Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  That, however, was followed immediately by all the lights going on in the building in whose shadows we’d previously been obscured—and all the other buildings nearby, too. With the staggered effect of a row of dominos, all the lights in the city were coming on, while the people on the lower floors of buildings began to flood the streets.

  In the commotion, I realized, no one would notice another group of citizens.

  With the crowd as his cover, Ghislain slipped away from us. He didn’t blend in because of his height and breadth, but he soon disappeared into a doorway, and no one seemed to notice.

  I felt momentarily guilty that our actions had disturbed all those people, who wanted no more than I did, when you came right down to it—just to live out their lives in peace and quiet, without being interrupted during their mealtimes. Some weren’t even wearing coats.

  It seemed that we were going to be the cause of more harm to the city than the Esar. We’d certainly be responsible for more fevers in the coming days.

  Then Laure grabbed my arm, practically dragging me through the snow, and I realized that the light on the bottom floor of the building we were meant to enter had been snuffed out.

  “If that’s not our sign,” Laure muttered, “then I’ll eat my scarf.”

  We left the uproar in the streets behind—and all that snow, which I was only too glad to see the back end of—and slipped unnoticed into the warm building, just as Ghislain had done earlier. Behind me, I heard Raphael lock the door—those who’d run out probably hadn’t thought to take their keys. It would provide a momentary setback, in any case.

  “This way,” I heard Ghislain whisper in the dark.

  We followed him.

  I very nearly tripped over something that was not a piece of furniture—it gave too much, and groaned when I kicked it—and I was suddenly grateful Ghislain had not lit a lamp again. First of all, our shadows would be visible from the streets, framed by the windows; second of all, I did not want to see the corpses of our enemies strewn across the floor. At least I didn’t step on anyone else, clinging to the back of Laure’s jacket in the dark so as not to become lost.

  “Watch the stairs,” Ghislain said, and I tightened my hold.

  “You’re gonna knock us both over if you’re not careful,” Laure muttered, but she didn’t shake me off.

  The six of us crept slowly down the stairs, Ghislain and Balfour in front this time, presumably because the latter was small enough to get out of the way of the former if we ran into any trouble. Laure was right behind them in the narrow pass, which meant I was considerably nearer to the front than I might’ve liked, with Luvander and Raphael bringing up the rear. They were guarding us, I realized, keeping the two civilians who certainly didn’t belong in this kind of operation well flanked on either side. It was very thoughtful of them, but it did little to soothe my nerves.

  At least I no longer had to worry about the Dragon Corps’s most infirm member slipping on any stray patches of ice. And if there were any troubles on the rickety steps, I had a feeling that Luvander would help him, if only for the sake of his second-favorite jacket.

  As we came to the end of the narrow stairwell, Ghislain halted, nearly causing a pileup when Laure didn’t take the hint and almost crashed into Balfour, nearly bowling him over like a ninepin. Up ahead, I could see a well-lit hallway with iron doors set into the white walls. The lights lining the ceiling flickered every so often, which gave the impression of candlelight. At least there was some light to see by, though when I glanced down at my fingertips to see how much dust had come away on my hands, I was very nearly ill. Not only was there dust, but there was grime, as well, and a slimy streak on my thumb from where I had been forced to guide myself along the uneven wall.

  Being too deep underground was one of my private nightmares—I couldn’t imagine being buried in all that awful dirt—but I wasn’t about to cause a fuss for personal reasons. At least we were in some semblance of a building, no matter how things dripped and dropped in the distant dark. I laid my hand against one of the stones, and it seemed sturdy enough; then I quickly drew my hand away.

  I was secretly, guiltily grateful that Margrave Royston hadn’t come along with us. After seeing his work firsthand, I knew that I did not want to be anywhere underground with him at my side. It was nothing to do with the man personally, and not a comment on his control over his Talent. I merely had no wish to end up accidentally buried alive should something startle him and force him to cause a cave-in.

  After giving us a chance enough to take stock of our surroundings, Ghislain began to move. Balfour, however, had turned his face to the side, squinting, as though trying to hear something. I strained to listen but heard nothing at all.

  “Something the matter, Balfour?” Luvander asked, in a bare whisper.

  “Pardon?” Balfour asked, shaking his head. “No, I’m fine. It’s nothing … Just this place; it seems …”

  “It’s quite eerie,” Raphael cut in. “Though I’m man enough not to be affected, I for one plan on spending as little time as possible here.”

  “I agree,” Balfour said, though he kept peering around Ghislain, as though he was still searching.

  “Things could get messy, here,” Ghislain said, pitching his voice low, so that I had to crane over Laure’s shoulder to hear it. “Helped myself to a few different key rings while I was up there, but I’m not sure what goes where, not to mention none of us knows where we’re going yet, so it might take some time. If we run into any guards, I plan on disposing of them. If anyone here’s got a problem with that, you can go upstairs and slip out while everyone’s still watching Mary Margrave’s fireworks display. Got it?”

  “Now that you mention it, I do love fireworks,” Luvander said, tapping his chin, then breaking character immediately when everyone rounded on him. “Honestly, it was just a joke. Pardon me for attempting to lighten our spirits before they leave this mortal earth entirely. See if I do you any more favors.”

  “We’d all be real grateful if you wouldn’t,” Ghislain said, but he wasn’t wearing a frightening expression, so I figured he couldn’t be all that upset about it. His sharp features were merely grim and exaggerated by the shadows—looking much like the beastly mask in the back room of the Yesfir hat shop. He reached into his coat pocket, pulling out three separate rings of keys. “Someone take these. I’m gonna want my hands free for other things.”

  “He means removing heads from bodies,” Raphael confided.

  “I’ll do it,” Balfour said, reaching up with gloved hands. He glanced over at Laure, who’d made an impatient move for the keys herself, and offered her a small smile. “Perhaps you can aid Ghislain in giving me cover?”

  “Yes, that sounds much more dangerous than trying keys in cell doors,” I said, patting her arm. “You should absolutely accept.”

  “Don’t have to patronize me,” Laure said, shaking me off.

  Since the hallway was well lit, and I didn’t see myself tripping over the last few steps in the dark, I allowed her to do it.

  “Weird place,” Ghislain said. “Seems like all the guards were upstairs. Now, why would that be?”

  Then, without waiting for the rest of us—not even bothering with a rousing promise of our soon-to-be victory—he rose like the terrifying specter of every bad dream I’d ever had about pirates along the coast or bandits on the main roads and marched deeper into the hall.

  Though I’d been holding my breath for some terrific event—another of Margrave Royston’s fearsome explosions, perhaps—none came. Ghislain looked left, then right, then back at us, shrugging his big shoulders. Another one of his signs, I supposed.

  Laure, Balfour, and I scurried after him; Luvander and Raphael were only seconds behind.

  “I don’t see any cells,” Laure hissed, looking deeply suspicious. “Are you certain we’re in the right place?”

  “Nope,” Ghislain said, heading arbitrarily to the right. “Wish the only man who knew a lick about the blue
prints in this place hadn’t run off like that. Hate flying blind.”

  “We needed him for our grand distraction,” Luvander pointed out. “I offered to don a dress and one of my best hats, but no one seemed to like that idea very much.”

  I found myself giggling—the sort of humor a man embraced before heading to the gallows, I supposed—and did my best to suppress the sound, so that I merely sounded as though I had a bad case of fear hiccups.

  We passed by several doors, all of them uniform and perfect—made of iron, with no decorative scrollwork or designs of any kind. I saw Laure peering at a few of them curiously, but when the keys didn’t work in their locks, Ghislain hadn’t stopped to examine them: nor had he attempted to bust them down with one of his large shoulders, and so we kept moving. It was probably better to do reconnaissance this way—make sure there were no threats lurking nearby before we allowed ourselves to become too engrossed in any one thing.

  The largest door was at the end of the hall, crisscrossed with broad strips of steel and fitted with a knob in the center. There was a keyhole beneath it, and Balfour set to work once more, examining the size and shape of the hole in the door, then comparing it against the keys on the three separate rings.

  I bent down to help him with them, this kind of detail being something I was drawn to instinctively. Keys were filthy instruments of disease, and I’d spent a great deal of time cleaning them for my father, and Laure’s father, and the town’s banker—whether they asked me to or not. Rather quickly—for me, at least—I turned up a silver key with the appropriate foot and what seemed like the correct number of wards shaped into it to bypass the lock.

  “Try this,” I said, handing it over so that Balfour—our key man—might do the honors.

  He took it, looking mildly baffled, the metal making a dull sound against his metal fingers beneath the fabric of his gloves and a slight magnetic pull causing the other keys in the rings to be drawn toward his palm. Then he set the key into the lock. I held my breath as he turned it, and sighed with relief when the tumblers shifted, the lock falling open with a click.

  “Thank you,” Balfour said, straightening up and returning the key rings to his pocket.

  “We’re sure this one’s not a velikaia?” Ghislain asked, peering at me skeptically.

  “You would be the first to know,” I assured him, quite cheekily for me, but I was privately rather elated with my small success—no doubt the only assistance I would be able to offer for the rest of the night.

  The door swung open with a gentle creak, and the six of us stepped inside. Next to me, Laure gasped, and Balfour stopped dead, as though he’d been transformed into his statue—or at least a smaller version of it.

  It appeared to me that we had stumbled upon some kind of enormous workroom. Set throughout the room were long, rectangular tables made of stone and framed in wood. They were surrounded by tall stools, likely for whatever workers frequented this factory to sit upon. Against the far wall was the largest assortment of tools I’d ever seen in one place. The sight would’ve made a man like my father very happy—he imagined himself to be a talented tinkerer—but I couldn’t even begin to name half of them. I recognized dozens of pairs of pliers in a variety of sizes, as well as a hammer for sheeting metal and some kind of hacksaw. One of the tables had a dreadful mess on it, large silver and gold machine cogs littered across its surface and a long twisting pipe that looked as though it’d been bent nearly in two.

  “This … This is the kind of stuff that Germaine woman had in her spare room,” Laure said, sounding weak. Slowly, she lowered her hands from her mouth, looking as though she expected the woman in question to leap from the shadows and drag her off to her offices. As if a simple physician was all we had to worry about now. “I knew I was getting a bad feeling from her, I just never …”

  “I’ve been here,” Balfour said, whiter even than Raphael now, which was a feat in and of itself. “I thought it looked familiar before, but I was so distracted—I must’ve come in a different way, but this room … I’ve been in this room before. It’s where Margrave Germaine worked on my hands. Somehow, I’d thought it was part of the palace. But they must have moved me.”

  Unaffected by our companions’ commentary, Luvander strode over to the table with the pieces lying on it, picking up one of the cogs and tracing his fingers thoughtfully over its sharp edges.

  “Hard to tell what’s what in all this,” he said quietly. “I feel as though I’ve walked in on Yesfir naked.”

  “It’s more than just material for my hands,” Balfour admitted.

  “Unless the Margrave planned on making you a very large pair,” Luvander agreed. “With wings.”

  He held up a finely hammered sheet of metal, about the span of my forearm, which curved in the middle into a sharp hook of metal, reminding me of a talon. The edges were filigreed, and there was a sort of frame to it as well of fine, thin steel, like thick rope wire.

  “Should I feel like a proud uncle?” Luvander asked, face red with emotion. It wasn’t joy, I realized, but mottled anger. “So many little ones to be.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense for them to be this size,” Balfour added. “Does it?”

  “Would anyone mind telling me what’s going on?” I asked.

  “It’s clear,” Ghislain said flatly. “The Dragon Corps is being rebuilt.”

  “And th’Esar clearly wishes to play dollhouse with them,” Luvander concluded. “He’s had them all made in miniature. Isn’t that sweet?”

  Even I was hit hard enough by this latest discovery to fall gravely silent; I couldn’t imagine how these men were feeling, observing what had once been their lives turned into scrap metal upon the table.

  But for what purpose was all this gathered here? I wondered, glancing over the collection of gleaming metal parts. Some were clearly recognizable, like Luvander’s wing: a claw here, a jaw there, even a curved, ridged tail. The rest was just guts and scrap, I could only assume, thousands of cogs and gears—the human equivalent would be a patient sliced open upon the autopsy table. I shuddered.

  “We shouldn’t be in here,” Laure said. When I turned to look at her—grateful to have something else to focus on other than the grisly sight before me—I saw that there was a faraway look in her eyes. It seemed that she, too, was hearing what Balfour had, earlier in the hallway. “We can’t get distracted. We’ve gotta find Adamo before those bastards upstairs wake up and come looking for who clobbered ’em.”

  “They won’t wake up for a long time,” Raphael said cheerfully.

  “But,” Ghislain added, “I take your meaning.”

  He left the room quickly—and I had to wonder if it was practicality that impelled him to leave or some deeper compulsion. Balfour was still staring around in horror, and Luvander’s face had been transformed by serious emotion. He hadn’t yet put the wing down.

  “Come on,” Raphael said almost gently. “We’ll come back later.”

  “Adamo will know what to do,” Balfour agreed, more like he was trying to convince himself than reassure his companions.

  Laure touched a rounded piece of metal on the table, then jerked back as though she’d been burned. “Come on,” she agreed, and stormed out of the room.

  I was forced to scurry after her, the other men somehow able to extricate themselves in order to follow me. Ghislain closed the big door behind us without a sound. “Another stairway out here,” he said, knocking gently at the wall in front of him. There was a groaning sound, like stone scraping against stone, and what had appeared moments earlier to be a solid wall swung away from us, revealing an even smaller, darker staircase. “Same formation,” Ghislain added.

  He had to crouch in order to fit; moments later, he disappeared into the darkness. Balfour moved after him, white around the mouth but with unwavering purpose. Laure looked more than ever like she belonged with them—a stalwart soldier heading off to battle—and I reached out to grab hold of her, wishing she could transfer some of her st
rength to me.

  We left the comforting light behind us and were swallowed up by the cool, deep dark. The sound of dripping water was growing louder—perhaps that was what Balfour and Laure had heard?—and I felt something drop onto the top of my head, causing my stomach to turn over like an omelet in the skillet.

  There would be no bath in the world long or cleansing enough to rid me of the crawling feeling all over my skin.

  At least the staircase was a short one. I missed my footing, so sure of another step to follow the last one, and Laure steadied me but also clamped a hand over my mouth.

  I could hear voices now, though not clearly. They were muffled—coming from around the corner—but the harder I listened, the more clearly I recognized them.

  One was the unforgettable bass of Professor ex–Chief Sergeant Owen Adamo, though he was doing his best to speak quietly. The other had a country accent better suited to softer tones, and my eyes widened like teatime saucers. Though I hadn’t heard that voice in weeks, I was still able to identify it. Somewhere close by, in this twisted prison compound, was the missing ’Versity student whose mystery had haunted my waking hours.

  It was, without question, our friend Gaeth.

  ADAMO

  Leaving a man to stew with his own thoughts and no one else to talk to was a common tactic in prisons everywhere. Troius probably thought he’d invented it, and wherever he was—having tea parties with his big metal dollies, no doubt—he was probably congratulating himself for a job well done.

  What he didn’t bank on was the cut on the back of my neck, the scab just now congealing, and my conversational partner in one of the cells a ways down from mine. All that was proving to be a real good distraction.

  … blood … again … Antoinette’s voice whispered, faint as the wind howling outside a window, only the ghostly noise was right between my ears.