Black Iron: An Impious Empires Novel

Black Iron

Black Iron

a novel by Franklin Veaux

Second Edition, Revised

Black Iron

Second Edition

Copyright ©2024 by Franklin Veaux

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Luminastra Press, LLC

2355 State Street, STE 101

Salem, OR 97301

[email protected]

Cover illustration ©2024 by James Lincolnshire

Cover Photography and Design by Franklin Veaux

Interior design by Franklin Veaux

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Veaux, Franklin, author.

Title: Black iron / Franklin Veaux.

Series: Impious Empires

Description: Second edition, revised. | Salem, OR: Luminastra Press, 2024.

Identifiers: LCCN: 2024933888 | ISBN: 979-8-9860637-4-4

Subjects: LCSH London (England)--History--19th century--Fiction. | Catholic Church--Fiction. | Alternative histories (Fiction) | Black humor (Literature) | Humorous fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Alternative History | FICTION / Humorous / Dark Humor

Classification: LCC PS3622 .E39 B58 2024 | DDC 813.6--dc23

eBook version 1.0

To Shara, my very own Lady Alÿs

1

It was the

rain that woke him.

At least he hoped it was rain. When you find yourself lying on the street with something wet falling on your face, you can’t always be sure. There were other possibilities, ones he preferred not to think too closely about.

His head hurt. So did his shoulder. His back, that hurt too. He could probably postpone worrying about the throbbing in his knee, at least for now, though it might present a bit of a problem when it came time to stand. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t need to run, though that, too, was something you couldn’t always take for granted. Something in his pocket poked most unpleasantly into his thigh, but he didn’t quite feel up to dealing with that just yet.

First things first. Where was he?

Reluctantly, with great effort, he opened his eyes. The wetness falling on him was in fact rain, an endless dreary drizzle of it pattering on the rough cobblestone around him. It pooled in the cracks between the stones. It formed larger rivulets that set out in search of the mighty Thames, that enormous body of what was in theory water, or had once been water, or had water as one of its less odiferous components. Tiny fingers of cold detoured on their trip to the storm grates and thence to the sluggish mud-colored river of maybe-water just long enough to flow into his pant leg and send icy wet misery down his back. They trickled from his collar to rejoin the rest of the water making its indirect way toward the river.

Gray shrouded him. Okay, that seemed right. Buildings towered above him, drab brick faces daubed with soot. Above them, a tangle of electrical wires, strung in hodgepodge fashion from building to building. Far above the buildings, an enormous zeppelin floated in the flat gray sky, angling down for landing. Its signaling lamp strobed a frantic staccato of brilliant light toward the ground.

New Old London, then. The wires were a dead giveaway. Surprising, that. More often, he woke in the streets across the river, in Old New London.

It hadn’t always been called New Old London. Once, it had simply been London. The city, driven by an ever-increasing population, had grown rapidly, sprawling helter-skelter until it fetched up against the banks of the Thames. It paused for a bit at the river’s edge, like a great swarm of termites gathering its strength. Then, all at once, it sprouted bridges across the river like tendrils of brick and metal. The moment those tendrils touched down on the opposite bank, the city resumed its growth with vigor.

For a while, the bit of London on the far side was called New London, which made the older bits Old London. Then, about the time the now-reigning monarch Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Margaret the Merciful, who had been granted that particular honorific by some unknown poet in an exuberance of artistic license, was just graduating from wetting herself to speaking in complete sentences, her father, the now-late Royal Majesty King John the Proud, had decided Old London was a bit fusty and by royal decree had ordered much of it razed and rebuilt.

A handful of people objected to his bold—some said audacious—approach to civil engineering, questioning both the cost and the small but nevertheless still important matter of what to do with all the people displaced by it, but a few beheadings soon sorted that out. A man can accomplish quite a lot when he commands both the royal treasury and the headsman’s axe. And it certainly helps when that royal treasury is groaning under the vast weight of gold sent home in a never-ending stream from the colonies of the New World.

So Old London became New Old London, which meant New London was now Old New London, and there you had it.

He moved his arm, the one pressed quite uncomfortably against the curbstone. His father had always said that any day you woke up looking down at the gutter instead of up at the gutter was a good day. By that measure, this was not shaping up to be a good day.

His father. That’s right, he’d had one of those, once.

A clue, then. He probably wasn’t an orphan. Orphans didn’t have memories of their fathers, did they? Maybe he would ask the next one he caught trying to pick his pocket. Having a father implied being birthed by human beings, which meant he wasn’t an animate, one of the not-quite-living constructs stitched together out of bits of the dead and then zapped back into existence with electricity and foul-smelling chemicals. And the fact that he was thinking about it clinched the deal. Everyone said animates didn’t have thoughts at all. They were frightfully expensive, and as beasts of burden they were only moderately useful, but they’d been all the rage since that doctor from Geneva had started making them a couple of years back. All the trendiest aristocrats employed one or two for menial tasks like carrying firewood, and a few inventive folks suggested they might have utility in some of the messier parts of home security. He found them creepy, with their weird and often mismatched eyes and their occasional bursts of unprovoked violence.

Not that humans were necessarily any better in the unprovoked violence department, but at least their eyes usually matched.

I think; therefore, I am not an animate.

That seemed a safe bet.

He still wasn’t quite sure who he was or what he was doing lying face-up in a gutter in New Old London, but he didn’t feel an undue sense of urgency about it. At the moment, he seemed not to be bleeding from anywhere, and nobody was chasing him. Might as well take advantage of this unexpected luxury, he thought.

He looked down the length of his body. Both legs present and accounted for, and in more or less the correct shape. Nothing obviously broken. But what were those ridiculous things on his feet? Two gaudy shoes, made of different kinds of leather assembled in a patchwork collage that was probably some current fashion among those who cared about that sort of thing, which he felt he most probably did not. They had bright red clasps and pointed metal tips. They were, he thought, certainly not the sorts of things he would wear under ordinary, or indeed even extraordinary, circumstances. They seemed quite impractical for either running or creeping, two things he had a vague sense that he did rather a lot of. Yet there they were, buckled to his feet in all their garish monstrosity.

Another mystery. That made two so far, and he’d barely been conscious for a minute. He hated days like this, or at least he thought he probably did.

The thing in his pocket poked into him with greater urgency. Time to do something about that.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then, with titanic effort, flopped over onto his side. That should sort out the problem with whatever was in his pocket.

He paused, breathing heavily. This new position squashed his hand rather unfortunately beneath him. It wouldn’t be long before he had to move again. Life was so unfair.

Baby steps.

A loud, clattering sound came down the alley. He blinked. A huge machine stomped past, all copper and black iron. Smoke poured from its chimney. A clanker. Two-legged, this one, vaguely human-shaped, or it would be if humans stood eleven feet high and had smokestacks protruding from the tops of their heads. A newer model, then. Its driver, high up in his cage, didn’t even spare him a glance. The thing wheezed and stomped down the alley, dragging a cart piled high with freshly fired bricks behind it.

Alley. Another clue.

New Old London was arranged in a grid, the late and much-lamented King John being of a mind more than a little obsessed with perfect geometry. Stories said he could not eat unless every table setting was properly arrayed, all the plates precisely centered in front of each chair, the service perfectly parallel, the chairs exactly the same distance from their neighbors. Rumors spoke of an unfortunate noble who had moved his plate from its appointed place before His Royal Highness had been seated and consequently lost his title, or perhaps his head, depending on which version of the story you believed.

More precisely, New Old London was arranged in two grids. You would, if you were to look down on it from one of the many zeppelins drifting through the ashen sky above, see an alternating pattern of streets and alleys. The streets, broad and level, had wide sidewalks fronting tidy storefronts well-lit by gas lamps or, in the more fashionable districts, electric arc lamps. The alleys were narrower and more potholed, without sidewalks or lighting. Tidy rows of buildings faced the streets, with the alleys running behind them.

Street, alley, street, alley: two different grids, slightly offset from each other. The people who mattered—aristocrats, merchants, skilled tradesmen: people with money, all—used the streets. Those without money used the alleys. Two different classes of people flowing along two different grids, living in two different cities, in a manner of speaking. It all made sense to somebody. Somebody in the former class, most likely. It seemed that wherever you went, the rich were willing to travel extraordinary distances to look at poor people but went to equally extravagant lengths to avoid looking at poor people close at hand.

He felt at home in alleys.

His hand throbbed. Time to do something about that. He rose to his knees and then, with another Herculean effort, to his feet.

He closed his eyes, panting. This must be what the heroes of Greek stories felt like, after they’d just skinned a hydra or defeated a twelve-headed lion or whatever it was they did.

A fabulously complex tangle of black silk and exquisitely spidery, jointed bamboo struts sat wet and broken on the rough cobblestone where he’d just been lying. Strange, that.

He leaned against a wooden refuse-dump, trying to catch his breath. Some colossal impact had caved in its side, spilling its contents across the ground around the black silk whatever-it-was. By some stroke of fortune, the refuse that oozed wetly to the cobblestones was mostly vegetative. There were far less savory refuse-dumps, like those behind the laboratories where the animate-makers plied their arts, creating those animated creatures of flesh from whatever raw materials the street offered up.

He looked up. Something had happened to the roof of the building above him, as though a large, heavy object had struck it with considerable force, shattering the red clay tiles in a vaguely circular area several feet wide. A broad swath of dislocated tiles made a path from the point of impact to the edge of the roof, just above the refuse-dump, where the gutter had given way and now swung forlornly from metal rivets. His eyes followed the path of destruction down, from the edge of the roof into the refuse-dump, and then to the street, right about…

Aha! He smiled grimly. That explained the various aches and pains, then. From the looks of things, he’d hit the roof plenty hard before he’d skidded over the edge into the refuse-dump, taking a bit of the gutter with him, and from there, come to rest in the alley.

At least that explained the how, if not the why.

No, he thought, scratch that, it didn’t even explain the how. Where precisely had he fallen onto the roof from?

More immediately, why was he wearing this ridiculous getup? A sodden black jacket with tails—tails, for the love of all that was holy!—hung wet from his narrow frame. A couple of feet down the alley sat what had once been, and was still trying against all odds to be, a top-hat. He had a vague sense that it belonged to him, though he could not imagine why he would own such a thing. He was still a bit hazy on who he was, exactly, but he was quite certain he was not the sort of chap who habitually engaged in the wearing of top-hats.

Nor in the habit of falling from the sky into a refuse-dump, he had to admit to himself, so perhaps he shouldn’t be too hasty with the assumptions.

A party. He had been to a party. In a top-hat and the absurdly impractical shoes—shoes he was certain he would never wear absent the most dire need.

He frowned, adding it all up. A party, a top-hat, shoes, a long fall onto a roof, a sudden slide into a rubbish-bin, and the wreckage of some silk and bamboo contraption that he knew, with abrupt clarity, had once been a gigantic kite.

A zeppelin. The party had been on a zeppelin. And he had left the party with some alacrity. Planned, evidently, to do so. From the look of things, he’d made arrangements in advance to depart over the side of the airship, rather than waiting for it to land as might be more traditional when one debarked from a flying vessel.

Damn, he thought, it sure would be nice if he could remember who he was.

The thing in his pocket intruded into his consciousness again. He wore pants that somehow managed to be just as ridiculous as his shoes. Like much of what the upper class wore, they had been designed to show off the fact that their owner had no need to do anything as profane as work, and therefore need not carry around anything larger than a pocket watch. The pockets, as a result, were vestigial, barely more than slits with a small pouch sewn inside. Whatever was in his pocket, it was larger than anything the tailor had meant for it to accommodate.

And it had sharp edges, or so it seemed. He would, he ruefully supposed, probably have quite a large bruise to show for it.

He stuck a hand in his pocket and drew it out.

Memory poured into him like wine into a glass.

He, Thaddeus Mudstone Ahmed Alexander Pinkerton, ne’er-do-well and ruffian of the most despicable sort, had just robbed, though only by the skin of his teeth and at, evidence suggested, great personal peril, Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Margaret the Merciful.

And lived, apparently also by the skin of his teeth, to tell about it.

He picked up the battered top-hat, set it atop his head at a rakish angle, and walked, or more correctly limped, down the alley, whistling.

Perhaps this might turn out to be a good day after all.

2

In the air

high above New Old London, the Lady Alÿs de Valois was not having a good day. Cold, wet wind gusted in through the yawning doorway, tearing at the folds of her deep blue gown. The huge loading door, normally barred shut against the possibility of an unfortunate guest tumbling to an unfortunate end, banged against the wooden body of the airship. The whistling wind almost drowned out the low mutter of the great engines that turned the enormous airscrews. Her mouth still hung open.

Right. My lady, I think you should come with me.

The owner of that slightly nervous voice wore the ceremonial bronze breastplate and white cape of the Royal Guard. His name was Roderick Hamsbender, and he, too, was not having a good day.

Roderick was, generally speaking, of slightly nervous disposition all around. Indeed, that was one of the reasons he’d joined the Royal Guard in the first place. For those who served in the Guard, almost nothing exciting ever happened.

Roderick’s father, a trader in imported cloth, had never been completely happy with his lot in life. He wanted the best for his only son, and had insisted that Roderick become a real man—the process of which involved, apparently, taking up the sort of profession in which one carried a weapon and helped rid the world of threats to King and Country (or more accurately, Queen and Country, times being what they were) in a suitably manly and heroic fashion. That left only a handful of possible careers. Members of the municipal police force dealt with dangerous criminals who had nothing to lose. Soldiers had lives that were mostly boring, interspersed with brief moments of excitement that were sometimes terminally so. The Royal Guard, on the other hand, spent almost all of their time watching noble types doing nobly-type things, like taking dancing lessons, raising taxes on the poor, and eating complicated little bits of food from the ends of small wooden skewers. As jobs went, it was prestigious, it was honorable, and best of all, it was dull.

Exactly what he wanted.

He had succeeded in the Guard by being clever enough not to show anyone how clever he was, and by honing a highly advanced deference to his betters. He was also tall, and had the strength that came from lifting heavy baskets. That helped, but it was mostly those other things that had facilitated his progression through the ranks.

The job did come with certain duties beyond standing still and deferring to his betters, and one of those duties was reporting infractions of the law. Roderick was not aware of any area of the law that specifically covered ladies of high birth assisting unknown gentlemen in leaving the Queen’s airship by means of the loading door while the ship was in flight, but there were rules that covered suspicious activity, and jumping out of the back of an airship, he reasoned, might be at least a bit suspicious. He figured he really ought to do something. Problem was, from the looks of it, doing something meant detaining a young lady who was not only of noble birth, but the daughter of King Philip XVIII of France, and on top of that was due to marry the Queen’s half brother. No part of that looked good for Roderick’s career prospects.

On the whole, he would have preferred to live his life hawking the finest imported silks. Imported silks, he thought with perhaps understandable naivety, seldom tried to kill you.

The wind drove a hard slap of rain into his face, threatening to knock his helmet off. He righted it absently, frowning.

The Lady Alÿs drew herself to her full height. Most people became more imposing when they did that, but in her case, it still left her a bit short of five feet tall. Her curly black hair, which usually tended toward frizzy even when sternly disciplined by comb and tie, managed to pull itself together long enough to stream imperiously in the damp breeze. Do you have any idea who I am? she demanded.

Oh yes, I do, my lady, Roderick said, bowing very slightly. I do indeed. His voice sounded a bit rueful. Meaning no offence, my lady, but I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t report this… He glanced out the gaping cargo door into the gray rain outside. This…um, this whatever-it-is to Her Majesty. I think it might be best for both our sakes if you come along with me. We’ll let her sort this out. His cape billowed behind him dramatically.

From Alÿs’s perspective, the day was going inexplicably sideways. And it had started out so well. The Queen’s flying parties were famous, and this party promised to be posh even by the normal standards of the Court. Queen Margaret was entertaining a special guest, namely the ambassador from the Ottomans, and had gone to considerable lengths to impress. There was to be a grand buffet, part meal and part (the better part, truth be told) an opulent display of wealth, with long tables of polished oak groaning under the weight of food so fancy that it was, in some cases, not even entirely clear which bit went into your mouth.

The Queen herself was dressed to impress as well, in a long but form-hugging brocaded dress with a lot of complicated and fussy bits on the front that somehow managed to conceal all the things a dress was supposed to conceal while still exposing enough to have set tongues wagging even five years ago.

But fashion is a mercurial thing, and one of the nice things about being a monarch was that you got to set the fashion. Many of the same women of the Court who would a few years back have found Margaret’s dress entirely outré were, this evening, just as outrageously dressed themselves, as it ever has been with those who cleave close to the bosom of power.

After the meal, there would be an all-evening dance attended by the various barons, dukes, earls, and viscounts who made up that part of the Royal Court that mattered. There would be subtle flirting and endless gossip to catch up on. Alÿs’s betrothed, His Excellency Sir Leo the Duke of Byron-on-shire, would be there, but no matter: His Excellency the Duke had scarcely passed his eleventh birthday and would be tucked somewhere out of sight the moment the first dance finished.

The decision that Alÿs would marry the Duke had been met with some small degree of shock and more than a few whispers behind exquisitely gloved hands. Alÿs was three years older than His Excellency, and some found an older woman with a younger man distressingly modern, even scandalous. But the union of the French and English royal houses carried with it no small advantages, and Alÿs, being the youngest of four siblings, was the most available to be sent off to a distant land for political purpose, so there it was. What could you do?

Such evenings were not without their charms. Alÿs had been looking forward to gossiping with the Lady Eleanor de Revier, the Queen’s favored lady-in-waiting. Alÿs had heard a rumor that Viscount Thomas Holland of Huntingdon was feuding with Baron William Marlboro, he of the bulbous red nose, over something involving the upcoming marriage of the good baron’s daughter. As a result, Holland was making noises about withdrawing his support for Marlboro’s son Bernard to attend the Academy of Military Arts, which would in all probability mean that the appointment would go to Richard, the son of the Duke of Barnstaple, instead. The Duke’s family was in good graces with the Baron of Harringworth, whose brother had just been killed in that dreadful war in Afghanistan that never seemed to end, so he would be bound to have a spirited opinion on the subject. Lady Eleanor would surely know every detail.

The zeppelin tilted up away from its mooring, making for the early evening sky. The city slipped away beneath them. Eleanor sidled up to Alÿs at the buffet to whisper hints of something even bigger than the developing feud between the Huntingdons and Marlboros. Something, she said, she had just learned about Charles Rathman, Earl of Shrewsbury, uncle to Her Most Royal Majesty and overseer of the evening’s festivities. Find me later, she giggled, and scurried away. Alÿs nodded, momentarily distracted by a minor kerfuffle at the far end of the buffet line, where an odd little man had set off a wave of tittering by picking up the wrong fork.

This was exactly the sort of gaffe that would, in more ordinary times, have attracted the sustained attention of Alÿs and the entire rest of the Court for days. For those born to the aristocratic class, silverware was a serious matter, rivaling in complexity the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica that Alÿs had struggled through with her frustrated tutors. It existed almost entirely as one of the many little rituals the upper crust of society created to separate themselves from the more beastly sorts of people, and only incidentally to assist in the pragmatic matter of conveying comestibles from plate to mouth.

But these were not usual times. The matter of the fork could not hope to compete with the matter of the Turks.

Margaret had personally invited Tahkir, the Ottoman ambassador, aboard her airship, setting many brows furrowing and many tongues wagging. He sat at the end of the table like some great exotic masthead carved in the prow of a ship, wearing an extraordinary outfit of yellow and blue, woven through with gold thread and decorated exquisitely with gemstones.

The ambassador smiled easily and often as he moved through the people, chatting with nobles and servants alike. Half a dozen members of his own personal guard surrounded him at all times, men with dark eyes and sleek black hair, who smiled far less often than the ambassador did. They too were dressed in robes of yellow and blue that set them apart from the Queen’s aristocratic guests in their opulent dresses and fashionable suits.

Alÿs looked forward to dancing with the ambassador later that evening. She had met him twice before at Margaret’s parties. She found him an excellent dancer and a charming conversationalist, always eager to listen to whatever she had to say, however trivial or gossipy. He seemed to take genuine delight in hearing her stories about her family back in France, about the goings-on in Margaret’s Court, and about anything else she wanted to talk about.

There was talk, though it was more whispered than spoken aloud, that Margaret planned to make an Ottoman a member of her Guard, an unprecedented departure from tradition that caused the narrowing of many eyes. Compared to that, the strange little man with his clumsy inability to navigate the tricky shoals of proper dinner etiquette became more footnote than main story.

The feast ended. The band assembled on the edge of the dance floor. Her Royal Highness and her guests moved to the airship’s Great Hall, where the members of the Court arrayed themselves under the curious eyes of the Ottomans.

Alÿs and her betrothed shared the first dance, as was the custom. The young Duke was a quick-witted lad with dark eyes and dark hair, only slightly taller than Alÿs herself. The Duke was a fine dancer, despite his age. Alÿs glowed with pleasure as they whirled together on the dance floor, soaking up the attention from the assemblage of aristocrats.

Alÿs noticed the man after her dance. The shoes caught her eye first: fetchingly designed, made of several different kinds of leather cunningly arrayed in a carefully crafted artifice of randomness. Metal points tipped each shoe, slightly upturned, in a style currently the rage back home in Paris.

The shoes were attached to the feet of the strange man who had very nearly used a dessert fork in place of a fruit fork, to his unending shame at this and every future Court function at which he might appear until the end of time.

She looked him up and down. He seemed to have been purpose-built as the exemplar of the word nondescript. Dark hair, dark eyes, not unlike the Ottomans standing to one side of the dance floor. Slight of build, with one of those faces that you forget the moment you look away.

She didn’t recall ever having seen him before this evening. That piqued her interest. She was intimately acquainted with all the members of the Queen’s Court and could tell you, were you of a mind to listen, their titles, crests, histories, and endless minutiae of who favored whom and who was most likely at a moment’s notice to challenge whom to a duel, the outcome of which would be talked about for weeks. She knew, to at least a casual level, the ever-changing swirl of consorts, attendants, squires, lackeys, and various hangers-on that buzzed around the noble families like a cloud of hopeful, gaily dressed flies. She knew the comings and goings of the ambassadors, lesser diplomats, and other functionaries who made their living operating the vast machinery of the state, and could even recognize in passing the couriers and servants whose jobs were likely to bring them in contact with civilization’s more refined elements.

And this man mystified her.

If there was one thing that intrigued the Lady Alÿs, it was a mystery. Preferably the sort of mystery that could be turned into a juicy bit of gossip of the sort that was the standard medium of exchange among her peers.

Who are you? she asked, emboldened by curiosity.

He bowed, looking flustered. I’m sorry, he said, I have—

It’s ‘I’m sorry, my lady,’ Alÿs said. And I insist, she added in a way that hinted darkly of unfortunate events to those who failed to obey—a strategy that cut straight through her combined disadvantages of stature and youth. I am Lady Alÿs de Valois, and I would very much like to make your acquaintance.

She offered her gloved hand. He reached out and shook her it in the manner of a carpenter or a fruit purveyor or some other member of the coarser classes. Alÿs was most thoroughly and astonishedly shocked.

I saw you at dinner earlier, she said when she had reclaimed her appendage. You seemed to be having difficulty managing your tableware. Who are you?

I am, that is… He hesitated. I am the second cousin once removed of the Earl of Glaucaster, visiting London from Canterbury, he said with the look of one reading from a script at an audition.

Oh? Charles has a cousin? I had no idea! Alÿs said mischievously. So you know his sister, Gertrude, then?

Of course! the strange little man said. Gertrude. Yes, of course, I know Gertrude well. Lovely woman.

His sister’s name is Francine, Alÿs said. She’s quite a nasty woman. Who are you really?

I told you! I’m—

I know what you told me, Alÿs said. I asked who you were.

The little man bowed awkwardly several times. I would love to stay and chat, but I must be off. Thank you, Your Eminen—Your Gr—that, is, um, m’lady, he said.

"Oh,