Devon Monk - Dead Iron

Rose had imagined this moment for years. How the trees and mountains and town would look. She had always known it would be beautiful. Breathtaking. But even so, she had underestimated the thrill of being above all the living world, had underestimated how small and pretty and quiltlike the earth rolled out beneath the moonlight. And she could not believe how far to the horizon she could see.

The boiler rattled so hard, it shook the basket. The whole craft lurched to one side, and Rose had to brace her feet not to go sliding across the floor.

“Whoa, now,” Alun said. “Easy on us, brother Bryn.”

They were beginning to descend, quickly, the ground growing larger and the black-shadowed tops of trees coming much, much closer.

“How much longer?” Alun asked, trying to correct their angle through the trees with the sails. Branches scraped the bottom of the basket, and a flurry of crows took off squawking.

“Almost out of steam,” Bryn called over the boiler’s thunderous noise.

Evergreen branches whipped against the sides of the basket and snagged up the lines tethering the balloon.

“Too many blasted trees!” Alun yanked on a sail line, dislodging a limb, and Bryn worked a lever to angle the fans and push the balloon out of the tree’s reach. But they were still falling too fast, branches slapping, cracking, catching at the aircraft, grazing over the delicate balloon fabric.

“Give us a sign, brother Cadoc,” Alun said.

The unmistakable rasp of material tearing sent a cold wave of fear down Rose’s spine. The balloon was broken. They weren’t going to land. They were going to crash.

“There!” Cadoc pointed to a clearing not far from the rail. They were just a ways, maybe half a mile, down from the building end of the track.

“Down,” Alun yelled. “Put ’er down, quick, Bryn!”

The boiler stopped rattling, completely burned dry of water. Wind rushed by, cold and wet from the steam gouting out of the balloon above them.

Alun and Cadoc heaved on the lines, opening pockets in the fabric, trying to push the balloon toward the clearing.

They sped down. Fast and faster.

Rose clutched the rail of the basket and watched, transfixed, as the skeletal giants of moonlit trees slapped at them with silvery fingers.

The fans whirred like hornet hives as Bryn put all the steam, and likely all the glim that was left, into them. “Brace for it!” he yelled.

Rose sucked in a deep breath and said a prayer.

The basket rammed into something solid, then just as quick was whipped the other way. Rose lost hold of the edge of the basket and fell as the entire craft tipped. She caught a glimpse of sky, trees, basket, the wind rushing past her, and then was caught by strong hands around her waist.

“Hold on!” Alun yelled.

Rose, half in and half out of the basket, facedown to the ground, couldn’t hold on to anything, but Alun Madder’s hands were a vise around her ribs. The basket tumbled, bounced, and then even Alun Madder’s strong hands couldn’t keep ahold of her.

Rose spilled free of the basket and hit the ground so hard, all the air was knocked out of her lungs. It took her a full minute to get air back in her chest and wits back in her head. And when she did, she realized two things.

One, she was on the ground. Scuffed, bruised, and mussed, but by most parts whole and undamaged.

And two, the Madder brothers were all laughing their fool heads off.

She pushed up to sitting, and tried to get her bearings.

Somehow, they kept the basket from breaking apart. Somehow they brought the basket down, close enough, and, more important, slow enough, that when the basket finally struck the earth, they hadn’t all perished falling out of the thing.

The balloon, however, was caught up in the tree branches, and torn open like a child’s wayward kite.

“Fine a landing as ever, brother Bryn,” Alun, who sat no more than a few feet away from Rose, said.

“Thank you, brother Alun.” Bryn chuckled and heaved up to his feet. He swayed a little, then seemed to get his footing and stomped over to the tipped basket. He twisted a valve, and threw open the burner grate. There was not a coal, not a stitch of fuel, left. “Well, she won’t burn the forest down.”

“Looks like a one-way ticket,” Cadoc said from where he was sprawled on the ground, staring up at the tattered balloon in the tree above him thoughtfully. “Pity. I do like air rides.”

“We’ll make you another balloon, Cadoc,” Alun said. “And you can try your hand at flying it.” He slapped at his shoulders and trousers, then stood. “Miss Small, are you in one piece?”

Rose took a deep breath to steady herself. She felt jostled and rattled as if she’d ridden a day in a horse-drawn carriage, as if every inch of the space they had traveled had rumbled beneath her as they passed over it. But that had been flight. Her first. And she had loved it.

She stood. “I’m fine enough, thank you, Mr. Madder.”

“Good,” he said, “that’s good. Thought I might have lost you there at the end, what with you jumping ship.”

“I assure you, I did not jump,” Rose said.

The brothers all laughed again, and went about reclaiming their weapons and supplies.

Rose wanted to know how they had built the ship, wanted to know what the balloon and sails were made of and how the tubes and hoses and steam and glim had powered it, but there was no time.

The thump of steam exhausting a stack rolled through the air from up the track and a long hiss followed. The matic that Shard LeFel rode was somewhere up the rail ahead of them and coming closer, like as not headed to LeFel’s railcars.

“Bring your weapons, lady and gents,” Alun said, jumping free of the basket. “It’s time we see to the end of Mr. Shard LeFel.”

They gathered their gear, and Alun pressed a modified Winchester rifle into Rose’s hands. “As a thank-you. For the use of the glim,” he said.

She nodded and turned to one side to sight the gun.

“You’ll want these.” Bryn pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket—well, more like modified goggles, thin brass out to the edges and wide round lenses, clear, set in permanently, with a tiny brass loupe over the right-hand corner of each lens. A spray of other colored lenses fanned off on one side.

Rose put the goggles on her forehead. “I don’t know that I understand this gun,” she said as they strode up the track. “Or these glasses.”

“Each lens is for a different distance,” Bryn said. “There’s a small tube there by your left ear.”

Rose reached up and touched the side of the goggle.

“There’s a retractable clamp on the barrel. Connect the two, and the brass loupe will show you your target.”

Rose slid the goggles over her eyes and connected the tubes. Nothing seemed to happen.

“It’s powered by pumping in a round,” Bryn said.

Rose stopped, and Bryn stopped with her, though Alun and Cadoc kept walking, their boots crunching in the gravel, their heads turned up to watch the moon more than their feet.

Bryn handed her a box of bullets from his pocket, and she loaded a single shell. The lever load snapped the bullet into place and the brass loupe on the goggles shifted to the lowest corner.

She raised the rifle to her shoulder and looked out along it. The brass loupe shifted smoothly like oil on water to show her exactly where her bullet would strike: rock, tree, leaf.

“Isn’t that glimsweet?” Rose said. She lowered the gun and pulled the goggles back up to her forehead.

“Thank you.”

“Wouldn’t want you injured in this fight, Miss Small. You’re a right special woman to survive traveling twixt-wise as we just did.”

“Survive?” Rose asked, surprised. “Think that would have killed us?”