Dead Iron

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—steam 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.”