Authors: Kin Law
“Simple, really. Birds of a feather flock together. Most of her conquests were never the same
after- even I was afraid what she might do behind the curtains of the boudoir. A lot of them came out in the mornings like they would evaporate at the touch of sunlight. There was madness in their eyes, a frantic devotion. ‘Countess’ was just one of the names they whispered amongst themselves, but it was one that stuck.”
“Pirates will call ourselves what we like. Most of Queen Victoria’s nobles these days are little different, all title and few lands to seat,” Albion noted.
Rosa nodded and continued.
“It seemed Nessie Drake had perfected what her original onerous romancer once did to her, a seduction like a strain of disease spread from her touch, her lips, her smell.
It was only a short time before she commandeered her own ship, crewed by her devoted followers, and not long after she found out Ada Lovelace really did have a ship called the
Lovelorn-
commandeered and crewed two years after they had first met.”
“Ahhh….” Someone, probably Alex, had a belated epiphany.
“
La Maere
,” Albion said casually.
“Blast it Alby, yes, Nessie’s ship was
La Maere
. Alex I understand, but you’re usually sharp as a tack.”
“No,
La Maere
. She’s right there, right outside the porthole.”
In a flash, everybody was pressed to the
bulkhead, Rosa Marija stuck to the glass tightest of all.
“The thing’s a fortress!”
Clemens had expected little different. He himself flew one of the rarer types of airship, the pressed-helium
Huckleberry
, and had been chased by a selection of Cantonese junks, Spanish corsairs, and even seen a Balaenopteron up close off the coast of Africa. Besides, he had seen
La Maere
before.
Chiropteran-class were so named not because of any particular size differences, but because they were laid out like their bat namesakes- vast networks of thin ribbing, supported by flat gas envelopes between.
The upshot of the arrangement was lift compound could be pumped through the skeletal ribbing to raise or lower the ship quickly. The entire construction was capable of gliding through the sky even under no boiler power.
It made for stealthy, fast ships usually favored by the ilk of the skies- namely, pirates.
Chiropteran-class airships could only be called ‘strange,’ a moniker certainly scoffed at by the builders of
La Maere
as ‘mundane.’ Not so much one ship as a cluster of several, the thing sprawled across Romania like it had dwelt there for centuries, feeding on blood from the necks of supple milkmaids. Gothic points marked bridges and quarters, while a phalanx of black, towering decks bristled with weaponry. Most pirates could only afford to field a ship of patchwork and gaffer’s tape- Nessie Drake required a vessel
a la mode
.
“Basically,” Rosa Marija said. “I’m going down there. Is anyone with me?”
“Do we have a choice?” Albion said.
The landing party consisted of four: Albion, Rosa, Hargreaves, and for some reason Blair, as well. It seemed Albion ran a democratic ship; nob
ody who did not volunteer were asked as to why.
A few minutes later, the four were
slip-sliding down the mountains, using the same cable anchors they used to drop down on unsuspecting freighters. Their boots crunched through deadfalls and over salt rocks, while the ominous shadow of
La Maere
loomed
in the near distance. It wasn’t long before they stumbled onto a paved path, and then they were rounding the peak where
the
‘Berry
stayed hidden.
Almost immediately, they saw Nessie had not set down in a region of wilderness. The valley showed heavy, old tracks and soot from wheeled engines and steam tractors. The wilderness had simply grown over
the old activity.
I
n a moment, there rose around them the straight, planned grids of man’s residences in square pits on both sides of the road.
There were signs of older structures, in the worked-over ground, but these had long been dug out and built over. As they approached
La Maere
, these buildings rose in gray, deserted obelisks.
Rosa Marija began to yell, and this time nobody tried to stop her.
“According to the map,” Elric Blair said, inspecting Prissy Jack’s careful handwriting. The apprentice helmsman understandably preferred the run of the ship to trekking through wolf-infested mountains into certain danger.
“This is a small worker’s village for the Salina Praid, a salt mine prized since the Roman times. The majority of the village is below ground.”
“Let me guess… they found aeon stones,” Albion Clemens said, pointing towards an abandoned lorry lying to the side of the road, its wheels rusted, its tires rotted off. The lorry was specially equipped with the isolating cages of aeon working, to prevent the stones from floating off when exposed to steam equipment. Curiously, natural steam did little to aeon stones, but engines made them shoot off into the sky.
“Same old story,” Blair agreed. “Aeon stone dust means easy wealth, and so the place shifted entirely over to mining them. After the place was dry, it was no longer profitable to hire back the old salt workers or rework the equipment.”
“Blood suckers,” Hargreaves said coldly, easily critical of foreigners.
They continued forward, into the shadow of
La Maere
. Rosa’s profanity-strewn calls echoed off the street ahead, where industrial arclights had been strung in a barely visible glow. Nessie Drake had parked the ship on top of three buildings. Everything surrounding it was overgrown; from the sky, it would have been hard to see her. From below, the massive airship hovered like a monstrous bat.
“If it were me, I would have stationed snipers there… there… and there,” Hargreaves remarked.
“She knows we’re here. Maybe she doesn’t have enough crew to host us,” Albion said. He also began to yell, only for Captain Sam, instead.
“If the fare is lead-flavored, I would rather our host be a little tardy,” Blair agreed.
For a moment, it seemed as if Nessie Drake was not in residence. Albion expected a hiss of steam, maybe, or some fanciful piston action from a section of umber shadow directly above them. Perhaps a slew of the stalactites forming the keel of the ship would drop down to imposingly receive them. Instead, there came a gravelly voice somewhere to the left.
“The Countess will see you now,” it said, directing their attention to a tall man in a stovepipe hat. His suit was immaculate, but there was a subtle effect to the fabric, making it gray at the edges. Combined with the pinstripes and his sunken cheeks, the man looked like a walking corpse. He sidestepped between two buildings and vanished.
“Gothic wanker,” Hargreaves pronounced again, falling into step behind Rosa as the group followed the gaunt gentleman.
Inside the alley, there seemed no sign of their host, until their eyes adjusted to the gloom. Then, it was readily apparent there was a gaping manhole not two inches from Hargreaves’ boot.
“Of course! What else would it be?” The Inspector griped aloud once more. “Perhaps there is even a cemetery down there. How about a haunted cathedral, hmm? Sacrificial altars? An ossuary!”
Rosa followed the stovepipe man silently, now her objective of being noticed had been achieved. Blair took a moment while she climbed into the dank hole.
“What do you have against Goths?” Elric Blair asked, using news nomenclature.
The Goths were inclined towards the morbid styling of a bygone era, under a different Victoria.
In England, Blair’s prowling grounds, the better educated ones would stage elaborate recreations of the aspects they found most bone-chilling: lying six feet under in safety tombs, engaging in conversation with passers-by through a narrow copper breathing tube. Other, less devoted folks simply used the style as an excuse for hosting exclusive parties, complete with blood fountains and black drapes.
Halfway into the hole, Albion stopped to chime in.
“Didn’t you hear the story? Nessie’s a Gothic revivalist. You ought to have expected this.”
“But this… this is bollocks! How do you expect me to take someone seriously who dresses like a Gorey illustration?” Hargreaves protested. Albion looked at her quizzically. Then he climbed out of the hole.
“I am, at this moment, wearing a buccaneer coat, bandanna, yellowed linen shirt, and a damn cutlass. I would not look out of place climbing a mast and spitting onto the head of Edward Teach. Do you take me seriously?”
“Not a jot,” Hargreaves answered with a straight face.
“Fair enough. At least you’re consistent,” Clemens yielded. “Maybe you were bullied by fanged freshmen in secondary. Who knows?”
“If you must know…” Hargreaves started, and thought better of it. She put her heels onto the ladder and started to climb down. With her eyes level to the street, she stopped, and finished. “I was one in secondary.” Then she slid the rest of the way down, with a little ‘ow!’ as she hit the floor below.
“Ah,” Blair remarked, peering into the hole. “I must admit, the thought of the Inspector in black fishnets and corset is an attractive prospect.”
Albion w
as laughing too hard to answer.
Inside the manhole, the group reconvened to discover they were not in some disgusting sewer. Instead of a filthy river of slime, the passage they entered was of clean dirt, stretching absolutely straight as far as they cared to see. The tunnel had bee
n lined with flameless arclight only for a few lengths. Past it, the passage marched on into abysmal darkness.
“There,” Rosa said shortly, and continued her march down the passageway. Despite the amount of metal she carried, her footsteps made very little sound.
“Miss Marija seems to be unusually serious,” Blair remarked. “Nessie Drake must be very important to her.”
“You seem bloody chuffed,” Hargreaves said to Clemens, who had taken to snorting every time he looked at the Inspector.
“I keep seeing that blonde mop done up in black ribbons,” Albion answered, extracting a huff and a blush. “Blair, what Rosa didn’t say was how old they started. Nessie’s been her on-and-off partner since they were six. They grew up on the streets, city-hopping from place to place.”
“Orphans?”
“Not sure. In any case, Nessie Drake is the closest thing to family she’s got.”
Meanwhile, the group reached a turn in the tunnel, where the passage opened onto a vast chamber. The roof was sloped, like a vaulted church, and the walls had been cut perfectly straight.
A broken cross lay in a corner, just big enough to nail a man.
“This is too good. Nessie couldn’t have built all this herself,” Albion said, and then began to play with the acoustics in the massive chamber.
“You are a child,” Inspector Hargreaves huffed. Clemens simply hooted in reply. They were cut off by a high, piercing voice, quiet but perfectly audible in this space.
“No, of course we did not. The living quarters are nearly unchanged from the aeon miners’, except for my chamber, of course. The Szekler Hungarians built most of this starting in 1562, under special provision, and before that it was the Bulgars and Avars, who laid their tunnels on top of the original Roman excavation. Very likely the salt of Transylvania lay fallow the fields of Gaul…. Fitting, no? The
Lovelorn
was originally a French vessel.”
“Nessie!” Rosa Marija cried, turning.
Atop a sort of stone dais, Nessie Drake sat on a throne of ruin. Whether the Szekler had built it, or if it was some special apparatus for the processing of aeon stones, they could not guess. Rust and neglect had obscured its original purpose. The mass of timber beams and two-foot steel nails reared out of the ground and seemed to flower into the ceiling far above, stretching out its limbs like a nightmarish, blasphemous crucifix.
In the thick of it, a pile of furs had been laid on an arrangement of beams, where Nessie Drake sat, stiff backed, arms laid out straight on two rests. Her dress was suitably Gothic, in layers of matte and filigree black, picked out with infinitesimally small rubies and garnets.
Her face was deathly pale, her eyes and mouth extended into a skeletal grin with some sort of ashen makeup. Her hair was done up to match a halo of ribbed collar, worked in a finger-prickling pattern of lilies.