Heart of Steel

by Meljean Brook

  Outside the wardroom’s porthole, the sky was dark, with only a faint lightening in the eastern sky. Work would begin soon. If today’s salvage expedition went well, she’d have reason to celebrate. There were worse ways to go about it than riding the sheets on a handsome man with a lean body and a silver tongue.

  Not many worse ways, but still tempting enough to try it out once or twice.

  Because the thought of that silver tongue made her feel generous, she said, “After I have my strongbox, I’ll buy you a drink and a pound of Guajaca coffee.”

  Barker’s eyelids became heavy, as if his latest ladylove had just whispered into his ear. A weak version of the brew was a sailor’s staple, but as Barker often rapturously described it, the difference between the strong Guajaca blend and the drink aboard Vesuvius was akin to the difference between cream and whey.

  Yasmeen rarely drank either, though the beans had once lined her strongbox with gold. To her mind, coffee was simply proof that civilization still existed in the New World after the Europeans and Africans had fled the Horde, whose khans and generals had believed that everyone beyond the Ural Mountains was a soulless barbarian. Yasmeen wasn’t inclined to agree with that belief, except for when she drank the barbaric piss that New Worlders called tea. But coffee was supposed to taste like barbaric piss, and the French and Liberé had fought a war over the ownership and taxing of it.

  War and taxes. The Horde and the New World were separated by oceans, but in Yasmeen’s experience, all civilizations were the same in essentials.

  But because she was feeling generous, she wouldn’t disrupt their quiet breakfast by saying so.

  Dawn had filled the clouded sky with a faint light when Yasmeen emerged onto the weather deck. The chill wind slapped her face. She folded her heavy collar up, tugged her woolen scarf in place over her nose and mouth. Vesuvius had anchored near the north dock. Her gaze searched the busy boardwalk, the dinghies cutting across the water, the rowboats-for-hire.

  A flash of bright color near a tinker’s cart caught her attention—a tall man wearing lime-green breeches. Though he faced away from her and a hat concealed his hair, that couldn’t be anyone but Archimedes.

  So he’d come.

  She reached for her silver cigarillo case. Tucked into her belt, it had been one of the few things that had survived the explosion and her fall into the harbor. Her gloves made her fingers thick, and she fumbled the catch before sliding it open. Only a few cigarillos remained inside. No matter. When Ivy Blacksmith retrieved the strongbox from beneath the water, she’d buy more.

  The cigarillo calmed her jumping nerves. On the docks, Archimedes weaved through the carts and coaches, passing the boats-for-hire. Was he light on coins? If the sketch had been stolen, maybe his purse had been, too.

  But, no. He stopped by a messenger in an autogyro, and a coin passed between them. Perhaps sending the message that he couldn’t join her?

  Footsteps approached across the boards. Yasmeen recognized Ivy’s quick stride and turned to greet the blacksmith. Her copper hair tucked beneath a wool cap and her freckled cheeks red from the cold, the woman usually wore a smile that was sweet to behold.

  But now she was grinning, all but vibrating with excitement. “It’s ready as soon as you are. We only need to sail closer to the south dock before we launch.”

  Yasmeen glanced around the decks. Though she had no doubt that Ivy’s submersible had been brilliantly designed and perfectly constructed, the diving machine hadn’t been tested before. If the blacksmith went into the water and anything were to happen to her, Mad Machen would likely go truly mad, and strangle Yasmeen for not stopping her. But if he were here from the outset, he’d only blame himself.

  “Where’s Captain Machen?”

  Ivy’s grin became a laugh. “There.” With a hand made of mechanical flesh, she pointed to an old herring buss floating nearby, its sails furled. “It’s Big Thom’s salvage ship. Eben’s borrowing his diving suit so that he can keep an eye on me while I’m down there.”

  Madness. The whole point of the submersible was that it would be safer than a suit, but Eben had a reputation to uphold. A feared pirate couldn’t also be a softhearted sap who desperately loved a sweet blacksmith, so he’d worry about her below the water, where there wouldn’t be any witnesses to it—and probably claim that he only wanted to prevent Ivy from using the submersible to escape him.

  Still, those dive suits were a death trap. Love made idiots of everyone. “A gold sous says that you end up rescuing him,” she said.

  “I’d be a fool to bet against that.” Ivy’s gray, ungloved fingers curled over the edge of the gunwale as she leaned forward, eyes widening. “Is that man attacking the messenger?”

  Yasmeen looked to the docks, where the autogyro was hovering above the boards, the young messenger’s legs spinning full tilt, the long blades a blur overhead. Beneath it, Archimedes had hold of the horizontal steel bar that served as the bottom of the boy’s seat frame. He began to run, pushing the autogyro to the edge of the dock, the unbuckled sides of his overcoat flapping open like wings and revealing an orange waistcoat.

  “Oh, blue heavens!” Ivy cried out as man and autogyro dropped from the dock, wobbling wildly. His boots splashed in the water before the machine leveled out and began to gain altitude. Archimedes whooped, and his familiar deep laughter carried across the harbor.

  Yasmeen had to laugh, too. He just couldn’t take the easy route, could he?

  The worried furrows in the blacksmith’s brow smoothed, and she watched them approach Vesuvius with an expression that seemed at once distracted and intensely focused. “With this much wind, I wouldn’t ever climb on one of those. But do you see how his weight stabilizes it? It’s because he’s so low. I’d have to figure out a way to land despite some heavy object hanging below—or design them not to land at all. For an airship, perhaps. And with that much weight, two to spin. That boy is sweating already. And by the blessed stars, those breeches are something else.”

  “So is Archimedes Fox,” Yasmeen said.

  “The adventurer?” Ivy glanced at Yasmeen for confirmation. After a moment of disbelief, her eyes softened and she looked to the man hanging beneath the autogyro again. “In London, the girls in our house who knew their letters would read his stories aloud to the rest of us. We’d pool our pennies when a new copy of the Gazette was printed, though sometimes it meant going without a supper. It was worth it, though. No matter how terrible the danger, he always escaped. Always. Even when it seemed impossible.” She smiled with the memory. “We listened to them so often, I knew chapters by heart.”

  So did Yasmeen. Perhaps that was why she’d found it so difficult to hold on to her anger—not because of his lean body or charming grin, but because in a sense, Archimedes Fox had been one of her closest companions for almost a decade.

  And now, he made her laugh when she had little reason to.

  “I heard he was someone else,” Ivy said quietly.

  Of course she had. Mad Machen wouldn’t have known any better, not immediately. “It’s funny, the things you hear on these seas. About ten years ago, I heard a story about a weapons smuggler who was betrayed by the Lusitanian mercenary he’d hired to carry his cargo from Reval to Copenhagen. Santos Silva was the mercenary’s name—have you ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because Silva and his men put a gun on the smuggler, and promised to leave him alive if he handed over the crate of weapons. Of course they wouldn’t have, so the smuggler dove behind the crate for cover and shot all of Silva’s men except for two seamen and the cook—he’s the one I heard the story from. But a smuggler who can kill eight men and then sail their bodies across the Baltic Sea so that his remaining associates will know better than to betray him doesn’t sound like the sort of man who’d laugh his way across a harbor beneath an autogyro, does he?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Ivy agreed, smiling. “That sort of man sounds like Archimedes Fox.”

&nb
sp; Clever girl. “So he does.”

  Flying near enough now that Yasmeen could see the buckles of his waistcoat and the diamond pattern in the orange brocade, Archimedes called out, “Permission to board, Captain?”

  “It’s not my ship!” she called back. “You’ll have to wait for your welcome!”

  “Wait? Well, that’s a fine way to ruin my entrance!”

  Grinning, he tilted his head back and said something to the messenger above him. Their direction veered slightly, carrying Archimedes to Vesuvius’s tall poop deck, where the autogyro’s blades were less likely to catch on the rigging.

  “I have to talk to him for a bit,” she told the blacksmith. “Then I’ll bring him over to meet you. He’ll probably try to persuade you to take him under.”

  “Not today, not until I’ve tested her. But give me ten minutes to polish her guts, and I’ll let him crawl around inside.”

  “He’s charming,” Yasmeen warned her.

  “Yes, but I can’t try to escape Mad Machen with a passenger in my boat, can I?”

  “If you escape with my strongbox, I’ll quarter you.”

  Ivy heaved a great, theatrical sigh. “And now fear for my life forces me to come back.”

  Yasmeen shook her head. She’d once paid the girl a fortune to leave Eben alone; Ivy had used the money to set up a blacksmith’s shop on Vesuvius instead. But Yasmeen supposed that it had worked out in the end: Ivy had also used a portion of that fortune to build the submersible for her, and it hadn’t cost Yasmeen a bit.

  The autogyro flew up over the stern, blades whirring. Lines of sand provided traction on the icy boards as Yasmeen made her way aft, where Archimedes landed lightly on the deck, his face flushed with exertion and laughter. Around them, Vesuvius’s crew gave him a hearty cheer, and he bowed, sweeping lower when he caught sight of Yasmeen.

  “Not their captain, but my captain,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have you. Within a day, you’d be strapped to a whipping post for disregarding my orders.”

  “That’s true enough,” he said, straightening. Heat flared in his emerald eyes as he looked her over, and Yasmeen stiffened. Oh, he’d ruin everything. From his silver tongue would come a suggestion of where she could whip him and order him about, the crew would hear it, and then she’d have to string him up naked from the side of Mad Machen’s ship.

  His gaze caught on her face. Relief slipped through her when he said, “I have followed one of your orders, however.”

  So he had. He’d bathed—and shaved, though he hadn’t needed to exert himself to that degree. She liked a rough jaw.

  “And here I am, at your disposal,” he continued. “What do you require?”

  She turned toward the stairs and gestured for him to follow. “Only a conversation, Mr. Fox. And I hope to soon have a gift for you.”

  Ivy Blacksmith hadn’t yet named her submersible, but Yasmeen had heard the crew members call it The Copper Prick. Yasmeen could see a faint resemblance in the cylindrical body and the rounded head, but she thought the name was wishful thinking on their part—the width of the capsule was as tall as a man, and in length was three times a man’s height. From there, the resemblance in shape ended. The tail tapered off into a propeller set over a pair of flat rudders, and she’d never encountered a prick with a raised bump on the shaft similar to Ivy’s glass observation dome in the capsule’s hatch.

  Perhaps she was more selective in her pricks than Mad Machen’s crew.

  She led Archimedes amidships and stopped near the port rail, where they could watch the activity around the copper submersible without standing in the crew’s way—and where they could speak in relative privacy.

  “Is this my gift?” He gestured to the submersible. “I already have my own, you realize.”

  God’s truth, men were all the same. But he also appeared suitably impressed by the machine—as any man ought to be. “Your gift is the copy of your sketch, if all goes well. Depending upon the sort of person you’ll have to steal the original back from, you’d be wise to put distance between you before she has a chance to realize it’s missing.”

  His gaze snapped to hers. “She?”

  He knew, Yasmeen saw immediately. His expression resembled that of a man who faced an oncoming battalion of war machines, with a mob of zombies closing in from behind. For all of his frivolity, for all of his charm, this man was also deeply aware of the dangers the world threw at them.

  “I can’t be certain,” Yasmeen said. And it seemed strange that the elite guard would steal such an item—they didn’t steal anything, unless it were necessary. But who could say what another person considered necessary? “But Miracle Mattson learned about the sketch from Franz Kessler. You’ve heard what happened to him?”

  “His throat slit. That wasn’t you? In her express, Zenobia said you were coming to speak with him.”

  “I didn’t arrive in Port Fallow until after it happened. But a woman was there, watching the house. I had no reason to think she knew anything of the sketch at the time—not until I heard from one of Mad Machen’s men that you were hiding in a crate, and paid him a sous to look for a woman in a robe. Were you truly hiding?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “If I thought I was her target. So you knew what she was. How?” Not many New Worlders recognized a gan tsetseg woman.

  “I’ve seen Temür Agha’s guard.”

  Temür Agha. Fifteen years ago, the general had crushed the rebellion in Constantinople by razing the city to the ground. Of royal blood, cunning and ruthless, his name inspired terror across the empire—including the ruling houses in Xanadu. Even the Khan hadn’t dared an assassination, and instead had named him the governor of the Moroccan occupied territories, sending Temür to the farthest edge of the empire.

  Even that meant risking an insult: officials and dargas were assigned to the territories outside of Asia as a punishment, not reward. Temür hadn’t retaliated, but from the beginning of his governorship, rumors had been swirling that he was amassing great power in Morocco and would soon try to march across the empire. Ten years had passed, and he hadn’t yet—but Yasmeen wouldn’t place bets against it happening, eventually.

  She didn’t care one way or another. In the meantime, she avoided Morocco as much as possible. Archimedes apparently hadn’t had the sense to, and the idea that he’d hidden from the woman amused Yasmeen; obviously, someone had explained what the elite guards were capable of, but hadn’t mentioned that they weren’t rabid murderers who gutted everyone who passed them. Only loyalty and duty were more sacred to the guard than self-control and compassion. If the woman had found him huddling near a crate, she’d have probably given him a blanket or a coin.

  Unless Archimedes had reason to think the woman had targeted him.

  Yasmeen froze with her cigarillo halfway to her lips. “Your debt,” she said. “Is it to Temür Agha?”

  “Yes.”

  Her stomach rolled into a hard knot. “And that woman was his guard?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see her clearly. I didn’t want to take the risk.”

  Only an idiot would. “I saw her clearly. What did Temür Agha’s guard look like?”

  “Long black hair, braided here.” His fingers met at the center of his forehead and dragged back over his ears. “Beautiful. Skin like teak on her face, but gray hands.”

  Yasmeen pursed her lips. He’d just described half of the elite guard after the women had been altered with mechanical flesh. “Anything helpful? Was she tall? Full-lipped, thin-nosed, curly-haired, round-faced? Did her features give any hint of her ancestry? Did you hear her speak?”

  “Straight hair. She didn’t speak. She was as tall as that blacksmith.” He indicated Ivy. “A Turk, perhaps. Or Hindustani.”

  A better description, but it was still impossible to be certain. “Perhaps the woman I saw was Temür’s guard, then. But as two months have passed and you aren’t dead, I suspect not.”

  Yasmeen hoped not. If she d
iscovered that the woman had boarded her lady, Yasmeen wouldn’t be able to avenge her crew alone; she’d need to hire a group of mercenaries and assassins. If the woman was Temür Agha’s guard, however, it hardly mattered whether Yasmeen went by herself or with a small army; either would turn into a suicide mission.

  “Franz Kessler and her presence on the docks might be a coincidence,” Archimedes said softly. “But not likely. If Kessler had told her of the sketch, she might have guessed it was aboard Lady Corsair. Were all of your crew killed before the explosion?”

  Yasmeen nodded. He’d put it together exactly as she had. “They barely had time to draw their weapons.”

  “That sounds like the elite guard. What I’ve heard they can do.”

  “What they can do, yes.” But not what they would do—and that was where Yasmeen became uncertain again. “But if she was only after the sketch, she could have stolen it without killing anyone, and without anyone aboard seeing her.”

  “And if she couldn’t open your strongbox?”

  Would she rage through the airship, taking out her frustration on the crew? Yasmeen didn’t think so. But perhaps the woman hadn’t been alone. Though Ginger had never seen who’d attacked her, she’d had an impression of “they.” Yet at such a moment, in the dark, one quick person could have seemed like many.

  Yasmeen simply didn’t know. “Whatever happened, when she didn’t find the sketch, she might have realized that you’d had it when you left my lady.”

  “If she saw me,” Archimedes said.

  “She saw you.”

  “But—”

  “She saw you.” Suddenly amused, Yasmeen caught his gaze. He’d managed to surprise her by hiding beside a crate in a pile of rags, but he wouldn’t have escaped the attention of that woman. “Even if we’re wrong and she was only strolling along the docks for her own pleasure, she saw you.”

  His eyes searched her face. “How do you know so much about them?”