eSteampunk Vol. 01 No. 03

by Anthology

  Contents

  Justice Like Clockwork

  An Empire’s Conception

  The Wizard of OZ:

  a Steampunk Adventure

  The Important Blueprints and the Boy Detective

  Progress the Webseries

  Black Dragon Blues

  Orphans of the

  Celestial Sea

  On the Conception of “Marian”

  Contributors

  eSteampunk’s

  Story of the Month

  Editor-in-Chief Doug Lance

  Managing Editor Mandy Alyss Brown

  Associate Editors S.A. Kyle, Lisa Finch,

  Copy Editor Preston McConkie

  Editorial Intern Brandon Todd Bachman

  Readers Suzanne Conboy-Hill, Lori Lopez, Mandi Ontis, Taylor Longnecker

  eSteampunk is a monthly fiction publication. The editors accept manuscripts online. To review our guidelines or submit a manuscript, please visit http://eFictionMag.com/Submissions. Correspondence may be sent to Mandy@eFictionMag.com.

  To subscribe, please visit the eFiction Store.

  Visit us online at www.efictionmag.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-4659-3279-2

  ASIN: B004UD88K2

  Copyright © 2012 eFiction Publishing

  eSteampunk’s Story of the Month

  We ask our readers to vote for their favorite piece at the end of every issue. The piece with the most votes will win eSteampunk’s Story of the Month Award and be published again at a later date.

  Vote here.

  Contents

  Stories

  Justice Like Clockwork Andrew Knighton

  An Empire’s Conception Jeffrey A. Ballard

  The Important Blueprints and

  the Boy Detective J. Woolston Carr

  Orphans of the Celestial Sea Mark Fenger

  Serials

  Black Dragon Blues Brent Nichols

  Episode Two - Assault in Le Havre

  Non-Fiction

  The Wizard of OZ: a Steampunk Adventure reviewed by Mandy Alyss Brown

  Progress the Webseries

  reviewed by Lisa Finch

  On the Conception of Marian MANDEM

  Justice Like Clockwork

  Andrew Knighton

  A door clanged open and boots tramped along the walkway, the echo of their passing rebounding through the hollow space around the prison’s central tower. Sarah turned from the bare concrete wall and thrust the battered stub of a teaspoon, the only tool in her toil, back into the hidden recesses of her mattress. This would be the third surprise inspection in as many days. They weren’t much of a surprise any more, but the tension still took its toll. The prisoners were constantly on edge, waiting for the sound of warders tramping their way, while the warders kept prodding, watching for a sign of the trouble they feared.

  Three men came into view along one of the walkways that ran like great iron wheels around the prison’s interior, long spokes reaching out to the rings that connected the cells. The cells themselves were little more than cages, with riveted iron floors and their backs pressed up against the rough concrete of the outer wall. Sarah found them as harsh and alienating as her fellow prisoners, grim people with grim pasts and nothing to say but curses and threats. She had never been more lonely.

  Two warders approached in their loose linen suits, flanking a prisoner in dark blue. Sarah’s own fatigues clung to her like a sodden blanket, the scratchy wool heavy with sweat. One more way to grind them all down, as the tropical sun shone into their cells and they sweltered through every long day’s heat.

  As the trio approached the two o’clock bell rang, and the cells shuddered into motion. Across the empty space of the prison, past the guards’ rotating tower, she saw the cells on the north wall tremble and shift, long chains dragging them up the walls, shifting them to left or right, lowering others into the empty spaces. Flecks of rust formed a brown cloud as the cells ground against each other. There were moans and shouts from the inmates, tense laughter from the watching guards.

  Sarah’s cell trembled and shrieked, setting her teeth on edge as it was dragged up the rough concrete wall, leaving behind her neighbours of the past week and her small achievements in marking the wall. She would be far more sorry to leave behind her feeble scratches than she would the inmates around her. Their grunts and snores would just be replaced by those of others, equally despicable in their words and habits. At least the bars that held her in held them back, kept her safe. Sending her here, a gentlewoman amongst the empire’s worst outcasts, was another attempt to belittle and intimidate her. But for all her fears and isolation, for all that she fought back tears every morning when she woke, she refused to let them win. As the shrieking stopped and the dust settled, she felt for her worn down spoon, eyeing up a fresh stretch of wall.

  The warders led their captive up a spiral of iron stairs, past the place where Sarah’s cell had been, to the empty cage beside her. As they passed, Officer Scabbry, the head warder, looked at her first swift scratch and snorted.

  “Let me guess, ‘Votes for women’?” he said with scorn. “Wouldn’t trust ‘em to vote on my dinner.” He leered at Sarah as he passed. “Wonder who’s been scratching my walls, eh? That’d need contraband, that would. I’d better search their cell real thorough, like. Their body too. They could be hiding that contraband anywhere.”

  Sarah stood with her arms folded, staring back at him. The thought of him searching her, grinning and laughing as he stuck his gnarled hands in her most private places, filled her with a sense of fear and disgust that she could barely suppress. But she would not let his sly threats and dirty implications wear her down. None of them would wear her down.

  Scabbry opened the empty cell and shoved his new captive inside.

  “In you go, Sir Reginald,” he said, his voice thick with mock deference. “Hope it’s to your taste.”

  The man peered out from beneath wild, bushy eyebrows, no hint of discomfort on his otherwise unassuming face. His gaze moved slowly around the cell, taking in the scuffed concrete, the iron-braced floor, the thin mattress, and the battered bucket for a chamber pot. After a long moment he ambled towards the back of his cage and peered at the gear wheels clutching the rusted rails that held the cell onto the wall.

  “So that’s how they do it,” he murmured, nodding to himself.

  “Rotten, ain’t it?” Scabbry grinned, oblivious to his charge’s mutterings, as the cell door clanged shut and the key rattled in the lock. “But I could make it much more comfy, for a proper gent like yourself. Pillows, books, tobacco, you can have them all if you do right by me.”

  The prisoner turned. “Could I possibly have a pencil and paper?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Scabbry said, leaning up against the bars. “Just tell me why you sank that ship.”

  “Oh,” Sir Reginald said resignedly, like a man with a sniffle facing the hundredth concerned question about his health. “Never mind.”

  He sat down on his mattress, staring at the tower that rose in stern vigilance through the centre of the prison. A looming concrete presence, a reminder that they, in their cells, were always watched and always judged.

  “Listen, Reginald,” Scabbry snarled, “you’re here for the long haul. That’s the price of treason. Just ask Miss Voting-Rights here. I can make your time here passable, or I can make it miserable as all hell.” He paused, waiting for a response.

  “You can indeed,” the prisoner said at last, then s
ettled back into silence.

  “Like that, is it?” Scabbry turned to the other guard. “Next move, put him in the higher racks. See how he enjoys the tropical sunshine.”

  He strode over to Sarah’s cell.

  “Her too,” he called out. “This pair of upper-class ingrates should make good company.”

  He leaned in close, one eye on Sir Reginald.

  “He might talk to you,” he whispered. “He tells you anything tasty, you tell me. Earn yourself a proper mattress, maybe some extra grub. You play extra nice, I’ll make things extra easy on you.”

  He paused to leer down at her before he stomped away.

  Sarah watched as the vile wretch left, baton swinging, whistling tunelessly to himself while all around his captives cried out their misery.

  * * *

  Sometimes Scabbry left the cells in place for a month. Sometimes he kept them moving all day. It kept the inmates off balance, not knowing who they would be next to tomorrow or when their world would change. No-one got to make friends or allies. No-one got a steady routine. Would they be at the bottom, the last ones to eat, or at the top, in the bright burning sunlight? It made some of them crazy, drove others to despair. The hardiest clung to their minds, if not their hopes, and the nights were as full of weeping as they were of snores.

  The moves were more frequent when Scabbry was in a bad mood. He spread his dissatisfaction far and wide, sowing misery like seed.

  The next move came just after midnight, jolting the inmates from their sleep. The cages danced their slow, grinding waltz for over an hour before peace was allowed to return. When it had ended, Sarah couldn’t get back to sleep. She lay staring up at the stars. Her new home in the upper tiers left her exposed to the elements, the bars keeping out neither sun nor wind, but it also left her exposed to a little beauty. The air here was so much cleaner than in London, the stars of the southern hemisphere forming patterns she had never seen in her youth. It still amazed her to think that something as huge and magnificent as the heavens could be different from place to place. In the dark of the night, letting her thoughts wander and prison sounds fade from her mind, this was the happiest she had been for two long years in the cells.

  As she lay inventing names for constellations, picking out imagined patterns in the night sky, she heard a scratching noise from the next cell. By the light of those bright stars she saw the new prisoner’s hands shifting in his lap. Disgusting as the implication was, it wasn’t an uncommon sight in a prison, nor one she wanted to see again. But there was something different about the movement this time, smaller shifts and pauses, accompanied by scratchings and clicks. Maybe a knight of the realm could be trusted to keep from night-time indecencies.

  She watched for a while, but there was too much shadow to make out what he was doing. Still, this man had made her curious, and she was not a woman to hold back. This was her chance for some civilised conversation, to reach out to another lost soul. This was a chance to do some good and to make her own life a little better.

  “Excuse me,” she said, keeping her voice low. The other prisoners might be thugs and savages, but that was no reason to be inconsiderate of their sleep.

  “Yes?” He didn’t look up from his work.

  “I apologise for being forward,” Sarah said, “but are you Sir Reginald Overby the engineer?”

  “Yes,” Sir Reginald said.

  “I’m Sarah Partington,” Sarah said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you,” Sir Reginald said. “Partington... Partington....” He paused in his work and looked over at her. “Hooves Partington?”

  “Not a moniker I like.” Sarah tried to suppress a certain pride at her own infamy. “But yes, that is what the newspapers called me.”

  Sir Reginald shuffled down his mattress until he was close enough to reach through the bars. They shook hands.

  “I apologise for any offense,” he said. “But tell me, I never could understand, why would a woman choose to throw herself under the King’s horse?”

  “For the right to vote,” Sarah said. “I thought the papers explained that.”

  She looked down into his other hand. He held a small metal file and a selection of tiny gears, each a round cluster of fragile points as pale as his skin. Chunks of bone from that night’s beef stew lay scattered across his mattress, apparently fated to become more mechanical parts. Intrigued, she leaned forward for a better look.

  “But why that method?” Sir Reginald asked. “Is a slip of paper and a fraction of a say in government really worth risking your life for?”

  “It’s not just for me. It’s for all women.” She thought back to that day, to the pain of battered flesh, the animal shrieks, the angry shouting; back beyond that, to the years of frustration, of being disempowered, disregarded, ignored. “For the voiceless, words are not enough. Action, grand action, became our only hope. If it took my arrest, or even my life, for us to be taken seriously, then so be it. Rather that than live in a society indifferent to our happiness.”

  His face still crumpled in puzzlement, he sat back down and started fitting the improvised gears together. “I’m not entirely sure I understand,” he said. “But then, I find people like that. God’s engineering is infinitely subtle and strange, the frustrations of unravelling it not worth what passes for answers. Machines, on the other hand....” He placed the set of gears and wheels down on the floor, pulled them back towards him, then watched them race away. “Machines are so much more satisfying.”

  A rasping laugh rose from the far side of Sir Reginald’s cell.

  “That’s good, man.” A tattooed face pressed up against the bars, only a few patches of grey skin showing through the swirl of tribal tattoos. Teeth sharpened to fearsome points glittered in the starlight. A ripple of fear ran through Sarah as she recognised the face of Shadow Puma, the prison’s most infamous inmate. “That’s mighty fine. Man with a view like that, he could be a lot of use.”

  Sir Reginald sighed. “I was. I will be again, once I’m done here”

  “Could be that happens soon,” Shadow Puma said. “I got me a plan. Little of your help go a long way in making it happen, see?”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Sarah hissed, her heart in her throat. “He’s a terrible man, a murderer, rapist and racketeer. You can’t help him get out into the world.”

  “You shut your hole, or I shut it for you lady.” Puma snarled and bared his teeth. Sarah shuddered at the sight, at his filthy fingers curled over like predatory claws.

  Sir Reginald shook his head. “I can’t help in any case,” he said. “This place may look to you like a crude cage, but it is a marvel of engineering. Walmingsby really earned his earldom on this one, and he took its secrets to his grave. A knighthood and countless pleas to the crown won’t get you access to the schematics, no matter how long you wait, and I waited a long time. No, I don’t know how this wonder works yet. And if I did, I doubt it would be appropriate to release a person such as yourself.”

  Puma hissed and rattled the bars of his cell. A neighbouring prisoner called out in complaint, then went quiet when he saw Puma’s face. Around them, the prison was truly silent, inmates listening intently for what came next.

  “You don’t do what I say,” Shadow Puma said, “you regret it when I get out.”

  “Maybe,” Sir Reginald said. “But until then I will sleep soundly for my choice.”

  He pulled his mattress away from Puma’s side of the cell, lay back, and closed his eyes. Puma shook the bars and glared at him, but it had no effect. The murderer gave one final growl and went back to his own mattress. Now that the show was over, Sarah heard the rustles of other prisoners rolling over and settling back to sleep.

  “Sir Reginald,” she whispered, not wanting to wake him if he re
ally were sleeping.

  “Yes, dear lady.” Sir Reginald’s eyes stayed closed, but his tone was patient to the point of indifference.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I destroyed a ship.”

  “A rival’s?”

  “No, mine.”

  “But why?”

  “Sometimes, in the search for knowledge, in the endless quest to sharpen one’s own craft, one must take some unsavoury steps.”

  He turned over and said no more.

  * * *

  The sun blazed, an angry eye glaring down from a clear blue sky. Sarah lay against the concrete, trying to protect herself with a slither of shadow and a flee-ridden bed sheet. They were in the top tier now, Scabbry having grown impatient at Sir Reginald’s silence. It was swelteringly hot, and the sheet made that worse, but at least it kept the sun’s rays from blistering her skin.

  Scabbry rattled the cells, running his truncheon along the bars like a fat, vicious child rattling fence posts. In the cell next to Sarah, a pale old man shrank back against the wall, hands clutched to his ears.

  “Enjoying the weather, eh?” The warder grinned his smarmy grin at Sarah, showing the gap where he’d lost three teeth in a riot. She was suddenly very aware of the way her clothes clung to her, soaked as they were with sweat. She had never thought of the prison uniform as showing off her body, but now she felt horribly revealed. Scabbry pursed his lips in the imitation of a kiss. “One of these days, my lovely,” he leered. “It ain’t like you can lock me out. After all, I’m the one with the keys.”