Heart of Steel (7 page)

“Your ship's blacksmith is skilled.” So skilled that Yasmeen would have lured her away from
Vesuvius
if the idiot girl hadn't been soft on Mad Machen.

“She's brilliant,” Barker said. He replaced the glove and glanced up at
Lady Corsair
. “None of your aviators have come down. Is this just a stopover?”

“Yes.” Even if it hadn't been, she wouldn't leave the airship unmanned while the sketch was aboard. “I'm only here long enough to have a word with someone. We'll fly out in the morning.”

“A word with someone?” Barker had known her long enough to guess exactly what that meant. “Would you like me to come along?”

She didn't need the help, but she wouldn't mind the company. “If you like.”

“I would. I'll fetch a cab. Where to?”

His brows lifted when she told him their destination, but he didn't say anything until they'd climbed into the small steamcoach.

He had to raise his voice over the noise of the engine. “Why Kessler?”

“He talked when he wasn't supposed to.”

“Is anyone dead?”

“Miracle Mattson. Kessler gave information to him.”

Barker's frown said that he was having the same thought Yasmeen had: Men like Kessler and Mattson didn't usually do business together. Though plenty of art was smuggled into the New World, it wasn't something Mattson ever handled. If Kessler needed weapons, yes. Not a sketch.

The coach slowed over the bridge across the first canal, crowded with laborers passing from the third rings to the docks. Three ladies wearing narrow lace ruffs around their necks and dresses of embroidered linen over corsets and crinolines stood at the other end, as if waiting for the bridge to clear of rabble before they crossed it. Yasmeen watched them, amused. Five years ago, the residents of the second circle had tried building bridges that were only for their use. That arrangement hadn't lasted beyond the first week.

By the time the bridge was out of Yasmeen's sight, the ladies still hadn't crossed it. She looked forward again. Kessler's home lay around the next corner.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” Barker asked.

“Just wait in the cab. I doubt I'll be long.”

“What do you plan to do?”

The same that she'd done to Mattson. “Make certain he won't talk again.”

The cab rounded the corner and slowed. Yasmeen frowned, rising from the bench for a better look. Wagons and carts blocked the street ahead, each one loaded with furniture and clothes. Men and women worked in pairs and small teams, hauling items from Kessler's house.

Barker whistled between his teeth. “I don't think he's talking now.”

Barker was right, damn it. The households in Port Fallow operated in the same way as a pirate ship. When the head of the business household died, the household's members voted in a new leader who took over the family. But Kessler's business was in knowing people, and keeping those names to himself. No one could carry on in his profession, and his blood family had no claim—and so everyone who worked for him, from his clerk to his scullery maid, would split his possessions and sell them for what they could.

Seething, Yasmeen leaned out of the coach and snagged the first person who passed by. “What happened to Kessler?”

The woman, staggering under the weight of a ceramic vase, kept it short. “Maid found him in bed. Throat slit. No one knows who.”

He'd probably flapped his lips about someone else's business. Yasmeen let the woman go.

“So we turn around, then?” the driver called back.

If he could. Carts, wagons, and people were in motion all around them, crowding the narrow street. Several more had already parked at their rear. A steamcart in front of them honked, and earned a shouted curse in response. Beside them, a wagon piled high with mattresses lurched ahead, giving them more visibility but nowhere to move.

The cart that took its place didn't block Yasmeen's view. Her gaze swept the walkway across the street—and froze on one figure.
Oh, hell.
Her muscles tensed, ready to fight . . . or flee.

Dressed in a simple black robe, the woman stood facing Kessler's house. Unlike everyone else, she wasn't in hurried motion. She watched the activity with her hands demurely folded at her stomach and her head slightly bowed. Gray threaded her long brown hair. She'd plaited two sections in the front, drawing them back . . . hiding the tips of her ears.

As if sensing Yasmeen's gaze, she looked away from Kessler's home. Her stillness didn't change; only her eyes moved.

Yasmeen had been taught to stand like that—to hold herself silent and watchful, her weight perfectly balanced, her hands clasped. She'd been taught duty and honor. She'd been taught to fight . . . but not like this woman did. Yasmeen knew that under the woman's robes was a body more metal than flesh. Designed to protect. Designed to kill.

It was difficult not to appreciate the deadly beauty of it—and hard not to pity her. Yasmeen couldn't see the chains of honor, loyalty, and duty that bound the woman, but she knew they were there.

And she knew with a single look that the woman pitied her in return. That she saw Yasmeen as a woman adrift and without purpose—a victim of those who'd failed to properly train and care for her.

Yasmeen lowered her gaze first; not out of cowardice, but a message that she wouldn't interfere with the woman's business here—and she certainly wasn't stupid enough to challenge her.

Next to Yasmeen, Barker eyed the woman with a different sort of appreciation. Of course he did. She'd been designed to provoke that response.

“Don't try,” Yasmeen warned him.

“She's a little older, but I like the mature—”

“She's
gan tsetseg
, one of the elite guard who serves the Horde royalty and the favored governors.”

Barker didn't hide his surprise—or his doubt. He studied the woman again, as if trying to see beneath the demure posture and discover what had earned the elite guard their terrifying reputation.

He wouldn't see it. The elite guard earned that reputation when they dropped that modest posture, not when they wore it.

He shook his head. “She's not Horde.”

“She's not a Mongol,” Yasmeen corrected. The Horde weren't a single race. In five hundred years, their seed and the empire had spread too far for every member of the Horde to be Mongols. Only royalty and the officials from the heart of the empire were still relatively unmixed, but since they provided the face of the Horde to New Worlders and the occupied territories, the assumption that everyone in the empire were Mongols had been carried along with it. “Just as not every man and woman of African descent born on the southern American continent is a Liberé spy . . . or a cart-puller.”

His face tightened. “Cart-puller?”

“I am saying that you are
not
. You cannot even hear it without being ready to go to war again?”

“Because you haven't been called one,” he said, before adding, “I wasn't a spy.”

Yasmeen snorted her response.

He grinned and glanced over at the woman again. “Why is she here? No one in Port Fallow is Horde royalty.”

“Then she's here to kill someone, or to take them back to her khanate.” Obviously not Yasmeen, or she'd already be dead. Instead, she was forgotten. The woman was watching the house again . . . waiting. “Whatever her purpose, don't get in her way.”

“All right.” Barker leaned forward and tapped on the cab driver's shoulder before dropping a few deniers into his palm. “Shall we walk? By the time we return to the docks, I'll be ready for that drink.”

Yasmeen would be ready for three.

 

 

Yasmeen drank three, but not quickly. Barker took his leave
after finishing the one she owed him, but Yasmeen stayed on, nursing hers until they were warm. Some nights in a tavern were meant for drinking, and others were meant for listening. Fortunately, nothing she heard suggested that word of the sketch had gone beyond Mattson and Kessler. She turned down one job—a run to the Ivory Market along the Gold Coast of Africa. Lucrative, but he hadn't been willing to wait until she returned from England, and she wasn't inviting anyone onto her airship before the sketch was in the Iron Duke's fortress.

She hadn't always been able to turn down jobs. Now she had enough money that she could be choosy. Even without the fortune that would come after selling the sketch, she could retire in luxury at any time—as could her entire crew.

She never would.

Midnight had come and gone when Yasmeen decided she'd heard enough. She emerged from the dim tavern into the dark and paused to light a cigarillo, studying the boardwalk along the docks. It was just as busy at night as during the day, but the crowd was comprised of more drunks. Some slumped against the buildings or slept beside crates. Groups of sailors laughed and pounded their chests at the aviators—some of them women, Yasmeen noted, and not one of them alone. The shopgirls and lamplighters walked in pairs, and most of the whores did, too.

Yasmeen sighed. Undoubtedly, she'd soon be teaching some drunken buck a lesson about making assumptions when women walked alone.

She started toward the south dock, picking out
Lady Corsair
's sleek silhouette over the harbor. Familiar pride filled her chest. God, her lady was such a beauty—one of the finest skyrunners ever made, and she'd been Yasmeen's for almost thirteen years now. She knew captains who didn't last a month—some who weren't generous toward their crew or not strict enough to control them. Some were too careful to make any money or too careless to live through a job.

She'd made money, and she'd lived through hundreds of jobs during the French war with the Liberé: scouting, privateering, moving weapons or personnel through enemy territory, destroying a specified target. Both the French and the Liberé officers sneered when she'd claimed that her only loyalties were to her crew and the gold, but they used her when they didn't have anyone good enough or fast enough to do what she could.

Then the war had ended—fizzled out, with the Liberé possessing the most territory and thereby considered the victor. All of the same animosities still simmered, but there wasn't enough gold left in the treasuries to pay for more fighting. So Yasmeen had left the New World, returned back across the Atlantic, and carved out her niche by taking almost any job for the right money.

Lately, that meant ferrying passengers over Horde territory in Europe and Africa—a route that most airships-for-hire would never take. Sometimes she acted as a courier, or she partnered with
Vesuvius
when Mad Machen carried cargo that needed airship support, fighting off anyone who tried to steal it from them.

A routine life, but still an exciting one—and the only kind of settling down that she would ever do.

Yasmeen flicked away her cigarillo, smiling at her own fancy.
Routines, excitement, and a particular version of settling down.
She'd have to record that thought and send it to Zenobia—along with an account of the little excitement that was about to take place.

Someone was following her.

A man had been trailing her since she'd left the tavern. Not some drunken idiot stumbling into a woman walking alone, but someone who'd deliberately picked her out—and if he'd seen her in the tavern, he must know who she was.

But he must not be interested in killing her. Anyone could have shot her from this distance. Instead, he tried to move in closer, using the shadows for cover. He needed lessons in stalking. Her pursuer paused when she did, and though he tried for stealth by tiptoeing, his attempts only made him more obvious. Of course, he couldn't know that Yasmeen was at her best during the night—and that she had more in common with the cats slinking through the alleys than the lumbering ape that had obviously birthed him.

She'd only taken a few more steps when he finally found his balls and called her name.

“Captain Corsair!”

The voice was young and quivering with bravado. He'd either taken a bet at the tavern or was going to ask for a position on her ship. Amused, Yasmeen faced him. A dark-haired boy wearing an aviator's goggles and short jacket and stood quivering in the middle of the—

Pain stabbed the back of her leg. Even as she whipped around, her thigh went numb. An opium dart.
Oh, fuck.
She ripped it out, too late. Pumped with this amount, her mind was already spinning. Hallucinating. A drunkard rose from a pile of rags, wearing the gaunt face of a dead man.

No, not a drunkard. A handsome liar.

Yasmeen fumbled for her guns. Her fingers were enormous. He moved fast—or she was slow. Within a blink, he caught her hands, restrained her with barely any effort.

She'd kill him for that.

“Again?” he asked, so smooth and amused. “You'll have to try harder.”

The bastard. She hadn't tried at all. And though she tried now, she sagged against him, instead—and for a brief moment, wondered if she'd fallen against a zombie. Each of his ribs felt distinct beneath her hands.

But zombies didn't swing women up into their arms. And they didn't talk.

“My sister sends her regards,” he said against her cheek. “And I want my sketch.”

“I'd have let you have it.” She couldn't keep her eyes open. Her words slurred. “You just had to ask.”

“Liar,” he said softly. “You'd never have given it back.”

Ah, well. He was right about that. But he might have been able to talk her down to forty percent. She began to make the offer, but couldn't form the words.