Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology Read Online Free PDF Page A

had instilled in him, making him feel far older than his nineteen years. He still found comfort in his prayers, but wasn’t sure anyone was listening.
    As a munitions officer, he had filled the little egg-shaped, chicken-legged waddlers he called “hatchlings” with gunpowder and set them trundling off toward the enemy to blow them to Kingdom Come. Only two feet high, a single brass hatchling could carry enough powder on its clockwork legs to dismember an entire group of men, raining body parts like hail and blood like tears.
    He had also maintained the huge, metal armament suits that could be donned by soldiers like the armor worn by knights of old. Bullets still pierced the suits, but it took a lot more of them to bring down the wearer—and they could do a lot of killing in the meantime. Peeling his friends out of their ruined armor had taken a little more of his soul. Their broken, bloodstained bodies sustained much more damage than those without the suits.
    None of those toys had made a bit of difference in the end anyway. The carnage on both sides . . . such a waste. A generation of young men decimated.
    The Confederates had lost, and he'd come home a little older, a little wiser . . . and a little bit broken. He wasn’t the carefree boy who had gone to war on a lark because his friends had. He had changed.
    He'd done his duty and served his country, but now that the war was officially over, he wanted nothing more than to get away from the memories of blood and carnage surrounding him. There were too many reminders—everywhere he looked.
    Tennessee had seen more than her share of destruction. Nashville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Shiloh . . . he couldn't even think of Shiloh without breaking into tears. The entire landscape of the state had changed. The ground had been soaked red by the blood of his comrades and their foes. Mass graves raised new hills. Forests had been leveled by both battle and expediency—the winters were cold in Tennessee, and trees would grow back. It still hurt.
    He had brought one of the hatchlings home with him. It was no use to the victors—one of its legs had been broken off and clumsily mended with baling wire, and the geared knee joint of the other leg was missing some teeth, accentuating its awkward gait. Its brass ovoid cylinder was pitted with dents.
    It wasn't much of a conversationalist, being as it had no mouth, but it was a great listener. He called it Chester, after his best friend who was killed in action, and the two of them got along tolerably well. Chester didn't berate him when he woke himself screaming in the middle of the night, sweating from remembered terror, the air rank and thick around him.
    Toby had been born and bred in the Tennessee hills, but he couldn’t face remaining where so many had died. He was losing a bit more of his soul every day he stayed.
    He thought long and hard about it, and decided that a change was in order. He had a hankering to see the world around him, so he sold his daddy's farm—what was left of it—and bought a ticket on the next steamship to the Old World. Maybe he was running from himself a little bit as well . . .
    Toby had been raised on his mother's fairy stories about Little People and talking animals until he was old enough to know better. By then, she wasn't around to challenge on them, having died when he was seven. Pa had no truck with children's stories and, after Ma died, he became hard and turned to the Lord’s Word for solace,replacing Ma’s tales with those of the Bible, and punctuating the lessons with the back of his hand or a length of switch—a firm believer in “spare the rod, spoil the child.” The fairy tales had soon begun to fade from memory a bit, but the Bible stories had stuck fast. From their beginnings had grown the faith that saw him through many hard nights.
    When he was packing up the few things he wanted to keep from the homestead, however, he came across the illustrated copy of Grimm's