Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat (25 page)

Chapter
24

very special treatment

“Aw, let him be,” said a harsh, flat voice with a thick English accent. “He’s already croaked.”

It was minutes before the argument in Donell’s office. Deeply frightened and confused, Will lay on the storage room floor, unable to move - except to breathe. Even that was becoming more and more difficult.

At least the burning pain in his side was gone, but it’d been replaced by an all-body chill that terrified him. He had trouble thinking straight, and he couldn’t tell if air was going into his lungs. Was he dying?

Dim lamp light hit his eyes. He could just make out a dark, blurry hallway and Bram Rasmussen’s half-focused face. A hand touched his neck, but the sensation was extremely dull.

“Still has a pulse,” he heard Bram say. “I think he stopped breathing.”

“He’s worm-food,” the bodyguard muttered unpleasantly. “It’s dodgy business, gettin’ caught with a stiff. Lemme toss him in a firebox. Gotta be one handy. They’re all over this junk heap.”

“Shut up, Lockwood, and open his mouth.”

“I’m not touchin’ that corpse’s face, and you shouldn’t, either. If you catch what done him in, I’m as good as dead, too!”

“It’s not a disease, you thick ox. It’s
poison
. Now help me. Open his mouth.”

Will felt strong hands prying his mouth open.

“You’re going to have that sip of Nofty,” Bram muttered, taking a small bottle from a pocket and pouring it into Will’s mouth. “My own special brew. Bottoms up!”

At first Will tasted nothing, but soon it became warm and acrid, burning like strong alcohol. He began to spit it out.

“Shut it tight,” Bram ordered.

With the big man clamping his mouth, Will swallowed by reflex, and his throat seemed to catch on fire. Some of the medicine got into his lungs, making him cough and hack. The pain was terrible, but at least he could breathe again.

“Hurry,” Bram urged, finding a large sack and stuffing Will’s feet into it. “Let’s get him to Texel.”

“Too dangerous,” the bodyguard protested. “We should just skive off.”

“‘Skive?’”

“Do the pitter-patter, you know. Get out of here.”

“Are these real words, Lockwood, or do you make them up as you go?”

The big man sighed with frustration.

“Never mind,” Bram said. “You really don’t get it. He’s been poisoned. This is certainly one of our toxins, but I’m not sure which. We do lots of things with our concoctions, including protecting secrets.

“If I don’t bring him in so we can find out how this happened and what sort of trickery he was up to, I’m letting my family down. Do you want to be part of letting the Rasmussen family down?”

Lockwood required no further persuasion. He finished stuffing Will into the sack and began dragging.

***

Just east of New Amsterdam in a bog-strewn place called Texel Island, Staas Floombach walked sullenly through the dark hallways of a fortress-like complex. It lay outside the old city walls, where a small river called the Woedwassen flowed south into the Noyrhine or New Rhine River, the enormous watercourse that started in snowy mountains far to the northeast and ran past the city before emptying into De Groes Zee,
The Great Sea
.

Texel Island was a dense, waterlogged swamp, so people had avoided it. Over time a community of thieves and miscreants made a cluster of stilt houses and small shops on the island’s southern part. The undeveloped northern end had been easy for the Rasmussens to acquire. They’d found bedrock under the muck on which to construct a cluster of sturdy buildings centered on a tall tower, and it had served as their base in the heart of Steemjammer territory since the fall of Beverkenfort.

For several years Staas had dutifully monitored the aether detection machines there in a damp basement lab. After losing his helper, he’d been living in the lab, sleeping on a rickety cot and having most of his meals brought to him. If the machines sensed something and he wasn’t there to observe it, it could cost him his life. He was on edge anytime he left his lab - like to eat or when he’d been summoned, as had just happened.

Fear. The higher he’d risen in the Rasmussen Protectorate, the more of it he’d experienced, and he was bordering on terrified at the moment. He’d been ordered upstairs, which meant the top floor of the main tower. As the cage door of the steemlift clanged shut and it accelerated up, he felt like his stomach would somehow come out of his body and get left behind.

“Floombach?” said a hulking, bald man with sideburns at the top, urging him out. “Wait here.”

Staas almost tripped over something in a sack on the floor.

“What’s that?” he asked nervously.

“A stiff,” the big man answered gruffly in his thick English accent.

“A what?”

“A daisy-pusher. You know, worm-meat.”

“You mean a dead body?”

“Are you daft? Stay right there, and don’t touch nothin’.”

With a menacing look, the big man went through a door. Staas noticed the sack had slipped down to reveal the still face of a young man.

“Great Maker,” he mumbled to himself, shocked, “they’ve killed a boy!”

He tried to ignore the body, but it looked so undignified, frozen in the stiffness of death and just left there on the floor. It irritated him.

“Poor kint,” he muttered, kneeling to examine the handsome, youthful face more closely. “This is what we all have to look forward to, I guess.”

Staas reflected how a few months ago his helper, a quirky old man who hadn’t seemed quite sane, had suffered a massive heart attack and died.

“Harvest him, quickly,” Staas remembered the cruel Rasmussen doctor telling a medic, “before it rots.”

Not here, Staas had thought, please not here, and mercifully they’d carried the old man’s body elsewhere to saw open the skull and remove the precious brain. The corpse had been thrown in a firebox, he figured, or had they just dumped it in the river?

“No proper funeral,” Staas grumbled, only half aware he was speaking aloud, “and the poor fellow had given his long, miserable life to them! Had anyone told his family? Did he even have one?”

The boy’s dead face bothered him so much that years of pent up frustration began to erupt in his mind. “What did you do that was so horrible to deserve this? Break a stupid rule? Tell them off? Or was this done for someone’s sick pleasure? From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

Staas shuddered to think what would happen to him when he died. Most lower-ranking members of the Rasmussen Protectorate had no idea what was in store for them. They actually believed the stories that
Steemjammers
made Shadovecht. But Staas was in the Scientific Branch and knew better.

“The brain is harvested and put to use,” an eccentric Rasmussen Necrologist had explained to him years ago. “It becomes a kind of dead biological machine, like a Variable Engine based in carefully preserved tissue, only far more sophisticated. Your brain, mine, and the brain of every Protectorate member will live on, in a non-literal sense, serving the greater good for many years.”

Staas had voiced his fear that awareness might go on, that some dim level of consciousness might continue.

“You’ll be
dead
!” the scientist had scoffed. “The mind will be empty, void. Or, on the off chance the Great Maker isn’t just a fairy tale, if such pathetic creatures as human beings actually have souls,” he paused to cackle scornfully at the idea, “the spirit will have fluttered up to the ‘Great Workshop in the Sky.’ Embalmed brain tissue has no more feeling than a machine.”

Staas wanted to believe him. He understood that it made sense, what the Necrologist had told him, but somewhere in the back of his mind, the fear remained.

He only knew bits and pieces of how it was done. After sawing open the skull and harvesting the brain, it was sealed in a jar of horrid smelling fluid to keep it from rotting. He’d seen that part, but the Rasmussens kept the rest of the process secret.

He’d heard rumors that they connected the brain with wire-like, artificial nerves to a highly advanced, humanoid contraption. Using Necrology, the study of the mechanics of death, they somehow revived the dead brain to a state of un-life and conditioned it to obey orders.

That’s how a Shadovecht was born. They could condition it to guard, to attack, or to break into a certain house at night and kill.

No one could prove who’d ordered the murder. Even if the Shadovecht was stopped, and they rarely were, they left no evidence linking it to the Rasmussens. Best of all, they could blame it on the Steemjammers.

“You don’t even know,” he said softly to the body, “what’s coming next, do you? Your preserved brain will be rushed by airship to the Shadoverks, where it will be wired for use, but what if you’re not truly dead?

“What if somehow your mind is reawakened into a shadowy, warped form of existence, trapped in a Shadovecht? Do you feel loneliness? Agony? Do you watch, helpless and confused, as your new metal body thoughtlessly obeys commands and commits atrocities?

“I dearly wish I could save you from that fate, for your sake and mine. I really do.”

He shuddered. Hearing the steemlift arrive, he silenced himself and stepped away from the body.

“Staas!” a man barked as the door was flung open.

He nearly jumped out of his skin. Clyve Harrow, the harsh voice on the other end of a speaking tube and the Rasmussen in charge of this place, strode out.

Never stare at his nose, Staas recalled a friend’s advice. Rumor had it that Clyve sent those who offended him to the Shadoverks for
experimentation
.

Trying not to cower, he looked at the floor and muttered, “Sorry, sir.”

“Have you entirely lost your senses?” Clyve snarled. “What happens if there’s activity on the aether, and you’re not at your post?”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I was summoned here.”

“I gave no such order.”

“I did,” came a youthful voice from across the lobby.

Bram Rasmussen and his bodyguard, Lockwood, exited the stairwell and marched towards them. Recognizing the youth, Staas felt his legs weaken. What was going on?

“You’re Floombach?” Bram asked.

Staas feared his heart might leap out of his chest. The High Leech’s son was speaking to him!

“Yes, sir,” he said nervously. “Master, I mean.”

“Stay here,” Bram ordered. “Lockwood.”

The young Rasmussen nodded at the body, which the big man put back in the sack. It seemed that Clyve had been ignoring it and had no idea what it was.

“Clyve,” Bram said. “We need to speak.”

***

“That, Master Bram, is how you get obedience,” Clyve Harrow said moments later after they’d entered his spacious office and shut the door, proudly referring to his conversation with Staas Floombach. “Fear.”

What an idiot, Bram thought. He wished old Noys Spelonken, or
Nose Caverns
, as he and Zylph called the man behind his back, would just shut up. Clyve’s hideous face was not a Rasmussen trait, thank goodness. His father, Harold Harrow, was a wealthy New London banker, and if anything his nose was even more upturned and disgusting.

Bram recalled a letter his father, Zander, had written him several months earlier: “Clyve’s one of the lesser cousins, as you can tell by the puny forelock that he pathetically waxes in an attempt to make it more prominent. This is his insecurity.

“However, he makes up for it by being extremely cunning, cruel and persistent. There’s still a great deal of Steemjammer loyalty in New Amsterdam. It’s people like Clyve who are going to help us crush it.

“Put up with his presumptuousness and learn from him. When there’s no more Steemjammer threat, Clyve and those like him will find their true place. Until then, patience.”

Bram wondered grimly if “true place” meant floating in a jar.

“Fear,” Clyve continued, “keeps the weak and the spineless complacent and eager to fulfill every command. Fear is our friend.”

As a smile spread across Bram’s face, Clyve beamed, assuming his words were being appreciated, but he’d misread the young man. Bram knew that Clyve was being used.

“I hear they opened a world hole in the heart of Rasmussenfort the other day,” Bram said, changing the subject. “Is this true?”

“It is,” Clyve answered proudly. “Two Shadovecht went through, and only one verltgaat’s opened since. Perhaps they killed old Hendrelmus himself.”

Perhaps, Bram thought, someone will stuff a pair of enormous corks up your ugly nostrils, you creepy sleeb.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” the young man intoned with forced politeness. Time to get to the point, he thought, or the old fool would blabber on for hours: “I found something at the Museum.”