Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures Page 3

  Neither of them left the banquet happy. When Tia got home she just sat in the middle of her room, frustrated and getting angrier.

  Her dad knocked and entered the room. “We have a problem,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Tia said, looking down at the carpet on her floor. “The city provides. It calculates the best outcomes for us. We have jobs we are engaged with. Lives that are often fulfilling. And I know that Owyn is a good choice. I’m struggling, but I think I’ll get through.”

  “Your aunt just sent a runner, he’s at the door. She says a quarantine order has been issued for you.” Her dad squatted down in front of her. “What have you been doing, Tia?”

  His face was so full of concern it hurt to see. Tia flinched. “I haven’t done anything since I came home.”

  “There must be probabilities or some new calculations the city has made,” her father muttered. He sat down on another chair and rubbed his forehead. No doubt he was wondering where he had gone wrong in raising her. Or trying to figure out what he could do.

  Which was nothing.

  “Or,” Tia said, “the city is right.” It was strange to think of the city itself bringing its attention on her. It was more than strange: it was scary.

  “What do you mean?” her father asked, looking up.

  “I’m an ambassador. I’m exposed to things that come into the city. It’s my job to stop them. It does mean there is a risk. And I know who I need to talk to.”

  “You can’t leave, there are ambassadors on the way,” her father protested, but Tia was already out of her chair.

  She used a long black cloak with a hood to help her slip around the shadows of the streets and flit her way to the guest houses.

  When Riun opened the door again, she pushed him back inside and closed the door behind her.

  “What did you do to me?” she demanded.

  “What are you talking about? What are you doing here?”

  “There’s a quarantine command on me. You’ve infected me with something; I want to know what.”

  “It’s just me,” Riun protested. “I’m not an agent. I’m not anything. I don’t have anything.”

  “Then you must have gotten something from someone else,” Tia insisted. “Do you have anti-city propaganda you’ve been exposed to or thoughts?”

  “What? No!”

  “What city sent you?” Tia poked his chest.

  “It was my own idea. I wanted to see the world. That’s all.”

  Tia threw herself down on the couch. “Then why am I suddenly a threat to peace and order? Why is the city going to quarantine me?”

  “I don’t know,” Riun said. He looked just as upset as she did. “There’s always a risk, being a traveler. That you picked something up somewhere. Some mannerism that a host city will get upset by. But I swear to you, Tia, I haven’t set out to do anything to you. I would never forgive myself if I did.”

  She looked at him sharply. “You seemed quick enough to push me out of the guest house earlier.”

  “For both our sakes, Tia. You and I both know you have a cardmate. You have a place in this city. I won’t jeopardize your life here.”

  But he already had. Just be revealing his existence, she realized.

  She opened her mouth to try and explain this, and a loud rap came from the door.

  “Open up!” shouted an authoritative voice. “Traveler Riun, in the name of the city open up!”

  Tia stood. “I’ve ruined it all for both of us, haven’t I?” The city had figured out she came here. Now Riun would be expelled.

  “What will they do to you?” Riun asked, eyes narrowed. He didn’t seem to be worried about expulsion. “Answer me quickly, for I’ve been to many cities, and the punishments for disorder vary wildly, Tia.”

  “Long-term quarantine,” Tia said. “Maybe a year. A recomputing of my personality profile based on an interview, pending release. Re-education during the quarantine.”

  Riun grimaced. Tia stood up and walked over to him. “It’s not your fault, Riun,” she said. “It’s mine for wanting something that isn’t mine to have.”

  She touched his lips with her fingers. To her frustration, he didn’t seem to be sharing the moment with her. His brow was creased with thought, as if he were struggling with something.

  Then he gently held her shoulders. “And what is it you really want, Tia? Is it me or the traveling? Or to escape the city? Some want to leave it, but there are always more cities, more places you’ll have to navigate carefully. More places you’ll be considered an outside threat by the city’s Mind.”

  Tia looked into his eyes. He looked quite earnest at this moment. So she returned that with honesty. “I know I’m attracted to the outside. I think that’s a part of it. And I think a part of it is you as well. I hope that’s the greater part. But how am I to know? You are not my cardmate.”

  The hammering on the door stopped. They would be breaking it down shortly.

  “If you truly are in love with both, and not just one of those things, then come with me,” Riun said, and held out a hand.

  Riun led her to his room and pulled on a coat, then swept his books and notes into his trunk.

  “Lock my door,” he said.

  Tia did, hearing the ambassadors crashing against the outside door. It creaked, seconds away from breaking open.

  “It’s not uncommon for travelers to have to run for it when a city changes its mind,” Riun said. “So we always have a way out that we note for each other.”

  He kicked at a panel, and a small section of the wall swung aside. They walked into the empty room next door and closed the false wall behind them. Outside, ambassadors trooped down the hallway and started banging on Riun’s door.

  Riun took them through two more rooms until they stopped at one with a window onto an alley.

  They squeezed through, yanking his trunk along with them, and clattered out into the alleyway. Riun pulled his collar up, making to run for the street, but Tia stopped him.

  “This way,” she said, pointing at their feet. Wisps of steam leaked out from the edges of a manhole. “There’ll be watchers on the streets. I know the steam tunnels.”

  Inside the dark tunnels they ran for the edge of the city, and emerged near the ravine elevators. Again, Tia directed them away from the street. “I know a faster way; my dad works around here,” she huffed.

  They broke through the doors and ran down the long halls of a calculating factory instead. Clean white, brightly lit, and filled with thousands of sober-faced men and women, leaning over abacus trays, flicking beads in response to equations being offered up to them by blinking lights near their control boards.

  Their presence caused a rippling effect of commotion as they passed through, with calculators in clean white robes standing up to shout at them.

  Tia threw open the rear doors, and they pushed past the handfuls of people waiting to board the city elevators. Curses and complaints followed them, but Riun shut the cage to the elevator and Tia hit the switches.

  The elevator climbed up the side of the ravine, hissing and spitting as it passed street after street level, and the roofs of houses at the lower levels, and clinging to the sides slowly slid past them.

  There was a balcony on the High Road near one of the bridges that ran along under the glass roof that capped the city. Riun grabbed Tia’s arm, and pulled her over to the railing. “Look,” he said.

  Tia did, and gasped. The city below was changing. People were spilling out onto the streets. Lights were turning on. It wasn’t orderly, or staggered in shifts as normal. Instead, the focus of the disturbance was the calculating building they’d run through. People were wandering the streets randomly, not using the flowchart sidewalks and lights.

  There was chaos in the Abyssal City and it was spreading.

  Lights flickered randomly, and gouts of steam burst from below the streets.

  “Did we cause that?” Tia asked, looking at the masses of pedestrians wandering aimlessly ab
out, shouting and arguing. They could hear the grinding shudder of machines coming to a halt over the bubbling hum of discussions and arguments drifting upward from the entire city. “Did you?”

  She glanced at him, and realized from the look on his face that he was just as horrified as she was. “I’m just a traveler,” he whispered. “Just a traveler.”

  They looked at the spreading chaos, rapt. “Do you think it’ll bring the entire city to a stop?” she asked.

  Riun shook his head. “No. No, I’ve seen this before. It’s a temporary fault. A system failure.” Warning klaxons fired to life throughout the city. “Soon they’ll order a return to homes, empty the streets. Stop all the machines then restart them. Order will return.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tia said. Not in all her life. It unnerved her. She’d always thought of society, the system around her, as stable and everlasting and solid.

  Yet here she was, with Riun. And there chaos was. In the distance, she heard the rumble of an intercity train.

  They had to move through the sandbox and get to it.

  “Listen,” Riun told her, hearing the train and turning to face her. They were so close, their lips could almost touch. “If you leave with me, I can’t promise you anything. I can’t promise you a home or a city that you fit into. I can’t promise you my love, I’ve only known you a week. All I can promise is a travel partner, and the fact that I do find you beautiful and interesting, and I want to escape with you. Can that be enough?”

  Tia pulled the silvered card off her neck and looked down at it. “Yes,” she said. “I’m willing to take chance and uncertainty.”

  And then she threw the card out into the space over the ravine and watched it flutter away, down toward the steaming, chaotic streets of the city.

  A Mouse Ran Up the Clock

  A. C. Wise

  Simon watched the mouse scale the clock’s side, whiskers thrumming. The clock struck, and the mouse quivered in time. Its paws lost their hold, and the mouse fell, its legs beating the air as Simon bent to retrieve it.

  Carefully, he turned the creature on its back. He could feel the flutter-beat of a heart through the skin, and above it the gentle ticking of a different kind of mechanism. He soaked the corner of a cloth in chloroform and held it near the mouse’s mouth and nose until the shivering stopped. Then he picked up a scalpel and tweezers, peering through his glasses, and opened the creature up.

  The mouse’s insides whirred, and the same honey-colored light that had lit its ascent winked off golden gears. Simon made a few minute adjustments; tightening here, and resetting a balance there, and then he righted the mouse. Waking, the mouse blinked and ran its paws over its whiskers before running for a hole in the baseboard.

  The bell hanging over the shop door chimed and Simon looked up. Hastily he pulled the watch, which he should have finished that morning, towards him and feigned absorption in his work. Hard boots clicked over the wooden floor, and the man’s shadow filled Simon’s peripheral vision, blocking the light. The man cleared his throat and Simon looked up. His heart went into his throat.

  “Herr Shulewitz? Simon Shulewitz?”

  “Yes?”

  Simon could barely swallow. He fought to keep his hands from trembling as he set the watch down and straightened his shoulders, trying to meet the Staatspolizei man in the eye. The officer held his peaked cap under one arm, and the rest of his uniform was in perfect order – pressed and clean with sharp lines and not a speck of dust. The row of medals across his breast would have been blinding if the sun hadn’t been behind him.

  “Herr Shulewitz,” here the man attempted something like a smile, but it pulled the deep scars around his mouth into ghastly lines and Simon fought the urge to shudder. “Are you aware that you have a vermin problem?”

  “Sir?”

  Simon gripped the counter until his knuckles were white to keep himself from visibly shaking.

  “Vermin, Herr Shulewitz. Mice.”

  The officer drew a plain white handkerchief, folded over to hide what was inside, out of his pocket and lay it on the counter between them. Simon’s heart beat high in his throat as the officer reached out one gloved hand and nudged the folds of cloth aside.

  One of his mice, looking as though it had been crushed flat by a boot, so gears mingled with blood and fur, lay within. Simon could not help his hand flying to his mouth. The Staatspolizei officer smiled.

  “A very curious creature, don’t you think, Herr Shulewitz?”

  “I . . .” Simon faltered. Tears burned behind his eyes, threatening to fall and make his fear visible. He tried not to think of shattered shop windows and cries in the night; neighbors who disappeared never to be seen or heard from again. It was easy to deny as long as darkness covered it, but now it was broad daylight and the officer was standing right in front of him. Simon darted a quick glance behind the officer. Were his neighbors drawing their curtains, bringing false night and pretending they didn’t see?

  “A very curious creature indeed, one with a great many uses, don’t you think?”

  It took Simon a moment to register that the officer was still speaking, still studying him with strange bright eyes, and still smiling his terrible slashed smile.

  “I believe, Herr Shulewitz, that the Emperor would be very interested in such a creature, and the man who created it. And if the Emperor is interested, then I am interested.”

  The officer reached out then, and his leather-clad grip was surprisingly strong on Simon’s upper arm.

  “Pack what clothing you need. You are in the service of the Empire now.”

  It was not a question.

  Unfamiliar landscape slid by outside the train window – a blur of green and brown. Simon had never been farther than a few miles outside his hometown before. Across from him in the private compartment, Herr Kaltenbrunner, as the officer had eventually introduced himself, was still looking at the clockwork mouse. When Simon had asked where he was being taken, Kaltenbrunner had smiled his terrible smile and replied, “Lodz, Herr Tinker.”

  Simon had heard of Lodz, a shadowy city far distant, which he pictured as grey and full of rain.

  “Truly remarkable!” Kaltenbrunner exclaimed, turning the mouse over again to examine the gears within.

  “Machinery melded with living flesh. Truly you are a visionary. Think, just think, of how such a thing might be employed – scoop out the eyes and put in eyes of glass instead and there you have it, the perfect spy! It goes tiny and unnoticed through every house at night, seeing who has been naughty, and who has been very, very bad.”

  “It won’t work,” Simon answered distractedly.

  He was still gazing out the window. For the moment he had forgotten to be afraid, and he continued to forget as he divided his mind between the outside world and the thing Kaltenbrunner was proposing.

  “A mouse needs a brain to live. You can augment what is there, but you can’t take too much out. A device to watch behind glass eyes is simply unfeasible.”

  “Ah, but it is feasible, Herr Tinker, if you know the right methods to employ.”

  Simon dragged his gaze away from the glass and blinked. Kaltenbrunner had once more tucked the mouse carefully away. There was something in the officer’s eyes, in his smile, that made it seem as though all the heat had suddenly drained out of the car.

  “The Emperor has many interests. Clockwork is only one of them.”

  Simon opened his mouth, but Kaltenbrunner lay a finger across his lips, his eyes shining.

  “You will see soon enough, Herr Tinker.”

  The train seemed to pick up speed then, as though through Simon’s alarm, hurrying them across the countryside towards the city full of rain.

  When they arrived in Lodz, Simon saw little besides the platform and the plain brick walls of the station. Almost immediately upon disembarking Kaltenbrunner slipped a black cloth over Simon’s eyes and tied it tight, binding his hands as well before bundling him into the back of a cart. H
e smelled the sharp scent of animal flesh, and heard a whip crack, and then they were rumbling forward.

  The road was poorly paved, and the cart jounced painfully over broken stones, leaving Simon bruised. His flesh was tender when they stopped again, and Kaltenbrunner took his arm. Simon was half dragged from the cart and led blind through the streets of the city. He stumbled once, but Kaltenbrunner hauled him up.

  Around him, the city was full of noise. Simon could hear footsteps, shuffling over the broken stones. Did nobody notice him being led away? Or did they simply not care? Simon pictured the men and women of the rain-filled city, heads bowed, hats pulled low, eyes downcast and perpetually shadowed.

  “Almost there now.” The officer spoke close to Simon’s ear, so Simon could feel hot breath, scented with brandy.

  All around them rose the stench of the city. It smelled of bodies, too closely packed, and waste, both animal and human. It stank of tallow, and oil, garbage and blood. Even blind Simon could feel the closeness as they pushed through narrow streets until they stepped through what seemed to be a gateway, and they were suddenly alone.

  The air felt damp on his face, and he longed to pull the blindfold away. The rope binding his wrists cut into his skin. Beyond the cloth the light lessened, and the surface underfoot changed, and Simon knew they had stepped inside. Echoes of their footfalls bounced back to them, and Simon lost count as they twisted through corridors until at last he heard a door being opened.

  Kaltenbrunner half-pushed him through, and all at once the blindfold was pulled roughly away and Simon blinked. They were in a vast space with a high ceiling of corrugated metal. Workbenches spread with objects Simon couldn’t even begin to name were scattered across the floor among other debris, so it looked like a scrap yard brought inside. Dim grey light filtered through glass panels and lit the floor in strange pale patches, broken by beams and pillars, which kept the structure upright and cast long shadows on the floor.

  At first Simon thought they were alone, but a sound among the scattered chaos made him turn. A man who had been seated at a workbench rose and came towards them. Like Simon he was young, but with darker hair, an added brightness to his eyes and a kind of fierceness in his smile.