Dead Iron aos-1

by Devon Monk

He scanned the ground. No boot prints, no broken branches, no sign of anyone moving this way. Looked like no one traveled past this point, even though this was the only path that he’d known the Madders to take up to their mine. He’d seen them bring their wagon this way, loaded down with supplies. Not that he’d seen them bring out rail carts of stone. The brothers just brought out pockets full of silver.

  It was looking like he’d followed a false trail.

  Cedar cursed under his breath and checked the sky. Nearly noon now. He’d wasted half the day heading to a hole full of devisers that wasn’t even where it was supposed to be.

  And all that time, there was a boy out in the elements, caught up by such Strange as walked the land.

  “Afternoon,” he called out. “If the Madder brothers are here, I’d be obliged to a little of your time.” He dug in his saddlebag and threw a purse full of coins onto the ground. It fell with a fat clink.

  Funny how the sound of coins falling caught the ear louder than a man could yell.

  The eldest brother, Alun Madder, pushed through the brush, looking to all the world as if he were out on a stroll, a long-stemmed corn pipe caught between his teeth, his overalls dirty and grease stained beneath a duster too heavy for the heat in the day. He had a red kerchief tied tight over his head, and sweat darkened it over his brow.

  “Morning, Mr. Hunt. Bring us that striker?” he asked. He didn’t so much as glance down at the bag of money between them.

  Cedar pulled the striker from his saddlebag and tossed it to him.

  Alun Madder caught it quick and nodded once before tucking it away in his coat.

  “I’m looking for a device someone of your caliber might be willing to sell me,” Cedar said.

  Alun’s dark bushy eyebrows notched up and he took a puff off the pipe, exhaling smoke that smelled like cherrywood. “What sort of device, Mr. Hunt?”

  “Something to track the Strange.”

  “Oh, now, you don’t believe in those old fairy tales, do you? The Strange? Elfsies and faeimps, and creatures that lurk beneath a bed?” He grinned wider and pulled his pipe out to point at Cedar with it. “I thought you a level-minded man.”

  “A tuning fork of pure silver.”

  Alun’s head snapped up. His smile was gone, his gaze sharp with a hangman’s delight. “Now, isn’t that a pretty thought? Forks of silver, spoons of moonlight. What do you suppose your knives should be made of, Mr. Hunt? Tears?”

  Cedar cocked the hammer back on the Walker and aimed it at Alun’s head. “Don’t know about my knives, but my gun’s made of pain.”

  Alun replaced the pipe in his mouth, slowly clamped down on it, watching Cedar’s eyes. Finally, he laughed. “Can’t help a man if I’m dead.”

  “Then it might be to both our favor for you to give me a straight answer. Do you have a silver tuning fork I can buy with that bag of money?”

  “First you tell me exactly what you’d use such a thing for, Mr. Hunt. Silver from this mine doesn’t just drop into any man’s hand.”

  “I’m hunting the Gregors’ boy.”

  Alun frowned, a fold crinkling between his brows. “The blacksmith’s boy? Wee thing?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Lost?”

  “Gone missing in the night.”

  “Just missing, you say?”

  “Taken in the night is what I reckon. And the only trail left to find him is the music in his windowsill.”

  Alun smiled again, but this time it was a look of respect.

  “Come on this way,” he said. “Any man with an ear to hear it must have reasons to follow it. Who am I to stop a fool on his quest?” He bent and snatched up the bag of coins, stuffing it away in some inner pocket of his coat. Then he turned to his left, and strode toward the solid stone of the mountainside. “Leave your horse out here. He’ll come to no harm.”

  Cedar dismounted, caught up his canteen and gun. By the time he’d shouldered his gear, Alun Madder had disappeared, taking a jag behind a standing stone that looked solid, but was really two stones so cleverly fit one in front of the other that the eye skittered right past the shadow of the doorway between them.

  Cedar glanced back at Flint, who was already drowsing. No one seemed to be watching. Cedar’s ears, sharpened as they were with the beast so close beneath his skin, could not pick up any other movement around them. Alun Madder had two brothers. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine them waiting in ambush.

  He hesitated.

  “You’re a cautious man for someone who uses a gun to end his sentences,” Alun called over his shoulder, his voice echoing as if he was already surrounded by stone. “Come in, Mr. Hunt, before I close the door behind me.”

  Cedar adjusted his hat and stepped between the stones. Alun stood a good way behind the doorway in what looked to be a torchlit cave entrance. Cedar stepped into the cooler air of the cave and Alun spun a brass captain’s wheel on the wall, guiding the heavy slab of stone to slide on rails silently until daylight was shut away.

  “Now, then, Mr. Hunt, let’s see what your money will buy you.” Alun twisted another smaller valve and gas lamps flickered to life along the highest edge of the chamber, sending out a soft blue light over the furnishings and walls.

  It was a chamber indeed. Three times as large as his one-room cabin, with walls that were smooth and slick, burnished to a soft glow, like ice under firelight. They were bare, except for a few wooden shelves with food and tools hooked and hanging. The only thing that caught the light was the pipes that stretched from ceiling to floor against one wall, and lined the room about knee-high. The ceiling was lost to the darkness above, where things Cedar could not see delicately scratched and skittered against the stone.

  The floor of the room was dry packed dirt and there were three closed wooden doors, one to each side, and one to the back. All three doors were sealed tight as a miser’s heart by locks as thick as Cedar’s arms. If he had to guess, he’d say at least one of the doors led down into the silver vein, and likely hid the carts, narrow-gauge tracks, and other implements the brothers used to pull silver from the stones.

  From the slight heat coming from the right of him, Cedar supposed the brothers’ forge or smelting room lay behind that door.

  Alun didn’t seem to care that Cedar had not budged a single step since walking into the room. Once the lights caught full, he waved at a chair—stones cleverly cut in the shapes of a table, benches, and footstools farther back in the room. “Sit and be comfortable while I check and see what I may have. Pure silver.” He shook his head. “Steel will give a truer tone. Where does a man like you get such ideas?”

  “Books.”

  Alun plucked a lantern off the wall hook. “Must be an odd book, that.” He stomped off toward the door at the back of the room and opened it. The light of his lantern did little to reveal more than a glint, a quick cascade of shine off an array of metals, from one wall to the next, as he stepped through the doorway and closed it.

  It had been an odd book. Wil had found it, dropped in the street by a girl in a town Cedar couldn’t recall. The first few months they traveled were a blur to him. What with his mind so focused on blotting out Catherine’s and the baby’s deaths, he’d near blocked out the world entirely.

  Even so, he remembered that Wil chased the girl down to give the book back to her. But she’d slipped quick as the dickens through some door or another and Wil lost track of her.

  Wil had brought the book back and spent the next several days reading bits of it out loud. Cedar recalled the leather-bound volume was slim and square, and Wil was always sniffing at the pages, saying they smelled of meadow flowers.

  And he remembered Wil reading about tuning forks. Made of brass, made of copper. Steel was best. But silver—that alone could cause harm to the Strange and keep safe the wearer.

  He didn’t know that it would work. The book had been lost with all their belongings when the Pawnee gods leveled their curse. But Cedar would rather go against the Str
ange with the chance of a weapon and protection than just meet them on mortal terms.

  Cedar paced, his own bootheels and spurs sounding like they’d been wrapped in sheepskin, oddly muffled against the dirt. He walked to the table, but did not sit. The chairs he’d first thought were made of crude stone were actually carved from marble and shaped to encourage a man to lean back, arms taking a slope downward like a ringlet curl. The table was likewise finely crafted, three sided instead of four, carved with a sure hand. A script framed the edge of it, lines that looked like lightning bolts, arrows, triangles, and slashes, reaching off to one end where the shape of an anvil held the corner, then off to a symbol that looked to be fire, and finally to the corner with a carving of a hammer crossed with the wavy lines of water.

  He’d seen these same symbols on the Madder brothers’ buckles and buttons, though not the language, if it was indeed a language that trimmed the table.

  Cedar leaned closer. He’d guess the language old. Not Latin or Hebrew. This seemed tribal, but not from any of the natives of this land. Perhaps from the brothers’ homeland, Wales.

  He dragged a thumb over one of the lines in the table, the mark like an arrow. As he drew his thumb away, the symbol glowed blue, like moonlight on fog, and left a faint ringing of bells in his ears.

  Music. Strange music.

  “Might be you should sit down, Mr. Hunt,” a voice said behind him.

  Cedar hadn’t heard a man walk up, hadn’t heard a door open. Sound was lost inside this cavern like a scream behind a gag.

  He turned. And saw the youngest Madder, Cadoc, pointing a gun at him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  If the day could match Mae Lindson’s mood, it would be raining ice and the sun would be cold as stone. She walked to the barn, her skirt catching in the knee-high grasses, the honey warmth of summer rising on the air.

  Her gaze lingered the longest on the eastern horizon and she paused, feeling the tug of the call to return to the coven’s soil at the soles of her shoes.

  Not yet. She couldn’t go home until she found Jeb’s killer. She gathered up saddle, blanket, and bridle, and leaned it all against a fence post while she shook a bit of grain to call her mule, Prudence, to come round. Once Prudence had eaten the handful of corn, she saddled and bridled her, then swung up, taking nothing more than herself, her shawl, and the shuttle tucked safely in her pocket.

  Mae turned northwest toward town, riding the shortest route to Hallelujah.

  It was not yet noon when she came down Main Street. The town seemed quiet, even though the clatter of horses, wagons filled with crops and material for the rail, and men and women going about their errands lent to the busyness of the place. It wasn’t until she stopped outside the Smalls’ mercantile that she realized what sound was missing—the ring and beat from the blacksmith’s shop that pounded out from dawn to dark ever since the rail’s approach.

  The rail depended on the smith to keep them in nails and bolts and repairs of the matics. All the farmers, ranchers, and millers in the area kept the blacksmith and his apprentices plenty busy. She couldn’t imagine what would bring all that work to a day’s halt.

  She was sure Mrs. Horace Small would be happy to pass on that information and every other scrap of gossip if she asked. Mrs. Small didn’t like Mae much, but she was more than happy to buy and sell the fine lace Mae tatted, and had never turned away a single sturdy wool blanket Mae wove.

  Mae had been saving up the bit of money she made from cloth and lace for years, adding it to any extra Jeb brought in. They weren’t rich, and she had never supposed they would be. But they had money set aside.

  She eased down off her mule and tied her to the hitching post below the porch. A rise of men’s voices, laughter mostly, rolled through the air along with the clank of the piano from the saloon down the street. Plenty of people hoping for better days. And it seemed some of them were more than happy to celebrate early.

  Mae walked up the front steps and then along the whitewashed railing to the open shop door. She didn’t like entering the mercantile. Not because it was always dark, filled from floorboard to rafter with things folk needed to live a civilized life, some items like the dishes from China or the fine glass lamps shipped all the way from the old country. There was something about the clutter of the place, of so many things from so many lands all crowded together, that made her restless and wanting for the simplicity and quiet of her home.

  Mae walked into the shop, the cooler air scented with the straw and dust of newly delivered goods. Mrs. Horace Small must be out for the day. Rose Small stood behind the counter in the dim-lit room, minding the till.

  She looked over and a smile lit her up.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Lindson,” Rose said.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Small.” Mae walked across the room. “I hope all is well with you.”

  Rose nodded, though a cloud passed over her eyes. “I’m good as glim. And yourself? Come into town with a few blankets before the weather turns?”

  Mae shook her head. She should have thought of that. Should have brought in the blankets she’d finished over the long summer nights. But ever since she had felt Jeb’s death, she’d been thinking of no other thing than revenge.

  She wasn’t even sure if she had eaten this morning.

  “No blankets today.”

  “Lace, then? Mrs. Haverty was discussing her daughter’s wedding dress and hoping we’d have a lace collar on hand. The shipments from back East didn’t make it this far out. I reckon someone in Carson City must have a hankering for fine lace.”

  “No, no lace.” Mae stopped at the counter where the coffee grinder sat next to candy in glass jars. She tugged off her leather gloves, one finger at a time. “I’ve come to withdraw from my safetydeposit box. I don’t suppose your father is in?”

  “He’s gone to meet with some of the out-of-towners who came in early today. Investors and businessmen looking to set up business now that the rail’s going to tie us to the oceans on both sides. We’ll have all the news from the world at our fingertips and plenty of new people passing through. Might even get a telegraph office. Looks like Hallelujah’s going to put itself on the map.”

  “Looks like it is,” Mae said. “But about your folks. Is your mother round?”

  “She’s just down the road a ways. At church seeing about the wedding. These things take time and plenty of effort from all the able women.” Rose looked down at the counter, and pulled a cloth from her pocket to rub at the wood. “Seeing as how it’s the banker’s daughter and the timberman’s son, it will be a wedding of some importance.”

  “All weddings are important,” Mae said. “Even for the most humble groom and bride.”

  “I reckon that’s true.”

  Rose went back to wiping down the counter, though Mae thought there wasn’t a spot of dirt left to rub. The thimble she wore on the top of her ring finger winked nickel gray in the wan light coming in from the shop’s two windows.

  Mae took a moment to really look at Rose. She was no longer the young girl she’d found running a kite in her fields back when she and Jeb had built their home seven years ago. Rose must be eighteen or so by now. And unmarried.

  No wonder she wasn’t lending a hand at the wedding preparations. The womenfolk had probably deemed her unfit for such things.

  “You’ll be a wife someday,” Mae said gently. “There’s still plenty of time for that.”

  Rose looked back up at Mae, and for a flash, there was hope in her eyes. Then she set her mouth and all Mae could see in her expression was clear resolve. “You’re more than kind to say so.” She put the cloth back in her pocket, ending the conversation.

  “Now, about your business today,” she said, digging up one of her sunlight smiles. “Can I help you in any way? Maybe go fetch my mother or father for you?”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary. If you have the keys to the safe boxes, we won’t need to trouble your parents.”

  “I know just where they’r
e kept.” Rose opened a drawer behind her and pulled out a set of master keys. She turned a glance over her shoulder. “I haven’t seen Mr. Lindson in a long while. He working the rail?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  Rose stopped, still as a deer under the eyes of a wolf. And the sorrow that crossed her face was heart-deep, bringing tears at the bottoms of her eyes. “I am so sorry,” she whispered. She didn’t say any more, didn’t ask how he’d died, didn’t ask if she was planning a burial, a funeral, a service with black lace.

  Mae nodded, and Rose got herself busy with the locked drawer that held the keys to the safety boxes.

  “Did you hear the Gregors’ boy, little Elbert, has gone missing?” Rose asked softly, as if there was more than rumor resting on her words.

  “I hadn’t heard.” Mae tried to remember how old the Gregors’ boy was now. Maybe three? Four? She was glad for something different to think upon, even if it was bad news. “Did he wander off?”

  Rose walked out from behind the counter, things in her apron pockets clacking quietly. “No one knows. He disappeared in the night. Right through the closed window and the locked door.” She paused between one step and the next. “Is that something you’d have a way of knowing about?”

  Mae looked down at her shoes. She’d never told Rose she was a witch, but Rose had a way of knowing about people almost like she could hear the truth of them without them even speaking. It hadn’t been said, but Rose knew Mae was conversant with herb and magic. And unlike any of the other folk in town, who were suspicious of her, Rose had been her first and her only friend in Hallelujah.

  “I don’t know that I can be of help,” Mae said. “Even if there were something I could do, there isn’t much in me but grief.” She paused, then added, “And that . . . clouds things. I don’t suppose that will change for a long while.”

  Rose’s hand gently cupped Mae’s shoulder and Mae realized Rose was an inch or so taller than her. Her hand was warm and strong. Her fingers squeezed just a little. “There isn’t anything more natural you should be doing but grieving, Mrs. Lindson. It takes a heart long days to heal.”