A 2007 book by Stephen Hunt that is the first in the Jackelian Series set in a steampunk world where a young girl named Molly witnesses a murder and runs for her life as she carries a secret.
Oliver lives a sheltered existence until he is forced to flee when he is framed for his uncle's murder and has to run across the country to learn more about a secret that has plagued him his entire life.
Soon both of them find themselves facing a great threat to civilization and, while they have their enemies, they will find allies.
Tropes for the novel:
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The book goes berserk with this trope, coming up with alternate Steam-Punky names for everything from journalists ("pensmen") to computers ("Transaction engines") to the Sun itself ("The Circle"). Some of the Smeerp-names, amusingly, also have entirely unrelated meanings in English, such as "cardships" for computer programmers (because they poke holes in punch-carsd to operate the mechanical transaction engines). These names range from the understandable ("Carlists" instead of "Marxists") to the baffling ("combination" instead of "union").
- Couldn't Find a Pen: One of the villains is fatally impaled during a sword fight in an open snowy field, by a fugitive he knows has been living under a false name. As he's dying, he tries to password of his foe's hidden identity using his own blood to write it down. In this case, the Dying Clue aspect of this trope is subverted, because the snow he writes the man's secret down on melts before his body can be found.
- Designer Babies: Female slaves in Cassarabia wish their wombs were used to incubate this trope, and not the monstrous Mix-and-Match Critters which the local bio-wizards dream up.
- Explosive Leash: The feybreed are forced to wear suicide torcs as part of joining the special guard.
- The Magnificent: King Steam arrives at court and interrupts courtiers reeling off his titles on the grounds that what is needed now is not hearing what new titles they invented to flatter him.
- Powder Keg Crowd: When a crowd gathers about the castle, the figurehead/scapegoat king comes out on the balcony to let them throw fruit and rubbish at him, sating their desire to riot.
- Sacred Hospitality: The commodore welcomes Molly to the hospitality of their house.
- Talking Weapon: There is a talking sword that is actually wise and generous.
- Transflormation: An ancient and evil civilization escaped a terrible disaster by moving underground, and coped with the lack of food by transforming the enslaved majority of its vassal-states' population into plant that lived off the caverns' thermal energy. The elite classes lived off their human "crops", which were helpless to resist or even protest.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: Revolutionaries obsessed with leveling all social disparities take over a city, then begin forcibly converting its organic inhabitants into Clock Punk proto-cyborgs so they'll be "equal" to the city's animated-construct inhabitants.
