The Dragon Knight and the Steam World

by D. C. Clemens

  People laughed at something the woman did, making me turn back around to pay attention to the mechanical illusion. The black and white play continued to feature the woman as the primary figure for about the next half hour. She was usually involved in getting in trouble or being the trouble with people, animals, or random items. I was a bit too fascinated by it to be much amused by the antics, but maybe I cracked a smile close to the end.

  Back outside, with my vision needing to adjust to the light and reality, Isabel asked me, “So, what’d you think? Pretty nifty, huh?”

  “It’s certainly something. Why no sound, though? Or color, for that matter.”

  “Whoa, calm down. Already want it all after seeing moving pictures just once?”

  “They’re coming,” said Damian, who I noticed had been quite fidgety throughout the performance. “Combining sound and color to images is tricky, but I’m sure it can be done. People are constantly working to improve these things.”

  “Including you, baby brother? Is that what you’re working on now?”

  “Sort of. A bit of everything.”

  “Like always.”

  “You should focus on one invention at a time,” said Felicia. “You’ll never get anywhere if you keep jumping from one thing to another.”

  “I know that, Ms. Genius, but it’s hard when the things I need for real experiments are too damn expensive. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until I’m sure I got something worth investing what I got.”

  “Well, focus on cameras,” said Isabel. I’m ready to be an actress.”

  “Hold on,” said Alex. “That woman in the illusion was a real actress?”

  “Uh, yeah. Didn’t you read at the… Oh, wait, I forgot you can’t read our language.”

  “What?” asked Damian. “What do you mean he can’t read our language?”

  “Huh? Nothing. He can’t read. Is that so weird?”

  “Not really, but why did you phrase it that way?”

  Catching up to our smaller group, Celeste asked Damian, “Shall we stop by the park? I haven’t been in several weeks.”

  “Uh, sure, dearest. How does everyone else feel about heading to the park?”

  “Being out-of-doors is always more invigorating than being within,” said Ishree. “Do you not agree, Mercer?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Are there actual trees in this park?”

  “Yeah,” answered Isabel. “Not many big plants grow here because of the poor dirt, but there are spots where they can sprout.”

  “At least if you humans do not pave over them,” said Svren.

  “Easy to say when your kind have all the good spots.”

  “If anything, that restricts where we can build. Krewen were using this land to its fullest before humans forced us off it.”

  “Before we-”

  “Isabel, Svren,” I said. “Do you have to do this now?”

  “I don’t. What about you, Svren?”

  “It will be good for him to know our history.”

  “Your version of it.”

  I sighed. “You each can give me your account of it separately.”

  Overhearing, Damian said, “So you don’t know history and you can’t read. I get that right?”

  “Aye. Assume whatever you want with those tidbits of information.”

  To get to the park, we passed the verge of a neighborhood much like the one Celeste lived in, except it appeared cleaner, newer, and flaunted foliage of its own. The park itself, while not large, did feature the most green I had yet seen on this world. Not much in the way of grasses, however, and the grass that did grow was an amber color. Trimmed shrubbery about waist high bordered the paths. The trees here featured thick trunks encased in reddish bark. None surpassed thirty feet in height. Despite the early winter season, the leaves on both the shrubs and trees remained a healthy green.

  On the grasses or softer looking dirt, dozens of children ran around and played their games. Some jumped on and over these rune-like squares drawn or dug into the ground. Others jumped over thin ropes they or others held and twirled. Bouncy balls were thrown or kicked. Exempting a handful of them, the majority of their parents merely watched on, or conversed with other adults in small pavilions as they ate. A tranquil slice of life, though the surrounding city’s brassy din and smoky stench barred a tranquil atmosphere overall.

  Celeste separated from the main group when she saw a twosome she recognized. I made my own separation when I spotted the trunks of several trees surrounded by white rocks, many of which looked ready to be turned into dragon stones. I asked Svren to join me so I didn’t have one of the unfamiliar Vanguards skulking right next to me.

  A few minutes afterward, Damian came up to me and asked, “Why are you looking at rocks?”

  “I need to keep my supply high, so I collect the good ones.”

  He stayed silent for a moment as he witnessed me examining the smoothness of two rocks in my hand and drop one so I could pocket the other. Seeing I was indeed serious, he asked, “Uhh, why?”

  “So they can make me fire when I need them to.”

  In a strange mix of a man laughing and a bird chirping, Svren chuckled. He ambled toward a nearby trunk to inspect its rock pile.

  “You guys fucking with me or something?”

  “Take no offense. I’m simply not supposed to be so forthcoming about who I am. However, I assure you, I am telling the truth.”

  “Oh, all right… I guess.”

  “Your sisters really won’t tell you what they know about me when they get the chance?”

  “Not sure. I don’t think they’ve ever been ordered to keep a secret before. Hmph, not that they go into detail much when they visit anyway. ‘We shoot at monsters. What else do you need to know?’ is all they say.”

  “It does sound fairly straightforward.”

  “Gods, do you even hear yourself? Monsters are called ‘monsters’ for a reason. My sisters aren’t out there fighting stinkin’ rats.”

  “Aye, they’re not… Well, I have no right to tell you not to worry about your own kin. All I can say is not to push for the details. If they wanted you to hear them, they would tell you. I suspect they want a family’s welcome when they visit you, not someone else to give a report to.”

  A heavy sigh. He brought out a cigarette packet and pulled out one of the sticks. Flicking on a lighter, he said, “Don’t know who you are, but sounds like you share a soldier’s perspective.”

  “I understand it well enough, except perhaps the following orders part.” I shook my head when he offered a cigarette. “What about you? What’s the perspective of an inventor like? That’s what you are, right?”

  “Trying to be. More often than not, I’m merely a handyman for the neighborhood, or whichever part of town will pay me. I’ve yet to meet a machine I can’t fix, er, eventually. Now, making a brand new one from scratch is a different story.”

  “Hard for me to imagine new contraptions after everything I’ve already seen.”

  “Yet every year there are more being made. Why, a few months ago I read of a fellow who created a kind of glass that supposedly does not shatter so easily. Imagine that! Transparent glass as strong as wood. Gods know I have lots of ideas in my own head, but if I get my dear Celeste to fund one of those ideas and it fails to catch on… Or what if someone steals the idea and makes it better? I hate thinking about it.”

  “Repairing already built machines sounds less stressful.”

  “It is, much less so, but it also pays much less so.”

  “You seem comfortable in Celeste’s home.”

  “It used to a grander place bustling with servants and life, or so she tells me. She lost much of it when her husband died. I’d like to bring that back to her, as well as to my own family.”

  Svren returned with his pick of stones, so I simply said, “I see.”

  I soon sat on a stone bench, my dagger working on carving the rune key on the roundish stone I held. My eyes were not wholly dedicated to the
etching. They often drifted to one of the smaller groups that had formed. For instance, the sibling trio kicked around a red ball to teach the finer points of a game to a trio of older children. Celeste chatted with several women around her age, though I’m not certain she knew them beforehand. The krewen stayed close to me, the lieutenants watched me and my brother from afar, and that brother discovered a convenient companion in Laura.

  Alex’s mouth seemed to be doing much of the moving. I doubt he related all that well to a servant girl no older than fifteen. I figured, from his point of view, Laura simply made for a better confidant than anyone else connected to me. From my point of view, I was all for anything that allowed him to release whatever surplus vexation he could.

  About the time I was thinking about a hearty meal, the remote crack of a gunshot echoed through a city as detached from the park to the people within it almost as much as the park was detached from Orda. A few did take the trouble to turn the heads toward the unexpected sound, but most carried on as if nothing happened.

  “Are gun battles common here?” I asked the krewen.

  “I wouldn’t call them ‘common,’” said Ishree.

  “Or even ‘battles,” added Svren. “All I heard was a single shot. Likely a human losing an argument.”

  “Or caught cheating.”

  “Or got too drunk.”

  “And those explanations are unheard of in a krewen city?”

  “Hmm, not so unheard of,” answered Ishree. “But far fewer incidents, yes. We krewen give ample warning before we resort to such viciousness. Humans often… What do they call it?”

  “Snap,” replied Svren.

  “Ah, right. Humans often snap without warning. A friendly card game will suddenly see tables turned over and pistols drawn. Quite shocking.”

  “What do krewen do?”

  “Oh, mostly puff up our feathers. Stamp our feet. Extreme cases will have us howling our dominance. Strange how humans don’t have an easy way to declare their dominance without going straight to brutish violence.”

  “I suppose the signs of human dominance are subtler,” I said. “We don’t growl or bark like dogs, puff up our hair, or, uh, stamp our feet, but I’ll still say we show some warnings. Tones change, muscles stiffen, sometimes faces get redder. People planning to do something violent usually sweat more. Those are my observations, anyway.”

  “Yes, such signs have become easier to detect after so much time associating with humans, but it takes an effort to notice them.”

  “Well, for my part, it sounds as if an upset krewen won’t be too difficult to single out.”

  When our stomachs began to demand a banquet, we regrouped at Celeste’s house. Laura had help from the twins and First Lieutenant Prat in preparing a lot of soup. Once we finished eating, which included cubes of reeking white cheese that tasted better than the soup itself, I saw no other way to pass the time other than training. Not the acute, muscle-aching type I wanted, of course. The closest I got to experiencing a push of my limits was sitting within Alex’s paralyzing shadow. Resisting his spell provided both of us a way to fortify our prana without moving. Candles and Isabel’s fireballs later assisted in my fire training.

  In the evening, Isabel used her heat conjuring to warm a copper tub full of water for herself and, in due course, others to take a comfortable bath in. As the last one to seek a cleanse, I needed to warm the water back up. My dragon flame instantly boiled the liquid element and steamed up the small room, but it got the job done. My last act in the tub was to use a dagger to cut away the hairy scruff beginning to form on my chin and cheeks.

  On stepping out the room, one of the twins stood holding folded clothes. With a thick purple nightgown bundled around her, and her hair formed into a bun, I only had her straight-faced demeanor to tell me it was Felicia standing before me. There existed a small possibility Isabel was pretending to be her sister, but such a possibility dwindled to nothing when I noticed the lack of those old, bumpy burn scars pyromancers inevitably suffered on their forearms.

  After rejecting her offer to wear new clothing, I asked, “What’s that slippery green oval thing in the tub for?”

  “You mean the soap? You don’t have that in your mystical land?”

  “Ah, I think we do. It just looks and smells different. Isn’t that used for clothing?”

  “No, you can rub it on yourself. Makes getting the dirt off easier. Helps with smells, too, but I think most of your odor comes from your clothes. You should at least get Laura to launder them.”

  “Maybe later.”

  Her darting eyes searched my face. “You shaved?”

  “Aye.”

  “Is being clean-shaven the style in Orda?”

  “There are plenty of beards there, but mine seems to come in patchy, so I always preferred cutting it. I haven’t tried growing it beyond stubble lately, though. Why? Should I?”

  She shrugged. “It’s the style here. Makes men look older. Your body may belong to a fighter, but your face is still kinda between boyish and grownup. Don’t want people to treat a dragon knight like a kid just because he doesn’t look the part.”

  “If it helps any enemies underestimate me, then perhaps it’s an advantage.”

  “Hmm, I guess strategy should be more important than aesthetics for you… That how you always think? In strategy?”

  “Hard not to.”

  “It’s why you don’t want to change out of your armor, right?”

  “Seems like the safest strategy to go with when in a world with weapons like your guns and continents filled with fiends.”

  “And not trusting the lieutenants. They’re not going to trust you if you don’t show you can keep your guard down around them when we’re supposed to be relaxing.”

  “I assume they’ve been ordered not to trust me, so taking off my armor won’t be what convinces them to defy an order if they have to. Besides, I never had to remove my armor to earn your confidence.”

  “No, but it would have been attained earlier.”

  “Well, good to know I have it now.”

  Walking away, she said, “Barely, dragon boy. Barely.”

  When it came time to sleep, Alex and I slept openly in the sitting room with some combination of the lieutenants and krewen. I happened to be awake during the later portion of the freezing night. I sat by the fireplace, severing its twitching wisps to practice controlling them. In due course, that turned to feeding the embers dragon prana. Finally, I brought a dragon stone’s ready dragon flame into the mix to better compare what I was doing.

  While my standard technique was easier due to Aranath’s prana feeding the initial burst, the personal prana I needed to keep it a dragon’s flame was immense compared to transforming regular fire into dragon’s breath. Conversely, my inexperience with dragon prana made it equally as likely that I would douse natural fire as empower it. It proved irksome to be so close to achieving the technique with the obvious advantage only for my attempts at sparking and manipulating natural fire to fall short. I truly needed to start wholly investing in the idea that I was handling separate elements, not merely two kinds of fire.

  At the break of dawn, as she once again supported my training, I asked Isabel to describe igniting her flame into existence. I said, “I get how to burn prana to feed fire, but I’m not getting how to actually ignite a new flame from nothing in the first place.”

  “Yeah, that’s the trick for us fire weavers, eh? Rocks, water, and air are almost always available to other weavers, but in a lot of cases, we got to learn to birth fire on our own. Let’s see, how do I describe it to you? It’s been years since I really had to think about. It’s all so second nature now… Hold on…”

  The pyromancer stared at her hand while her fingers and wrist slowly twirled. A miniscule fireball flashed over her fingertips at the end of the twist. She blew it out and tried the same motion again.

  After the third attempt, she said, “Oh! I remember! Felicia taught me a technique she learned f
rom a book. It’s like this…” She snapped her fingers to bring forth an ember of her own creation. “People talk about how conjuring fire is all about your emotional state and that kind of crap, but that’s more about mastering regular ol’ fire, and you only need it so you can turn it into something you already know how to control, right?”

  “Aye, mostly.”

  “Then my professional recommendation is to treat your prana like two rocks.”

  “Two rocks?”

  “You know how you can strike some rocks together to make a spark? Well, that’s kinda how I treat my prana. I release it, split it, and ‘strike’ one part of it against the other part. Make sense?”

  “Hmm, I think it does.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Of course it does. Snap your prana apart and snap them back together. Do it with proper speed and friction and you’ll get your magic spark.”

  I nodded. “I think this will help. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Except, now that I think about it, my teachings on guns and now fire conjuring are not being reciprocated. What can you teach me about prana?”

  “It’d be easier if we were allowed to spar. I’m not great at articulating prana techniques.”

  “Try me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We went out again late in the morning. I went with the flow, so I was freely herded to another moving picture theatre, more time at the park, and a few boxing matches. The matches took place in an outdoor venue where people from all walks of life gathered to view the spectacle of hardy men looking to punch the shit out of each other for money and the chance to be punched by another, presumably better, boxer later on. I could see the appeal. I itched to get in the ring myself, a hankering I perceived in Alex as well. A shame these official events seemed to disallow amateurs.