Then, he bounded to the next: he heard silence beneath his feet. This would be the express car he had seen the Pinkertons return to when the train stopped in Navajo country.
He flexed the tendons in his wrist, rotating the guns that crowned them until, with a pneumatic hiss from a catch pressed in his palm, a tiny projectile sprang out of the multi-barreled pistol and stuck in the car roof. He hopped back to the car edge as the clockwork timer on the top whirred to detonation.
The split-second, right before: his breath catching, pulse racing like a thoroughbred, thrilling to the randomness of life without thaumaturgy, the keenness of a skate down the razor’s edge, without horoscopes that definitively told him what the next day would bring, without love enchantments to spark others’ desire, without the certainty magery’s manipulation of reality brought. The joys of not-knowing: this was why he risked his life and the eternal servitude of his immortal spirit to serve the White City.
He hadn’t really lied to his fellow poker players when he told them he was a gambler.
He just didn’t name the game he played.
The (obscenely illegal) plastic explosives inside the bolt blew a hole in the roof of the express car three feet in diameter; Leslie leapt through boots-first with the last cascade of wood and shingle.
Inside, the Pinkertons were ready for him; their heads had transformed beneath their bowler hats into blazing phosphorus eyeballs—a metaphor-made-flesh, embodying the advertisements of their detective agency prior to the Awakening: We Never Sleep. They blasted him as one with a ghostly fire that would have ignited anyone else into a screaming bonfire of agony. But he wore the Chrysalis, with the shaded lenses snapped over his goggles, so he didn’t even get spots in his eyes.
He leapt toward the nearest Eye and flicked his wrists a different direction and twin Tamil katar blades shot out of the brass braces. With the left dagger he sliced through a retina the width of his face and was already moving away as gelatinous white burst out of it, turning and spinning and burying the right dagger up to its hilt in the chest of the second Eye next to him.
The third Eye, intuiting further attacks against the Chrysalis would be useless, turned the stream of his spirit-fire onto the floor of the car, blowing a hole in it nearly as big as the one Leslie’s explosives had blown in the roof. Though the Chrysalis rendered him immune to magic, those people and things outside it were still very much mune. But Leslie pinwheeled sideways away from the eruption and unloaded the explosive rounds from the fan-like pistols into the Eye’s midriff. He was dead before the blowback smashed him against the wall.
Nicola Tesla sat on the railroad company safe, amidst bags of mail inside the express car cage, handcuffed to the bars, hood still over her head. Leslie dug the keys out of the jacket of the Pinkerton slumped against the wall and opened the door.
When he pulled the bag off her head she sneered at him. “Edison stooge.” Slight Serbian accent, darkly beautiful, same knowing baleful gaze as her famed ancestor. She spat on the floor at his feet.
Leslie groaned through the small speaker set in the front of his mask. “Ms. Tesla, I am nobody’s stooge.”
“Doctor Tesla.”
“Mr. Thomas Edison may have founded the White City, but we operate solely on the universal principle of returning science to the world. We should be allies.”
“Your Edison publicly recanted science to save his neck. My great grand-uncle did not and he burned. Your secret society was founded by a thief and a coward and nothing good will come of it.”
He jangled the keys in front of her. “I take it then I am too morally compromised for you to accept my help?”
She pouted. She was beautiful. “Go ahead,” she said, turning her face away.
She sprung to her feet as soon as he unlocked the cuffs and opened a medium-sized steamer trunk in the corner of the cage. Leslie recognized it as one of the pieces of baggage the Navajo had turned over with her. “I’m afraid we need to leave your things behind,” Leslie said.
“Not this.” She removed a long mahogany rifle with a steel sphere at the end of a filigreed brass barrel.
“What do you have there?”
“An apparatus for generating, intensifying, and amplifying electrical force in free air.”
“Ah.”
“A lightning gun,” Dr. Tesla said slowly.
“Yes, thank you, I know what a lightning gun is.”
“How should I know? I am sure you have received all sorts of erroneous notions from the followers of that degenerate Edison.”
“Ma’am. The War of the Currents ended over a century ago. This is no time to declare that hostilities between your family and the Edisons have resumed. We have mutual enemies to unite against.”
She sniffed. “It would appear I have no choice but to accept the aid of my inferiors. Very well, then; take me to your White City. I have no doubt your clock-punchers and patent lawyers will benefit greatly from someone with genuine scientific knowledge.”
“No doubt,” Leslie said dryly.
He helped her through the hole in the roof then hoisted himself up. As soon as the mountain air hit him he was brought up short by the crackling of the wireless in his ear. The White City always maintained radio silence during delicate operations such as this.
“Si. Si, can you hear me? Our three on the train went blind, so you must be there. Say hello to your old friend.” Morgan Ash’s deep mahogany laugh froze Leslie’s blood. Ash was the First Ward Boss in Manhattan. His former employer.
“Possession of wireless radio technology is a Class A felony which carries a sentence of up to twenty years in prison,” Simon Leslie said. Tesla looked quizzically at him, but he held up a finger for the explanation to wait. “Ah, but that’s right—the rules don’t apply to you, do they?”
He could almost hear Ash ensconced in his suite in the Dakota Hotel overlooking Central Park, a cigar in whichever hand wasn’t holding the receiver. “For your information, Si, I am not violating our sacred ether with electromagnetic radiation in order to transmit sound, but rather a spell cooked up by the boys in Applied Thaumaturgy that resonates with your transceiver in much the same way.”
All this talk of “ether” was, of course, pseudoscientific nonsense. But with magic the bosses had the power to force their pseudoscience on the world and make it true. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to chat, Morgan. Kind of in the middle of something.”
“So you are. But I don’t believe you’re quite aware of what that something is.” The chuckle again. “The leak inside the Bureau of Animist Affairs, that told the White City where the handoff for Dr. Tesla would be, and which train? The source of that leak would have been me.”
Simon Leslie stood up straight as a roar echoed from the rear of the train. He looked down to the caboose and saw a second dragon, a Ying Lung Wang, an enormous purple blue creature with a long funnel-like snout, as it oared its sea-turtle flippers through the borealis of the ley line. Pinkertons covered its leather-plated shell, enormous head-eyes glowing beneath bowler hats.
The sky above them rippled and flashed and an airship descended from the clouds—a gondola swarming with Pinkertons hanging from a sinewy P’an Yin Lung, fur-like licks of white fire straggling from its jaw.
Dr. Tesla grunted, and Leslie looked at her, and was surprised to find her smiling.
“You have fallen for a trap, Edison man,” she said. “I was just bait. They want your Chrysalis.”
* * *
The Neversleeps poured over the turtle dragon and dropped from the sky, spitting gouts of white flame and whirling sigils of burning gold. They were mostly humans, but he saw Sidhe and dwarves mixed among them too, and that made Simon Leslie think of the Homestead Strike, in which Morgan Ash had ordered him, as leader of the local Neversleeps, to summon the dwarves’ ancestral enemies from their former home in the Nine Worlds: the monstrous two-headed Ettin. The giants had scooped up diminutive miners six at a time and popped them into razor-lined mouths and
crunched down on them like popcorn. After that day of horror Simon Leslie resolved to find a better way to live, or die trying. Fortunately the White City found him.
But now it seemed like he would die anyway.
“I would strongly advise giving yourself up, Si,” Morgan Ash purred in his ear. “Ain’t no shame in it. We sent numbers enough to crush the Four Corners, much less one traitor and one extremely misguided Slav bitch.”
Tesla yanked back the lever on her lightning gun and cried out a curse in Serbo-Croatian (“Nabijem te na kurac!” he thought he heard) as blue tines crackled out of the metal sphere, zigzagging through the night and finding the Pinkertons wherever they were with the unerringness of falcons and stiffening them with electric fire.
“Seeing as how we have history, you and I,” Ash rambled on, “I promise you, once you get to The Tombs, the inquisitors won’t torture you too much. Sure, the judge’ll order a requisite number of Hexes of Excruciating Pain, but beyond that the severity of the interrogation is largely up to the discretion of the presiding officer. Which, just so you know,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “will be me, regardless of what copper’s name is actually on the register.
“I’ll only ask you to name a few names,” Ash continued. “Five? The main atomist leaders. Where the White City is. How you’ve managed to keep an entire hive of damn heathens invisible from our scrying mirrors.
“And, of course, our experimental thaumaturgians will be going to town on your leather jumpsuit. They’ll crack it. Trust me, they’re smarter than a barrel full of Teslas. If they can’t find a spell to get past the Chrysalis’s defenses, shit, they’ll write one. Don’t think they won’t.”
“Down!” Leslie cried, and Tesla ducked dutifully, allowing him to blow the Pinkerton who had landed behind her off the train with a booming round to the chest. The cloud dragon overhead had managed to overtake the dragon pulling the train and was dropping off Neversleeps to outflank them. They could not survive a two-front war. Leslie leapt forward, grabbed a protesting Tesla and bounded back to the express car, dropping through the hole he’d made so they could regroup behind the imposing iron safe.
“This doesn’t look promising,” Leslie said in an off-handed way. He could barely hear himself over the throbbing pulse in his neck. He nodded at Tesla’s silently steaming lightning gun. “Busted?”
“Bite your tongue. Overheated. Give it ten seconds of cool-down.”
The roof erupted in a roar of unearthly flame that blackened and ripped whole chunks off in plumes of embers. Within seconds it would be gone, and they would be fully exposed.
The man and the woman looked at each other. Their short destinies were written plain on each other’s faces.
Then, the woman had a spark.
“Your Chrysalis, it self-generates a localized bioelectric field, yes?” She feverishly snapped open compartments and undid screws on the lightning gun.
“I’m generating the field, the suit just keeps it in continuous circulation in a closed system… Hey, don’t break that down, we can still use it—”
“No, no we can’t. We need to eliminate more of our enemies at once.” She removed a small metal box from the side of the gun. “We’ll use the cavity resonator. It can expand the Chrysalis’s bioelectric field.”
“But the field is self-contained. How can you attach your resonator to it?”
“We need to breach the—”
“No!”
“Listen to me—”
“The first rule of the White City is you never breach the Chrysalis—”
She slapped him. He barely felt it inside his leather mask, but she kept talking. “That’s Edison talking! Use your imagination, man!”
Before he could respond, the flaming roof of the express car collapsed and the room filled with Neversleeps. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through the far door into the adjoining car. Passengers already awakened by the sounds of chaotic battle all around them began screaming once they saw the mosquito-like proboscis of the Chrysalis. They rushed to fill the aisle to get away from them; the fugitives managed to hop and weave around the masses but the column of Pinkertons slammed into them, forestalling pursuit.
Morgan Ash radioed, “Hellfire and damnation, boy, don’t you know when your bell’s been rung? I promised my kids I’d read ’em a bedtime story before their nanny puts ’em to sleep.”
Through two more sleeper cars and a combine they ran, to burst through into the first and final car, little more than an open platform in the center of which the driver sat in the Lotus position. He was a Celestial, of course, communing with the dragon in a single conjoined mind to keep its simple lizard’s brain calm and pliant. The Celestial sprang to his feet when the intruders burst through the door and launched into a high-pitched call in Cantonese for Fire, the Element of Greater Yang, but Simon Leslie scissor-kicked him sideways off the train before the third syllable. The Chinese hit a fir tree by the side of the ley line and dropped like a stone to the ground.
Nicola Tesla crouched by his waist with a utility knife, pressing down on the Chrysalis, probing for a good place to make the incision. “We are doing this, yes?”
He was taken back when she looked up at him for his response. It was the first time she had solicited permission from him; perhaps it was the first time in her life.
“What about the other passengers?” he asked.
“What about them?”
Simon Leslie shook his head. It was insane. The whole thing was insane.
“Go ahead,” he said.
He groaned as if it was his own flesh cut when Tesla made an incision in the Chrysalis just above his pelvic bone to remove an electrode from its underside. This she inserted in the box-shaped resonator, which she then hooked to his belt. From inside the second skin he could feel the nature of himself alter; the breath caught in his throat. Though the bioelectric field was invisible, as he pulled Nicola Tesla closer to him he could feel it envelop her; her cheeks suddenly flushed looking at him, and he knew she felt the same way too. A sudden conjoined intimacy, not borne of word, deed, or desire, but real all the same, and it moved both of them deeply.
A small ladder led to the ceiling hatch of the “engine,” and from there they hopped onto the muscular ripple of the dragon’s back; its scales were cold and shiny and impossibly smooth; he lost his footing several times until he started to grab onto the ridges of the lizard’s vertebrae and use them as handholds to pull himself along its back. A Li Ying Lung was mostly a serpent, with two vestigial limbs dangling on either side of its undulating expanse. Uncoupled from the mind of its human handler, the dragon huffed and roared with irritation at the two pests skittering across its skin, amber eyes roiling with confusion, but the leather harness attaching it to the great bulk of the train prevented it from flexing its back and hurling the interlopers off.
Leslie reached the base of the lizard’s head and peered over its snout at the ley line coursing beneath it. A gently spinning cylinder of infinitesimally narrow beams of blue, gold, and green light coursed from horizon to horizon. Below he could see they were just now crossing a massive ravine through which coursed the Humboldt River.
“This is where I was going to have us jump off anyway,” he yelled over the thunderous whomp of the dragon’s wings. “Are you ready?”
“Of course not,” Nicola yelled back. She wrapped her arms around his neck, nearly choking him. “Do it anyway!”
A Pinkerton’s ocular blast shot past him. Already the Neversleeps had reached the driver’s car; already they were climbing across the lizard’s back in pursuit.
“Fuck it,” he said to no one in particular.
He planted his foot on the skull ridge between the dragon’s hate-filled eyes and leapt over its snorting nostrils. The expanded field of magic-annihilation from the Chrysalis met the psychic resonance of the ley line, and confronted it with its own impossibility.
And in that instant, it ceased to exist.
* * *
The enormous dragon did not need the ley line in order to fly, of course; it had wings for that. But the enchantments cast on the ten train cars it towed required interactions with the line to stay aloft. And when the ley that cut through the Sierra Madre abruptly winked out of existence, the train plunged like a ponderous chain into the canyon below, dragging the screaming, spouting dragon down with it.
Leslie hit the water first, dislodging Tesla from his neck. Even the breathing apparatus built into the Chrysalis could not keep the wind from getting knocked out of his chest. Gasping, the first thing he did was unhook Tesla’s resonator from his waist for he could feel it overheating, trying to burn a hole in his side as he fell.
As he pushed it away from him he saw out of the corner of his eye, in what little light could be stolen from the murky brown by his goggles’ enhancements, Tesla’s curls trailing behind her as she sank unconscious into blackness.
At the same time out of the corner of his other eye the shadows of the dropping train cars blotted out the surface of the river above him.
Then a great invisible hand swatted him out of the way just as the train crashed into the water in the exact spot where he had been; the river vomited him upward onto a stony heap of slate in a shallow narrow.
He watched the Li Ying Lung dragon crashing down atop the heap of compartments jutting from the water. The wyrm wriggled and ripped his way free of the damaged harness, then sprang into the sky with a breathless shriek of terror; it disappeared with frantic flaps over the nearest peak, the two dragons that had brought the army of Pinkertons instinctively chasing after it.
Leslie spotted Tesla lying facedown in the water near the edge of the shale bar, sputtering and coughing. He raced to her and picked her up from behind, gripping her abdomen and forcing her to cough up as much water as he could. He saw bits and pieces of the resonator floating past on the current and he realized what had happened: the device overheated and exploded, creating a shockwave that hurled its creator and him to safety.
Dead Man’s Hand Page 45