by Devon Monk
Cedar ran back toward the cavern and passed Molly Gregor as she was running toward the ship. “Make it quick, Mr. Hunt!” she shouted.
Cedar rushed through the halls, taking the turns by memory to their sleeping quarters. Wil looked up from where he had been dozing as Cedar pounded into the room.
Mae had a satchel stuffed and slung over her shoulder, her coat on, and a hat securely in place. She was grabbing up the blankets they had brought in from the ship.
“We need to go. Now.” He rushed over to where Rose was sleeping and gathered her up as carefully as he could into his arms.
“What’s happening?” Mae asked as she hurried to the door.
One thing about Mae, she knew how to ask questions on the go.
“There was a signal set off. A flare. Captain Hink thinks someone is coming here. Either for us, or for the people aboard Captain Beaumont’s ship.”
“Who?” Mae asked. “Who would be coming here for us?”
“I don’t know,” Cedar said, “but the captain says that light was fired last night, and whoever’s on the way will be armed.”
Mae didn’t say anything more. They jogged through the tunnel until they hit fresh air.
The landing pad was a study in chaos. Beaumont’s crew hauled supplies into their ship, as did Hink’s men. Great gouts of smoke filled the air above, blocking what sunlight there was and making the entire scene more confusing.
Wet flues coughed up so much smoke and steam that the landing area and all those working or running about on it were obscured.
Wil ran straight for the Swift, not needing his eyes to know where she was anchored. Cedar and Mae were right behind him.
Cedar was glad Rose was unconscious. He could get her to the ship quickly or he could get her there painlessly. And they didn’t have time for painless.
The rumble of turbines and fans firing up clogged the air along with the shouts of voices, and banging of metal, rope, and wood as the ships prepared to fly.
But above all that, up in the sky, a high whine was growing louder.
Cedar wasn’t the only one who heard it. Seldom paused and tipped his face skyward. Captain Hink was nowhere to be seen, though Cedar could hear him cussing out Old Jack somewhere back toward the doors to the living area.
Whatever ship it was coming in above them, whatever threat it might bring, Cedar wanted Rose and Mae out of the line of fire. He stepped up into the Swift.
“You think the hammock, or should we strap her in?” he asked Mae.
“Better strap her in. Here.” She spread one of the blankets out on the floor, and then shook the harness loose from its place attached to the wall where they had last sat.
Cedar got on his knees and eased Rose down onto the blankets.
“Hold her up a bit,” Mae said. Cedar did so, listening to the ruckus outside while Mae slipped Rose’s arm into the straps and buckled the harness over her chest.
The crack of a gunshot rang out, and the repeated shots of return fire.
“Hold tight,” Cedar said, “and stay with the ship.” They needed the crew on the ship, in the ship now, giving her fire to put her in the sky. Molly was aboard, back behind the blast door trying to drum up the boilers. But the rest of the crew were outside.
Cedar ducked out the door, intending to hunt Hink’s men and haul them in by the scruffs of their necks if that’s what it took to get this ship out of here.
In the short time he’d been in the ship, the chaos of people rushing about had turned into a standoff.
Old Jack and all his men were lined up behind the rock blind, near the doors to the living chambers, guns drawn. Up on the top of the cliffs, his men were scrambling to man the cannons. If they fired those cannons on them, or worse, on the ship, they would cripple her and strand them all here.
Captain Hink, Ansell, Guffin, and Seldom stood side by side in front of the Swift as if their bodies alone could shield the ship from harm.
Standing behind them were Miss Dupuis, Mr. Theobald, and Miss Wright, weapons the likes of which Cedar had never seen before, drawn and facing off Old Jack.
“You snake-belly, backbiting pissant,” Captain Hink yelled. “Who did you sell me out to?”
“Ain’t yours to know. Yet,” Old Jack yelled back.
The big boilers and fans of the Coin de Paradis caught hold and puffed out steam. Then the fans picked up and threw so much wind and dust and smoke around, it was impossible to see half a foot in any direction.
“Fire!” Old Jack hollered.
Jack’s men powdered the air with shots, bullets lost to the sound of the fans angling for the climb. Hink and his crew fired back, taking scant cover from the few crates of supplies still scattered out on the field.
“The ship!” Captain Hink yelled. “Seldom, Guffin, Ansell. Out, out! Get her out before they fire the cannons.”
The men ran for it under the clamor and god-awful racket of the Coin de Paradis’s slow launch. Cedar didn’t know why the ship was so loud. But what he did know was there was an ax strapped next to the Swift’s door.
He grabbed the ax, stuck it in his belt, and drew his gun, wishing for his rifle. He jumped out of the Swift, Wil right beside him, and fired at Old Jack and his boys so the crew could make the ship.
But Captain Hink, Miss Dupuis, and her companions were pinned against one side of the landing pad, concentrating their fire at the cannon stands, to keep Old Jack’s men from firing on the crew and ship.
“Get to the ship!” Cedar yelled. “Dupuis, Theobald, Wright. Get to the Swift.”
But Miss Dupuis and her crew did not budge. “We stay with you,” she said.
Captain Beaumont’s ship cleared the landing pad, lifting up straight at Old Jack and his boys. Old Jack used the ship as cover, and by the time the last board on the ship’s hull had scraped the wall of rocks, Old Jack was gone.
But his men had made the cannons, and let loose a blast straight at the Swift. It missed, but not by much.
Cedar ducked behind the corner of stone where the captain and others were huddled, just as Captain Hink ran out into the middle of the landing pad, waving his arms and airing his lungs in full shout. “…backstabbing devil! Don’t you go hide in that hole of yours and leave them out here to fight for you. And you!” He yelled up to the men on the cannons. “Stop shooting at my ship!”
Through the dense shifting smoke, another shadow loomed over the field.
Cedar looked up just as a new gout of gunfire ricocheted off the cliff walls, throwing sprays of dirt and rock like someone had tossed dynamite.
Hink ran for cover. “Fly!” he yelled, throwing his hands up twice, as if by will alone he could push the ship into the air. “Get the hell out of here!”
For a moment, Cedar didn’t think Ansell, Guffin, Seldom, and Molly were going to do what the captain said, didn’t think the Swift would take to the air. She had a few holes in her, but hadn’t yet been hit by a cannon.
“That’s an order!” Hink added.
And then, so fast that Cedar had to suck in a hard breath, the ship was up and screaming over the edge of the cliffs, rocketing to the clouds.
The looming shadow passed across the landing pad, and as the smoke cleared, Cedar craned his neck to see the sky. A ship was coming in for a landing.
Easily as big as the Coin de Paradis but built with a closed deck and plenty of portholes with cannons set to fire, she rose up from the cover of the mountain peak, turned into the wind, and bore down on them.
Old Jack’s signal must have reached its intended party.
“It’s Les Mullins’s boat,” Hink said as he, Cedar, Miss Dupuis, Mr. Theobald, and Miss Wright pressed their backs against the rock wall. Wil was there with them too. Not a lot of cover, but it was either stand out in the open flat with an armed ship homing into view, or take a chance in the mazelike tunnels of Old Jack’s place. Tunnels Jack and his men knew like the insides of their eyelids.
“Who’s Les Mullins?” Cedar asked.
They were all busy reloading their weapons, and glancing up at the ship closing down on the field, while the singing cry of the Swift beating against the wind to make her retreat filled the air.
“He’s a man I should of killed when he was in my sights. Works for a general who wants me and mine dead.”
“Which general?” Miss Dupuis asked.
“General Alabaster Saint,” Hink said. “Heard of him?”
“Yes,” Miss Dupuis said, pumping the shotgun in her hands. “I have. Dismissed from command for trading weapons between the North and South, among other offenses.” She glanced at Cedar. “He is in league with the forces you and I were speaking of earlier, Mr. Hunt. Dark forces.”
“The darker, bloodier, plain crazy hell on earth thing the Saint can find,” Hink said, “is what he’s going to be in league with. Never saw a more bloodthirsty insane rabid demon in my life.”
“What does he want with you?” Cedar asked.
“He wants me dead.” Captain Hink holstered his gun and picked up a modified Smith and Wesson. “I served under him. Mutinied. Saved a hundred and fifty men’s lives that day, and got the Saint discharged for disobeying the president’s direct orders. He’s wanted my head ever since. The feeling is mutual.”
The shadow of the airship had passed over them now, and the ship itself was coming into position just to one side of the landing pad. It wasn’t moving in fast, whether due to the shifting winds or smoke, or if they were waiting to see if the cannons were manned, Cedar wasn’t sure.
“Well, that’s some good news,” Captain Hink said. “They’re looking for us.”
“And how do you define that as good news, Captain?” Theobald asked.
Hink grinned at him over his shoulder. “Son, so long as the Swift’s in the sky, we all have a chance of getting out of here. I know Les Mullins. He’s got a gut wound from our last meeting and a crew who’d just as soon kick him out of the boat as take a bullet for him. We shoot, we put a few holes in that ship, and Mullins is gonna turn tail and run.”
Cedar lifted his head. There was a scent on the wind, a song he could feel in his bones.
Wil snarled.
The Strange. He narrowed his eyes and searched the ship’s portholes. Steely-faced men stood there, rifles, shotguns, and flamethrowers at the ready.
Theobald pressed his spectacles closer to his face, glanced at the same portholes Cedar was looking at, and swore. “I think we’ll need more than guns for this fight.”
The men staring out of the ship were not human. Well, not all of them.
They were strangeworked.
Just like the things that had nearly killed Mae, Wil, and little Elbert back in Hallelujah. Just like Mr. Shunt.
“Why do you say that, Theobald?” Captain Hink asked.
Cedar’s heart thumped against his ribs. “Those aren’t men.”
“What?” Hink asked. “Of course they’re men. I know his crew.”
“They aren’t men,” Cedar continued as Theobald got busy unpacking things from his carpetbag and handing them to Miss Dupuis and Miss Wright. “They stink of the Strange.”
Hink took a moment to give Cedar a long look. Then, “Strange. All right. So they’re not men. Haven’t met a thing that breathes that can’t be unlunged. Take the ship first. Fans, and rudder, don’t aim for the envelope. Unless we have fire, a few rounds of bullets won’t take her down. And if we ground this beast, be ready to aim for the head of anything that crawls out of her belly.
“We clear on that?” he asked.
“Yes, Captain,” Miss Dupuis said, latching a contraption of brass and tubes and gauges that fit over her shotgun, like a second weapon.
“Aye, sir,” Theobald said, adjusting his goggles and shrugging a belt of bullets over his shoulder, that fed into the chamber of the blunderbuss in his hand.
“Aye,” Miss Wright said, winding a coil of wires up her left arm and sliding her gun into a fanned-out device of brass and copper that looked like a dinner plate–sized shield with tubes and wires rolling around it.
“Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked. “Are you in agreement?”
The beast pushed against Cedar’s bones. It wasn’t the full moon—wasn’t even close. The new moon should be tonight, complete blackness in the sky. But he couldn’t think. Couldn’t just think as a man ought to. The hunger, the need, the scent of the Strange drew a hard, killing thirst up through him.
His grip on logic, on the thoughts of a man, was slipping.
The beast thrilled and tore at his mind. Taking. Ruling.
Kill, it whispered. Destroy.
Cedar strained to push that desire away. His sanity was sliding with each breath.
He growled, and pulled his goggles into place, his crystal-sighted Walker heavy in his palm, and the need to spill blood and tear bones from flesh rolling through him in a hot wave.
“You have me,” Cedar rasped, answering Hink, answering the beast within him. And promising the ship full of strangeworked men, coming down hard over the landing pad now, doors open, guns rattling through the air, that he would be their end.
Distantly, Cedar was aware of the captain and the others firing at the ship.
He didn’t care about the ship. Didn’t care about the bullets spraying through the air. Didn’t care about the cannons locked and loaded, fuses lit.
He ran. To the ship, to the strangeworked crew, Wil beside him, ahead of him.
All the world seemed to slow to a dream landscape. He could sense the heartbeats of the strangeworked men in the ship. He could hear their sour song, hungry to devour this world, tainted with the nightmare singsong stitched together by Mr. Shunt’s thread.
The song, the beat of hearts, the blood he could almost taste in the back of his throat were so clear, they made Captain Hink’s yell, the gunfire behind him, the gunfire ahead of him seem like the softest hush of wind through leaves.
Cedar’s world was filled with the scent of the Strange. All his reason for breathing was their death.
He was running, close enough now so he could see their faces clearly, the flat hatred twisting features into snarls of malevolence. The ship wasn’t near enough the ground, still, three of the strangeworked men jumped from it.
Their legs should have shattered. But they landed cat-light, and were running, guns firing, straight at him, each with a flamethrower at the ready on his back.
Cedar didn’t pause. Ax in one hand, gun in the other, he shot the first Strange in the head, then pivoted and hacked the second man through the neck.
They both fell.
And they both stood up again. But not for long. Wil was on them, tearing out throats, breaking necks.
Cedar laughed. He licked the blood off his lips, shifted his grip on the slick ax handle, and lifted his gun. He took aim again and fired.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Captain Hink realized all the shouting in the world wasn’t doing a thing to stop Cedar Hunt from charging straight into enemy fire.
He’d seen that sort of thing on the battlefield before, where a man goes fool-headed and doesn’t know when to retreat.
But there was something about Mr. Hunt that he didn’t expect.
He moved fast, far faster than a man should, and seemed to have an uncanny awareness of where the bullets were headed and when to duck them.
The wolf beside him was the same. They moved and fought like two creatures with one mind, faster than their enemies, always knowing where their enemies would be and how best to take them down.
Before Hink could even get more than a few cuss words out, Cedar and the wolf had killed three men.
Except then the three men got back up again.
Holy hellfire. That was something Hink had never seen on the field before.
But Cedar Hunt just laughed and found himself a flamethrower. And then got serious about his butchery.
More men were jumping out of that ship. Men Hink recognized. Men who shouldn’t be walking without crutches. Men wi
th hands where stumps had been.
They weren’t Mullins’s men. No, the ship’s crew stayed on the ship, and turned the guns on the field.
It didn’t matter how fast Cedar Hunt was. Didn’t matter that the wolf moved like shadow and smoke. They were going to be killed.
More gunfire rained down from the cliffs above them. Jack’s men had turned out the Gatling guns and were aiming them at anything that moved.
Theobald stood side by side with Miss Dupuis, that gun of his shooting out grapeshot that caught anything it touched on fire, while Miss Dupuis unloaded her shotgun, sending out bullets that exploded on impact.
They were a coolheaded couple who looked like they’d seen their share of battle at each other’s sides.
But it was too much. Too many bullets. Too easy to die. And Hink wasn’t about to get himself shot and let Mullins finish him off for good.
“Out!” he yelled. “Get in the tunnels. There’s a door that way you can bust in.”
“What about Mr. Hunt?” Miss Dupuis yelled.
“I’ll get his attention. You get running!”
Captain Hink bolted toward the stone stairs that led up to the main cannon. He was exposed, halfway up the stairs, but out of range of the Gatling guns, which couldn’t fire straight down on him since they were set back too far in the hole cut into the cliff.
Almost there, almost there, he panted as he ran the stairs.
Something hot bit through his leg and he fell forward.
Son of a bitch. He was shot. If that bullet came from Mullins’s gun he was going to dig it out and make the jackass eat it.
Hink got back on his feet and took the rest of the stairs, cussing his way through the pain.
The cannon was unmanned. Likely the boy had been shot and tumbled to his death, or had hightailed it when he saw Mullins’s ship come up with her guns.
Hink got busy, checking the cannon, clearing the barrel, adding the powder, tamping, and dropping the ball inside.
It was slow work for one man. But Captain Hink was a determined man who had no problem doing the work of two when he put his mind to it. He glanced down over the battle. The ship still hovered there, letting loose round after round of ammunition, while Cedar and the wolf seemed to have come enough to their senses that they’d taken cover behind a scree of stones.