Dead Iron aos-1

by Devon Monk

  “There’s a boy gone lost, Mr. Madder. Your curiosity will have to carry on without me.” The door swung open behind him. He could tell the door opened only because a wash of air filtered into the room. The door itself, a slab of stone that ten men couldn’t shoulder closed, moved silently on those well-oiled rails.

  Mae stepped through the doors and Cadoc closed them quickly behind her. The youngest Madder moved over to stand in front of the door, fists on top of his hips pulling back his duster just enough to let Cedar see the guns holstered there.

  “Tell me, Mr. Hunt,” Alun said. “How did you repair the watch?”

  The question was unexpected.

  The Madders had said they’d tried to fix it and couldn’t. And now, just a day in his keeping, the watch was running again. It appeared the Madder brothers didn’t take kindly to being out-tinkered.

  “Dropped it.”

  “That so?” Alun said.

  Bryn, who stood near Alun, cleared his throat and held both hands up to show no weapons were within them. “Might I could see it, Mr. Hunt? Timepiece deviled me for weeks. Won’t go so far as to open it up, but it’d be a pleasure to see it working as it should.”

  “That door behind me going to open up if I show you the watch?”

  Alun chuckled. “The watch. Now, Mr. Hunt.”

  The brothers were spread about the chamber. He’d be lucky to get off three clean shots, luckier if they did enough damage to keep the Madders from pulling their own weapons. He gritted his teeth, swallowing back a growl. Easier to give them what they wanted and walk out of here than to waste daylight digging their graves.

  He reached in his pocket and withdrew the watch, letting it dangle off his knuckles.

  Bryn walked nearer, his hands still held upward. When he was an arm’s length away, he tucked two fingers into his vest pocket and withdrew a pair of brass spectacles. He perched those on his nose, folded his hands behind his back, and leaned in, squinting at the watch face.

  He breathed a word, not English, then craned his neck to meet Cedar’s gaze.

  “How?” he asked, honestly perplexed. “It was broken. More than broken. Irreparable. If any hands could fix it, it would have been mine.” He stretched out the fastidiously clean fingers of one hand, waited for Cedar’s assent.

  Cedar nodded. Bryn gently placed his fingers at the back of the watch and tipped it to catch the light.

  He frowned, then ran a thumb over the crystal face, running his nail at the seam.

  “Blood,” Bryn said. “Yours?”

  “Don’t see that it matters. This watch is none of your concern.” He pulled the watch away. But Bryn was just as fast as his brother. He snatched the watch out of Cedar’s hand, breaking the chain in two.

  “Think it might yet be ours,” Bryn said. “And our concern to boot.”

  “I’ve had enough,” Cedar said. “There’s deals been made and word been given. I’m as good as my word to settle my debt. Give the watch back.”

  Bryn took a step away, shaking his head. “You’ve done something to it we couldn’t. Way I see it, the neighborly thing is to let us take it apart, see what moves it.”

  “Way I see it,” Cedar said low, “is you’ll give me back what’s mine, or I’ll break your jaw.”

  That did it. The brothers, grinning and always hankering for a fight, were on him. His gun was knocked out of his hand, as fists meant for breaking stone slammed into his head, his ribs, his stomach. Their laughter filled the chamber.

  Cedar swung, connected. Swung again. Pulled his hunting knife from his belt, sliced through air, snagged the edge of cloth, hit flesh. A flash of light filled the cavern as one of the brothers set off a charge. Cedar blinked, trying to clear his vision.

  A hand caught his wrist, twisted. Yanked his wrist up behind his back.

  Cedar yelled. Another fist, then too many to count, rained down. A boot slammed into his chest. He fell back. He could just make out Alun’s face as he dropped on him, a knee pushing all the air out of his lungs.

  The brothers gave one hard cheer, Bryn and Cadoc holding down his arms and legs and utilizing rope they must have stashed in their coats to bind his boots and wrists.

  “Didn’t realize you wanted to get in a scuffle with us, Mr. Hunt,” Alun said. “Not over something as small as a watch. Brother Bryn was just ribbing you. The watch is yours. We Madders are true to our word too. But now I’m hard curious as to why you’d be willing to come to blows over it, and why, exactly, your blood seems to have fixed it up, when all our skills did it no good.”

  Alun Madder grinned big enough to split his head in half. “I believe we’re inviting you to extend your stay with us awhile.” He wiped the blood off his mouth with his sleeve, then gave Cedar a mostly somber look. “With my apologies.” He pounded a fist across Cedar’s jaw.

  The blow hit so hard, sparks filled Cedar’s vision as the brothers’ laughter filled his ears.

  He tasted blood even before his head snapped back and hit the stone floor. His ears rang, and blood ran down the back of his neck mixing with the dirt.

  Cedar struggled to stay conscious. He didn’t know what would happen if he passed out. Didn’t know if the beast that lingered just beneath his skin would break free, moonlight or no moonlight, to tear the brothers apart, or if he would simply fall unconscious.

  The Madders finished binding his feet, legs, arms, then picked him up as if he were no more than a suckling pig trussed up on a pole. They dropped him into a chair.

  “Now.” Alun licked blood from his split lip and rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see what, exactly, you’re made of, Mr. Hunt.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Shard LeFel carried a lantern hooked on the end of his dark, curved cane. The blacksmith’s boy stumbled along beside him, holding the hem of LeFel’s coat as they walked the enclosed split between the two train carriages to the boiler car. The boy was slow-eyed, dreaming on his feet, caught in the drugs LeFel had forced upon him, unable to think or speak. Not that it mattered for what LeFel intended to do to him.

  He pulled open the door, which he never locked. The only man who had ever tried to steal from this carriage left the rails in a meat bag. His blood still stained the wooden stairs.

  At night the shuffling, clicks, and huffs of steam from the windowless carriage rattled out beyond the walls as the things he kept inside stirred, restless. Pipes from this car ran to the other two cars set here on the rail spur, and the steam in those pipes kept LeFel’s living quarters and private bath heated.

  LeFel and the boy stepped inside. Even though the sun was in the sky, the interior of the boiler car was dark as a grave. He raised the lantern, but shadows hung heavy and thick, unmoved by the sweep of light.

  “Wake, my sweet. Wake, my beasts. Wake and do your king’s bidding.” LeFel walked deeper into the room, placing the lantern on a small table to the right of the door. The boy followed.

  LeFel pressed down on the boy’s shoulder. “You will sit here, child. And dream.” The boy dragged one hand down the wall as he folded upon the floor, curling up like an infant, his thumb tucked in his mouth.

  So fragile, these human young, LeFel mused. So unable to defend themselves.

  He walked away from the child and over to a heavy handle that jutted up to shoulder height from the floor. Made of black iron and brass, the contraption looked like a pump for water except for the gears and woven pulleys that ran from its joints up to the walls, wrapping among the pipes and valves and yet more gears and pulleys that flowed over the entire inside of the carriage like a fishing net made of metal.

  LeFel drew his black silk gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. He detested manual labor, but waking his menagerie gave its own reward. He pumped the handle at a steady pace, allowing the complicated system of pulleys and gears to warm. Bellows pushed air through pipes down into the burner in the underbelly of the train car, fanning the coals there, and setting water to boil, then steam to push through smaller pipes—st
eam that pushed levers and spun wheels.

  The lantern on the table reflected glints of brass, silver, ruby, diamond from the shadows.

  Creatures stirred in that darkness. Creatures shifted and creaked and moaned, filling the carriage with their hot, wet exhales.

  Metal creatures. Gears and steam. Matics. From all corners of the world, created by all manner of men’s hands to do his bidding.

  Pipes fastened to the walls of the carriage groaned and clicked. It didn’t take long before that power was pumped into the matics, giving the tick to the shuffling beasts’ hearts.

  When the moaning and stirring was replaced by the huffing chug and tapping metrics of matics under full power, Shard LeFel flipped the wall toggle on the gas lanterns, bathing the entire space in light.

  Metal creatures pivoted toward him. They had no eyes with which to see, but they each contained a drop of glim mixed with a handful of powdered chemicals—a mix LeFel had stumbled across years ago. The mix of chemicals and glim gave the creatures a curious sort of awareness—not intelligence, but just enough rudimentary thinking skills to imprint upon them their single function: to kill.

  They were not quite alive, and he preferred them that way. Killing machines with no room for remorse or reluctance were very useful to a man of his ambitions.

  The matics had been constructed over the last two hundred years. Built by men he rewarded richly by giving them a quick death at Mr. Shunt’s discretion. Mr. Shunt did not always kill immediately. Some of the men had lived for years before Mr. Shunt found them and paid them a most final visit. Still, LeFel had been assured their deaths were swift, if not entirely painless.

  Looking upon his servants set fire to LeFel’s pride. This collection, this zoo, this army, suited a king, a conqueror.

  One creature was made of metals and riches from the Celestial Empire, ivory and gold, inset with jade and rubies and the jewels of an ancient emperor’s crown. Another beast was pieced together with thick welds, hard steel torn from the narrow veins of the distant mountains of Germany and forged by the fire of volcanoes.

  Hulking monstrosities creaked at every joint, wielding hammers and pistons for arms, threshers for hands. Delicate tickers sculpted to resemble animals and birds, some so detailed to the natural world, they would be accepted by the creatures they imitated. Warped, twisted globs of metal, misshapen heads and gears, leather-accordioned bellows, potbelly burners, and great hinged chest-plate furnaces—they were matics, tickers, horrors made of steel.

  And all of them, from the largest bent half over, to the smallest the size of a rat, waited for his command. He would need only half of them this night, free only half of them on this task.

  “The dead man has risen from his grave. He walks again, our Mr. Jeb Lindson. You will find him. You will tear him apart into so many pieces there won’t be two bones left to go walking.”

  He strode back to the boy and pulled him by the scruff of his shirt up onto his feet. “Are you awake, whelp? Are you enjoying your dreams?” He drew a thin knife from his coat and sliced the thick of the boy’s thumb. The child whimpered, his eyes pupil-dark and wide with shock. LeFel caught up the drops of blood in a small glass vial. The matics would need mortal blood to understand the hunt. This child’s would have to do.

  The matics sensed the blood. They drew closer, tugging on their chains.

  LeFel clamped his hand around the boy’s wrist to steady him. If the boy fell to the floor now, the beasts would destroy him and carve out his bones. LeFel lifted his dark curved cane and caught it up in the ropes that hung in loops across the ceiling.

  “This is the blood of a mortal. This blood is upon the dragonfly that drives the wings of one man’s heart. Find the dead man with the dragonfly in his chest and kill him.” The boy’s blood dripped upon the wooden slats of the floor, and the matics lifted heads, snouts, mandibles, vents, to absorb the scent of it carried by the steam.

  “Find this blood. Do not return to me until you have ground the dead man’s body to mulch. But bring me his head. Whole.” He yanked the ceiling ropes with the cane, loosening the pilot knot, then thunked the base of the cane into the floor at his boot. The knots untied, clamps released, and bindings—some metal, some magnetic, some fiber—unbound, fell away in shushing coils upon the wooden floor. A dozen matics, just half of his menagerie, large and small, were free.

  Hungry, lumbering, slick and quick, the matics could fill their steam bellies with blood just as easily as with water—and they had done so over the years. Evidence of that could be seen in the blackened blood rust staining the joints of neck and chest and jaws.

  They circled the boy, brushing against him to smell, to record, to savor the blood of the child who helped bind metal to a dead man’s flesh. The rest of the matics, still trapped by chain and steel along the walls, moaned softly and shifted against their shackles.

  LeFel released the boy, who swayed on his feet but did not fall, eyes lost in the middle of a nightmare, tears streaming his face, as the free matics touched and stroked and sniffed and plucked, scenting, tasting, recording him.

  LeFel strode to the center of the carriage and opened the trapdoor in the floor. “Now,” he commanded. “Hunt the dead man.”

  The army of cogs, jointed limbs, razor jaws, and glittering gears dragged away from the boy, then skulked past LeFel. They slipped through the trapdoor in one step, or skittered down the iron ladder to the ground, then away, out from beneath the carriage, unseen by the rail workers, silent as ghosts.

  The stink of steam and oil and coal hitting the cooler air of the afternoon lifted up through the trapdoor and filled the carriage. LeFel pulled the lever, closing the trapdoor. The other matics cooed, moaned, reached toward the lever. Hungry for blood. They waited, huffing, clacking. Waited to kill for him.

  “Today is not your day to serve. I am loath to waste two centuries of my collection on one dead man. But your day to feast will come. Soon.”

  He strolled back to the boy and looked down at him, silent a moment. He wondered how much longer the boy would last. Wondered when the horrors would finally break his mind. “Does your hand hurt, my child?”

  The boy did not answer. He stood, shaking, as if chilled, or perhaps in shock. LeFel needed the boy to endure only a day more. Just until the waning moon.

  LeFel placed his fingertips on the child’s back. “Sleep will solve all your ills, little maker. Sleep will make this world fade away and bring to you the soothing world of dreams.”

  The boy finally blinked and took a deep, stuttering breath. He closed his eyes and leaned against LeFel’s coat, his fist caught tight in his sleeve.

  “Follow me,” LeFel murmured, “follow me to dreaming.” LeFel placed his hand between the boy’s shoulders and propelled him along with him.

  Before they left the carriage, he snatched up the lantern with the crook of his cane, leaving his creations hunkered in darkness again.

  Outside, LeFel paused. It was difficult to see the movement in the dappled shadow and light of the forest, but he had a keen eye. He smiled as his tickers, his slaves, his children of destruction, ran smooth and quick, faster than living beasts, faster than steam and metal should move, spreading like a plague, hunting for a dead man—hunting for the only thing that stood between him and the witch.

  “And when they are done with you, Mr. Jeb Lindson, not even the witch will recognize your bones.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mae Lindson rode down the mountain, her mule, Prudence, slow and surefooted through the loose shale path. She glanced over her shoulder again, scanning the ridge for Cedar Hunt. She had thought he was leaving and had hoped to ride with him awhile. Not to convince him to help her—she’d given up on that. He’d made up his mind, and told her no twice. She was sure there wasn’t anything she could do to change that.

  But Cedar Hunt ranged the mountains and hills tracking cougar, wolf, bear. She intended to ask if he’d seen any sign of her husband. But since he wasn’t riding out,
she’d just have to find the killer her own way.

  Her mule settled into a plodding pace, head down. It would take more than a few hours to reach her cottage. And by the time she provisioned, it’d be too late in the day to set out to hunt the killer. It would have to be tomorrow, then. Tonight, she would pack supplies, tend the goats, and cast a scrying spell to lead her in the right direction.

  Tomorrow would be soon enough to start her journey.

  She thought about riding through town again and buying supplies, but she had all she needed at home. Still, Rose’s smile and the promise of the rhubarb pie almost made her head into town for no other excuse. It had been a sure comfort to see a friendly face. But instinct told her the night would come on too quickly, and she had best be tucked up tight in her home before it fell.

  Even though the day was still warm, she shivered. The Madder brothers had some strangeness about them. She was sure of that. It wasn’t witchcraft. When she put her fingers on Alun Madder’s arm, she had felt like she was touching the deep roots of the mountains themselves. And then, when she had offered her skills to him, she had felt a power in his presence, an authority about him.

  Finding Cedar Hunt mixed up with the brothers was a surprise. Mr. Hunt kept to himself almost as much as she and Jeb did. She’d never thought him to have dealings with the brothers who were known for brawling, drinking, and driving hard bargains. What, she wondered, would send Cedar up the mountains today, asking the brothers’ favor?

  Perhaps she and he both had problems that required the brothers’ particular abilities.

  Even though she hadn’t let on back in the mine, the shotgun was a magnificent piece of genius. If it worked half as well as it appeared to be built, it was a very powerful weapon indeed. But she didn’t dare fire it to get accustomed to how it performed. Five bullets meant she would have no more than five chances to end the killer’s life.

  She had bundled the gun in a blanket and lashed it to the back of her saddle. The shells were safely tucked in her saddle pack. But even though the shotgun was safely behind her, she wasn’t unarmed. A woman traveling alone, even near town, or perhaps especially, was most likely to draw trouble. Therefore, Mae kept a Colt in the saddle holster near her knee.