Dead Iron

by Devon Monk

  Mae stared at the hearth and the overturned bowl. It was a dark sign, an omen of death, of Strange things.

  Mae shut the window. So be it. She aimed to see Jeb’s murderer dead and buried. No matter how shadowed the path that would lead her down. She’d walk through death and more to make the killer pay.

  She pulled her shawl off the hook, and tied her bonnet beneath her chin. Wooden clicks and clatter from wings and windmills and chimes hung about the house, stirred in the still air. If Jeb had carved words into those trinkets, they’d be whispering warnings to her.

  “I mean to find his killer,” she said quietly to the small bits of wood and metal, to the memory of Jeb within them. “And there is nothing that will stand in my way.”

  But all her anger wouldn’t kill a man. She’d need a weapon. The omen warned it might be more than a man she hunted. It might be the Strange.

  Mae paused at the door, then turned back to her sewing basket. She took up the delicate double-moon tatting shuttle Jeb had given her on a chain as a courting gift. It was a good-luck token, carved by his hand and inlaid with thin silver vines and gold leaves. It was the most valuable thing she owned. She didn’t want to offer it up in trade to the Madders, but she would if she had to.

  The knot of grief in her chest spread out and dug hard into her ribs. She took a deep breath and refused to cry a single tear more. Jeb was gone. His love, his warmth, ended. Now she had rage to keep her warm.

  She folded the shuttle carefully within a bit of silk stitched at each corner with thread she’d spun in starlight, then soaked in rosemary. It wasn’t much, certainly not a weapon that could be used against the killer. But it was valuable. She hoped, if necessary, it would be a good item to trade for the Madder brothers’ help. If not, then she had coin in her bank safety box they might find fitting barter for a device that could kill a man or monster.

  Her home was silent, not a click or whir from any corner. No longer filled with the sound of her spinning wheel and Jeb’s singing set to the tick of his carving knife over wood, or the hot iron and crimps as he bent metal. It was silent as the grave. Dead as her heart.

  She pulled the anger and rage closer. If death was her only life now, she would embrace it. She strode out into the morning light, pulling the door hard behind her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cedar made good time over the flats past town, then around Powder Keg Bluff. The wind was at his back, and what clouds came up with dawn burned away as the day went on. He’d been by the brothers’ mine before, but not too close. The Madders made no secret of the trips and alarms they’d put in place to remind anyone who wandered their way of just how valuable they held their privacy. Rumors said they had gun-wielding matics that could take a man down at a hundred yards without a single finger touching a trigger.

  Cedar didn’t know whether that was true, and hadn’t found a need strong enough to test the fate of a person arriving unannounced at the Madders’ mine.

  Until now.

  He pulled up a good half mile from the mine, swung down out of the saddle, and swigged a mouthful of water from his canteen before pulling his crystal-sighted Walker out of his saddle holster. He drew his goggles up from around his neck. The enhanced-distance lens might do him some good. He stayed on the ground, less of a target out here with scant tree cover, and pulled his goggles over his eyes, tipping the brim of his hat to angle a bit of shade over his vision. With a roll of his finger over the brass gear at the side of the goggles, he adjusted his vision to high magnification. He could also slip down a thin slice of ruby, which gave a man an edge on seeing in the night, or shutter the goggles with slit brass, which made sight in the glare of sun on snow more bearable.

  He’d purchased these from a watch deviser outside Chicago—the same man he’d bought his brother’s watch from.

  Animal trails led up the mountain, but the mine entrance and the area around it was covered by scrub. He paid particular attention to the stones stacked up in a tumble from where the mountain had shaken them loose. Looked for the telltale glint of metal among the rocks, searching for guns or tickers.

  Not a flash of brass, not a copper glow. If the Madder brothers had guns or matics guarding the mine, they weren’t visible from this angle.

  Course, if he was wanting to keep an entryway undisturbed, he’d keep his guns hidden too.

  Cedar swung back up into the saddle and headed toward the mine. He pushed the goggles up on his forehead, the cut beneath his kerchief healed to an itchy ache. If the brothers were so set to keep folk out, they’d likely known he was there a mile ago, and closing in.

  The raw call of a red-tailed hawk filled the air and beetles chirred like cogs rattling against a tin cup. The only other sounds were the steady clomp of hooves beneath him and the creak of the saddle.

  The terrain started into an upward slope, loose shale deep enough that Flint was buried fetlock-deep into the rocks, each step akin to a slog through water. The shale tumbled and chattered like broken pottery down the slope, kicking up enough dust that Cedar could taste it at the back of his throat.

  Nothing strange about dust at the end of summer. But the shale loosened a whirlwind, two small dust devils one-toeing ahead of him, picking up bits of leaves, twigs, and carrying them along.

  Nothing strange about whirlwinds either. Except these whirlwinds didn’t die out as they should. The wind went flat, but the whirlwinds danced on ahead of him, toe-to-toe and out again, a waltz of dirt and air. With no wind to drive them, they sailed against the natural world, and tottered up the road, right up the slope, right up, he reckoned, to the door of the Madder brothers themselves.

  The dust devils folded in half, a bow; then the spinning wind and bits of leaves stretched out to point off toward the mountainside ahead, looking so much like two gentlemen lifting a welcoming palm toward an entrance to some kind of fancy hotel. They held like that a tick, then busted apart, leaves and dust flying off in every direction, whatever force that had kept the devils together gone now.

  If there was a natural explanation for dust devils spinning when there was no wind, Cedar didn’t know it.

  He didn’t cock his gun. Shooting at the wind would do him no good. He did rest the barrel across the saddle horn, ready if he needed it.

  He clicked his tongue and urged Flint up the rise in the path, steeper than it looked, and lined with mountain mahogany and brush with thorns as long as his thumb.

  At the top of the rise, the air grew damp and cool. The green scent of a stream running nearby mixed with the taste of stone and dust in his throat.

  Huh. He didn’t recall a year-round stream out this way. Didn’t recall the Madders sluicing for gold. He wondered if they’d diverted a creek, wondered how they’d gotten it to run against its way, if that was so.

  No other sign of the Strange here—no dust devils waiting to escort him on. No matics, small or large, at least none that he could see. The trail died off, leaving him surrounded on two sides by brush. To his right stood gunmetal gray stones that looked as if they’d plunged from the top of the mountain and buried themselves into the ground. Behind him was the shale and dust path.

  He scanned the ground. No boot prints, no broken branches, no sign of anyone moving this way. Looked like no one traveled past this point, even though this was the only path that he’d known the Madders to take up to their mine. He’d seen them bring their wagon this way, loaded down with supplies. Not that he’d seen them bring out rail carts of stone. The brothers just brought out pockets full of silver.

  It was looking like he’d followed a false trail.

  Cedar cursed under his breath and checked the sky. Nearly noon now. He’d wasted half the day heading to a hole full of devisers that wasn’t even where it was supposed to be.

  And all that time, there was a boy out in the elements, caught up by such Strange as walked the land.

  “Afternoon,” he called out. “If the Madder brothers are here, I’d be obliged to a little of your time.”
He dug in his saddlebag and threw a purse full of coins onto the ground. It fell with a fat clink.

  Funny how the sound of coins falling caught the ear louder than a man could yell.

  The eldest brother, Alun Madder, pushed through the brush, looking to all the world as if he were out on a stroll, a long-stemmed corn pipe caught between his teeth, his overalls dirty and grease stained beneath a duster too heavy for the heat in the day. He had a red kerchief tied tight over his head, and sweat darkened it over his brow.

  “Morning, Mr. Hunt. Bring us that striker?” he asked. He didn’t so much as glance down at the bag of money between them.

  Cedar pulled the striker from his saddlebag and tossed it to him.

  Alun Madder caught it quick and nodded once before tucking it away in his coat.

  “I’m looking for a device someone of your caliber might be willing to sell me,” Cedar said.

  Alun’s dark bushy eyebrows notched up and he took a puff off the pipe, exhaling smoke that smelled like cherrywood. “What sort of device, Mr. Hunt?”

  “Something to track the Strange.”

  “Oh, now, you don’t believe in those old fairy tales, do you? The Strange? Elfsies and faeimps, and creatures that lurk beneath a bed?” He grinned wider and pulled his pipe out to point at Cedar with it. “I thought you a level-minded man.”

  “A tuning fork of pure silver.”

  Alun’s head snapped up. His smile was gone, his gaze sharp with a hangman’s delight. “Now, isn’t that a pretty thought? Forks of silver, spoons of moonlight. What do you suppose your knives should be made of, Mr. Hunt? Tears?”

  Cedar cocked the hammer back on the Walker and aimed it at Alun’s head. “Don’t know about my knives, but my gun’s made of pain.”

  Alun replaced the pipe in his mouth, slowly clamped down on it, watching Cedar’s eyes. Finally, he laughed. “Can’t help a man if I’m dead.”

  “Then it might be to both our favor for you to give me a straight answer. Do you have a silver tuning fork I can buy with that bag of money?”

  “First you tell me exactly what you’d use such a thing for, Mr. Hunt. Silver from this mine doesn’t just drop into any man’s hand.”

  “I’m hunting the Gregors’ boy.”

  Alun frowned, a fold crinkling between his brows. “The blacksmith’s boy? Wee thing?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Lost?”

  “Gone missing in the night.”

  “Just missing, you say?”

  “Taken in the night is what I reckon. And the only trail left to find him is the music in his windowsill.”

  Alun smiled again, but this time it was a look of respect.

  “Come on this way,” he said. “Any man with an ear to hear it must have reasons to follow it. Who am I to stop a fool on his quest?” He bent and snatched up the bag of coins, stuffing it away in some inner pocket of his coat. Then he turned to his left, and strode toward the solid stone of the mountainside. “Leave your horse out here. He’ll come to no harm.”

  Cedar dismounted, caught up his canteen and gun. By the time he’d shouldered his gear, Alun Madder had disappeared, taking a jag behind a standing stone that looked solid, but was really two stones so cleverly fit one in front of the other that the eye skittered right past the shadow of the doorway between them.

  Cedar glanced back at Flint, who was already drowsing. No one seemed to be watching. Cedar’s ears, sharpened as they were with the beast so close beneath his skin, could not pick up any other movement around them. Alun Madder had two brothers. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine them waiting in ambush.

  He hesitated.

  “You’re a cautious man for someone who uses a gun to end his sentences,” Alun called over his shoulder, his voice echoing as if he was already surrounded by stone. “Come in, Mr. Hunt, before I close the door behind me.”

  Cedar adjusted his hat and stepped between the stones. Alun stood a good way behind the doorway in what looked to be a torchlit cave entrance. Cedar stepped into the cooler air of the cave and Alun spun a brass captain’s wheel on the wall, guiding the heavy slab of stone to slide on rails silently until daylight was shut away.

  “Now, then, Mr. Hunt, let’s see what your money will buy you.” Alun twisted another smaller valve and gas lamps flickered to life along the highest edge of the chamber, sending out a soft blue light over the furnishings and walls.

  It was a chamber indeed. Three times as large as his one-room cabin, with walls that were smooth and slick, burnished to a soft glow, like ice under firelight. They were bare, except for a few wooden shelves with food and tools hooked and hanging. The only thing that caught the light was the pipes that stretched from ceiling to floor against one wall, and lined the room about knee-high. The ceiling was lost to the darkness above, where things Cedar could not see delicately scratched and skittered against the stone.

  The floor of the room was dry packed dirt and there were three closed wooden doors, one to each side, and one to the back. All three doors were sealed tight as a miser’s heart by locks as thick as Cedar’s arms. If he had to guess, he’d say at least one of the doors led down into the silver vein, and likely hid the carts, narrow-gauge tracks, and other implements the brothers used to pull silver from the stones.

  From the slight heat coming from the right of him, Cedar supposed the brothers’ forge or smelting room lay behind that door.

  Alun didn’t seem to care that Cedar had not budged a single step since walking into the room. Once the lights caught full, he waved at a chair—stones cleverly cut in the shapes of a table, benches, and footstools farther back in the room. “Sit and be comfortable while I check and see what I may have. Pure silver.” He shook his head. “Steel will give a truer tone. Where does a man like you get such ideas?”

  “Books.”

  Alun plucked a lantern off the wall hook. “Must be an odd book, that.” He stomped off toward the door at the back of the room and opened it. The light of his lantern did little to reveal more than a glint, a quick cascade of shine off an array of metals, from one wall to the next, as he stepped through the doorway and closed it.

  It had been an odd book. Wil had found it, dropped in the street by a girl in a town Cedar couldn’t recall. The first few months they traveled were a blur to him. What with his mind so focused on blotting out Catherine’s and the baby’s deaths, he’d near blocked out the world entirely.

  Even so, he remembered that Wil chased the girl down to give the book back to her. But she’d slipped quick as the dickens through some door or another and Wil lost track of her.

  Wil had brought the book back and spent the next several days reading bits of it out loud. Cedar recalled the leather-bound volume was slim and square, and Wil was always sniffing at the pages, saying they smelled of meadow flowers.

  And he remembered Wil reading about tuning forks. Made of brass, made of copper. Steel was best. But silver—that alone could cause harm to the Strange and keep safe the wearer.

  He didn’t know that it would work. The book had been lost with all their belongings when the Pawnee gods leveled their curse. But Cedar would rather go against the Strange with the chance of a weapon and protection than just meet them on mortal terms.

  Cedar paced, his own bootheels and spurs sounding like they’d been wrapped in sheepskin, oddly muffled against the dirt. He walked to the table, but did not sit. The chairs he’d first thought were made of crude stone were actually carved from marble and shaped to encourage a man to lean back, arms taking a slope downward like a ringlet curl. The table was likewise finely crafted, three sided instead of four, carved with a sure hand. A script framed the edge of it, lines that looked like lightning bolts, arrows, triangles, and slashes, reaching off to one end where the shape of an anvil held the corner, then off to a symbol that looked to be fire, and finally to the corner with a carving of a hammer crossed with the wavy lines of water.

  He’d seen these same symbols on the Madder brothers’ buck
les and buttons, though not the language, if it was indeed a language that trimmed the table.

  Cedar leaned closer. He’d guess the language old. Not Latin or Hebrew. This seemed tribal, but not from any of the natives of this land. Perhaps from the brothers’ homeland, Wales.

  He dragged a thumb over one of the lines in the table, the mark like an arrow. As he drew his thumb away, the symbol glowed blue, like moonlight on fog, and left a faint ringing of bells in his ears.

  Music. Strange music.

  “Might be you should sit down, Mr. Hunt,” a voice said behind him.

  Cedar hadn’t heard a man walk up, hadn’t heard a door open. Sound was lost inside this cavern like a scream behind a gag.

  He turned. And saw the youngest Madder, Cadoc, pointing a gun at him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  If the day could match Mae Lindson’s mood, it would be raining ice and the sun would be cold as stone. She walked to the barn, her skirt catching in the knee-high grasses, the honey warmth of summer rising on the air.

  Her gaze lingered the longest on the eastern horizon and she paused, feeling the tug of the call to return to the coven’s soil at the soles of her shoes.

  Not yet. She couldn’t go home until she found Jeb’s killer. She gathered up saddle, blanket, and bridle, and leaned it all against a fence post while she shook a bit of grain to call her mule, Prudence, to come round. Once Prudence had eaten the handful of corn, she saddled and bridled her, then swung up, taking nothing more than herself, her shawl, and the shuttle tucked safely in her pocket.

  Mae turned northwest toward town, riding the shortest route to Hallelujah.

  It was not yet noon when she came down Main Street. The town seemed quiet, even though the clatter of horses, wagons filled with crops and material for the rail, and men and women going about their errands lent to the busyness of the place. It wasn’t until she stopped outside the Smalls’ mercantile that she realized what sound was missing—the ring and beat from the blacksmith’s shop that pounded out from dawn to dark ever since the rail’s approach.