Corsets & Clockwork Read online

  Corsets & Clockwork:

  13 Steampunk Romances

  Edited by Trisha Telep

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction by Trisha Telep

  RUDE MECHANICALS by Lesley Livingston

  THE CANNIBAL FIEND OF ROTHERHITHE by Frewin Jones

  WILD MAGIC by Ann Aguirre

  DEADWOOD by Michael Scott

  CODE OF BLOOD by Dru Pagliassotti

  THE CLOCKWORK CORSET by Adrienne Kress

  THE AIRSHIP GEMINI by Jaclyn Dolamore

  UNDER AMBER SKIES by Maria V. Snyder

  KING OF THE GREENLIGHT CITY by Tessa Gratton

  THE EMPEROR'S MAN by Tiffany Trent

  CHICKIE HILL'S BADASS RIDE by Dia Reeves

  THE VAST MACHINERY OF DREAMS by Caitlin Kittredge

  TICK, TICK, BOOM by Kiersten White

  Acknowledgments

  Author Biographies

  Copyright

  Introduction

  THERE ARE MILLIONS of stories in the Clockwork City; here are thirteen of them.

  Human hearts are delicate things. They are not made of gears and cogs, or pistons and steam-driven hydraulics. Place the human heart next to a technological marvel of scientific industry created by the lurid imaginations of the Victorians and it will seem weak, useless, good for nothing--easily punctured, torn, or broken. It obviously needs sturdier parts and could use a lesson in physics. A human heart will not, for example, win a war or power a factory or light a city or fuel a demonic industry. A clockwork heart would certainly be a better idea--sturdier, more useful, sound, and reliable. It would not get so easily bruised and battered, nor would it be a slave to emotion. But would a finely tuned wonder of engineering be able to love?

  Fortunately, none of our heroes and heroines has a clockwork heart (well, okay, one does, but that's unavoidable). You might get away with a clockwork heart for the "steam" portion of our entertainment, but you'll never make the "punk" contingent with anything less than a gory, flesh-and-gristle muscle that is pumping blood and taking prisoners. The devil may be in the mechanized technological details, but the story is firmly in the human. Victorian science fiction is not much without a healthy dose of the incorrigible, brave, hysterical Victorians themselves, is it? You may yearn for the infernal devices but it's the heroine who breaks your heart. Where would the story be without the kick-ass rebellion ... in an airship under goggles, in a corset that's simply impossible to swim in, fighting Lovecraftian monsters in a 1958 T-bird, or dodging metal Nazis? Come for the steam, stay for the punk.

  In this book you'll find magical outcasts and kindred spirits, feisty heroines and genius inventors, war zones and supernatural rituals, darkness and dystopia. A tonic of forgetfulness helps keep the real world under wraps; a misunderstood murderer is on the lookout for love in the City of Gold. There is an eternal struggle between science and magic, logic and beauty, technology and intuition. Lovelorn stage managers, oppressed Siamese twins, and idealistic young bombers skulk through the dangerous streets of the soot-choked city of industry. This is a sprawling, diverse, fantasy-heavy, unashamedly promiscuous steampunk collection that takes giddy pleasure in throwing the rule book out the window and detouring drunkenly like some manytentacled Great One with ADD.

  So, what do you get when you cross steampunk with romance? Say hello to my little friend--steampunk's younger sister, the romantic baby of the family who refuses to pay attention and who, when you dress her up in all her steampunk finery, invariably takes her safety scissors to her epaulettes and trades all her cool weapons to a cute boy in homeroom for a lunchbox full of Twinkies (she'll just make more in shop class next period). And although she might seem a tad light-hearted to the steampunk purist, beneath her too-tight corset, intricate infernal hairstyle (which can be reduced to cinders by a well-placed bomb), and optimistic desire for love beats the heart of a true pioneer adventurer and a suitably fierce addition to the steampunk family tree.

  TRISHA TELEP

  Rude Mechanicals

  BY LESLEY LIVINGSTON

  ... A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,

  That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,

  Were met together to rehearse a play ...

  A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

  QUINTILLIUS FARTHING SAT on the high stool at the stage manager's post in the darkened wings of his uncle's theatre, contemplating murder. Or perhaps suicide.

  No ... no ... a murder-suicide. Yes, he thought, that seems the most elegant solution to this, my present dilemma. After all, wasn't that how Romeo and Juliet worked things out? Maybe this could be one of those cases of Life imitating Art ...

  Out on the stage--standing just out of her light, as usual--Marjorie Dalliance blanked on a line, stood blinking dumbly for a long moment as if waiting for the forgotten words to magically appear in the air in front of her, and then laughed like a braying ass when they didn't. Just to let the meagre audience know, in case they hadn't already figured it out for themselves, that this particular production of Romeo and Juliet was--contrary to the marquee billing overtop the Aurora Theatre's front doors--a comedy.

  Or maybe it was a joke. A long, cruel joke.

  Quint ground his teeth together and his thoughts swung back into the just plain "murder" camp. For a while, sitting there in the darkness, he'd idly considered feeding his cue script to the blue-glassed gas lamp at his elbow, a page at a time. Once the entire thing was consumed, Quint fancied he would just up and leave the performers--if such they could be genuinely called--to their own devices.

  He sighed and took the silver fob watch from his vest pocket, glancing at the faintly luminous face. There was still plenty of time left before the second-act curtain fell. He could probably manage to track down that shifty fellow he'd seen earlier that afternoon peddling gas-powered pistols and auto-shooters from a cart in the Narrow Market.

  A bit of luck and Quint could be there and back again in time to spectacularly, and with great realism, remind Marjorie Dalliance--and the theatre's whole, buffoon-ridden patronage--that this particular play was supposed ... to be ... a ... tragedy.

  Instead, it was just tragic.

  He hazarded a glance back at the stage where "Romeo" approached the balcony and tripped over a bit of foliage that "Juliet" had knocked loose in her out-of-character merriment. Quint shook his head woefully and settled back onto his perch in resignation, signalling another lighting cue up to the booth with his hooded lamp. He couldn't leave. The troupe probably wouldn't survive his absence long enough for him to exact his bloody vengeance. And besides, his uncle did truly need him to--

  "Moon!" Quint hissed to himself in a whisper, suddenly having realized that Marjorie had--yet again--forgotten to trip the lever switch that activated a specific mechanism of the scenery apparatus before she'd made her entrance. "She's forgotten the ruddy moon again ..."

  "Lady!" Honorius Clement, the actor playing Romeo, sadly hadn't noticed and was already barrelling on through his next line: "By yonder blessed moon I swear ..."

  The guffaws from the boorish few souls sprawled about the audience seats drowned out Clement's voice as the hapless twit gestured to an empty space above the balcony where the risen moon was, most definitely, not.

  Quint dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

  On it went. For almost another two whole hours, and it was mostly all downhill. When the final curtain fell, Quint felt it almost as a blessing.

  * * *

  Once he'd finished sweeping the empty house and setting the gas lamp ghost light to keep lonely vigil in the middle of the darkened stage, Quint left by the stage door, turning the key in the big brass lock, and headed over to the Deus Ex Machina--the pub up the st
reet--for a bit of liquid consolation. His uncle, Agamemnon Wentworth Farthing--once the greatest theatre impresario the City had ever known--would already be there. He hadn't even had the heart to stick it out for curtain call. And that, Quint thought, had been mercifully brief, the actors offering only perfunctory bows before leaving the stage, shedding bits of costume in their collective wake as they headed toward the dressing rooms. Mostly, they'd all been in a hurry to get to the place Quint found himself now, too.

  The Deus Ex Machina--as the Mac was formally proclaimed by the soot-begrimed sign that hung swaying over the doorway--had become in recent years a kind of eccentric shrine of sorts. A memorial for all of the theatres and all of the productions that had met their deaths along the once-grand "Palace Row." The Row was an area of the City comprising four long blocks of increasingly dilapidated edifices, crumbling buildings housing stages--referred to in the better days of recent memory as "theatre palaces"--where scintillating performances of the thespian craft seen in times past had mostly given way to the creeping depredations of the "popular arts."

  As, over the years, the crowds had thinned, one by one the theatres had begun closing their doors. And as they had, the owner of the Deus Ex Machina had bought up the most interesting bits of sets and props--at ridiculously low prices--and mounted them on the walls and posts and beams of the rabbit-warren public house. The best ones he hung suspended from the rafters above the long oak bar.

  Quint was, admittedly, conflicted about the practice. On the one hand, he appreciated the memorializing--these were productions that should be remembered--but, on the other, it sometimes seemed to him ... macabre. Like theatrical taxidermy. He didn't like to think of all the living breathing performances he'd marvelled at in his youth as something to be skinned and stuffed and mounted like the carcasses of hunting trophies.

  He shook off his gloomy thoughts and pulled open the heavy oak and bronze door of the pub. A rush of warm, greasy air tumbled over him, dissipating in the cool, wet night, and he stepped into the noisy closeness of the Mac's innards. He elbowed his way toward the very back corner to the long, low table where his uncle always sat slumped after a performance, surrounded by a bevy of theatrical cronies, to discover that talk had already turned to "the problem with theatre."

  That's a bad sign, Quint thought. That topic didn't usually rear its ugly head until the second or third round of ales. He signalled the barmaid for a small beer and sat down, turning only half an ear to the same familiar conversation. It was like listening to one of those old circular songs where one party began and everyone picked up the tune in turn and it just went round and round with no end and no beginning. Often the discussions would chug away into the wee hours, until Quint was forced to drag his uncle out into the street and help him stumble up the steps of the late-run trolley-tram.

  Always, the topic was the same. The problem with theatre.

  "Bums in the seats" was the problem. Or, rather, the increasing lack thereof. Over the past few years, the Aurora (in particular, but all of the Palace Row houses in general) had been losing audiences to other forms of popular entertainment. "Entertainment" being an entirely subjective term, Quint thought bleakly. He'd trodden the boards beneath the soaring gilded arches of the Aurora's proscenium since he was old enough to toddle about upright, fetching props and costumes, bringing the actors jugs of water and flasks of whisky. Eventually he'd been allowed to take on bit parts now and then--he had a natural talent for acting and an eye for directing, his uncle had told him--when he wasn't stage managing the productions.

  But now, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Quintillius Farthing was beginning to despair for the future of his chosen profession. The Chalice, one block over on the Row, was the first to give up on producing actual plays. Its owner now ran nightly revues of assorted novelty acts instead. Quint had gone to see the show--if "show" it could rightly be called--out of pure, bloody-minded curiosity one night when the Aurora had been dark. Afterwards he'd cursed himself and heartily wished he hadn't gone. The headline act had consisted of a chorus of dancing girls in peek-a-boo underthings, jiggling and bobbing alongside a fire-breathing dwarf on stilts wearing break-away suspenders ... and no underthings whatsoever. Quint shuddered at the memory.

  But the Chalice wasn't the only one, either. A few houses further up, for instance, there was a theatre that had recently opened a larger-than-life--and entirely obscene--marionette puppet show that was running three performances a day and drew large, rowdy, drunk crowds. In between that tarnished venue and the Aurora, there was another boarded-up theatre that had gone permanently dark where, outside on the street, a tramp ran an act with a marmoset on a pneumatic pogo stick.

  A marmoset. Of all things.

  The last time he'd walked past, Quint's heart had sank to discover that the marmoset was pulling in more cash than his uncle's theatre. Getting better crowds than a performance of Shakespeare, for pity's sake.

  A marmoset.

  "Spectacle!" one of the old boys down the table in the Mac suddenly roared. "We need more spectacle!"

  "Bigger sets!"

  "Explosions!"

  "What about art?" Quint said finally, tiring of the wrongheadedness of it all. "What about artistry?"

  "Aye, lad." The roaring chap gave him a sharp glare. "What about it?"

  "We could try hiring some real actors, you know." Quint shrugged. "Instead of that ridiculous bawd we've got playing Juliet--"

  "Oy! Watch'r mouf, Farving!" the delicate ingenue in question yowled from the next table over, where she sat on Old Capulet's lap, quaffing from a pewter mug. "Or I'll give you a rose by any ovva name!" She shook her fist at him.

  Quint sighed and turned away from the raucous laughter at that table. He had no actual fear of offending the base creature. She probably wouldn't remember most of that night's proceedings by the next morn, anyway. "Just like she can't remember most of her lines," Quint grumbled to himself.

  Agamemnon smiled gently in the face of his nephew's seething frustration. He nodded his chin at the table full of actors. "We've got her for the same reason we've got most of them, except for the few old-timers. We've got her because she's cheap."

  "She is that," Quint agreed, but quietly enough so that Marjorie didn't hear him this time. The last thing he wanted, ironically enough, was to make a scene. He sighed. It was the crux of the problem. Smaller audiences meant less money coming, which meant less money to pay for real talent, which in turn, ensured even smaller audiences. "I should go back to the Aurora, Uncle. The box office receipts are in need of counting ..."

  "Twenty in the audience today, Tilli, old chap," Agamemnon patted his nephew's knee. "I already counted. And five of those were comps."

  "Uncle, I thought we'd agreed--no more complimentary tickets?"

  "You worry too much, Quintillius," the old sage who still ran the Orpheum said from across the table as he pushed a mug toward him. "You need a lass, my boy. Some lovely doll who'll take your mind off the work."

  In the corner, the gaggle of chorus dancers from the naughty revue sent up an unrelated shriek of laughter and Quint shuddered.

  A lass.

  He was certainly not opposed to the idea. But he'd grown up steeped in the classics. The great love stories. And he'd decided long ago--somewhere around the age of nine or ten (he'd been a terribly precocious child)--that the girl who managed to capture the heart of Quintillius Farthing would be ... extraordinary. He would settle for nothing less.

  Never mind that. He shook the silly fantasy of a lady love from his thoughts, frowning. No. The work was the only thing Quint cared about. He didn't want a girl to take his mind off it. Through the haze of pipe and hookah smoke, Quint gazed up at the ceiling of the Mac. Above him, a harpy-wing apparatus from his uncle's last truly successful performance--Shakespeare's The Tempest--hung suspended from wires, stretched out as if in phantom flight.

  Quint distinctly remembered the thrill of watching an actor wearing the magnificent wings descend to th
e stage from the Aurora's fly-tower through a rolling cloud of dry-ice fog to the accompaniment of crashing thunder and lightning, speaking those marvellous lines ...

  Agamemnon had been forced to sell off the contraption to the Mac's owner when his bar tally had grown too long. Quint stared at the iridescent feathers, wired with such care to the frame, and wondered at the artistry that had made them seem so lifelike on stage, under the lights.

  Suddenly, the bench beside him creaked, shaking Quint out of his reverie. He turned to find himself looking into the eyes of a compact, wiry little man with iron-grey hair curling out from under a velvet top hat, and wearing an immaculate, if slightly old-fashioned, frock coat and cravat. The man leaned forward and Quint saw his own eyes reflected in the convex lenses of the delicate brass pince-nez perched on the other man's long, hawkish nose.

  "Call me Kingfisher," the man said. His breath was hot, pungent with the tang of absinthe. "Young Master Farthing ... I have something you should see. You and your uncle."

  * * *

  They left the Mac, travelling by hired coach up the hill until the streets became too narrow and perilously rutted for the high, thin wheels of the carriage to navigate. The man, Kingfisher, paid the driver with carefully counted-out coins--silver, Quint thought, impressed--and then led the way down a winding side street.

  At ground level, a thickening coal-dust dirty fog swirled about their boots as they walked along the cobbled streets. High overhead, Quint saw the gleaming metal skin of a TransAtlantica Flights intercontinental dirigible reflecting silver-blue moonlight as it made its stately way westward through the night skies. Toward America, on the other side of the vast ocean, Quint sighed wistfully. He wondered for a brief moment about the theatrical possibilities in a city like New York, where the airship would dock in a mere few days. Perhaps that was what he should do. Pack up and head for the New World!