Dead Iron

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Shard LeFel gazed down at his floor at the pile of wood and bones and gears that had just hours before been a creature most strange and divine. Mr. Shunt lingered in the shadow of LeFel’s living quarters, but held just inside the railroad car’s exit, LeFel noted.

“You have failed me, Mr. Shunt. Twice,” LeFel said to the skeletal shadow of a man. “What a pity you are. I shall not offer you another chance to bring the witch to me.”

He picked up his cane and prodded the pile of flesh and wires with it. Nothing in there, not a spark of living left to give the Strange another chance to occupy that body, to walk whole and solid in this world.

It was a waste of gears, a waste of gravewood, a waste of blood, bone, and steam.

And it had all been a waste of time. The witch’s life, and her magic, were no closer to his possession.

He had gears, he had matics, and he had steam. But he did not have time left to waste.

“If you cannot secure me the witch, then I shall call upon her own kind to place her in my hands. Mortals have their uses.”

LeFel turned. The wolf, barely breathing and bleeding heavily from Mr. Shunt’s disciplinary administrations, didn’t even have enough air to whimper. It would be dead soon, but not before the moon rose to open the doorway home. LeFel would make sure it lived that long. One day. And no longer.

LeFel picked up the bits of wood, bone, and metal, heavy in his hands, and warm even through the black leather gloves that he wore.

He threw the mess at Mr. Shunt, who did not flinch as limbs and coils struck his coat and slid to the floor at his feet, leaving a slime of oil and blood behind.

“Stitch that back into breathing. Set a tick in its heart. And be sure that it exactly resembles the blacksmith’s child. Exactly.”

Mr. Shunt did not smile. His gaze was hard and dead as iron.

“And do it before the sun burns to noon.”

Still Mr. Shunt did not move.

The Strange was showing far too much of its own resolve. Any other day in his near three hundred years on this land, he would have reminded the Strange exactly of its place. And who, exactly, was its lord. But so long as Mr. Shunt did as he was told for one day longer, LeFel didn’t care what notions or hard hungers the Strange hid from him.

“Leave me, Mr. Shunt, and see that you do as I bid,” LeFel commanded.

Mr. Shunt bent, just so much as a degree, his gaze locked on LeFel. He swept out his arm, and his coat followed, the hem lifting and brushing over the pile of bones and bits, wiping the expensive rug clean of the shattered creature.

And then he was gone, through the door that let a breath of air into the room, stirring the lace and silk curtains, with the clean, fae light of stars promising a new day rising.

The door latched tight and the shadows of the room returned.

The mortal boy, the true blacksmith’s child, shifted in restless dreams on his cot. “Not much longer, my child,” LeFel cooed. “Before the next dawn, I will slough off this world as nothing more than a bad dream, and all your pain, your fear, your dreams, will be gone, forever.”

The child did not open his eyes, but LeFel knew he was listening, knew his dreams were filled tight with his words.

“There can be no steam without fire,” he said as he pulled his gloves off one finger at a time, then poured fine brandy from a crystal decanter. “Just as there can be no justice without bloodshed.”

He drank from the glass, and drew the curtain aside, waiting patiently to watch his last sunrise break over this mortal world.