Devon Monk - Dead Iron

Rose swallowed hard and tasted the oil and burn of spent black powder. She didn’t reckon there was an easy way out of this alive.

She fitted the goggles back over her eyes and fired cover shots at the hulking Goliath that hammered an arm down so near the Madders, one of the brothers fell flat from the impact. The big beast reared back, screeching and clacking. It was recharging, ratcheting up its firing device to slam its arms down again.

Rose shot at the thing, aiming for what she prayed were vulnerabilities: tubes, connecting valves, and gauges.

But the matic did not slow. It rolled this way on strange tracked feet that chewed over the terrain as if it were riding on rails.

The Madders used her fire as a chance to run back behind the screen of trees with her.

“Do you have a plan, Mr. Madder?” she yelled to Alun as he skidded to a stop behind the tree to her right, both his brothers half a tick behind him, grinning and breathing hard

Bullets zipped through the night air. Needles and dirt sprayed down around them.

Rose leaned out again and fired off the last of her shots at the railmen, who were holding ground behind the metal monsters.

“Plan to kill the matics and crack LeFel out of his fortress,” Alun said. “Reload, Miss Small. The boys are going to need cover.”

Rose was already reloading. She glanced up at the Madders. Bryn and Cadoc were gone.

Just then the rapid fire of what sounded like a hundred guns tore flashes of light through the night.

“That’s the battlewagon,” Alun yelled over the peppering recoil of bullets. “Figure it has a twenty-five- or thirty-shot cartridge.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe, then sparked a wick with a tiny striker, and puffed until the tobacco caught.

Rose’s heart beat harder than a hammer. She’d heard tales of the rapid-fire guns used in the war, but she had never seen such a device, and didn’t want to become intimately acquainted with one now.

“That one’s done,” Alun yelled into the sudden pause of gunshot.

“Fire, Miss Small.” He clamped his teeth down on the pipe stem and leaned out from behind the cover of the tree. He sent off a volley of bullets. The battlewagon had extinguished its cartridge and must be reloading. But how much time would that take?

Rose Small shouldered her shotgun and aimed back at the field. The battlewagon was indeed reloading, but the hulking Goliath rumbled toward them on its tracks, hammer arms pulled back and ready to tear down the trees they stood behind. Rose took aim at the Goliath, but nothing seemed to stop it.

“Look low,” Alun yelled.

Rose lowered her rifle.

Another matic, the huge spiked wheel, was rolling their way, rattling over dips and tree stumps, one hundred yards and closing fast.

Rose fired everything she had at it. So did Alun. But they didn’t have nearly enough firepower to stop that thing.

Alun was no longer laughing. He was cussing up a lung. He pulled something from his pocket and lit the wick of it with his pipe, then lobbed it at the rolling matic.

A ground-shaking explosion rang out, but the wheel kept coming.

Rose was out of bullets. She pulled her handgun and stood her ground, setting off shot after shot at the spiked wheel. Bullets didn’t stop it. Bullets didn’t even slow it.

Fifty feet out. Thirty. Twenty.

Rose turned to run.

And in front of her rose a monster out of nightmare.

Mr. Jeb Lindson.

Rose froze and stared into the eyes of a dead man.

“Move!” Alun hollered.

Rose threw herself to the side.

Jeb yelled.

Just as the spiked wheel bashed through the trees. Limbs cracked and crashed to the ground with skull-splitting impact.

Rose tucked up tight behind a boulder and covered her head with her arms. She peeked out just in time to see the wheel come to a crashing stop in front of Jeb Lindson, the forward-most spike pulling back like a cannon ready to fire.

With inhuman strength, Jeb Lindson swung the huge round tickers attached to the chain around his wrists. He slammed them into the matic. Metal met metal, crashing and sparking. Steam gushed into the air as the wheel matic faltered under the blow. Jeb didn’t wait for it to fall. He lifted the giant chain and ball and smashed it into the matic again, busting seams, popping rivets. The wheel matic exploded, hot scrap and ash raining down out of the air.

Then the big man went walking. Toward the rail. Toward Mr. Shard LeFel’s train cars, where his wife, Mae Lindson, was held captive.

Rose smelled hair burning and patted at her shoulders. Her hair was on fire! She pulled at the base of her braid, dragging her hair forward over her shoulder. A very bad mistake. The fire licked up the side of her cheek. Rose yelled and slapped at the fire, blistering her palms. She snuffed it out just before it reached her ear, and sat there, for a second or two, trying to get back her breath and her courage.

The night filled with bullets again. The battlewagon was rolling closer, firing another deadly round off into the night.

Blinking back tears of pain, and swallowing down her fear, Rose scrambled for her gun and prayed she had enough bullets in her pockets to end this.

Mae Lindson had no weapon except her magic. It would take her voice to curse or bind, or draw upon magic of any kind. And she had no voice.

Jeb yelled out in agony. He was alive, trying to find her. Trying to save her. But that monster Shard LeFel was right. He was too late. There was no time left.

Time.

Alun Madder had given her a pocket watch. She knew it carried a speck of glim. Could she use it as a weapon?

As Mr. Shunt turned his back to stuff Elbert inside the gory clockwork of the Strange, Mae worked to get the pocket watch out of her coat. They had bound her hands together in front of her, but she could still move them.

The Strange that held the chain around her throat was hypnotized by Mr. Shunt’s work. If it noticed what she was doing, one hard tug on her chain would crush her neck.

Mae fingered the watch into her hand, then slowly pulled it up to her mouth. She tugged at the leather gag, but it wouldn’t move. Over the top of the pocket watch she whispered, more song than word, more breath than voice, calling on magic, begging magic to come to her, hoping the glim would work as an amplifier, a cupped hand, a bullhorn, to call the magic and make it stronger. She begged magic to not so much break a curse but interrupt it and hold it away for one single minute, for one single man: Cedar Hunt. And then she pressed down the watch stem, stopping the watch, and stopping Cedar Hunt’s curse, for just one minute.

Cedar Hunt gasped for air and pushed himself up onto his knees. He didn’t know how, but he was a man, even though moonlight filled the sky. He saw the gun on the platform beside him. The gun Mr. Shunt had shot him with. He picked it up and pushed onto his feet, nearly blacking out from the pain. He staggered through the train car toward the child, toward his brother, toward Mae.

Rose Small looked for Alun Madder. He was sprinting over the matic Jeb Lindson had reduced to a pile of rubble, and headed straight at the Goliath, an ax in each hand, his pipe cherry bright in his mouth. The battlewagon trundled over the terrain, headed right for him, reloading a cartridge as it picked up speed.

It was suicide. There was no cover, no way Alun would survive a rapid-fire round from the matic.

“This way!” Alun Madder yelled. “Quickly! The boys will take care of the men.”

Boys? Rose heard Cadoc and Bryn let out a hoot from down the rail. The two younger Madder brothers had clambered up inside the big rail-matic scraper with bulletlike wheels that leveled the land. Somehow they’d powered the thing and were now riding it down over the bank of men, Bryn looking like some kind of bug as he worked the levers in the cab—his goggles reflecting moonlight and gunfire. Cadoc, wild-haired and laughing as he hung by one hand and one foot off the side of the beast, unloaded shot after shot into the rail workers’ rank.