Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables by Stephen L. Antczak, James C. Bassett

pair of goggles that gave his eyes a bizarre, insectile appearance.
    “What, by Jupiter, are you doing here?” the man asked, pulling the goggles off his face as if they might be causing him to hallucinate. “No one walks through these woods nowadays.”
    “If they are regularly troubled with explosions beneath their feet, that would hardly be a wonder. Shall I assume that was your work,” the soldier asked, pointing to a few wisps of sulfurous smoke, “since you came from a door in the rock that clearly leads to wherever that explosion originated?”
    The disheveled man peered at him, his uncovered eyes sharp with speculation. “An observant man, I see. Do I take it rightly, by your dress, sir, that you are but late returned from the battlefields of the Southeast?”
    “I am not returned at all, sir,” the soldier said, taken for a moment by a perverse humor. “But I am, indeed, late from the war.”
    “I don’t recognize you,” the man said, “and I’ve lived in these parts nigh on five years.”
    “I am not from these parts. I find myself at loose ends and thought I’d take a walk until I tied them back up again.”
    “What, no family nor friends nearby?”
    “None. Not nearby nor anywhere. All dead.”
    “A tragic tale, friend, and perhaps too common in this time of conflict.” The man shook his head in sorrow and then offered his hand. “My name is Conscience Morton and you have my sympathies.”
    The soldier took his hand and shook it stiffly, but offered nothing more, for there seemed no further reply to make.
    Morton continued after a moment’s clumsy silence. “Well, friend, if you have no destination, perhaps I might persuade you to do me a small favor…? Though you are wan—perhaps still suffering from your wounds?—you seem a strong man and clever. Educated, I would guess. And what I would ask of you requires no great strength, but is quite out of the question for one…encumbered by such flesh as I am.”
    The soldier nodded at him to go on, or in agreement that the gentleman before him was, inarguably, rotund and unused to physical labor.
    “Below,” Morton began, “lies a great maze of caverns and tunnels in which are secreted such marvels as would amaze even the most jaded collector, and gold enough to send a miser into transports of joy. Now, among this treasure lies a small music box—quite an ordinary sort of thing carved of a pretty bit of wood and bound in brass and no larger than a lady’s prayer book—that I made…for my late wife.” The man watched the soldier from the corner of his eye as he spoke and must surely have noticed the other’s unhappy expression as he added, “She died of a brain fever and nothing to be done for her, poor thing.”
    The soldier bowed his head and shook it in sympathy, his eyes sparked with tears.
    “So you see,” Morton continued, “how dear such a keepsake is to me.”
    “I see,” the soldier replied, dashing the moisture from his face with the back of one scarred hand.
    “I would give all the gold of Midas to retrieve that box. It was stolen from me by a rival, a mad inventor, a very devil of a man who has turned his hand to building vile mechanisms—but I let my emotions run away with me. Forgive me. It is only recently I’ve discovered that he keeps the music box in his secret laboratory, which lies below.”
    “In these caves you say run beneath our very feet?” the soldier asked.
    The weighty Mr. Morton nodded. “As you say. And I have tried to gain access to the place to reclaim what is mine, but this man—beast that he is—set traps at the door which I, unsuspecting, set off and the explosion has sealed this entry. There are other ways in, but only to this one did I hold a key. And now I cannot pass through it.”
    The soldier drew himself up, frowning in thought and looking at the man before him as if he could weigh the truth of his talein his gaze. “How do you propose to get below and reclaim your