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!”