She was standing against his side again, holding his hand.
“This is Mr. Weiss,” she said to him. “He is a good man, and he’s willing to take you as an apprentice.”
“Apprentice?”
She nodded to the shop around them. “It means he can teach you how to do what he does. How to make the things he makes for everyone in the village. Like the iron pots we use, and the nails you and father used yesterday.” She smiled up at him. “I told him how quickly you learn and how strong you are.”
Youngblood put his hand around Gerda’s waist, pulled her close, and used some of the new words he’d learned. He said to the man, “Gerda is my friend. I would like to learn how to make things for her.”
A grin split the old man’s face. “Your friend, you say?” The man looked thoughtfully at him, and the fire hissed quietly in the background. “What’s your name, son?”
He looked down at Gerda, who squeezed his hand, smiled up at him, and rested her head against his shoulder.
“Lukas.” He said it quietly, but with assurance.
“My name is Lukas.”
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I too took a road less traveled, Frost
And I can tell you what I found
The ambition worn, the youthful lost
And never a glade or town.
The warmth of friends I have lacked at night
Laughter in the day
But stranger things than most I’ve seen
In the shadows along my way.
Through each night, eyes watch my step
Or rustle as I lay
Stones clatter and click, the silence descend
Alone, alone I stay
Leaves grow thick, trees grow close,
The path so often lost
I follow a ribbon of lonely dirt
Which wind and sunlight toss.
But of the dusk have I not spoken
Of the dawn I have said none
For the creatures which wander from dark to light
Frightful, and never undone.
—Argentiis
The story continues in Ironclad, coming 2017
And…
A new series by Daniel Foster, Paan’s Rising
Please enjoy the excerpts
Development Excerpt
From…
Ironclad
June 1914, somewhere in the Atlantic
The watch passed in ripples of saltwater. They came out of the darkness before the old battleship’s running lights, broke across her steel bow, then slipped quietly astern. Garret shouldn’t have been on deck. He should have been in his hammock. He ached for sleep. Instead he sat in the shadow of the forward gun turret and let the salty wind blow over him.
Another seaman stood not far away, looking out over the rail. He lounged, smoking a cigarette. He and Garret paid no mind to each other.
Other than the partial shadow in which Garret sat, the main deck of the USS Kearsarge glowed brightly, strung with the newfangled electric lights. Beyond her railing, though, the night sea was empty. Just endless ripples.
The orange end of the seaman’s cigarette glowed now and again, painting his face in an orange crescent before it disappeared back into the night.
Beneath Garret, Kearsarge sung her quiet song. She was a vast ship, a three hundred and seventy-five foot long iron beast, and she throbbed day and night with the power from her coal-fired belly.
Garret had thought the Appalachian hills knew the meaning of sleep, but they didn’t. Not like a night on the open ocean. When it was cloudless and stars sprinkled the expanse, Garret could stand on deck and look up and pretend he was not alone, for the stars above were still his stars, even though he didn’t know their names. They were the same ones under which he and Babe had hunted raccoons since she was a pup. They were the same stars under which he and Molly had lain, talking and laughing then making love, then cuddling, finally drifting away in each other’s arms. These were the same stars, and on clear nights, they stretched from horizon to horizon, glittering quietly, while the iron beast bore him away.
On nights like this one, however, the stars hid themselves behind steel clouds, impenetrable as the armor on Kearsarge’s flanks. Strong as the steel which composed her skeleton. Dark as the iron that enclosed her burning heart, deep beneath him.
Garret swallowed hard and stared ahead, letting the wind dry his eyes until they stung. Kearsarge was a monstrous old thing. Iron bulkheads and iron rivets and iron stanchions and iron guns and iron turrets and decks and cabins that seemed to go on forever. Good lord, she had her own pharmacy and even a small post office.
Her forward cage mast loomed above him, rising many stories in a web of invincible black iron. The lights cut its shape from the darkness, and far atop it, a single white light burned like a god’s eye, brilliant enough to see to the depths of Davy Jones’ locker. Kearsarge’s forward turret rose above him as well, her main guns protruding like black tree trunks, polished, perfectly cylindrical. The long arms of death.
Yet, for all her size and power, Kearsarge was a relic, a quaint old man o’ war among the gigantic dreadnoughts of the modern navy. Kearsarge had just been refitted to make her marginally useful again. It was a half-hearted redemption of sorts. Redemption, though, was not a word in Garret’s vocabulary. It did not belong in his life.
I thought I could do it, Molly. I thought I could be your husband. He had to swallow hard. I wanted it more than anything.
But he’d only ever been a blacksmith. Or at least a blacksmith’s son. Then he became a monster. Now he was nothing.
Better to be nothing, he thought. He stared at the sea before him. It went forever, blank and featureless until it curved off at the edge of the world.
I miss you so bad.
“There you are!” The voice was jarring. “We’re gonna play kings in the corner, come on Gar.”
The casual use of Molly’s pet name for him hit him like a slap. “I said don’t call me that,” he snapped.
The other guy backed up a step, stood awkwardly for a moment. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
And just like that Garret was alone again. His shoulders slumped.
I have to do this. I have to. But the more distance he put between himself and Molly, the worse it hurt. That was the amazing thing about the human heart. No matter how much you took out of it, there was somehow always more to lose.
He was alone. Alone in a crowded room. Alone on a battleship in the middle of the sea. Alone in his hammock with his buddies snoring sonorously around him.
They don’t know what I am. They shouldn’t trust me.
For an instant, the thought crossed his mind to jump over the side. No one would see if he went quickly. The men on watch probably wouldn’t hear his small splash over the roiling of Kearsarge’s wake. He could go to the end that was fated to be his.
But not yet. Molly was still relying on him to provide for her and for their baby.
At the thought of his child, Garret suppressed a cry and bit his lip until he tasted blood. He punished himself daily by thinking about Molly. But he wasn’t strong enough to think about their baby. It gutted him. He focused on the pain in his lip, used it as a rallying point from which to gather the tattered remains of his intent.
For the baby, it worked, once again.
More than a year ago, he’d faced down a monster, a demon in physical form. A werewolf from the pit of hell. It had torn up Garret and everyone he loved. It had killed his Ma and his Pa. It had burned his town to the ground.
All that he had survived. Now he was left with the real monster. Now he was forced to live daily with the thing he knew would destroy him. Garret looked out to sea, turning to the side to watch the indistinct water fade past.
Everyone tried to tell me, Mr. Fix, Sarn, even the thing that gave me the strap.
Garret could run from anything in the world, but no matter how far he went, he was be
ginning to understand that he would never escape himself.
Development Excerpt
From…
The Dark Heart
May, 1929
Christopher had gone to sleep snuggled in warm blankets, but a sharp chill was waking him. His head was spinning too, a dizzying whirl that turned his thoughts into a slurry. Where’s my bed? He was lying on frozen ground. He didn’t know how long he’d been there, but long enough that the cold had bitten into him like a thousand little teeth, sinking into his muscles, stiffening his joints.
His fingers and toes ached. As he came around, his muscles began to quiver. He stilled them. His head was clearing enough for him to begin to suspect where he was, and that meant he had to be quiet. Absolutely quiet.
He bent his stiff knuckles, blinked, drew a breath. The air was so cold that it stung his lungs. He blinked again, but his vision swam and his stomach was still doing barrel-rolls. I’m in the grey forest. He fought down panic. It’s a dream. It’s just a dream. He said it over and over in his mind. It didn’t help. Sometimes, when he found himself here, he felt disembodied, safely floating over the scene, the trees as indistinct as if he was looking at them through a pane of dirty glass, and the painful cold of the place barely touching the edge of his senses. This time he could feel the stiff pine needles beneath his back, his vision was clearing by the second, and the air was so cold that it hurt. This time he was on the ground.
Maybe I’m somewhere else this time. There were lots of cold places on earth, right? The last of the fuzz left his vision. Tall trees rose above him. For a second, he thought he was pinned to a cliff, and the trees were growing sideways, but it was only because his head hadn’t yet righted itself. Eventually it settled and he realized he was lying down on flat ground with trees growing straight up above him, like they were supposed to.
He sat up gingerly and almost threw up when his stomach heaved again. He surveyed the scene, and panicked. He was definitely in the grey forest. He didn’t know what else to call it. It was dim, cold, and lifeless. It was full of charcoal-colored, rough-barked pine trees which all rose out of a deep needle bed. The bed, too, was frozen and crunched softly when he moved. The trees weren’t thick enough to interlock their branches, but it didn’t matter because the sun never seemed to shine in the grey forest. It was blotted out by the clouds, which were always low and heavy. And they never moved. As far as he could see, everything was drab, cold, and still.
There was no snow, but the needle bed and rocks were covered with frost, and the trees wore a thin coating of ice as if they had been glassed and powdered with frozen crystal. The forest had an open-air, thin feel to it, as if it was atop a high mountain. No, it was more than that. The forest felt empty. Alone, as if nothing had ever lived there.
But Christopher knew that something did. He scrambled for the nearest tree, crunching the frozen needles. The sound was jarring, but when he reached the tree and pressed himself against it, quiet returned. He listened.
Nothing.
The air never quite blew in a breeze, but it never felt quite still, either. It slipped by, just below Christopher’s hearing, hollowing out the silence. Christopher gripped the striated bark until his knuckles whitened. He had drifted to sleep with the last line of his mother’s lullaby in his head: For your mother is near, and so always she’ll be. Christopher wasn’t a little boy anymore, he was twelve years old. He teared up anyway and would have broken down were the fear of death not strong enough to keep him silent.
A shiver wracked him. He crouched, tucking his knees against his chest. His breath clouded in front of him. He was wearing nothing but the longjohns he’d worn to bed so, despite his efforts, he was soon shivering violently. He only had to make it until the dream ended. Maybe there aren’t any of them around, he told himself. It was rare, but sometimes it happened. Beneath his roaring fight-or-flight instincts, a small rational part of his mind wondered how he could be weighing his chances of survival in a dream. Wasn’t the hallmark of a dream not knowing that you were dreaming?
A soft sound came from nearby, like a sigh of wind through leaves. But there were no leaves. The sigh was followed by a soft chirp and a trill. The trill ended in a deep pop—a noise made low in a heavy chest, like a big joint popping out of socket. Christopher gripped the sides of the tree. He clenched his muscles to stop their shaking. The forest was empty enough that he could feel the beast’s presence like a pressure, a weight on the thin air. The huff of wind came again, close enough for Christopher to recognize it this time. It was the hiss of air through long, slit-like nostrils.
Please mommy, help me. Christopher begged mindlessly, beginning to shake. Please help me… don’t let me die…
A single needle fell from an ice-covered branch. It landed with an audible tap.
The beast approached his hiding place, prowling through the ice and trees. The sounds of its footfalls drifted left, then right as though it were uncertain, listing back and forth. Searching. Christopher was afraid to take a peek, but he needed to know where it was. The tree trunks bounced sound around until it was impossible to tell which way anything was coming from. He gripped the rough bark and sneaked one eye around the edge of the tree. He saw nothing between the icicle-covered pines. Rough landscape, cold and lifeless. The huff came again, more clearly this time.
It was behind him.
Christopher flailed around the tree, putting it between himself and the beast. As he did so, he saw it from the corner of his eye. As always, it was the color of new-fallen snow. He cowered against the tree, expecting gory death to rush down upon him with flashing teeth and claws, but it didn’t.
Maybe there was more than one. They could be surrounding him. He’d seen three of them do that to a grizzly bear once, and knew from prints he’d stumbled across that there were more than three of them. Lots more. He’d also seen what little was left of the grizzly when they’d finished with it.
The chill had taken hold of his body. Christopher couldn’t feel his feet, and his hands were responding clumsily. He was going to have to try to sneak away. He couldn’t outrun the beast, but he couldn’t stay either. It was tempting, too tempting to just huddle against the tree and pretend that if he was quiet enough, it might pass him by. They never did that. It would find him. He crept slowly away on his numb limbs and tried to keep the tree as a sight-shield between him and the beast. He’d made it ten feet from the tree, standing in the open, when another huff and a deep pop came from his right.
Caught. There were two of them. The second one was standing on a rock thirty feet away. There was nothing but open air between he and it. He was in plain view. His imagination treated him to a picture of his head, fitting easily between its long jaws. Of it biting down and snapping his skull like an acorn. Christopher’s bowels let go. But it didn’t run towards him with its effortless strength. It stared to the side as if it was unaware of him. It was crouched, claws dug into the rock, bracing itself. Quivers ran through its muscular limbs.
The beast didn’t look like a cat or a dog or a bear or anything else which belonged in our world. It had a solid, compact body from which sprouted four long powerful legs, built for running. Christopher had seen pictures of animals that lived in icy climates, and they all seemed to have thick fur. This beast’s fur was so short and neat that it looked almost sleek, but for a small row of spines rising down the center of its back. Its long, dragon-like skull seemed to mount to its shoulders without a neck, and it had a large lump in the middle of its forehead. Its lower jaw was oversized and full of curving teeth, the two largest at the front. Its upper jaw tapered to a point, from which grew one huge hooked tooth that fit between the lower two like a can opener. It looked like it could bite a log in half. Its small eyes, sunk deep in a heavy brow, were pale blue, with snake-like pupils.
It was hideous and silken at the same time. Clean and white as a young lady’s wedding dress, but its curved teeth protruded in the twilight. Ugliness, beauty, and death all in one.
/> Despite the fact that he was in plain sight, Christopher didn’t run. The beast was crouched and shivering. He knew what it was doing. Of the dozens of times he’d been in this forest, he’d only seen this twice before, but if he held still, he might have a chance.
Christopher’s stomach heaved as he watched the beast’s muscles twitch under the strain. He’d seen those muscles being used too many times. The beasts didn’t just pounce and kill. They would bite their victims with those huge teeth, tear at them for a minute, perhaps rip an arm loose or bite off a foot, then they would sink their teeth into a leg or arm and run with the victim, dragging them perhaps for miles over the frosty ground, stringing blood all over their white coat. Then they would stop and tear at the victim some more. Then they would bite down and drag them away again. Christopher had never seen the end of it. He didn’t know how long it took the victims to die.
Tears fell from his face to the frozen needles. The beast was still looking away from him. A slit formed at the bottom of the round lump in its brow. The beast forced itself to hold still, and the slit grew wider, revealing something slick and wet and bright orange. The beast opened it slowly and kept wincing as if even the grey twilight was too much light for it. It took a full minute to completely open.
It was a third eye, huge and orange as hellfire. When the eye was fully open, the beast shuddered from its flared nostrils to the tip of its thin, whip-like tail. Its orange eye stared into the forest. The beast trilled, a painfully sharp, bird-like call which made Christopher shrink. With a scrape of claws on rock, the beast was gone, its muscular legs flinging it away into the trees. Behind him, Christopher heard the other beast trill in response and fling itself after its companion.
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