Steamborn (24 page)

“If it
is
difficult,” Charles said as he lowered his voice, “let us know who and what their reasons are.”

“I will. You’d have to be a fool not to see the value here.” Ambrose extended his arm and shook Charles’s hand. “Either way, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It was late when they made it back to Bat’s house. Jacob thought Charles might fall asleep while he regaled his parents with stories of all the contraptions plastering the Wild Horse.

“I think we’ll have to go there,” his mom said. She leaned against his father.

“A camera that can take a photo in under a minute?” his dad asked. “Sounds like one of those old fairy tales in your books.”

“Fairy tales don’t have cameras, Dad.” Jacob pulled his backpack up off the ground and unbuttoned the main flap. “Here.” He held his arm out with the little gray metal frame the picture man had given them.

His dad leaned forward and took it from Jacob’s grip. His eyes moved from the photo to Jacob and back.

“And they developed it already?” his mom asked, leaning in closer to see the photo of Alice, Jacob, and the Jumper. “Oh, Jacob, look at the colors!”

“It’s a new kind of camera,” Jacob said. “The picture man said it was a new kind of film that lets them do color. He said a lot about mixing three colors and chemicals and … I don’t know, but it looks neat, doesn’t it?”

Jacob yawned.

His dad handed the picture back, and Jacob looked at it again. Alice wore a big smile. The Jumper had huge eyelashes, as Alice liked to call them, and the pattern on its fur made it look like a smile. Jacob’s arm was around Alice, and he rather liked how they looked together. Him with his short, scruffy hair, leather vest, and a worn pair of denim pants, and her with a looped leather shirt, or loops as the Highborn kids called them. Pockets alternated with wide straps down her shirt and ended above a darker leather skirt.

Jacob knew they were leftovers from the Highborn kids, but they were new to the Lowlanders. Jacob was pretty sure all of the kids would be asking their parents for loops when they got home. You could fill those pockets with just about anything.

“Why don’t you get some sleep,” Jacob’s mom said.

Jacob’s first instinct was to argue that he wasn’t tired, but he was actually very tired. He nodded and stood up. Bat said two of his guests had left to stay in the Castle, which left a few extra beds open for Jacob and his parents. The thought of not sleeping on the couch or the floor enticed him.

“Sleep is a fine idea,” Charles said as he stood up and walked down the hall, somewhat leaning over like he was ready to fall into bed.

Jacob watched him go and then nodded. “Okay, I’ll see you in the morning.” He gave each of his parents a hug. His dad squeezed him hard enough Jacob had trouble catching a breath until the hug relaxed.

He made his way to the spiral staircase and started up to the top floor. He supposed it was an attic, really, with the narrow rooms almost fully contained in each dormer. Bat had called it something else. Jacob tried to remember as he stepped off the stairs and squinted in the dark hallway.

“A gable dormer. That was it,” Jacob whispered to himself as he pushed the iron handle down and pulled the heavy wooden door open.

It didn’t take long for Jacob to make himself at home. He slid his backpack onto the top of the cedar chest in the corner. Only a sliver of moonlight and the yellow glow of a distant streetlamp lit the small space. Jacob opened the first in a series of drawers beneath the bed. A yellow-green glow rose up from the jar of glowworms when he set them inside.

He hesitated, and set the jar on the cedar chest instead. Even the dim light glinted off the silver skull when Jacob pulled
The Dead Scourge
out and laid it at the foot of the bed. He was tired, no doubt, but Alice had told him about some of what she’d read later in the book, and nothing was going to stop him. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders after tossing his clothes into another drawer, propped himself up on his elbows, and began to read.

There was only one man guarding the gates to the great city of the Deadlands. A field of death—man, beast, and machine—was strewn around him. He did not move, no, he only waited. When we were close enough, he asked what our purpose was.

I had been sent to treat with the Deadlands nation, and I told him as much. It was when he nodded, in that simple gesture, I realized he was not entirely a man. The brass and copper I had taken to be armor disappeared beneath his flesh. Pistons moved at his neckline, and something shifted and spun beneath his jaw.

It was not until I set foot in the Deadlands that I learned what they called themselves: Biomechs. They were the men and women who had taken metal into their own bodies, some to repair hands or feet or limbs, others to gain strength.

Atlier, one of our own smiths, was fascinated with the Biomechs. The rest of us were intimidated at best, and terrified at worst. Never had I seen such power as what we saw from the Biomechs in the battle of the Deadlands nation. Raw, terrible power.

Jacob read until the light from the glowworms started to dim and he realized they needed food. He leaned over the bed and opened a drawer, pulling out a small box of dead flies. The glowworms weren’t particular about what they ate, really, but they did tend to glow better on a steady diet of flies.

Jacob added the food to the jar, and the glowworms immediately began to eat. He set the lid back on and levered the wire lock across the top to hold it closed before shutting the light away in the drawer.

He left
The Dead Scourge
on the edge of the cedar chest. There were questions to which he wanted answers. Charles had been in the Deadlands War, and Jacob wondered if the old man had seen Biomechs with his own eyes.

Tomorrow, he’d find out.

Charles wasn’t at breakfast the next morning, but Jacob’s mom told him the old man was working out in his lab. Jacob stuffed his face with eggs and a soufflé he was fairly certain had some kind of flies in it. Some things shouldn’t be crunchy.

Charles was hunched over his workbench when Jacob walked out. He loaded a heavy spring onto the tensioner and lined up the metal brace for another prosthetic. Charles glanced up when Jacob swung the oak door closed, the metal bars hitting the frame with a clang.

“Morning, Jacob.” He turned his attention back to the mechanical hand.

“I thought you’d be working on more nail gloves.”

“I was, earlier,” Charles said, nodding to a small stack of gloves.

Jacob picked the top two up. There were three altogether. “Are they already done?”

“Not quite. I need to outfit the cartridges with springs and followers so we can load them. You want to give me a hand?”

Jacob started digging through a wooden bucket under the bench. He’d seen Charles stash the thin metal strips the day before. Jacob pulled out the long iron box that held the followers, and pushed the bucket back under the bench with his foot.

He set about mounting a spring catch in the smaller vise on the other end of the table. It would be almost impossible to set the follower properly if he didn’t have the catch. Jacob forced the cartridge down over the spring catch until it clicked. He made sure the spring was properly aligned before slipping the follower in through a little slit in the side. One of his favorite things was letting springs fire bits of metal and wood around the room.

Charles raised his eyebrow when Jacob looked up.

“Duck,” Jacob said, and he ripped the bolt of the spring catch out the side. The spring exploded with enough force to throw the cartridge across the room where it slammed into the door with a thunk.

Charles looked at Jacob and tried to hide a smile. “Good thing Bat doesn’t mind a dent or three in his doors.”

Jacob walked over to the door and picked up the cartridge. “Can we start loading them?”

Charles glanced back at him. “You
want
to load them? I didn’t think you enjoyed the menial tasks.” He turned his attention back to the workbench. “I hate loading those cartridges. I need to build something that can feed them automatically. Maybe mount it on the bench.” He nodded to himself. “A curved bin would work. Like a magazine but much taller.”

“How would it push the spring back?”

Charles sighed. “I don’t know yet. I’m just complaining, Jacob. If you want to load the magazine, you go right ahead.

Jacob pulled his stool up beside Charles and dragged a blue and red can of nails closer. He picked one of them up and twirled it between his fingers. “They don’t really look like nails.”

“True. They don’t have heads until the springs drive them into wood. Even then, it’s not as clean a head as a fully manufactured nail.” There were three quick clinks as Charles adjusted one of the braces with a small hammer and chisel. He blew a few metal shavings out of a wrist joint and tested its movement again.

“Charles?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you ever see a Biomech in the war?”

The old man’s hand slowed in its movements, gently wiping the dust and dirt off the black mesh of the new prosthetic. “I saw many Biomechs, Jacob. Understand, some of the Deadlands people used biomechanics to repair a lost arm or leg, much as you designed these prosthetics. Others though … other men were hungry for power, and would give almost anything to obtain it.”

“What kind did
you
see?”

Charles leaned back on his stool and raised the magnifiers on his glasses. “I saw all of them, Jacob. I saw a man without legs who could run as fast as a Fire Lizard, and a woman without an arm that could lift a carriage with one hand. And I saw the madness. The crazed men who worked their machinations into their own bodies. Not to replace or repair a wound, but simply to make themselves
better.”

“Did they?”

“In a way, I suppose. They made themselves very good at killing, Jacob, letting fear drive them to extremes. They killed our friends, they killed themselves, they killed the Fire Lizards. The Forgotten wore the Deadlands banner, and by the gods they earned that damned skull.”

“Are they still like that? Even after the war?”

“Some, I am sure.” Charles tightened a length of metal in one of the vises. “The city of Bollwerk has grown to be a much more civilized place than you’d expect.”

“How do you know?”

Charles fell silent. Jacob could see the small frown etched across the old man’s face, and he knew better than to ask him anything else. They worked in silence for a time, until Jacob thought it would be okay to speak, or perhaps until his hunger had impaired his judgment.

“Do you think they were wrong to create them?”

“The smiths?” Charles asked.

Jacob nodded.

“No.” Charles set his tools down and turned to Jacob. “There is very little in this world that’s inherently evil. Even the most evil men you can think of didn’t start out that way. Most men don’t become what they intended to be.”

“What do you mean?” Jacob asked as he crossed his arms.

Charles pinched the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t always want to be a smith, much less a tinker. Tinker is a label given to a smith when people think he’s lost his mind. My mind is very much intact, thank you.”

Jacob muffled a laugh, and didn’t say what came into his own mind.

Charles smiled. “Yes, well, now we’re getting off topic. My point is, I wanted to be an organist. I wanted nothing more than to play the organ at Festival and sit in the Great Hall behind the castle walls. It wasn’t a crazy dream, Jacob. I was good. I was damn good, but then the Deadlands War came, and the world became something else.

“Do you miss it? The organ, I mean?”

“There are days, yes, when my mind is stuck in the past. You have a passion, don’t give it up. You’ll need it to keep the shadows at bay when this world goes wrong.”

Jacob didn’t know what to say. Should he say sorry? He didn’t think Charles would like that. Charles was not a man to accept pity, especially from someone a quarter his age. He thought it would be safer to stay quiet, or change the topic entirely.

Jacob looked up at Charles. The old man stared back, but Jacob didn’t feel like Charles was seeing what was in the room. His mind was somewhere else. Charles held up the prosthetic, tested the knob that controlled the hand, and nodded.

“That one done?” Jacob asked.

“Yes, let’s get back to the nail gloves. We’re going to need the money from those, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t you think we should donate some of them?”

“The city is paying for the repairs and the tools.” Charles stretched out one of the thick springs and latched it into a hook. He lowered one of his lenses and began inspecting it for any weaknesses, prodding and pulling on the metal spiral. “If it was Lowlanders having to pay for their own repairs, yes, I’d give them as much as they needed for free. But we’ll need money if we have to run, Jacob.”

The thought of taking a trip with Charles excited Jacob. The old man was full of stories, and it seemed like every day he had a new one to share. Jacob worried about his dad, though. Could his parents make the trip? And what about Alice? And what about the other Lowland kids he knew?

Jacob’s thoughts took a dark turn as he thought about what Charles was saying, what he’d read about in
The Dead Scourge,
and what the men had said in the catacombs. If Newton convinced Parliament to force the miners back to work, before it was safe, they’d have a revolt. The Lowlanders were mostly unarmed behind the city wall, so Newton would get his wish either way. They wouldn’t have to feed the dead.

Charles and Jacob didn’t say much else through throughout the day. Jacob’s mom and Bat came by a few times with snacks, but almost the entire day passed inspecting springs and assembling cartridges. It was evening before someone knocked on the outer door to the lab.

“Get that, would you?” Charles asked.

Jacob set down the mesh glove he’d been stitching to one of the braces. It really didn’t need another row of stitches, but he was going to lose his mind if he had to load so much as one more nail cartridge. Jacob reached out to the lock on Bat’s door, a simple button in the center of the wrought iron brace. He pressed it and a series of gears moved together, retracting the bolts that were sunken into the floor.