Cliffside

You have to be careful in the Steamworks.

It is a belly filled with brass and steam. Towering pipes twist and turn like yarn through brick walls and floors. Concrete walls and iron doors, bars like a prison. The heat, sweltering and pure, scouring your skin free. It is enough to drive you insane.

I thought I was insane, once.

That first day, when I had taken the King’s Shilling and become a City Engineer, I crawled through the hole in the ground down the slim ladder with rungs as thick as bottles. I thought I could feel the heartbeat of the City through the bricks as I descended, deeper and deeper into the pit. I kept my eyes shut, squeezing tightly lest I look down and fall.

Yellow. Burning yellow. With a sharp sliver of black dividing the topaz jewel, the cat’s eyes slowly blinked in the flickering firelight.

“Patience,” Rufus muttered, half to himself, half to the cat. “Almost there. Almost.”

It had become a mantra, a holy psalm that spurred Rufus’s actions ever onward. It kept him going, moving in the dim candlelight when his strength had all but left him. Almost there. Just a few more tests…

Duke Markus von Himmelman, son of Lady Margret De’Mechaump and Lord Phredrick von Himmelman, Baron of Lower East Spannerton, Duke of Topside, and a Welcome Lord in the court of Prince Reinheart himself, was furious. He stormed about his office like a madman, pulling his watch out of his vest pocket and clicking it open every few steps. When the clockwork timepiece provided nothing less than further frustration, he would stuff it back into his vest, turn sharply on his heel, and begin stomping in a different direction across the large carpet.

Loman John stared into the darkness. He could hear the steamer-ship — could always hear the steamer-ship — before its dim lights came into view. The fog was low in the evenings, and even the strongest lanterns could not pierce the mist for more than a kilometer at most; but the hissing grind of the engines were unmistakable, and it carried even in the Cliffside fog.

The layfolk called it fog, but Loman John knew more names. Every dockworker did. There were fogs that were light and pleasant, like butterflies kissing your skin. There was damp and heavy fog, the kind that made your socks wet. There were the mists that covered the air like smoke, and you couldn’t see three feet in front of your face. There were more besides, and each had their own name to the Dockworkers of Cliffside.

“Never!” Yolanda Allingdale hitched up her dress and began to run. Not the expected trot of a petulant child, or the flurry of lace that marked any good girl’s proper retreat to their room; but a bracing stride of a run that carried her out of the room and halfway up the mansion’s stairs before her mother could raise a single protest.

It was difficult to run like that in such thick and tightly fitted clothing, but Yolanda had practice. She ran everywhere she could, from the mansion to the orchard and from the orchard to the pond. She loved running, and not just because it was precisely the sort of thing the Governess disapproved of, but also because it was freeing, liberating. It felt natural, like she had been born to run from tree to tree, climbing and swinging in the branches.

Arthur Von Gusse sat quietly, sipping his tea.

It was some dreadful Asian blend — nowhere near as pleasant or aromatic as a solid Brittianian tea; what was the country coming too? The King was becoming far too multicultural, Arthur mused. When Queen Virginia was alive, the Empire always had the best, whether it was English or not. Of course, the best often was English, and if it wasn’t… well, a short war would soon see that it was. Now, all King Wilhelm seemed to care about was making friends, and by extension making everything as foreign as possible. The Passenger’s Crossing was one of the few places left in the whole of Cliffside that hadn’t completely succumbed to the advancing hordes.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that once a pirate has spent enough time at sea, the Horizon looks different everywhere on earth.

This is not how a sailor begins their career. When they first step onto the swaying ship, young and fresh-faced, they are first overwhelmed by the majesty of it all: a distant expanse of unending blue, swallowing up the past, future, and anything else that the sailor brings with them.