Dead Iron (35 page)

“Steam and wind.” He frowned over at the basket, where Bryn was feeding coal into a firebox set up high in the middle of it. He had sparked and turned the tinder uncommonly quickly into flame and poured water from his canteen into a small keg set atop the tinderbox. “Mostly,” Alun added.

He grinned, clamping his teeth on his pipe. “Let’s have the locket, girl.”

“No.”

Alun’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “No?”

“You heard me.”

“Means something to you, does it?”

“More than to you.”

He gave her a considering gaze. “Well, then, let’s have you use it. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”

Cadoc Madder stopped pacing and was now pointing the tuning fork northwest like a compass needle. “The rail,” he breathed. “They’re headed to the rail.”

“Nice of them to make it easy,” Alun said. “Just a hop and a skip.” He shrugged on his backpack, then pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of a crate and attached it by tubes and lines to his backpack before climbing into the basket.

Bryn Madder finished tinkering with the two windmillblade contraptions on either side of the basket. He pulled a squatbodied blunderbuss and a sledgehammer out of his pack before getting into the basket next to Alun. “Coming with us, Miss Small?” he asked.

“Where?” she asked. “How?”

“The rail, apparently,” Alun Madder said around the stem of his pipe. “And as for the how, you’re looking at it.”

Rose glanced over her shoulder toward the way the matic had left. She couldn’t catch it on foot. And even though the Madders were clearly not in their right minds, she wasn’t sure what choice she had other than to run to town and get a horse. And she had no time for that either.

She gathered up her skirt and tucked the hem of it through her belt beneath the heavy coat she wore.

Alun Madder raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything as to her impropriety, and she wouldn’t have cared if he did. Hitching up her skirt gave her a better stride, and the long coat hung nearly halfway to her boot tops, but was split front and back so she could run if needed. Even so, there was a good palm width of her stocking in clear view that would have scandalized her mother if she’d seen it. Rose climbed over the edge of the basket, where the heat from the boiler made it almost unbearably hot.

“Stand behind me, girl,” Alun Madder said.

Rose stood beside him instead.

Alun laughed. “Well, then. Are you coming, brother Cadoc?”

Cadoc Madder took in a breath as if to say something, but instead drew a two-bladed ax out from his pack. He nodded thoughtfully, and lifted up the edge of the cloth on the ground, standing to one side to reveal a hole.

“What?” Rose started, but then she didn’t need to finish.

Bryn pulled a hose that was coiled at the side of the burner and tossed it to Cadoc, who turned, caught the hose, and clamped it down tight to the hole in the fabric.

Bryn Madder worked the valves, and a blast of hot steam roared into the fabric.

Cadoc Madder waited until the fabric started taking on a round shape before he stepped into the basket with them. From the shape of it, Rose suspected there was a second fabric inside the first, filling with steam. Cadoc hauled on the ropes and pulleys and helped lift the fabric—the balloon—into the sky above the basket, then fastened a tube that was already wet with condensation down onto a drip hole in the water reserve.

Wonder caught at Rose’s heart. “A balloon? We’re going to fly?”

“No better way to travel,” Alun said. “Be to it, Bryn. Quick, now. We wouldn’t want to miss the party.”

Bryn adjusted levers and turned valves on the burner, which clicked and rattled and shook in a most distressing manner. “If you’d step to me a moment, Miss Small,” he said. “With your locket?”

Rose did so, and pulled the locket out from beneath her blouse, but did not take it off from over her head. She held it out on the chain for him. “I don’t see as how this can help.”

Bryn gently caught the gilded robin’s egg with his clean fingertips. He pulled a chain out of his pocket, on the end of which was a collection of thin watchmaker’s tools. He chose one tool and inserted it into a tiny hole at the base of the locket. The locket spun open like a flower blooming.

Delicate gears and spindles within it twisted and rolled, revealing a small glass vial couched in the center of the locket. The vial glowed a soft green light, but Rose could not tell if it was filled with liquid or gas or something else altogether.

“What is it?” She could not look away from the locket, and did not want to.

“Glim,” Alun Madder said quietly. “And all we’ll need is a drop or two, to set this ship in the air.”

“Glim?” She could hardly believe it. She’d been wearing a fortune around her neck, and never once suspected it. “How can it help?”

“Not much glim can’t help,” Alun said.

Bryn nodded once, asking permission to pull the vial out from the tiny latches that held it in place.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“Want an engine to run faster, add glim,” Alun continued. “Want a fire to burn hotter, a coal to last longer, a wound to heal better, add glim.”

“Does it really come from the sky?” Rose asked, watching Bryn break the wax seal on the vial with his thumbnail.

“Harvested by specially equipped airships,” Alun said. “Not that the scientific minds can agree upon what, exactly, glim is made of, nor why exactly it works the way it does.”

“Wait,” Rose said, finally looking away from the glow in Bryn Madder’s hand. “You don’t know how it works?”

“Sometimes a man doesn’t need to know how a thing works so long as he knows that it does work.”

Bryn opened a small gearbox on the side of the burner, and tapped out exactly one drop of glim. The drop floated down into the gears.

The basket lurched and a whirring racket started up. Rose grabbed hold of the railing, her breath frozen in her chest as the balloon above them snapped taut and round.

And then the world seemed to take a step away.

The sturdy basket made it feel like she was standing on solid ground, but when she looked over the edge, the ground was growing farther and farther away. They were lifting up, soft as a sigh, now at about midheight of the trees, and still rising.

They were flying!

“Put this back in the locket.” Alun took the vial from Bryn and handed it to her. She looked it over as carefully as she could in the moonlight. He, or maybe Bryn, had remelted the wax on the mouth of the vial, effectively sealing it. Rose placed the vial back in the locket. It snicked into place and then the locket spun closed all on its own, though she figured there was a spring set to trigger it to lock again. She tucked the locket back inside her dress.

When she looked up again, the bottom of the basket was above even the tallest trees. She grinned and put one hand over her mouth to hold back on a whoop of joy. She was flying!

Bryn Madder took hold of the levers, and with the assistance of the fans on each side of the craft, and some clever saillike rudders that Cadoc and Alun manipulated on the sides of the balloon, they were able to steer the craft off over the trees and the hills and the creeks, to the rail.

Rose had imagined this moment for years. How the trees and mountains and town would look. She had always known it would be beautiful. Breathtaking. But even so, she had underestimated the thrill of being above all the living world, had underestimated how small and pretty and quiltlike the earth rolled out beneath the moonlight. And she could not believe how far to the horizon she could see.

The boiler rattled so hard, it shook the basket. The whole craft lurched to one side, and Rose had to brace her feet not to go sliding across the floor.

“Whoa, now,” Alun said. “Easy on us, brother Bryn.”

They were beginning to descend, quickly, the ground growing larger and the black-shadowed tops of trees coming much, much closer.

“How much longer?” Alun asked, trying to correct their angle through the trees with the sails. Branches scraped the bottom of the basket, and a flurry of crows took off squawking.

“Almost out of steam,” Bryn called over the boiler’s thunderous noise.

Evergreen branches whipped against the sides of the basket and snagged up the lines tethering the balloon.

“Too many blasted trees!” Alun yanked on a sail line, dislodging a limb, and Bryn worked a lever to angle the fans and push the balloon out of the tree’s reach. But they were still falling too fast, branches slapping, cracking, catching at the aircraft, grazing over the delicate balloon fabric.

“Give us a sign, brother Cadoc,” Alun said.

The unmistakable rasp of material tearing sent a cold wave of fear down Rose’s spine. The balloon was broken. They weren’t going to land. They were going to crash.

“There!” Cadoc pointed to a clearing not far from the rail. They were just a ways, maybe half a mile, down from the building end of the track.

“Down,” Alun yelled. “Put ’er down, quick, Bryn!”

The boiler stopped rattling, completely burned dry of water. Wind rushed by, cold and wet from the steam gouting out of the balloon above them.

Alun and Cadoc heaved on the lines, opening pockets in the fabric, trying to push the balloon toward the clearing.

They sped down. Fast and faster.

Rose clutched the rail of the basket and watched, transfixed, as the skeletal giants of moonlit trees slapped at them with silvery fingers.

The fans whirred like hornet hives as Bryn put all the steam, and likely all the glim that was left, into them. “Brace for it!” he yelled.

Rose sucked in a deep breath and said a prayer.

The basket rammed into something solid, then just as quick was whipped the other way. Rose lost hold of the edge of the basket and fell as the entire craft tipped. She caught a glimpse of sky, trees, basket, the wind rushing past her, and then was caught by strong hands around her waist.

“Hold on!” Alun yelled.

Rose, half in and half out of the basket, facedown to the ground, couldn’t hold on to anything, but Alun Madder’s hands were a vise around her ribs. The basket tumbled, bounced, and then even Alun Madder’s strong hands couldn’t keep ahold of her.

Rose spilled free of the basket and hit the ground so hard, all the air was knocked out of her lungs. It took her a full minute to get air back in her chest and wits back in her head. And when she did, she realized two things.

One, she was on the ground. Scuffed, bruised, and mussed, but by most parts whole and undamaged.

And two, the Madder brothers were all laughing their fool heads off.

She pushed up to sitting, and tried to get her bearings.

Somehow, they kept the basket from breaking apart. Somehow they brought the basket down, close enough, and, more important, slow enough, that when the basket finally struck the earth, they hadn’t all perished falling out of the thing.

The balloon, however, was caught up in the tree branches, and torn open like a child’s wayward kite.

“Fine a landing as ever, brother Bryn,” Alun, who sat no more than a few feet away from Rose, said.

“Thank you, brother Alun.” Bryn chuckled and heaved up to his feet. He swayed a little, then seemed to get his footing and stomped over to the tipped basket. He twisted a valve, and threw open the burner grate. There was not a coal, not a stitch of fuel, left. “Well, she won’t burn the forest down.”

“Looks like a one-way ticket,” Cadoc said from where he was sprawled on the ground, staring up at the tattered balloon in the tree above him thoughtfully. “Pity. I do like air rides.”

“We’ll make you another balloon, Cadoc,” Alun said. “And you can try your hand at flying it.” He slapped at his shoulders and trousers, then stood. “Miss Small, are you in one piece?”

Rose took a deep breath to steady herself. She felt jostled and rattled as if she’d ridden a day in a horse-drawn carriage, as if every inch of the space they had traveled had rumbled beneath her as they passed over it. But that had been flight. Her first. And she had loved it.

She stood. “I’m fine enough, thank you, Mr. Madder.”

“Good,” he said, “that’s good. Thought I might have lost you there at the end, what with you jumping ship.”

“I assure you, I did not jump,” Rose said.

The brothers all laughed again, and went about reclaiming their weapons and supplies.

Rose wanted to know how they had built the ship, wanted to know what the balloon and sails were made of and how the tubes and hoses and steam and glim had powered it, but there was no time.

The thump of steam exhausting a stack rolled through the air from up the track and a long hiss followed. The matic that Shard LeFel rode was somewhere up the rail ahead of them and coming closer, like as not headed to LeFel’s railcars.

“Bring your weapons, lady and gents,” Alun said, jumping free of the basket. “It’s time we see to the end of Mr. Shard LeFel.”

They gathered their gear, and Alun pressed a modified Winchester rifle into Rose’s hands. “As a thank-you. For the use of the glim,” he said.

She nodded and turned to one side to sight the gun.

“You’ll want these.” Bryn pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket—well, more like modified goggles, thin brass out to the edges and wide round lenses, clear, set in permanently, with a tiny brass loupe over the right-hand corner of each lens. A spray of other colored lenses fanned off on one side.

Rose put the goggles on her forehead. “I don’t know that I understand this gun,” she said as they strode up the track. “Or these glasses.”

“Each lens is for a different distance,” Bryn said. “There’s a small tube there by your left ear.”

Rose reached up and touched the side of the goggle.

“There’s a retractable clamp on the barrel. Connect the two, and the brass loupe will show you your target.”