4. In Darkness I Will Find You

The blows striking his head made Dr Darius Vonken instinctively shut his eyes, but his attacker seemed more intent on bludgeoning him randomly than targeting vital points. The brute struggled to keep him pinned as Vonken wrenched himself off his stomach.Vonken swung his arm in response, realizing too late he’d left his cane behind at Autumn Hill. Blast and damn! He thrust up his right knee, grimly satisfied when his attacker wheezed sharply like a bull in the slaughterhouse and slumped, hands weakly trying to cover the area Vonken had wounded. Vonken threw them both sideways, toppling the goon, and scrambled back. He snarled at the burly man with the steam-hammer arm, “This isn’t even a decent spot for an ambush, you amateur! I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to assault me within full view of the house!” He glanced up the hill, noting that although lamplight shone from the library window, the curtain was drawn, the other windows mostly dark. Shaking his head, he pointed to a shadowy patch just past the gates to the drive. “Had you a brain in that thick head, you would have waited until I –“ The man rolled over, kicking strongly; one clod-coated boot connected with Vonken’s left ankle. The mere instant it took the doctor to regain his balance was enough for the brute to leap to his own feet, raising that jackhammer of a fist. Vonken managed to duck the first unwieldy swing; a jet of steam hissed past his nose.

“Blast it, these boots are highland elk!” Vonken cried angrily, examining the scuff upon the supple black leather, sidestepping the second blow as he lifted his foot. “Tell your master he owes me a new pair of boots!” He backpedaled quickly, avoiding a third clublike swing of the enormous arm, and the brute growled. Vonken gave him a disgusted look. “I see finesse is not your particular skill.”

“You took somethin’ what belongs to Mr Villard,” the man grunted, pausing a moment to regain his breath. Vonken felt a twinge of admiration; that hadn’t been a soft blow he’d given the goon, but the hired heavy seemed able to shake it off now, straightening his shoulders and focusing more sharply on the man in green. “Hand it over and,” a gap-toothed grin split the homely face, “I’ll let ya off with a maimin’.”

“I assure you I possess nothing which Mr Villard could ever call his own,” Vonken snorted, circling so the nearest street-lamp was behind him, hoping the light in his opponent’s eyes would help. He briefly considered outrunning the brute. That arm looks crafted of Taftinnium; must weigh half a ton. However, though he had no problem exercising the better part of valor, it might prove more effective to send a message back to Villard that Darius Vonken was not a man to be intimidated with violence. He took a step back as the goon he’d nicknamed Hammer advanced, metal arm glinting. The hiss of steam telegraphed his next thrust, and Vonken jerked his head aside. Soldered fist met iron lamppost; the recoil knocked the heavy man back a step. “Why he chooses to employ such clumsy oafs for his dirty work is beyond me. You’re lucky I’ve forgotten my cane, else I’d have already boxed your ears like one of the Sisters of the Oncoming Storm!” he taunted.

“I got no problem takin’ it from your body once I’ve pummeled ya,” Hammer growled, showing a little more speed as he tried an undercut. Once again, Vonken sidestepped, and the fist clanged off the lamppost.

“Careful there, boy. You’ll be cited for destruction of city property!”

Hammer looked furious enough to bite through his own arm. Suddenly he pulled a firearm from beneath his coat, a tiny Dust-pistol. Vonken scoffed, “Oh for heaven’s sake! A tart-gun? What, did you steal it from your girlfriend in the red lamp district?”

“Stay still so’s I can pound ya, ya fairy!” Hammer roared, and let off a shot. Vonken threw himself to one side, mentally re-evaluating his tactics. First, get the pistol away from him. That might actually do some harm. If the heartlink is severed...

Aloud, he countered, “Only my coat is green, boy. If I look like the Green Fairy to you, clearly you’ve spent too much time in the taverns wharfside as well as the brothels! Oh, wait, my mistake; the wharfside places don’t serve real absinthe, do they? No, cheap crabwhiskey’s good enough for the lowly likes of you!”

Snarling, Hammer aimed the pistol roughly and loosed another shot of Dust-powered aetherfire. Vonken twisted himself out of the way, mindful of the cone-shaped spread of the flashing green energy, but didn’t anticipate Hammer to immediately follow it with a swing of the powerful arm, directly at Vonken’s head. His own gloved hand shot up and caught the metal fist, stopping it abruptly. Both men stared startled at each other an instant.

“What the fu—“ Hammer rumbled. Vonken shoved. Hammer tumbled, his head thudding hard against the street cobbles. As he groaned, his flesh hand touching his skull, Vonken bent and took the dropped pistol.

“Damn it, you fool, I was intending to merely rip that ridiculous appendage from your shoulder,” Vonken said. His voice was low, regretful. “Now you’ll have to end your own miserable existence, rather than have to report your failure to your corrupt master.” Hammer stared dumbly up at him, only registering what was happening as Vonken knelt and stuck the pistol’s muzzle under the man’s chin. His eyes widened.

“No, waaaaiii—“

Vonken blinked several times, waiting for his vision to clear. His sensitive eyes still burned with green reflected light. He sighed. Damn and blast. Blast and damn. Nothing for it, but Villard will certainly notice this one. I suppose a message is a message, no matter what the medium... He snorted, mildly amused. Good thing there’s not a valid spirit medium in Concordia at present. He’ll never know what really happened. He wrapped the still-twitching fingers of the deceased around the butt of the pistol, avoiding a glance at the fading glow in the black air where the man’s head used to be. The blood beginning to spurt from the stump of a neck was bad enough, and Vonken was grateful he couldn’t truly smell it. The sound of it, gurgling and starting to really gush, was unpleasant enough.

Vonken rose, dusted off his tunic, and looked up and down the street. The night was quiet, at least in this posh neighborhood. Another glance at the house atop the hill showed no change; the fight had been unlikely to be visible from its windows, in any case. If the red-lensed man Vonken had labeled Blinky had seen any of the fight, he didn’t seem eager to come down and continue it on his colleague’s behalf. The doctor sighed again, annoyed. If you’d remembered your blasted cane, this wouldn’t have been necessary! Pay more attention. His shoulders sagged, the toll of all his Dustcrafting tonight catching up with him. I need a cup of tea. And a long nap. Perhaps a nip of that bourbon. He stretched on his toes, raising his arms, straightening his whole body, before striding away from the jerking, spurting corpse beneath the lamp. The Watch will dispose of that soon enough. It shouldn’t trouble the effete citizens of Hillside when they emerge fashionably late tomorrow morning.

He walked down the gently winding street until it reached an intersection at the river, and paused there to gaze at the black water. The Willamette ran fast enough in these higher elevations to still look relatively scenic in the daylight, he knew; none of the sludge from the factories or the effluvia from the city sewers clogged it until it fell over the Mansfield Escarpment, created years back to power the city’s industry as Dust was too rare to bear the burden. Above the falls, one might imagine the water to be as pristine as it had been prior to the Cataclysm...unless one was foolhardy enough to drink it. Pleasure boats carried the wealthy farther upstream, as far as the southern mountains if one wished a journey to a reasonably “safe” wilderness, where hunting lodges catered to the Villards, the Athertons, and the Autumnsons of this region. It appeared as lively as it always had, if one discounted the lack of salmon. Below the falls was another story. Vonken had seen for himself the sores and diseases of those humbles unlucky enough to live on the river’s edge, downcurrent from the refinery... Only after the Columbia joined with the sluggish stream, washing all the city’s waste through the forest and out to sea, did the brown reek of it turn blackish-blue again.

He crossed the stone bridge and continued on, the lamps becoming set farther apart, until only the occasional light high on the wall of a fenced-off building offered any security to the nocturnal traveler. He wasn’t concerned, though he knew his skills had been so exhausted tonight that he wouldn’t be able to manage more than a crackling spark between his fingertips to frighten off any would-be footpads. If it came to that, he wasn’t averse to leaving another corpse in the street, and in this neighborhood, such an event would barely afford an investigation by the Watch. All the same, he was tired, and so took extra effort to carefully observe his surroundings as he walked. At last, his laboratory hove into view.

It wasn’t a building many would judge to be the workshop of a prominent inventor. Blunt-cornered, with fanciful touches of Gothic Revival in its stone crenellations and corner gargoyles, it abutted two similar edifices, all of them built in the ‘forties when this street had served as a new business district. The hoped-for prosperity had never quite bloomed here, and the merchants and bankers had moved a little south, closer to the river, or north to the Columbia to more easily receive the ocean-brought treasures from the Far East or California on wharves built down into the gorges. Vonken’s lab and residence had once been the Second Pacific Savings Bank. The name remained carved into the polished granite of the grand lintel over the double-riveted bronze doors. The grotesques of figures of industry parading around the top of the building in a soot-stained frieze amused Vonken, and he did nothing to alter the façade after he moved in.

He whistled a specific refrain at the gargoyle on the southwest corner, and its head turned. When its lenses focused on him, he raised his left arm as a falconer might, and the construct coated in powdered granite spread its metal wings and swooped down to him. Its weight caused his arm to lower a moment; he took a deep breath and forced himself to hold it steady. He petted it absently as he approached the entrance, whispered the passwords and traced the proper spell with a quick gesture, and resumed stroking its snakelike head as he carried it inside.

The vast lobby of the former bank echoed his steps. A single lamp, its wick low, made his shadow chase strangely among the black polished pillars and open, empty spaces. Sheets covered long tables in one wing, where his last attempt at an aetheric ship for personal transport lay partly built. He hadn’t touched it in almost a year. His current project took all of his time lately. He scowled at the thought. All my time not occupied by wild goose chases for deceased friends. Damn it all! If Mikael didn’t have the element on him, and Villard hasn’t recovered it in the Wastelands, what happened to it? Could he have sent it by a Courier which was waylaid like that poor beast? He glanced at a smaller table nearer the back of the cavernous room; he really should try to put the poor bird back together. She’d gone above and beyond her orders to bring him Mikael’s final letter. Viewing the shadowy, broken form there made him remember the small lizardy thing on his arm, and he tapped its nose gently. “Show,” he commanded.

The gargoyle hopped down on a nearby railing which had once corralled customers to the tellers’ windows. It choked, its body cramping and unwinding repeatedly, and then jerked its head upward. Light spewed from its round, open mouth. The flickering images showed him, in faster-than-life motion, the few people who’d passed the bank in the street that day. He watched silently, recognizing the local fishmonger and his cart, the local brawlers having a drunken argument as they passed in the early evening (no doubt after being tossed from yet another tavern), furtive souls hurrying home in the dusk. At sunset, himself leaving the building, and nothing until his return. The light shut off, and at once the little monster he’d built began peeping plaintively at him.

“Oh, hell,” he sighed, wondering if he really had the strength for this. Closing his eyes, he sought out and drew in all the energy he could latch onto; doing even this strained him, and he fought back a wave of dizziness. Bracing his hand on the railing, he leaned over and vomited the sparking aether down into the creature’s mouth, a bizarre tall bird feeding his hungry chick. He gasped, staggering, but the gargoyle seemed sated. It chirped at him again. He raised a shaky finger, pointing to the vent in the roof, hidden in the darkness of the high ceiling, and the gargoyle flapped off, going back to its roof-edge perch.

Vonken remained clutching the railing for some minutes, bone-weary. Last time I forget to feed the damned thing before I go out. Rallying himself at last, he trudged past the tellers’ windows, full of supply cabinets and far less mundane things now, and opened both the strong ward guarding the massive door to the vault and the door itself. Nothing had yet disturbed his sanctuary, but now that Villard believed him the holder of something he wanted...well.

One couldn’t be too careful in this city.

Once “home,” Vonken removed his tunic and hung it on the coat-tree inside the vault entry. He unbuttoned his shirtcollar, and pried off the tight gloves finger by finger. He flexed his hands, examining them in the brighter lamplight of his private rooms. Holding up well so far. Good. He fetched a bit of cold poultry and a hunk of Concordia Stilton from the icebox, and plunked himself into his favorite chair to peel off the ruined boots. He sighed as he wiggled his feet into his slippers, poured a draught of bourbon from the decanter on the tea-table next to him, and sat there eating and sipping until his immediate appetite was fulfilled. He briefly considered tea, but felt so worn-through that he rejected it in favor of his bed.

He did make one detour. Gloves tucked under one arm and a krakenoil lamp held high to light his way, Vonken stopped at the door to the inner vault, which in former times held gold from Alaska or property deeds for the wealthiest merchants. He didn’t like opening this door, but it was necessary. Horribly necessary. Mentally bracing himself for the ugly sight, he cracked open the reinforced-steel door and thrust the hand with the lamp within.

Quiet, bubbling respiration reached his ears. In a moment his sight adjusted to the shadows, and he made out the still form floating in the tank. Hating it, he nevertheless forced himself to take a step closer. Another. Another, until he could make out the features of the man in the sustaining amniotic solution. Empty eyesockets gaped above a straight nose. The frayed moustache gently flowed in the light current circulating round the glass coffin. Most of the auburn hair was gone, save for patches randomly dotting the scalp above the stitches; he’d been too unnerved by the hole left in the skull, and had to close it, as any good surgeon would. Liquid had bloated the body somewhat, and the ugly sores seemed to have spread across more of the naked skin. Vonken shuddered. He felt the pull of the heartlink through the aether, and for a moment touched his chest, listening to his pulse, softly thumping in time with that of the man in the tank.

If the element hasn’t been recovered...or if Villard gets hold of it first...how will I ever... He frowned deeply. No. Don’t play that awful game. Best not to think of the worst, lest it come to pass. But he knew that old superstition would only hinder him. Time to make alternate plans...but what? How?

Much troubled, Darius Vonken shut the room up again, leaving the living but soulless body floating, floating through the night in darkness, though he would dream as he usually did of the Coldspark energy coursing over the skin of that unfortunate, of the pain it had caused him, looking out through dark blue eyes forever changed by Dust.

His bed was bolted to the floor, so his unhappy tossing only disturbed the blankets.

3. Tea and (a lack of) Sympathy

“Perhaps just a tot, to take off ze chill,” Henry Villard agreed. “Zees old bones, ach...but perhaps it has been a little less grey zis fall, no?” His gesture at his broad satin waistcoat struck Holly as if he thought he was showing generosity in allowing her to serve him her best brandy.

Dr Vonken regarded Villard with cool, unreadable eyes. “Do you surmise we may be emerging from the Grey Time, then, Herr Founder?”

Villard shrugged, smiling. Holly tried to keep her hands from trembling as she brought out the tiny crystal snifters and all that remained of her father’s imported French spirits in a matching decanter. She poured three glasses and handed them to Villard and Vonken before resuming a hesitant seat next to the doctor. Vonken sniffed the rim of the glass and let a drop touch his lips, but then spoke dismissively as he set the snifter on the table. “Our best ambianologists have concurred: we shall have no lifting of the Cataclysm’s clouds for years to come.”

Villard returned in a friendly enough tone, “Und perhaps zey are correct, but you cannot fault a hopeful man.” Vonken gave him a nod, more courtesy than agreement. Feeling a bit desperate, Holly took a larger swallow of the brandy than she’d anticipated, and coughed. She started at the gentle smack of Vonken’s gloved hand between her shoulderblades. Villard’s brows knit a moment. “How are you holding up, my dear?”

“I...all right, I suppose, thank you, Mr Villard,” Holly said, her throat on fire. Suddenly she recalled she’d not eaten since luncheon, and looked askance at the glass in her hand. Perhaps this wasn’t a wise choice. Best stick with the tea. Forcing calm, she picked up her teacup and sipped. Vonken apparently knew how to brew it properly.

“I vas vundering,” Villard mused, swirling the ruby liquid in his glass and gazing heavy-lidded into its purity, “vhether you have received any strange packages lately, Miss Autumnson.” He looked up and caught her gaze, his own somber. “I have heard some...rumors vhich disturb me greatly, zat perhaps some of our more radical elements, who do not share our reverence for your late brutter, may be plotting some sort of...demonstration. Something involving this house, or you. I vould not vish to see harm come to you.”

“Really?” Holly squeaked. She took a deep breath, and wrenched control over her voice. “How...how preposterous. Everyone loved my brother.”

“Ah, but zis vould be a strike at me, you see,” Villard explained. “Everyone knows whom your brutter worked for, and there are some uninformed riffraff, you know, who still blame me for ze tragedy at ze Refinery last year.” When the Concordia-Villard Dust Refinery had exploded, an entire neighborhood of workingclass houses was vaporized in an instant, and the outlying roads now bore a slippery coating of glass not unlike the obsidian artefacts displayed in the City Museum.

Vonken sipped his tea while Villard spoke. Now he offered, “Outrageous.” His tone was flat, ordinary, and completely free of outrage.

Villard nodded. “Ach, it vas awful, awful. Those poor people.” He sighed, and quaffed more of the brandy, then refilled his glass from the decanter still on the table. “So, you have an idea already of the ignorance of zis type of person; and as ve all know, Ignorance is ze paving-stone on ze road to Catastrophe.”

“I have not received any packages at all in weeks,” Holly said. “But why would anyone try to harm me to get at you, Mr Villard?”

Villard smiled as if he was teaching a precocious but not particularly well-read child. “My dear girl, because zey are ignorant, and ignorant people often strike out at anything zey see as associated with ze object of their misdirected wrath. Your brutter worked conspicuously for me; your brutter was given a hero’s memorial by me – und by ze way, I hope you vill approve of ze final design; Concordia’s finest sculptor is hard at work – and so, some poor souls, undoubtedly with minds deluded by Dust-poisoning –“

“Undoubtedly,” Dr Vonken murmured, gently stirring a cube of sugar into his second cup of tea.

Villard nodded at him, and continued to Holly, “Deluded, you see; so zey may strike at you, thinking zat by doing so zey will hurt me.” He offered a smile again. “As it certainly would. You are absolutely certain nothing out of ze ordinary has arrived at your home, since, shall we say, September?”

Holly noticed Villard’s two men reentering from the hall, their faces impassive, though the red-lensed man shot a suspicious look briefly at Vonken. She could have sworn she saw the man’s nostrils flare wide like a horse’s, but then he stood straight and gazed at nothing in particular. “Well...no. Not out of the ordinary, no. But I...I thank you for your warning, Mr Villard. I shall certainly inform you if anything unusual arrives.”

Villard nodded, but seemed somehow disappointed. “Be sure zat you do. One cannot be too careful where some elements of vat ve are pleased to call society are concerned, ja?” He glanced at Vonken, and chuckled low. “Herr Doctor, you have barely touched our hostess’ good brandy. It vould be a shame to let it go to vaste now zat it has been exposed to air.” Villard’s own second glass had vanished as quickly as the first.

“I find my taste these days runs rather more to stimulants than depressives, Herr Founder,” Vonken replied evenly. “Do feel free to quaff it as you have your own.” His smile under the curling moustache gave no offense, but Holly stiffened in anticipation of the city founder taking it.

“And now I realize I have been remiss in not examining ze papers of ze Krampf Society Journal of late,” Villard said. “Vat research are you currently exploring, in zat great dark laboratory of yours, Herr Doctor Vonken? Many of my aldermen have joked with me, how much zey desire to get a...a sneak peek, as ze newsmen say, at your experiments. How long has it been since you pioneered ze Dust prosthesis industry?”

Holly busied herself with putting away the empty decanter in the chamber of the maple sideboard. The insult in Villard’s words was clear, though his tone also remained casual. She heard Vonken match him, geniality for geniality: “Why, not so very long...about as many years ago, Herr Founder Villard, as it was that the Northern Pacific Transit Company began slaughtering natives of the Interior to retrieve the Dust rocks, and sending back maimed soldiers with that precious cargo.”

“Slaughter is...a harsh word, Herr Doctor. Do you not recognize the savagery of ze tribal intruders to the Interior?”

“Intruders? It was their land before our ancestors shoved them off it; and one may hardly blame them for becoming crazed after the effects of the Cataclysm. Many a settler in the Dakotas or a rancher in Texas suffered the same horrible fate,” Vonken responded. “My dear, you look pale. Forgive us for blathering on about such terrible matters, won’t you?” Holly turned, realizing she’d been standing motionless at the sideboard for over a minute. Vonken patted the loveseat cushion. “Do sit. Doctor’s orders.”

Reluctantly, she rejoined him. Vonken looked as if he might put a hand on hers, and she drew back, giving him a quick glare. He smiled as if he hadn’t noticed at all, but made no move to touch her. Villard turned his attention back to her as well. “Ja, forgive us, Miss Autumnson. It is not often I have ze chance to engage in...debate.” He glanced at the mantel clock. “But ze hour lengthens, and I am sure you vish to rest. You do look peaked, forgive me for observing.”

“She has had a traumatic few weeks,” Vonken said. “As representative of the hospital’s Visiting Committee this month, I thought it prudent to drop by and see what Miss Autumnson might require for her health.”

“Very kind of you, I’m sure,” Villard said, inclining his head. He rose to his feet slowly, and his men perked their shoulders as though coming to attention. Villard gestured with his hat. “May I valk you out, Herr Doctor, so zat ze lady may not trouble herself more tonight?”

“I have yet to perform a check of Miss Autumnson’s vitals,” Vonken answered smoothly. “But I’m sure she would appreciate you not standing on formality, Herr Founder.”

Villard’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he nodded. “Of course. Perhaps I vill drop by and continue our little chat about ze Interior at your lab sometime, Herr Doctor.”

“I’d be delighted. Good night, Herr Founder.”

Villard bowed to Holly, waving her down as she half-rose out of ingrained habit. “No, no, it’s all right. Good night, Miss Autumnson. Expect to hear from me again soon, and by all means come to me if you see anything suspicious.”

“Thank you,” Holly managed, fuming inside. Vonken thinks he’s going to stay here one minute longer? Oh, I think NOT. “Good night, Mr Villard.”

Vonken sat placidly next to her until the door latched, and they heard the soft footsteps of all three men descending from the front stoop and crunching on the pea gravel path to the driveway. A quiet creaking was the only sound which carried indoors after that, from Villard’s personal steam-carriage heaving itself into motion. Holly began, “I don’t know what sort—“ but Vonken shushed her, his hand on her arm, listening intently. Despite her anger at being ordered around, Holly bit her lip, waiting.

When finally the doctor relaxed, she shook off his hand and stood. “Dr Vonken, I do not appreciate you using my home as some sort of...of stumping-block from which to insult the most powerful man in Concordia, and who was very kind to my brother and myself!” She gave a very unladylike snort; she didn’t care what he thought of it. “Men who will take from me by force, indeed! The only force anyone has used here tonight is that awful serum you forced upon me earlier!”

To her surprise, he nodded. “I should have known, from your brother’s description of you, that such a measure wasn’t necessary. My apologies, Miss Autumnson. I have been...out of Society for some time, I fear.”

“Injecting me with a truth serum –!”

“Vitae veritae,” he corrected, and calmly finished his tea.

Incredulous, Holly stared at him. Was he really going to sit here in her parlor and pretend his assault had been no more than a slip of manners? As she opened her mouth to give him a harsher piece of her mind, he set his teacup down and gave her a very direct stare. “Blinky will be watching the house. He may try to get in when he thinks you’re not home...or asleep.”

“What?”

“Although I’m fairly sure Hammer will trail me home,” Vonken continued, ignoring her gape of shock. “We’ve given them cause to suspect that I’ve already taken the element, which should ease Villard’s mind enough that he won’t harass you openly again.”

“That was harassing?”

“Had I not been here,” Vonken said sharply, standing to glare down at her, “the polite questions would have rapidly turned to a brutal search, and when they didn’t find anything, they’d bind you and use far more painful methods to extract information from you than the little pinprick you suffered at my hands, my dear.”

Holly struggled to make words come out of her rising rage. “You are making some insufferable accusations, Doctor. I wonder what might happen to your rank and standing among that vaunted surgeon’s society were I to repeat any of this to Mr Villard!”

“Am I?” he countered. “Go upstairs. See how many things you find out of their places in every room. Since their boss was playing nice, they probably made at least a halfhearted effort to put things back instead of leaving your home a wreck, but I’ll wager you’ll discover they have been rifling your belongings.”

Holly shook her head vehemently. “I don’t even know what to say to such an outrageous claim!”

“If you think that’s outrageous, my dear, what about that tragic explosion which destroyed the refinery and two streets of slums around it? Oh, yes, it was sad, but they were only the dregs of society, weren’t they, the poor who hadn’t even the skill to be employed as launderers or cart-haulers or trash-pickers, but spent their days, some of them their lives, crushing the rocks from the edge of the Wastelands for a few specks of Dust, none of which they ever owned or reaped any benefit from beyond a day’s meals! Who cares about a few hundred of them, when the banner of the Northern Pacific Company must fly ever higher over Castle Villard until its shadow covers all of Columbia Pacifica!” He was nearly shouting, his eyes dark under heavily creased brows, teeth flashing white as his moustache didn’t quite hide his sneer. Holly stared, frozen in place. No one had ever shouted at her before tonight. Vonken took a deep breath, and finished in a lower register: “Why would Henry Villard care that his own laxity in refining the most dangerous substance mankind has ever known caused the loss of a small swath of the poorer neighborhoods? Plenty more will breed. He’s already completely rebuilt the refinery bigger and with faster machines than ever. And plenty of men, women, and those urchins one hardly notices for their very ubiquity are desperate enough to risk their safety for the promise of hot Pacifica crabs and broth every day. Why don’t you ask him what measures of protection he has installed in this new factory? Better yet, I urge you to go see the conditions for yourself, and then have the stupidity to insist Henry Villard gives a damn about anyone but Henry Villard.”

He turned away from her, one hand gripping the mantel, his head down. Holly felt herself breathing hard, and tried to calm her rapid pulse. Could he possibly...but why would... A thought struck, and she tentatively found her voice again. “Last...last winter...the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club sewed over four dozen little coats for those children. Mrs Atherton herself delivered them to the refinery!”

Vonken lifted his head, and gave her a sardonic smile over his shoulder. “And did you see any of the little dears wearing them?”

“Why, I...well, I...I didn’t...didn’t often go to that part of the city,” Holly said, fighting back a blush.

“I’ll bet,” Vonken muttered. “Well, my dear, had you bothered to step out of your Hillside neighborhood even for a day after that New Year’s blizzard, you’d have noticed the unusually high number of urchins frozen in their hovels, or in the streets after they were turned out of cupboards in the factories where they’d been trying to hide for warmth. I guarantee you the men who shoveled their bodies from the dirty snowbanks saw no coats on them. I can state this unequivocally because I treated a number of the survivors.”

Holly couldn’t believe anyone could be so cruel. “But those coats! I saw the coats; they were most of them of wool! Some even had little hoods, to cover their ears! Surely the foremen wouldn’t have denied them...” But she stopped. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Mikael had kept a secret business partner from her, had kept a book with a secret compartment in their home without her knowledge; the city founder asked her strange questions and gave strange reasons for doing so; this enigmatic doctor threw horrible accusations around like poisoned Dust in a Wastelands dirt-devil. And the way they both were snapping at each other, pretending to be polite, drinking up all my brandy, and those frightening men of Villard’s... At the thought of their appearance in the parlor again, before Villard left, Holly shuddered. Whatever they’d been doing, she didn’t like them at all. Especially not the one with the false red lens for an eye... She bit her lip again, feeling Vonken watching her, allowing her to turn it all over in her mind.

Quietly, his voice softer and with even a possible hint of approval in it, he said, “Mikael spoke of your quick mind. He told me once it was a good thing women weren’t allowed to join the Scientific Expeditionary Brigade, or he’d never have been the Autumnson to make Captain.”

Holly swallowed, and raised her eyes to the doctor’s. All coldness had gone from them, and now they seemed quiet reflecting pools, deceptive in their blueness, fathomless. “My brother said that?” she asked.

Vonken sighed softly, and gave her one nod. As she considered this unlikely statement, he roused himself again, and went to the window to peer cautiously past the curtain-lace. “He’ll be in the trees, most likely. You’ll need stronger wards.”

“Mikael?” Holly asked, confused.

“Blinky.” Vonken shot her a grin, then strode briskly from the room. Holly nearly tripped over the stupidly long mourning skirt trying to keep up. He halted at the back door, stretching his lean frame up to examine the jamb. “Hmm, yes. Completely unacceptable.” He braced himself as if expecting a wind to try and blow him back, and then began murmuring in that same glottal tongue he’d used earlier. Holly watched, fascinated, as the energy snaked out of his fingertips, slow as mist at first, then pouring out of him, glowing golden, cooling to blue as it settled along the lineaments of the door, then creeping outward to outline the kitchen windows as well.

Vonken rocked back on his heels, appearing winded. “That...that ought to do it,” he gasped, then gave a breathy laugh. “Wish I could see Blinky’s face when he tries to open that. He’ll be in for a nasty shock.”

Holly took a cautious step closer, staring at the dying glow surrounding Vonken. The last thing to fade, she saw, was a patch over his heart. “You’re a Coldspark,” she said, then blushed as she realized how rude she must sound. However, Vonken only smiled.

“Maryland,” he said, and walked through the swinging door to the dining room. Holly trailed after him, mesmerized when he repeated the whole ritual for the windows there. Although the Interior of what had been the United States was hardest-hit in the Cataclysm, with jagged boulders the size of whales, they said, the size of buildings, slamming with such force into the once-grassy plains that the Crater had formed from their toxic, explosive impacts, much of the eastern seaboard had perished as well. More of the rocks from some wretched Hell of the heavens found their graves in the Atlantic, and waves like Noah’s flood covered the shores, and one horrible Cataclysm Stone had screamed to earth right upon the Capitol building, so it was said. Many viewed it as proof that the Union had been the wrong side to be on in the late war, or that an evil administration had brought horror down on the whole country. The Freemasons were blamed, the Indians were blamed, the new advocates of descent from apes contrary to Biblical teachings were blamed, but in the end everyone suffered. Streaks of fire caught the eyes of those few survivors who made it back to the States from ships at sea, north, south, east and west, from fur trappers in the far treeless snows to half-crazed former banditos begging asylum from the burning southern desert. All reports suggested that the astral destroyers had spared no corner of the globe.

The worst eyewitness report, however, had come from a preacher who took it as his mission to carry the tales of terror, the wrath of an old god, across the entire continent east to west. Before he died of Dust poisoning in the convent of the Sisters of the Oncoming Storm, the preacher told of the rock which did not quite strike the earth of Maryland...but exploded in the sky above it, and rained down death for days. It was the first sign of the Cataclysm, a full week before any other horror struck. All the fish in the Chesapeake writhed in the shallows; those which didn’t die, they said, grew more eyes, legs, fierce claws, and snarled and shrieked day and night. The birds attacked people, and those clawed by their poisoned talons spasmed and frothed at the mouth before expiring in agony. And the people...

Vonken had moved on to the front hall and door, again chanting strange words as he wove his long fingers in the air, directing the flow of Cataclysmic energy through his very body, shaping it into protective locks around every point of entry. Holly stayed a few paces behind him, watching in silence. Those who had breathed the air in that place, the air full of Dust, had either died in raving anguish, eaten from the inside out by a fierce fire which made their bodies glow and burned with frost anyone who tried to touch them...or become channelers of the very aether. Whatever power the Dust contained, stored for aeons in its fine crystals as it hurtled through the vastness between stars, the few men and women known as Coldsparks could somehow concentrate it from the very air they breathed, rumor had it. They could shape it to their desire. The very first krakenpilot was a Coldspark.

When Vonken gathered his strength, his breathing noticeably labored, and placed his foot upon the lowest tread of the stairs, Holly spoke up. “Why are you...why are you doing this?”

The look he gave her was perplexity itself. “Good lord, woman, do you really think I’d leave this house defenseless now that Villain has an unholy interest in it? The more time passes without that element arriving in his hands, the more unhappy he’ll be...and he won’t stop tearing your home apart until he’s completely satisfied you’re not withholding it from him.” He started up the stairs grimly. “I’ll throw him off as much as I can, but it would be a blot on my conscience if I had to perform an autopsy in your bedroom tomorrow.”

Shivering all over once, Holly forced her feet into motion after him. “But...but I don’t have the faintest idea what this thing is!”

“Something your brother discovered on his last expedition. Sorry, bad phrasing: on the one he returned from earlier this year, before he went out again in June.” Vonken didn’t pause, muttering and weaving shimmering ribbons of light, moving on from room to room on the upper floor as soon as the glow began to turn from gold to blue. Holly approached one window closer in the library, and felt the chill from the ward. She glanced outside, thinking of his comment about the trees, but saw nothing. She drew the curtain anyway. Bizarre as this whole affair was, she admitted to herself she did feel a little safer seeing Vonken apply stronger wards to her entire home. Embarrassed, she realized which room he was heading into next.

“Wait! But that’s my...” She stopped in the doorway to her bedroom, but her shyness was suddenly breached when she saw its condition. “My books!”

The pile of reading material which she always kept on the floor near her bed had been toppled, and Vonken hadn’t been near it. Turning quickly, Holly saw her desk drawers ajar, her wardrobe slightly open. She strode to it angrily and yanked open the doors. One of her best silk dressing-gowns slid the rest of the way off its hanger to puddle on the carpet. “They rummaged through my things!”

“Your surprise surprises me,” Vonken said dryly, then focused on raising the wards here. Holly gathered up the gown in her arms, furious. The instant he stopped speaking that disturbingly familiar language at the window, she snapped at him.

“How did you know my brother? What was this business venture you had with him? Why is it turning my home upside down?” she demanded.

He paused, staring coldly at her, then stepped around her and went down the hall to the last room. Mikael’s room. He began chanting again, facing the windows and the hearth in this grander room, which had been their parents’ once. Holly stepped in front of him, and he jerked his hands up, startled. “Tell me! If this is as dangerous as I’m starting to think, tell me just what the hell you’ve dragged me into – you and my stupid brother!” she almost yelled. Only when his eyes narrowed at her did she realize how foolish she’d just been; his energy sparked and crackled around her. She was inches away from his chest, and he held his hands, fingers spread, out to her sides, forming a cage of energy enclosing them both. Frightened, she dropped her voice. “Please stop.”

“No,” he said.

“Stop, please. Turn it...turn it off.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he growled, teeth gritted, lips taut. “Stay absolutely still.”

She started to nod, then stopped herself. She held herself as frozen as possible while the cold radiating off his entire body enveloped her, driving up shivers in every limb. Vonken took a breath and resumed speaking, his voice quiet, repeating the same words he’d used at every ward, and suddenly Holly recognized two of them. I know that! I know that language! Where have I heard it? No...no...not heard it, read it! What book, what book could I have heard the language of a Coldspark in? Wonder overcame her fear suddenly, and as he finished with a last gesture, drawing the wisps of energy into himself again, she burst out, “Why does that make me think of Hans Christian Anderson?”

He blinked at her, recovered himself, and took a step back. “That was Dutch,” he said, sounding surprised and...perhaps...amused. “My family was Dutch, generations ago.”

Holly looked quizzically at him. “Coldspark language is nothing more than Dutch?”

He laughed outright then, and Holly listened in wonder. Where his speaking voice was sharp, midrange, inflected only for stark emphasis, his laugh was melodic, shooting upward. “I have no idea what the rest of them do. It’s just harder for anyone to break my wards this way. Most of you pioneer-family types can’t pronounce a glottal stop to save your skins.” He appeared weary, and the smile faded. “I can’t tell you what arrangement your brother and I had, Miss Autumnson. The less you know, the better.”

“That’s not a very comforting excuse, Doctor Vonken.”

“It’s all I have.”

“So Mr Villard’s hired thugs won’t harm me if I don’t know anything, is that what you’re implying?” This whole night had begun to feel like a mystery by Mr Poe, or one of those awful penny-dreadfuls Mikael had enjoyed in the cheapside paper.

Vonken touched the door of Mikael’s wardrobe. It too had been opened and roughly pawed through. He gazed at his own reflection in the mirror on the inside of the door, and abruptly Holly thought, But he can’t have been in Maryland on the day of the Cataclysm. He looks too young! That was nineteen years ago, and he can’t be so much as thirty...well, perhaps he was a boy. But doesn’t the Dust age a person early? Maybe it doesn’t affect him because of his blood, whatever it was that made him a Coldspark instead of sickening him, killing him? How did a youth survive the journey from the East to here? I’ve never heard the like.

He broke into her inner questions by answering the one she’d asked aloud. “Oh, I didn’t imply that at all. They’ll still torture you if they suspect you’re holding out any information. At least I’ll have the comfort of knowing you won’t be able to implicate me.”

Holly stared at him. The corners of his auburn handlebar twitched. Incredulous, she realized: “Is that your idea of a joke?”

Vonken flashed a grin, then straightened his broad shoulders. “I advise you not to leave the house for a few days, Miss Autumnson. I will make an amulet for your personal use, but it will take me a short while to craft, and I do have more pressing matters to attend right now...”

“More pressing than my safety? I don’t much care for your sense of –“

“That wasn’t a joke,” he said brusquely, leaving the room, trotting down the stairs with what seemed forced energy.

“Doctor! Wait!”

He paused at the front door. “If I stay any longer, Miss Autumnson, your neighbors will begin to gossip. Besides, that gent with the piledriver for an arm is waiting out there for me. Wouldn’t want to deprive him of a comeuppance.” Another brief, cynical smile. “I bid you good evening, my dear. Pleasant dreams.”

And just like that, he left. The door latched behind him. Exasperated, Holly rushed to the glass inset and rapped at it. If he heard, he gave no sign; she watched his back moving farther and farther until only the crunch of his boots on the gravel gave a hint as to his direction. Holly let her hand fall from the glass. “But how do I open the wards to get out?” she groaned.

She wandered into the parlor, saw the snifter of brandy Vonken had barely sampled where he’d left it upon the low table. The last of the French brandy her father had kept as his personal stock. Wasted. Holly sighed, and held it up to the light. Which side had the doctor sipped from? Did she want to put her lips where his had been?

Oddly, that idea didn’t repulse her.

She drank it in two great swallows, hoping to drown her anger and frustration at the whirlwind her life had unexpectedly become. Then it occurred to her she might have a Dutch dictionary among the foreign phrasebooks her father had collected during his years as a merchant, a baron of trade to places she would only ever read about. Places which no longer existed. She lifted her skirts and nearly flew upstairs to the library.

The library window afforded a wonderful view of the front drive and the gates at the bottom of Autumn Hill, but as Holly paged through books in foreign tongues, trying to decipher what each was without benefit of English translation on the pages, she didn’t draw back the curtain again to look out. Which was a pity, as she missed seeing the burly man with the mechanical arm leap from the copse of aspens onto the weary back of Dr Vonken.

2. Unexpected Guests

Holly stared at the doctor, unable at first to form a coherent thought out of the miasma of confusion swirling in her head. Impatiently, he rapped his cane against the wall of the covered portico. “Miss Autumnson! Time presses!”

“What do you mean, my brother has –“

“Your late brother was not killed by hostiles,” the stranger said curtly. “His death was a murder by men in civilized dress, in point of fact; and his killers are very likely coming here next, and they are unlikely to believe you are wholly ignorant as you seem.” He took a deep breath, and before Holly could protest his extraordinary behavior, he lifted the smoked laboratory goggles from his face; intense dark blue eyes, the shade of the ocean depths, pierced her own mild brown ones. “Miss Autumnson, I implore you: if ever you loved your brother, do not allow his murderer to plunder his discovery as well as his life.”

Holly hesitated. The lamps were being lit, urchins with spindly ladders trotting along the chilling cobbles just past the gates. Dr Vonken blinked as the wind ruffled the thick-leaved maple branches, light from the street below playing across their faces a moment. This simple, involuntary reaction made him seem less intimidating suddenly. Holly stepped back, lifting one hand to cover her mouth so he couldn’t catch what she whispered, allowing the protective wards to part for him. Vonken strode directly in, retaining his cane, looking around with a quick, dismissive frown. “Where is it?” he demanded.

Drawing herself taut to her full height, she was still a head shorter than him. She shut the door and tried to regain some sense of control in her own home; the intruder swung himself around the stout balustrade, his long legs taking the stairs two at a time. “Dr Vonken! What exactly are you talking about? My brother was slaughtered by savages in the Wastelands, and if there were any new species discovered during his expedition, his notes have been tragically lost!” she called after him, hauling up her skirts to chase after the impertinent stranger. He was nowhere to be seen at the first landing, but from the library she could hear furniture being shoved across the parquet. “Dr Vonken! What are you doing? I must protest this...” Her voice trailed off as she reached the doorway to the library and saw the chaos he’d wreaked in a few short minutes. “Oh St Howard Philip,” she breathed. Books spilled off shelves, desk drawers had been wrenched open – even the locked one – the heavy oaken desk knocked askew in the struggle to force it to give up its secrets.

Vonken whirled, frustrated, gesturing at her with a thick book. “It’s not here! He bade me look in the usual place, but it is not here!” He punctuated the last three words by thumping the head of his cane on the cover of the book.

Holly forced herself to speak slowly, firmly, lowering her tone. “Doctor, if you do not explain yourself this instant I will summon the Watch.”

“The Watch don’t tangle with me,” he growled, but then calmed himself. Unbidden, he sank into a chair at the desk her brother had used when he was home. “We really don’t have time for this,” he sighed, glanced up at her imperious glare again, and squared up his shoulders. “Miss Autumnson. Did Mikael send you anything from this latest excursion? A packet, a letter, anything at all?”

“It was not his custom,” Holly replied, puzzled. “He often traveled where there were no express messengers. You’d be aware of this if you knew him, Dr Vonken.” She regarded him suspiciously, thinking Perhaps summoning the Watch anyway is a prudent idea, but the surgeon shook his head, ignoring the long straight locks which slid over his left eye at the gesture.

“We were...engaged in a business venture together. I wasn’t a close friend. Yet just a day ago I received a letter by Carrier from your brother, instructing me to fetch...fetch something he had sent to his sister, which he feared would cause you great harm.” His voice had softened somewhat; Holly couldn’t place his accent, but it was definitely Eastern, the sharp edges of the tenor voice modulated more carefully as he explained his purpose here. “I have the letter with me, if you wish to examine it.”

“I very much wish to,” she said. The doctor nodded once and unbuttoned the top of his green tunic, revealing a more ordinary shirt. “My brother never mentioned you,” she continued. “I find it highly unlikely he would place his trust in a total...strange...” She lost her words again at the brief glimpse of bare, smooth skin when he unbuttoned his shirt as well to retrieve a folded sheet of foolscap. He handed the paper to her, and she saw one edge was ragged. This had been torn from a cheap journal, the same sort Mikael favored for his note-taking when “out in the field,” as he’d persisted in calling his dangerous ventures.

“I created the Dust-powered prosthesis your brother wore. I operated on him during his tenure at All Souls,” Vonken said quietly. He indicated the book he still held. “I gave him this.” He flipped open the cover to reveal the title page, turned toward Holly: Treatise on the Uses of Horse-Shoe Chitin in Manufacturing Prosthetic Limbs, by Dr Darius Vonken, EMOK, PhD DC. Holly wouldn’t admit it aloud, but she was momentarily impressed at the initials signifying this man was not only an Emeritus of the Munificent Order of Krampf but held a doctorate in DustCrafting as well. The book, however, sounded dry as a Wasteland stream and unlikely to have been on Mikael’s favorite-reading list. Perhaps anticipating this idea, Vonken gave her a sardonic smile, and said, “Trace the degrees with your little finger of the left hand.”

Curious, Holly came two steps closer to do so, though she glanced twice at Vonken, mistrustful. When she completed the soft passing of her finger over the intaglio letters, the book’s pages flipped themselves to a spot in the middle, revealing a hidden chamber cut into the tome. A secret charm! She’d read of such things, but had never seen one used. Why would Mikael have need of such a silly legerdemain? “It’s empty,” she pointed out.

Vonken’s face fell even as his glare intensified. “And he told me you were the scholar of the family. Hmf.” Holly flushed hotly, but he didn’t apologize. “Yes it’s empty! And yet Mikael instructed me to look here for whatever he sent back, because he realized...” He broke off, lunging to his feet again and pacing the library, removing books from shelves at random, peering into the dark spaces behind dusty encyclopediae volumes. “Nothing in his letter sounds familiar?”

Holly realized she hadn’t even unfolded the letter yet. The handwriting was unmistakably Mikael’s, his terrible penmanship as distinctive as the finest French cursive. She read it swiftly, silently:

Vonken,

I have made a mistake. Sent the largest sample of new element to my sister Holly at Autumn Hill for safekeeping, but I fear consequences I hadn’t anticipated. V seems obsessed with it & will do anything to claim all of it for NPA. Suspect his intentions not as stated. I am being watched & can’t say more now but will explain my theories when I return. Please retrieve the element from my home in the usual place & keep at your lab until I

Nothing more. Holly looked up in alarm. “What is he talking about? What ‘element’? He didn’t send me anything! Where’s the rest of this letter?”

Vonken snatched the paper from her, refolded it and tucked it back within his shirt, swiftly rebuttoning his clothing. “There is no more. The Carrier who brought this to me was badly damaged, and collapsed into bolts and scrap the instant I confirmed my identity to her.”

Holly felt a shiver of ice pass across her shoulders. The birdlike constructs, Dust-powered like all modern marvels since the Cataclysm had scattered the mysterious essence of distant stars across the face of the planet, were built to withstand tempests and attacks by wild creatures in their flying rounds. “A Carrier...damaged beyond operation? What on earth could...” She realized something else: He referred to it as a ‘her’. As though it had life like a creature of blood. How odd.

“What indeed,” he agreed grimly. “Miss Autumnson, I beg you, speak only truth. Did your brother send you anything since he departed in June? Even a simple postal card could be significant.”

Holly shook her head. “No. No, not a word. He left and then two weeks ago I...” A catch in her throat. Swallowing past it, she finished simply, “I learned of his death.”

“Damn,” Vonken sighed. He passed his hand over the book, reversing the charm, making it appear ordinary again, and set it on the desk as though laying down a hope. “Perhaps that Carrier was also waylaid.” He straightened again, his lips set in a firm line beneath his moustache; he stroked one tip of it thoughtfully. “I suppose there is some consolation in knowing Villard’s goons didn’t find it either.”

“Henry Villard?”

Vonken gave her that same sardonic look again. That expression was really beginning to irritate her. “I trust the scholar of the Autumnson clan at least knows who her brother was employed by?”

“My brother was Mr Villard’s most esteemed researcher,” Holly snapped, pride for Mikael enflaming her; she saw Vonken’s eyes flick to her raised bosom, angering her further. “Mr Villard built our city, Dr Vonken! I don’t know what forsaken Eastern town you came from, but even before the Cataclysm, Mr Villard was forging paths out here! He oversaw the building of every rail track from here to California and up into the Yukon wilds, expanded the steam shipping routes upriver from the coast, personally funded each of my brother’s expeditions –“

Vonken waved a hand dismissively. “Maryland, Miss Autumnson, where we were quite familiar with rails, canals, and steam power when your fine city was a collection of fishing huts along the estuary!”

Feeling defensive, Holly returned in a voice rising with scorn: “Then you ought to be more respectful of what Mr Villard and his company have accomplished! He was the first entrepreneur to think of harnessing the kraken for transport! If it weren’t for his vision, we would never –“ Struck by what Vonken had said as much as by his glower now, she stopped to ask, “Did you say Maryland?” Vonken grimaced. “But...but wasn’t that the first to...”

“History is dead,” the doctor snapped. “Give me your hand and swear to me you know nothing of any of this!” He didn’t wait for her consent, grabbing her left hand in his larger black glove, turning it palm-up. Holly choked out a protest, but from some unseen pocket Vonken had produced a tiny needle; he pricked the center of her palm, making her cry out. She tried to pull away, but he held her firmly, long fingers closed around her delicate wrist. “I am sorry, Miss Autumnson, I truly am, but this is crucial,” he murmured. Holly raised frightened eyes to his, feeling a sickening wave of cold coursing like mercury up her arm. To her surprise, his expression was regretful, almost kind. He locked his gaze on hers, and she found herself frozen. Strange words escaped his lips; she thought she recognized the tongue he spoke, but her mind seemed slow to react. “Did you receive anything at all from Mikael since he traveled east in June?” Vonken said, enunciating each word carefully. Part of her was glad he did, as he seemed to be trying to speak through a curtain of ice-water. She found herself slowly shaking her head No. “Have you had any word from him, or from anyone claiming to speak for him?”

“Only...only you,” Holly murmured.

“All right. There, there...I’m sorry, my dear.” Vonken paused, seeming lost, stroking his moustache again. Holly trembled, wavering on her feet. As if snapping himself from his own thoughts, Vonken looked sharply at her, then muttered something else in that strangely familiar tongue, all glottals and clicks. Holly blinked. The library came into focus once more. The doctor released her, and she quickly stepped back, even though she felt ill and liable to fall over her own feet.

“You...you wretched brute,” she hissed. Never, never had anyone dared assault her like that! “Get out. Get out of my home this instant!”

The doorbell rang. Holly managed not to jump out of her skin, though it took every bit of will she possessed. “Ah, that’ll be the Watch,” she proclaimed, though she hadn’t summoned them. Yet. “You’d best be on your way, you pathetic excuse for a surgeon! Using some sort of veracity serum on an innocent young woman! I’ll have your license!”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” he growled, advancing on her, but even as she looked around to find something she could use as a weapon to defend herself, he pointed toward the door to the second-story hallway. “You will go at once to the door and let the gentleman you find there into your parlor. At once, as if everything is normal!”

“What?” She gaped at him. The very nerve of this monster! How dare he! “That’s the Watch, I tell you! You’re in for it now, you, you –“

“Save the insults for after I save your life, you ungrateful, sheltered little spinster-in-waiting,” Vonken snapped, striding past her without a backward glance. “The Watch, hell! That’ll be Villard himself come to pry out of you the element you don’t even have!”

Shocked, Holly had to remind herself to take a step, to get her feet to move. She followed him, seeing him racing down the stairs, heading toward the back of the first floor. “It’ll do you no good running out the back!” she shouted, “That’s warded too!”

Vonken’s sharp voice traveled back to her despite the distance he was putting between them in the spacious house. “I’m not running, blast it, woman! I’m starting tea!”

Tea??

Holly cautiously descended the stairs. The bell rang twice more. Hoping it perhaps actually was one of the Constable’s men just stopping in, checking on a bereft young lady on her own, she tried to smooth down her hair, adjusted her skirt, and went to answer the door. When she pulled the massive, carven front entry open, her mind froze again at seeing Henry Villard himself in the yellow light of the portico lamp. The old man’s cheeks lifted briefly in a consoling sort of smile. “Good evening, Miss Autumnson. I apologize for dropping by at zis hour...I hope I am not inconveniencing you.” The slight German accent, the twinkling eyes, the white walrus-moustache and shining, balding head were impossible to mistake.

Holly tamped down the shock in her voice, doing her best to appear composed. “Why...not at all, Mr Villard. To what do I owe the honor?”

“I wished to stop by personally to offer my condolences for your brutter,” Villard said. He smiled sadly, and gestured with his bowler hat. “Please. May I come in for a moment?”

How did Vonken know? Why did he refer to Mr Villard’s men as ‘goons’? What game is all this? She heard the whistle of a kettle. Dumbly, she stepped aside, whispered the passwords to the wards, and watched with growing unease as Henry Villard, founder and patron of the city of Concordia – and indeed the most important man in all of Columbia Pacifica, bar none – walked in accompanied by his usual escort of two burly gentlemen in boiled-wool suits. One of them had a steam-levered arm, a massive thing surely too unwieldy for anything but punching holes in things. The other’s eyes shifted immediately over everything in the foyer, one red lens extending and contracting again like a camera illumina, focusing on the staircase in particular. Holly wondered what sort of terrible accidents had necessitated these alterations...and then shivered at the thought: or perhaps they WANTED their bodies augmented for some other purpose.

Augmentations, she remembered, that Dr Vonken, with his list of degrees and honors, specialized in at All Souls Hospital.

Unsure what to think anymore, Holly mutely gestured toward the parlor. Villard grandly indicated she should precede him. Trying not to betray her worries with any awkward movement, she walked with her head up along the short hall to the interior rooms, past the darkened dining room and the swinging door to the kitchen, where a light showed. When she swung her gaze to the chairs by the small but lovely cast-iron mantel, she had to repress a start. Dr Vonken sat comfortably upon the high-backed loveseat, pouring tea from her finest dragonware pot. Upon seeing her, he stood, straightening his formal tunic, and executed a perfect bow to Mr Villard. “Well! An honor, sir. Your timing is excellent; the tea is only just being poured.”

Villard gave a grave nod in reply, and took the largest chair by the hearth, where a small fire crackled. Holly hadn’t lit one yet. She gave Vonken a frown; how had he managed to brew tea, light a fire, and yet appear so composed in barely four or five minutes since he’d darted down the stairs? Remembering her duty as a hostess, she noticed only two cups sat upon the low table. “Mr Villard, do please let me offer you and your associates some tea and...would you like cake? I may have...”

“Nonsense, dear girl,” Villard said, watching Vonken as the doctor resettled himself on the loveseat, crossing one ankle over the other and taking up his cup and saucer as though completely at peace with the world. “I know you’ve been doing without; ve may, at some more private time, discuss such matters. For now, vy don’t you allow Herbert and Russell to fetch things for you. Russell’s mutter was my housekeeper for many years; I am sure he knows his way around a kitchen.” Brusquely, the old man waved away his men. At a loss, Holly stood a moment undecided. Then Dr Vonken patted the empty half of the loveseat next to himself.

“My dear, the good Founder is absolutely correct. You are the one in grief; allow us to tend to you. Come sit down again, and we’ll have some bright conversation now that our eminent patron is present, I’ll wager.” Vonken’s smile lifted the corners of his moustache, but the look in those dark blue eyes said plainly: sit down and play this game if you value your life. When Villard shifted his gaze from Holly to the doctor, the man’s slender, gloved fingers held his teacup delicately to his lips, pinky curled in the finest Eastern manner. The other cup steamed on the table directly in front of the empty section of the loveseat. With smile still firmly pasted on, Vonken held his free hand out toward the table. “As you see, my dear, I’ve already taken the liberty of pouring for you. Do you take lemon?”

Reluctantly, Holly moved to the loveseat, and sat stiffly next to the doctor. Henry Villard’s eyes narrowed, only a fraction of a moment, but Holly saw it, and when the Founder of Concordia stretched his arms along the chair, she understood something very dangerous was indeed going on right here in her parlor. Something she didn’t comprehend at all yet. “Ah, thank you, Russell,” Villard said, and Holly started; the red-eyed man had been utterly silent re-entering the room with another cup and saucer for his master, and just as silently retreated into the darkened hall. Where are they? Why are these men even in my house, any of them? What in all the kraken-soaked oceans of Hades is going on?

Villard smiled at Vonken, who lounged against the back and arm on his side as if he’d visited the Autumnson house many times as a favored guest. “Vell now, zis is quite a cozy house. Vat exactly brings you here, Herr Doctor?”

Vonken stroked his moustache curls and smiled. Holly nearly jumped when a log sparked in the fireplace. She had the frightening sensation that she’d never been so threatened in her life, but the men kept smiling at each other. Smiling, she thought, like hoarwolves about to fight over a rabbit.

“I may have some brandy, if you gentlemen would prefer,” she piped up, and wished they might say yes so she’d have a polite excuse to take a long drink herself.

1. Autumn Hill

Black her dress, her veil, her long walnut hair bound up in black velvet ribbon. Grim her thoughts, grey as the lowering dusk. Properly attired as befitted her mourning period, Holly Autumnson walked at a sedate pace up Seventh Street, returning the nods or tipped hats of the merchants driving their carts past her, back toward their warehouses by the wharf now that the day’s selling was ended. She pushed a small two-wheeled cart by herself, head high, endowing her reduced station with as much dignity as she could call forth after a day of trudging around the marketplace. A month ago, Mrs Bottleby the housekeeper would have done all this: weekly trips to Market Street, occasional ventures farther out to donate clothing and old linens to the hospital. A month ago, Holly had assumed her brother, though long out of communication, was still alive.

As she turned off the street into the cracked brick drive of Autumn Hill, her shoulders gradually slumped. She paused to roll them in the uncomfortable mourning dress. Being the grieving sister, only living relation to the belated explorer Mikael Autumnson, brought upon her more hardships than she’d ever anticipated. Although the Northern Pacific Airways Exploration Company settled a grief benefit on her, that amount barely paid off Mikael’s funeral and the many outstanding debts she’d not even known her brother owed. A small pension was supposed to begin at the end of the month, but although she was sure the stipend would indeed continue to be paid by her late brother’s employer to the end of her own days – unless she married – it barely covered bare living expenses. To be frugal, Holly had dismissed all of the regular staff, only keeping her retaining contracts with the city’s trash haulers and with the Concordia Incorporated Kraken Oil suppliers, which both would visit weekly to ensure the drafty house her father had built continued habitable. Now she carried out all the necessary household errands herself.

The pushcart seemed even heavier as she trudged up the winding drive to the house atop the hill. The high privet wall needed trimming, she noticed. Would her neighbors tut-tut behind their hands if she let it go through the fall? Probably, she thought, grimacing. Certainly, the Athertons will. Well...let them gossip. It’s cheaper than hiring a new yardman. Sighing, she raised her eyes to study the tall house with its mansard roof of dull green slate, taller than half the trees atop the hill. Many of those leafy sentinels had been planted by her father after the home’s construction had deforested much of the acreage, their wood going into the paneling and trim; the maple in the front yard, just starting to burn scarlet with the change of seasons, had been a gift from an eminent horticulturalist. Every element of the landscaping was carefully planned and planted to evoke a sense of timelessness; artifice substituting for beauty; a symbol of the taming of this wild frontier at the edge of the western world.

The house itself bespoke a past prestige, when her family name had ranked among the snobby Athertons and the powerful Cookes. The architect who designed it had been well-known in New England before the Cataclysm. A two-story turret on the northwest corner afforded a view of the harbor, where Nathaniel Autumnson had watched his ships come in, back when trade with the Orient was still possible, before the Pacific Maelstrom. Imported chinaware, exotic brass fixtures, and lush Persian carpets pointed back to the era of commerce, and she knew she really should sell a few of these. Their rarity today would fetch a handsome price on the auction block of Grieg’s, with antiquities collectors fawning over an Indian brass lamp or a teapot of finest bone china painted and gilded to resemble a mythical dragon. All the same, Holly had grown up surrounded by these items, and after the Cataclysm, after the failure of her father’s imports business and his own death from a heart too strained to bear more, she regarded the house as a complete entity which would suffer if stripped of its obscure treasures, its exotic finery. It would be like stripping a harem dancer and forcing her to stand nude in the public square. And now with Mikael gone as well...

Holly shook herself out of this melancholy, and forced her feet to resume climbing the steep last section of the drive. I have enough, she thought. I have enough to continue, and I won’t be turned out of my home, at least. I suppose I should thank Henry Villard for that. It had been an emissary of Villard’s flagship company, the Northern Pacific, who had knocked on the front door just two weeks ago to tell her they’d discovered her brother’s remains in the Interior Wasteland. “Killed by hostiles,” the official cause of death. His body too decimated for a viewing; the remains had been identified from his corroded copper arm and the St Howard Philip’s medallion which he always wore tucked under his shirt. Holly had been dismayed, but not surprised. Mikael’s love of exploring, especially in the wastelands, had almost guaranteed a violent end one day. She had hoped it would be years away, that he would have time to start a family first. I suppose I should be grateful they brought him back. His grave could have been a pile of dirt in the barren Interior. Or worse.

She’d heard stories of the hostiles who roamed the Wastelands between the Rockies and the Crater; native tribes freed of their reservations by the fire and horror of the Cataclysm only to suffer terrible changes. Those whom the greenfire had not killed outright, it was widely rumored, had become...other. True savages with horns and teeth and claws like demons, a hundred times more dangerous than their forebears. Even almost twenty years after the devastating juggernaut had struck the good earth, stories emerged from the Interior of creatures the airship explorers had seen, and the tales grew more horrifying each year. Into that beastly wilderness her brother had gone, not for profit like some of the adventurers, but to explore, to document, to take chromagraphs if possible.

“For Science, Holls! Come on, doesn’t the idea of being the little sis of the Man Who Found Dragons appeal to you?” Mikael had teased her before his last, fatal expedition.

“Nobody’s really seen them,” Holly argued with a skeptical sniff. “Why not publish more about the kraken?”

“Oh, kraken’s old news,” Mikael scoffed. His treatise on the psychic bond between the strange airbeasts and their human pilots had sent ripples through the scientific community as far south as San Diego, and had resulted in Mikael’s hiring by the Northern Pacific to improve beast-and-man relations. He had negotiated progressively more expensive, expansive expeditions east. His papers, published in the most respectable journals, detailed changes in the fauna of the North American Interior which most people would have found incredible were it not for the specimens of badgelope and tri-winged moth he brought back to Concordia. Specimens he’d gone to great personal risk to obtain.

“But the Crater? Mikael, please don’t,” Holly said. She remembered trying to keep the fear out of her voice. Fear only made her brother more derisive of her for her sex. Women, he believed, were unsuited for adventuring due to their more fragile constitutions.

“Holly! No one has even seen the Crater in eight years, since Mulholland’s crossing! Eight years, Holls! And Villard’s footing the whole bill of goods!” Excitedly, he ticked off the extensive list. “Cruiser-class kraken with a full crew; a geologist and a morphologist in addition to myself, and trained assistants for us all; two of Concordia’s finest to keep our carcasses safe –“

“Freebold’s Venture had armed guards,” Holly reminded him grimly. The doomed trip undertaken by the adventurer Boris Freebold had become this generation’s equivalent to the Donner Party of which their parents had shuddered to hear. “Some good it did them all!”

Mikael gave her the smile she hated, the patronizing one which said she’d never understand. “Freebold was a fool. He went by horse and wagon train. Did I mention we have a kraken of the biggest order? In a pinch, I’ll bet the pilot could order it to attack any hostiles who bother us!” He rubbed her shoulders, trying to reassure her. “I’ll be safe, I promise. It’s a bit of a longer trip, I’ll admit, but I’ll be back before All Hallow’s with some proper scary stories for the bonfire!”

Now here it was the seventh of October, and her brother roamed no more, tethered to earth forever in the cemetery on the far side of the city.

Holly paused to gesture at the kitchen door, whispering the password to disarm the wards. She began unloading the cart, carrying household supplies and food into the house. Mikael was dead, along with the rest of his expeditionary force...though not all the bodies had been found, it was assumed all had perished. The kraken was lost, perhaps killed and eaten by hostiles, or by something more formidable and enigmatic even than the majestic flying beasts which called the blasted scar of the Crater home. Mikael was dead, and Father was long gone to lay beside the mother she barely recalled, and her loss of fortune and status ensured no suitor would approach her now. She would end up a spinster, alone in this drafty house on a lonely hill.

She shivered. Stop that! Put the kettle on, and pick a new book for the night. She liked best those tales from back east, stories both true and fanciful set in impossible cities like New York and Boston and the Capitol of the States-That-Were. Stories from Before, especially those with daguerreotypes or illustrations of places which looked not unlike Concordia or Seattle, but with no flying tentacled ships, no insectile velocipedes, no fine machines powered by Cataclysm Dust. How strange that former world must have been. Already caught up in imagining what quaint history she might read after supper, she roused only at the repeated ringing of the front bell. A visitor? No utility men ought to be by today, should they? A quick check of the calendar only deepened her puzzlement: Thursday, October seventh, Eighteen hundred ninety-nine. Market Day, otherwise ordinary.

The man standing within the portico was far from what she expected. The long emerald-green tunic, buttoned from high collar to flaring skirt and narrow at the waist, marked him as a surgeon of the Order of Klamph. Closely-tailored black kid gloves covered long fingers, and smoked glass lenses hid his eyes. His sleek auburn hair, fashionably long in front and with pointed sideburns, showed no grey; neither did his impeccably waxed moustache, curled in the handlebar style over almost feminine lips. Broad shoulders and a stern bearing offset that, however, with a far more masculine air. Conscious of her less-than-proper appearance at this instant, Holly drew her back up firmly. “May I help you, Doctor?” she asked politely.

To her surprise, he tilted his straight-edged nose upward and sniffed, then rapped the heel of his cane on her porch. “Only a level two ward? For a home with information this important? Hardly sufficient.” He looked right at her, and Holly fought a sudden impulse to take a step back. “Lower your ward, Miss Autumnson, and allow me ingress.”

Holly gaped a moment at his rudeness, then recovered indignance. “I do not even know you, sir! Why on earth should I allow—“

“Because I am Dr Darius Vonken, and because your idiot brother has put you in danger,” the stranger snapped. “Men are already coming here to take by force what they want. I promise you I’ll be much gentler, but I can only protect you if you let me in!”