Devon Monk - Dead Iron

The floor of the room was dry packed dirt and there were three closed wooden doors, one to each side, and one to the back. All three doors were sealed tight as a miser’s heart by locks as thick as Cedar’s arms. If he had to guess, he’d say at least one of the doors led down into the silver vein, and likely hid the carts, narrow-gauge tracks, and other implements the brothers used to pull silver from the stones.

From the slight heat coming from the right of him, Cedar supposed the brothers’ forge or smelting room lay behind that door.

Alun didn’t seem to care that Cedar had not budged a single step since walking into the room. Once the lights caught full, he waved at a chair—stones cleverly cut in the shapes of a table, benches, and footstools farther back in the room. “Sit and be comfortable while I check and see what I may have. Pure silver.” He shook his head. “Steel will give a truer tone. Where does a man like you get such ideas?”

“Books.”

Alun plucked a lantern off the wall hook. “Must be an odd book, that.” He stomped off toward the door at the back of the room and opened it. The light of his lantern did little to reveal more than a glint, a quick cascade of shine off an array of metals, from one wall to the next, as he stepped through the doorway and closed it.

It had been an odd book. Wil had found it, dropped in the street by a girl in a town Cedar couldn’t recall. The first few months they traveled were a blur to him. What with his mind so focused on blotting out Catherine’s and the baby’s deaths, he’d near blocked out the world entirely.

Even so, he remembered that Wil chased the girl down to give the book back to her. But she’d slipped quick as the dickens through some door or another and Wil lost track of her.

Wil had brought the book back and spent the next several days reading bits of it out loud. Cedar recalled the leather-bound volume was slim and square, and Wil was always sniffing at the pages, saying they smelled of meadow flowers.

And he remembered Wil reading about tuning forks. Made of brass, made of copper. Steel was best. But silver—that alone could cause harm to the Strange and keep safe the wearer.

He didn’t know that it would work. The book had been lost with all their belongings when the Pawnee gods leveled their curse. But Cedar would rather go against the Strange with the chance of a weapon and protection than just meet them on mortal terms.

Cedar paced, his own bootheels and spurs sounding like they’d been wrapped in sheepskin, oddly muffled against the dirt. He walked to the table, but did not sit. The chairs he’d first thought were made of crude stone were actually carved from marble and shaped to encourage a man to lean back, arms taking a slope downward like a ringlet curl. The table was likewise finely crafted, three sided instead of four, carved with a sure hand. A script framed the edge of it, lines that looked like lightning bolts, arrows, triangles, and slashes, reaching off to one end where the shape of an anvil held the corner, then off to a symbol that looked to be fire, and finally to the corner with a carving of a hammer crossed with the wavy lines of water.

He’d seen these same symbols on the Madder brothers’ buckles and buttons, though not the language, if it was indeed a language that trimmed the table.

Cedar leaned closer. He’d guess the language old. Not Latin or Hebrew. This seemed tribal, but not from any of the natives of this land. Perhaps from the brothers’ homeland, Wales.

He dragged a thumb over one of the lines in the table, the mark like an arrow. As he drew his thumb away, the symbol glowed blue, like moonlight on fog, and left a faint ringing of bells in his ears.

Music. Strange music.

“Might be you should sit down, Mr. Hunt,” a voice said behind him.

Cedar hadn’t heard a man walk up, hadn’t heard a door open. Sound was lost inside this cavern like a scream behind a gag.

He turned. And saw the youngest Madder, Cadoc, pointing a gun at him.

If the day could match Mae Lindson’s mood, it would be raining ice and the sun would be cold as stone. She walked to the barn, her skirt catching in the knee-high grasses, the honey warmth of summer rising on the air.

Her gaze lingered the longest on the eastern horizon and she paused, feeling the tug of the call to return to the coven’s soil at the soles of her shoes.

Not yet. She couldn’t go home until she found Jeb’s killer. She gathered up saddle, blanket, and bridle, and leaned it all against a fence post while she shook a bit of grain to call her mule, Prudence, to come round. Once Prudence had eaten the handful of corn, she saddled and bridled her, then swung up, taking nothing more than herself, her shawl, and the shuttle tucked safely in her pocket.

Mae turned northwest toward town, riding the shortest route to Hallelujah.

It was not yet noon when she came down Main Street. The town seemed quiet, even though the clatter of horses, wagons filled with crops and material for the rail, and men and women going about their errands lent to the busyness of the place. It wasn’t until she stopped outside the Smalls’ mercantile that she realized what sound was missing—the ring and beat from the blacksmith’s shop that pounded out from dawn to dark ever since the rail’s approach.

The rail depended on the smith to keep them in nails and bolts and repairs of the matics. All the farmers, ranchers, and millers in the area kept the blacksmith and his apprentices plenty busy. She couldn’t imagine what would bring all that work to a day’s halt.

She was sure Mrs. Horace Small would be happy to pass on that information and every other scrap of gossip if she asked. Mrs. Small didn’t like Mae much, but she was more than happy to buy and sell the fine lace Mae tatted, and had never turned away a single sturdy wool blanket Mae wove.

Mae had been saving up the bit of money she made from cloth and lace for years, adding it to any extra Jeb brought in. They weren’t rich, and she had never supposed they would be. But they had money set aside.

She eased down off her mule and tied her to the hitching post below the porch. A rise of men’s voices, laughter mostly, rolled through the air along with the clank of the piano from the saloon down the street. Plenty of people hoping for better days. And it seemed some of them were more than happy to celebrate early.

Mae walked up the front steps and then along the whitewashed railing to the open shop door. She didn’t like entering the mercantile. Not because it was always dark, filled from floorboard to rafter with things folk needed to live a civilized life, some items like the dishes from China or the fine glass lamps shipped all the way from the old country. There was something about the clutter of the place, of so many things from so many lands all crowded together, that made her restless and wanting for the simplicity and quiet of her home.

Mae walked into the shop, the cooler air scented with the straw and dust of newly delivered goods. Mrs. Horace Small must be out for the day. Rose Small stood behind the counter in the dim-lit room, minding the till.

She looked over and a smile lit her up.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Lindson,” Rose said.

“Good afternoon, Miss Small.” Mae walked across the room. “I hope all is well with you.”

Rose nodded, though a cloud passed over her eyes. “I’m good as glim. And yourself? Come into town with a few blankets before the weather turns?”

Mae shook her head. She should have thought of that. Should have brought in the blankets she’d finished over the long summer nights. But ever since she had felt Jeb’s death, she’d been thinking of no other thing than revenge.