All the Lives You Left Your Mark Upon
THE STEAMLINER PILOT’S TALE
This is more her story than mine, but her story became mine, and I have lived with it for more than twenty years. First Elitia Peake stole my heart—ripped it right out of my chest—and then she went on to steal everything else.
What did I see in her, fool that I was?
I was culpable too—no avoiding that. I played with fire, I struck the spark. I flirted. I smiled at the ladies with the roguish smile that I knew would feed that twist of longing in a certain sort of woman. Elitia was indeed that sort of woman, but she was not the only one.
With their everyday clockwork lives, the Albion villagers think steamliner pilots are glamorous. After all, we travel across the land, guiding a caravan of passenger gondolas, cargo cars full of exotic wares from faraway places. I was dashing and handsome. I commanded the steam engines. I piloted the monstrous vehicle along the coldfire rails and up into the sky. I stoked the fire on the big steel wheels. I was everywhere. I was mysterious.
Some women like that—and I know how to find them.
Albion is quiet and content nowadays, full of peace and prosperity thanks to the Watchmaker’s Stability. The people carry on their lives with little desperation and few ambitions. But not everyone sleepwalked through their days in the villages I visited. I would land the steamliner at a station, stopping for a day to visit, to conduct business, and, more often than not, slip in a secret rendezvous. My aloof life was both predictable and exciting.
Then I met Elitia, and a light but illicit game became a tangled trap. It was my own fault. When an alchemist plays with dangerous chemicals, the reaction doesn’t always produce gold.
In those days I traveled different routes from the Mainspring Hub, just for the variety. I would take my steamliner into Crown City, then shift to another spoke route and head off to a new endpoint. I would cruise out to far-flung villages, where the townspeople greeted me with hospitality, and the pretty young girls met me with sparkling eyes, whispered invitations, and more. I was there and I was gone—a philanderer, if that’s the term you must use, but I saw no harm in it. Neither did the women. If the clock isn’t watched, who notices a few stolen seconds?
Truth be told, when I was cocky and playing with fire, I actually preferred married women because they knew the extent of what I was offering, and they knew what they needed; they had no silly dreams of anything more.
Once, I made an error with a flighty young girl who became caught up in unrealistic fantasies, wanting to ride across Albion like a queen at my side, believing herself to be my One True Love. That didn’t fit my plan at all, and after an awkward unpleasantness, I had to switch steamliner routes until such time as the girl found herself another One True Love and forgot about me.
For married women, though, I was an occasional ray of sunlight in an otherwise overcast life, just a brief thrill. They rebelled against their predictable lives. I offered them a flash of excitement, and when I departed, they went back to their normal lives, everyone happy (even the unwitting husbands, who were pleased to see their wives smiling more than usual). Married women had no flights of fancy, no dreams of running away.
But Elitia Peake was different. I should have sensed the danger when I was the one who began to have foolish dreams of a future with her. I looked forward to Lugtown more than any other destination. We had our fling, and each time was better than the last. I didn’t realize how quickly she had me wrapped around her finger.
Elitia was married to Arlen Peake and had a young daughter and what others considered a quiet, perfect life, but that was by no means enough for her. Elitia had a hunger that consumed me and consumed all common sense, until after a scheduled stop in Lugtown, when I stoked the fires and built up the engine pressure, Elitia ran to the motivator car at the last minute. She swung herself inside as the coldfire rails glowed and the cars began to move. She had only a change of clothes and a smile that melted my heart.
“Take me with you, Brock,” she said. “I need this. For once in my life, I’m going where I want instead of where I should.”
I had no way of knowing how fateful that decision would be, but I also had no way to resist her. I said yes. We left Lugtown and rode off together on the steamliner, high above the world. We traveled to other villages, followed my dreamline compass to the far ends of Albion and then all the way back to Crown City. At night there were stars in her eyes and stars in the sky, and we talked about the future, the routes we could explore, the places we would go.
Once I reached the Mainspring Hub, I could easily adjust my schedule so as to avoid Lugtown, sure I wouldn’t be welcome there again. I wasn’t the only steamliner pilot who had encountered an “unexpected awkwardness” like that, and we helped one another. Steamliner pilots were interchangeable cogs in the big machine, and the Stability continued.
I gave Elitia exactly what she wanted, what she needed. I was too caught up in it all to think about what I wanted or needed. Elitia. That was my answer whenever I asked myself the question.
She and I explored Albion and explored each other, and reveled in the happiness we had mapped out in our wistful fantasies for months…until even that life became routine. Dreams shine brightest when they remain only dreams, because reality becomes prosaic all too quickly.
Elitia wasn’t much of a reader, but during the long hours in my private cabin she would peruse the volumes I kept on my shelf. She was particularly interested in Before the Stability, the salacious account of the dark, violent times that had beset Albion before the Watchmaker’s arrival more than two centuries ago, how he had learned to create plentiful gold through alchemical means, how he had devised coldfire as a clean and abundant power source, how he had stopped the chaos and put the whole world in order.
But the cautionary descriptions of those lawless times did not have the expected effect on Elitia. She found the descriptions edgy and exciting; her eyes shone with the thrill. Wanting to maintain my hold over her, I revealed to her some of my own family history, which was perhaps best forgotten.
“Back in those days,” I said, with what I hoped was a tantalizing grin, “my family members were outlaws—quite infamous.” I paged through Before the Stability, finding the appropriate chapter and pointing out where the Watchmaker described the mayhem caused by the Pennrose Clan.
Although the book exaggerated those legendary misdeeds to make a point, I did remember my great-grandfather telling stories when I was a boy, describing the adventures of his great-grandfather. From the way he told it, the old Pennrose gang was a group of piratical scalawags with hearts of gold as well as hoards of gold. It was a rough-and-tumble time, where being self-sufficient meant that one had to be aggressive—take or be taken.
Elitia read the chapter avidly, and she found it glamorous, the outlaws romantic. Back in Lugtown she had left her dull existence for the dream of an exciting life aboard the steamliner with me. Now, unfortunately, I saw that dream slipping away into the prosaic. After all, Elitia Peake had me already, and what kept her going was the desire for something else. How did I not foresee that she would grow as bored with me as she had with her husband? I think she was addicted to the adrenaline rush of new things.
She made the ridiculous suggestion that we should become outlaws ourselves to recapture that exciting and unpredictable time before the Stability. And because I felt I was losing her, I became even more foolish and encouraged such talk, feeding her imagination. Other than what she read in Before the Stability, Elitia knew little about what an outlaw was. Neither did I. Yet we were giddy with our plans.
We decided to rob my own steamliner.
My airship hauled levitating cargo cars filled with lumber, grains, construction stone, even livestock. Passenger gondolas carried people from Crown City to the outskirt villages and back. Secure armored cars carried the Watchmaker’s gold to maintain the trading network throughout the land.
Elitia became obsessed with the idea of gold. After reading legends from Before the Stability, she gave the rare metal an almost mythical quality. Once the Watchmaker’s alchemy had made gold ubiquitous—still vital but less precious than before—its value had decreased, but Elitia still fantasized.
So I began to make plans.
Cargo workers and porters traveled in the steamliner’s back compartments. They were considered low-class citizens, unruly and unreliable; restlessness made them change their jobs often and move on. Right now, that worked to our advantage, for if we were to become outlaws, then we would need people of flexible morals and ill-defined schedules.
When my steamliner set down at a destination village, Elitia would make a point of striking up a conversation with the cargo workers in the back cars. She gradually developed a list of men and women who seemed amenable to a risky and exciting, but unspecified, plan—and others who weren’t. When we reached the Mainspring Hub in Crown City, I already had a good idea of which ones to let go and which ones to keep on. Thus, Elitia and I shaped the character of the crew working aboard my steamliner.
I had many uncertainties, but whenever I voiced them, Elitia would look disappointed—in me. And her overwhelming enthusiasm smothered my doubts. If I grew nervous about the enormity of what we were planning, she would calm me, focus me, and make me think of only the next small step, which didn’t seem so insurmountable. We were tiptoeing down the slippery slope.
Besides, the excitement of planning such a great adventure made her a wild and passionate lover, and that would make me forget my concerns, for a while.
Finally, when Elitia was certain she had our crew also wrapped around her finger, we revealed our bold plan. I was sure some of them would recoil in shock, at which point I didn’t know what we’d do. But Elitia had dropped just enough hints to whet their appetites, and every one of them agreed, lured by the glory of adventure as well as treasure. They did exactly what she told them to do…just as I always did.
Despite my terror, when the time came to rob my steamliner, the escapade was remarkable and exciting—just as she had promised. That night on the pilot deck, I operated the controls, damped the engines, vented the coldfire exhaust, and dropped the steamliner. Many of the travelers were asleep in their passenger gondolas and oblivious to the unscheduled landing until it was well in progress. From flying these routes for many years, I was intimate with the geography of the grasslands and rolling hills. Even though there were no alignment rails to take us on a vector into a particular village, I set the steamliner down on the uninhabited plains of Albion.
It was a rough landing, but Elitia threw her arms around my neck, kissed me hard, and disembarked, tugging on my arm to follow. The cargo workers swung down from their rear compartments and went to work on the passenger gondolas. The steam pressure was still high, and each separate gondola was held aloft by swollen levitation sacks, different colors signifying the class of transport.
The rough crewmembers disengaged the gondolas, breaking the pistons and hydraulic connections, then setting the cars aloft. The levitation sacks carried the gondolas aimlessly upward, without guidance; they would descend of their own accord soon enough, many miles away. For now, passenger cars scattered like colorful soap bubbles on the wind. Awakened travelers opened the hatches, waving their hands and demanding help as they drifted off.
Elitia laughed as she and I marched up and down the line of grounded cargo cars. I already had the steamliner manifest, so I knew that some of the compartments contained cut fieldstone, others had cast-iron rods, sacks of grain, crates of potatoes. We discarded all of those.
One small armored gondola had a yellow levitation sack. “This one contains the shipment of gold,” I said, stating the obvious to the crew.
Working together, tense, thrilled, giddy, we attached the motivation engine to the gold gondola, then connected two of the crew compartments, where our co-conspirators would live and sleep and celebrate. I powered up the engines, added coldfire to the furnace. Our abbreviated steamliner flew away into the night with its stolen treasure.
I knew my family history and the charts of our old holdings from before the Stability, so I went there. I landed the motivator car in the rugged empty hills, where we unloaded the stockpile of the Watchmaker’s gold—cases filled with neatly stacked coins, ingots, perfect circular rings, thin rectangular sheets of gold foil to be used for ornamentation. Everything glowed with the vibrant yellow of true wealth. An incalculable fortune.
We had become genuine outlaws.
Over the next few months, we robbed six more steamliners.
After slipping in our crew as cargo workers aboard a liner, Elitia and I would travel as wealthy visitors to distant lands, clothed in fine garments with new pocketwatches and jewelry purchased with the Watchmaker’s stolen gold.
As we lived free and chaotic lives, Elitia blossomed into an even more vibrant, intense person. She took my breath away; sometimes she frightened me. Our adventures reminded her of the heady days before the Stability, exciting outlaw times with no schedules. We were self-sufficient, clever, and resourceful. We took whatever we could, we lived wherever and however we chose, and we moved across Albion so that no one would find an established hideout. We were becoming a notorious gang of thieves and anarchists.
Bear in mind, all this occurred twenty years ago, long before the current Anarchist who causes the Watchmaker such consternation. Our gang caused far more turbulence to calm and orderly Albion than that atrocious man could hope to do. The Anarchist may be bombastic, but he’s not much more than an amateur—one person more interested in ideology than profit, which makes him laughable. Our gang, though, enriched ourselves. We shook up the world—and those were some of the best times I had with Elitia.
But, as before, even the greatest excitement becomes prosaic after a time, and she wanted each new robbery to be more spectacular, more audacious than the previous one. Although Elitia managed to make me agree every time, I felt something hard and heavy gnawing inside me as the months went by.
Some members of our crew took their share of the wealth and slipped away, but our band grew nevertheless, which meant more outlaws to split the profits, more people to implement more complex robberies. At first I knew each man personally, and they gave at least lip-service to the conceit that I was the leader of our gang, since I was the steamliner pilot. But it didn’t take them long to see that it was Elitia who posed the challenges and made the decisions. It was so easy for her to manipulate me. For a long time, I pretended that I made those ill-conceived choices of my own accord, but eventually I realized otherwise.
Then a dashing and edgy young man named Glendon joined us. He was dark-haired, roguish, and always two days past a clean shave. Elitia recruited him in Crown City, listened to his ideas, and the two of them immediately proposed even greater plans. Glendon inspired the other members of the crew to tackle even more ambitious robberies, just as I was beginning to backpedal, suggesting caution. I worried that the Watchmaker and his Regulators would surely be intent on capturing us to quash the constant disruption of schedules we caused.
But Glendon talked with such grand designs and grand gestures that Elitia was caught in his spell, just as I had been caught in hers. She was enthralled with him, and she laughed off my concerns; at times it even seemed that she was laughing at me.
Again, afraid that she might be slipping away from me, I clung tighter in the only way I knew how—I agreed to everything she wanted, despite my reservations. I went along with what she and Glendon proposed. Elitia clung to me, she reassured me, but I felt a widening gap between us.
During our next raid, when we seized another airship, we were surprised to discover that two members of the Red Watch were hidden inside the armored compartment, assigned to guard the Watchmaker’s gold. The Regulators were armed with cartridge-powered rifles that shot golden bullets. The guards were just as startled by our unscheduled robbery as we were to find them there.
I was sure we’d been caught, but Glendon fought like a mad dog. Elitia was at his side, and I tried to protect her, but the battle was over in a few seconds. Both of the Red Watch guards lay dead. Glendon looked exhausted but satisfied. “All is for the best,” he said with a mocking sneer. Then he rummaged through their red uniforms and robbed the two dead men.
Unsettled by the dramatic shift, our gang scrambled to complete the robbery and offload the stolen gold. We fled with the treasure, leaving the dead bodies behind. I was sickened, horrified. I didn’t know what to do. As outlaws, we had crossed a line that I had not even seen coming.
The worst moment came when I looked over at Elitia and saw that her eyes shone with a bright excitement I hadn’t seen since the first time we had illicitly made love. She was flushed, breathing hard, and I could see that she wished she could do it all again.
We made camp in a place where we were sure no one could find us. After we divided up the treasure, four of our disconcerted outlaws vowed that they were leaving the very next day. “Gold is gold,” one man said, “but blood is too high a price.”
I couldn’t argue with them. In fact, I longed to take Elitia and run away, too. We could stop this chaotic, dangerous life, find some place like Lugtown, or Barrel Arbor, or Ashkelon—they were all the same—to settle in and find our own new Stability.
“This has to stop,” I said to her when we were alone. “Enough! Two men are dead. We can’t ever let this happen again.”
Elitia just mocked me. She and Glendon had already begun planning their next robbery, which would be even grander.
By now all of us had more gold than any person could want, but the outlaws decided that they needed more. When Glendon proposed hitting another steamliner only a week later—much sooner than the Watchmaker would ever suspect, he claimed—he asked for a show of hands, and every one of them agreed. What could I do, fool that I was? I cast my vote as well, hoping Elitia would approve, though she rarely noticed me anymore. None of our gang mistook my agreement for enthusiasm.
Because Elitia spent so much time with Glendon, I learned to understand loneliness even when I was among so many comrades. Oddly enough, though I had spent months with these people and committed crimes at their sides, I didn’t really know them at all. The vivid memory of those two dead Red Watch members was a more constant companion. The blood that spilled on the ground was certainly more valuable to those guards than any gold.
On the night before our next ill-advised steamliner robbery, I was restless and deeply insecure about the things I feared would go wrong. Seeking reassurance, even if I had to give it to myself, I wandered away from the camp into the dark night so that I could be even more alone than I was with my fellow outlaws. I was tempted to just keep walking, to leave that part of my life behind and reset it like a clock, but I didn’t have the nerve.
Until I found Elitia and Glendon together under the moonlight.
They had taken a blanket to a distant hillside, where they lay naked and intertwined, laughing, whispering. Elitia made contented purring noises that I had not heard from her in some time.
I stood in the shadows under the trees, just staring, as if my heart had turned to lead without any alchemical reaction whatsoever. I felt betrayed, dismayed, yet not at all surprised. How could this be unexpected? Elitia had proved herself unfaithful from the very moment she’d left her husband and run off with me.
A decisive man sets his own course, but Elitia had made my decisions for me for some time now. And now she made another one for me, although inadvertently. I turned my back, knowing that the two hadn’t even noticed me there. If I confronted them, I was sure Elitia would not have shown any guilt, and Glendon would just have been smug. I didn’t want to give them that.
I didn’t bother to take my share of the gold. I took only my dignity, although few shreds of that remained. I simply walked away, heading across the open landscape that centuries ago had been an unruly wasteland infested with outlaw bands like my own family. Now I was all alone, and I set off, knowing that if I walked far enough in a straight line I would eventually come upon steamliner tracks.
If I had been a sensible man, I would never have looked back, but as I’m sure my story has shown, I am not a sensible man. I could not disentangle myself so cleanly from the strands that bound me to Elitia. And when I discovered steamliner tracks in the open hills, knowing the outlaws’ plan, I had to watch where they meant to strike, even if I didn’t intend to participate, even if I refused to stain my hands with any more innocent blood.
I found an outcropping that would give me a good vantage, where I could see the tracks and the surrounding hilly terrain, the small reservoir. Far out here in open country, with no nearby villages, the steamliner would descend to refill its boilers from the lake.
And that was where Elitia, Glendon, and their fellow outlaws would strike.
As with most of our robberies, everything occurred like clockwork. The steamliner arrived overhead with its chain of levitating balloons, its cargo gondolas, the yellow sack with prominent honeybee markings. The vessel settled down on the glowing blue tracks, and the steamliner pilot emerged from the motivator car. His crew disembarked from their living compartments, ready to pump water into the big tanks. I recognized the pilot as an old comrade of mine, a woman with a deep voice who liked to sing to her engines, back when my life had been on an entirely different schedule. She looked older now, but surely I did, too. Her life had ticked away in a precise fashion, and I could have had that life, if I hadn’t broken away to become an outlaw. If I hadn’t met Elitia. All those wasted years…
That was when wild Elitia, Glendon, and six others struck.
From where I sat hidden, I hoped they would succeed without anyone being hurt or killed, although I knew Glendon had a taste for it. I felt both dread and fascination as I watched from my hidden vantage, remembering when I had found our heists exciting, when the outlaw life had made me feel alive and inflamed with love for Elitia. Now I felt like an astronomer staring at alien life on a distant planet. I didn’t understand any of it.
As the gang closed in on their prey, the two passenger gondolas burst open, and a full contingent of the Black Watch boiled out, carrying cartridge-powered rifles. It was a trap! As I suspected, the Watchmaker had devoted great resources and predictive abilities to stop our chaotic robberies. After he had imposed his Stability, Albion was supposed to be a place of contentment and prosperity. He could never tolerate a gang of outlaws.
The Black Watch showed no mercy. They opened fire, shooting a rain of golden bullets. They cut down the two foremost gang members who rushed the steamliner. I stared, and my throat went dry as the black-uniformed soldiers rushed out, perhaps trying to capture the outlaws, but just as satisfied to kill them.
Moving as a team, both desperate yet flushed with excitement, Elitia and Glendon fought back. Like an animal, she threw herself on one of the Black Watch guards, startling him. Glendon tore the rifle free from the man’s hands and killed him, then swung the weapon around to shoot another Regulator. Then he and Elitia, without even speaking of their plan, rushed the passenger gondola, which was now empty since the soldiers had all emerged.
Elitia dove aboard the gondola as Glendon disengaged it from the steamliner caravan. Separated from the rest of the chain, the lone gondola rose into the sky, borne aloft by its bright blue levitating sack. Hanging out the open door of the compartment, Elitia and Glendon laughed at the soldiers below. They rose higher, out of reach, drifting on the uncharted wind.
From my hiding place on the distant outcropping, I shaded my eyes and stared upward, dismayed. My heart pounded. Even though I knew how faithless Elitia was and what she had done to me—all the things she had done to me—my heart still wanted her to get away. To be safe.
Then three members of the Black Guard emerged from another passenger gondola. On the ground, they set up a larger-bore weapon—an alchemy cannon!—aimed its barrel at the sky, and launched a gleaming artillery projectile. Elitia and Glendon saw it coming.
Like a streak of lightning, the projectile struck the blue levitation sack and detonated, transforming the gondola and my faithless lover into a ball of blue-white fire like a new alchemical sun in the sky.
Elitia, my Elitia, vanished in a blaze of glory. And even though I watched in despair, I realized that this legendary death was exactly the way Elitia would have wanted her tale to end.
Defeated and aimless, I found my way back to our now-abandoned outlaw camp, where I gathered the supplies I might need for a long cross-country trek, but I left all the gold.
It took me six days to reach a village on the steamliner path, and from there I made my way to Crown City and the Mainspring Hub, by which point I had concocted a story to explain myself. I would file papers and tell the appropriate officials that I had been held prisoner by Elitia and her bandits all this time. I expected to be bombarded with questions, and I hoped I could find an acceptable way to answer them.
As it turned out, all I had to say was that I had trained as a steamliner pilot, and that I belonged on board, guiding the caravans. Experienced pilots were always in demand, and the Watchmaker’s bureaucracy slotted me into the schedule again.
I became a pilot once more, following the straight-and-narrow path of the coldfire rails, returning to a quiet, perfect life that now seemed hollow, but I convinced myself it was enough. I carried passengers and cargo back and forth, back and forth. Prosaic, yet satisfying.
I have served as a reliable steamliner pilot for twenty years. I no longer seek out rebellious women in the towns I visit, although I know they are still there.
And that is why seeing you now, daughter of Elitia Peake, brings all this back to me, highlighting the excitement…and reinforcing my regrets.
Now, after the disastrous explosion as my steamliner comes in for what will surely be a horrendous crash, I know the bandits have struck again. I hope I can save you, Marinda, but regardless I will die knowing that at least I am no longer an outlaw.
I take solace in that.