by Devon Monk
“Get out of the way, you damn fool!” a man’s voice yelled.
Cedar blinked and it seemed that the entire world came burning back around him with singular heat and color and light. The vision of Father Kyne was gone.
“Something wrong with your ears?” the man yelled again.
Cedar peered down the other end of the street behind him. Seven men stood in the street, wearing dark-lensed goggles, heavy leather coats and boots, and overlarge gloves more suited to smelting metal. They held wide-muzzled shotguns equipped with copper tubes that connected to a box, which was slung over their shoulders like bulky canteens.
A soft green fire licked around the edges of those copper tubes. Glim. Those guns were powered by glim.
“Mr. Hunt?” a familiar voice asked. “Is that you?”
Cedar recognized the figure driving the steam carriage at the back of the line of men. It was Sheriff Burchell. He also wore goggles, a heavy coat, and a thick scarf around his neck. He carried a slightly different version of the copper-box gun, this one slender with a bayonet fixed at the end.
“I’d move aside, Mr. Hunt. There’s trouble in the air tonight, and you don’t want to be on the wrong end of our guns.”
He said it affably enough, but he was dead serious.
Cedar managed to lead his horse over to Mae’s wagon, which she had tucked up tight against a feedstore.
Wil followed, silent in the darkness. He somehow kept his horse in hand, and stopped next to Cedar.
“Who’s that?” Wil said quietly.
“The sheriff,” Cedar replied.
“Don’t like him.”
“Neither do I,” Cedar said. Then, “Is there something I can help you with, Sheriff?”
“Have an entire posse of men to help me, Mr. Hunt,” Burchell called out over the huffing boiler of his cart. “And you’re about to see just what my forces can do.”
The rumbling beneath their feet grew louder, and brought with it the eerie trumpet call that stroked higher and higher until it was a piercing whine.
The Strange screamed and sobbed. They were crying. Whether from pain or fear or loss, Cedar did not know. But the lawmen spread their feet as if bracing for a wave, and toggled the triggers on their guns.
“Steady,” the sheriff said, his voice loud and strong. “And…fire!”
Seven guns shot out lace-fine netting that crackled with pure bolts of glim.
Seven nets caught seven Strange. And since the Strange were little more than spirits, once the copper and glim struck them, they lit up with an eerie green glow and even Cedar could see them.
Mae gasped, seeing, Cedar knew, for just that moment, the Strange as he and Wil always saw them. He supposed the men with guns saw them too.
“Draw!” the sheriff shouted. “Ready for the rush.”
The men reeled in the nets, fast as starving fishermen, dragging the Strange down the street toward them. Once the nets were in reach, they triggered another lever on the gun and the bellows on the side pumped, sucking the Strange into the copper box.
With a flick of levers, the nets were ratcheted back into the firing chambers and the copper wires snapped with glim again.
“They’ll never be fast enough for the rest,” Wil said.
“The rest?” Cedar asked.
Wil pointed. “The Strange. That mob of them. You don’t see them?”
Cedar shook his head slowly. “No.”
Wil gave him a sideways glance. “That’s not like you.”
“Maybe it’s the magic,” Cedar said. “How many Strange do you see?”
“Dozens. They aren’t crying anymore. They’re attacking.”
Cedar did not move. Neither did Wil. It was disconcerting, almost surreal, to just stand aside while other men fought the Strange, Strange who only became visible to Cedar when the nets struck true.
Those goggles the men wore gave them some kind of sight that picked Strange off the bones of shadows. And those guns fired again, nets snapping, glim crackling, and men reeling in their eerie catch.
But there were twice as many Strange as there were men.
The sheriff stood behind the wheel of the buggy. He’d put his gun down and was tapping on a telegraph key mounted near the buggy’s steering wheel. His fingers flew through code, slinging messages.
Just before the wave of Strange should be upon him, just when Wil told Cedar they had surged past the men he hid behind, suddenly the Strange were gone.
“Blown out like a light,” Wil said.
At that same instant, the moment when the sheriff’s fingers stiffened to a halt, the underground call went silent.
Only the ticking metal of the net guns’ gears rolling the remaining nets into position broke the quiet. Then, from some far off corner in the city, a piano picked out a rambling tune.
The sheriff laughed. “Well done, gentlemen! Well done, indeed. I’d say the citizens of Des Moines are safe for the night. We’ll patrol the streets until dawn, but I’d wager we won’t see more of those nightmares.”
“Is that what those things were?” Cedar asked. “Nightmares?”
Sheriff Burchell tugged at his goggles, and let them fall down into the scarf he wore around his neck. Across the darkened intersection of roads, Cedar could see his smile, friendly as a coyote.
“What you just saw was some of the troubles a civilized town falls upon in this modern age. That was the Strange, Mr. Hunt. I’d think you’d have run across them in your travels.”
“That was more than I’ve ever seen in once place,” Cedar said. “What brings them on like that? Coal? Or is it want for those fancy copper-and-glim guns you have there?”
The sheriff paused, still smiling, but there was something different about how he held himself, as if steel had staked his spine in place.
“Maybe it’s nothing but the moon, Mr. Hunt,” he said, his voice barely glossing over the anger he held in check there. “You know what an odd master it can be. Brings out all sorts of unnatural things at night. Unnatural things in men too.”
“And children?” Cedar asked. “Do you suppose the full moon sends children wandering out of town into the cold arms of winter?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Hunt,” he said with what almost sounded like real concern. “I’ve seen to it that we have patrols of men on the streets every night. Folk have taken to tying their children to the bedpost and locking every door and window. And still there are empty cradles in the morning. I don’t think that’s the moon’s fault. I blame the very creatures we just burned off of the street.”
“Burned?”
“Those guns carry boxes packed with hot coals. Once the Strange are sucked in there, they never come back out. Like straw up a chimney flue.”
“You’ve thought this through,” Cedar noted.
“You can thank the mayor for that. He knows what’s best for this town, and sets to seeing that it’s done. But now we have roads to cover. Good night to you and yours, Mr. Hunt.”
He pressed the throttle down, and the carriage rumbled to life, the back stacks puffing a thick cloud of smoke that rolled upward like the edge of an ocean wave, silvered by the moonlight. The other men turned and followed him.
“Well, he was unpleasant, wasn’t he?” Wil said.
“He knows something,” Mae said. “Something about the children, I think. But he is right: there is no power the full moon can give to take children away.”
“What about a spell?” Cedar asked.
“Witches?” Mae didn’t sound very surprised. Cedar wondered if she’d been thinking that could be a possible cause for the children’s disappearance for some time now. “It’s…I think there are some spells that can send someone wandering. And the full moon brings most magic strength. But magic doesn’t lend to wicked ends. The very practice of magic is peaceful, gentle. Tried and true.”
“What did you just say?” Cedar asked, as a memory slipped through his mind.
“Magic is gentle?”
“The last thing.”
“Tried and true.”
He had heard those words before. Heard them from a man. “Is that a saying among witches? That magic is tried and true?”
Mae nodded. “I suppose it is. When I lived in the coven we said it often enough. The old spells are the best for they are tried and true. Why?”
“I’ve heard it recently. From a man. But I can’t remember where or who.”
“Father Kyne?” Wil suggested.
Cedar shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s something more. It feels important.”
“Well, the trail’s gone cold. No more ribbons of light,” Wil said.
The side of Cedar’s neck stung, and he cupped his palm over it to ease that pain.
“So how about we follow that trail instead?” Wil pointed to the mouth of an alley, at the figure standing there. Not a man—well, not a man made of flesh and bones. It was a Strange, the Strange Cedar had seen three times now.
Instead of bits of wood and dirt, it was made of things found in the city. Scraps of cloth, torn newspaper, and wrappers off bottles and crates that formed the arms, legs, and body, along with bits of wire, rusty nails, a broken watch fob, and a sparkle of glass. All those pieces seemed to be constantly moving, as if a small wind tangled them together to make the humanish shape of the creature.
Even with all those castaway bits of life giving it shape, the eyes were not human. And they were very much not alive.
They were nothing but the ghostly light of the Strange. It raised one hand. And in that hand was the pink ribbon—Florence’s ribbon.
Then it opened its mouth and whispered softly, “Help her.”
Rose’s arm was getting a little tired, raised as it was, holding her gun trained on the opposite door of the railcar.
“Hink,” she said quietly.
“Mmm?”
“It’s been near half an hour. I don’t think anyone’s opening these doors.”
He shifted behind her, taking a step forward. “I’ll have a look.”
While he did that, she walked to the stack of crates and stepped over the puppet man lying on his back and staring at the ceiling as if he had a head with which to stare.
“Dark out. I can’t see anything in particular. Ship fans have gone quiet,” he noted.
“We should go now, before we’re noticed,” Rose said.
“Do you still have that torch?”
“I think so. But do you think we could just go out through the roof instead? Quieter that way.”
Hink struck flint to steel and Rose winced, expecting another one of the many flares he’d been throwing around lately. But this time it was just a single flicker of light, a wick caught to flame. He held it up, walked to the highest stack of crates, and studied the ceiling.
He kept the light low, but it was night out and the freight car had the two holes Rose had burned into the doors. Also, the walls themselves weren’t exactly air tight. If there was someone watching out in that dark, they’d see slants of light slipping out of the freight car, and that would surely send them searching.
“You up to climbing?” Hink asked.
“If it means getting out of this box, I am.” Rose plucked a signal light off the wall and held up the glass chimney while he lit it.
The lantern light seemed like a whole sun compared with the little flame he’d been using. It was easy enough to find a rope, and Hink was a dead aim throwing it out the hatch in the roof they’d come down through.
“I’ll go up first,” he said. “If it takes my weight, it will take yours. Once I’ve reached the top, tie this end of the rope around your ribs, and I’ll help pull you up.”
“I know how to climb,” Rose said.
He nodded. “Good. But tie it anyway. I don’t know how much time we’ll have once I top that roof.”
He tugged on the rope one more time, then held on to it while he climbed the height of the boxes stacked along the wall. He hoisted himself up the rope, hand over hand, with impressive speed. Rose was once again reminded that Hink was an airship captain, and likely spent more than half his time crawling over ropes and riggings. Of course he was quick at the climb.
His boots disappeared over the top. After a pause, he leaned over the hatch. “Come on up. Quick now.”
Rose blew out the lantern, set it at her feet, and tied the rope in a loop under her arms. She made sure her skirts were tied up and out of the way and thought, not for the first time, that Molly Gregor, Hink’s recently departed boilerman, had it right by wearing men’s trousers. As soon as Rose had a chance to do so, she was changing back into her practical overalls. The modern adventurer didn’t need fluff and ruffles. She needed good boots, a reliable pair of suspenders, and a level head on her shoulders.
Rose was good to her word and climbed the rope while Hink hauled back on it, bringing her over the top of the train car with more speed than she’d expected.
She sat and Hink let go of the rope and crouched down next to her. “Are you okay?”
“Good as glim,” she whispered back. Rose worked the knot on the rope. “Any idea where we are?”
“Too dark to see much, but I heard the airship fans fade off east of us, and that”—he pointed—“looks to be a work shed or factory of some sort.”
“So people might be that way,” Rose said, pulling the rope off and tossing it back down into the freight car. Hink did one better and tugged the other end of the rope free and kicked it down the hatch.
“I reckon,” Hink agreed. “Town should be that way. My guess is Des Moines.”
“So we go to town?”
“We find a telegraph office.”
“Why?”
Hink stood and offered her his hand, which she took. They crossed to the side of the freight car, to the rungs set down the side, which they could use as a ladder.
“I have information that needs passing along. That thing in there? It’s something my superiors want to know about. Telegraph will be quickest.” Hink lowered himself down the side, feet sure on the rungs. He was on the ground in an instant.
Rose followed, cussing a bit under her breath as her boots got tangled in her skirts.
“Problem?” he asked when she reached the ground.
“I’m just thinking Molly Gregor was smart to wear men’s trousers, with all the climbing and cavorting that goes into this sort of life.”
Hink tightened just a bit. The death of his crew member still hurt, even though it had been months ago, and not his fault.
“She was one of a kind,” Hink said kindly. “And smart.”
“Yes,” Rose said, “she was. I might even buy myself some tailored trousers that I could wear about town. Something more sleek and fitted than all this fluff.”
Hink had taken a step and stopped. He looked back over his shoulder with a grin. “Woman, why did you go and have to put that vision in my head?” He started off again. “I do not have time for such distractions.”
Rose smiled and followed on his heels. The freight car had been placed surprisingly accurately on a rail spur, which connected to a line that ran parallel to the warehouse they had seen from the top of the car. At this late hour, no trains appeared to be coming or going, and the airship that had transported the car here was not visible in the sky.
Hink moved from shadow to shadow with clear purpose. He wasn’t going toward town. He was headed straight to the warehouse.
“Wait,” Rose whispered when they paused by an empty wagon. “Why aren’t we following the rail or road into town?”
He pointed at the telegraph pole standing at one corner of the warehouse. “Telegraph line. Shouldn’t be manned this time of night. I’ll send the message here, then we’ll bolt to town.”
“Is the homunculus that important?”
“Yes.”
Hink strode away from the wagon, straight toward the warehouse. Rose supposed if someone came along to stop him, he’d tell them he was a U.S. Marshal here to inspect the place. Or, jus
t as likely, he’d hit them in the face and consider that explanation enough.
They rounded the corner of the warehouse. Four doors were spaced up the length of the building, the one at the farthest end looking the most likely to lead to an office.
That’s where Hink was walking.
Rose followed. The only windows were up higher than her head, and all of them were dark and still. If this was a working warehouse and not just a place of storage, then it was silent and waiting for dawn to bring its workers back. She had heard of many big businesses in big cities keeping at least one person on the grounds to watch for robbers and other undesirables, but since this building was so far from town, she doubted anyone would leave portable valuables behind.
And though some factories chugged away through the night, this place was silent.
Just before they reached the door, a man stepped out of it. He tugged his bowler hat down tight, then looked ahead and behind.
And saw Hink, who had closed the distance between them.
“Hey!” the man said, startled.
Hink grabbed hold of his arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him up against the warehouse. “What are you doing out here at this time of night, friend?” he asked.
“I’m…I’m.” The man paused. Just as Rose recognized his voice.
“Mr. Wicks?” she said.
“Ms. Small?” He twisted to try to see her, but Hink pressed a little harder, keeping him in place.
“It’s Thomas,” Rose said. “Let him go.”
Hink didn’t seem to be listening. “What are you doing here? I thought you were up in first class sipping tea in your stocking feet.”
“Well, there was a robbery.…”
“Yes, I recall,” Hink said. “Shot a man for trying to nick my valuables. What I’m wondering is just how much you are involved in the whole thing. Seeing as how you obviously took a smoother ride to this warehouse than we did.”
“I’m not—” He grunted as Hink pressed a little harder. “For the love of decency, Mr. Hink. Will you please let go of me so I can explain?”
