Devon Monk - Dead Iron

Bryn Madder knelt beside the basket, using a ratchet to tighten a bolt on a fan or small windmill blade attached to the side of the basket. Cadoc Madder finished straightening the material over the ground and walked toward the basket, one finger up as if testing the air, a tuning fork pressed to his ear.

“What is that?” she asked.

Alun Madder held a lit wick to the bowl of his pipe, puffed several times, then exhaled smoke. “Just a little gadget we made.”

“What does it do?”

“It takes us faster than feet can travel.”

“How?”

“Steam and wind.” He frowned over at the basket, where Bryn was feeding coal into a firebox set up high in the middle of it. He had sparked and turned the tinder uncommonly quickly into flame and poured water from his canteen into a small keg set atop the tinderbox. “Mostly,” Alun added.

He grinned, clamping his teeth on his pipe. “Let’s have the locket, girl.”

“No.”

Alun’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “No?”

“You heard me.”

“Means something to you, does it?”

“More than to you.”

He gave her a considering gaze. “Well, then, let’s have you use it. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”

Cadoc Madder stopped pacing and was now pointing the tuning fork northwest like a compass needle. “The rail,” he breathed. “They’re headed to the rail.”

“Nice of them to make it easy,” Alun said. “Just a hop and a skip.” He shrugged on his backpack, then pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of a crate and attached it by tubes and lines to his backpack before climbing into the basket.

Bryn Madder finished tinkering with the two windmillblade contraptions on either side of the basket. He pulled a squatbodied blunderbuss and a sledgehammer out of his pack before getting into the basket next to Alun. “Coming with us, Miss Small?” he asked.

“Where?” she asked. “How?”

“The rail, apparently,” Alun Madder said around the stem of his pipe. “And as for the how, you’re looking at it.”

Rose glanced over her shoulder toward the way the matic had left. She couldn’t catch it on foot. And even though the Madders were clearly not in their right minds, she wasn’t sure what choice she had other than to run to town and get a horse. And she had no time for that either.

She gathered up her skirt and tucked the hem of it through her belt beneath the heavy coat she wore.

Alun Madder raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything as to her impropriety, and she wouldn’t have cared if he did. Hitching up her skirt gave her a better stride, and the long coat hung nearly halfway to her boot tops, but was split front and back so she could run if needed. Even so, there was a good palm width of her stocking in clear view that would have scandalized her mother if she’d seen it. Rose climbed over the edge of the basket, where the heat from the boiler made it almost unbearably hot.

“Stand behind me, girl,” Alun Madder said.

Rose stood beside him instead.

Alun laughed. “Well, then. Are you coming, brother Cadoc?”

Cadoc Madder took in a breath as if to say something, but instead drew a two-bladed ax out from his pack. He nodded thoughtfully, and lifted up the edge of the cloth on the ground, standing to one side to reveal a hole.

“What?” Rose started, but then she didn’t need to finish.

Bryn pulled a hose that was coiled at the side of the burner and tossed it to Cadoc, who turned, caught the hose, and clamped it down tight to the hole in the fabric.

Bryn Madder worked the valves, and a blast of hot steam roared into the fabric.

Cadoc Madder waited until the fabric started taking on a round shape before he stepped into the basket with them. From the shape of it, Rose suspected there was a second fabric inside the first, filling with steam. Cadoc hauled on the ropes and pulleys and helped lift the fabric—the balloon—into the sky above the basket, then fastened a tube that was already wet with condensation down onto a drip hole in the water reserve.

Wonder caught at Rose’s heart. “A balloon? We’re going to fly?”

“No better way to travel,” Alun said. “Be to it, Bryn. Quick, now. We wouldn’t want to miss the party.”

Bryn adjusted levers and turned valves on the burner, which clicked and rattled and shook in a most distressing manner. “If you’d step to me a moment, Miss Small,” he said. “With your locket?”

Rose did so, and pulled the locket out from beneath her blouse, but did not take it off from over her head. She held it out on the chain for him. “I don’t see as how this can help.”

Bryn gently caught the gilded robin’s egg with his clean fingertips. He pulled a chain out of his pocket, on the end of which was a collection of thin watchmaker’s tools. He chose one tool and inserted it into a tiny hole at the base of the locket. The locket spun open like a flower blooming.

Delicate gears and spindles within it twisted and rolled, revealing a small glass vial couched in the center of the locket. The vial glowed a soft green light, but Rose could not tell if it was filled with liquid or gas or something else altogether.

“What is it?” She could not look away from the locket, and did not want to.

“Glim,” Alun Madder said quietly. “And all we’ll need is a drop or two, to set this ship in the air.”

“Glim?” She could hardly believe it. She’d been wearing a fortune around her neck, and never once suspected it. “How can it help?”

“Not much glim can’t help,” Alun said.

Bryn nodded once, asking permission to pull the vial out from the tiny latches that held it in place.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“Want an engine to run faster, add glim,” Alun continued. “Want a fire to burn hotter, a coal to last longer, a wound to heal better, add glim.”

“Does it really come from the sky?” Rose asked, watching Bryn break the wax seal on the vial with his thumbnail.

“Harvested by specially equipped airships,” Alun said. “Not that the scientific minds can agree upon what, exactly, glim is made of, nor why exactly it works the way it does.”

“Wait,” Rose said, finally looking away from the glow in Bryn Madder’s hand. “You don’t know how it works?”

“Sometimes a man doesn’t need to know how a thing works so long as he knows that it does work.”

Bryn opened a small gearbox on the side of the burner, and tapped out exactly one drop of glim. The drop floated down into the gears.

The basket lurched and a whirring racket started up. Rose grabbed hold of the railing, her breath frozen in her chest as the balloon above them snapped taut and round.

And then the world seemed to take a step away.

The sturdy basket made it feel like she was standing on solid ground, but when she looked over the edge, the ground was growing farther and farther away. They were lifting up, soft as a sigh, now at about midheight of the trees, and still rising.

They were flying!

“Put this back in the locket.” Alun took the vial from Bryn and handed it to her. She looked it over as carefully as she could in the moonlight. He, or maybe Bryn, had remelted the wax on the mouth of the vial, effectively sealing it. Rose placed the vial back in the locket. It snicked into place and then the locket spun closed all on its own, though she figured there was a spring set to trigger it to lock again. She tucked the locket back inside her dress.

When she looked up again, the bottom of the basket was above even the tallest trees. She grinned and put one hand over her mouth to hold back on a whoop of joy. She was flying!

Bryn Madder took hold of the levers, and with the assistance of the fans on each side of the craft, and some clever saillike rudders that Cadoc and Alun manipulated on the sides of the balloon, they were able to steer the craft off over the trees and the hills and the creeks, to the rail.