Dead Iron

CHAPTER THIRTY

Cedar fought instinct that told him to run, far from the flames, from the mob, from the matic that rumbled over the ground toward Mae Lindson’s house.

But where there was a matic, Mr. Shard LeFel would not be far behind, and neither would Mr. Shunt.

Cedar intended to put a final end to that monster.

He paused in the stand of trees, watching the mob. There were too many people, too many guns, too many torches, between him and the matic. He growled, low and unheard over the heat of the fire, the heat of the men shouting. The tuning fork against his chest rang out with a single sour note even though he stood perfectly still. The Strange who had taken Elbert was near. Near enough to kill.

Inside that matic was his foe, his enemy, his prey. Two beating hearts waiting to be ripped free of the sinew that held them, two spines to break, two skulls to crush. Mr. Shunt, and Mr. Shard LeFel.

Cedar crept low and growled softly again. The mob swarmed closer to the house, yelling. His ears pricked up. Faintly over the yelling of the crowd, he heard the back door slam shut.

Mae. Mae trying to run free. Mae trying to escape. His heart beat faster as the thoughts of a man overrode the beast’s need to kill. Mae had been in that house. He’d told her to stay until he returned. They would trap her. Kill her.

A blaze of flame shot up the side of the house, wood catching fire beneath torches and quickly turning into an inferno.

Cedar Hunt rushed silently through the cover of underbrush, the cover of shadow, the tuning fork screaming a bitter song.

Mae couldn’t die. He couldn’t let her die. Couldn’t bear her death. He ran a wide berth to get behind the house to the door he had heard slam. The wind heaved with smoke, fouling Cedar’s sense of smell.

She couldn’t survive that fire. He’d told her to stay. She would be burned alive.

Wolf instinct yelled: Run. Every nerve pumped hot with panic, powering his muscles to bunch and push. Faster. Faster.

Cedar pressed his ears down against his head and bared his teeth as he ran across the field. The wound in his side split open, poured with new pain. Almost there. Almost there to save Mae.

The heat from the fire grew stronger and stronger with every step he took. The light ruined his vision.

He leaped through the open back door and into a blistering hell.

Fire roared, chewing away the walls, snapping the wooden whimsies, burning them to ash, destroying the chairs, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, with white-hot liquid heat. Cedar crouched, eyes slit, and pushed into the living room. Searching for Mae.

Smoke burned his eyes; embers singed his fur. His skin charred. He could not find her. Could not find Mae.

There might be a nook or corner where she hid, but there was too much fire. He could not endure.

Run, run, run, the beast howled.

And Cedar Hunt could not hold against that instinct any longer.

He ran from the house. Out into the night. Ran until his lungs filled with air instead of smoke. Ran until the cool winds cleaned his eyes and soothed his flesh.

He had to believe Mae had found her way out. He had to believe she had left the house earlier in the day; had to believe she had tired of waiting for him and gone hunting. Had to believe that the door slamming was just a trick of the wind.

But he didn’t. Not in these lands where nightmares spread roots and sucked away all hope, all life.

The mob broke up, chose which men would stay and see to it that the house burned to the ground. Just then the matic suddenly huffed louder, and rumbled away from the gathering, out into the field.

Cedar knew where the matic would go. Back to the rail.

And that was where he would kill.

Cedar Hunt raised his voice, sorrow and anger howling against the night sky.

He took a step, and the pain from the wound in his side bloomed hot through him. It was bleeding again, bleeding still, worse than it had been. He didn’t care. There was no time to stop. No time to feel pain. He ran, first just a lope, then a ground-eating run. To the rail. To death.

Mae Lindson couldn’t get to the shotgun on the ground next to her and charge it in time to shoot Mr. Shunt. Rose Small didn’t look so much frightened in Mr. Shunt’s grip as just angry. That Rose was keeping her head about her was one thing good to their advantage. Unfortunately, Mae couldn’t think of many more.

“Your end is come, Shard LeFel,” Alun Madder said, his voice low, but commanding. “We have played this game to its finish. And just as you were banished to walk this land, you will die in this mortal land. Enough of your hollow threats. If we had the mind to, we’d shoot you now.”

“And lose the Holder?” Shard LeFel smiled. “How would the order of the king’s guard reward you when they find that you have let a weapon of that magnitude slip through your fingers?”

“You underestimate the guard’s resources,” Alun Madder said. “We’ll find the Holder, whether or not you’re breathing.”

“Or you’ll find pieces of it.”

Alun’s head jerked up.

Shard LeFel smiled. “If you kill me, the Holder will explode like glass under a hammer. And every piece will be loose in the land. Even one fragment of the Holder will destroy cities, kill hundreds, thousands, in most unusual and painful ways.” He smiled again. “You will not shoot me. But I have no such qualms about this girl. Mr. Shunt, make her bleed.”

Mr. Shunt raised the knife to her face.

“No!” Mae stepped forward. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll come with you. Let Rose go.”

“Mrs. Lindson,” Alun said, his voice tight, his eyes on Shard LeFel. “Don’t do what this dog says. We’ll find a way to save Miss Small.”

“Not before he has that monster cut her apart,” Mae said. “No, I’m going with him.”

Alun Madder took a step forward and extended his hand to her. They shook and he said, “I only wish you’d take a minute when you need it the most. Think things through.”

“I have thought this through,” she said.

“Then that might just save us all. Good luck to you.” Alun Madder searched her face, finding, she knew, her determination. Mr. LeFel might know she was a witch. But he most certainly did not know she was a witch like no other. Vows and curses came to her as easy as drawing a breath. And Mae didn’t need any weapon greater than that.

Alun stepped away and Mae realized he had pressed a pocket watch into her palm. It was warm, as if an ember lay coiled within it. No, not an ember—glim. She had seen glim once, from a man who tried to sell just a drop of it to her when she and Jeb were traveling out this way. She would know the feel of it anywhere.

She had no idea how a pocketful of glim would do her any good, though it was said the glim could give strength to anything it was set upon. She tucked the watch away in her coat, and turned back to face Mr. Shard LeFel.

“Let Rose Small go.” Mae took a few good-faith steps toward the matic, then stopped, waiting.

Mr. Shard LeFel worked the levers in the monstrous metal beast. “Yes, of course. Let us make good on our promise, Mr. Shunt. Let the girl go.”

Mr. Shunt pushed Rose so hard she flew several feet before landing on the ground.

And just as quickly, Mr. Shunt suddenly appeared in front of Mae.

She sucked in a gasp. Before she could exhale, he had cut the straps of her satchels and packs. They dropped in a thump to the ground. He wrapped at least two arms around her, another clutched to the brim of his hat.

And then the world became a blur. Ground sped by, the side of the matic pulled up beneath her as Mr. Shunt scaled it nimbly as a spider climbing a wall.

Once over the edge of the cab, Mae was shoved, facedown, and pressed into the leather cushions behind Shard LeFel’s throne. Mr. Shunt pressed his knee in her back with a punishing weight.

She couldn’t move if she wanted to. Steam pounded the air and jolted the matic into action.

Facedown with Mr. Shunt’s wide, hard hand clamped against the back of her head and his knee digging at her spine, Mae could still tell the matic moved faster than anything she’d ever known, faster than trains or ships.

And she had no idea where they were taking her.

Rose Small hurt from her bonnet to her boots. More than feeling bruised and scraped, she was angry. She pushed up and staggered to her feet, but it was too late. The matic thundered off over the field faster than a racehorse on Sunday.

“Stop!” she yelled, which did absolutely no good.

“They can’t hear you,” Alun Madder mused. “All those gears and steam deafen.” He tapped at one ear for good measure.

Rose turned on the Madder brothers. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had so much anger boiling up inside of her, she thought she’d about go insane from the noise of it. “You should have stopped him! How can you just let that, that Shard LeFel take Mae? He’s going to kill her!”

Bryn Madder was down in the collapsed tunnel, handing up packs, gear, and a crate or two. Alun and Cadoc took each load from him, spreading the barrels and crates out, then digging in their packs. They were paying no attention to her.

“You promised me you’d help me save Mae,” Rose said. “Help me get her out of town and out of harm’s way. Have you always been liars, Mr. Madder, or were you saving it all up for today?”

Alun Madder, who was crouched next to a pack, sniffed and looked her way, his arms resting along his knees, his weight balanced on the toes of his boots. “We’re so much as liars as we’ve always been, I suppose.”

He turned back to the pack, digging away, just as his brothers were digging through crates and boxes. “However,” he said, “if Mr. LeFel had wanted to kill Mrs. Lindson, he would have simply had Shunt cut her heart out. He is more than happy to do such things.” He pushed that pack aside, stood up to pry the lid off a crate, and began digging.

The brothers were spreading out a collection of metal and gears and plates of wood and copper and glass. They scattered them on the ground like a strange puzzle or game, occasionally glancing up at the sky as if gauging the distance, the stars, or the wind that pushed them.

“So we sit here and wait until he tires of her company and then kills her?” Rose looked around. “And build a . . . a barn? No. I’m going after him.”

“Ah!” Alun said, and his brothers stopped rummaging through their packs to look over at him. “Here it is.” He pulled out his pipe, dusted the dirt off it, and clamped it in his teeth with a satisfied grunt.

Rose made a frustrated sound. The brothers had gone completely mad. Fine, then. She would save Mae on her own.

She picked up Mae’s tinkered shotgun and started walking. Got about a dozen steps away before Alun called out.

“By the way, Miss Small. We’ll need that locket of yours,” he said.

She turned, hands on her hips. And nearly lost her grip on the gun when she saw what the brothers had built.

In the short stomp she’d taken, they’d assembled the pieces of wood and metal into a perfectly square basket of some sort, large enough for six people to stand within it. Rising up at each corner was a lattice and attached to that were ropes. Spread out behind the basket was what looked like a huge blanket, white in the moonlight, and fine enough that the slight wind rippled the material.

Bryn Madder knelt beside the basket, using a ratchet to tighten a bolt on a fan or small windmill blade attached to the side of the basket. Cadoc Madder finished straightening the material over the ground and walked toward the basket, one finger up as if testing the air, a tuning fork pressed to his ear.

“What is that?” she asked.

Alun Madder held a lit wick to the bowl of his pipe, puffed several times, then exhaled smoke. “Just a little gadget we made.”

“What does it do?”

“It takes us faster than feet can travel.”

“How?”

“Steam and wind.” He frowned over at the basket, where Bryn was feeding coal into a firebox set up high in the middle of it. He had sparked and turned the tinder uncommonly quickly into flame and poured water from his canteen into a small keg set atop the tinderbox. “Mostly,” Alun added.

He grinned, clamping his teeth on his pipe. “Let’s have the locket, girl.”

“No.”

Alun’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “No?”

“You heard me.”

“Means something to you, does it?”

“More than to you.”

He gave her a considering gaze. “Well, then, let’s have you use it. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”

Cadoc Madder stopped pacing and was now pointing the tuning fork northwest like a compass needle. “The rail,” he breathed. “They’re headed to the rail.”

“Nice of them to make it easy,” Alun said. “Just a hop and a skip.” He shrugged on his backpack, then pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of a crate and attached it by tubes and lines to his backpack before climbing into the basket.

Bryn Madder finished tinkering with the two windmillblade contraptions on either side of the basket. He pulled a squatbodied blunderbuss and a sledgehammer out of his pack before getting into the basket next to Alun. “Coming with us, Miss Small?” he asked.

“Where?” she asked. “How?”

“The rail, apparently,” Alun Madder said around the stem of his pipe. “And as for the how, you’re looking at it.”

Rose glanced over her shoulder toward the way the matic had left. She couldn’t catch it on foot. And even though the Madders were clearly not in their right minds, she wasn’t sure what choice she had other than to run to town and get a horse. And she had no time for that either.

She gathered up her skirt and tucked the hem of it through her belt beneath the heavy coat she wore.

Alun Madder raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything as to her impropriety, and she wouldn’t have cared if he did. Hitching up her skirt gave her a better stride, and the long coat hung nearly halfway to her boot tops, but was split front and back so she could run if needed. Even so, there was a good palm width of her stocking in clear view that would have scandalized her mother if she’d seen it. Rose climbed over the edge of the basket, where the heat from the boiler made it almost unbearably hot.

“Stand behind me, girl,” Alun Madder said.

Rose stood beside him instead.

Alun laughed. “Well, then. Are you coming, brother Cadoc?”

Cadoc Madder took in a breath as if to say something, but instead drew a two-bladed ax out from his pack. He nodded thoughtfully, and lifted up the edge of the cloth on the ground, standing to one side to reveal a hole.

“What?” Rose started, but then she didn’t need to finish.

Bryn pulled a hose that was coiled at the side of the burner and tossed it to Cadoc, who turned, caught the hose, and clamped it down tight to the hole in the fabric.

Bryn Madder worked the valves, and a blast of hot steam roared into the fabric.

Cadoc Madder waited until the fabric started taking on a round shape before he stepped into the basket with them. From the shape of it, Rose suspected there was a second fabric inside the first, filling with steam. Cadoc hauled on the ropes and pulleys and helped lift the fabric—the balloon—into the sky above the basket, then fastened a tube that was already wet with condensation down onto a drip hole in the water reserve.

Wonder caught at Rose’s heart. “A balloon? We’re going to fly?”

“No better way to travel,” Alun said. “Be to it, Bryn. Quick, now. We wouldn’t want to miss the party.”

Bryn adjusted levers and turned valves on the burner, which clicked and rattled and shook in a most distressing manner. “If you’d step to me a moment, Miss Small,” he said. “With your locket?”

Rose did so, and pulled the locket out from beneath her blouse, but did not take it off from over her head. She held it out on the chain for him. “I don’t see as how this can help.”

Bryn gently caught the gilded robin’s egg with his clean fingertips. He pulled a chain out of his pocket, on the end of which was a collection of thin watchmaker’s tools. He chose one tool and inserted it into a tiny hole at the base of the locket. The locket spun open like a flower blooming.

Delicate gears and spindles within it twisted and rolled, revealing a small glass vial couched in the center of the locket. The vial glowed a soft green light, but Rose could not tell if it was filled with liquid or gas or something else altogether.

“What is it?” She could not look away from the locket, and did not want to.

“Glim,” Alun Madder said quietly. “And all we’ll need is a drop or two, to set this ship in the air.”

“Glim?” She could hardly believe it. She’d been wearing a fortune around her neck, and never once suspected it. “How can it help?”

“Not much glim can’t help,” Alun said.

Bryn nodded once, asking permission to pull the vial out from the tiny latches that held it in place.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“Want an engine to run faster, add glim,” Alun continued. “Want a fire to burn hotter, a coal to last longer, a wound to heal better, add glim.”

“Does it really come from the sky?” Rose asked, watching Bryn break the wax seal on the vial with his thumbnail.

“Harvested by specially equipped airships,” Alun said. “Not that the scientific minds can agree upon what, exactly, glim is made of, nor why exactly it works the way it does.”

“Wait,” Rose said, finally looking away from the glow in Bryn Madder’s hand. “You don’t know how it works?”

“Sometimes a man doesn’t need to know how a thing works so long as he knows that it does work.”

Bryn opened a small gearbox on the side of the burner, and tapped out exactly one drop of glim. The drop floated down into the gears.

The basket lurched and a whirring racket started up. Rose grabbed hold of the railing, her breath frozen in her chest as the balloon above them snapped taut and round.

And then the world seemed to take a step away.

The sturdy basket made it feel like she was standing on solid ground, but when she looked over the edge, the ground was growing farther and farther away. They were lifting up, soft as a sigh, now at about midheight of the trees, and still rising.

They were flying!

“Put this back in the locket.” Alun took the vial from Bryn and handed it to her. She looked it over as carefully as she could in the moonlight. He, or maybe Bryn, had remelted the wax on the mouth of the vial, effectively sealing it. Rose placed the vial back in the locket. It snicked into place and then the locket spun closed all on its own, though she figured there was a spring set to trigger it to lock again. She tucked the locket back inside her dress.

When she looked up again, the bottom of the basket was above even the tallest trees. She grinned and put one hand over her mouth to hold back on a whoop of joy. She was flying!

Bryn Madder took hold of the levers, and with the assistance of the fans on each side of the craft, and some clever saillike rudders that Cadoc and Alun manipulated on the sides of the balloon, they were able to steer the craft off over the trees and the hills and the creeks, to the rail.

Rose had imagined this moment for years. How the trees and mountains and town would look. She had always known it would be beautiful. Breathtaking. But even so, she had underestimated the thrill of being above all the living world, had underestimated how small and pretty and quiltlike the earth rolled out beneath the moonlight. And she could not believe how far to the horizon she could see.

The boiler rattled so hard, it shook the basket. The whole craft lurched to one side, and Rose had to brace her feet not to go sliding across the floor.

“Whoa, now,” Alun said. “Easy on us, brother Bryn.”

They were beginning to descend, quickly, the ground growing larger and the black-shadowed tops of trees coming much, much closer.

“How much longer?” Alun asked, trying to correct their angle through the trees with the sails. Branches scraped the bottom of the basket, and a flurry of crows took off squawking.

“Almost out of steam,” Bryn called over the boiler’s thunderous noise.

Evergreen branches whipped against the sides of the basket and snagged up the lines tethering the balloon.

“Too many blasted trees!” Alun yanked on a sail line, dislodging a limb, and Bryn worked a lever to angle the fans and push the balloon out of the tree’s reach. But they were still falling too fast, branches slapping, cracking, catching at the aircraft, grazing over the delicate balloon fabric.

“Give us a sign, brother Cadoc,” Alun said.

The unmistakable rasp of material tearing sent a cold wave of fear down Rose’s spine. The balloon was broken. They weren’t going to land. They were going to crash.

“There!” Cadoc pointed to a clearing not far from the rail. They were just a ways, maybe half a mile, down from the building end of the track.

“Down,” Alun yelled. “Put ’er down, quick, Bryn!”

The boiler stopped rattling, completely burned dry of water. Wind rushed by, cold and wet from the steam gouting out of the balloon above them.

Alun and Cadoc heaved on the lines, opening pockets in the fabric, trying to push the balloon toward the clearing.

They sped down. Fast and faster.

Rose clutched the rail of the basket and watched, transfixed, as the skeletal giants of moonlit trees slapped at them with silvery fingers.

The fans whirred like hornet hives as Bryn put all the steam, and likely all the glim that was left, into them. “Brace for it!” he yelled.

Rose sucked in a deep breath and said a prayer.

The basket rammed into something solid, then just as quick was whipped the other way. Rose lost hold of the edge of the basket and fell as the entire craft tipped. She caught a glimpse of sky, trees, basket, the wind rushing past her, and then was caught by strong hands around her waist.

“Hold on!” Alun yelled.

Rose, half in and half out of the basket, facedown to the ground, couldn’t hold on to anything, but Alun Madder’s hands were a vise around her ribs. The basket tumbled, bounced, and then even Alun Madder’s strong hands couldn’t keep ahold of her.

Rose spilled free of the basket and hit the ground so hard, all the air was knocked out of her lungs. It took her a full minute to get air back in her chest and wits back in her head. And when she did, she realized two things.

One, she was on the ground. Scuffed, bruised, and mussed, but by most parts whole and undamaged.

And two, the Madder brothers were all laughing their fool heads off.

She pushed up to sitting, and tried to get her bearings.

Somehow, they kept the basket from breaking apart. Somehow they brought the basket down, close enough, and, more important, slow enough, that when the basket finally struck the earth, they hadn’t all perished falling out of the thing.

The balloon, however, was caught up in the tree branches, and torn open like a child’s wayward kite.

“Fine a landing as ever, brother Bryn,” Alun, who sat no more than a few feet away from Rose, said.

“Thank you, brother Alun.” Bryn chuckled and heaved up to his feet. He swayed a little, then seemed to get his footing and stomped over to the tipped basket. He twisted a valve, and threw open the burner grate. There was not a coal, not a stitch of fuel, left. “Well, she won’t burn the forest down.”

“Looks like a one-way ticket,” Cadoc said from where he was sprawled on the ground, staring up at the tattered balloon in the tree above him thoughtfully. “Pity. I do like air rides.”

“We’ll make you another balloon, Cadoc,” Alun said. “And you can try your hand at flying it.” He slapped at his shoulders and trousers, then stood. “Miss Small, are you in one piece?”

Rose took a deep breath to steady herself. She felt jostled and rattled as if she’d ridden a day in a horse-drawn carriage, as if every inch of the space they had traveled had rumbled beneath her as they passed over it. But that had been flight. Her first. And she had loved it.

She stood. “I’m fine enough, thank you, Mr. Madder.”

“Good,” he said, “that’s good. Thought I might have lost you there at the end, what with you jumping ship.”

“I assure you, I did not jump,” Rose said.

The brothers all laughed again, and went about reclaiming their weapons and supplies.

Rose wanted to know how they had built the ship, wanted to know what the balloon and sails were made of and how the tubes and hoses and steam and glim had powered it, but there was no time.

The thump of steam exhausting a stack rolled through the air from up the track and a long hiss followed. The matic that Shard LeFel rode was somewhere up the rail ahead of them and coming closer, like as not headed to LeFel’s railcars.

“Bring your weapons, lady and gents,” Alun said, jumping free of the basket. “It’s time we see to the end of Mr. Shard LeFel.”

They gathered their gear, and Alun pressed a modified Winchester rifle into Rose’s hands. “As a thank-you. For the use of the glim,” he said.

She nodded and turned to one side to sight the gun.

“You’ll want these.” Bryn pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket—well, more like modified goggles, thin brass out to the edges and wide round lenses, clear, set in permanently, with a tiny brass loupe over the right-hand corner of each lens. A spray of other colored lenses fanned off on one side.

Rose put the goggles on her forehead. “I don’t know that I understand this gun,” she said as they strode up the track. “Or these glasses.”

“Each lens is for a different distance,” Bryn said. “There’s a small tube there by your left ear.”

Rose reached up and touched the side of the goggle.

“There’s a retractable clamp on the barrel. Connect the two, and the brass loupe will show you your target.”

Rose slid the goggles over her eyes and connected the tubes. Nothing seemed to happen.

“It’s powered by pumping in a round,” Bryn said.

Rose stopped, and Bryn stopped with her, though Alun and Cadoc kept walking, their boots crunching in the gravel, their heads turned up to watch the moon more than their feet.

Bryn handed her a box of bullets from his pocket, and she loaded a single shell. The lever load snapped the bullet into place and the brass loupe on the goggles shifted to the lowest corner.

She raised the rifle to her shoulder and looked out along it. The brass loupe shifted smoothly like oil on water to show her exactly where her bullet would strike: rock, tree, leaf.

“Isn’t that glimsweet?” Rose said. She lowered the gun and pulled the goggles back up to her forehead.

“Thank you.”

“Wouldn’t want you injured in this fight, Miss Small. You’re a right special woman to survive traveling twixt-wise as we just did.”

“Survive?” Rose asked, surprised. “Think that would have killed us?”

“There’s not anything in this world without risk,” he said. “Especially untested devices.”

Rose shook her head. “I’m sure I agree with you there, Mr. Madder.” She hefted the gun. “But I enjoyed every second of it.”

A crashing squeal of metal on metal ground into the night behind them, coming up the tracks as if something huge was being dragged. If LeFel’s matic was coming from ahead of them, Rose had no idea what sort of thing was coming up from behind.

“Don’t dally,” Alun yelled back to them, jumping to one side of the track, and still jogging while he navigated a way through the bushes. “Sounds like the fun’s just beginning.”

Bryn turned and jogged to catch up with his brothers, and after a moment’s hesitation, and a moment’s prayer, Rose did the same.