Gears of Brass: A Steampunk Anthology Read online

  A Division of Whampa, LLC

  P.O. Box 2160

  Reston, VA 20195

  Tel/Fax: 800-998-2509

  http://curiosityquills.com

  Compiled by Jordan Elizabeth

  A Clockwork Dollhouse, Clockwork Wolf, Treasure's Kiss, A Clockwork Beast, & Clockwork Dwarves © Jordan Elizabeth

  Zeus' Fire © Lorna MacDonald Czarnota

  Lana's End © Christine Baker

  The Clockwork Monkey © W.K. Pomeroy

  Autumn Rose © Eliza Tilton

  A Princess of Zephyris © Heather Talty

  The Key Girl © Grant Eagar

  My Golden Anabel © Natalia Darcy

  The Archive Room © Clare Weze

  Time Spun Souls © S.A. Larsen

  Last of the Giants © J. Million

  For information about Subsidiary Rights, Bulk Purchases, Live Events, or any other questions - please contact Curiosity Quills Press at [email protected], or visit http://curiosityquills.com

  ISBN 978-1-62007-802-0 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-803-7 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-804-4 (hardcover)

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  About the Authors

  More Books from Curiosity Quills Press

  Full Table of Contents

  What is steampunk? It’s a story like any other story: a chance to escape the world for a few hours, to live in the wilderness of an author’s imagination, to adventure, to fall in love, to die for one’s friends. It’s classic storytelling in a visually rich, emotionally gripping era that still resonates with us today. That setting usually has a 19th Century Victorian steam-technology vibe, but not always - my own steampunk series is set in an alternate-India fantasy world. The range and breadth of imagination in steampunk stories is very much unlimited. Plus you get to rollick about in corsets and top hats, inventing gadgets and saving the world from the villains who turn that fantastic steam technology to their own dastardly purposes.

  Who can resist that?

  In this anthology, you’ll find clockwork dollhouses and clockwork dwarves; farmers, woodcutters, inventors, and bloodthirsty uncles; reworked fairy tales and half-human, half-machine “composites.” In other words, you’ll find a rich playground with airships and intrigue and secrets that are best kept hidden. If you’re looking for some bite-sized entertainment of the scrumptious kind, an anthology of steampunk works is the perfect place to start. Grab a tale or two over lunch, snack on another for dinner, then settle into your favorite chair for the rest.

  Your literary palate will thank you.

  Susan Kaye Quinn

  Author of The Dharian Affairs trilogy

  (Third Daughter, Second Daughter, First Daughter)

  a steampunk fantasy adventure-romance

  A young woman stands beneath a gas lamp on a street corner. She wears a corset and a bustle, with goggles covering her eyes, and she checks a pocket watch that ticks a melancholy tune.

  What story lies within her heart? Is it one of airships and steam trains?

  Working at a Victorian Fair first introduced me to the concept of steampunk. With the use of a new word, I went to the Internet, searching for steampunk attire and books. Who knew you could buy steampunk shower curtains? My usual fantasy stories took a turn for the steam-driven and steampunk became my new favorite genre.

  The idea for a steampunk anthology derived from a dream one night: a girl created a clockwork dollhouse and it showed the murders of her family. A short story exploded from that dream, and I wondered what a steampunk anthology would be like.

  Laboratories and steamcoaches, swords and clockwork spiders.

  I reached out to my writing friends to ask them to rise to the challenge. They, in turn, told their friends, and in a puff of steam, an anthology formed.

  he doll raised her leg, the gears grinding, and upset the balance of her metal body. She toppled against the wooden floor of her house, but her other leg lifted in the same movement, more gears grinding.

  Jane sighed, scooping the doll up while it attempted to walk, the gears moving slower until the five-inch creation lay still in her palm. The scent of lavender wafted from the doll’s purple silk dress. Jane had used her best skills to sew the tiniest stitches along the full skirt and bodice.

  Sunlight from the playroom window bathed the dollhouse and made the doll’s yellow curls glow. Jane had used some of her own hair; it had to be a perfect replica. So far it was, since it couldn’t walk.

  Humming, she set the Jane doll on the miniature canopy bed and sat back on her knees to frown at the dollhouse her father had built. Three towers, two fireplaces, a working lift, and clocks that ticked off the time in every room.

  “Jane Pendleton!” Her brother stomped into the room, his hands curled into fists and his nostrils flared. Brass chains fastened around the ankles of his boots jangled with each stomp.

  “What?” She widened her eyes to look innocent, although her heartbeat sped up.

  “Why aren’t you at Father’s business meeting?” He spoke slowly as though she were a simpleton as well as an invalid.

  “Because I’m not the governor. He is.” Jane folded her hands in her lap. Neither are you, Robert. She picked at the wide, pink sash that contrasted with the crisp whiteness of her dress. If Robert hadn’t insisted, she could go without a corset. Instead, the contraption bit into her ribs and constricted her lungs. She couldn’t bend over as far as she needed to when she tinkered at her workbench.

  “You’re twelve. Why are you still in this nursery? Father needs to be proud of us. We represent him.”

  She swept her gaze across the room with the pale blue walls and floor-to-ceiling shelves covered in old toys she and her father were working on converting into machines. The eighteen-inch doll with the scarlet silk dress could cry whenever someone walked by it, and the soldier could fire a cotton ball from his musket. “If Father asks me to go, then I’ll go.” She could’ve pointed out that Robert was only fifteen and giving himself airs, but then he might break something in the room. Last time she’d contradicted him, he’d smashed her easel—the one she’d designed to hand her paints when she verbally asked for them.

  “He shouldn’t need to ask.” Robert folded his arms. His polished cufflinks winked on the sleeves of his white shirt and matching buttons lined the front of his velveteen vest. “The government is more important than toys. Mother never cared and look at what happened to her.”

  Jane stiffened. “She was poisoned.” Leave it to her brother to make their mother’s death a flippant rebuke.

  “Exactly.”

  How could her brother be so callous? No one had found the culprit. Every time Jane wandered the hallways, she studied each person she passed, wondering if he or she had been the one to do it. Someday, she would find the culprit, and she would invent something that would torture that man or woman until they felt the same sorrow she did.

  The clocks in the dollhouse chimed in unison. The one over the playroom’s door chimed a second after.

  “What’s all that racket?” Robert scowled at the dollhouse.

  “Noontime.” He would never leave unless she did something to annoy him or accompanied him back to their father’s meeting. “Want to see what I designed last night?” Jane lifted a doll from the attic where her father had constructed miniature trunks that opened and shut.

  She fit the clock key into the doll’s back and wound it until the gears clicked. Pulling the
key away, the doll’s arms moved up and down.

  “See?” Jane smiled at her brother. “Amazing, isn’t it? I’m working on making a doll walk next. I told Father we should find a way to make the dolls mimic us, so that whatever we do, they do. He said that would take magic, though.”

  Robert pursed his lips.

  “I’m making the dolls look like us,” Jane continued. That would be certain to bore him. “I have a doll for you and a doll for Father. That doll has a suit on. The doll in the ball gown is Mother. The one on the bed is me and this one will be my daughter.”

  “You don’t have a daughter.”

  “I will someday. I’ll name her Ainsley.”

  “Don’t you know you have to use names approved by the government?” Robert lunged forward faster than she could react and snatched the doll from her hand. Jane grabbed the sloped roof of the dollhouse to pull herself up, leaning against it. The walker her father had made for her lay behind her. She should’ve kept it closer, but she hadn’t expected her brother to roar into the room.

  “Give her back,” Jane squeaked. Pain lashed up her right leg as it did whenever she tried to stand on it without assistance. Her father had built the dollhouse to be her height when she was nine, so she had to bend forward, the corset stabbing into her budding breasts.

  “You should want an honor medal, not a doll.” Robert threw the delicate toy at the door. It struck the wood and fell, one arm snapping off. He lifted his foot to kick the house.

  “Stop!” Jane lifted her arms without thinking and fell sideways, wincing as her leg hurt fiercer. That stupid defect that left her foot misshapen, twisted, unable to be used.

  Robert stepped back, smirking. “No wonder Father doesn’t push for you to be at these meetings. The governor should be perfect. He doesn’t want you.” Laughing, Robert marched out the door while Jane’s shoulders shook with sobs, tears burning her eyes.

  Her brother slammed the playroom door and the doll lifted her remaining arm with a grinding of her gears.

  Metal scraped against metal. The glass in the windowpanes shook. Chimes tinkled outside as the wind blew. The glass shook harder before it lifted. A leg slid through the opening, then a hip, and a body. A fourteen-year-old girl hung by one hand as she pulled down the disused window and dropped to the floor.

  “Oomph.” She lost her balance as she waved her arms and tumbled onto her bottom. The exclamation bounced off the walls, the one to the right made of stone and windows, the other wood and doors. Gray paint peeled, and she wondered what color it might’ve been once. The windows sat high toward the ceiling, offering in the dull light of a cloudy evening. The gas lamps on the wall remained dark, cold.

  She stood to brush dust off her black breeches. The hallway remained empty, but an intruder alarm would have sounded farther in the mansion, and someone would come soon.

  Her bronze-colored flats with the contrasting silver-colored toes slapped against a wooden floor coated with grime. No one must’ve been in the hallway for twenty-four years, just as they’d told her.

  The door across from her had a pineapple cutout in the center. Not that one. She headed right, passing a birdcage cutout, a whistle cutout, and stopped at the door with the songbird cutout. It could’ve been a raven if she tipped her head just so. Crouching, she pulled the lock pick kit from her slack’s pocket and fiddled with the catch until the gears clicked. She turned the knob and stepped inside, leaving the door ajar.

  Dust motes floated in the air, visible by the light from the two windows in the far wall. A mechanical rocking horse rested in the corner by a miniature steam train set on a table. Toys covered the shelves, all colors dimmed by fading and dust, as though a rainbow had weathered.

  A dollhouse rested in the center of the room on an ornate carpet. She walked across the floor to kneel behind it, that side left open for hands to play in the rooms. More dust coated the furniture and dolls. She found the male doll in the suit and sat him at the long table in the downstairs meeting room. The little girl doll with the yellow curls slept in the bed. That one could stay.

  She set the little boy doll in the kitchen and took a glass bottle, no bigger than her littlest fingernail, from her pocket. The bottle went on the table next to him; a red X had been painted on the side of the bottle. The mother doll in the ball gown lay at the boy’s feet, one arm spread overhead.

  The Ainsley doll went in the open doorway.

  The girl walked to the shelves and located the silver music box. Opening it, she took out the clock key. She had to blow on the hole in the side of the dollhouse before the key would fit, then she turned it once, twice, thrice—it took fifteen tries before the gears clicked.

  The clocks in the dollhouse turned.

  “State yourself!” A man stepped into the doorway. He wore a black shirt and matching pants, his shoes as shiny as polished silverware.

  The girl stood up from behind the dollhouse and lifted her hands to show she held no weapon.

  Governor Robert Pendleton scowled as he stormed down the hallway, his security captain dogging his heels.

  “I don’t know how she got in, sir,” the man babbled. “The alarm went off in one of the windows.”

  “Then she got in that way,” Robert growled.

  “They should all be locked, sir. No one’s been in the children’s wing since your sister eloped.”

  “Apparently, you’ll have to check them.” Robert turned into the playroom and stopped fast, his boots squeaking on the filthy floor. He should’ve destroyed the room as soon as Jane disgraced the family, burned all her toys and left the walls bare.

  A girl stood beside the dollhouse, two security guards flanking her. She blinked at him with green eyes rimmed in kohl. The security captain had told him who the girl claimed to be, but Robert hadn’t believed it.

  “Ainsley.” She should be at the seaside cottage. How had she gotten twenty miles to the city?

  “Hello, Uncle.” Her face remained impassive.

  He hadn’t seen her in… it had to be going on five years, but the governess sent him pictures every year at her birthday, and she looked just like her mother, the same strong chin and deep-set eyes. Her hair was darker though, more blonde than yellow.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked into the castle.”

  He ground his teeth until he tasted blood from biting his tongue. “Why are you here? You don’t have permission. How did you find this room?”

  “This room called to me.”

  Of course. Just as insane a comment as something Jane would’ve made. “Did you climb through a window?”

  “How would I do that? Aren’t they locked? You keep the windows at the cottage locked. Aren’t all windows locked?”

  She couldn’t know she was kept as a prisoner. The governess had orders not to allow her near anyone other than the servants he handpicked. “Why are you here?”

  “Why not?” She smiled, but it seemed to be more of a smirk. “I missed you. I wanted to be with you.”

  “What are you wearing?” He ordered gowns for her, corsets, velvet boots, attire befitting the governor’s niece. Instead, she wore a boy’s breeches and a maroon jacket that fasted up the side. Her hair hung loose, although she was old enough to have it pinned up.

  “Clothes.”

  He would get nowhere with her. Hadn’t the tutors taught her anything? He rounded on the security captain. “Take her to my parlor and keep her from leaving. I’ll find out what’s happening at the cottage. Miss Pendleton, your governess will be here at once to take you home.”

  She blinked at him. “My name is Miss Ainsley Michaels.”

  “Out!” He pointed to the door. She walked past him without turning her head, without acknowledging him with her gaze.

  Where did that ticking come from? He stomped to the dollhouse and crouched. That noise hadn’t come from it since Jane left. She’d wound the infernal thing every morning before breakfast as if it mattered more than food.

 
; Had the dolls always been in that position? The one on the bed, the one in the meeting room…

  His skin prickled and he paled. The two dolls in the kitchen, who had put them there? Had it been an accident? Those stances. Ainsley couldn’t have known. No one knew.

  Jane’s words flitted back to him. She’d wanted the dollhouse to mimic the family. She’d claimed that would take magic, though.

  It couldn’t be what he thought.

  Robert moved the boy doll into the attic and the mother doll to the living room. He stuck the bottle in his vest pocket. He would have to find whoever set up the dollhouse that way. As they died, he could tell them they had one aspect wrong. The poison he’d used had been in a white bottle, not green.

  Robert steepled his fingers and rested them against his lips. Impossible. Utterly impossible. The clock on the office wall behind him ticked off the minutes, and he linked his breathing with that. Tick. Inhale. Tock. Exhale.

  “The cottage is gone,” he whispered.

  “Yes.” The courier adjusted his jacket. “Burned to the ground. I asked in the village and some people claimed to have seen smoke yesterday, but they’d assumed it was an autumn bonfire.”

  “The cottage had over twenty rooms, but they thought it was a bonfire?”

  “The village is three miles away,” the courier said.

  “There should’ve never been a bonfire there. Ainsley was only allowed in the inner garden.”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  Robert flared his nostrils. “Did you find anything there? Anyone left?”

  The courier shifted his gaze toward the marble floor. “We found a skeleton. Three of your men are still searching. There were furniture remains and a few chimneys. I looked through the stable house myself. Nothing left.”

  Robert pushed back his chair and fumed to the filing cabinet, yanking open the top wooden drawer where he kept his niece’s information.

  He flipped past the folder of her medical records, past records of what she ate every day, and the news articles where he spoke about her to the media. She was a delicate creature, prone to fits of imagination—if she got out and told anyone what had happened there… He pulled out the folder that listed everyone employed at the cottage.