Tales of Engines & Demons - Volume 1 **SAMPLE**

Lost Love - Introductions

Yosh Morrina sits beneath the shade of the sagging veranda and watches the brutger as it makes its ponderous way around the township's dusty square. The odd shaped black barrel, high on the creature's wide shoulders, sways as it moves, and the small metal cups that hang from it swing and clank on their hooks. Its proto-mowmok familiar jumps and capers about its body, using its six prehensile limbs to clamber up and down. It leaps agilely from one of the brutger's thick knuckled hands to the other, and occasionally it swings itself around the tall water barrel on the cup-chains.

The day is typically hot, and the brutger water seller's wares are proving popular. Whenever a customer approaches, the tiny mowmok takes a cup from its hook and fills it from a tap at the barrel's bottom before proffering it to them. Each time a cup is filled, a wisp of cold vapour escapes with the clear liquid. The proto-mowmok then chitters excitedly and holds the cup in two of its small hands until a coin is received in payment, whereupon it hands the cup over and scurries up to its master's neck to drop the coin into the bag that hangs from its collar. After that, it swings back down and chitters angrily until its customer has drained the small cup and returned it.

While these noisy transactions take place, the brutger stands and watches the view in front of it through its gently vacant eyes, while nodding its head amiably. Its expression, provided by its wide, strangely curved mouth, seems to be of permanent private amusement, though anyone who would attempt to steal the money from around a brutger's neck would soon see a swift change in its expression, although not many of those people would survive for long enough to describe it.

Yosh Morrina smiles to himself. Despite his skills, not even he would be foolish enough to attempt to steal from a brutger.

The smile doesn't stay on his face for long.

His eyes are drawn back to the desert; to the empty vastness where his love has gone.

The veranda where he sits, and the drinking hole it is barely attached to, face the township's south road, though there isn't much of the road left to be seen. Only a few scant metres of the sloped surface are still visible, before it disappears beneath the sands. Even at the top of the hill the sand fills the gaps between the road's cobbles, and collects itself in small drifts about the doorsteps of the close packed buildings on either side. Lower down the hill, the buildings are slowly being engulfed. The sand has reached the handles of their blocked doors, and not far beyond that, it is half-way up the houses' first floor windows.

The more optimistic of those buildings' residents have raised ladders against their walls, or built rough stairways of stone to their second story windows, abandoning the lower levels to the sand archapids and veinweed. The owners of the buildings lower down the hill have given up entirely. The sand has reached their rooftops, and only the slanting, sand blasted pitches remained visible, new sloping dunes building up on the southern faces of their chimneys. The only substantial structure visible further down the hill is the tall smoke-stack of the township's foundry, long since abandoned by the Engineers. Beyond that, the desert rolls away into shimmering heat.

Yosh Morrina is half blinded by its brightness. He continues to stare, though he no longer sees. He is remembering a different veranda, in a different place; a veranda cloaked in fragrant narcali, not strangled with the skeletal remnants of dead olap vine.

* * * * *

It was dark. The thick scent of the climbing flowers filled his nose, and the distant murmuring laughter of the party guests reached him from the other side of the villa, but he was filtering their noise out, listening for closer sounds of threat.

He always worked better in the dark. Locks were teased open by touch, by the scant feeling of the tumblers' resistance against his picks, and the night presented little cause for distraction. He smiled as he felt the last tumbler move a fraction. Yosh repositioned his fingers on his other picks, applied the required pressure in just the right places, and smiled again as the locking bolt slid silently from its housing.