“You’re not Weldon,” she said. “Where’s Weldon?”
Kincaid pointed with his thumb down the stairs. “I think Weldon decided to try a different line of work.”
“Now why would he do that?” The woman seemed sincerely taken aback.
“Something about dying,” he offered.
She made a dismissive sound. “He didn’t die the first time. And with the modifications I’ve made to the projectors and the lumitypes, the odds of him having to fight a—”
“I’m here to fix the furnace,” Kincaid interrupted, hefting his toolkit higher. “Nothing personal, but this is really heavy.”
When she didn’t react, he added, “And I get paid by the hour.”
• • •
THE WOMAN SAID TO CALL HER MEL, and given her steady stream of chatter—periodically punctuated by surprisingly insightful comments about the overall condition of the building’s outdated boiler—he was able to determine she was a mechanik of some sort. She seemed the type: confident but plain, as comfortable talking shop as chatting about the weather. She skipped right past his name and didn’t seem concerned with checking his work orders. Instead, she led him through gloomy hallways decorated with colorless antiques on dark-wood shelves—he caught a glimpse of a trollkin-carved figurine of Dhunia—and down a spiral staircase that branched in three different places. They encountered no one else. But in numerous places along the way, he spotted cats watching him with disinterest; even without seeing them, he’d suspected they were there. The allergic tingling in his nostrils warned him.
“I told them I could fix it,” she was saying, “but the truth is, I’m better with more advanced machinery. I also think I made them nervous when I suggested adding some improvements. This furnace is so old, they’d probably just discovered steam when they built it.”
“So, you must have cut your teeth working on ’jacks?” he asked. The giant automatons were the most sophisticated mechanikal constructs Kincaid had ever worked on, but he didn’t really care about her familiarity with them—he was just making conversation until he could be alone with his work.
“Steamjacks, warjacks, laborjacks, all ’jacks.” She grinned over her shoulder at him as she led him from the stairs and across a wide stone floor to the furnace room door. “If your name is Jack, I can tune you up, too.”
He didn’t think it was a particularly good joke. “Funny,” he said politely.
She shook her head. “Nah, it’s not. But I appreciate you saying so. Actually, I don’t get much excuse to work on ’jacks here, either. Our gear is a quite a bit more specialized and delicate. It’s hard to explain.”
She opened the metal door and gestured to a sizable hunk of metal that filled three-quarters of the small, low-ceilinged chamber beyond. Kincaid suspected someone had built the room around the unit; there wouldn’t be any other way to get it in.
“This is it,” Mel said. “It’s probably been down for days, but it took forever for anyone to notice—it’s always cold in Blackwell Hall anyway, you know? So, I took a quick look, and I’d recommend checking the thermostat first. I didn’t have the tools to unfit the pipes or I’d have started there.”
“Thank you.” He put down his toolkit; his hands shook openly, and he quickly thrust them into the pockets on his coveralls. “I’ll need to check a radiator once I have things up and running here.”
“Not a problem. I’ll come back for you in a little while.” Mel reached into one of the myriad pockets on her own coveralls, took out an elaborate brass pocket watch, and confirmed the time. Then she cocked her head. “Let’s say an hour. You okay?”
Kincaid said, “Yeah, I just don’t like small dark spaces.”
“Me, too. That’s the exact reason I was born.” Mel put her watch away and grinned at him. “If you get stuck or freak out, call me after you get it all resolved, and I promise I’ll come running. See you in a bit.”
She headed back up the spiral staircase, and when she was out of sight, Kincaid faced the furnace room’s entryway. He could feel cold sweat on his neck as he braced himself to crawl inside. His breathing became ragged, almost panicked, as he opened his toolkit. Once he got to work, however, he was able to put the memory of the last small dark place he’d been out of his mind, at least for now.
• • •
IT WAS EASIER THAN HE’D EXPECTED—a blocked conduit that had been installed with an automatic shutoff switch if the heat reached a certain intensity. Once he cleared the blockage, it was just a matter of checking a radiator to ensure it was generating heat again.
So, he wandered up the stairs in search of either a radiator or the woman Mel. He noted with relief that the ceilings were high and the walls far apart. Once out of the furnace room, he no longer felt the panic of his past strangling him.
On the ground level, he heard the steady murmur of voices coming from beyond an arched doorway. Both of its colored glass doors were thrown wide open, and the lamplight from beyond that fought back the gloom of the corridor made him momentarily forget it was still daytime outdoors. He stepped into that light.
The scene in the great hall beyond was one of controlled chaos. While the walls were lined with the ornate shelving and thick draperies Kincaid considered typical of historical mansions, a trio of long modern tables formed a U shape to fill the room’s center. A host of intriguing equipment—a strange box with an accordion lens topped by a circular disk set with other lenses, a variety of unusual lighting apparatus, and a sizable collection of metallic gear for which Kincaid could not determine a function—was assembled on all three tables.
To one side, a middle-aged man with black skin unpacked a strange suit of armor from a crate, a bulky striped garment to which were attached a profusion of pipes and gauges. He looked up when Kincaid entered the room and in that glance revealed his eyes as unusually pale. For a moment Kincaid wondered if he might be blind, though he his actions did not suggest it. He interacted with the younger man next to him easily and comfortably, as if they knew each other well, and he had about him a protective air—and Kincaid could guess why. The pale and painfully thin younger man looked like he might break in half in a summer breeze. From a separate crate, this individual lifted a peculiar enclosed helmet resembling a gas mask with protrusions and switches along its sides.
In the central space formed by the three tables stood a dark-haired young woman who carried herself with sufficient authority that it seemed likely she was the leader of the crew, despite her youth. He knew confidence when he inadvertently ran into it—or when it was forced—and there was something in her manner suggesting she felt she had something to prove. Maybe she had just recently been given the responsibility of leadership? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen it.
She had glasses with thick black rims that made him think of a librarian he’d once courted, but the way she kept her pistol so notably high on her side made him think of a grave robber he’d once hated. The way she wore her long hair made her seem especially young, but he guessed her in her twenties—still too young to be bossing around the likes of the sour-faced black man in the corner, he decided. But as the grave robber had once warned him in the dead of night, Trust none of what you hear and less of what you see.
As a sizable gray cat jumped up onto a table and brushed against her elbow, the young woman scribbled furiously on a notepad as she assessed each piece of equipment. When she turned to speak to the person standing next to her, Kincaid recognized Mel. The mechanik affirmed something the young leader said to her and then noticed Kincaid waiting with his toolkit.
“That was fast,” she said. “Must’ve been the thermostat like I thought.”
“Nope. Core conduit,” Kincaid said.
“Automatic overheat shutdown?”
“Yep.”
“So, essentially the thermostat.” She grinned; she knew he had her. “Still, damned fast. Especially for someone being paid by the hour. You could have stretched it out a bit.”
“I
have some ethics, believe it or not. I just need to check a couple of radiators, and then I’m done here.” He looked around the hall at the hive of activity. “Mind if I ask what’s going on?”
“This is where the magic happens.” The black man’s head came up. He gave her a sharp and disapproving look. She cleared her throat. “Okay, not actual magic. But here’s where we do what we do, you know?”
Kincaid noted Mel’s suddenly pensive look and snorted. “All right, then—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m just going to check the radiator.”
He went around the tables, nodding once to the other man—who could definitely see after all, though there was something unsettling about his silvery eyes. He was clearly preoccupied with checking his strange armor, but he acknowledged Kincaid’s nod as Kincaid reached the radiator on the farthest wall. Just standing before it, he could feel the heat coming from it; still, he made a production out of kneeling to check its thermostat and its pipes that disappeared down into the floor. He could feel Mel watching him.
Satisfied, he rose, glancing up at a massive family portrait on the wall above him as Mel suddenly appeared at his side.
“That’s Mr. Strathmoore,” she said, “and those are his late wife and daughter. He’s the reason for this whole operation. Just being myself, I have my doubts he’s even around anymore. Nobody has seen him in months. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone missing and just popped up again later on. Anyway, this is all his—the missions, the equipment, the house. I wasn’t being evasive, for what it’s worth. I presumed you knew about our work when you took the job. That’s not a secret, though we do have a few others.”
Kincaid shook his head, though it was clear she wanted him to ask. “I don’t ask questions when I get work. We all get along better that way. I’ll bite—what is your operation?”
Mel grinned. “Ghosts.”
“So, is this Strathmoore the one who pays me? Or is he a ghost, too?” Kincaid asked. He hoped not—if the portrait were accurate, Strathmoore looked like the kind of man who could command men to drink the blood of their enemies just to stay hydrated. He found it hard to take the mention of ghosts seriously.
Mel barked a laugh. “You want to get paid? I can get you work that pays a lot more than you get for just fixing furnaces.”
“I don’t know. What are we talking about here? I’m not looking to get in any trouble.”
“Relax. Do I seem like the type would get you in trouble?” She indicated with a nod of her head the bespectacled young woman inventorying the equipment. “I told Abigail I thought you’d do just fine for our needs. What do you weigh—maybe two hundred?”
“That’s about right. Why?”
She extended her hand. “One fifty-six. Nice to meet you. Come with me.”
As they approached, the woman Mel had identified as Abigail set aside her notebook and turned to face him. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Good morning. I’m Abigail Thorpe, the investigator for this team. Melanie seems to think you have what it takes to join us at the Majestic Playhouse.”
Kincaid looked at the mechanik, who smiled back at him. Just the same, he shook his head. “Lady, I’m not theater material. I don’t sing, I don’t dance, I don’t even do shadow puppets. I can’t even act surprised.”
“We don’t need an actor. We need a bodyguard. What we call a bouncer. Weldon was supposed to watch our backs.”
“Who’s—?” Kincaid caught himself as, out of Abigail’s view, Mel feigned terror and turned in frantic little circles filled with false panic. “Oh, right, him. The not-enough-coins guy.”
“Trust me, we pay reasonable rates. What’s your name?”
“Kincaid.”
Abigail Thorpe raised one eyebrow above the rim of her glasses. “Is that your first name or your last name?”
Kincaid hesitated then said, “Just Kincaid.”
“I see. A man who doesn’t want anyone to know too much about him.” She smiled. “All right. Do you have any experience fighting, Mr. Just Kincaid?”
Thinking of the holdout pistol hidden up his sleeve, Kincaid shrugged. “A little.”
“Good. We will get you hooked up with a baton, then. No blades, no guns. After all, we’re not looking to kill anyone.” Abigail Thorpe reached down to pet the gray cat that now wove its way between her boots. “We need to leave soon, so once the two of you get the wagon loaded, I’ll introduce you around.”
She picked up the cat, making kissing noises at it as she turned to go. Kincaid felt a sneeze coming but resisted it long enough to turn away with Mel. He sniffed forcefully, and it subsided.
“You aren’t allergic to spirits, are you?” the mechanik asked as she led him to the open double-doors of the great hall.
“Is that possible?” Kincaid answered. “Who the hell would know?”
Mel grinned. “You’re going to fit right in hunting ghosts. Welcome to the Strangelight Workshop, Kincaid.”
• • •
IT’S NOT A MANSION, KINCAID THOUGHT as Mel preceded him past ornate statues and glass display cases filled with relics from cultures he couldn’t identify. It’s a museum. He thought he spotted the man with the silvery eyes, Grimes, in a portrait depicting him alongside a trio of women, though Grimes’ eyes appeared normal in the painting. And some of those cases housed mechanikal devices that he suspected were part of the Strangelight Workshop’s unorthodox pursuits. He couldn’t discern their functions, and Mel didn’t give him time to ask questions.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, anyway. Who hunts ghosts? And why? What am I getting myself into here?
A short time later, as she led him down a wide staircase—this one of dull stone with a narrow band of thick black cloth cascading down its center and tapestries draped on either wall—he revised his opinion once again: Blackwell Hall was actually a castle pretending to be a mansion.
“Bailey’s an acquired taste,” Mel was saying. “Don’t let him rattle you.”
Kincaid tore his stare away from what he was pretty sure was a skorne battle flag. “Wait—who’s Bailey?”
They turned a corner at the bottom of the stairs and approached the end of a short corridor. The way was blocked by a makeshift wall of metal bars that made Kincaid shudder. Beyond were crates and shadows. Mel said, “Cronan Bailey is—”
“The quartermaster,” said a massive shape that detached itself from the shadows and stepped up to the bars. Kincaid had always considered himself tall, but the snarling man who produced a set of iron keys and proceeded to unlock a door in the bars made him look up to meet his eye. Bailey muttered under his breath as he opened the door and then seemed to remember they were there. He curled his lip. “I’m the ass you want to kiss to get your gear.”
Mel snorted. “Oh boy. He’ll give us the gear either way, but yes, he’s the ass, all right.”
“New blood?” Bailey gestured the two of them through. Out of three years’ worth of habit, Kincaid was careful to not fully turn his back on the quartermaster.
“This is Kincaid,” Mel called over her shoulder as she moved between crates, headed for the back of what Kincaid could now see was a storage chamber. “He’s taking over for Weldon.”
“Don’t care.”
“Weldon was the one who had a little bit of a breakdown at the cemetery.”
“Oh,” Bailey said. “But still—don’t care.” The man made an ugly high-pitched noise, a cross between an unoiled wheel being turned and a rat being crushed beneath said wheel. Kincaid realized the quartermaster was laughing at his own cynicism. “He was the crybaby, right?” He locked the door again. “This one gonna cry, too?”
Kincaid cocked an eyebrow at the quartermaster but said nothing.
Bailey made that noise again. “Mel, tell him which crates to load. If he’s like the crybaby, he won’t even know an alchemical capacitor if he were being electrocuted by it.”
Kincaid said, “Did the crybaby ever say he’d like to beat you
to death with one?” Perhaps not the best way to ingratiate oneself with a new employer, but then again he wasn’t sure he even wanted the job.
Bailey blinked with surprise, and Kincaid was satisfied to leave the burly quartermaster staring after him as he followed Mel to a metal bay door. He helped her raise it, flooding the area with welcome sunlight. They were at the west side of the mansion. A medium-sized wagon with two horses to draw it was parked between the bay door and a tall hedge on that side of the house, along a path that likely led down to the stables he had passed on his way in. The hedge wasn’t high enough to block his sight of the city and the ocean beyond. Even from here Kincaid could see sunlight reflecting off the waters of Ceryl’s harbor as well as its bright white buildings.
“You won’t have to tangle with any ghosts,” Mel explained as she turned back to the various crates. “Here, take this box down. No, that’s Grimes’ job. You’re just to make sure nobody sneaks up on us or tries to hassle us. Oh, and if anybody starts acting possessed, you’ll need to step in. Some ghosts can also make inanimate objects attack, but all you need to do with that is just duck, right?”
“What does that mean, ‘step in’?”
“Wham.” Mel brought one fist down on her open palm. “A strong slap will usually do the trick and bring them back to themselves. Also, if some nosy neighbor pokes their nose in? You keep ’em occupied and send them away. That’s why you’re the bouncer. People don’t always appreciate us. But really, most of what you’ll do is carry heavy things and look like you mean business so nobody interferes with our work. Don’t kill anybody, of course, but if some vindictive ghost takes them over, you may have to put their lights out. Not me, of course.” She grinned. “I like my lights just the way they are.”
“All right.” He could feel himself wanting to bail out now. Possession? If such a thing were even possible—and these people clearly believed it was—who in their right mind would want to get mixed up in such things?
Her grin faded and she sighed. “No, wait. If I’m possessed, I guess you need to knock me out, too, since I have the most dangerous gear—”
Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology Page 2