Aldric Gearwright's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The boy on the workshop table had six hours of breath left, and Aldric Gearwright's power gauge sat at a quarter full. He knew because he had built the gauge, and he had built the boy's failing lungs, and he had built the small brass bellows that pushed air through what remained of his son's chest. None of it would matter without more steam. A full-body augmentation needed pressure his coal furnace could not give. His son had come home from the war in a crate. Aldric had promised him he would walk again. He intended to keep that promise before morning. He crossed the workshop and pulled the tarp off the pressure tanks he had spent three months building. Three polished canisters, a central gauge, copper piping bent by his own mechanical hand. The belt rig would strap to his son's waist and feed the new limbs directly. Empty, it weighed nothing. Full, it could run a man for a year. He had no way to fill it here. Aldric shrugged his steampunk robe over his shoulders and took up his copper-pipe staff. He kissed the boy's forehead through the shadow of his hood. "One trip," he said. "Then we begin." The capped geyser stood two miles out on the ridge, wrapped in riveted iron plate, leaking white mineral crust down its stone base. Townsfolk called it cursed and left it alone. Aldric called it a battery. The problem was the wheel valve at its side. It took four men to turn, and he had come alone. He had not come alone. He had brought bait. The geckagriff waited at the tree line where he had staked it that morning, horse-sized, feathered down the spine, its bearded-dragon jaw working on a haunch of goat. Aldric approached with his mechanical hand open and empty. The beast clicked its beak once. He fitted the harness over its neck and rigged the chain to the valve wheel. "Walk," he said, and struck the flank with the flat of his staff. The geckagriff pulled. The chain sang. The wheel groaned, held, then turned. Steam screamed from the release port in a white column that bent the trees. Aldric snapped the coupling of his belt tanks onto the feed pipe. The gauges climbed. Red. Redder. The needles pinned. He shut the valve before the tanks split. All three canisters sat heavy on his back now, hissing softly, hot through the leather. Enough pressure for the surgery. Enough for his son to walk. He ran the geckagriff back down the ridge at a trot. Halfway home, he saw the smoke. Not chimney smoke. Black, thick, wrong. It rose from the direction of his workshop. Aldric kicked the beast into a gallop. The tanks jostled against his spine, full of the only power in the world that could save the boy, and every second closer, the smoke grew taller.