Altitude of Kings

By Yorgo Douramacos

What powers will be unleashed when music and magic meet jealousy and greed? This stylish Steam Punk adventure plunges headlong into a world of power, treachery, sex, and music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yorgo Douramacos
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223999744

Yorgo Douramacos

Yorgo Douramacos is Millenial stereotype living with his wife and their cat in Indiana. He has two college degrees and the debt load to prove it. He is obsessed with photography and history and he works hard to build his life around a media diet most would consider a form of penance.

Book preview

CAPTAIN AUBERON DRAPER

Iknow my son has it in him to be more than I have been. Unique and weightless, raised in the air, unrooted to the earthly concerns that make men vile.

There is a jewel. It is the prize of empire. I own it and its power holds us aloft. Superheated below deck, the spell it casts makes buoyant the metals of earth and enlivens the human soul like a tightened string. Its secret tells in the lives and minds of my passengers. It makes their basic natures light and irrepressible. People here become what they might never have been on earth.

Yet this is not widely known and back on land all that people speak of when our shadow passes is who (or why) we are, so far above. If I could offer them an answer I might find time to land again. But it required my father’s ingenuity entire, and my own ridiculous tenacity to eat the lives of groundlings and senators until this beast was aloft.

A man can cripple a nation in his ambition, if he makes the right promises. And lucky thing ours came good. Because the shattered edifice of life and home we left beneath requires dramatic escape for every cluster of two hundred who avail themselves of the treacherous crossing and landing, all saturated by the vile, opportunistic, and insane.

I often wonder, which of those am I?

And since that bleakly joyous day we ascended, every unnerved observer awaiting judgment of the jealous heavens, we have made journeys unending; there and back and always.

It was not my intent to never again touch down. But demand is ceaseless and the system slowly perfected to refit, refuel, and repair en route.  Always everything happens here, the lawless misty nowhere and the only place my son has ever known.

He can be forgiven his complacency. He’s an untested boy. But neither fate nor I will forgive him his connection to The Jewel. Their shared heat and influence make him priceless, the occult magic of a secret gem. If he were just no one, clearly destined for the scrap heap like every child I ever imagined having, I would allow him to dissipate and think nothing of it, but his being and power is the blood of this realm. I know his faults and if anything see in excess the quality beneath. It is my work to hone his ambition so that he may be both engine and commander of this nation of motion and change.

I will present him a challenge.

ALDIS DRAPER

Morning on my father’s ship... mourning on my father’s ship. A description accurate to what a day is like on board. Not including the nights, which I prefer.

As for the actual quality of mornings, I could hardly say. I am rarely awake before noon by reckoning of our onboard clocks set firmly by Greenwich. They have no restitution for their opinion based on sunshine or stars. Any fixed measure is useless since we have defeated such concerns, gravity chief among them. Nature cannot give us the time so well as our abstractions can tell by clockwork and machine.

We fly.

Or more accurately, we punt upon the clouds like an obese swan. I’m certain the sight of us is comical. Once the terror recedes. I fail to know, having never left board. Born here, live here, always here. Not that it is my wish but it is my inheritance. I am the first generation air lord born and raised. Upon the eve of our ship’s launch I was conceived and upon my birth its sovereignty decreed. The engines explode day and night with a buoyant fire that presses against the forces of earth and air. I do not understand it but my father commands it and it is to my ultimate benefit I suppose.

I wake up today and it has been twenty-five years since my ordained arrival. I scratch my stubbly chin and teeter toward the washbasin near the gold-rimmed window of my stateroom. The room smells of night sweat, lovemaking and spilled gin. I can only decipher bleary shades but I know every inch and make it to my window facing the sunrise. Squinting out at this 5th day of March, birthday, my day. Make it through until tomorrow and you’ll be alright. I see birds, a flock of small black sentinels enquiring why this mass of wood and gilded iron rises into their domain today or any day.

I smile a wry colonial smile. We’ll settle the clouds and mine gold from the ether if we like. The birds float benignly by, likely forgetting their curiosity as they pass out of sight.

Will there be any breakfast? inquires a voice I half recognize, muffled by the covers.

I search quickly among the previous evening’s debris: A flurry of drinks and dancing among the gentlemen and girls who give them diversion. A specific face, round and pale, young, red-haired and gaily laughing about nothing. It repeats as others dwindle away until it’s just gin, the bedroom, and...

Parson? The voice is directly behind me and a hand is on my chest. I turn around, startled.

Margot!

So we’re back to first names? I thought we’d still be playing at ‘parson and prioress.’ Wrapped in the bedclothes she sidles up and coquettishly repeats her question about breakfast.

There’s a knock on the door, Aldis, are you ready yet, boy? It’s my father, brusque and awake, banging. If it weren’t for Margot I’d not’ve heard anything but my father calling me, boy, first thing upon my twenty-fifth birthday.

You said your name was Karl! Margot pipes.

Father bangs again, Is someone in there with you?

I hush the girl and answer, I’ll be ready in ten minutes.

That is ten too many! Hurry yourself, boy.

I withdraw from Margot and head for the closet, Dress now and leave five minutes after me. Hurrying about I grab clothes and toss them toward the bewildered girl.

What about breakfast?

I apologize but this is where we must part. I will remember you fondly. I busily unravel my closet and shuffle about with buttons and buckles. You’re the only person on this whole blasted ship who’s spent time with me because of who I am.

But I don’t even know who you are. She says, perched on the bed behind a pile of her clothes.

Exactly, I say. To you I’m Karl, a watchmaker’s son. You know me completely untarnished by the truth. I walk to the door buttoning my topmost buttons and straightening my collar.

Is it really all that bad? The empathy in her eyes is half endearing, half revolting. 

It probably will be before the day’s over. Half out into the hall I turn back to add, Remember, five minutes.

Father and I ascend the main staircase onto the center deck. The air is thin and misty with a high-altitude chill. The massive propellers stir the air posted like centuries every thirty yards along the immense creaking hull. The ship is two hundred yards end to end. A beast splitting the vapor like a whale.

You’re twenty-five today, son. He’s not looking at me. For all of the tenderness in his voice as he touches the brass railing and gazes away he might be calling the horizon, son.

"This ship is nearly your