Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium (2 page)

~*~

Exhausted and exhilarated after a day spent making her peers look like fools, Abigail returned home to find two men of dubious character waiting for her in the smoking lounge.

Both were young and well dressed, but after that, all comparisons between the two failed. One was dark and calm, sitting in a comfortable arm-chair as he enjoyed a freshly lit pipe; the other was blond and fidgety, wearing down her expensive carpet with the soles of his expensive shoes. Abigail's eyes flashed with fury at these two men and their unannounced intrusion.

"I do not know who you two are," she told them, retrieving the fire poker from her hearth. "But as I remember telling the servants to allow no one in, I can only assume you have arrived through some means of mischief—"

"Mischief," the dark haired one said, laughing. "Yes, you could certainly make that claim, Miss Parsley."

At once, the other turned to her, glaring at the poker in her grip. "I still think this is a mistake, Nigel."

"Oh, quiet down. She’s exactly what we're looking for."

"Explain yourselves at once, or I will send someone to fetch the constable," Abigail said, pointing the poker at the blond.

"We apologize for our crude manner," Nigel replied, moving to stand and bow. "We gained entry by convincing your servants that this is a matter of the utmost importance. Do not think poorly of them; we are quite persuasive when we wish to be. I am Professor Arcanum, and this is my associate, Mr. Daffodil."

The iron poker wavered in her grip, its tip beginning to sink toward the carpet. "Arcanum? Daffodil?"

"Yes," Jeremiah said. "We’re very important people, you know."

"Yes, yes. I recognize your names," Abigail replied. "I know you, Nigel—the famous naturalist and mathematician. And you," she added, glaring at Jeremiah, "the equally infamous mad scientist and administrator of the Steamwork. I read that last paper of yours."

"Oh?" Jeremiah asked, the scowl melting into something cheerful and bright. "Did you?"

"Yes," she said. "Absolute rubbish. You had no clue what you were babbling about."

Jeremiah blanched.

Nigel laughed. "Oh yes," he said. "You are most certainly what we need."

"I’ve read your work as well," she told Nigel. "You, at least, seem to have some fundamental grasp over your field." She now held the iron poker out in front of her as if it were a sword, still watching the men warily. "Nevertheless, I fail to understand what matter requires you to intrude in my home at such a late hour without so much as sending a letter of introduction first."

"Secrecy, Miss Parsley." Nigel said, then tapped the bell of his pipe to spill the loose ash into a tray. "We require your assistance. Jeremiah and I are working on a remarkable project."

"A project?" Abigail’s eyes narrowed. "Oh yes, let me guess. You are working on some sort of ground-breaking research; some immensely important and grand experiment. But just one problem—you have yet to find some means to fund your wondrous project.”

"Well," Nigel said, "Funding is always a problem, yes—"

"And so you’ve read a little bit about me, found out that I’m a very rich and unmarried woman who is very keen about matters of mathematics and engineering?"

"Well, yes, something like that—"

"And so you think, ‘Oh, of course she’ll sponsor our wonderful experiment!’," Abigail finished. She swept the poker up and pointed to the exit. "Out."

"You’ve got it all wrong," Jeremiah began, but Nigel cut him off.

"Of course. We shall leave at once," he told her. "We apologize for bothering you with this trifling matter. Would you care to perhaps show us to the door?"

Abigail glared. "The faster you are out of my home, the better." She gestured for the gentlemen to follow; it was then that she noticed both were carrying umbrellas with peculiar stylized hilts. "Are you daft? There isn't a cloud in the sky."

"Isn't there?" Nigel asked, then shrugged.

This gave Abigail pause, but she was quick to brush it aside. She led them both to the exit, opening the door and stepping aside to let them leave. Before she could slam the door shut, both had turned to face her.

"Mr. Daffodil?" Nigel said. "Time, please."

Jeremiah removed a gold pocket watch from his coat, checking it. "Forty five seconds."

"Madame, if I may just mention, before we go—one of the reasons we came to you was because of a paper you wrote. ‘The Impossibility of Weather Prediction’, I believe."

Abigail’s hand rested against the doorknob. "Yes? What of it?"

"Even my compatriot acknowledged it as a brilliant summary of what makes accurate weather prediction absurd,"

Nigel said. "You describe the difficulties of understanding incredibly complex systems elegantly. We were particularly smitten with your example of how, over time and through a chain of countless events, the stroke of a sparrow's wings can change the course of a hurricane."

"Yes, yes," Abigail said irritably, although she flushed beneath the presence of the compliment. "Well, then, I’ll bid you both a good night."

"Time, Mr. Daffodil?"

"Twenty seconds."

"You were correct, of course. Predicting weather with our standard model of mathematics is impossible," Nigel said. "The best we can do is attempt a somewhat educated guess."

"I’m aware," she snapped. "I wrote the paper. Now, as I was saying, good night—"

"Mark," said Jeremiah.

Both gentlemen lifted their umbrellas skyward and opened them with a pop. At that exact instant, thunder roared over their heads. A shower of rain dropped down over Abigail’s estate like a curtain on the stage.

Abigail stared up into the sky with an expression of bewilderment.

"Well, then," Nigel said, turning back to the road. "I suppose we’ll bid you a good night as well, Madame. Again, we apologize for bothering you with this insignificant matter." He and Jeremiah began to walk away, umbrellas held high.

It took Abigail a moment to find her voice. When she at last did, it was burdened with a hoarse croak: "W—wait."

Jeremiah and Nigel stopped, looking over their shoulders.

Abigail ran out into the rain. When she reached them, she was soaked through and through.

"Perhaps my original assessment was hasty. If you gentlemen might need someone to look over your notes—"

"We are uninterested in a secretary," Nigel said.

"And we are certainly not looking for a sponsor," Jeremiah said.

"But," Nigel added with a swiftly growing smile, "we are in the market for a partner."

~*~

Nigel Arcanum and Jeremiah Daffodil propose a grand partnership.

~*~

A river of gold flowed through a steam-powered city.

It was carried upon the greased rails of human ingenuity, ferried from one civilization to the next along a massive trumbling track that speared its way through air and soil. Every day, its trains pumped prosperity and corruption in equal parts through the city's brass-lined veins. And every day, its trains ran on time.

The city of Aberwick was a topographical nightmare wrested from the laudanum-fueled fever dreams of half-mad cartographers. It was cradled in a yawning canyon of volcanic rock, with communities swelling up into massive heaps of brick and timber; the trains flowed aside, above, and even through these mounds.

If the train rails were Aberwick's veins, then under Aberwick was its steam-powered heart. Beneath the crusty topsoil and the jigsaw puzzle of slums was a maze of tunnels and caverns where ancient boilers harvested the burning expulsions of geothermal vents, providing heat and power to the urban sprawl above. A tangle of pipes tied in mad knots of right and wrong angles slurped the volcanic gas like a thousand straws, drawing it up to the slums and the extravagant villas that lay high above. But despite all of this, it was the trains that had become the symbol of Aberwick: ceaseless, endless, and punctual.

Count Orwick watched the city through his office window as the trains outside plunged into tunnels and emerged across bridges, forming a tangled knot complex enough to give even Alexander's sword pause. Powerful locomotives weaved their way through the web, their conductors following Orwick's calculated directions—directions so divorced from common sense that calamity seemed inevitable. Yet like a magician poring over archaic alchemical formulae, he snatched success from the jaws of failure again and again.

His office was extravagant yet tasteful. Sets of exquisitely crafted maple chairs inlaid with floral patterns and padded with matching damask cushions gathered around his marble-topped desk. Ornate brass fixtures capped with glass spheres provided light along the walls, with coils of gas burning brilliantly within.

The elegance was lost upon Mr. Eddington as he marched in; for him, it was all the useless trimmings of a noble busy-body.

The rail-thin administrator of the Steamwork was the sort of man whose face had been designed explicitly for the purpose of expressing outrage. There was never a moment when he lacked either a cause for indignation or the indiscretion necessary to express it.

He was accompanied by a gentleman who clutched a pile of documents to his chest as if it were a crucifix and he had just blundered into a den of nosferatu after wading through a pool of blood mixed with steak sauce. Mr. Tweedle was the chief administrator of all six of Aberwick's banks, and yet he was so boring in appearance that we shall waste no more words to describe him, save to note that he sometimes wore a very uninteresting hat.

"Count Orwick!" Mr. Eddington cried, the force of his voice causing Mr. Tweedle to cower. "I demand an explanation!"

Count Orwick tore himself away from the window with great reluctance. He observed the gentlemen as an alley cat might observe a pair of exotic birds kept safe in a cage; interesting, but ultimately inconsequential.

"For what do you demand an explanation?" Count Orwick asked.

"For this!" Mr. Eddington slapped the newspaper down onto the desk.

"That," Orwick said, "is a newspaper. I believe it may, on occasion, contain news."

"Sometimes crossword puzzles," Mr. Tweedle said, before sinking under Mr. Eddington's withering glare.

"Not the paper, Count Orwick. The article on the front page." Mr. Eddington's finger stabbed at the title. It read: STEAMWORK UNDER INVESTIGATION.

"Oh, that," Orwick said. "It should be of little concern to such law-abiding men as yourselves."

"My associates and I brought our business to this fair city under the assurances of non-interference at the hands of the government."

"And so you have received it. And so you will continue to receive it. Her Majesty has made clear her desire for your sovereignty over personal affairs," Count Orwick said.

"Then what is this talk of an investigation? Why were we not informed?"

"I planned on scheduling a meeting with you this afternoon to discuss the matter," Orwick said. "Her Majesty has requested your full compliance in a government investigation of your facilities. She is concerned about the recent rash of attacks against our banks, and what it might mean should your inventions at the Steamwork fall into the wrong hands."

"Our security is second-to-none," Mr. Eddington said. "I will not have your men interfering with my work, blundering about in my workshops and disturbing my machines. We can carry out our own investigation, thank you very much."

"And what have you unearthed concerning the recent demise of your research assistant, Mr. Copper?"

"A tragedy, to be certain, but a wholly inevitable one," Mr. Eddington said. "Mr. Copper's research was highly dangerous. He ignored safety protocols time and time again."

"Her Majesty has reason to believe it may be part of an anarchist plot," Orwick said. "She wishes for the case to be re-opened and investigated."

Mr. Eddington's scowl deepened. "I have no desire to see your 'agents' in my house of business, Orwick."

"Please, Mr. Eddington. Agents? In my employ?" Orwick brought a narrow hand to his chest, as if fending off violence. "I have no such thing. I am merely a humble instrument of the Queen's will."

"In that case," Mr. Eddington said, stepping backward and folding his arms over his chest. "I demand the investigation be carried out by a third party, unrelated to you or your government."

"Such a strange request," Orwick said. "Do you think us as little more than a motley collection of spies and thieves?"

"I think that history speaks for itself, Count Orwick."

"Very well. Hire any investigative agency you would like, so long as it is clear that they are impartial to the matter. I only ask that a government consultant be allowed to join the investigation, to ensure that our concerns are addressed."

Mr. Eddington's eyes narrowed into a stare that could slit open stone. "One consultant," he said.

"Only one," Orwick agreed, and then he smiled. Both Eddington and Tweedle instinctively recoiled; Orwick's smile was a vicious thing, full of malice and sharp edges. Nary a friendly flat-topped tooth lay in sight.