Devon Monk - Cold Copper

“Call me Captain Hink. I don’t go by Marshal unless I’m about to bring someone to law.”

“Really? Seems a hassle to change your names around like that. Why not just Cage for Captain and Marshal?”

“Because no glim pirate should be known as Marshal Cage. They’d shoot the ship right out from under my feet.” Then he said, “Down.” He nodded at the platform in the middle of the floor between a rise of gears and pulleys surrounding it.

From the look on his face, Wicks didn’t like to be ordered around either. Still, he strolled over and stood on the boards of the hoist. “I assume you understand how to set this device to working?”

“Haven’t run across a matic I can’t figure. Rose?”

“What?”

“Get on the platform with him.”

“You want me to go down there with him? I thought you didn’t want me anywhere near the man.”

“He didn’t?”

“No,” Hink said.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“No,” Hink said a little louder. “You aren’t going down there with him alone. We all go. Don’t plan to turn my back on you now, Mr. Wicks. Fancy papers or no.”

Hink set the matic in gear and then mounted the platform next to them. He pulled a lever and the entire contraption lowered, far more smoothly and silently than Rose expected. They dropped only one floor down, into a basement.

But that basement was massive, carved out of solid stone and at least three times as large as the upper floor. A series of connected tunnels with arched ceilings braced by metal connected to this huge center room and splayed out in every direction like the petals of a half-bloomed flower. All the tunnels and ceilings were lit with what must be electric light, strung with copper lines and shining like dewdrops catching sun.

The floor was water-smooth with rails down each tunnel and crossing at each junction.

A train station? No, Rose knew it wasn’t just that. Perhaps it was built for transporting something: coal or some other valuable.

Against the wall stood massive tanks and coils that looked like huge snail shells lit up from within and wrapped in copper wire. That copper wire ran through tubes across the ceiling, down the metal bracers against the walls, and looped across hundreds of other wires that suspended huge glass balls in a dozen colors, each glass ball wrapped in even more copper.

It was a fairyland of wires, cogs, glass, and power. Ideas she’d never been brave enough to imagine sat right here, already a reality. She knew what this was, though not what it was being used for.

“Power,” she said. “Acres and acres of power. Generating it. Storing it. And pushing it down those cables, I think. It’s…magnificent.”

“What in the world is this for?” Wicks asked. He glanced over at Captain Hink. “What do you know about it?”

“Rose.” Hink stepped off the platform behind Rose, who was already wandering out into the chamber.

The wonder of the place set her head to buzzing. She couldn’t seem to take it all in, to know what it all might mean. And she so very much wanted to.

“It’s connected,” she muttered as she started toward the towering tank on the nearest wall. “All of them. They’re made of…what is this? Copper? It’s the wrong color, too green and white, almost turquoise.” She stopped directly in front of one of the huge contraptions and stretched her fingers to touch it.

“Rose.” Hink pulled her hand away, then stood in front of her. He wasn’t big enough to block her view of the entire thing, but just the sight of him made her realize she had been foolishly wandering the place like a moth drawn to fire.

“There’s glim involved,” he said, not letting go of her hand. “And there’s Strange. Look.”

He turned her about so that her back was toward him. Across the room, stacked from floor all the way up to the ceiling, were dark metal shelves filled with copper and glass devices. Just like the copper and glass battery they had found in the train and put in the puppet man.

But instead of the glass globe in the middle of all that copper being empty, each globe was filled with something alive and skittering.

“God in heaven,” Rose breathed. “Something’s trapped in there.”

Hink, for just a moment, wrapped his arm around her waist. For just a moment, she was held against him, protected in the strength of his arms, his body.

“It’s the Strange,” he said very quietly. “Can you see them?”

Rose nodded.

“So can I, though I don’t usually. Do not touch them,” he said.

Then he gently let go of her and walked across that room toward them like he was approaching a wall full of rattlesnakes.

It took all the will Rose had in her not to turn and run from this place. The Strange were evil, mindless, brutal creatures that enjoyed nothing more than torturing people. She’d seen what they could do. She’d seen them make the dead walk. She’d seen them do worse.

Suddenly, she was too hot and too cold at the same time. She wanted to be anywhere else but here, yet she could not make her feet lift to run.

Hink was almost at the globes. He was going to touch them. He was going to reach out and then there would be nothing but a thin curve of glass between him and the creatures that were destroying the world.

They’d kill him. Draw him in. Devour him.

“Lee.” She said the word all in an exhale. “Please, Lee. Don’t touch them. Don’t leave me.”

Hink didn’t stop. Didn’t pause. He stepped up to the towering stack of caged Strange and stared at them, making a decision. Then he reached out and pressed his palm against the glass.

Cedar landed hard on his shoulder and hip. He gritted his teeth against the pain spearing through his side and leg. He’d broken a rib for sure, maybe done worse to his leg. He pushed up and out from under his brother, his head pounding. Even though it was cold enough to see his breath coming out in steamy gasps, his skin was on fire.

He struggled to get on his feet, but couldn’t do any more than rise up upon his knees. Every inch of his body hurt more, much more, than it should. His mind slipped between conscious thought and raw hunger to kill.

The curse wrapped around him, broken free from Father Kyne’s hold, stretching his body, twisting him into the shape of the beast. Changing from the body of a man to that of the wolf had never been a painful experience.

Until now.

Cedar yelled as the curse broke the spell and claimed him again, turning him into a creature that hungered for the blood of the Strange.

But even with the curse in full force beneath the power of the moon burning bright, the thin chain he wore that the Madders had given him months ago managed to separate just enough of his thoughts that he retained the barest vestiges of logic. Still, he had very little control over the beast.

Control that slipped.

The world broke apart into color and fragments of trails and scents: shattered bits of all the things, living and dead, that had passed this way.

Above it all, the scent of the Strange was strongest, tangled though it was in the smells of Wil next to him and of the wildflower scents of Mae from where she stood with the horses.

Mate .

The beast demanded he run, hunt, and rend the Strange until they broke and bled.

Wil was on his feet next to him, and like him, wore the skin of the beast. They would hunt, together. They would kill, together. It was what they were made for. It was all they breathed for.

To kill the Strange.

Cedar howled and Wil lent his voice to his brother’s song, to his rage. There was a Strange nearby. A familiar Strange. Cedar growled. That Strange stood, just on the other side of a fallen tree. It held a ribbon in one hand.