“How would a man change his face? By means of necromancy, that is.” I dubiously eyed the boiler on the steam crane as I fastened the hook to the giant brass-bound box, thin orichalcum wires burnt deep into its wooden sides. After seeing firebox-powered boilers on Istros riverboats, a purely coal-powered boiler seemed primitive, especially considering that Xarakel was home to at least a dozen master wizards that I had met in the previous three days.

  “You mean, putting on a dead man’s face?” The nameless master’s eyebrows lifted. “I would not like to transplant a face—it is very difficult to remove intact, and even if you do, there are five dozen points of attachment to get the muscles all lined up if you want full prosthetic control.”

  “Five dozen?” I asked. The steam crane chuffed as I pulled a lever, the box wobbling as it rose, the whole thing the size of a coffin for a draft horse. Johann took two prudent steps away from the mechanism.

  “Yes—I made an artificial face once.” The nameless master glanced across the river and shook his head. “The most fiddly mechanical work I ever did. Not worth it.”

  I looked across the Tanais River to the white tower of Sharkel on the opposite side, the city already waking even though the sun had not yet risen, and took a guess at why the nameless master would have glanced across the river when thinking about whether or not his work had been worthwhile. “Was it a prosthetic for a client?”

  “Oh, no,” the nameless master said. “I hoped to impress a young woman in town.”

  “She wasn’t impressed?” I asked as I undogged the wheel and began to swing the crane over the river. Poorly lubricated gears ground loudly, broadcasting a lack of maintenance.

  “She was, but matters ended poorly anyway. Not worth it.” The nameless master let out an exasperated sigh. “Untalented women are often impressed by any little bauble. I imagine yours jumped in your bed as soon as you put the smallest bit of enchantment on that bit of amethyst she wears—I am guessing you used a basic love charm to bespell her. Very much more efficient than my wooing effort.”

  “I would ask you not to insult Captain Borova,” I said stiffly as I locked the wheel back in place, glancing around with sudden concern born of two causes. First, Katya might have been somewhere within earshot, and while she could not practically deny to our present host that we were engaged in fraternization, she would surely dislike the crude characterization of our relationship if she had heard it; I was concerned for the nameless master’s safety. Second, I had not been aware that Katya’s necklace was enchanted; she had gotten it off a dead Wallachian rebel. What if it was cursed? Or what if it had carried a love charm, and her subsequent fondness for me had been born entirely of artifice?

  The first part of the worry abated slightly when I did not see any signs of Katya’s nearby presence; only rational reasoning helped to push away the second part of my worry. Katya had worn the necklace for years without any apparent ill effects. And she did not wear it every second of every day; I had plenty of occasions to see her without it, and those occasions had frequently included affectionate moments. No, surely the magic on the necklace was something innocuous. Perhaps a protective charm, though the death of its first owner suggested any protective properties had proven insufficient.

  “Magnificat, are you listening?” The nameless master’s question cut into my thought-filled reverie. “Are you ready, or do you want to try a different spot before you drop the line?”

  I looked out at the water, murky rippling currents making it difficult to see the bottom below, then realized the problem that the teacher’s question was aimed at. “Oh, I see, there’s a rock there. That would make the trap land unevenly. Thank you for speaking up before I lowered the trap.”

  The nameless master looked at me, his right eye squeezing shut as he scowled. “I have never met a diviner who works as subtly as you do. Perhaps it is that your aura is so completely unmasked that small magics may as well be completely masked… Minificat, has he told you about any of his divination techniques?”

  “He does read tea leaves,” Johann volunteered. “Uncannily well. And—”

  I shot an angry glance at Johann. I didn’t like reading tea leaves, and calling me skilled at such an art seemed to inevitably lead to either requests or mockery. I hoped the nameless master wouldn’t ask me to show him how much superstitious nonsense I had learned about the dubiously nonmagical art of reading tea leaves. While I had managed to keep that training hidden for the first part of my military career as a mechanic, my accidental promotion to steam knight squad leader had not come long before a certain little old peasant lady had wandered into the camp set by the task force and asked me to show what she’d drummed into my head to General Ognyan Spitignov.

  I’d read his past, present, and future: A wronged woman betrayed, her soul unrestful. Found by and loyally following a man with a hole the shape of an egg where his heart should be. A dragon, and the cup cracking under the force of the man’s brutish grip, signifying the end. All nonsense, of course, just a parsing of the blobs at the bottom of a teacup. It wasn’t as if Ivan Ivanovich, his nominal subordinate and his main handler on behalf of the saner elements of Emperor Koschei’s military at the time of the reading, had been walking around with an egg-shaped hole in his chest. Presumably, his belief in the accuracy of the reading had been fueled by having known at least one woman who had died, which is a common fact of life for most people of an adult age.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  News of my talents, however, had spread immediately, before my dubious future forecast of the mad general’s misfortune could be tested by the real-life vagaries of fate and fortune. (I sincerely doubted the man had ever even encountered a dragon before his demise at the hands of Prince Vlad.) For some reason, people love having their fortunes told, as if wet clumps of plant matter or the preordained mechanical march of the stars and planets across the sky could help them skip ahead to a personal happy ending. I did not like the nameless master, but I wanted his respect, and him knowing that I practiced the peasant art of reading tea leaves seemed likely to undermine that.

  “Ah, a tea-leaf reader. I understand. You look to be of an age to have been born around the time of the Coalition War, perhaps less than nine months after its resolution.” The nameless master’s look was speculative. “That explains the reluctance of your parents to have you tested in spite of having the means to purchase a colonel’s commission; the merest suggestion of such a paternity would be both politically and personally inconvenient, absolutely devastating to your mother’s reputation.”

  Offended and confused in equal measure, I waited for the nameless master to explain as I adjusted the position of the crane. When no explanation was forthcoming, I spoke firmly through gritted teeth. “My father has no magic whatsoever. Nor my mother, whose faithfulness is not in doubt after bearing him seven children. My talents simply sprang up without precedent after I became a steam knight.”

  The nameless master paused. “Magnificat, my apologies for the inadvertent insult. I retract my insinuation; I am not confident you are even a quarter Corsican by your appearance. That said, I have never seen such talent without precedent. If you have divined for yourself that you are truly the son of a mundane man, perhaps it is inherited in an unusual pattern; some talents skip generations regularly. Some even pass across sexes, it could be from your maternal line.”

  “None of my brothers had any magic, either,” I said, growing more confident. There were six of them, and as they were all older, they certainly would have developed any magical talents before I left if they had any. “Nor any of my uncles, cousins, and nephews.” Given that my uncles were all even older than my father, I had seen many adult examples of my paternal line; I was less familiar with my maternal relatives. “Neither did my maternal grandparents—admittedly, my paternal grandparents died before I was born, but I have never heard of them as anything other than ordinary farmers.”

  The nameless master gave an exasperated sigh. “It is not my position to argue with you about your own family history—we are here to fish. Or at least, to set the trap and wait a while; I have prepared a good lecture on transformations of flesh for you two, and I dislike sitting unproductively in a classroom. One should always have a project in progress to supervise.”

  I nodded and pulled the lever that would unlock the winch. We all watched as the box splashed down into the water, then slowly sank, its sides shimmering with a glowing glimmer.

  “How often have you succeeded?” Johann asked.

  “The trap trips about one morning in thirty that I go fishing,” the nameless master said. “Bait can be troublesome to come by, so I prefer to pull it out and try again rather than leave it unattended. Half the time the trap has been triggered, it comes up empty; and three out of the four times I’ve pulled up something, it’s been a mass of common scavengers—eels and catfish, mostly.”

  A mechanical groan drew my attention; the crane shifted position slightly with a clunk, demonstrating the loose fit of its poorly maintained gears as the cable wiggled.

  “You are a very lucky man,” the nameless master said, his tone flat. “I’ve never seen a bite so quick.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. Reflexively, my hand flew to the bloodstone that hung on a leather thong around my neck, resting against my skin under my shirt. The well-worn green stone with its thin red inclusions was a good-luck charm given to me by an old peasant woman—the same superstitious one who had opinions about reading tea leaves and who had plagued my summers with heavy chores when I was not quite fully grown.

  “No time to be religious and grab at your hidden cross,” the nameless master said sourly. “Saint Whomever won’t draw up the winch.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, hastily grabbing the crank and winding in the cable manually. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try re-engaging the gear to raise it with steam power, and while the box was large enough to hold a draft horse, water is not much heavier than a horse by volume (which is why horses sink most of the way when dropped into the water), and whatever creature was inside thrashing around wouldn’t be much if any heavier than the volume of water it had displaced from the box.

  It took a bit of effort to get the box moving, and that got worse once the box broke the water and was no longer buoyed, but I do not think it was that much heavier than a giraffe; then it grew noticeably lighter as the water drained out, spraying out of the slats in streams that reached out to either side. Then I locked the winch back in place and threw the lever to rotate the crane, taking a moment to catch my breath as poorly maintained gears ground loudly.

  The box rocked violently as the crane moved, and then there was a loud noise as a much-abused pair of gears slipped off axis. The arm of the crane slewed sideways as it swung out of control, and the box smashed against the wooden wall of the warehouse behind us. The wall broke; so did the box. A familiar full-sized mermaid flopped out; not the one who had been obsessed with Ragnar, but one of her brunette sisters, the one who had complained of being abandoned. Her eyes widened as she landed on top of a pile of fragments of wood, and she let out an unladylike noise vaguely like a burp on impact, red-stained river water flecked with herbs squirting out of her mouth.

  “Excuse me, Signore Corvus,” she said in embarrassed Venetian, looking at the spill of ruddy river water and smoothing her hand over a slightly rounded belly. Her eyes were wide and her expression innocent. “I must have bitten my tongue; you must forgive me my clumsiness in spitting out blood on your nice clean cobblestones—look at this mess, I cannot even tell what was in the box originally and what has come out of these crates.”

  I do not know if Johann’s eyes were wider or the nameless master’s, but after a pregnant moment of silence, it was the latter who spoke next. “You did say that they are able to talk. I must apologize for not believing you.”

  Dark steampunk fantasy

  The world of Rohana exists beneath a barrier of luminous crosses that has enclosed humanity in a dome. Within it, people bow to Rohai and his Church of Harmony, who have divided the world into city dwellers who harness crystal technology and villagers who reject it.

  Haran Baratti fled his homeland with his infant son, Heron, and found refuge in a remote village in a neighboring country. But the sanctuary they seek does not last, and events revolving around Haran's past leave Heron alone, forcing him to return to his father's homeland. But to get there, he can only do it by obtaining a special passport, which will allow him to travel to different kingdoms.

  Having been raised in a different culture, Heron will have to navigate a world of mechanical cities powered by crystalline powers and governed by various social structures. There he'll meet allies and face dangerous foes. And those whom he encounters have secrets; some of them, if revealed to the public, may reshape the very foundations of the Rohana Federation. Will Heron, in learning those secrets, realize that maybe some of those secrets should have stayed buried?

  What to expect:

  ? Dark steampunk-inspired power fantasy with extensive world-building

  ? Magic systems where power comes at a psychological cost

  ? Visceral, well-choreographed combat sequences

  ? Mysteries that unfold across multiple volumes

  ? Steampunk aesthetics merged with elemental magic

  ? Stories where the actors are often found in morally grey areas