Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  “Well, well, well, ain’t this cozy,” he said through a mouthful of beef. “Three little piggies. Maybe I’ll huff and I’ll puff…”

  “And maybe I’ll blow your head off,” muttered Cockayne. He winked at Gideon, who nudged Bent in the ribs.

  The journalist stepped forward, clicking his fingers through the bars. “’Ere, Inkerman. Cockayne says you can be relied on for a light. I’m dying for a ciggie.”

  “You got any?” said Inkerman. “I ain’t standing you a smoke. And did laughing boy tell you the drill?”

  He nodded at Cockayne, who was glaring at him. Bent produced a flat tin of rolled cigarettes and held it through the bars. “Have one of mine, if you like.”

  Inkerman grinned and took one, which he slid behind his ear. “Very good of you. I gotta say, you’re one helluva more amenable houseguest than Mr. Cockayne.” He paused. “Still gotta insist on the drill, though.”

  Bent nodded and stuck a cigarette in his mouth, pushing his face into the space between two bars and holding his hands out as far as they would go behind him. Inkerman struck a match and held it out toward Bent, who maneuvered the end of his cigarette into it and sucked hard. When it was lit, Bent backed off and Inkerman held up the match to Gideon. “You having one?”

  Gideon shook his head but said, “I think Cockayne will.”

  Cockayne had already pushed his face against the bars, holding his hands out behind him. Inkerman looked at him, then at the match. He let it fall from his fingers, and it burned itself out on the dirt floor.

  “Aw, look at that. It was my last match, as well.”

  Cockayne said nothing, simply stared impassively through the bars. Inkerman shrugged and dug in his waistcoat pocket for another match. “Cat got your tongue, Cockayne? Aw, you’re no fun when you won’t get riled.” He struck the match and held it out. “Suit yourself. Your smokes are numbered, anyhow.”

  The match hovered around the end of Cockayne’s cigarette, Inkerman guffawing as he kept the flickering flame just out of reach. Cockayne raised one eyebrow and grinned back, the cigarette falling from his lips. Then he spat a spray of the colorless spirit Bent had filched from the governor’s cabinet, enveloping the match and expanding the flame with a whump into a fireball that engulfed Inkerman before he had time to even scream.

  “Quick, before he falls backward!” yelled Cockayne, and Gideon, having the longest reach of any of them, stretched through the bars and grabbed hold of Inkerman’s belt. The fat sheriff’s head was a blackening ball at the center of the yellow flames, and Inkerman was slapping at his face. Gideon grimaced as he pulled Inkerman hard into the bars, and Cockayne hit him once in the face, pulling his fist back and shaking it.

  “Goddamn! I don’t know what hurts most, the burning in my hand or the burning in my throat. What the hell did you say that stuff was called, Bent?”

  “Spirytus,” said Bent, gazing in horrified fascination at Inkerman as he slid down the bars. “Do you think we should put him out?”

  “You got the keys?” said Cockayne.

  Gideon jangled the bunch he’d extricated from Inkerman’s belt. “Bent’s right … we should do something.”

  “You get the bars open before this whole place goes up,” said Cockayne. Inkerman had flailed backward, spreading the fire to the papers on his desk. Cockayne unbuttoned his fly and Gideon gaped at him.

  “Is he getting the old chap out?” asked Bent. “He is! He’s going to—”

  Cockayne let loose a stream of piss that hit Inkerman in his head and sent clouds of acrid steam rising to mingle with the black smoke filling the pen. Gideon shook his head and fumbled with the keys until he found the right one and the cage doors swung open.

  “Wait there,” said Cockayne. “I need to check that the coast is clear.”

  He dipped into the smoke and reappeared a moment later. He winked at Gideon and kicked the cage shut, neatly whipping out the bunch of keys. He said, “You never do learn, do you, Smith.”

  “You effer!” shouted Bent, rattling the bars. The door was stuck fast.

  Gideon glared at him. “Like a dog to its vomit.”

  Cockayne grinned. “I’m doing this to prove something, Smith.”

  “That you’re a bastard?” said Bent.

  “No. That you can trust me.” He reached down and unlocked the cage. Behind him, Inkerman moaned. “Just remember, I could have left you in there. But I trust you, Smith, so you gotta trust me.”

  “When hell freezes over,” said Gideon, dragging Bent out of the cage. “But for now … come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “One minute,” said Cockayne. He bent down and retrieved his pearl-handled guns from the shuddering body of Inkerman. Gideon gagged at the smell of roasting flesh. Inkerman’s head was a blackened thing running with its own juices. Cockayne whispered, “Told you that you were at the top of my shit-list, Inkerman.” He put the barrel of one gun against the man’s head. Even in the smoke-filled pen, Gideon could read his pain-filled eyes. Do it. Please.

  “The old Louis Cockayne was a real bastard who’d leave you to burn,” said Cockayne. “Count yourself lucky I’m a reformed character, and you can thank Gideon Smith for that.”

  Gideon turned away as the gun reported with a loud echo. Cockayne emerged from the smoke, his face grim. He held open the door. “Now for the hard part, Smith. We have to get out of Steamtown alive.”

  * * *

  Cockayne led them into the dusty, dark alleys off the main drag, taking them between the clapboard houses and edging along the shadowed verandas on the largely unlit streets into an area that was dominated by single-story whitewashed stone buildings.

  “The old Spanish quarter,” whispered Cockayne, holding up his hand as a horse-drawn wagon, a tank of water sloshing on the back, rumbled past in the direction they’d come from.

  “Eff to the tour, Cockayne,” gasped Bent, leaning against the wall, a hand on the stitch in his side. “Just get us out of here.”

  “I’m trying to,” he said. He looked at Gideon. “I’m going to take us west, thread through some of the coal mines and the slave quarters. They’ll be expecting us to be making for the Wall.”

  There was shouting from the edge of town where the pen was located, and when he looked back Gideon could see the underside of the black clouds painted a dull orange. Cockayne squinted into the night sky and frowned. “The fire’s spreading,” he said. “Should keep them busy for a while.”

  Cockayne paused between two buildings, at a wide road that was better lit than any of them would have liked. He held up his hand, glanced around the edge of the dark house in both directions, then led them softly out on to the dust track.

  And right into a sudden pool of light that erupted from a dozen strongly focused oil lamps that were abruptly exposed. There were six men on horseback flanking a trio of grumbling crablike vehicles that were spewing steam and coal dust from their exhausts. Their steel-plate armor casings were mounted above a series of wheels covered in what looked to Gideon to be hinged metal belts, creating snug tracks on which the wheels could mount almost any low-lying obstacle and negotiate any terrain. Suddenly he plucked a memory from an old issue of World Marvels & Wonders, a Lucian Trigger adventure that he recalled also featured Louis Cockayne … in the theater of lies and half-truths that Gideon now knew the penny blood stories were. That wasn’t to say everything in the adventures was false—Lucian Trigger might have embellished the escapades of his lover, Dr. John Reed, for public consumption, but Gideon had to assume that much of it, the menaces included, were based on fact.

  Menaces such as these. Gideon sensed Cockayne whipping out his pearl-handled revolvers, hefting their familiar weight now that they were free from Inkerman. Unfortunately, the relief Gideon felt at Cockayne’s keen eye beside him was drowned out by the volley of clicks from the rifles held by the men on the horses and clinging to the growling vehicles. Cockayne muttered, “Great. The Bowie Steamcrawlers.”

  “No point ru
nning, Louis,” rasped a voice from behind the bright lights. It was Thaddeus Pinch. “Might as well just come quietly now.”

  “So you can torture me?” shouted Cockayne. “No thanks, Pinch.”

  “What about you, Mr. Smith? Mr. Bent? What say we talk about this like adults, huh? I’m hardly going to cause harm to two agents of the Crown, am I?”

  Bent murmured, “He’s got a point, Gideon.”

  “Yeah,” said Cockayne. “A red-hot one he nearly rammed up my ass. On my mark, back the way we came, right?”

  “What’s the signal?” hissed Gideon.

  “This.”

  Cockayne’s guns spat twin explosions again and again, each bullet unerringly finding an oil lamp. Some flared and died, and some sprayed their unfortunate holders with blazing oil. As the street was plunged into darkness filled with the shouts of the men and the roar of the Steamcrawlers, Cockayne pushed Gideon and Bent back, taking the lead and winding through the narrow spaces between the stone buildings until the houses thinned out and the pit towers reared up ahead in the darkness. The rumbling of the Steamcrawlers was replaced by the clanking of the mine gear.

  “There’s a quarry beyond the mines,” said Cockayne, glancing behind them. “We should be able to slip down into that and leave the Steamcrawlers standing. Then we’ve just got to get out the other side before Pinch summons the wherewithal to get a posse around the quarry.”

  “I’m effed,” said Bent. “We need to rest.”

  “No time,” said Gideon. “We have to keep moving.”

  Behind them, the shouts grew louder. Gideon grabbed the panting journalist by the sleeves and dragged him onward, between two tall wire fences that bordered two adjacent mines. A group of negroes sharing a bucket of water with a long-handled ladle in the dull light of one of the mines watched impassively as they ran past. Gideon wanted to stop and tell them that he would free them, somehow. Then he felt wretched and naïve. It wasn’t his mission to wage war on Texas, to free its slaves. What would he tell these dull-eyed men who watched him rushing by? That he could do nothing to help them right now, but he would write a letter in the strongest possible terms to the authorities when he returned to England?

  “Smith, quit daydreaming. We got a problem.”

  Gideon blinked as Cockayne put out an arm and stopped his progress. He felt stones and loose earth crumble at his feet, and he realized he was on the edge of a yawning chasm, its far side in darkness and its bottom hidden by shadows far below.

  “I thought you said this was an effing quarry, Cockayne, not a canyon.”

  “They must’ve done a bit of work since the last time I was here,” said Cockayne apologetically. “Shit. I’m out of bullets as well.”

  Gideon turned slowly as Pinch, sitting on top of the lead Steamcrawler, rolled inexorably toward them between the mines. His bizarre vehicle stopped, juddering and exhaling steam, the barrels of three guns fixed on Gideon from dark slits in the Steamcrawler’s armor.

  “Nice, huh?” said Pinch, patting the Steamcrawler. “Jim Bowie left ’em to me after he got himself iced in the desert. I said to Bowie, you got to know your limits, your boundaries. He was always off in places that didn’t concern him, having adventures and getting the British and Spanish royally pissed. Me, I know my place. Steamtown.” A match flared, igniting the end of his cigar, reflecting in his dark eyes in a way that spelled pure crazy to Gideon. “And I’m the fucking King of Steamtown, gentlemen, and I will have my due tribute.”

  Pinch picked up a rifle and trained it on Gideon, his deputies locking Bent and Cockayne in their sights. He said, “We’ve been blasting the shit out of this quarry with dynamite for a year now. It’s two hundred and fifty feet to the bottom. Either you jump or you get a bullet in your heads. Don’t rightly give a shit which you do, myself. But I thought I’d give you a choice.” His metal jaw wobbled, his blackened teeth bared. “I’m good like that.”

  17

  PAYMENT IN KIND

  Carefully following the instructions that had been left with her, Rowena stood on the observation deck of the Skylady III and aimed her Lime Light Signaling Lamp in the direction of the cluster of distant lights around the black shape that crouched on the pale horizon. San Antonio. Steamtown. She was half an hour away, and they would have sighted her long ago, readying their defenses against the incoming ’stat. Only transmitting the coded message—it seemed to be a string of numbers broken up by words such as “blackbird” and “eagle,” “bugle” and “spoon,” utter nonsense—would cause Steamtown to hold its fire and allow her to land in the airfield the manifest told her was on the east side of the town. Rowena flashed the signal three times, hoping that someone at the other end had a signaling telescope trained upon her and was transcribing the message that would enable her to approach unmolested.

  Flashing the code left her just her enough time to get the QF three-pounder Hotchkiss from the armory out to the observation deck. According to the helpful notes, the airfield was adjacent to several warehouses containing—Rowena surmised—coal. Which meant she would need help retrieving the Hotchkiss and her collection of incendiaries. Coal burned very nicely, and the Hotchkiss would be the flame she put to the touch paper of Steamtown.

  Rowena strode from the observation deck into the bridge and surveyed what she’d found when she burst the lock and chain off the hold. There were fifty-four of them, evidently payment for the cargo of coal she had been hired to take back to New York. She’d felt sick when she first opened up the hold, sick to her stomach that she’d been involved, no matter how unwittingly, in this. Then she had reconsidered. Better that it was Rowena Fanshawe who had taken the contract than someone who would have followed the orders to the letter.

  “I need some help,” she announced. The fifty-four faces turned to her. “I need to bring some equipment—artillery and ammunition, mostly—from the armory up to the observation deck. I need strong arms and, more importantly, steady hands.”

  There were five or six hesitant hands raised, then more, until eventually all of her passengers were volunteering. Even the children. That someone had quite happily sold children into slavery for a ’stat’s hold full of coal … she didn’t feel sick anymore. She felt angry.

  When Rowena had first jimmied the lock off and opened the door the fifty-four pairs of eyes regarded her with a mixture of slight interest, fear, and hatred. And why not? As far as they were concerned, she was just another link in the chain that was dragging them from one wretched life to another. Half of them were black, and after she’d unchained them all and taken them up to the galley (a Frenchman with them had rustled up the most marvelous stew from ingredients Rowena, a self-confessed terrible cook, kept in the larder) she did a quick census. The blacks were mainly the descendants of slaves from the South who had moved to the British territories when the Mason-Dixon Wall was being built. In British America they had been free, true, but by no means as liberated as the whites in New York, especially when it came to finding work and places to live. Black people tended to congregate in the Harlem district, and these families reported that slaver gangs who haunted the shadows were a regular and well-known hazard. While nightsticks and knives had been used to cajole many of the people in Rowena’s ’stat to the North Beach Aerodrome, the slavers also used more subtle means.

  “I applied for a situation on the docks,” said a broad, shaven-headed man named Oscar, hugging in his protective arms a wife with downcast eyes and three small girls with rags tied in their hair. “The pay was good. They said they’d like to meet the family, make sure I wasn’t some union plant. I brought us all down to the warehouse.” He shook his head, tears welling up in his eyes. “They took us all at gunpoint to the airfield. Told us we’d all be getting a new situation, all right, me down the mines and Catherine here…” He hugged her tighter still.

  “No one’s going down the mines, and no woman is working … working anywhere in that horrible place. Not while you are under my protection.”

 
“And who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” The accent was Scottish, from a young man who must have been one of the British citizens of little or no resources who had taken cheap passage to America to help build the Empire State. They were of the masses, the great unwashed, those unwanted, unloved, and unmissed by the upper classes. And in America they had found not the promised land, but others like them. Among the other captives Rowena had noticed down-at-the-heel Italians, a pair of German brothers, a contingent of homegrown Americans with no stable income or proper roots. The Empire had diffused many wonderful concepts and inventions around the world, reflected Rowena. Unfortunately, many not-so-great ideas had also followed the British colossus that bestrode the world, and the class system was one of them.

  “Me? I’m Rowena Fanshawe of Fa—”

  “Of the Captain Trigger adventures?”

  She had been about to say “of Fanshawe Aeronautical Endeavors” when the young Scot interrupted her. Something in his shining eyes reminded her of Gideon, and her stomach churned unexpectedly. Was he down there, ahead of them in the gathering darkness, in that pit of vipers? Was he hurt? Was he even alive? And did she care, beyond their friendship, beyond the sense of brotherhood they shared from adventuring high in the airways and beyond?

  She smiled. “Yes, of the adventures.”

  As the young Scot began to relate, in hushed whispers, a précis of Rowena’s greatest moments (or, in the case of some of the accounts by Lucian Trigger that had appeared in World Marvels & Wonders, most outrageous lies) she turned her attention to what would happen when they finally reached Steamtown.

  * * *

  They were still bound for Steamtown despite Rowena’s discovery. Her first thought on facing her motley and unexpected group of passengers had been what the hell am I going to do with you lot?

  “I have enough fuel for the return trip,” she’d said. “Do you want to go back to New York?”