Ironshield

by Edward Nile

  Fuck...

  Darian opened his eyes in a series of slow blinks. With a supreme effort, he lifted his leaden head from his chin to look about, bleary and confused.

  Edmund Paulson held a steaming cup under Darian’s nose. “Tea?”

  Darian jerked in his seat. He couldn’t do much else. “You’ll hang for this, Paulson,” he snarled, straining against the ropes tethering him. “You and your senator both.”

  “Ah, a coffee man, then.” Paulson sipped the tea. “Shame.”

  “Senator Salkirk will know I’m missing,” Darian spat. “If you and Mutton think you had it bad before, just wait until the world hears about this.”

  “Bold of you to assume you’ll get to tell the tale.” Paulson set the cup down on a small table already laid out with metal instruments of various sizes and shapes. He sat in a chair opposite Darian. “But threats aside, I think the presses will be more interested in this than the disappearance of one hired goon.” He lifted the briefcase from the floor. “Don’t you?”

  Darian blanched at the sight of the case. The thought of what Senator Salkirk would do to him for losing the contents of that briefcase to the opposition made whatever Paulson had in mind seem like a child’s scolding. “No one’s going to believe it,” he said, trying to sound convinced. They’ll claim you forged it all. The mad ramblings of a washed up drunk!”

  “Maybe,” Paulson admitted. “Maybe they’ll need more evidence. Maybe that’s why you’re still alive right now and not at the bottom of the pier.”

  Darian laughed. That made his head swoon. His tongue felt numb from whatever drug Paulson had had the little shit stick him with. “And you expect me to talk? I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but you can’t beat a professional at his own game.” Darian nodded to Paulson’s tools. “If you’re half the man you were supposed to be during the wars, the second you go to work on me with your little play set, I’m a dead man. What you get out of me won’t count for shit if word gets around you kidnapped and tortured me without trial. You’d have to kill me. But that doesn’t matter, because you don’t have the sack for the job to start with.”

  As Darian talked, his captor picked up a scalpel, examining the blade.

  Darian laughed. “Your hand’s looking a mite shaky. Maybe you need a drink or three.”

  Paulson put the scalpel down and rummaged in his coat pocket. He drew out a flask. “I shouldn’t even be here,” the secretary mused, turning the flask over in his hands.

  Darian scoffed. “Save the self-pity for someone not tied to a chair.” He kept trying to work at the knots binding his hands back, but for all his alcohol abuse, Paulson knew how to tie a man down.

  “I should be retired. I should be with my wife.” Paulson looked at Darian. “I wasn’t there when she died. She was Sam’s sister, you see. With the Revolution balanced on a knife’s edge, and Sam helping hold it all together, he couldn’t afford to rush off to her bedside. Bless the man, he was sure she’d make it. Worried enough to send her husband, though. Worried enough to send me.” Paulson unscrewed the flask with a sigh. “I was a bit more cynical, you might say. The epidemic that got her had a nasty track record. I was… afraid of what I’d find when I got there. So afraid I stopped for two whole days on the trip to wallow in my cups. By the time I reached Ellen, she was already gone.

  “I was a coward. Too much of a coward to face my wife’s death, and too much of a coward to let my friend know I’d failed to be there. To this day, Samuel Mutton thinks I arrived in time to receive his sister’s final words. In all fairness.” Paulson let out a mirthless chuckle, the open flask still held, undrunk, in his hand. “I believe I gave a fair approximation of what she’d have said.”

  The fuck is he on about? This wasn’t in any interrogation manual Darian had ever read. The drunk bastard really has lost his mind.

  “By the time I did arrive, to see a shroud on my dear Ellen’s face, I couldn’t turn back time and change what I’d done. So instead, I made a promise, then and there. A promise that I’d join her, once I was no longer needed here.

  “Then, Arkenia entered a war with Xang, and my friend, Ellen’s brother, needed me again. Ten years, delaying my retirement. Ten years keeping her waiting on the other side. When the North and South turned on each other on the heels of that bloody campaign, I said to hell with it. ‘I’ll drink like a fish,’ I decided. ‘If the whiskey kills me, at least it can’t be said I quit on my friend.’”

  Paulson raised the flask. “I should be resting, now. But you cocksuckers don’t know when to leave my country alone.” He overturned the flask, letting amber liquid spill to the floor.

  It pattered against something, and Darian looked down.

  He hadn’t done more than a cursory study of the room when he awoke. Moldy walls with chipped plaster, a dingy overhead lamp that might have once been opulent. From the mouldings along the floor and ceiling to the dark carved stone hearth at the other end of the room, this place had either been an affluent household or, more likely, the mockery of one. An old hotel, If Darian had to guess.

  He had only given it all a glance, so he’d missed the plastic sheet laid on the floor beneath his captor and him.

  Now Darian watched Paulson’s whiskey spatter onto the plastic, flowing around its creases, collecting in little pools that reflected the dim yellow lamplight.

  “Well, you have your wish,” said Edmund Paulson. “Retirement’s cancelled. And now that I’m back to work at full capacity, you and your friends can bet what’s left of your treasonous lives I’ll be thorough.”

  Darian watched the liquid fall until the last drop left the mouth of the flask. His chair was bolted down, so that when Darian tried to shuffle back, nothing happened. All he could do was watch as Paulson advanced on him.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t hold back his scream.

  *

  It was easy to forget how sticky blood was, until he felt it between his fingers.

  Edmund used a wet rag to clean off his hands as he left the room, but knew he’d need a more thorough wash later to get the crimson residue out from under his fingernails. It would take even more to relieve that all-too familiar copper stink.

  Get used to it, he told himself. Taking the briefcase from under his arm, Edmund placed it on a decaying desk in the adjacent room. He still couldn’t quite believe what it contained. But here it was.

  Should head straight over and kill that bastard, Edmund thought. All in good time. Right now, he needed to make another stop. Nathaniel Davids had to be warned. Word needed to be sent out to Samuel before he did something rash.

  Paulson felt that even Ellen would understand. That maybe, even a monster like the one he’d become could make her spirit proud.

  Chapter 27

  Something hit the window of James’ hotel room.

  He rolled over, wiping the sleep from his eyes to squint in the gray morning light barely seeping in through dusty drapes.

  A pigeon, he told himself, pulling his blanket back over his bare chest and rolling onto his side with a shiver. This place was such a relic, the walls might as well have been paper for all the cold they kept out.

  Another strike against the window.

  Okay, a persistent pigeon. James swung his legs off the bed and crossed the sparse little room. He opened the window. The third rock just missed his head, knocking against the wooden window frame as he lifted it.

  “What’s the big idea?” James snapped. His next recrimination faltered when he saw who the culprit was.

  Tessa Kolms’ breath misted in the frosty air. Bundled in a black coat lined with white fur, surrounded by the glittering permafrost that coated the gravel road, she looked… James didn’t have a word for it, or for the lump in his throat at the unexpected sight. He wasn’t sure what haunted him more, the faces of the dead, or those of the living. But of all the ghosts, that of what could have been was among the most pervasive.

  James almost didn’t see Na’Tet at all,
standing at a respectful distance from Tessa, his head bowed.

  She followed his gaze and shrugged. “Uncle doesn’t want me wandering off alone.”

  “And you listened?” James massaged his forehead. Whatever time it was, it was too early. “What’s going on, Tess?”

  Tessa’s unpainted lips were full and red in contrast to pale skin made all the more striking framed by her jet-black hair. Even from here, James could see her blue eyes, sparkling as bright and cold as the frost.

  Tessa lifted a bottle of vodka. “Get dressed,” she called. “It’s about time we shared a drink.”

  Not for the first time since he arrived in Helmsburg, James noted how Tessa Kolms had changed from the girl he knew. She’d always been fierce. Quick-tempered, blunt, brave to a fault. But always there’d been a sense of hesitancy, the uncertainty of a young woman still figuring out who she was, her place in the world.

  The humility and reticence were gone, replaced with cold pride. This new Tessa didn’t seem the type to throw rocks at windows in the wee hours of morning to ask an old flame out for a drink. Yet here they were, walking out past the edge of town, following the glittering, frozen road toward the ice-crusted lake. More of a fishing pond, if James was honest about it. With a gray sky above and surrounded by even grayer ridges, the place had all the warmth of a graveyard. It suited James’ mood of late.

  Tessa stripped out of her fur-lined coat, revealing another beneath that looked suspiciously like an Industrialist gray uniform. She laid the heavier garment on a stony patch of ground like a blanket and sat. “The booze’ll warm us up,” she said, patting the spot next to her. “Besides, the sun’s almost out.”

  She was right. Even now, James could see its light poking from across the tree-lined horizon.

  James glanced toward Na’Tet, who’d perched himself on a rock, shrugged into his cloak and smoking from a long, elaborate pipe that gave off a floral fragrance. He bowed his head to James.

  “Listen, ‘Tet,” James said. “I’m sorry about what happened back at the hideout. What Arnold said wasn’t right.”

  “Holy James did no wrong by Na’Tet. Do not let this one disturb you.” With that, ‘Tet turned to look out toward the road.

  James sighed. Settling himself down beside Tessa, he accepted the bottle and took the first burning swig. He’d never been one for vodka, but James enjoyed the immediate warmth radiating down his throat to settle in his stomach. “Better than coffee,” he remarked, passing the bottle back to Tessa. “Surprised you didn’t break out some northern whiskey.”

  “Decided I’d skip the brain damage,” she responded with something between a grunt and a laugh. Tessa took a considerably longer gulp than James had before handing him the bottle once more. “This helps me when I’m bored. Or nervous.”

  “And which one are you now?”

  Tessa averted her eyes, ran a hand through her hair. Her locks were shorter, but the habit remained the same. This was the old Tess, the reserved, shy side of her as she tried to parse through a situation that couldn’t be handled with harsh words or fists.

  “Both,” she said at last, taking another gulp. “I keep waiting for us – Uncle Ivan and the rest – to actually do something. We lost our other hideout not too long ago in a town called Dalbrook. Ever since, we’ve been staying low, tinkering away. It’s like we’ve been waiting for something but none of us knew what. A few started talking about shutting down for a while and I knew if we did, that’d be the end of it, the end of the Industrialists. Then you show up out of nowhere. I thought that meant something until…”

  “Until I said I was out,” James finished for her. “Now you’re afraid the legacy will die, that you’ll see the fall of the whole movement and wonder what you could have done to stop it.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was soft, just above a whisper.

  It was James’ turn to drink deep. “I know the feeling. Your dad’s legacy, the thing we fought and bled for, all resting on your shoulders.” Ironshield came to mind, dark and silent, a tarnished tombstone over his family’s name. But he also saw his father’s Warsuit in its final hour. When Tessa raised it from the ground to face Samuel Mutton’s Redstripe.

  When James proffered the bottle to Tessa next, he didn’t let go when she grabbed it. He locked eyes with her, and their fogged breath mingled between them.

  “If the Industrialist North ended with you, Tessa Kolms, it would be the finest end anyone could ask for. My father would be as proud of you as yours must be.”

  She kept staring at him after he let go of the bottle. James didn't know if he could look away, even if he wanted to.

  Tessa broke eye contact first. She took a slow sip of vodka. "I wish I could know what my dad thought for certain." She scowled. "But those Appeaser bastards still have him locked up, and if I try to get a message to him, even under a false name, the Southern goons won't stop until they find me. Me, and the rest of us."

  "Arkenian goons," James corrected. "Much as we don't like it, the North versus South shit? It only matters if there's still part of the country that's ours." He drank next, welcoming the liquor's bite. "As likely to get arrested by someone from the north as by anyone else."

  "Maybe so," Tessa responded.

  But is that even true? All it had taken was a throwdown with soldiers in a Goethegar tavern to bring a rebel out of the woodwork to save James' life. How many of his people, his comrades, existed in secret, away from these little pockets of resistance but still willing to fight?

  They drank silently for a while, watched the sun climb its way into the sky, hitting their faces with the day's first bit of warmth.

  "Do you still believe in it?" Tessa asked. "In what we did, what we and our fathers fought for?"

  It was a hard question to answer. Like most Industrialists, James had looked at their cause as a continuation of the Revolution on which Arkenia was founded. The South hadn't been the enemy so much as a tool of the real foe, the Lytan Empire, which had roped their former colony into a demilitarization deal. James was no Imperial sympathizer. He believed in his country and its independence. However, he'd barely been born when Lytan abandoned their claim here, so what did he truly know?

  No, the more James considered it, the less he viewed the Civil War as simply a prolongation of the struggle against Lytan. The war between the Industrialists and the Appeasers, to people like James and Tessa, wasn't about the bygone grudges of former Imperial thralls, but about the conflict between two different ways of life. In an Arkenia in which men could pilot Warsuits freely, the rule of government was predicated on whether said government could live up to the people's expectations. In the eyes of many Industrialists the removal of that great equalizer, that could allow even a small group to contend against a much larger tyrannical force, left the state able to function through fear alone.

  Warsuits were what allowed the relatively small Industrialist army to hold out against numerically superior Southern forces. They were the armor that protected Arkenian revolutionaries against Lytan cannons, making them more than men. Those machines had served as beacons of strength and freedom to Quar, a nation which had known neither under the assault of Xangese totalitarianism. A people that could be stripped of such power by a piece of paper could be denied just about anything.

  Maybe Lytan hadn't put the Imperial boot back on Arkenia's throat as some feared, but that didn't mean the nation didn't have the tender neck of its sovereignty bared beneath an unseen axe. This begged the question of which mattered most. That more people lived, or that those who did lived free.

  "Jim?"

  "Yes," James said, responding to her question. "And no. If that makes any sense."

  "About as much as anything else." Tessa continued to play with her hair. The movement exposed red scar tissue at the back of her neck, which disappeared beneath the collar of her jacket. It looked like a burn mark.

  James had told Ivan there was no way someone could crawl through Ironshield's engine works unscathed. It t
urned out he was right.

  Tessa saw him notice and pulled her collar up to hide the scar.

  "It's my fault," James said.

  "Don't start with that horseshit again," Tessa interjected. "You got there as fast as you could. Had it been you, you'd have never made it out of that Kaizer alive."

  "No, it is my fault." James touched her arm. "Maybe if I hadn't turned you down…"

  Tessa snorted. "What then? If we'd fallen in love would that have stopped the war, kept Mutton from destroying Quarrystone?"

  "I did."

  "Guess you think they'd have called off the Flemmingwood and Graytop assaults if only James Edstein and Tessa Kolms had fu- what was that?"

  "I did, Tess. I did fall in love."

  Tessa's face went blank. She lifted the bottle straight up, draining half its remaining contents. The vodka was putting some color into her pale cheeks.