Free-Wrench Page 3

Chapter 2

  That evening, as the sun was setting, Nita arrived at the steamworks for her shift. The events of the morning were still heavy on her mind, but she tried to push them aside and focus on the task at hand. The day shift had removed the broken section of pipe and the jammed valve, but daylight had run out before the replacement could be installed, leaving it for Nita and her partner to do. Tonight that partner happened to be Drew.

  “Blast it,” he muttered to himself. “I must have left my five-sixteenths in the locker. Do you have yours?”

  Nita slipped a wrench from her tool sash. “You really ought to take better care of your tools.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Give me a break; I’ve got other things on my mind today.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Your picture device. You know, trading with the outsiders is strictly enforced and very limited. I don’t think we’ve had a legitimate shipment in three years. How exactly do you plan to get away with using this device if you manage to buy one?”

  “I’ll just say I found it in a curio shop from the old days before we closed the borders. For all anyone knows, the cam-er-a is an ancient invention out there. Heaven knows they come up with some remarkable gadgets. And fine spirits, too. We make better wine, but the whiskey from out there? Hits you like a hammer.”

  Nita raised the new valve into place and steadied it while Drew began to tighten the bolts.

  “Do they have anything besides pointless toys and things to feed your vices?”

  “Possibly. Once they pulled out the liquor I stopped paying attention to anything else.”

  Nita narrowed her eyes.

  “Relax, Nita. I kid. They have all sorts of things. They make excellent optics. My best telescope came from them. They’re always eager to show off their firearms as well, but even I’m not foolish enough to be caught with one of those. There are rare delicacies, exotic fabrics and pelts, tinctures, ointments…”

  “They sell medicines?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call them medicines. One was to regrow hair. Another was to, er, restore vigor.”

  “Oh. Well, do they work?”

  “What are you implying?” he asked, nervously running his fingers through his hair and checking his reflection in the fresh pipe section.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “If you’re so interested, why don’t you come along? We’ll take my brother’s boat up to Moor Spires. They’re due to dock there in a few hours. They’ll be leaving just before morning, so hopefully this replacement doesn’t take all night, and we can skip out a bit early.”

  “Well… no. I didn’t bring any money.”

  “No need. They don’t have any use for our currency. Why would they? Fortunately for us, it is just as difficult for them to get Calderan goods as it is for us to get theirs. Sea salt, jewelry, anything we make is worth more than gold to them. If you really want to get in their good graces, bring them something made of trith.”

  “Trith? The stuff they make the coils from?”

  He nodded. “They can’t make it out there. They’ll trade just about anything to get some.”

  Another gift from the volcano, trith was first created centuries before by some of the very first settlers on the islands. An alloy made of half a dozen metals and a special mineral found only in the volcanic stone of the mountains, it had properties that no other metal could match. Paper-thin ribbons of the stuff could be made into coil springs that could store ten times the energy of a steel one, seemingly without fatigue. Thin bars of the stuff were stronger than several inches of iron, and once forged not even the heart of Tellahn’s volcano could manage to do much more than soften it. It didn’t rust or even tarnish. It was little surprise that its creators named it trith, which, in the old tongue, meant perfection. The formula for creating it existed as a closely guarded secret, and making it proved quite expensive, but it was nonetheless common in Caldera thanks to the fact that nearly all that had ever been made was still in use.

  Perhaps seeing her will weakening, Drew pressed on. “Come on, if nothing else you’ll get a chance to meet someone from outside of Caldera. Not many who can say they’ve done that.”

  She turned the offer over in her head. It would be a lie to say she’d never been curious about things beyond the Calderan borders. One of the few regrets she had about working in the steamworks was the simple fact that her skills would be of use in few places on the isles, and thus there would never likely be anything new or exciting to look forward to in her career. A small but vocal part of her yearned for novelty, to see new sights and experience new things. If nothing else, these black-market folks promised plenty to see.

  “All right. I’ll join you this time. But neither of us are going anywhere if we don’t get this valve in.”

  Few better ways exist to ensure problems will arise in a given task than by making plans for afterward. Halfway through completing the installation they discovered that one of the mounting holes hadn’t been machined properly. Once it had been removed, corrected, and fitted again, the supply crew managed to send along the wrong size nuts and bolts. The horizon was already starting to get rosy when they finally finished up the project and were given permission to leave.

  “Ugh, I feel disgusting,” she said, hurrying out of the last roughly hewn tunnel and into the locker room.

  “Well, you’ll have to feel disgusting a bit longer if you want to make it to the market on time. We’ve got to leave now, no time to shower,” Drew warned. He checked the clock and quickly emptied his locker into a bag.

  “I suppose I can bring my clothes and get changed when I go home. We’ll be done before the sun is up; there shouldn’t be too many people to offend with my ripeness.”

  “And just think of the wonders you’ll be bringing with you! Which reminds me. Don’t forget to bring something to trade.”

  She nodded and hastily grabbed a few bags of salt and a brooch she’d left in her locker months ago. After a moment of thought, she grabbed a large coil box and two smaller ones. The prospective payments were loaded into a bag and thrown over her shoulder. With that they made their way quickly to the pier a few streets away, where Drew’s brother Linus waited in the early morning fog.

  The boat was anything but impressive, a simple, flat skiff. It had two large paddlewheels on the side for propelling and steering, and a sputtering boiler to power them occupied the rear. Being a Calderan vessel, however, it was painted with bright, cheery colors in an intricate scheme and had a figurehead carved with skill to resemble a barracuda. The side proudly proclaimed it to be The Triumph.

  “Any later and I’d have left without you,” Linus said, flipping open a pocket watch and leaning close to the yellow flame of the boat’s oil lamp.

  “You’d have wasted your time then, because you don’t know today’s password. Now let’s get on with it before we miss them.”

  Linus untied the boat, and the trio made their way along the shore to the western side of Tellahn. Their destination was a jagged cluster of outcroppings a bit more than a mile off shore. They were far too small and too steep to be considered islands, standing out of the water like menhirs erected by a particularly haphazard ancient civilization. In the days before Caldera had isolated itself, the cluster served as a neutral ground where authorities could make sure that nothing too dangerous was brought to the islands. Now it was a largely forgotten feature of the shore that just so happened to be perfect for mooring an airship near enough to the surface to avoid drawing too much attention.

  The fog turned anything more than a hundred yards out into a shadowy gray form, so it wasn’t until they were nearly upon Moor Spires that they saw the airship emerge from the haze. It was lashed to the three tallest stones, and Nita’s eyes opened wide at each new detail as it was revealed. Until now, an airship had only ever been a dot in the sky drifting slowly along as it gave her homeland a wide berth. Seeing one up close fascinated her, though even to her untrained eye it was clear that this ship was not what one might call a f
ine specimen. A bulging, barely intact gas sack comprised the bulk of the vehicle. It had at one point been red, but time and misuse had turned it into a quilt of differently colored patches and grafts. The sack was enormous, perhaps seventy-five feet long and bulging to thirty feet in diameter at its thickest. It was rounded at the front and pointed at the back where a trio of fins stuck off the top and sides, giving it a stretched-out teardrop shape. The thickest part of the sack was wrapped in a wide metal lattice, which served as the mounting point for five barrel-sized nacelles, evenly spaced. Each nacelle was filled with a blossom of short overlapping blades and had a smooth metal cowling.

  The hull of the ship dangled below the sack, stretching to forty feet in length and trailing back from the front end of the sack, following a slightly narrower profile. Like the sack, it had signs of obvious patching, strips of blond, unstained wood standing out against the rich brown of the original planks. The overall structure of the ship put one in mind of a yacht-sized pirate ship that had been hauled out of the sea. It had a flat deck on top, separated into a main deck and an elevated tier toward the front to better follow the lower curve of the sack. Below the railing at the edge of the deck was a row of glass and brass portholes running the length of the ship, and below those were a second and third row. Jutting to the left and right from the front of the ship was a pair of cannon clusters, three each, with a single cluster sticking out of the back. Where it departed from the pirate ship motif was the piping, which jutted out of and into the hull with little rhyme or reason, and here and there escaping steam hissed and spat. Black smoke huffed out the back of the ship from three soot-covered metal chimneys. Thick black rubber hoses ran up a wooden runner from the deck to the central band of the sack, leading one by one to the nacelles.

  Directly below the ship, a small dinghy hung attached to it by a pair of slackened chains. In the dinghy was a mound of sacks and chests and a young man, who, in the process of relieving himself off the opposite side, had his back to the approaching skiff. The man whistled to himself and, based on the trajectory, was attempting to amuse himself by creating as high an arc as possible. Linus gave the steam whistle a quick pull, startling the young man into what was nearly a messy conclusion to his little interlude.

  “Well, that wasn’t a very neighborly thing to do to a fella!” called out the young man once he’d managed to finish up and make himself decent again.

  “Just wanted to give you a little warning. There’s a lady on board today,” Linus said.

  “Is there? Well, ain’t my face red! How do you do, ma’am! I hope you don’t mind if I wait until you all are a mite closer before I introduce myself proper, just so’s I don’t have to yell quite so much.”

  There was an odd twang to the man’s voice, but an earnest quality to his words. He also had a peculiar manner of dressing, at least from Nita’s point of view. In Caldera, unless one’s occupation dictated otherwise, a certain formality applied to even the most basic outfits. Clothes were tailored, carefully selected, and properly displayed, but no sign of similar care stood out in this man’s ensemble. His pants were of a black canvas, faded to gray at the knees. He wore a long brown coat, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing a tan shirt with long sleeves that were similarly rolled. The coat was open, and beneath it was a black vest and a loose-fitting belt weighted heavily down on one side. Now and again a gust of wind pushed the coat open enough to reveal a pistol. The man himself was rail thin, with sandy-blond hair cropped short and a face with a few days of stubble. He had a friendly but incomplete smile and more than a few scars on both his hands and face. Compared to the dark skin of most native Calderans, his skin was very fair, though the sun had baked it a bit brown.

  The Triumph pulled close to his little dinghy and threw across ropes to tether them together.

  “I apologize for what you seen me do, ma’am. Sun’s nearly up and all, which is our cue to skedaddle most days, so I didn’t see no harm in heeding to nature’s call. Figures you all would show up and make a fool out of ol’ Ichabod. That’d be me, by the way, ma’am. Ichabod Cooper. Pleased as punch to meet you.” He held tight to the dangling chain and leaned out over the water, extending a hand for a shake.

  Nita obliged him. “Amanita Graus.”

  “Pleasure, Miss Graus. Now, before we get to business, I got to get this out of the way.” He reached into a pocket inside his coat and pulled a rough sheet of paper out, staring at what was written upon it as though it was a particularly challenging puzzle to unravel. When he spoke, it was with the slow and unnatural diction of someone who was unaccustomed to reading in general, and completely unused to doing so aloud. “Hel-lo. Dear. Sir. … Do. You. Have. The. Time.”

  “The time is bright and early,” Drew recited.

  Ichabod furrowed his brow, then turned his face upward and bellowed. “That right, Cap’n?”

  “Just get on with it,” rumbled a reply from somewhere inside the ship.

  “Well, all right. So, what are we after today?” Cooper asked. He rubbed his hands together and flipped open some of the chests. “Gunner said you were interested in the girlie pictures last time.” He pulled out another portfolio. “We’ve got some more of those.”

  Drew cleared his throat in embarrassment. “I was interested in the fashion.”

  “Oh.” Cooper flipped through the portfolio. “Then you probably won’t like these. No fashion as such.”

  “Oh, uh, not so quickly,” Drew said as Cooper began to tuck the portfolio away again. “There’s an inherent artistic beauty to the female form. I’ll trade you a quarter bag of Calderan sea salt for it.”

  “Sold. Anything else I can do you for today?”

  “Last month I’d asked about that device for making these pho-to-graphs.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Gunner said something about that. You’re in luck. It took some doing, but we managed to get our hands on one for you.” He unearthed a leather-wrapped box with an odd, pleated sleeve emerging from the front. The front of the sleeve was affixed to a lens and mounted to a runner. Knobs and buttons littered the top of the box. “As I understand it, this here box, along with some fancy paper and some bottles of fancy chemicals, are all you need to make them pictures, so long as you follow the instructions. You get the box and enough paper and chemicals for a hundred pictures or so. What’s your offer?”

  “I’ll give you a half bag of salt.”

  “If we’re talking salt, I figure three bags is more in line with the cap’n’s expectations.”

  “I’ll go as high as a full bag.”

  “Then you’ll be getting your picture box from someone else.”

  “Fine, a bag and a half.”

  Cooper tipped his head from side to side, then quietly said, “I’m not so good with figurin’. How’s that compare to three?”

  “Favorably,” Drew said.

  “It’s half as much,” Nita clarified.

  “Eh, half’ll do. It’s a pain lugging it up and down. Anything else?”

  “Just a bottle of whiskey. Ten year.”

  “The man’s got some fine taste. I keep a bottle of this myself, for toothaches and such like.” He fished out a stout bottle of thick brown glass. “Let’s see. That was a bag and a half for the picture box and all that, plus a quarter bag for the girly pictures. What’s say we just call the whole lot of it two bags, so’s I don’t have to go pouring things out?”

  “Suits me,” Drew said, hefting the two bags across and receiving his goods in exchange.

  “Now, for the lady. What’ll it be, ma’am?”

  “Do you carry medicines?” Nita asked.

  “Oh, we got all sorts of treatments that’ll cure your many ills. This here liniment, for instance, is guaranteed to take care of any muscle aches you might have.” Cooper revealed a familiar brown bottle.

  “That just looks like more whiskey.”

  “It’s got a million uses, ma’am. Treats just about anything that might ail you, particularly if you suff
er from what Cap’n calls an ‘excess of sobriety,’ which I’m sorry to say he’s been having quite a bout with of late.”

  “I was hoping you might have a treatment for a specific disease. Something called Gannt’s Disease.”

  “We mostly carry sundry and recreational-type things. Proper drugs are a bit of a chore to get.”

  “Well, do you at least know if such a treatment exists?”

  “I don’t rightly know. I’ll check.” He looked up and bellowed, “Cap’n! You ever heard of something called… what was it, ma’am?”

  “Gannt’s Disease,” she replied, loudly enough for the unseen captain to hear.

  “Well now, a question of a medical nature would more properly be addressed to our resident medical practitioner, wouldn’t it?” growled the muffled voice.

  “Good thinking, Cap’n. Butch! You ever heard of—?”

  Before he could finish, a torrent of words in an unrecognizable dialect poured out of a different part of the ship. Cooper nodded thoughtfully.

  “Gives you shaky fingers? Makes you keel over after about twenty years or so?” he asked.

  Nita nodded, trying to shrug off the casual way in which her mother’s plight was described.

  “Sounds like it!” Cooper said. More unrecognizable yelling followed. “Seems they don’t call it that in our parts. Them fuggers got that one worked out, though. Not the sort of thing they’d usually share with the likes of us, though.”

  “Fuggers? Wait, are you telling me there is a cure?”

  “Butch seems to think so, but like I said, we don’t carry it. It’d be a fair bit of trouble to lay our hands on some.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll pay any price.”

  “For a special order like that, it’d be a pretty big price, ma’am.”

  “I am Amanita Graus, one of the oldest daughters of the Graus clan. We are among the most wealthy and influential families in all of Caldera. I can meet any price.”

  Cooper looked her up and down and gave the air a sniff. “I don’t pretend to know how rich folk from your parts usually look or smell, but I gotta say, you ain’t what comes to mind. Not that it matters, of course. Round these parts, cachet don’t mean too much. You’re only as rich as what you brung with you. So how much you got?”

  “I’ve got three bags of salt.”

  “A special order like that? Three bags is a good start, but it won’t get you all the way there. What else you got?”

  She rummaged through her bag and revealed the brooch. It was polished silver, engraved with complex filigree, and set with amethyst and amber. By Calderan standards it was quaint and simple. Judging from how wide Cooper’s eyes had grown, he had a higher opinion of it.

  “Cap’n! She’s got a bit of jewelry here that I think’ll pay for… well, I think it’s… remember back when we had to replace some turbines and you had to sell that ring of yours? It’s about like that.”

  “That’ll do,” the captain hollered back.

  “Right, ma’am. We’ll take the salt and the jewelry and head on out to see if we can’t find that medicine of yours. We’ll be back just about this time next month. The pass phrase is—”

  “Oh no. I’m not giving you this payment just to send you off with the hopes of getting what I paid for. I want some sort of guarantee.”

  “There ain’t no guarantee to be had, ma’am. The fuggers ain’t too keen on parting with stuff like that. We’ll have to meet with our supplier. There’ll be discussions, haggling and such. Might be we’ll be back again next month with empty hands. Of course, we’ll give you your payment back, minus some expenses, but—”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “Ma’am, you can ask your friend. We ain’t gonna just run off with your money. We’re professional.”

  “It is non-negotiable.”

  “We ain’t no passenger liner, ma’am.”

  “I’ll pay extra, but this is very important to me, and if there are negotiations to be done, I want to be present to see that everything in your power is being done to attain the treatment.”

  “I understand, ma’am, but there’s more to it than that,” he said, vague frustration behind the words, as though he was running through a tiresome and all-too-frequent speech. “Smuggling a few odds and ends back and forth is one thing. Doing the same with people on board looks an awful lot worse to the people who might catch us. You’ll be with us for a month. If people get the idea we took you without your permission, that’s kidnapping or trafficking or some such. Not to mention you might die, which your folks might call war. That’d cost us pretty dear. Ain’t worth the risk.”

  “If it will cost you more, then I’ll pay more. I’ve got this.”

  She revealed one of the smaller coil boxes. Upon seeing it, Drew’s eyes shot open and he snatched the box from her hand.

  “Are you crazy?” he said.

  “What? You said they liked trith.”

  “Did you say trith?” Cooper said, interest piqued.

  “I said a bit of trith. A few washers or something. Not a whole coil box.”

  “How much you got there, ma’am?”

  She snatched it back from Drew and slipped a screwdriver from her tool sash. A few deft twists loosened the face plate, which she twisted aside to reveal the purple-black spiral within. She handed the box across to Cooper. He took it, then fished in his pocket until he found a coin. Clutching the box tight in his hand, he scratched the coin against the coil, then held it up to find a neat little notch had been carved out of the coin without so much as a scratch on the coil.

  “Uh, Cap’n!” he said, his voice a bit shaky. “This young lady here wants to ride along while we look for her medicine for her.”

  “Well, then you explain our policy regarding passengers.”

  “I did. She’s willing to pay with trith. Got a whole box here. Feels like about half a pound.”

  “And there’s more where that came from,” Nita said, loudly enough to be overheard.

  The waves lapped against the boats as all waited for an answer.

  “Did you tell her the whole passenger policy?”

  “Oh, right. Forgot that other bit.” He turned to Nita. “You reckon you’ll be able to pitch in and all that?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That ain’t the question, ma’am. We all do our best. The question is, do you reckon your best will be good enough to do the job? And to pay the consequences if you don’t measure up?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  He looked her up and down. “She looks like she might be able to lend a decent hand along the way, and she says she’s willing. What do you say, Cap’n? … Cap’n?”

  After a short pause, the splash of a rope ladder unfurling into the water between the boats came as the captain’s answer.

  “Well, all right then.” He handed back the coil box and held out a hand to help her over. “Welcome aboard the Wind Breaker, ma’am.”

  “Nita, you can’t do this,” said Drew.

  “If it means giving mother her life back, or at least her life’s calling for even a few years, then I must.”

  Cooper gave two quick tugs to the chain. “Get ready to haul the captain’s gig once we’re up! We’re running late as it is! Watch yourself, ma’am. After you.”

  Nita tested the strength of the ladder, then slipped the coil box into a pouch on her belt, strapped her bag to her back, and began to climb.

  “You’ve got the passwords for next month, right, Drew?” Cooper said.

  “Yeah, I do. Nita, think about this for a moment. It will be dangerous out there! You’re breaking the law! We’re not supposed to leave the borders of Caldera without permits! What’ll I tell the foreman? What’ll I tell your mother?”

  “Tell them I went on a trip. I haven’t taken any leave in months,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be fine, Drew. How bad could it be?”