Steamborn
Authors: Eric R. Asher
THE STEAMBORN SERIES, BOOK ONE
by
ERIC R. ASHER
Books by Eric R. Asher
The Steamborn Series
Steamborn
Steamforged (forthcoming)
Steamsworn (forthcoming)
Vesik, The Series
(Recommended for ages 17+)
Days Gone Bad
Wolves and the River of Stone
Winter's Demon
This Broken World
Destroyer Rising (forthcoming)
Copyright © 2015 by Eric R. Asher
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Produced by ReAnimus Press
Edited by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae
Cover typography by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae
Cover artwork by Enggar Adirasa
~~~
The forgotten will never be.
~~~
STEAMBORN
Eric R. Asher
Jacob ran. He heard the shouts of the market guards as they chased him through the muddy cobblestone streets of Ancora. Their armor gave away their position as the metal plates clanged together and their boots fell heavy on the stones.
“There!” a guard said.
Jacob dove under a peddler’s table, scattering rugs and crates as the woman hissed
at him
to run faster. Jacob grinned when he realized the peddler was rooting for
him
and not the guards. The armored guards would never be able to dip under the thick stone tables that rested across the ancient troughs. They’d have to go around, or over, and Jacob knew their armor was too heavy for that.
“Get back here, you Lowland maggot!”
Jacob glanced
back
. The enraged armored forms were momentarily frozen in front of the brightly colored tents and tables before Jacob vanished down an alley. They could still catch him on the next street if he
wasn’t
careful, or if he wasn’t fast enough.
Something sizzled in a large metal pot near the last stall he
sprinted past
, and for a moment, Jacob wished it were food in his pocket instead of the loot he’d been lucky to take. He slid around the corner of an old brick house with a tiled
roof
and slipped into a narrow alley most people
never would
have noticed. The Highborn guards, used to the wide streets behind the city wall, didn’t have a chance of tracking Jacob through the maze of dim back alleys.
He eased farther into the shadowed space as the shouts and curses of the guards grew louder and then faded as they passed him by.
He caught a glimpse of the polished silver armor as two of the men rushed onward. None of them glanced at the small alley. Jacob smiled and felt his pockets. Still there, his fingers met the reassuring bumps of his prize. He forgot the smell of food as he imagined finishing the pistons he’d built with Charles for the new boiler. With a good
cushion,
they could run for
hours,
or more. They’d just have to—
“Jacob Arthur Anders,” a voice said from behind him, deeper in the alley.
Jacob spun, knocking his elbow on an uneven brick in the wall and cursing as he stumbled back a step. “Alice! What are you doing here?”
Alice leaned forward, her gray wool dress barely clearing the wet ground. Her red hair hung in curls, brushing her shoulder as she looked down at Jacob’s hand and frowned. She raised her eyes to meet his, and he could still tell they were blue, even in the dim light of the alley. “What did you steal now?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have your hand over your pocket.” The amount of accusation in her voice startled him. Alice pointed at his hand and said, “You only do that when you’re hiding something.”
“None of your business,” he said, squaring his shoulders and standing up as straight as he could. It left him a fraction of an inch taller than Alice.
“Oh, I think it
is
my business,” she said. “Festival is coming up, and we’re supposed to dance. You’re my partner.”
Jacob rolled his eyes.
“Stop that. You’re my partner, and if you get caught, they won’t let you dance and I’ll be stuck alone.”
“It’s just a stupid dance.”
Alice snapped.
“Just
a
stupid
dance?” She glared at Jacob. “Once per year we have Festival to celebrate the end of the Deadlands War, that’s it. Festival is the biggest fair of the year, and
this
is the only year we get to dance, Jacob, the year we turn sixteen. I’m not missing this because you can’t keep your priorities straight.” Alice wrinkled her nose—Jacob thought she was rather cute when her nostrils flared—before she turned around and stomped off. At the end of the alley, her foot came down in a mud puddle, sending a small arc of filth up onto her gray dress. She paused and stared at her mud-caked boots, shot a look at Jacob that he thought might literally cut him and then disappeared around the corner.
Jacob followed Alice to the end of the alley. She continued on, vanishing down another narrow street before he carefully studied the sparse crowd, making sure none of the guards were around. The afternoon sun cut a clear path past the few clouds in the western sky, a fact he hadn’t much noticed while he’d had his mind on his thievery. The Highlands stood to the north. A fine layer of clouds obscured the highest towers, but he could still make out the city walls.
He hadn’t been to the city since he was a young child, and in his own eyes, that was many years past. Some part of him wanted to see the Highborn men and women, to see how other children lived when they didn’t have to fear what might come over the walls.
Jacob casually stepped out of the alley and merged into a slow-moving group of townspeople. They were all dressed in muted grays and browns, with an occasional burst of color from something purchased at the market, as they continued downhill.
He followed the crowd as they moved to the south. A few carried fresh, steaming bits of chicken and some dried beef from the Highlands. Jacob hadn’t tasted beef since the last Festival, and he eyed another boy’s snack with jealousy.
A shout from across the street startled Jacob. His eyes landed on one of the guards, and he was relieved to find the man occupied with a fight between two older teenagers. Jacob drifted over to the other side of the group, just to be safe. He slipped down an old winding street as soon as they were clear of the guards.
It was quiet there. Most of the retired folk lived in the higher parts of the Lowlands. A few people waved and smiled at Jacob as he walked by. Most of them knew he was a pickpocket, but they didn’t mind so long as it wasn’t their own pocket being picked.
The street came to an abrupt end at the edge of a cliffside. Jacob leaned on the fence and looked down. The lift was all the way at the bottom. He frowned and looked at the cable. Even with the gears that Charles, the old tinker, had installed, it would take forever to get it back to the top.
Jacob unlatched the gate, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to do that unless the lift was topside. He pulled a pair of gloves from his back pocket and slipped them on. After making sure his loot was secured, he reached out for the nearest pole supporting the lift.
“Jacob! Don’t you dare!”
He turned his gaze over his shoulder and saw his schoolteacher, Miss Penny, scowling at him from her parents’ yard.
“Bye, Miss Penny!”
“Jacob, you get back here right—”
He didn’t hear anything else she said. The wind screamed past his ears and pulled on his jacket as he wrapped himself around the pole and dropped. The cliffside was a blur beside him, but the sweeping mountain range across the canyon was clearly in focus. Jacob grinned as he tightened his legs and hands around the pole and began slowing himself down.
He could see details in the lift now. The huge flywheel on top of it sat idle beside the grate on the lift’s roof. Once he was slow enough and close enough, Jacob let go. His boots slammed into the top of the lift, causing the grate to clatter in its frame. No one waited at the bottom when he jumped to the ground, so he didn’t have to worry about explaining himself. That made him quite happy as he hurried down the hill and into the deepest parts of the Lowlands.
The homes weren’t as nice here, not even as nice as the north side of the Lowlands, but it would always be home to Jacob. The roofs didn’t match, showing an array of tile and slate where they’d been repaired. A few homes couldn’t afford even that, and instead they layered thatch for insulation and to stop leaks.
Jacob slowed as he started up out of the poorest part of town. The outer wall was partially collapsed here, and Parliament’s men were still cleaning up the last of the invaders from the latest breach. They’d have a temporary wall built by the end of the night, but it could be a while before the brickwork was restored. The sky had darkened since Jacob started his trek, and a few sparse raindrops littered the street around him. He watched a group of men in dark blue uniforms push the great mottled brown carcass of a Walker—it was up to Jacob’s waist when he stood beside it—back through the hole in the wall.
The monster had large jaws and what seemed to Jacob to be a hundred orange legs. A portion of the thing slid down the mountainside before the men moved on to the next segment, sawing through it and pushing it outside the wall in turn. It had only been a day, but most of the invaders had already been harvested or at least pushed back outside.
The thin bricks and wood of the wall here was nothing like the mighty stone fortress around the Highlands. The invaders grew bolder every year, reaching higher and breaching the Lowlands as often as they could.
Something had burrowed through the wall here, exposing the people to this Walker and two other invaders. They’d been fortunate to have a Spider Knight on patrol when it happened. No one had been hurt this time, but they weren’t always so lucky. A giant beetle had managed to smash through the home nearest the wall, but the family had been at a neighbor’s house.
Miss Penny used to tell stories about a time when the invaders almost never came through the walls looking for food. The mountains kept the Lowlands safe, the elevation too great for the creatures to thrive in the thin air. When the invaders grew larger and climbed higher, Parliament raised the walls around the Lowlands. The thick stone walls rose up around the Highlands soon after, leaving the Lowlands wall to slowly decay into disrepair.
Jacob turned back to the road and shivered. He didn’t want to look at the monsters outside the wall. He daydreamed about leaving and fighting off the invaders, keeping his people safe. Alice had the smarter idea, he knew. She planned to use her studies to get a job in the Highlands behind the city wall, where she’d be safe from the constant threats of the Lowlands. When Jacob saw the havoc the creatures could wreak, sometimes he’d rather pretend they weren’t there. Jacob ground his teeth and increased his pace, happy to get away from the carnage. The excitement to show Charles what he’d stolen returned as he put more distance between himself and the breach.