Dead Iron

by Devon Monk

  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 gl
ass. 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.