You’re reading my weekly serial The Mechanical Crown. Find out more here.
Previously: Tranton Seldon has exiled himself to the impassable Barrier Mountains, committed to finding a route to whatever lies on the far side. The endless storms and strange creatures that dwell on the peaks have other ideas…
New to the story? Jump to chapter 1
One step, then another. Left foot, right foot, pushing forwards, never looking back, never looking up. Leave it all behind. The impossible is such only if it’s allowed to be. Break it apart, make it small, one piece at a time, and don’t let anyone say that it can’t be done. Navigating the Barrier Mountains is impossible; taking the next step through the snow is manageable. Stack enough steps one after another and become a pioneer.
That’s how Tranton had always done things, and it had served him well.
Traversing from the smashed caravan towards the other shapes in the ceaseless blizzard demanded constant corrections, as the darker shapes vanished and reappeared in seemingly different positions, blurring and smearing in his vision. The sideways snowfall lanced this way and that, stabbing at his eyes, determined to disorient him. He’d captained ships across the Winfast Gap during storm season, but those journeys had never been as challenging as walking ten metres through the white. He could keep his legs under him as the deck of a ship tilts on a steep wave, but the wall of snow in the mountains left him vertiginous and nauseated.
He kept going, and came upon a chariot, designed for carrying perhaps two people. Struts protruding from the front indicated where horses would once have been tethered and the sides were shielded. A military vehicle, then. He touched its surface and again discovered an unnatural warmth which kept the snow from settling. The chariot was designed such that its riders could fire arrows while at speed. Tranton had a memory, vague and distant, of seeing pictures of such vehicles in a history book he’d read to Farah. She’d pored over them, wide-eyed, asking him all manner of questions to which he had not known the answers. The chariot was old.
Already he could see many more structures dotting the ice plain around him, clustered more closely; the first caravan he’d stumbled upon had been on the fringes of a convoy, perhaps lost in the storm and separated from the rest. Together it made for an odd, abandoned village of upturned and battered vehicles, anachronistic in their design, damaged but peculiarly preserved amongst the frost.
There was no food, no supplies or equipment that would be of use. Either it had rotted away over many years or the caravans and carts and wagons had been largely empty to begin with, perhaps having left somewhere in a hurry. It was hard to imagine, but perhaps the mountains had been less inhospitable when they had started their journey. Where the travellers had fallen next to their transport their bones were preserved, fresh snowfall turning to steam before settling. Strange that animals hadn’t taken the bodies away when they still were adorned with meat. A cool mist hung in the air, steam re-freezing and drifting down into the spaces between. Tranton was reminded of hot springs and geysers he’d visited on the edges of Safast’s vast desert plains, though absent of their sulphuric stink, and there seemed to be no cause for the anomaly. It wouldn’t be the first thing he’d seen in the mountains to evade a satisfying explanation.
Tranton tried never to trade in hope. It was hope that got people killed, made them complacent, led to poor decisions. He preferred to examine a situation, form a plan and attack it with sheer bloody-minded determination. It’s how he’d run his business and his marriage; successfully for the former, less so for the latter. The Barrier Mountains permitted no hope, so it had been fortunate that he needed none. Encountering the caravan, though, had produced a flicker: a slight anticipation.
He leaned back against the outside of one of the battered carriages, enjoying the steam as the ice melted from his clothes and warmth spread across his back. The temperature difference was slight, but to his chilled skin felt as hot as an oven. A hole was blasted in the carriage’s side, wooden panels broken and splayed inwards, as if something large had impacted upon it with force.
A glimpse of movement caught his eye. A shadow on white.
Other than the layers of snowfall, there was rarely motion in the mountains. The ground was white, the sky was white, and they stayed in place. A rabbit hopping from a burrow was a novelty. Anything larger than a deer was trouble. Even these caravans and chariots and carriages were locked to the place of their destruction. Movement meant life, which meant a hunt — the priority was to determine whether he was the hunter or the prey. He squinted against the glare and saw a four-legged shape in the distance, briefly visible before disappearing behind one of the ruined carts.
A wolf, and not one of the big bastards. A small wolf meant Tranton Seldon had a chance of a decent meal, and he’d been hungry for days.
He gripped the handle of his knife with his good hand and unsheathed it, always happy to feel its weight. He’d been a man of tools, and the mountains gave him scant opportunities to use those skills. His lost finger throbbed, called out to him from its resting place somewhere off in the distance, by now deep beneath the snowfall. Tranton only needed one hand to kill a wolf; it was considerably easier than a person.
The wolf reappeared, closer now but still a good twenty feet away, emerging from the glare and then receding into the pale white. Tranton readied the knife and began to close the distance.
Another wolf trotted out from behind a caravan to his right, stopped and looked at him, tail between its legs. Its ears twitched and it licked the sides of its jaw.
More of the creatures revealed themselves, some smaller and some bigger, all ragged and in a state of slow disintegration, visible wounds and scars across their bodies. He’d occasionally seen them hunt in pairs but had never a pack. Through the middle came a bigger shape, taller than the rest, broader, closer to the size of a horse than a dog. He’d sighted one of these once before, far off, hunting bears. The Barrier Mountains did something to the animals here; if the inhabitants of Hollanhead knew what lurked in the mountains above they’d never sleep again.
They didn’t know, and they weren’t there. That meant it wasn’t their problem, but it was his. Everyone else from back home had sensibly stayed on the peninsula by the shore, enjoying the beach, food and music.
Not for him. Not anymore.
A small knife wasn’t going to do the job, so he turned and ran towards the centre of the convoy of caravans. The pack responded, saw him moving and increased their pace, their growls sounding like the coordinated shouts of soldiers. He ran, the cold air whipping at his eyes, feet crunching hard into the packed snow and ice. He ran, the weight of layers of dead animals pushing down on his shoulders. The blizzard thinned and thickened, at times obscuring his outstretched arm, then clearing to reveal the wolves encircling him, closing tighter and tighter around him in a half-circle. Hunger-red eyes and flecks of spittle freezing at the edges of muzzles, teeth sharp and anticipatory, matted fur black and grey and thick with blood.
There was nowhere to go. No trees to climb, and the caravans were too shattered to offer shelter. From their positions and angles he seemed to be reaching what had been the front of the convoy.
The wolves were outpacing him, running in great galloping strides, relishing the pursuit, eager to feast upon this strange two-legged thing.
Beneath his feet the ground changed, the familiar compacting crunch of snow giving way to a darkened solidity: the ice cleared and he ran onto bare rock, as if emerging from a forest into a clearing. All around the air was filled with a fine mist, and snow turned to rain before it hit the surface. The same phenomenon as surrounded the caravans, but on a larger scale. The blizzard still raged around the edges, but he was running through a bubble of calm. A spiral pattern, spiked fingers of bare rock delineated by lingering snow, drew him towards a central point, his curiosity momentarily overwhelming his desperation. If he was about to be eaten, he’d like to have some answers first.
The wolves peeled out into a wider arc, reluctant to tread on the unnatural, warmer, ice-free ground. They surrounded him but didn’t approach, staying instead on the edge of the blizzard. He watched them from the corner of his eye as he kept moving, slowing his pace. No sense in running out the far side of whatever it was.
Colliding his foot with something low and hard, Tranton tumbled forwards and crunched onto the floor, losing his grip on his hunting knife, which skittered off across the rocks, and avoided breaking his skull only by the cushioning of his furs. As he rolled and scrabbled back to his feet, thinking perhaps that he’d run into one of the wolves, he discovered instead a metal chest, its lid ajar. The pattern of meltwater on the ground emanated from the chest’s position.
Sat on their haunches, the wolves watched and waited.
The chest was plain, with a broken clasp and handles on either end. It was unremarkable, save for being found atop the Barrier Mountains in the midst of a blizzard, resting on a patch of unfrozen rock. Acutely aware of the ring of wolves, he lifted the lid and peered inside: trinkets and jewels, gold engraved boxes, pocket-watches and other items which he didn’t recognise. An oddly curated selection of objects of presumably some significant value to their owner. The chest must have been carried ahead of the caravans, perhaps when they encountered whatever calamity had befallen them. A last attempt at survival.
At the edge of the mists stalked the alpha wolf, huge and imposing, more a beast from myth than an ordinary animal. If it stood on its hind legs it would easily tower over Tranton. It placed a tentative paw onto the clear rock, its determination to reach its prey overcoming its fear of the unnatural space.
Grabbing at some of the heavier objects inside the chest, he hurled them one after another in the direction of the wolf. The first missed; the second hit its nose. The alpha snarled and hesitated, surprised that its next meal was capable of putting up a fight. Tranton kept throwing, though his supply of projectiles was finite and fast dwindling.
One of the items he took from the chest caught his attention: short, about the length of his outstretched hand, metal and cylindrical with an inlaid leather grip, a small, weighted, spherical shape on one end and what looked to be a belt clip on the other. It may have once been attached to a blade, but was now no more than a hilt: precisely engineered but ultimately useless. Its diameter was such that it could at the very least be shoved firmly into a wolf’s eye socket.
The hilt settled into his grip, feeling unexpectedly comfortable and well-balanced, and he found himself desiring to hold onto it, not to fling it at the nearest beast. There would be something else he could toss, something less satisfying that he wouldn’t mind losing. Everything about the object drew his attention, such that he had to force himself back to the situation at hand: the alpha was advancing, tentatively entering the mist, disturbed by the steam and clear rocks but determined to get its quarry.
A sequence of clicks were inaudible through his layered head coverings but he felt them in his hand, coming from the object he still held. A mechanism somewhere inside it, and then the spherical end was reconfiguring itself, tiny filaments of metal sliding aside to reveal an opening from which burst a blade, ratcheting out piece-by-piece, shards of polished metal interlocking with a precision that hid the seams, almost taking his head off as it assembled itself. One edge of the blade folded out and expanded in a further complex series of movements, sculpting a scimitar curve.
Tranton stood, astonished, wielding a weapon which had not existed moments earlier. Two additional components emerged perpendicular to the hilt between the grip and the blade, forming a cross-guard. Given its construction the blade should have been flimsy, weak, riddled with break points, but it felt as would a single piece of forged steel. If he’d been holding the hilt the other way around he would have saved the wolf pack a whole lot of trouble. Another half-formed memory from a history book flitted past and he pushed it away, lifting his attention to the alpha wolf.
He grinned behind his face mask, a child with a new toy, the unused muscles in his face creaking at the effort.
Adjusting his posture, he shifted the blade in his hand. It was long enough to be a two-handed grip but his off-hand was still wrapped in cloth and throbbing from his increased heart rate.
Thinking him distracted by the alpha, a smaller wolf charged from the mists, leaving no time for Tranton to be picky about his strategy. He brought the sword up awkwardly, still feeling its weight and finding himself hampered by his unwieldy footwear and thick clothing. The wolf barrelled into him and clamped its teeth around his free arm but failed to break through the furs to his skin. He lifted the blade and drove it down through the wolf’s neck, and then it was still, blood filling the gaps where the snow refused to settle.
Another came at him and he succeeded in spearing it through its gaping maw, tearing it a new gash from head to belly. The sword was sharp, frighteningly so, far more than a blade that had been sat in a chest up a mountain had any right to be.
The other creatures paused, wary now.
He took a moment to adjust his hold and correct his posture. Much better.
The scarred alpha wolf emerged from the steam, walking towards Tranton, slowly, carefully, not making the mistake of its comrades.
“Hello there,” Tranton said, his voice strange and loud in his ears. “You’re a big one.”
The wolf snarled.
Tranton hefted the sword, turning it to catch the light. “You see this?” He nodded towards the blade. “This is my magic sword. I just found it. It’s my new favourite thing.” He tilted the tip of the blade towards the wolf. “You don’t have one.”
Starting a new serial was a good opportunity to redesign some of the presentation. Hence the new intro area, and the chapter numbering. I avoided chapter numbering with Tales from the Triverse as it didn’t really add useful information. TMC is split much more obviously into seasons/parts, so I thought I’d try out [season.chapter]. We’ll see how it goes.
Did you see the eclipse on Wednesday? We didn’t have any of the fancy glasses so resorted to casting a shadow onto white card using a colander. This is apparently a thing that is done.
That cut-out segment of moon-shadow moved from the right edge of the circle, over the top, and out to the left. I have to admit to being impressed, and have newfound respect for colanders. I’m still going to drain vegetables through it, though, to make sure it doesn’t get delusions of grandeur.
I loved this note from Naomi Alderman earlier this week:
This is absolutely the case and it works in reverse as well: as a writer, I love the regular habit of writing and sending out this newsletter. It’s helped me become more productive while still being able to concentrate on the kind of writing I love doing. I’ve never felt the need to cater for a particular audience like so many YouTube channels. The newsletter scene seems much more civilised.
As someone who struggles with writing about landscapes, I appreciated this:
Also, puns:
OK, keep reading if you’re a paid subscriber for some behind-the-scenes author notes.
Thanks, everyone!
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