Tin Swift (11 page)

“Mr. Hunt,” she said as if just noticing him. She glanced quickly at the room, her eyes pausing on Rose. Her hand flew up to the tatting shuttle she wore on a string, almost like a talisman, around her neck. That touch seemed to calm her, and a bit of color came back to her pale cheeks.

“I’ll be fine. I am fine,” she said, correcting herself. “It wouldn’t matter if I was out of my mind or not. I know the herbs. I can tend to Rose.”

“The undead are not far in the night,” Cedar said. “Keep your gun ready.”

“You’ll be in the building?”

“Yes.”

She placed her hand on his arm and Cedar caught his breath at her touch.

“Don’t look so concerned, Mr. Hunt. I’m well. Well enough. Find the Holder, if it’s here. And hurry.”

The three windows of the jail, two set high on either side of the door, the other set high on the other side of the stove, were shuttered. Suddenly, those shutters buckled inward, slammed by something heavy from the outside.

Hands.

Cadoc Madder’s blunderbuss fired three roaring shots, but that didn’t stop the pounding on the shutters.

The undead were out there, close, and they were impatient to be inside.

“Put your spurs to it, Mr. Hunt,” Alun said. “I’ll hold here.”

One of the window shutters near the door burst open, hands and arms reaching into the room. Alun strode over to Mae.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Lindson.” He opened the firebox and pulled out a piece of kindling. Then he pulled a bottle from inside his coat pocket and lit the cloth hanging out of it. He stormed across the room toward the door, but looked over his shoulder at Cedar.

“What are you waiting for? I don’t believe the Holder’s in this room, now, is it?”

“No,” Cedar said.

“Well, then.” Alun made the shoo-shoo motion with both hands, the flaming wick and kindling stick crackling with small sooty sparks. “On with it.”

Cedar jogged across the room toward the hall of cells.

“Fire, brother Cadoc!” Alun yelled.

Cedar was in the mouth of the hallway, and glanced back.

The muddy miner cocked his arm and let the lit bottle fly. It hit hands, arms, and then a huge flare of an explosion seared gold against the night.

Alun laughed and ran to the window. He pushed the scorched shutters together, then put his shoulder to them and pulled another bottle out of his pocket.

Crazy. Plain crazy.

And so was he for traveling with the brothers. Next time, if there was a next time, Cedar would think twice about the promises he made them.

A lantern at the end of the hall washed Bryn Madder in peach light, the stone wall behind him darkened with soot.

“Haven’t seen it in crook nor cranny,” Bryn said, pushing his goggles up onto his forehead. “You still say it’s in here someways?”

“Or was here,” Cedar said. “If it’s gone, it’s left a strong scent behind.”

Three cells. Seemed a bit overkill for a town this size. But since Vicinity wasn’t that far off the trail leading folk to settle, mine, or otherwise stake their claim out west, he supposed there were times when all three cells might be in use.

The cell doors were open. Another explosion roared out just beyond the walls, and Cedar hurried into the first cell, dragging the fingers of his left hand along the metal bars, listening for the song of the Holder.

“You’re a trusting sort of man.” Bryn chuckled as he sauntered toward the open door.

“Nope,” Cedar said. “Just well prepared.” He eased his gun out of his holster and nodded at Bryn.

Bryn grinned, and stopped in his tracks. In the low light of the lantern, his clouded right eye shone gold. “Indeed you are, Mr. Hunt. But you must know that locking you away here would hardly do us any good.”

“I don’t know the minds of any of you Madders, for how often you change them,” Cedar said. “Nor am I certain how you define what is good for any of us.”

He paced out of that cell, then into the second one, running his fingers again along the bars. Listening for the song of the Strange, listening for the song of the Holder.

Nothing in this cell. Cedar walked into the last cell.

“We define good in the common way, I suppose,” Bryn said. “There’s a great good that needs doing in these times. And we’re men to see that it gets done.”

“Reclaiming the Holder?” Cedar asked.

“That. And more.”

“Not sure I’m comfortable putting the Holder in your hands.” Cedar ran his fingertips along the bar. “No offense, Mr. Madder.”

“None taken,” Bryn said much too cheerfully. “It’s one of the reasons we are so enamored with you, Mr. Hunt. You are a man of rare morals who sees these things with different eyes.”

“Not sure I follow your logic.”

“You have made a promise to return a device made of seven pieces—each piece a powerful weapon in its own right, and the pieces together even more devastating. Yet you hesitate in handing it over, not because you want to use the weapon but because you worry that others will.”

Bryn sucked on his teeth, while the clatter of another explosion roared out from beyond the walls. “That says something about you, Mr. Hunt. Honorable things.”

“Don’t know that it’s honorable,” Cedar said. “Just plain sense.”

“The kind of sense that makes for a well-thought man.”

Another gunshot roared out, and Alun’s voice could be heard over the din. “Are you near done, Mr. Hunt? Brother Bryn? Or should I find myself some bigger bombs?”

“Near on,” Bryn shouted out. “It’s a cold trail, isn’t it?”

Cedar nodded and walked out of the cell. He took a few extra steps to the stone wall at the end of the hall, a wall burned by fire. “Wonder why there’s a burn mark here? Not a convenient place to start a flame.”

He pressed his fingers against the dark smudge of soot on the wall.

A shock ran through him like lightning striking near his boots. The Holder had been here, and burned here. And over the shock of that knowledge rolled the distant song of Mr. Shunt.

Cedar glanced up. There was a fist-sized hole in the roof. He didn’t know how it was possible to propel a chunk of metal through the sky to
land a state away, but he was sure a piece of the Holder had burned its way through the roof and landed where he was standing.

“It landed here,” he said. “And someone must have picked it up.”

“Time’s up, gentlemen,” Alun called out. “Load your guns.”

“It’s gone?” Bryn said.

There was a rising noise outside, something that sounded like a matic thumping with full throttle steam just on the edge of Cedar’s hearing. He’d heard that kind of noise before, but couldn’t place it. A train? A steam wagon?

“It’s gone.”

“And you’re sure?” Bryn stared at the hole in the roof.

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” Bryn pulled his rifle. “Let’s go find out where it went.”

Bryn jogged down the hall. Cedar followed.

Alun and Cadoc Madder were stationed in front of the broken windows on either side of the door, which was about to be pounded down.

Cadoc Madder shot grapeshot blasts into the faces of the unalives who were trying to clamber through the window to the left of the door.

“So nice of you gents to join us,” Alun yelled as he uncorked a bottle with his teeth and splashed it over the faces and hands of people trying to shove their way in through the window to the right of the door. The shutter was burned and busted into splinters on the floor at Alun’s feet, along with four or five unfortunate, and very dead, bodies.

“You find our Holder, Mr. Hunt?” he asked as he waved the burning kindling at the undead at the window, setting hair and skin on fire and sending them lurching back a step or two.

“Saw where it burned through the roof. It was here, landed here, likely a month ago.” Cedar strode over to Mae, who had Rose semi-awake and sitting and was trying to wrap a long strip of cloth around her chest to hold down a thick, wet-herb-smelling compress.

“See any indication of where it got off to?”

That tickling at the edge of Cedar’s hearing was still rising, growing louder, coming closer. A steam engine pushing hard. But not a train.

“No.” Cedar shot the man trying to wedge himself through the window near the stove.

“No idea at all?” Alun asked, taking aim with his shotgun and unbraining three people for his effort.

“Can it walk on its own?”

“It cannot,” Alun said.

“So someone took it,” Cedar said. “We get the women the hell away from Vicinity, then I’ll hunt it down.”

Mae finished buttoning Rose’s dress and pulled her coat closed. “The women can stand on their own feet.” She helped Rose up, and pulled her gun.

Rose looked ghastly pale, but she licked her lips and nodded. Mae’s attention had done her some good, but she certainly wasn’t up to fighting the undead mob outside.

“I don’t suppose you have a spell that might help us out, Mrs. Lindson?” Alun asked.

“No, Mr. Madder. Magic doesn’t work to harm people. Not even the undead.”

He laughed and madness rode the rise of it. “Oh, magic can do terrible harm, Widow Lindson. To dead and the living alike. But only in certain hands.”

“Bryn,” Cedar said, “did you see a back door?”

“Nothing by the cells.”

“Then we fight, make a path to the wagon,” Cedar said. “Mae, take Rose there near the desk. When I yell for you to run to the wagon with her, you do that.”

“Wagon’s unhitched,” Cadoc Madder said as he reloaded his gun, unconcerned about the undead hands scraping the air just inches in front of his face.

Cedar swore. He’d forgotten. If the women made it to the wagon, they couldn’t drive it safely out of here. And Rose couldn’t sit a saddle to ride out on her horse, even if the horses were unharmed.

“The Holder?” Alun asked again. “Are you sure you have no idea which general direction it got off to?”

Cedar knew, had known from the moment he touched the burned patch where the Holder had smoldered.

“East. It’s not near. Not within a day or two. But east. Now,” he said, “can we put our attention to getting through that mob?”

“With pleasure.” Alun unhooked the hammer from his belt and swung it with bone-breaking force.

The growl and steam of a matic, something big and coming closer, was so loud, Cedar almost couldn’t hear the screams and moans of the unalives.

He’d heard that sound before. Not lately. Not in the last few years. But he’d heard it. He just couldn’t place what sort of matic it came from.

The window over the stove broke and a woman crawled through. She stumbled across the room toward Rose and Mae.

Mae shot her clean in the head and the woman fell to the ground, twitching.

Cedar stepped up and fired another bullet into her brain.

The Strange that had been inhabiting her pulled up out of the body, a ghost with teeth where its eyes should have been. Insubstantial as fog, it clawed at Rose, but had no more effect on her than a cool breeze.

That was why the Strange wanted bodies. Crossing into this world, they were spirits with no form. They couldn’t hurt, couldn’t rightly touch the world around them, except for small nuisances—a bite or a pinch. But certainly nothing near to the damage a physical form could provide them.

“Let’s blast our way out of here, brothers,” Alun yelled. “Put these people to their rightful rest. Mr. Hunt, I suggest you get the women out
and away from here. Far and fast as you can. We have ways to find you. You still have that chain we gave you?”

Cedar reached up and touched the necklace hanging around his neck. The Madders had told him it would keep the thoughts of a man in his head when the moon turned him to wolf. And it had done just that.

“I have it,” Cedar said. “I won’t leave you to these monsters.”

“Our paths divide here, Mr. Hunt. I am trusting you to do anything you must to see Rose gets medical attention, understand? We’ll find you no matter how far you roam. Believe in that.”

“But—,” Cedar started.

It was too late. Alun kicked the hinges off the door, which was already buckling with the press of bodies. Six people tumbled into the room and fell down flat.

Bryn and Cadoc shot them till they weren’t moving anymore.

Alun rushed out the door with a roar, swinging that big hammer of his, sending body parts flying like a man mowing down wheat.

The thrum of a steamer working hard poured in through the door.

“Nice working with you, Mr. Hunt,” Bryn yelled as he pushed his goggles over his eyes and pulled an ax out from under his coat. He followed his brother out into the night. “We’ll see you again real soon.”

“The Holder wants what Rose has,” Cadoc Madder said. “Remember that. The key.” He unhooked a wrench the size of a small child from off his back and strolled out after Bryn.

Cedar rushed to the door. The brothers smashed the undead with hammer, ax, and wrench, holding them off the building just enough for Cedar and the women to escape.

The wagon was turned on its side. No way out there. The horses were gone.

A racket of fans grew louder and a flash of light swept across the Madder brothers as they laughed and bashed their way through flesh and bone.

The light wasn’t coming from a low angle. It was coming from somewhere up high. The roof? Cedar leaned out a bit and looked up.

The entire night sky seemed to be filled with the bullet shape of an airship. Her fans were working to keep her steady, her nose up into the wind that gusted down from the hills surrounding the town. Lanterns held to what appeared to be mirrors were the source of the light.

And then a rope ladder dropped down, just a few paces from the door.

“Ho there, strangers!” a man’s voice called out. “This is the airship
Swift
. If you want a way out of that tussle, grab hold.”

Cedar glanced at the Madders.

“Go on!” Alun yelled. “Get Rose medical attention. We’ll find you!”

Running was not an option, not with Rose so wounded. No horses, no wagon. They might be jumping out of the griddle into the fire pit, but it was the only way out.

Cedar ducked back into the building. Mae was already helping Rose walk to the door.

“I’ll take her,” Cedar said, putting his arm around Rose. She leaned against him, weak and heavy, but still standing on her own. “Climb the ladder, Mae. We’ll be out of this soon.”