Cold Copper: The Age of Steam

  The men each hung their guns on wall pegs, then freed the copper boxes from the contraptions by thumbing off a couple latches and giving them a good tug.

  “Want to put money on that, Sal?” one of the other men asked.

  “Didn’t say I’d bet for it.”

  “Here now. A man who ain’t willing to back up his opinion with money shows you exactly what his opinion’s worth.”

  The men chuckled and walked off with the copper boxes, heading deeper into the warehouse, out of Rose’s sight. In a moment, a clattering of cogs and wheels and chains filled the quiet of the place as some large device was activated. After a bit, there was silence.

  “Should we follow them?” Rose whispered once the racket had died down.

  “No,” Hink whispered back. “We stay here.”

  “We do not stay here,” Mr. Wicks said. “We investigate.”

  Hink just shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how you can’t seem to understand a two-letter word, but let me try again: No.”

  “As your director, I order you to follow my orders, Mr. Hink.”

  Hink snorted.

  Mr. Wicks scowled at him. He stood and very quietly and quickly made his way down the aisle, pausing at the end of the stack of crates and peering around the corner to where the men had wandered.

  “Blasted yatterhead,” Hink whispered. He turned and gave Rose a look that said she would share the blame if Wicks got them all killed.

  There was no use calling out—the other men would likely hear them. So Rose did the only thing she could think of. She pulled her gun and got ready to shoot if Wicks was discovered.

  Thomas didn’t dash out from behind the crates. But it wasn’t long before the men were back, talking over more mundane market prices of buckwheat and potatoes. They crossed over to the door.

  Wicks ducked down out of their line of sight as the men reconnected the copper boxes back to the guns, shouldered them, shut down the lights, then left through the same door they’d come in.

  Rose’s heart thumped for a minute, maybe two, as her eyes, once again, got the hang of darkness. Then Captain Hink was on his feet, just as quiet as Wicks, but twice as large and twice as temperamental as he strode in a killing sort of way down to where Wicks sat.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hink growled.

  “Gathering information.” Wicks stood, dusted his coat, and adjusted his hat, though neither looked out of place to Rose.

  “They could have found us.”

  “Yes. Then we would have killed them, I suppose,” he said nonplussed.

  “Idiot,” Hink grumbled.

  “‘Sir,’” Wicks added. “You will address me as ‘sir.’”

  “When hell burns holes in my boots,” Hink said. “And not even then.”

  “What exactly will convince you of my station above you, Marshal Cage?”

  “Paperwork signed and sealed by the president. Don’t have that, do you?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Wicks dug in the satchel he carried, thumbed through a small stack of paper, and pulled out one clean sheet.

  In the dark of the place, Rose could just make out a seal of an eagle worked up in red and blue ink.

  “Will this do?” He handed the paper to Hink.

  Hink took it and tipped it to the meager light slipping in through the cracks in the ceiling.

  “Anyone could forge a document. There’s practically a printing press on every corner nowadays.” He shoved it back at him.

  Thomas paused, looking for a moment like he might have just noticed the depths of Hink’s stubbornness.

  “Yes. Well,” he said. “I want to know where they went with those copper boxes. Go and see where they put them and report back to me.”

  Hink inhaled. His hand clenched into a fist.

  She didn’t know if he was fighting the urge to yell at the man or just fighting the urge to fight.

  “Lady said she wants to go to town,” Hink said. “Find a nice hotel and a bath. I say that’s the way I’m walking.”

  “I’m sure Miss Small won’t mind one little jaunt to see what’s behind that door.” He pointed.

  Rose walked over to the both of them. Then walked past them so she could see what he was going on about.

  There at the far end of the warehouse was, indeed, a door. “Armory?” she suggested.

  “Won’t know if we don’t look.” Wicks took the distance at a quick clip, placed his hand on the door handle, and leaned in a bit as if listening for something moving behind the door. Then he tried the latch.

  The door opened. Wicks turned, grinned, and stepped over the threshold.

  “Idiot,” Hink said. “And a fool. We should leave, Rose. Now.”

  “You want to know what’s in there,” she said. “You know you do. Doesn’t matter if he’s your superior or a horsefly. You’ll always wonder what was really back there. Got a case of the curious in a bad way.”

  Hink glanced at the boarded-up windows, then shook his head, a smile easing the edge of his anger. “Woman, the trouble you find.” He turned and stormed off after Wicks.

  “I like to keep my eyes out on the world,” she said.

  “Thought you wanted a bath.”

  “I do. After we find where they went with the copper boxes.”

  Hink pulled his gun again, and stepped away from the stacks of crates and into the darkened room. “Wicks?” he called out softly.

  Thomas seemed to melt out of shadows, a small flame tucked tight in his hand so as not to give more than an ember of light to his face. “Some kind of device here. I think it’s a hoist for the goods. The men used it.”

  Captain Hink never seemed to fail when a light was needed and this time was no different. He pulled a flint and steel from his pocket and lit up a small torch.

  “You hear that?” he asked.

  Rose nodded. “Like trumpets, but higher? And…water? Maybe there’s a waterwheel that runs the equipment under here?”

  “No,” Hink and Wicks said at the same time.

  “You first, Marshal Cage,” Thomas said.

  “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. br />
  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.

  Cedar could smell its fear, could hear the sour song that bled from it into everything it touched. He knew the Strange understood what he was. Knew the Strange understood he was death to its kind.

  But still it stood there, not attacking, not running. It lifted its hand with the ribbon, as if making sure Cedar knew it carried a human token, a child’s ornament.

  And then it ran.

  Instinct curled and exploded in his chest. He would hunt it, track it, run it down, kill it.

  Wil was right beside him as they pounded across the snowy terrain. Through the forest and over hills, across a field spread wide beneath the moonlight. The Strange ran faster, always just ahead of them, leaving a trail so strong Cedar could have found it with his eyes closed.

  And then he heard water, a river flowing hard beneath a layer of ice. He knew that river. He had been here before, here where the road split in two, branching toward the city of people and away through a stand of trees to the frozen river.

  Danger. The beast knew it was a trap, and so did his logical mind. He stopped, hidden in the shadows, Wil at his side. They waited, watching as the moon slipped in and out of the clouds at the horizon.

  The moon would soon set. Dawn was only a few hours off. Though the curse was still strong, Cedar could already feel the power of it fading.

  There was no reason to wait. They should kill the Strange.

  But something held him back.

  Danger.

  The Strange was waiting for them. Waiting on the bank by the frozen river. Waiting to kill.

  Cedar moved out of the shadow, drawn by the unbreakable need to kill the creatures that tread the earth. He held near the curve of the path, slipping silently through brush. This was a trap. He knew it must be.

  And as he neared the river, he heard more than the song of the Strange. He heard children crying in the night, calling out for mothers and fathers. Calling out to be saved.

  Wil heard it too, and whined softly, his ears flicking forward and back.

  Because even though they heard a hundred children calling, crying out, there was only one child they could see.

  A little girl,
maybe three years old, barefoot and shivering in her nightshirt, her hair braided at each ear. She clutched a tattered blanket close to her chest and walked across the snow-covered stones as if she were blind or sleepwalking, following the sound of children’s voices straight to the icy river.

  The Strange stood upon the ice, the pink ribbon pinched between its fingers and trailing in the predawn breeze. It stared at Cedar, watching his every move with those odd eyes.

  He growled, but the Strange did not move.

  It waited.

  When Cedar had the clarity of a man’s mind, he would say it was not afraid; certainly he no longer smelled fear on it. Nor did it seem set to attack the child. When he had the clarity of a man’s mind, he would say the Strange was waiting for him to understand. It was desperate. And sad.

  But the beast warred with his thoughts: Save the child or kill the Strange.

  “Help,” the Strange whispered. Not asking. Showing.

  The wind rose with the early light, bringing with it more than the sound of the children calling, crying, begging. That wind brought with it the scent of the Holder.

  Cedar jerked his head up and took a backward step.

  The Holder was here, and as the Strange pointed at the ice, he knew the Holder was there, in the river, hidden beneath the ice.

  Calling the children.

  The little girl was almost at the river’s edge.

  Save the child, his logical mind demanded.

  Cedar ran for the girl.

  Just as the Strange ran for her.

  She collapsed before either reached her. But it was the Strange that somehow whisked her up and, faster than the wind, pulled her away from the river and ice and ran away with her into the forest.

  Cedar dug claws into the frozen ground, twisting to catch at the Strange, launching after it.

  But the sun broke the horizon, lifting the curse. He writhed in agony as his flesh and bone once again snapped, shifted, and compacted, forcing him too soon into the shape of a man.

  Hink didn’t blow apart or fall down dead from his hand on the globe. So that was a good thing. The bad thing was the six men who came striding over from a door across the way. Men who were armed with ordinary, but no less deadly, sorts of guns and rifles. Men who looked an awful lot like a sheriff and his posse.