Black Iron Read online

  Black Iron

  Black Iron

  a novel by

  Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert

  Black Iron

  Copyright ©2018 by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

  Thorntree Press, LLC

  P.O. Box 301231

  Portland, OR 97294

  [email protected]

  Thorntree Press’s activities take place on traditional and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Chinook, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.

  Cover illustration ©2018 by Julie Dillon

  Cover design by Franklin Veaux | Interior design by Jeff Werner

  Copy-editing by Roma Ilnyckyj | Proofreading by Hazel Boydell

  eBook by Franklin Veaux

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Veaux, Franklin, author. | Rickert, Eve, author.

  Title: Black iron / Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert.

  Description: Portland, OR : Thorntree Press, LLC, 2018. |

  Series: Impious Empires ; book 1 |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018004206 (print) | LCCN 2018009297 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781944934668 (epub) | ISBN 9781944934675 (mobipocket) | ISBN

  9781944934682 ( pdf) | ISBN 9781944934644 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781944934651 (softcover)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Black humor (Literature)

  | Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.E39 (ebook) | LCC PS3622.E39 B58 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004206

  Digital edition v1.0

  To Kay, Harry, and Whiskers

  1

  It was the rain that woke him.

  At least he hoped it was rain. When you find yourself lying on the street with something wet falling on your face, you can’t always be sure. There were other possibilities, but he preferred not to think about them.

  His head hurt. So did his shoulder. His back, that hurt too. He could probably postpone worrying about the throbbing in his knee, at least for now, though it might present a bit of a problem when it came time to stand. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t need to run, though that, too, was something you couldn’t always take for granted. Something in his pocket was poking most unpleasantly into his thigh, but he didn’t quite feel up to moving his leg just yet.

  First things first. Where was he?

  Reluctantly, with great effort, he opened his eyes.

  The wetness falling on him was rain, an endless dreary drizzle of it pattering on the rough cobblestone around him. It pooled in the cracks between the stones. It formed larger rivulets that set out in search of the mighty Thames, that enormous body of what was in theory water, or had once been water, or had water as one of its less odiferous components. Tiny fingers of cold water detoured on their trip to the storm grates and thence to the sluggish mud-colored river of maybe-water just long enough to flow into his pant leg and send icy wet misery down his back. They trickled from his collar to rejoin the rest of the water making its indirect way toward the river.

  Everything around him was gray. Okay, that seemed right. Buildings towering above him, drab brick faces daubed with soot. Above them, a tangle of electrical wires, strung in hodgepodge fashion from building to building. Far above the buildings, an enormous zeppelin floated in the flat gray sky, angling down for landing. Its signaling lamp strobed a frantic staccato of brilliant light toward the ground.

  New Old London, then. The wires were a dead giveaway. That was surprising. He was used to waking up across the river, in Old New London.

  It hadn’t always been called New Old London. Once, it had simply been London. The city, driven by an ever-increasing population, had grown rapidly, sprawling helter-skelter until it fetched up against the banks of the Thames. It paused for a bit at the river’s edge, like a great swarm of termites gathering its strength. Then, all at once, it sprouted bridges across the river like tendrils of brick and metal. The moment those tendrils touched down on the opposite bank, the city resumed its growth with vigor.

  For a while, the bit of London on the far side was called New London, which made the older bits Old London. Then, about the time the now-reigning monarch Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Margaret the Merciful, who had been granted that particular honorific by some unknown poet in an exuberance of artistic license, was just graduating from wetting herself to speaking in complete sentences, her father, the now-late Royal Majesty King John the Proud, had decided Old London was a bit fusty and by royal decree had ordered much of it razed and rebuilt.

  A handful of people objected to his bold—some said “audacious”—approach to civil engineering, questioning both the cost and the small but nevertheless still important matter of what to do with all the people displaced by it, but a few beheadings soon sorted that out. A man can accomplish quite a lot when he commands both the royal treasury and the headsman’s axe. And it certainly helps when that royal treasury is groaning under the vast weight of gold sent home in a never-ending stream from the colonies of the New World.

  So Old London became New Old London, which meant New London was now Old New London, and there you had it.

  He moved his arm, the one pressed quite uncomfortably against the curbstone. His father had always said that any day you woke up looking down at the gutter instead of up at the gutter was a good day. By that measure, this was not shaping up to be a good day.

  His father. That’s right, he’d had one of those, once.

  A clue, then. He probably wasn’t an orphan. Orphans didn’t have memories of their fathers, did they? Maybe he would ask the next one he caught trying to pick his pocket. Having a father implied being birthed by human beings, which meant he wasn’t an animate, one of the not-quite-living constructs stitched together out of bits of the dead and then zapped back into existence with electricity and foul-smelling chemicals. And the fact that he was thinking about it clinched the deal. Everyone said animates didn’t have thoughts at all. They were frightfully expensive, and as beasts of burden they were only moderately useful, but they’d been all the rage since that doctor from Geneva had started making them a couple of years back. All the trendiest aristocrats employed one or two for menial tasks like carrying firewood, and a few inventive folks suggested they might have utility in some of the messier parts of home security. He found them creepy, with their weird and often mismatched eyes and their occasional bursts of unprovoked violence.

  Not that humans were necessarily any better in the unprovoked violence department, but at least their eyes usually matched.

  I think; therefore, I am not an animate.

  That seemed a safe bet.

  He still wasn’t quite sure who he was or what he was doing lying face-up in a gutter in New Old London, but he didn’t feel an undue sense of urgency about it. At the moment, he seemed not to be bleeding from anywhere, and nobody was chasing him. Might as well take advantage of this unexpected luxury, he thought.

  He looked down the length of his body. Both legs present and accounted for, and in more or less the correct shape. Nothing obviously broken. But what were those ridiculous things on his feet? The shoes were gaudy, made of different kinds of leather assembled in a patchwork collage that was probably the current height of fashion among those who cared about that sort of thing, which he felt he most probably did not. T
hey had bright red clasps and pointed metal tips. They were, he thought, certainly not the sorts of things he would wear under ordinary, or indeed even extraordinary, circumstances. They seemed quite impractical for either running or creeping, two things he had a vague sense that he did rather a lot of. Yet there they were, buckled to his feet in all their gaudy monstrosity.

  Another mystery. That made two so far, and he’d barely been conscious for a minute. He hated days like this, or at least he thought he probably did.

  The thing in his pocket poked into him with greater urgency. Time to do something about that.

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then, with titanic effort, flopped over onto his side. That should sort out the problem with whatever was in his pocket.

  He paused, breathing heavily. This new position squashed his hand rather unfortunately beneath him. It wouldn’t be long before he had to move again. Life was so unfair.

  Baby steps.

  A loud, clattering sound came down the alley. He blinked. A huge machine stomped past, all copper and black iron. Smoke poured from its chimney. A clanker. Two-legged, this one, vaguely human-shaped, or it would be if humans stood eleven feet high and had smokestacks protruding from the tops of their heads. A newer model, then. Its driver, high up in his cage, didn’t even spare him a glance. The thing wheezed and stomped down the alley, dragging a cart piled high with freshly fired bricks behind it.

  Alley. Another clue.

  New Old London was arranged in a grid, the late and much-lamented King John being of a mind more than a little obsessed with perfect geometry. It was said he could not eat unless every table setting was properly arrayed, all the plates precisely centered in front of each chair, the service perfectly parallel, the chairs exactly the same distance from their neighbors. There were rumors of an unfortunate noble who had moved his plate from its appointed place before His Royal Highness had been seated and consequently lost his title, or perhaps his head, depending on which version of the story you believed.

  More precisely, New Old London was arranged in two grids. You would, if you were to look down on it from one of the many zeppelins drifting through the ashen sky above, see an alternating pattern of streets and alleys. The streets were broad and level, with wide sidewalks fronting tidy storefronts well-lit by gas lamps or, in the more fashionable districts, electric arc lamps. The alleys were narrower and more potholed, without sidewalks or lighting. The rows of buildings faced the streets, with the alleys running behind them.

  Street, alley, street, alley: two different grids, slightly offset from each other. The people who mattered—aristocrats, merchants, skilled tradesmen: people with money, all—used the streets. Those without money used the alleys. Two different classes of people flowing along two different grids, living in two different cities, in a manner of speaking. It all made sense to somebody. Somebody in the former class, most likely. It seemed that wherever you went, the rich were willing to travel extraordinary distances to look at poor people but went to equally extravagant lengths to avoid looking at poor people close at hand.

  He felt at home in alleys.

  His hand throbbed. Time to do something about that. He rose to his knees and then, with another Herculean effort, to his feet.

  He closed his eyes, panting. This must be what the heroes of Greek stories felt like, after they’d just skinned a hydra or defeated a twelve-headed lion or whatever it was they did.

  There was a fabulously complex tangle of black silk and exquisitely spidery, jointed bamboo struts lying wet and broken on the rough cobblestone where he’d just been lying. Strange, that.

  He leaned against a wooden refuse-dump, trying to catch his breath. Its side was caved in, its contents spilling across the ground around the black silk whatever-it-was. By some stroke of fortune, the refuse that oozed wetly to the cobblestones was mostly vegetative. There were far less savory refuse-dumps, like those behind the laboratories where the animate-makers plied their arts, creating those animated creatures of flesh from whatever raw materials the street offered up.

  He looked up. Something had happened to the roof of the building above him. It looked as though a large, heavy object had struck it with considerable force, shattering the red clay tiles in a vaguely circular area several feet wide. A broad swath of dislocated tiles made a path from the point of impact to the edge of the roof, just above the refuse-dump, where the gutter had given way and was swinging forlornly from metal rivets. His eyes followed the path of destruction down, from the edge of the roof into the refuse-dump, and then to the street, right about…

  Aha! He smiled grimly. That explained the various aches and pains, then. From the looks of things, he’d hit the roof plenty hard before he’d skidded over the edge into the refuse-dump, taking a bit of the gutter with him, and from there, come to rest in the alley.

  At least it explained the “how,” if not the “why.”

  No, he thought, scratch that, it didn’t even explain the “how.” Where precisely had he fallen onto the roof from?

  More immediately, why was he wearing this ridiculous getup? A sodden black jacket with tails—tails, for the love of all that was holy!—hung wetly from his narrow frame. A couple of feet down the alley was what had once been, and was still trying against all odds to be, a top-hat. He had a vague sense that it belonged to him, though he could not imagine why he would own such a thing. He was still a bit hazy on who he was, exactly, but he was quite certain he was not the sort of chap who habitually engaged in the wearing of top-hats.

  Nor in the habit of falling from the sky into a refuse-dump, he had to admit to himself, so perhaps he shouldn’t be too hasty with the assumptions.

  A party. He had been to a party. In a top-hat and the absurdly impractical shoes—shoes he was certain he would never wear absent the most dire need.

  He frowned, adding it all up. A party, a top-hat, shoes, a long fall onto a roof, a sudden slide into a rubbish-bin, and the wreckage of some silk and bamboo contraption that he knew, with abrupt clarity, had once been a gigantic kite.

  A zeppelin. The party had been on a zeppelin. And he had left the party with some alacrity. Planned, evidently, to do so. From the look of things, he’d made arrangements in advance to depart over the side of the airship, rather than waiting for it to land as might be more traditional when one debarked from a flying vessel.

  Damn, he thought, it sure would be nice if he could remember who he was.

  The thing in his pocket intruded into his consciousness again. The pants he was wearing were just as ridiculous as the shoes. Like much of what the upper class wore, they had been designed to show off the fact that their owner had no need to do anything as profane as work, and therefore need not carry around anything larger than a pocket watch. The pockets, as a result, were vestigial, barely more than slits with a small pouch sewn inside. Whatever was in his pocket, it was larger than anything the tailor had meant for it to accommodate.

  And it had sharp edges, or so it seemed. He would, he ruefully supposed, probably have quite a large bruise to show for it.

  He stuck a hand in his pocket and drew it out.

  Memory poured into him like wine into a glass.

  He, Thaddeus Mudstone Ahmed Alexander Pinkerton, ne’er-do-well and ruffian of the most despicable sort, had just robbed, though only by the skin of his teeth and at, evidence suggested, great personal peril, Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Margaret the Merciful.

  And lived, apparently also by the skin of his teeth, to tell about it.

  He picked up the battered top-hat, set it atop his head at a rakish angle, and walked, or more correctly limped, down the alley, whistling.

  Perhaps this was going to be a good day after all.

  2

  In the air high above New Old London, the Lady Alÿs de Valois was not having a good day. Cold, wet wind gusted in through the yawning doorway, tearing at the f
olds of her deep blue gown. The huge loading door, normally barred shut against the possibility of an unfortunate guest tumbling to an unfortunate end, banged against the wooden body of the airship. The whistling wind almost drowned out the low mutter of the great engines that turned the enormous airscrews. Her mouth was still hanging open.

  “Right. My lady, I think you should come with me.”

  The owner of that slightly nervous voice was dressed in the ceremonial bronze breastplate and white cape of the Royal Guard. His name was Roderick Hamsbender, and he, too, was not having a good day.

  Roderick was, generally speaking, of slightly nervous disposition all around. Indeed, that was one of the reasons he’d joined the Royal Guard in the first place. When you were in the Guard, almost nothing exciting ever happened.

  Roderick’s father, a trader in imported cloth, had never been completely happy with his lot in life. He wanted the best for his only son, and had insisted that Roderick become a real man—the process of which involved, apparently, taking up the sort of profession in which one carried a weapon and helped rid the world of threats to King and Country (or more accurately, Queen and Country, times being what they were) in a suitably manly and heroic fashion. That left only a handful of possible careers. Members of the municipal police force dealt with dangerous criminals who had nothing to lose. Soldiers had lives that were mostly boring, interspersed with brief moments of excitement that were very exciting indeed...sometimes terminally so. The Royal Guard, on the other hand, spent almost all of their time watching noble types doing nobly-type things, like taking dancing lessons, raising taxes on the poor, and eating complicated little bits of food from the ends of small wooden skewers. As jobs went, it was prestigious, it was honorable, and best of all, it was dull.