New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam by Neal F. Litherland

Author:Neal F. Litherland
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: James Ward Kirk Publishing
Published: 2015-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

The fires below filled the underground with smokes of every taste and texture. The furnaces hissed and belched with the scent of seared gas, while rows of tallow lanterns lit the stone walls and walks like the pathways of some fairy city beneath a mountain. Candles flickered near sleeping mats, and day lamps burned bright as noon while the scrims stripped the old canvases and turned them into new vistas. In the lowest pit the flash-pots mixed their powders and punts, conjuring red and blue lightning that splashed twisted shadows against the walls like nightmares in magnesium. Far and away from the other stage hands and their crafts, lined up on the parade ground like mechanized gladiators in a clockwork ludus, the company patiently awaited Fiona's attentions.

They were all shapes and sizes, but most of the old tin soldiers had seen far better days. The sagging steel-toes, with their battering ram shoulders and inexorable gaits, had marched back and forth in the background, wearing the jerkins of reavers or the woolens of townsmen for years. Delicate white gloves designed for leaning against set pieces or out of windows had to be perched like tarnished egrets along invisible parapets in the shadows to hide their arthritic joints. Posers stood stiff and straight, statues whose engines had worn down, or whose movables had been stripped for parts, but whose death didn't set them free from servitude. Facing the company, seated on a skeletal throne, sat the lead.

He was a handsome machine, brass and crass with his sculpted torso and his rakishly tilted head. The center piece of any Theatre De Mechanike show, he was due the best attention. He lounged like a bandit king, one leg stretched out on a ratchet jack like a stolen ottoman, one arm dangling over the throne's support. He was, in short, just as she'd left him.

Something clattered in the shadows of the Archives, the sound of steel on stone like the snapping of a twig in the iron jungle. Fiona picked up a crescent spinner and tapped it against her shoulder. She stepped between the trunks of the cast and walked into the dark canyon of towering shelves that held all of the carefully punched play drums. She found two shadows curled at the base of “Gretchen's Lady Dear,” a perennial favorite whose drums stood like copper moss cradled by sagging mahogany. They clutched at each other, silhouettes in slow motion. Fiona brought the spinner down on a brass case, and the flat, hard crack of steel on the shell was like a shot in the close confines.

“Jinx!” Olivia hissed, leaping up like a scalded cat. Albert scrambled backward, crab walking until he banged his head against another casing hard enough to pop the snap lock.

“Shaft!” Albert grunted, teeth clenching. He drew breath like a leaky bellows and touched his head. Fiona folded her arms over her chest and looked at her apprentices. They looked back, smiling sheepishly. “We weren't-”

“This will be good,” Fiona interrupted Albert. “You're a rigger for a reason Albert, and it's because you can't lie worth a tin trench.

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