Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  And plant you for coal

  Your flesh it will blacken

  And harden and then

  Your daddy will dig you

  Back up again.

  It was the softer edge of dusk. Wunderlich and Kanarien walked together to the company store. Wunderlich needed her pickaxe sharpened, lamp oil, food to last another week, “and perhaps a length of canvas to patch these old coveralls of mine.”

  Kanarien needed never to leave Wunderlich’s side.

  They held hands, as they did every day going down into the Inkpot. As they did every night in the battered old hurly-bed, forehead to forehead, legs entwined, while the clockwork canary chimed lullabies and Wunderlich talked softly of her life before, in Manchester and Brussels and Paris. The work she had done with Engels and Marx. The uprising in South Germany, the friends who had died there. Her exile in ’49, first to London, then the States. The time she’d lost an eye to a policeman’s riot baton. How her friends had scraped up the funds to fill the empty socket with a Forged Orb “as if I were some bourgeoise with money to burn on mechtech”.

  She spoke often of her friends, dead now or scattered or too disappointed in their own constant failure to keep on. “We thought we could burn forever, like a coal seam fire, smoldering underground for decades, then bursting to the surface and lighting up the world. But there weren’t enough of us to keep the fire going. We burnt out. You would not think it to look at me, Kanarien, but once I was a flame.”

  Kanarien’s silent history filled with flames, with uprisings, secret meetings and public protests and the passionate babble of ghosts. Even her memories were no longer lonely.

  Palm to palm they walked, crumple-shouldered from a day of crouching and drilling, blasting and loading. They sauntered slowly, cracking the knuckles of their free hands, shoulders rolling to work out the kinks. A swathe of violet doused the last orange embers in the west. Wunderlich’s face was tilted to catch the first star. Kanarien’s, as always, turned up to her friend. The yellow-necked clockbird perched on her shoulder and chimed the hour like a silver bell.

  “Pretty evening,” Wunderlich grunted. “Wer reitet so spät durch nacht und wind? Es ist der vater mit seinem kind . . . Ha! Little bird, sometimes I think the twinkle in your eyes is shaped like a question mark! That was poetry, Kanarien. Goethe. ‘The Erlking’, as Scott would have it translated – perhaps not well. But we’ll leave that for now. Yes, I will read you the rest tonight; I cannot remember all of it. You will regret your asking eyes maybe, for it is a very frightening poem, about a bad king who carries children away to the deadlands.

  “Kanarien, I do not pretend to admire Goethe’s politics, but his poetry . . . His poetry brings me home.”

  Wunderlich trudged with huge, soft strides. The dinge of soot had not yet leached all the gold from her hair. Her teeth flashed by the light from every windowpane they passed. One green eye glinted more weirdly than the other, the worked crystal of her Forged Orb deepening its glow in the dusk.

  Kanarien skipped three steps for Wunderlich’s every one. One black-knuckled, black-nailed, black-pored hand crept up to clutch Wunderlich’s ragged elbow, one hand pressed hard her own chest. Her heart thudded terribly. She would have to slow down or start coughing.

  She did not want to slow down. She had never heard poetry before Dagomar Wunderlich. Why could they not walk faster, so as to return all the quicker to their own private room, so as to be alone again at last, with Goethe and the Erlking, where Wunderlich would teach her poetry, and Kanarien would repeat it back in kisses.

  Chirping at the sudden burst of speed, the clockbird clutched her shoulder. Kanarien tugged imploringly at Wunderlich’s sleeve, and Wunderlich shouted a laugh.

  “Slow down, little bird! Let an old girl get her wind!”

  Arms comically akimbo, Kanarien halted in front of the Candletown Company Store. See there? said the jut of her sharp chin, her noiseless laugh. We’re here already!

  Snorting, Wunderlich bent double and set her hands on her knees.

  When she straightened, she did not seem winded. Her face was closed to expression. She studied the store from under heavy blonde brows, and there was a look in her good eye that was harder than the facets of her Forged one. She opened her palms and held them slightly before her, whispering: “O father, my father, and did you not hear/The Erlking whisper so low in my ear?”

  Kanarien, ever watchful, stopped laughing. Three months ago, she would not have understood this shift in Wunderlich’s mood. Now her memories were full of Manchester, Paris, Brussels, East Germany. She knew why she had worked all her life for Candletown and still owed her death in debt to it. Why Mama had died without medicine. Why Pa took a C&O train engine to bed instead of one of the Watering Hole’s whores.

  The clockbird on her shoulder pranced and twittered. Her hand slipped from Wunderlich’s elbow to her wrist.

  “Little bird,” Wunderlich said in a rasp. “Little friend. My soul is sick. Every day I must resolve anew: No more fighting! This time I will keep still. I will bow my head and back away. I will do this work and no other. I am that tired, yes, and disappointed. Yes, and defeated. I have my scrip in hand. I have my list of necessary items to buy with it. Before us is the door into the place that will sell me what I need. And yet, before I pass through it, I must stop a moment, remembering everything that brought me here. And at what cost.”

  All about that massive gold head, now bent earnestly toward Kanarien’s, the stars were like lanterns flung pell-mell to the bottom of the most monstrously deep shaft ever sunk. Wunderlich stood, gathering courage enough to face her cowardice, tears making gloss of her one good eye.

  Kanarien watched her, full to trembling.

  That she should cry. That she should cry!

  Before she made the decision to do it, Kanarien had stooped low. She scooped up a large rock and chucked it through the Candletown Company Store window. She opened up her mouth and screamed. Of course no sound came out. Of course, no sound. But the rock shattered the glass, and that was good enough for her.

  The world was suddenly full of rocks.

  Wunderlich tried to grab her. She was big and Kanarien small, but Kanarien knew how to use her size, how to fold herself smaller still, and – born eighth in a miner’s litter now mostly dead – she had learned long ago to be slippery besides. Strong as she was, Wunderlich would never hurt her. Wunderlich had had all the violence knocked out of her; Kanarien had not. Eighteen years it had built in her like firedamp, and Wunderlich’s tear was the spark that ignited her. That she should cry! Where was her next rock?

  Not a stone unturned, wasn’t that the phrase? Not a pane left whole. The hole in her breath. The pain in her chest. Break it all.

  “No, Kanarien!” That was Wunderlich. Dagomar Wunderlich, whom, could she speak, she would call her heart’s darling. “Please, Kanarien. The manager – he’s sent for the Superintendent. Stop or he’ll call the Operators . . .”

  “What is going on here?”

  That was McRae’s roar. He came stumping up the hill from his Operators’ office, his face as red as his hair, faster than any man on mortal legs could move. He snatched at Kanarien, too, his freckled fists pale in the gloom. But Kanarien had been a trapper brat, a mule girl, a loader and laborer, fast and fierce, and what was he, really? What was Superintendent Tiberius McRae, after all? Just another one-legged orphan of the Inkpot. He thought his mechleg and fancy job made him finer than those he’d left below, did he? Kanarien screamed again – again without sound – and kicked his good knee until he buckled.

  “Bitch! Is she drunk?”

  “She’s upset. I don’t know why—no, don’t! Don’t hurt her.”

  “I won’t—hurt her—if she stops trying to bite—me—aaugh!”

  Kanarien strained. Others had joined in the seethe. So many hands, her shirt in rags, but no one could hold her. Where was her bird? Where was her bird?

  Her boot crunched on something already broken.


  Fresh rage washed her vision. The night turned clear and pink. Easy to see in the dark if you spent your life there. It was the sunlight that blinded you. It was the poetry. And the kisses. And the tears.

  The Candletown Company Store stood open. The door flung wide. That door! Which, in order to pass, Wunderlich must call herself a coward. Her Wunderlich, who used to be a flame.

  If she could get so far . . .

  Past that door were sacks of flour, sacks of salt and sugar. Something to rip. Something to scatter. Let the Operators pick white grain from white grain from white grain, separating each from the other, like the poor cinder girl in that story Wunderlich once told her. Let them bend to the task dawn ’til dusk, until each sack was full again.

  Past that door were tubs of butter, twenty-seven cents a pound. It was twenty-four cents everywhere else – that’s what Wunderlich said. A criminal price for butter, she’d said, and the miners didn’t even have real money to pay with. Company scrip, useless everywhere else butter might be cheaper. Illegal currency to buy criminal butter, but what could you do? You needed butter; you had scrip. So what can you do?

  Kanarien knew what she would do.

  If she got past that door, she would smear it. Smear it all. Grease the walls, the floor. Unfurl bolts of calico over streaks of shining yellow butterfat and topple pyramids of canned goods over that. There. That’s what your butter’s worth, your green beans, your peaches. Stacks of pickaxes. Buckets of shovels. The soft brown “crow coal” they mined for nothing, not even a pittance, incidental in the pursuit of anthracite, and still they had to pay for it, to light their own fires, to cook their own food. She would crush it underfoot. It was worth just that much.

  Oh, what wouldn’t she do? What wouldn’t she ransack? If she could get past that door.

  All hands fell away. Her knees jounced in the dirt, palms scraping gravel, but she was up again in a gasp, sprinting for the door . . .

  An enormous metal arm reached out of the sky and lifted her into it.

  Fury left no room in her head for surprise. Kanarien, dangling from the scruff of her neck, studied the thing coolly, closer at this moment to the nightmare god of her childhood than she had ever been before.

  They’ll snatch you from sleeping

  And plant you for coal.

  She pondered it. Might it be dismantled with nothing but her teeth? Her naked fingers? Underneath all that metal there was a man, wasn’t there? Isn’t that what they all say? Or at least the last parts of man. Rotten meat wired up and armor-plated, any soul possessed by the original flesh sold long ago.

  They had prowled at the periphery of her life as long as she remembered. The Operators of Candletown. She used to wake, wet and jolted, from dreams that saw them chasing her through endless black tunnels, further into the black, until the air failed, and her own breath crushed her. All her life she had revered them. Feared them. Hardly thought of them, except while sleeping.

  Kanarien had never felt more awake.

  She dangled, and they stared at each other. Or, at least, the Operator seemed to stare. Its metal faceplate was blank but for a single crystal glittering a bit off center. The crystal was faceted like a fly’s eye. Kanarien hissed at it.

  The Operator hissed back. Or perhaps that was just the hydraulic guts of its system, readying itself to shake her like a wolf shakes a rat. Kanarien clenched her teeth. Her neck snapped from side to side. The Operator tossed her to the ground as carelessly as it had plucked her from it. A long way down. Kanarien did not land lightly. The breath whooshed out of her. Her sore chest seized up. Dirt filled her nose. She vomited for breath.

  The wheezing of gears. The creak of oiled steel. Eight, great, jointed legs picked across the ground to her. The earth shook. The dust, displaced, rose in the air like a ghost road. Once more that metal arm reached down, pinchers closing about her ankle.

  If Kanarien could have squealed, she would have. Up she went again, upside down. All her blood pounded in her head. The Operator swung her gently. A rag doll in the grip of a vengeful child. The pinchers loosened.

  She heard Wunderlich howl.

  The world slowed as she tumbled through the air and Kanarien saw many things.

  She watched as Wunderlich seized a pickaxe from the floor of the company store. She watched Wunderlich raise it high, her false eye shining out like a green torch in her blood-streaked face, her gold hair standing about her head. McRae cowered back from her, and the manager, and the other men who’d gathered. But they had nothing to fear. They were not Wunderlich’s target.

  She bent her head and charged like a freight train at full speed toward the Operator, a scream tearing from her throat as she swung the pickaxe hard.

  Kanarien landed.

  Her last thought was, Valkyrie.

  Then all the stars went out.

  They call it Hell’s Well.

  It had been the first and finest of Candletown’s mines. Tapped out, used up, abandoned now. They left the immense underground labyrinth to collapse quietly into itself, wooden supports rotting under the weight of white fungi, brittle pillars cracking with the sound of gunshots no one hears. Black acid waters rise in slow floods, filling old chambers, washing away the crunch of coal dust and pulverized limestone, covering the bones of rats and mules and miners alike.

  At first, the Operators posted “No Trespassing” signs and walked a strict circuit to enforce them. But the longer Hell’s Well continues unused, the more its ruins are neglected.

  The little slate pickers and trapper brats like to go that way to play, where the din and clash and bellow of Candletown is snuffed and the loblolly scrub has begun to grow. They have cleared an area for baseball and tag.

  Grown-ups never venture out that far. They have forgotten Hell’s Well entirely, or are too tired to contemplate the long walk, or say they worked that mine when it was open “and mean never to return again, so help me!”

  Really, they are afraid of the shaft. With the elevators removed, cables, platform and all, the darkness goes down forever.

  The young ones dare each other to spit into that hole. Sometimes they make it to the edge, hawk a good one, the mucus black as everything in Candletown, and let it fly. It is then a chill overtakes them, a cool updraft of exhalation, like a breath from below. They back away from the shaft again, shaking, faces drained of color beneath the grime.

  It is as if they had spat into their own graves.

  “Dagomar,” said Kanarien. “Are you awake?”

  There was only one light at the bottom of the shaft. It glared greenly from Wunderlich’s Forged Orb, half-lidded by a rim of bruised flesh. A sickly light, but Kanarien was grateful for it. A Forged Orb equipped with Eidolon Eyesight, Wunderlich had once told her, could detect firedamp before it ignited, white damp before it killed you with the smell of violets, or black damp before your head goes funny and you lie down to die gasping.

  But that kind of extra tech costs extra coin, maybe costs your soul and your unborn too. Wunderlich’s orb was the old-fashioned kind, good only for glowing in the dark.

  “I heard the thunder,” Kanarien said, “far away, but still underground. I knew it was coming even before I heard it, because rats had been chewing my boots, and then they all left. Pa always did say miners’ rats were canny. Used to keep a pair for pets. Tame as tame can be. Named Calamity Jane and Lady Jane, respectively. Lady Jane didn’t have any tail, I remember. Rats can hear the thunder of a cave-in before we can, Dagomar, did you know? Pay attention and you can follow the rats out in time. Like your Pied Piper, Dagomar, but in reverse. Only, I don’t think this cave-in was an accident.

  “We’re in Hell’s Well; I can smell it. I used to work here with Pa. I ever tell you that? I think, while we were out from those knocks on our heads, they dumped us here and left us to die. And I think they brought out the dynamite to make sure of it. That was the thunder. I’d go out and explore it, but I daren’t leave your side. I might never find you again.”

&nbs
p; The worked crystal glowed feverishly in Wunderlich’s empty eye socket. Her good eye, her seeing eye, was dull. Filmed over in old blood and coal dust. Her mouth was open. Several of her teeth were shattered to stubs. Splintery juts of bone scrabbled from her lacerated skin. Her knees and elbows bent at odd angles. There were chunks missing. A trail of glistening stink seeped from her stomach.

  Broken beyond repair.

  Kanarien dragged herself closer to where Wunderlich lay. Rubble blanketed her large body, a mixture of rock and dirt and the crumbly brown crow coal that didn’t count toward tonnage. Kanarien smoothed her hand over the rubble. Not much difference between it and her own crusted fingers. Wunderlich had said that humans were made of much the same stuff as coal. Her ma had said something similar, coughing her life out on that bunk. Said everything was dust.

  Not them, though. Never them.

  Kanarien’s chest hurt more than ever. Every breath was sharp as it was shallow. She brought a hank of once-gold hair to her lips.

  “One day, Dagomar, they’ll dig us up again. One thousand years after Candletown has fallen, when the coal is spent and the need for coal is past, a new generation will come, digging for our bones. They will explore Candletown as though it were a city on the moon, asking themselves: What happened here? Whose bones are these? How did they live and what made them die?

  “So they will dig for answers, as in our day we dug for fire. And I’ll tell you what they’ll find, Dagomar. This mine. Our mine. Not Hell’s Well. Not by then. For we’ll have made of it a cave of wonders. We shall be the wonders, Dagomar, you and I. They’ll dig for years and find us here at last. The treasure at quest’s end. Resting here, at the bottom, as if waiting for their widened eyes all that time.

  “They will see us through a shimmering. A casket made of diamond. And in it, two bodies, perfectly preserved, entwined in each other’s arms like a single being. Are they saints? they’ll ask, but then they’ll see the coal beneath our fingernails. The giantess with hair like a lion – is she an angel? But then they’ll see the pickaxe set at your feet like an offering and know you for a worker.