Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  “You said you heard voices?” Balfour asked. The moment of recollection had passed, and though he was now as white as a sheet, the faraway look in his eyes had diminished almost completely. He no longer looked like a ghost. “After visiting Margrave Germaine?”

  “Yeah,” Laure said, shrugging uncomfortably. “I know it doesn’t sound right, but I swear—”

  “Did they say anything?” Balfour asked. Apparently, he was interested enough that good manners no longer applied.

  “Nothing, really,” Laure began. She bit her lip, staring up at the mask over Balfour’s head like it was challenging her somehow, then sighed, shoulders slumping. “Maybe a few things. Most I could pick out was my name. Just kept saying it over and over again in the night.”

  “I’ve seen Margrave Germaine for these,” Balfour said, lifting his hands to us. I could see some of the gears were still visible at the junction between his thumb and forefinger, breaking the illusion of metallic skin. “I also … heard things.”

  “Bastion,” Luvander said. “What a merry, strange crowd this one is.”

  “Gaeth heard voices, too,” I said. On instinct or habit, I touched his letter through the fabric of my vest pocket, which was where I always kept it—in case someone should be snooping through my things and find it by accident. It seemed necessary somehow for me to protect him this way from those who would believe he was a madman and a simpleton, when I knew he was neither.

  “And who is Gaeth?” Luvander asked. “Your other fiancée?”

  “The student who went missing,” I replied. “He left behind a letter—it described the same phenomenon.”

  “I wonder if this is the way the magicians felt, during the fever,” Balfour mused, looking distant again. Memories of the war could have been nothing but painful for him, I assumed, and here there was no hiding from them.

  “Yes, but where in bastion’s name is Adamo?” Luvander asked. He checked the clock for the hundredth time, fiddling with the knot in his scarf. All at once, the clock began to chime—a horrible, squawking noise that sounded like a bird being murdered. Even Laure jumped a little. I could feel my heart move in my throat, and Balfour’s hands gripped the lip of the table so tightly that, when his fingers came away, they’d left little indents in the wood.

  “Why do you own such a horrible timepiece?” Balfour asked. “I’ve kept quiet about it for this long, but it’s worse than hearing voices!”

  “Ghislain sent it to me,” Luvander replied, somewhat sulkily. “It was a gift. I’m certain he murdered pirates for it. You really don’t like it?”

  Balfour opened his mouth to reply when I heard the faintest of bells ringing somewhere behind me, within the shop.

  “Someone’s at the door,” I said, for that was the only assumption I could draw from the sound.

  “The shop is closed,” Luvander replied. “I understand that my wares are in high demand, but for once I agree with Adamo—there are more important things than hats. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

  “Mightn’t it be Adamo at the door?” Laure asked. “Who knows how long he’s been ringing, with us yapping like this.”

  “I told him to come around back,” Luvander said. “But he’s getting old, isn’t he? Perhaps his memory’s failing him. I’ll go see to it.”

  He stood, the chair scraping beneath him, and headed to the door. It swung open without a creak, swinging back and forth on well-oiled hinges. Luvander’s disappearance left only Balfour, Laure, and me together—the most awkward of trios. None of us wished to be the first to speak, and so we sat in uncomfortable silence. I could tell that Balfour and Laure wished to question each other in more detail about their similar symptoms, but neither of them felt comfortable doing so in front of me. And so I was the third wheel, I realized. But I could never have left Laure alone with Balfour, impeccable manners or no.

  “Well,” Balfour said at last. “Do you remember what it sounded like?”

  “Metal,” Laure replied. “All whirs and grinding gears. Kind of what I’d imagine those hands’d sound like, if they were three times as big.”

  “Incoming,” Luvander said from behind the door, and barged in a moment later.

  Behind him—in a moment of utter, bizarre coincidence—was the older man I’d seen with Hal on more than one occasion—the one who I could only assume was his lover. He was alone, without Hal, and I knew immediately from the expression on his face that something was amiss.

  “I’ve come on Owen’s behalf,” he said, “since the man in question has just been arrested.”

  ELEVEN

  BALFOUR

  Once, in the middle of the war, I’d seen Cassiopeia set light to a store of powder. Everything had happened as if in slow motion—the yellow flames arcing through the night, one moment of perfect silence suspended in the air before Ivory’s target caught flame. It’d sent explosions ripping fiercely through the battlefield, nearly knocking me off Anastasia, since I’d been closer to the ground doing my usual reconnaissance.

  The effect Margrave Royston’s announcement had on the room was quite similar to that experience. Everything went still and cold. Then, abruptly, the room exploded.

  I was very nearly knocked off my perch again, though this time by the young lady Laure, who’d surged to her feet and strode right over to Margrave Royston as though she thought he’d been the one to do the arresting personally.

  “What d’you mean, ‘arrested’?” she demanded.

  “Exactly what it sounds like,” Margrave Royston replied—without any of the witticisms for which he was so notorious among the diplomatic circles.

  “What for?” Laure persisted. I couldn’t blame her for leaping into action at once, after all. She hadn’t been trained to deal with this kind of situation—she was a student, and not an airman, retired though we were. It was always nice to have someone so forceful among our numbers, unafraid of asking the difficult questions. Before, we’d been gifted with rather a surplus of forceful personalities, so that neither Luvander nor I was used to speaking up. Usually that someone was Adamo; but obviously, under these circumstances, someone else needed to step up and take his place.

  “That is a very good question,” Royston said, “one which I find I cannot answer officially. I have my suspicions, though, if you’ll hear them.”

  Laure didn’t seem impressed by the diplomatic answer. I folded my hands to keep them steady while privately wondering whether the young woman had ever been told it was bad luck to behead the messenger. “What kind of city is this, anyhow, where you can go around arresting people like that—just willy-nilly?” Laure demanded. “And what sort of friend are you that you didn’t stop ’em?”

  It was a great deal to absorb all at once. The girl’s companion—young Toverre, who’d been clinging to a napkin through the entire thing as though it were a life raft—practically leapt up from his seat to try to calm her, elbows and knees everywhere, while I myself glanced to Luvander to see what he made of this mess. While my responsibility toward him was considerably different from that of a fiancé, I’d spent quite enough time hiding in the bastion, away from old friends. Now, more than ever, it was important to show solidarity—especially if what Royston said was true.

  He was sitting very still, hair falling tousled over his knitted brow, and he hadn’t even reacted to the revelation of Adamo’s first name, which I myself hadn’t been aware of until just then.

  Surely I must have known it at one point—perhaps when I’d first joined the corps, during a whirlwind of preparations and paperwork—but that was feeling as distant a memory as my early childhood. Adamo had always been Adamo to us, just as we’d known each other by single names. It evened us out when we entered the Airman, where no one was a country lord or a petty thief. We were all just Dragon Corps.

  “Young woman, please restrain yourself before you do both of us physical harm,” Margrave Royston said. He looked troubled, and I couldn’t exactly blame him. Adamo was untouchable, or so I’d a
lways thought; I couldn’t imagine him allowing this, nor could anyone else in the room, it seemed. Even the war had never managed to faze him. We were all shaken. “Trust me when I assure you—I attempted to do the very thing you have suggested, and I was informed that this was no happenstance arrest but rather was being carried out on the orders of the Esar himself. I don’t know how much comprehension you have of Thremedon’s particular politics, but a magician trying to argue against the Esar has almost no chance at all of overturning his ruling. In fact, if he became aware that I was making a fuss over things, he might just make things worse for Owen in order to make a point. He likes magicians very little, but he likes me even less. The quieter I was, the less messy things would become.”

  “That’s horrible!” Laure said. Her face was turning red the same way Merritt’s always did when he inevitably discovered the latest indignity to be visited upon his poor boots.

  Toverre was standing beside her, attempting to calm her down, though he seemed reluctant to actually touch her, thereby risking the full force of her wrath turning in his direction. A wise move, I thought, and I was shamefully grateful that Luvander had no such temper to speak of.

  “Did they tell you what the charges were?” Luvander asked at last.

  “Treason,” Margrave Royston said with a blank expression that stirred something dangerously close to fear in the deepest part of me. There was no chance he’d misspoken; I wouldn’t lie to myself and hope for something like that. “Conspiring in private with secret information to use against the Esar, more specifically. I came here to warn the rest of you—I half assumed the shop would be crawling with Wolves when I arrived—but perhaps we’re still ahead of the pack, so to speak.”

  “They wouldn’t come here,” Toverre said, glancing over his shoulder in sudden suspicion, as though he was having second thoughts about having come to the shop.

  Perhaps that was the smart reaction to take, but I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to. I felt rooted in place, a curious mixture of guilt and horror doing battle in my stomach. Of all the people I knew, Adamo could take care of himself the best—that was never in question. There had always been the possibility during the war that one or more of us might be taken captive at any time; we’d always been prepared for it. Indeed, after our last flight over the Ke-Han capital, some of us had been held in their prisons. It was merely that no one had ever imagined those doing the arresting might be on our side of the Cobalt Mountains, rather than the Ke-Han. Despite that, our course of action was clear: If Adamo was in trouble for something that involved all of us, then it was up to all of us to get him out of it.

  It also implicated everyone in the room, including the two young students. What a warm reception they were having in the city.

  I hadn’t even been given chance enough to ask Laure everything I’d wanted to. Given the gravity of Margrave Royston’s news, it seemed unlikely we’d be able to focus on anything other than Adamo’s plight—hardly what Adamo had planned for us, I realized. Even in prison, he’d be trying to protect us all, keeping our names out of it.

  Perhaps I’d been trained too well by him—I should’ve been furious, but I found myself coming down closer on the side of admiring.

  “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Laure asked, suddenly hushed. “I went to him, told him all those things about that Germaine woman. I knew not going was gonna get me in trouble. But it got him in trouble instead.”

  Margrave Royston blinked. He looked completely awful—the way Thom had, sometimes, when the rest of us had been out on a raid and he’d been alone in the Airman, waiting up all night for news. He must have been with Adamo when it happened. Either that, or he’d had exceptionally fortuitous timing to enter the scene at the very last second.

  “Are you referring to Margrave Germaine?” he asked Laure.

  “Who else?” Laure said, throwing her hands up in the air. “She started all this, mark my words. Ain’t nothing good that’s ever come of her that I’m seeing.”

  Luvander sighed, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Without its usual lively animation, his face simply looked tired and much older than I remembered. I wondered if I shouldn’t be the one bringing him lunch every now and then, if only to keep things even between us. Just because I’d suffered the most obvious injury didn’t mean the others hadn’t. His throat had been stitched up with a needle and thread. And, as he said, he wasn’t the sort of man to be taken down by a “wee infection,” but he worked hard at his shop, from sunup to well past sunset. Not to mention all the energy he used up with his complicated monologues. It was a wonder he didn’t eat like a horse, just to keep up his strength.

  “That may well be the connection, now that you mention it,” Margrave Royston said, smoothing the hair at his temple as though he needed something to do with his hands. I recognized that impulse; only a moment ago I’d been wishing for my gloves to toy with. “I am not saying it’s your fault, so please cease looking as though you’ve not made up your mind whether to strike me or not. All I mean to say is that if Owen had been meeting with his fellows previously, at no great detriment to his personal freedoms, then perhaps it was his sudden interest in Margrave Germaine’s business—which is the Esar’s business—that suddenly landed him in trouble. If it was his investigation into what Margrave Germaine has been doing and not your little meetings of the minds, then … I do detest speculation, but it would explain why Dmitri hasn’t turned his sights on this shop yet, and we are all safe and sound while he is not.”

  “Isn’t that a comfort,” Luvander said, standing up at once. “Well, dear friends, as they say when mired in the filthy muck that passes for water down by the Mollydocks: We’re all in deep shit now.”

  “Still, better off than Adamo,” Laure muttered, looking quite content to start a fight with anyone who disagreed.

  No one dared. We veterans could smell a battle coming and knew how to avoid it altogether.

  “I looked into Germaine’s business, myself,” Royston said thoughtfully. “But I suppose the gossiping of the Basquiat doesn’t concern him as much at present. It’s more what Adamo represents, I believe. There isn’t any statue of me in the middle of the most popular street in Thremedon.”

  “Do you think we might at least be able to see him?” I asked; someone had to be the man to get his hopes up, after all. “Perhaps the Esar—he must see reason. We’ve done nothing wrong. As far as any rational man is concerned, we’ve done nothing at all.”

  We’d all agreed to let the Esar act first for this very reason. I didn’t think anyone had ever dreamed this would be the first action he’d take—especially when the most Adamo could be accused of was forcing me to eat breakfast when I wasn’t hungry. Some mornings it seemed like a crime, but it was hardly an arresting offense.

  “You’re assuming this is a man with whom one can reason at all, by this point,” Margrave Royston said, still looking grim. “After the war—not to mention what happened to our diplomats in Xi’an—his state of mind has been increasingly … fragile. No; that isn’t the word. Suspicious. Antoinette can barely get him to agree to see her these days, and all because she practically runs the Basquiat. He doesn’t want her to know his thoughts; I doubt he wants anyone to know them. He doesn’t trust anyone anymore, and like it or not, Owen cuts a rather threatening figure.”

  “That he does,” Luvander agreed, tugging at his scarf. “What’s more, he’s our threatening figure. Surely you don’t mean to suggest we do nothing at all? As much gossip as we’ve heard about you, I’m sure one or two stories about the Dragon Corps and its complete lack of common sense must’ve reached your ears in return. That’s not exactly how we play it, diminished numbers or no.”

  “When did I insinuate that? Such a course of action is hardly what I’m counseling,” Margrave Royston said. If the reminder of his past stung, he didn’t mention it. Thremedon rarely forgot its scandals, but at least it did stop caring about them after a while. “All I meant was that we have to
be cautious, for Owen’s sake. And to remind impetuous youth that, according to law as it stands, the Esar does not technically need a reason to arrest anyone. People tend to forget that. He is the Esar, and if he wished, he could arrest anyone wearing blue on a Saturday. The people wouldn’t like it, and he’d never be so careless with their support, but it is possible.”

  “Someone oughta change that law,” Laure said.

  “It’s in place from the war,” I found myself explaining. When I’d been learning all the rules and provisions that comprised Volstov’s system of government, in order to be ready to take my place with the other diplomats, I’d found most of the memorization boring, but at least the knowledge had stuck. And now, here it was, proving useful in a most unexpected way. “I … suppose that, what with one thing and another, and the continued threats from the Ke-Han, they never got around to rewriting it.”

  “Rather convenient for the Esar,” Toverre murmured, deep in thought.

  “And inconvenient for us,” Royston agreed. The two seemed similar in some way though I couldn’t put a metal finger on it.

  I felt indignant all of a sudden, for Adamo most of all, but also for my friends, and lastly for myself. We’d spent so many years fighting against an external threat—fighting for Volstov, our home, in the face of a deadly horde—that it had never even occurred to me Thremedon might one day turn around and betray us, like a favored pet suddenly turned rabid.

  Once again, I had to think that Ghislain and Rook had been the smartest, realizing the climate in Thremedon didn’t welcome living heroes and getting out while they still could.

  “Hm,” I said, as something further occurred to me.

  “What is it?” Luvander asked.

  “Before I realized what any of this meant, I’d been planning on sending a letter to Thom about all this,” I explained as quickly as I could, leaving out that it was something of a custom between Thom and me to write each other whenever things got rough. We told each other about the most awkward, embarrassing things that we’d recently undergone, and—through the exchange—they no longer seemed so terrible to either of us. “I was writing a letter to him about all of this, just to get it off my mind. About how I’d run out of the bastion, humiliating myself in front of everyone, and how I had been hearing things—those voices. I’d written about everything, really. I never sent it, but if we are coming under suspicion, it seems like it might be a good idea not to leave it lying around.”