Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  * * *

  As the Skylady III limped into the lightening sky, the prairie ahead of them turning from deep red to golden brown, Rowena told Gideon and Cockayne of the strange cargo she had brought to Steamtown.

  “And you have no idea who contracted you?” said Cockayne.

  She glared at him. “If you’re going to say something smart, Louis, then don’t. Just don’t. Of course I would never have taken on such a job ordinarily, but I wanted an excuse to get to Steamtown.”

  Cockayne held up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, don’t hit me. I was just asking.”

  Gideon nursed a tin cup of coffee from the pot that Bent had sent up. He stared at the unfolding landscape, the ’stat flying low and slow, seemingly just skimming the eerie rock formations that rose up from the desert. “Trading people for coal.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to do something about it.”

  Rowena laid a hand on his arm. “Gideon, you can’t save the world single-handedly,” she said softly.

  “She’s right, Smith,” said Cockayne. “We need to focus on the matter at hand. Though I bet you’d damn well give it a go if you could.”

  Rowena raised an eyebrow. “You know, Louis, someone who didn’t know you might think you actually like Gideon Smith.”

  Gideon felt his cheeks burning despite himself. Cockayne laughed. “Smith? He knocked me flat on my back. What’s not to like? He actually hits like a man these days.”

  Gideon looked at him. “Why did you do it, Cockayne? Why did you steal Maria from me?”

  “Do you love her?” asked Cockayne. “That clockwork thing with a dead woman’s brain?”

  Gideon narrowed his eyes then looked away. Cockayne said, “Why can’t you admit it, Smith? What’s holding you back? You’ve been halfway around the world chasing this little chicky, and you can’t come out and say you love her?”

  “Leave it, Louis,” murmured Rowena.

  Cockayne shook his head. “Uh-uh. Smith here’s a great one for passing judgment on the rest of us. ‘Why’d you do it, Louis?’ Or ‘Must you keep farting, Bent?’ And ‘Don’t touch my pecker, Rowena.’”

  “Shut it,” said Gideon quietly.

  Cockayne put his battered face against Gideon’s. “Just fucking admit it, Smith,” he hissed through his broken teeth. “You’re hot for a pile of gears and pistons with a whore’s brain. Just fucking admit it, fisherman.”

  “All right, I admit it!” roared Gideon. “I love her! Is that so fucking difficult for you to understand?”

  Rowena touched his arm again, and he looked to where an ashen-faced Bent was leading the others up the ladder to the bridge. They were all stock-still, staring at him.

  Cockayne laughed. “No,” he said quietly. “No, it’s not too difficult to understand. What I didn’t understand was why you wouldn’t give in and say it, Gideon. It’s one of the things that make you what it says on your wage packet. It’s what separates you and me and Rowena and even our friend Bent from them.” He cocked his head slightly to the passengers. “Being a hero isn’t always about shooting guns and spouting platitudes. Sometimes bravery’s just about having the gonads to stick your head above the parapet and say, ‘Hey, I’m different. And I don’t give a rat’s ass.’”

  Gideon felt the anger drain from him. Cockayne winked and Rowena sighed. “You and your little heroes’ club,” she said, but Gideon caught her giving Cockayne a small smile. Bent approached and said, “I have no effing idea what all that was about, but … ain’t that the farm?”

  Gideon looked ahead. “Yes, I think it is.”

  “Then we’d better get a wriggle on. Looks like Farmer Giles is up and leaving.”

  * * *

  “You’re spooking the goddamn cattle!” shouted Oswald P. Ackroyd, holding fast to the reins of his horse as it whinnied and stamped its hooves on the dry earth. He’d waved Albert on to try to keep the thousand-strong herd moving, and Caroline was driving the covered wagon, from which the girls peered out in awe at the thing that cast its long shadow over them.

  “Mr. Ackroyd,” called Gideon, cupping his hands around his mouth. The Skylady III was barely fifty feet off the ground now, Rowena holding their course steady as the crippled ’stat continued to lose altitude and power. “It’s me, Gideon Smith. And Mr. Bent. Do you remember us?”

  “I remember you,” shouted Ackroyd. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We need somewhere to land, so we can try to repair our ship. Are you leaving the farm?”

  Ackroyd shielded his eyes against the rising sun and nodded. “We got somewhere better to go. You ever hear of the Nameless?”

  Cockayne, at Gideon’s side, nudged him. “Tell him yeah, we’ve heard of the Nameless. Tell him we want to see him.”

  Gideon looked at him. “Do we? Why? Who is he?”

  “Tell you later,” said Cockayne. “Heard his name mentioned back in Steamtown.”

  “Where did the Nameless tell you to go?” called Gideon.

  “Follow the Wall west and then take a bearing southwest in ten miles. Keep going until you see an abandoned mine.”

  Gideon looked at Cockayne. “That sounds uncomfortably close to Steamtown for my liking.” He turned back to the bridge. “Rowena? Think we can make that?”

  She bit her lip as she looked at the instrument panel. “We’ll have to.”

  As the Skylady III began to jerkily wheel away from the cattle drive, Gideon waved. “Thank you, Mr. Ackroyd. We’ll see you there.”

  * * *

  “Where the fuck is Billy-Joe?” seethed Thaddeus Pinch. Inkerman might have been an ugly cuss, but he had enough smarts to keep his boss informed. These ass-hats Pinch had surrounded himself with didn’t know their cocks from their noses half the time.

  “I think you sent him across to Uvalde,” said one of the ass-hats, scratching his ass-hat head.

  Pinch cuffed him upside his cauliflower ear. “I know that. But he should be back by now. Where is he?”

  They all scuffed their boots in the dust. “Don’t think they came back, Mr. Pinch, sir.”

  Goddamn it all. He was surrounded by cretins. Which was all he could expect, them being fleshly and weak. And all around him, his beloved Steamtown burned. Most of the coal stores had gone up in flames. He’d heard that indentured men from three of the dormitories had fled east during the confusion. That was damn near a hundred men. Someone told him that in one of the brothels on the north side of town the women had up and knifed all the men in their beds, and gone into the night as well.

  But he still had the dragon. He’d made sure of that, tripling the guard on the Alamo. Gideon goddamn Smith wasn’t going to get his hands on it anytime soon. Besides, no one knew where this Maria was. Pinch shook his head at the thought of it. A clockwork toy that looked like a living, breathing woman, with all that power at her fingertips. It had given him a hard-on just to picture her in his mind’s eye, even as he stood in the chaos, watching the crippled airship banking into the night sky. But where the hell would you find such a thing, lost in the deserts of Texas?

  It was then that he’d remembered what Billy-Joe had told him in the saloon. He’d been too fixated on the Nameless, too worried that the spooky fucker was going to come and give him shit in Steamtown. Not that it mattered now. Steamtown was all but gone. Let the Nameless come and walk down the main street with his stupid patchwork clothes like some crazy frontiersman. Let him go up against Thaddeus Pinch. Some stupid prairie legend against a man who was practically a machine god? Let the fucker try.

  Yes, he’d been too focused on the Nameless to listen to what Billy-Joe had been trying to tell him. And there was something else.… The Nameless had this girl over the back of his horse. She looked dead. Had a giant key sticking out of her back. Hellfire and damnation. A girl with a key in her back. Maria.

  “You,” said Pinch. “Do you know where Billy-Joe and the others went yesterday? When they ran up against the Nameless?”

  One of the other cretins raised
his hand hesitantly. “I do, Mr. Pinch, sir. They were over at one of the old abandoned mines, maybe twenty miles west. Close to where the Yaqui have their camp.”

  Pinch clapped him on the shoulder with his metal arm. The man didn’t flinch. He was either smart or too stupid to be afraid. Either way, Pinch could make use of him. “What’s your name again?”

  “Larry, Mr. Pinch, sir.”

  Pinch dug in his pocket and flipped the burnt sheriff’s badge he’d plucked from Inkerman’s charred corpse at him. “You’ve just been promoted, Larry. Now get me every available gun who isn’t guarding the dragon, get every Steamcrawler still in working order fired up, and have them at the gates in an hour.”

  “Where are we going, Mr. Pinch?” asked Larry.

  Pinch cuffed him in the head. “Don’t ask questions. Just do it.”

  He looked out into the dawn. He was going to get his queen, she was going to fly his dragon, and then Gideon Smith, Louis Cockayne, and any other bastard who had ever crossed Thaddeus Pinch were going to get the wrath of Steamtown down on their sorry asses.

  * * *

  Someone had been busy—either Chantico or the mysterious gringo who had no name. Inez suspected the latter. She loved Chantico dearly, but he didn’t strike her as the type to be able to do so much work on the old house. Much of the roof had been repaired already, and several of the rooms had been cleared of rubble. Thankfully, the bodies of the dead Texans had also disappeared without a trace. The house was almost pleasant now, and in the kitchen area there was a big barrel of water, cold and fresh. The Nameless must have done all this, must have filled that up from the creek. Six skinned rabbits hung from a hook in the kitchen, and there were yams and berries piled up on the stone work surface.

  Almost like home. But where was Chantico? The Nameless had patched up a lean-to behind the house where the horses could be tethered, with a water trough and piles of dried grass. Inez’s horse, exhausted after the long early-morning ride from Uvalde, was the only one there. She had thought Chantico would be here to meet her.

  She went to the interior room where they had put the clockwork woman—she was so heavy!—and secured the door with a padlock they had found amid the bits and pieces scattered around the building. There were no windows, so there was no chance of anyone finding her there. Inez cursed herself for letting Chantico keep the key. Where was he? Hung on a nail on the door was a small leather pouch of Yaqui design, and a note scrawled in Chantico’s spidery hand. He was rare among his tribe for the ability to read and write both Spanish and English so well, and she was proud of him. His letter to her was no great literary achievement, however. It simply said Lo siento. Sorry.

  Inez rattled the door handle. What was he sorry for? Not being here? She tipped the pouch into her cupped hand and gasped. There was a red stone in there, as big as the top of her thumb, which seemed to glow with its own internal life. Its setting looked like gold, and it was tangled in a golden chain. It must have been obtained by Chantico on one of the many Yaqui trading expeditions. It was quite beautiful. She searched through the warren of rooms (whoever set up this place really must have thought the mine was going to bear fruit, because there were rooms for a score of men here) and found a washroom with a big stone sink and even a tarnished tin bath. There was a cracked mirror, mottled with blossoms of mold, on the wall, and Inez fastened the gold chain at the back of her neck, admiring the red stone at her breast. She looked herself in the eyes, moving a thread of hair from across her eyes, and suddenly her stomach lurched. Her room in the casa at Uvalde, the hot running water, her dresses and boots and nice things … she had left them all behind. For a Yaqui boy and, it seemed, a tumbledown house in the middle of bandito country. Had she any idea what she had done?

  Inez tucked the pendant away within her shirt and smoothed down her skirts. The Nameless had made a fine start, but there was plenty to do before this place was livable, and no better time to start. She had some matches in her sidesaddle and could get a fire going in the kitchen; perhaps a rabbit stew could be on the hob for whenever Chantico decided to show his face. She touched the lump of the amulet at her breast. Just so long as he didn’t get the idea that she would do all the cooking and cleaning while he swanned around on tribe business, so long as he threw her the odd trinket now and again. She had given up her old life and was not about to embrace a new one that was just as restrictive. This was a new world, and Chantico had better get used to it.

  After she had diced the rabbits and got a big pot of water boiling on the stove, Inez found a long stick and tied a few lengths of dry brush to one end to fashion a passable broom. The house really was coming along nicely. A few rooms still had no roof, and the shutters on all windows but the one in the room that Inez had mentally marked out as her and Chantico’s bedroom needed repair, but her vigorous brushing had worked yet more wonders in the large rooms. There was a distinct lack of furniture, of course. Either they would have to think of a way to trade, or Chantico would have to get busy with chisel and wood saw. Inez paused to take a drink of water from her hip flask. It was barely daylight, and she had achieved so much. But where was that blasted Chantico? She took his note from the pocket of her skirts and read it again.

  Lo siento.

  A sharp pain suddenly stabbed her heart. What, exactly, was he saying sorry for? What if his own heart had gone cold; what if he had deserted her? She bit her lip, just as something caught her eye on the horizon, a billowing cloud of dust rising up before the ascending white-hot orb of the sun. Riders? Steamtown riders?

  No. The swirls of sand were being dragged into the air by something else, something huge and unwieldy that charted an erratic course toward her, close to the ground but unmistakably above it. Inez’s makeshift broom fell to the dust and her jaw slowly dropped.

  It was an airship.

  19

  LA CHUPACABRAS!

  “So … your cover was blown, you were thrown in jail, half of Steamtown has been blasted to smithereens, and you’ve whisked fifty slaves from under Thaddeus Pinch’s nose,” said Cockayne over a pot of hot coffee on the bridge. “And you’ve still failed to get back the brass dragon or locate Maria. You did say this was a secret mission, Smith?”

  “One we wouldn’t have to undertake at all but for your rank criminality, Cockayne.” Gideon scowled.

  “Seconds out, round two.” Bent chuckled. “’Ere, Rowena, you should have seen Gideon lay Cockayne out in that cell with one punch.”

  Cockayne put his shoulders back. “Only because Pinch’s goons had tortured me half to death. Anytime you want to try again, Smith…”

  Rowena put her head in her hands. “For God’s sake. You’re like a bunch of schoolboys.”

  Cockayne raised an eyebrow. “Says the woman who got trigger-happy with a QF Three-Pounder Hotchkiss. Jesus Christ, Rowena, you don’t do things by half, do you? You know Pinch ain’t gonna rest until he’s had his pound of flesh now. He’ll be madder’n a scorpion.”

  “Which might work in our favor,” said Gideon. “If he’s angry he might make mistakes.”

  “You got a plan?” asked Bent.

  “If it’s as good as your last one, we can all expect to be getting intimate with red-hot pokers real soon,” said Cockayne.

  “Strictly speaking, Mr. Cockayne, you’re in my custody for the theft of property of the British Crown and abduction of one of its subjects. I removed you from that jail—”

  Cockayne blinked. “You removed me from jail?”

  “—from that jail in San Antonio for the express purpose of allowing you to redeem your earlier crimes by helping in our mission to locate and liberate Maria and the brass dragon Apep,” finished Gideon, his eyes locked on Cockayne’s. “If you want, I can hand you over to the custody of the nearest British garrison and arrange for you to be transported back to London to stand trial.”

  “Jesus,” breathed Cockayne. “Pinch’d never get a poker up your ass. You already got a stick jammed up there.”

 
Gideon scowled. Was even Rowena trying hard to hide an involuntary smile at that? He said, “So yes, I do have a plan. We’re going to land the Skylady III at this settlement Mr. Ackroyd told us about, then we’re going to effect whatever repairs are necessary.”

  “Then?” asked Cockayne.

  “I’ll tell you when we get there,” finished Gideon lamely. He knew the others knew he didn’t have any idea at all. But he couldn’t show how weak and useless he was. They were relying on him.

  Cockayne pointed through the glass. “Good. I’ll look forward to it, because I think the place is coming up right now.”

  * * *

  Inez watched from the shadows of the house as the airship—impressively huge, though listing badly—limped in and cast down its anchors, which dragged in the sand until they snagged on rocks and tree stumps, bringing the vast dirigible to a bobbing halt. Winding gears brought the gondola down to just a few feet off the ground, and then the occupants began to disembark down a wooden stairway that unfolded from an observation deck. A woman first, in white shirt and khaki breeches, followed by three men, one of them fat and in most unsuitable clothing for the prairie, and then a veritable flood of people—children, too. They certainly didn’t look like Steamtown rabble, so she ventured out of the cool stone building and watched them from the sun-kissed veranda, which had also been patched up remarkably well by the Nameless. The woman and three men who had dropped to the ground first seemed to be the most assured and in charge, and they immediately began scouting around, inspecting the abandoned mine shaft and turning their attention to the house, where they eventually sighted Inez. She raised a hand in greeting, and they began to approach. Just to make sure, she cocked her rifle’s safety and laid it out in plain sight on the wooden rail running around the veranda.

  “I am guessing you are a long way off course,” she called in English.