Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  Gideon took Cockayne’s place at the window. “If only we could stage some kind of diversion, take Pinch’s attention away from Apep so Maria could get onboard.”

  “How long will it take to get that bird in the sky?” asked Cockayne.

  “Once the artifacts are in place on the dashboard, I think I have full control over Apep,” said Maria. “Perhaps only minutes from then, though I have always been somewhat indisposed when I have been at one with the dragon.”

  “Mmm,” said Cockayne. “Now’s the time you want to see Bent come blundering into the place, or Rowena shooting everything up.…” He paused, staring at the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight slicing through the broken timbers of the church roof.

  “What?” asked Gideon. “Cockayne, do you have an idea?”

  Cockayne stood and squinted down his arm at his pearl-handled revolvers, flipping open the chambers with his thumbs and rotating them, each one the snug home to a shining bullet. He spun the guns on his fingers and slid them home into his holsters. Patting his pockets, he located a cigarette and a match, which he struck on his belt buckle and touched to the end of the tobacco. His face was briefly illuminated under the shadow of his hat, then it fell into darkness again, save for his shining eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  * * *

  “No, no, absolutely not,” said Gideon.

  “It does seem like madness, Mr. Cockayne,” said Maria.

  “Yeah, crazy like a fox, that’s me,” said Cockayne. “Now, to save time, let’s say you’ve tried to change my mind and it hasn’t worked. You understand what you’ve got to do?”

  Gideon sighed heavily then nodded. “You sure you can do this?”

  “Hey,” he said, smiling crookedly. “I’m Louis goddamn Cockayne.”

  He went to the door and opened it a crack. Gideon heard a volley of clicks as every gun in the courtyard was turned on them. He felt sick.

  “Thaddeus,” called Cockayne. “I’m coming out. Make sure your boys keep their trigger fingers under control.”

  Cockayne turned, touched the brim of his hat, and winked at Gideon. Then he let himself out and pulled the door shut behind him. Gideon ran to the window as Maria stationed herself behind the door, armed with half a pew. If anyone tried to come in, they’d get the full weight of her clockwork might for their troubles.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  Gideon peered through the window. “Nothing, yet. They haven’t shot him, which is a good start.”

  * * *

  “Glad to see you’ve seen sense, Louis,” said Pinch as Cockayne stopped and took a long drag on his cigarette. “But … where are your friends?”

  Cockayne tossed his cigarette to the dust and ground it under his heel, spurs jangling. “Want to talk, Thaddeus. Got a bit of a proposal for you.”

  Pinch nodded. “Talking’s good, Louis. And I like proposals. Deals. It’s just … well, folks who make proposals generally got something to bargain with. Way I see it, Louis, you’ve kind of already cashed in your chips.”

  Cockayne regarded him coolly. He said, “You were always a fast gun, Thaddeus. Leastways, before you started with all the…” He waved his hand up and down. “All this machinery.”

  Pinch laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I know you, Louis Cockayne. You believe the bullshit they say about you. You believe you’re the fastest gun between here and Japville. And yeah, before that coyote took my arm off, I’d have planted a bullet between your eyes before you’d even thought about touching your guns.” He paused. “Where’s this going, Louis? What’s your proposal?”

  Cockayne smiled. “Me and you, Thaddeus. Mano a mano. Let’s see who’s the fastest. You win, you get the girl. I win, we walk out of here.”

  Pinch waved his metal arm. “You got me at something of a disadvantage, Louis.”

  Cockayne waved his left hand. “I’ll fight southpaw.”

  Pinch grinned with his metal jaw. “You serious?”

  Cockayne shrugged. “Levels the field somewhat. What do you say?”

  Pinch ruminated. “You win, you don’t get the dragon. You just walk out, right?”

  Cockayne said, “If you like, but why worry about it? If I win, Thaddeus, you’ll be dead.”

  Pinch rubbed his jaw. “Still can’t say as I like the odds much, Louis. But say you had as much of a handicap as me … that might be better.”

  “What are you suggesting, Thaddeus?”

  He grinned. “You wear a blindfold, Louis. You shoot left-handed, and you wear a blindfold. Those are my terms.”

  * * *

  “Surely he isn’t going to agree to that,” said Gideon, horrified.

  “He does tend to go on about what a fine gunman he is,” said Maria.

  “Even so…” He looked at her. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Let us hope so,” she said quietly.

  * * *

  Cockayne lit himself another cigarette and walked over to the far side of the dragon, putting the church behind him and to his right. Pinch’s men followed, as he hoped they would, and formed two groups to either side of the two men. This, too, was what he was banking on. With Pinch’s men putting their backs to the dragon, it meant more opportunity for Smith and Maria to get out of the mission and get Apep in the air.

  He just hoped they did it sooner rather than later. He also hoped they hadn’t swallowed Cockayne’s bullshit, just as much as he hoped Pinch had swallowed it all. He was a god-awful shot with his left hand, and he’d be about as much use blindfolded as a nun in a poker game. The plan was that as soon as Pinch’s men lined up, Gideon and Maria would get the hell over to the dragon while Louis ran for cover in the confusion. As Pinch called for a blindfold and took up his position in the dusty courtyard, Cockayne began to have a bad feeling about it. He sucked hard on his cigarette as one of Pinch’s cronies pulled an old strip of linen tight over his eyes.

  His older brother Rick had been shot in a gunfight in Lomax Gulch, a one-horse town that had no right to claim the life of a Cockayne. Rick had been a faster gun than Louis, but for some reason he had fumbled his draw against some weasel-faced little asshole with an eye on the main prize. His childhood friend Ralph had brought his hat and gun belt back to the Connecticut farm, full of remorse and apologies as he handed them over to the weeping Mrs. Cockayne. They’d buried Rick out west, of course. Ma Cockayne had asked if he’d had any final words.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Ralph, wringing his hat. “He lived a little while after he got shot; the doctor couldn’t do anything for him. But he had time to tell me … he said the minute he stood out there in the main street of Lomax Gulch, he knew. Knew he wasn’t going to make the draw. He said he supposed all gunmen knew when they weren’t going to make it.”

  Louis Cockayne didn’t know if that was true or just gunslinger bullshit that Rick and Ralph had liked to impress the ladies with in the saloon bars of dusty, one-street towns. All he knew was that he didn’t have that unflinching certainty himself, even as he was blindfolded, even as his ears strained to pick out the steam exhalations of Pinch’s modified body parts. All he knew was that he was going to try his goddamn best to come out of this alive.

  Maybe that was Louis Cockayne bullshit overriding gunslinger lore.

  He hoped to fuck that Gideon was already on his way to the dragon as Pinch said, “We’ve taken your right-hand gun, Louis. Gonna get a countdown from ten—can any of you fucking idiots actually count, by the way?—then you go for your gun. I’m right in front of you, Louis. I won’t move. I promise.”

  Louis could almost see the grotesque grin. “That’s a relief,” he said. “Okay, Pinch. Whenever you’re ready.”

  * * *

  “Ten,” came a voice from Cockayne’s left. He felt his palm itch and his fingers flex. Wrong hand, asshole, he told himself. The left. The left.

  * * *

  “Nine.” Gideon eased open the door. Pinch had put three men
on the dragon, but they were all looking toward the imminent gunfight, their guns held loosely by their sides.

  * * *

  “Eight.” You don’t need your eyes, Cockayne told himself. You’ve shot a gun, what, every day of your life since you were eight years old? That’s thirty years. Even if you only shot once a day, that’s more than ten thousand fucking times you fired a gun, Louis. You don’t need your eyes.

  * * *

  “Seven.” Gideon eased himself out of the doorway, willing himself to fade into the white stone wall of the church. Maria held his hand tightly, and he slowly drew her to the open door. Quiet, quiet, quiet. He dared to look at her, and their eyes locked. Please don’t let me die here, he thought, not now that I’ve found her. This was what it had all been for. Ever since he had found Maria in Einstein’s house, then lost her again what felt like a dozen times over, he had fought to be reunited with her. The mere touch of her hand was like one of the fizzing electric connections in the tumbledown Einstein house, coursing through his body. So this was what it felt like. This was love.

  “We can do this,” he whispered. “Together, we can do this.”

  “Yes,” she murmured back, her eyes never leaving his. “Together we can do anything.”

  * * *

  “Sev—uh, I done that. Six.” From his boot heels, which were planted in the dust, to his hat brim, which divided the tender warm breeze that flowed over his face, was six feet and two inches of space, space into which Louis Cockayne compressed the world around him, folding the distance between him and his mark so that Pinch’s foul visage was up close in a halo of brilliant sunshine. Cockayne just had to bring up his gun and blow that stupid metal jaw right off his fucking face.

  * * *

  “Five.” The courtyard was perhaps three hundred feet wide by fifty feet deep. Aside from the men watching silently as Pinch and Cockayne faced each other across the gulf of dust and sand, and the bodies of the fallen men, and the dragon staked beneath the sun-bleached tarpaulin, there was nothing. Nothing save for the single bone-dry twig that had conspired to be under Gideon’s boot and that rent asunder with a crack thunderous enough to wake the dead.

  * * *

  “Four.” Cockayne had focused every sound, every breath, every shuffling foot, into a pinprick that he locked away into a corner of his mind that he wasn’t planning on using for the next two minutes. Then a snapping something shattered the lock, and every breath came like a snorting bull, every footstep like a flamenco dancer’s heels beating out a tattoo on a saloon stage.

  * * *

  “Three.” Slowly, minutely, as though time had stalled and everyone was swimming through Lyle’s Golden Syrup, heads began to turn toward them. Gideon felt Maria’s grip tighten on his hand, and his heart sank. The dragon’s tail was within reach. But not close enough. As though in a dream, he felt Maria let go of him and bring up her gun.

  * * *

  “Two.” Cockayne’s head was filled with crackling and sparking, his concentration shattered. He didn’t know whether he should be reaching for his gun or dragging off his blindfold and making a run for it. There was only the deafening sound of the snapping twig jarring against the measured rhythms he had sorted into an endlessly repeating pattern, the countdown from Pinch’s crony, the sound of his own breathing, the steady beat of his heart. The snapping twig, and something else.

  * * *

  “One—uh, Mr. Pinch?” It was the final trumpet, the heavenly hosts come to take Louis Cockayne away to his final rest. A sustained note that began to break up into … yes, into a tune. A melody. Perhaps Pinch had shot already, perhaps Louis was behind the curve, perhaps he was already dead and he didn’t yet know it. Or perhaps … he reached up and ripped the blindfold from his face.

  * * *

  The tail of Apep, as thick as a tree trunk, snaked out from under the tarpaulin, the layered brass scales shining in the sunlight. It was almost as though the dormant metal beast sensed Maria’s proximity and shuddered slightly at the presence of its pilot. Gideon had no idea whether it was science or sorcery that put the dragon in the air, or if he’d know the difference between them anyway.

  “Gideon…”

  Maria had heard it, too. They’d all heard it. The horn, or trumpet or … or bugle. Gideon’s heart suddenly soared. There, flowing over the hill toward the gates, was a dusty blue river of men on horseback, flying the Union Flag. He squinted into the sun as the men approached. It was Captain Humbert, from the garrison, he was sure. And alongside him, in leather and denim? Surely that was Jeb Hart.

  All the Steamtowners were running to the gate to see what was going on, turning their guns away from Louis Cockayne, away from the dragon. They might just get away with this. Gideon glanced over at Cockayne and raised his hand in a tentative signal, his forefinger curled to his thumb, the other fingers standing to attention.

  * * *

  Cockayne glared at Gideon. Go, he mouthed. Get the goddamn dragon. He threw the blindfold away and pulled out his gun, transferring it to his itching right hand. It was only the cavalry heading over the hill. He allowed himself a smile. “All bets are off,” he murmured. “I guess that’s our royal flush.”

  Pinch seemed to hear him. Maybe he had steam-powered ears as well. The king of suddenly nothing very much dragged his eyes away from the approaching cavalry, even as his men began to open fire from the palisade. He turned to face Cockayne, his face contorted in fury. Cockayne hadn’t thought Pinch could look any uglier. He guessed he was wrong.

  “You know what beats a royal flush, Louis?” he said quietly, though strangely Cockayne heard every word over the din. “A gun.”

  A shiver ran down Louis’s body from head to toe. His hand seemed to be made of stone as he tried to drag the gun up. He felt … he felt like he’d never felt before. Scared and frozen and oddly serene, all at the same time.

  Maybe it wasn’t gunslinger bullshit after all. Maybe Ralph had been right about his brother Rick.

  Maybe, just maybe, when it was your time, you knew.

  His heartbeat roared like a thunderstorm in his head, and he watched almost impassively the journey of the bullet that exploded from Pinch’s gun.

  * * *

  “No!” yelled Gideon. Pinch’s gun had barked, once, and Cockayne had tumbled forward, clutching his stomach. Gideon looked at Maria, who urged him onward with her eyes. She was at the dragon’s head now, tearing the tarpaulin off its brass crocodilian head. Its eyes were two portholes, one shattered to nothingness weeks ago by the Fleet Air Arm over Biggin Hill.

  “Get in,” Gideon ordered. “I’ll be one minute.”

  It took less than a quarter of that to reach Cockayne and turn him on his back. The sky was fuzzy with gun smoke, and Humbert’s men were fighting their way through the palisade gates, making short work of the Steamtown rabble. Pinch was standing where he had been when he shot Cockayne, looking at his gun almost in puzzlement, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just done.

  “Louis,” said Gideon. Cockayne was bleeding heavily from his stomach. He opened one eye and grinned.

  Blood poured from his mouth.

  “It’s all right, Louis,” said Gideon gently. “The cavalry’s here.”

  “Good old cavalry,” said Louis, then coughed, more blood bubbling up from his mouth, frothing at his mustache. “Blaze of glory, eh, Gideon? Now go. Go get your dragon.”

  “We did it,” said Gideon. “You did it. Just hold on. They’ll get help. They’ve got a covered wagon.”

  Cockayne shook his head. Behind Gideon, he heard Maria shouting. He was dimly aware of Pinch, on the edge of his vision, stalking away from them. Toward the dragon. “It’s too late, Gideon. He got me. Don’t let all this have been for nothing. The dragon…”

  Gideon felt tears sting at his eyes. “No. No, Louis. You said you were going to teach me how to shoot.”

  Cockayne shook his head, his eyelids fluttering. “You don’t need me, Gideon. You’re what they say yo
u are.”

  Gideon strangled a sob. He did need Louis Cockayne. Louis Cockayne was a pirate and a thief and a self-serving bastard, but … Gideon couldn’t bear to see another one of his friends die. No one had told him it would be like this. No one had said everybody would die.

  “You’re the Hero of the Empire, Gideon,” whispered Cockayne. “I taught you all I know, kid. Time you stood on your own two feet. Don’t be a follower anymore. Be your own man.” He coughed again, more blood oozing between his cracked lips. “Remember what I said, a lifetime ago? Be prepared…”

  Gideon nodded, tears clouding his eyes. “And if you can’t be prepared…”

  “Be lucky,” finished Cockayne, suddenly becoming heavier in Gideon’s arms. “I can see the corn waving in the breeze.” Cockayne opened his eyes again and focused on him. “Be lucky, Gideon.”

  Then he was gone.

  * * *

  “Gideon!” He looked up at the sound of Maria’s voice. She was letting off shots at Pinch, who was stalking toward her. Why wasn’t she in the dragon? She could have had it in the air by now.

  “Get in,” he screamed, laying Cockayne down and sprinting toward her. “Get in Apep, get it airborne!”

  She shook her head tightly at him, firing her last bullet at Pinch then tossing the gun away. She climbed through the broken eye porthole into the cockpit just as Gideon leaped onto the tarpaulin-covered wing, dodging a ricocheting bullet from Pinch’s gun, then threw himself along the cantilevered neck and over the head, swinging himself around to join Maria.

  He had not been inside the cockpit before, and he didn’t have the luxury of more than a cursory glance around. There was one seat, in wood and fragile animal hide, before a rudimentary dashboard. Snaking into the floor of the cockpit was a thick, flexible metal hose. Gideon held it up, but Maria shook her head. “I do not need to be connected directly to the dragon anymore, Gideon. Not since … well, not since whatever happened, happened. I just need the artifacts.”

  The tarnished metal panel had indentations for all the artifacts that had been scattered across the globe until the dread Children of Heqet had collected them all for the insane Dr. John Reed. Each one was laid in its housing. The ring that had sealed poor old Annie Crook’s fate. The jeweled box, hidden beneath the cliffs in Sandsend, for which his father died. The golden scarab, stolen from Castle Dracula, which had set the vampire Countess Bathory on her quest for vengeance. The small, crude funerary shabti figure, stolen from the British Museum.