  “Having a cup of cocoa,” Adamo replied. “Why, Roy, what’s it look like?”

  “You know very well what it looks like,” Roy replied, looking back and forth between me and Adamo. “Ah, if I’m not mistaken, this is the same exuberant lass who once inquired as to whether your trousers caught fire in midair, is it not?”

  “That’s me,” I said, feeling a distinct prickling in my cheeks. At least it was cold, so I could probably square away most of the blame on that.

  “Royston,” Hal said, coming very near to elbowing him in the ribs. “I’m sorry about him. He’s always going on about manners, but I think he secretly likes forgetting he has them.”

  “It would hardly be polite to ignore what’s right in front of my eyes, wouldn’t you say?” Royston said with a sniff. I knew exactly what he was thinking, and by hiding a sudden giggle in my hot chocolate, I ended up making a sound like I was choking.

  “Might be needing spectacles soon,” Adamo suggested. “Seems like your eyes are finally going.”

  “This really is incredible,” Roy said, ignoring him completely. “You have no idea, young lady—Owen Adamo has not willingly spoken to someone younger than he is for at least fifteen years. And he does not drink hot chocolate, either.”

  “We probably shouldn’t interrupt him, then,” Hal said, looking at me like he thought he recognized me but couldn’t quite place it. He looped one arm through Roy’s, giving him a gentle tug. After a moment of standing his ground, this Roy fellow allowed himself to give.

  “Don’t think you’ve heard the end of this,” Roy called to us, as Hal pulled him into the night.

  “Never once thought I had, actually,” Adamo muttered. He finished off his drink in one more go, then crushed the cup in his hand with a small grunt. “Here’s some advice, Laure.”

  “Thought you didn’t like giving it,” I said.

  “Consider it more of a warning, then,” he told me. I nodded, touching the backs of my teeth with my numb tongue—I’d definitely burned it, and now all the taste buds were tingling. “Never keep an old friend around for too long.”

  “And why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because they start knowing you too well,” Adamo replied.

  EIGHT

  BALFOUR

  We were in the middle of delicate talks with Chanteur—we’d graduated from the laborious task of hammering out land trade rights and finally come to the crux of the Arlemagne visit, which was to establish our mutual desires for alliance during future wars—when I first heard the noise.

  It was a low hum, like gears beginning to grind slowly against one another. I looked up to see if anyone else had noticed, but they were all paying attention to the passionate speech Chanteur was giving—about their centuries-old marine difficulties with Verruges, and why it was necessary for Volstov and Arlemagne to crush those seafaring pirates once and for all.

  No one but I had noticed, then.

  I waited for the sound to fade, or for someone else to glance up and catch my eye. But neither of those things happened; rather, the noise grew louder, and it sounded like a piece of metal being dragged over steel. I pressed my fingers to my temple, wondering why no one else was reacting to it. Chanteur hadn’t even paused in the middle of his speech.

  Perhaps there was some construction happening in the street and I’d been so immersed in my own business that I’d missed reading the notification posted downstairs. Or perhaps everyone else in the room was simply a more professional diplomat than I, trained to tune out all extraneous noise so that it wouldn’t interrupt proceedings. Even Troius didn’t show any signs of being disturbed—half-asleep, perhaps, and twiddling a pen between his fingers like he was thinking about taking notes, but also thinking about how nice it would be not to bother. There was nothing in his expression that indicated he was hearing the same frightful noises I was.

  I drew in a deep breath, willing myself to be calm. Despite all my best efforts to ignore what I was hearing, the sound itself was slowly intensifying. It was like being caught within the workings of some enormous waterwheel, the metal groaning and creaking all around me.

  At the Airman, Ivory had often complained of suffering from headaches so severe that he took to bed and wouldn’t speak to anyone for the entire day. He’d said it sounded like all the dragons crowding themselves into his head at once, squeezing and scraping up against one another until he felt like sticking his knife in there just to get them out again.

  Fortunately for everyone, not the least Ivory himself, he’d never actually gone through with the plan.

  “I think that you’re forgetting where Volstov’s strengths lie,” said Diplomat Auria, one of the more-experienced civil servants attached to our particular case. “It’s been years since we fought any kind of naval battle—decades, even. Our resources are exhausted from warring with the Ke-Han for so long—until these past months, that was our main focus—and we’ve only just begun to recover from the economic loss, not to mention the depletion of our soldiers. Surely none of you has forgotten this.”

  She added this last point with a look around the Volstovic side of the table, as though we’d all managed to fail her once again. It was evident that she was frustrated by her team being comprised of mostly novices. Most of those with more experience, such as Margrave Josette, were working on relations between Volstov and the Ke-Han—and Auria had made it clear on more than one occasion that, should negotiations fall through, she did not expect to catch any of the blame for it. One woman alone could not champion this cause, she’d explained, and also, it seemed immensely humorous to her that after years of being qualified for more than she was given, she’d somehow gone back to being a ’Versity lecturer rather than receiving her desired promotion.

  “Surely there’s no need to be so negative,” Troius reasoned. “No one’s counseling we leap from one war and straight into the next. It’s merely a question of support—isn’t that right, Chanteur? If Verruges should come knocking, we pledge to lend our boots to give them a firm kick in the ass, pardon the expression.”

  Troius was good with people; even over the roaring between my temples, I saw that Chanteur appreciated the friendly piece of vulgarity and offered us all his first real chuckle that day.

  “That is what we had been hoping for,” Chanteur said.

  “I believe it’s well established that Verruges will and indeed has already been ‘knocking,�
� as you so charmingly put it, for nearly as long as we were at war with the Ke-Han,” Auria replied. “I do not believe our country can agree to something that conscripts us into further conflict, and certainly not one with no conceivable end in sight. Simply put, Volstov cannot afford to agree, despite our desire to show solidarity.”

  Chanteur dabbed at his nose, looking drippy but also mortally offended that we hadn’t been moved by the passion of his speech alone. I was curious to hear what he’d make of his defense—that is, if that infernal racket would quiet for long enough to let me listen.

  Unfortunately, at just that moment, there was a horrible screeching sound, like metal shearing apart, and I buried my face in my hands, attempting to squeeze it out. My hands were somehow cold through the gloves, even though the rest of me was sweating like it was the dead of summer.

  Then, just as abruptly as it had started, the noise stopped. After such intensity of sound, I felt for a moment as though I’d actually gone deaf. If it hadn’t been for the sound of my own heart pounding in my ears, in fact, I would’ve assumed I had. Slowly, the regular noises of the day began once more to filter in; I could still hear the sounds of Auria arguing with Troius, and Chanteur blowing his nose in between interjections; but they seemed distant now, as though my head had been plunged into a bucket of water.

  Another voice, one I didn’t recognize, whispered something in my ear.

  I jumped—a perfectly reasonable reaction, I thought, given I hadn’t realized anyone was so near to me, but I found I’d been correct in my assumption. There was no one close enough to me for that, and yet I still heard, or even felt, the echo of that voice, the sensation of hot breath against my cheek and throat.

  My twitching was severe enough to catch Troius’s attention. He gave me a strange look and broke away from the argument for a moment to write something down on his collection of blank notes at last. Just as though we were two bored students in the ’Versity, he folded it in half and slid it across the table.

  I glanced around to see if anyone had noted the action, but Chanteur and Auria were deeply engaged in a discussion about whether or not we were Verruges’s next target if Arlemagne’s sea defenses should fall. No one had noticed, so I read Troius’s note.

  Are you all right? it said.

  I smoothed the page out carefully, the fingers on my right hand twitching ever so slightly. It was likely a cause of my nerves, but even the smallest of involuntary spasms made me nervous, as though at any moment my hands would begin to fail me again. Was this to be the way the rest of my life was—my hopes raised by a period of good luck, only to be dashed again when the mechanisms slowly wound down once more?

  I am fine, I wrote back, and hurriedly shoved the paper in Troius’s direction.

  Chanteur was tapping his fingers against the table in irritation now, staring at Auria as if he was pondering declaring a very personal war between the two of them there and then. I mimicked his gesture without thinking, drumming my own gloved fingers quietly against the table’s surface. It was a simple enough act, and yet all at once the grinding of metal started up again in my ears. The sound of it was muted now, like the gears of an enormous clock turning to keep time.

  Feeling distinctly foolish, I used one of my own sheets of paper to write a message to Troius. Do you hear anything strange? it asked, and I passed it under the table before I could be tempted to elaborate.

  “I am of the opinion that we have been very generous in our talks so far,” Chanteur was saying; it seemed Auria had gotten out of her chair now, the better to look him in the eye. That was the trouble with women diplomats, Troius had explained to me once over lunch; everyone expected them to be sweet and kind, and when they turned out to be ballbusters, it was double the usual offense. I didn’t agree with him, but it did seem to be part of the trouble Chanteur was having at the moment—not Auria’s fault, I thought privately, but rather his. “Considering the various indignities visited upon the last envoy—how our nobility suffered at Volstovic hands—I think it very unexpected that you would deem yourself worthy of commanding anything at all, let alone steering the direction of these talks. We are the ones who deigned to send a second envoy, after all.”

  “I will not be bullied into making a decision,” Auria said, turning rather red in the face, herself. “I don’t care how many times I have to repeat myself, Chanteur. We may continue this discussion in front of the Esar, if we must, as I am but his mouthpiece here. He will tell you, the same as I have, that we are not currently able to donate anything to your cause.”

  I felt a tapping at my leg and reached down to take the note back from Troius.

  The only thing I hear is the sound of our talks being extended another two months, the note read. Under that, crossed out but still legible, was: Kill me now.

  I smiled, but my skin had turned clammy with sweat, and I was starting to feel suffocated by the still air in our discussion chamber. Underneath those miserable talks remained the faint humming, whirling of cogs, and the occasional clang, like a piece of metal being beaten flat. If I could get out of the room, I hoped, there might be some chance the noise wouldn’t follow me. Such an idea didn’t seem logical if the sound was in my head—and it had to be, if Troius hadn’t made note of it—but then, what was logical about hearing things?

  Metal groaned, like the beating of enormous wings, and I heard the voice again, just the faintest whisper. It was too quiet to make out. It sounded halfway between the cry of a baby and a lonely moan.

  Perhaps I was suffering from some postwar medical condition that hadn’t chosen to manifest itself until just then. If so, the timing was excellent. I’d be the latest airman to destroy relations with the Arlemagne, just carrying on tradition—although it didn’t seem to me that it would have been entirely my fault. Matters were self-destructing without my assistance.

  I’d heard of soldiers who’d been in great battles coming home with shock, dealing with sounds that weren’t there, memories of the horrors they’d seen—their minds transforming harmless, everyday noises into something far more sinister. I’d spent the better part of my life surrounded by the very sounds I was hearing now, the creak and groan of organic metal, living machines. It was exactly like stepping into the dragon stables—to speak with Anastasia for a time or hide from the other members of the corps. I didn’t know what could possibly have triggered it after so long, but now that I’d recognized the sounds, there seemed to be no other explanation for them.

  I would have to seek out a physician, or perhaps consult first with Adamo and Luvander to see if they’d ever suffered anything similar. Maybe in visiting with my fellow airmen, I’d unearthed more than pleasant memories.

  Now, that would be an interesting discussion to initiate. It would be harder to begin than any awkward letter, and I could just see myself, invited to tea in the back of Luvander’s hat shop, clearing my throat and asking, “So, have you heard any dragons lately, boys?”

  My right hand twitched again, and I reached into my coat pocket for a handkerchief to dab some of the perspiration off my face.

  “We’ll put it to a vote, then,” Auria was saying, her jaw clenched tight. “If I find I’m outnumbered, for whatever reasons, then we’ll discuss further terms about the specific aid Arlemagne will require. If not, then you’ll have our answer clearly, without appeal. Perhaps we may still work out some sort of emergency clause with regards to your situation with Verruges. Rest assured, Volstov would never abandon an ally, despite our current position in world affairs.”

  I flexed my hand, then clenched it beneath the table, practicing until I no longer felt the lingering sensation of that lone, troubling twitch. My hands had been so lifelike since their recent overhaul—and certainly my living hands had also twitched during moments of great anxiety—but I found that I didn’t altogether like the feeling of it when it happened to the metal. There were some accuracies that a prosthetic simply shouldn’t be able to achieve, and when they moved on their own, it always
left me to wonder if they’d simply end up developing a kind of awareness of their own, just the way the dragons had.

  The idea was utterly absurd—but no more so, I supposed, than hearing voices.

  I glanced up from the table only to find that Auria, Troius, and the other members of our envoy were all staring at me. Their expressions varied from curious to annoyed.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked, somewhat mortified. I already knew the answer, but this was the easiest way for me to ascertain in what way I’d just made a hideous blunder.

  “We’re taking a vote, Balfour,” Auria said, clearly none too pleased with having to repeat herself. “Are you all right? You’ve turned white as a sheet.”

  “You know what?” Troius said. “I think we should all take a recess. This is an important decision, and I for one would welcome the extra time to really think on it from both sides. Best not to rush these important matters.”

  I was grateful to him, though Auria looked for a moment as though she intended to take his head off.

  “You seek out that time to confer with your Esar, you mean,” Chanteur said, darkly suspicious. He added a bob of the head for etiquette’s sake—his version of a bow to our esteemed highness.

  I was gripping the edge of the table so hard that I realized I was beginning to make a mark.

  “If you wish to have equal time to confer with your king,” Auria said, “we will give you that opportunity.”

  “And call talks off for another month while we wait for the messengers to travel back and forth?” Chanteur asked. “Some of us have families we wish to return to and urgent matters at home!”

  “In the meantime, we’d show you every glory Volstov has to offer,” Troius said smoothly. “For free, of course.”