Episode Price: Pay-what-you-can

Episode 1

Everyone Dies

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The day the ringmaster died, so did civilization.

Knowing nothing of what was to come, we complained of boredom as the ship steamed from Bombay* to Boston. There was little to do except rehearse, drink, and gamble over cards. Everything tasted of salt, and bathing in seawater anointed us all with the perfume of dead fish. A plague of short temper spread through the troupe. I had no friends among them, so I took pleasure at seeing them snarl at each other like fighting dogs.

A three-day bout of seasickness* soured the ringmaster's disposition further. Though Mr. Loyale's health seemed to recover, his temper didn't. When Miss Miller (The Fabulous Lady Equestrienne Who Defies The Fiery Rings of Death!) declared her intention to begin her dress rehearsal without him, her expression was promising.

Promising that if Mr. Loyale berated her for not waiting, he'd better hope a gelding knife wasn't to hand.

Promising a fine show for us.

#

On the ship, "Aether's Bounty," the Atlantic Ocean.

"If anyone sees Mr. Loyale," Lacey Miller said to the group playing poker by the rail, "please inform him that I'm rehearsing." She walked away, her polished riding boots clicking across the deck.

The ringmaster had said they'd meet at sixth bell. * She'd warmed her horses up before she went through the ship asking about the absent ringmaster. She wouldn't let them suffer, waiting with their saddles on, simply because he wasn't going to show.

Mr. Loyale didn't appreciate her skills; it would surprise nobody that he disrespected her by showing up late. Why, when she wished to buy a new pair of matched Arabian yearlings to train, he'd as good as said that equestrian shows had lost their novelty and the future of the circus lay elsewhere. A hot ball of anger flared up inside her. A lady never loses her temper, she heard her mother say, in memory. Lacey kept her back straight and her walk smooth. The heavy skirts of her riding habit swirled around her ankles. She raised her chin slightly, balancing the weight of the heavy chignon she'd swept her blonde hair up in. She brushed her fingers across her riding hat, checking that it tipped forward to precisely the right angle and that the hatpin still anchored it securely. Always check your appearance before a show.

Behind her, she heard the flutter of cards being shuffled back into the pack. A low whistle alerted other performers that something was going on.* The whistle repeated along the length of the ship. The monkeys out for their daily promenade chattered excitedly when their handler changed their routine, heading after her. The shuffle of feet on the deck told her that others followed. Let them. She didn't mind an audience, she told herself, though her stomach knotted.*

She'd been raised to be a proper lady, but that didn't mean she would back down to a bully.*

Lacey climbed down into the hold, where the poor animals huddled in their cages. The monkeys were among the lucky ones: small and nimble enough to be taken out, tame enough to be trusted on deck. And when the aerialists allowed the monkeys to play among their ropes, the creatures made a delightful spectacle.

The lion snarled half-heartedly at Lacey as she passed, more a complaint about his circumstances than anything personal, and then rested his chin back on his paws.

The camels felt well enough to be mean about it, smelly, ill-tempered beasts that they were. One worked his jaw preparatory to spitting; Lacey darted past. By a muffled curse behind her, she guessed the camel had found another target among those who'd followed her down. She smothered a grin.*

The new aether-powered elephant they'd acquired in India loomed in the darkness of the hold. Brass capped the ends of the monstrous elephant bones and linked to shining ball-and-socket joints. In place of muscle and tendon, it had rod and piston. Metal pipes drilled into bone and conducted the aether * to glass storage tubes. The elephant golem fueled itself. Lacey had to admire the efficiency, though the use of bone aether to golem dead creatures caused her to shudder.

Bad enough that the living might be strapped into golem harnesses and forced to labor with strength granted from the consumption of their vital energies. That even death was no escape. . . .

Lacey hastened past the elephant golem to her horses, stabled together near the edge of the makeshift ring. She expected the tardy ringmaster to be waiting for her there, but she kept her eyes on her horses, caressing their heads and feeding them a couple of sugar cubes, strengthening herself for what was to come.

She heard discontented whispers from the people who had followed her down into the hold. Time for the show.

Lacey paced forward to the darkened ring. Brass piping connected aether lamps spaced around the perimeter of the ring. Lacey bent and flipped a toggle to release fire aether into the pipe, and then struck a match to light the source lamp. The aether conducted the fire from the source, dividing its heat and lumina * among the outer lamps. Around the ring, they flared to pale light.

The ring was empty. The crowd behind Lacey grumbled with dissatisfaction. Maybe they'd also been anticipating Mr. Loyale--expecting him to be waiting to admonish her for being late, when she'd been looking for him. After a moment of readjusting her expectations, Lacey squared her shoulders and went to the side of the hold. Ropes snaked down from the shadows above and looped around a heavy iron ring that served as an anchor, keeping aerial props and equipment high in the shadows above until needed. Mr. Loyale had booked passage on a steamship with a hold nearly as deep as the circus' main tent was high, to allow for practice inside.

Lacey unwound the jeff* to lower the Fiery Rings of Death! They wouldn't be fiery until her actual performance. * None of them were so foolish as to have uncontained fire in the hold of a ship.

The loop of rope slithered up and snapped taut against its new limit. Behind Lacey, the hoops plummeted down. Somebody screamed. Lacey whirled to look at the group of onlookers. One of the albino twins pressed his hand to his mouth as if to call back the scream, his pink eyes wide. The aerialists tensed, rising to their toes. The Indian mahout* cast a quick glance around the hold and returned to staring at her--no, past her--along with the rest. The acrobats looked ready to flip backward. The snake charmer stood statue-still, the only motion the slow movement of Samson, the baby boa draped across her shoulders.

The fortune teller slowly raised one ring-heavy finger to point at the hoops. A prickling sensation ran along Lacey's spine, and she pivoted to look.

A dark figure swayed between the shining hoops. Their ropes crisscrossed around his neck, suspending Mr. Loyale above the rink he'd ruled in life. A macabre boutonniere of blood flowered from his chest, and liquid of uncertain provenance oozed drop by drop from the tips of his boots.

"I suppose Mr. Loyale will not be joining me for my rehearsal after all," Lacey said faintly, stunned by the gruesome puppet dangling above the ring.

A scuffling noise came from the crowd as a short man of middling years with a plain face and a calm demeanor pushed through to the front. "The ringmaster said he wanted to discuss my act. He wanted to meet at the fourth bell." He hesitated. "It seemed urgent, but he never showed."

"Thank you, Ginger," Lacey told the man, whose nickname came not from his current unremarkable coif, but from the fiery orange wig he wore while clowning. Ginger nodded and faded back into the crowd. He seemed to only come alive in the ring, as if he folded up his personality and tucked it away along with the wig and face paint.

Lacey looked at the other performers. They stared back.

"We'll get Doc," a voice piped up from the back of the crowd.

Lacey squinted into the shadows. One of the conjoined sisters had spoken. She wasn't sure which one. The sisters seemed to be waiting for something. Lacey jerked her head in an awkward nod. The sisters left, running in lockstep, their arms wrapped around each other's waists.

A midget stepped forward and crossed his arms over his chest. "It ain't right to just leave him there." He frowned up at Lacey as if he expected her to do something about it.

"That's so," his wife said, a matching scowl on her small face.

Goaded, Lacey said, "He's hanging about a foot too high for me to untangle him!" She scanned the crowd. "Hark, can you get him down?"

The enormous black strongman stepped into the ring and cocked his head. "Yes. Push up on his legs. Too much weight on the ropes."

Hark's massive frame dwarfed Lacey when he stood beside her. She wrapped her arms around the corpse's knees and lifted. Foul liquid oozed over her arms. She breathed through her mouth to avoid the smells of death. It was no worse than mucking out stalls, she told herself. No worse, and just as necessary.

Hark unwound the ropes from around Mr. Loyale's puffed-up neck. He caught the weight of the body as it fell. Lacey released her hold and staggered backwards. Cradling the corpse as gently as if it were his own baby, Hark stood.*

The conjoined sisters trotted back into the hold, pulling Doc behind them. He took one look and shook his head. "Too dark. Bring him up."

Above decks, the blood seeping through Mr. Loyale's shirt showed clearly in the afternoon sunlight. Doc bent over the body. What began as a quick exam slowed once he'd removed the shirt and bared the corpse's torso to the light. He inspected Mr. Loyale's mouth, surveyed his arms, ankles, and calves, felt under his chin, and pressed his fingers into Mr. Loyale's armpits.

As word spread through the ship, it drew others to the little tableau. The ring of watchers grew two, three, four deep, and kept growing until all the members of the circus* crowded onto the deck: freaks and geeks, aerialists and clowns, canvasmen and hostlers, blacksmiths and carpenters, costumers and cooks, musicians and games riggers, contortionists and fortune tellers, tumblers and gymnasts, museum keepers and ticket takers, food butchers and roustabouts.

"Did anyone see him recently?" Doc asked.

"He stopped by the card game and watched for a bit," a candy butcher* said.

"When was that?"

"When I had a full house, aces high, and the damn albino beat me with four of a kind--twos! Who holds onto twos!?"*

Lacey narrowed her eyes, giving him her best "boss stallion" look.

"I don't know when! All the damn days are the same at sea!" He squinted. "It was a couple of hands before the elephant keeper came up from the engine room. That hand I won with two pair."

The Indian mahout said, speaking carefully in his heavily accented English, "I am coming up after I hear the fourth bell."

"Probably you saw Mr. Loyale right before he died," Doc told the candy seller. "How did he look?"

"Kinda sleepy looking, I guess. Pale. Tired. I figured he was still recovering from the seasickness. He seemed in good enough spirits. Winked at me to wish me luck before he left."

"Hmph," Doc muttered. "Well, what killed him was being stabbed." He spread his fingers over the wound on the corpse's chest. "I'd have to cut him open to see what kind of knife did it. Since I don't want to get arrested--" a wry smile twisted up the edges of his lips, "--again, it'll have to wait for the coroner."

"Who would do that?" said Hark, the strongman. "He helped many of us when we needed it most."

Nobody else spoke up to defend the dead man. They shuffled back a bit, looking at their neighbors to see what they'd say--and then, really looking at their neighbors as it sank in that the murderer was one of their own.

Doc looked up at Hark. "He helped some of us, yes. And he fought with us, and tampered with our acts, and pushed us to do things we would rather not, and generally made himself unpleasant. He was, in short, the ringmaster. I don't know what we'll do without him. Or without the circus."

Most circusfolk couldn't make it as townies.* A freak worth paying to see in a sideshow would fare poorly without the protective air of the exotic granted by the circus. A performer who'd trained for years to master his art would wither if forced to unskilled labor. Others had their own reasons to keep moving.

Lacey saw the moment the fear took them, as she would see a skittish horse tense before bolting. Instinctively she moved to intervene.

"Everyone dies sometime," she said, "but it doesn't mean the end!" She cast about. "The backers! We'll telegraph them once we reach Boston. Surely they won't want to waste their investment. They'll hire another ringmaster, and the circus will go on!"

The crowd paused, still prepared to bolt but willing to listen.

"What about the coppers*?" the skeleton man called, looking ready to fade back behind the chimney stack he leaned against.

"That must...depend on what the investors demand," she temporized.*

Doubt lingered on a few faces, but they drifted apart instead of bolting.

"What will you do with Mr--with the body?" Lacey asked Doc, once the crowd dispersed. She felt an odd reluctance to leave him alone with the corpse--or, perhaps, to leave the corpse alone with him.

"We're docking at Boston sometime tonight?"

She nodded.

"I'll take him down to the engine room, then, and put him in the aether containment chamber. The influence of the flux bottle will stir his bone aether to greater vitality. It will keep his flesh from degrading, at least until we dock."

"Is that safe?" she asked, astonished.

He smiled a crooked smile. "For a living man, certainly not. After a factory explosion, I once--. Ah, but that tale isn't fit for ladylike ears. Suffice it to say that for a dead man, secondhand exposure for a few hours should cause no troubles."

"Once we arrive in Boston, we can telegraph the investors. They will know what we ought to do," Lacey said. It was almost a prayer.

#

The Mountains of East Tennessee

It began with an imperfection in a handblown glass tube*. The join of the stopcock made the small air bubble nigh-invisible. The new assistant assigned to maintain the lab didn't notice a thing. Likely, he was regretting having agreed to take a position in the remote mountains of East Tennessee. The town nearby wasn't what anyone would call lively. Most of the young girls had moved to the cities for paying jobs in factories. The ones who remained weren't the brightest or the most beautiful, and they all had relatives with shotguns.

The imperfection hardly mattered, but it had gone unnoticed for a month, allowing the slow leak of fire aether to form an invisible bubble that floated and danced in the assistant's wake, now behind him, now ahead.

The assistant opened the exterior door to the aether enrichment chamber, and then hesitated. Beyond the interior door, the enriched aether was stored. He could not resist the urge to peek.

And even that would not have caused serious harm, except to any potential progeny of the assistant, if he had not squinted at the interior, decided it needed a closer look, and struck a match to light his lamp--too close to the invisible bubble of fire aether.

#

Nearby

Mina trudged home. It was the last year her parents could afford to send her to school. She planned to treasure every bit of it, even the long walk back. At the Culhane farm, she stopped to pet the farm cats that lingered near the fence.

After one last scratch behind the ears of a raggedy tom, she straightened and looked up--as the sky exploded in spreading whiteness. Mina clapped her hands over her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Then sound like a thunderclap picked her up and threw her off the path to tumble down the mountain. She came to rest in a trickle of water in a shallow gorge. Blackness took her. She never felt the rocks bouncing down the scree and striking her body.*

#

40 Miles West of Topeka, Kansas

Gerhardt Yoder straightened from cutting hay and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. Only a few more hours to sundown, and then he could enjoy a beer cooled in the spring. He looked across his field with pride. He and his sons had worked hard: his cattle would not go hungry this winter. Life in the new country was good.

Light flashed in the East, bright as if another sun was rising. He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand. The brilliant whiteness rolled closer. He couldn't bear to look at it directly for more than a few seconds. When his sons were small, he'd bought a circle of smoked glass from a peddler so that the family could watch the eclipse. He wished for it now.

Closer.

It moved faster than any cloud. The storm grew at an uneven rate, suddenly expanding forward or to one side as if it had hit a pocket of accelerant. Streaks of lightning crossed the sky, and where they led, the brilliant whiteness followed.

Gerhardt sensed that the others had stopped working as well, but he didn't scold them. In snatched glances before his eyes burned and watered, he saw tornado funnels of whiteness reaching down. In the distance, smoke.

"Fire!" he shouted. "I think the Johansen farm. Come! We hitch the horses and go. Wilhelm, get shovels. Johan, axes."

"Wait!" Johan said, pointing. "There are more!"

Other columns of smoke rose where the twisters touched down. The leading edge of the white storm approached Gerhardt's farm. Even the crickets in the field grew silent. A sizzle and snap made the hairs on Gerhardt's arms stand on end. When he looked up, lightning arched across the sky over his field like a cathedral dome. A vortex of fire reached down.

"Run!" Gerhardt shouted.

Mercifully, the intense heat from the fire killed him before he realized that he did not die alone.

#

Denver, Colorado

Mrs. Du Voix (Marcella Simmons, according to her identification papers) surveyed her "guests" with lidded eyes. Half her gift was timing. Three women and one man sat around the table. They held hands to form a circle, their eyes closed, their expressions anticipatory. Almost ready, Mrs. Du Voix thought. The drapes shrouding the windows provided the perfect atmosphere--though more light seeped through than she expected.

She made a mental note to order heavier drapes from the seamstress, though she kept her outer expression tranquil. "Oh, Sister Lucia Magdalene," she intoned, "come to me. Aid us to communicate with our dearly departed. Share with us the wisdom of those beyond the veil!"

Really, the light was too bright.

"I feel Sister Lucia entering me!" she cried. The hands holding hers jerked satisfactorily in surprise. This would be a good session, she thought--and then she did feel something.*

Her eyes sprang open. Brilliant light streamed through the heavy drapes. Her back arched. Her mouth gasped in a paroxysm of pain. She felt her bones expand, radiance pouring out of them and into her flesh at an unbearable rate.

Around her, her clients thrashed, caught in spasms of their own.

"Have mercy!" she croaked, fearing that a powerful spirit had taken offense at her deceptions. She hoped it would release her.

Instead, she felt her heart rate accelerate like a runaway horse. Blood vessels burst beneath her skin. Trails of blood oozed from her nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. And then the almost-famous spiritualist Mrs. Du Voix achieved her final, permanent communion with the departed.

#

On the outskirts of Augusta, Georgia

The sun beat down on Jacob's neck as he bent and heaved a massive boulder out of the ground. Sweat beaded on his dark skin and trickled across the brass and leather aether harness he wore. He hated the thing with all his heart. After the war, when he got his freedom, he'd sworn he'd never put it on again.

The night his master said he had to work for another year, he and his wife--and the two of their children who hadn't been sold away yet--bundled up what little they had and stole away in the night. They hid in the woods until they stumbled across a group of freed slaves building their own town.

In Freeville, they scratched a living out of soil so poor that no whites contested them for it. They built themselves a one-room house, ate what they could grow and raise and trade for, and dressed in cast-offs, but they had very little money. When they could, they went to Augusta to buy or barter for necessities.

Life got harder when Augusta passed Black Codes*. Only the ex-slaves with workpapers from a white master were allowed in town. Jacob still wouldn't put the aether harness back on.

It wasn't worth it, he argued to the other free blacks who thought it was the only way. The harness stole the aether from their bones to provide extra vitality to their muscles--at the cost of years of their life, and weakness in their old age. And the harness could control them. They might as well be slaves again!

But when Jacob and his wife's new baby was born, it was weak and fitful and in need of proper doctoring, doctoring that cost money.

Jacob carried the boulder over to the cart, tumbled it in, and walked, at his own pace, to the next large rock. The overseer gave him a dirty look but made no threat. Jacob smiled to himself. At least that had changed.

The overseer's expression grew confused, then fearful. Jacob looked over his shoulder. A vast white cloud expanded towards them from three sides, glittering like mica in the sunlight.

"Boss, what--" he began. He stopped. The overseer was plainly as pig-ignorant as he.

When had an overseer provided help anyway? Jacob touched his charm bag, squared his shoulders, and prepared to take it, whatever "it" might be.

The sky went white. His aether harness tightened around his chest as if it were a living thing. Jacob felt a tug on his bones that he recognized as the harness spindling bone aether out to power his muscles. He gasped and tensed. The power flooded his body. Then the flow reversed. Energy poured into him, until his whole body vibrated with it. He threw back his head and howled. The cascade of energy didn't stop. The harness tried to store all that power--and failed. It funneled the excess into his flesh. His muscles all convulsed simultaneously. Pain radiated through him where the overload fired his muscles so strongly that they tore away from bone and ligament. His face locked into a rictus, his eyes wide and staring at the sky. He fell to the ground. Shuddering gasps and groans provided the accompaniment to his pain. Some of them came from his throat, and some, not.

Thrashing like a fish drowning in air, he flopped onto his side. The overseer had crumpled to the ground, dead or unconscious. Convulsions like Jacob's wracked one of the other harnessed freedmen. The second had died in his traces, withered down to half his size in only a few minutes. If Jacob had had control over his muscles, he would have flinched. Instead, he writhed on the ground and prayed for the pain to end.

#

Boston, Massachusetts

William McCormack's legs ached and his feet throbbed. He'd walked all day looking for a place that might hire him. His father had died in the last sickness that spread through the slums, but William wasn't big enough to take his place canal-building. When he'd tried to get a job as a newspaper hawker, the other boys chased him away with cries of, "Stinking Paddy!"

Across the street, he saw a sign in the window of a butcher shop saying "Help Wanted." He trotted over, lured by the scent of sausages on the breeze. If he worked there, maybe the butcher would let him take scraps home sometimes.* He was at the door, hand raised to knock, when he saw the smaller sign in the window: "No Irish Need Apply."*

Shoulders slumped, he plodded away, his dreams of sausages evaporating.

His mam's shift in the crystal workshop at Peacock Chandeliers ended soon. The supervisor, Mr. Roger, wasn't a bad man. He'd let William sit at the edge of the shop floor and wait for his mam, so long as William kept quiet and didn't get in the way. Mr. Roger kept candy in his pocket, and he gave a piece to each child worker at the end of their shift. Sometimes William would get a wrapped molasses taffy or a piece of horehound candy* at shift change, too.

The waiting list for jobs in the crystal workshop grew longer each time a new shipful of immigrants docked. Conditions were much better than at some of the other factories. Twenty minutes for lunch, a row of thick glass blocks near the ceiling letting in plenty of light, a fan to keep the heat bearable. Mr. Roger wasn't the kind to take personal liberties with the workers, either.

William slipped inside the noisy factory and found his way to the crystal workshop. His mam glanced across at him and smiled, but her fingers never stopped flying as she fished a crystal prism from the basket on her table, hooked it onto a short chain, and draped the chain over a hook on the slow-moving conveyor that snaked its way past the work tables. At the end of the conveyor, children plucked the hanging prisms and attached them to loops on child-high chandelier skeletons. They spun the chandeliers* this way and that, to make sure no crystals were missing--and perhaps to send rainbows cavorting across the workshop.

Mr. Roger looked down from his glass-windowed office up above the shop floor, where he could watch all that went on. Though he didn't come out and chase William away, he didn't smile either. No candy today, William thought. That was okay. All he really wanted was to rest.

William sat near the door, his back to the wall. He drew up his knees, pillowed his head on his arms, and closed his eyes.

He woke slowly from a dream in which person after person turned him down for a job as his face grew hotter and hotter. Awake, the heat was real enough. White light blazed through the glass blocks above, illuminating the factory floor with unbearable clarity and bleaching the crystal-cast rainbows to invisibility.

White-hot brightness flashed like lightning inside his eyes, blotting out everything else. Pain swept through him with prickling heat. He fell to the ground, screaming. Around him, he heard other people crying out and sharp cracking sounds that he couldn't identify. Something sharp cut his cheek. He struggled against the pain and pushed himself up to his knees. A bang! rattled the workshop and hurled him to the ground.

The horrible, painful brightness faded, leaving blindness in its wake. William pushed himself up to hands and knees. He swayed. Standing seemed impossible. If he had to crawl, he would.

His vision seeped back, though he stared at the world through a heavy veil. Everything was black and shades of gray. Slowly, he understood what he looked at. A hole gaped where a wall had stood. Rubble was strewn across the workshop. The workers lay like tantrum-tossed dolls. Only a handful struggled to push themselves up.

Across the room, the heavy worktable his mother sat behind had crashed to the side. He couldn't see her. Glimmering crystal shards were strewn across the floor, their beauty promising only pain. He crawled toward his mother's table, picking his way around the fallen, careful where he placed his hands and knees. He tried not to look at the dead workers, but he could not keep himself from studying their faces. Blood ran from their eyes, their nose, their ears, but he stared at each one until he knew: not his mam.

Halfway there, he saw her. She huddled in a crumpled heap under the heavy weight of the worktable. He pushed himself to his feet to run to her, but on the first step, his muscles gave way. He fell and hit the ground with bruising force.

He crawled faster, no longer choosing his way but simply plowing through. The crystal shards cut into his palms and his knees. It hurt, but the anticipatory, waiting-to-unfold pain in his heart overwhelmed it.

"Mam!" he said, when he reached her. "Mam, it's William! Mam, look at me!" He cradled her head with bloody hands.

When she opened her eyes to look at him and managed a faint smile, he knew everything could still be all right. "Hello--." A frown crossed her face. "Can't--breathe." She gasped for air. "Too--heavy."

William pushed against the worktable, but he couldn't budge it.

He crawled to the doorway of the factory and pulled himself up to stand. Bodies sprawled in the street, but nobody moved.

"Hello, can somebody help?" he called. "Please, my mother is trapped! Please help! Is anybody there?"

He held his breath, but all he heard were the soft whimpers and moans coming from the factory behind him.

#

Meanwhile, the igniting aetheric wave swept past Boston and over the Atlantic Ocean, where a steamship called Aether's Bounty traveled unknowingly into it.

(To be continued in Episode 2, The Great Boston Pyre...)

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