Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel

by Adina, Shelley

“Ah, now we are getting somewhere.” Evan leaned forward. “And then?”

  “I approached this person, and as I came closer, I realized she was looking for something, too, searching the waysides and ranging back and forth a little way into the desert, as I had been.”

  “She?” Evan repeated. “Who was it?”

  An expression of disgust creased the other man’s face. “Una bruja. A witch, with a painted face and a skirt of white. Yet she wore a man’s waistcoat and boots and hat. A caricature of a woman, neither one sex nor the other.”

  “She was looking for what the Viceroy had lost, too?”

  “Si. And my urgency increased. I must find it before she did, or there would be disaster. And then I thought—no, this is not a race—I can simply kill her and get on with my search. So I unsheathed my sword and ran at her.”

  It did not take an expert in dreams to interpret that.

  “Did she flee?”

  “No.” The commander got up and poured himself another brandy, waving his majordomo back into his place before the door. The lip of the decanter tinkled on the rim of the glass before he replaced it on the sideboard. “She changed into a dragon, a giant metal dragon, growing and roaring with the fire in her furnace-like belly. Her long snake’s neck reared back and flung a great gobbet of fire at me, and though I raised my sword to defend myself, it melted. The fire burned off my hand and raced up my arm, and as it engulfed me, I screamed … and woke myself up.”

  Evan sat silently, the image vivid in his mind, while the other man tossed back the brandy and gave a sigh.

  “So. What am I to conclude, senor? That I am to die a fiery death, or merely that I must avoid eating the small red chiles with my dinner henceforth?”

  “Neither, sir … though in my mind, it would not hurt to leave those dreadful red vegetables alone. I believe your unconscious mind is sending you a message.”

  “And?”

  “What is it that your forces here and the witches both seek? What belonging to the Viceroy are the two sides most interested in?”

  He thought a moment. “The river. The land. Trade.”

  “To my knowledge, the witches have no interest in land or trade, outside of what they need to live on.”

  “There you are wrong. They seek to control the river, and he who controls that has power over the other two.”

  Evan sat back. “You have said it, sir. Power.”

  “But the Viceroy has not lost his power. If anything, it only increases every day with our work here.”

  “But who is really in charge of the Royal Kingdom?” He must tread carefully here. He had no idea of the man’s loyalties. He could toss Evan into the pit or have him executed as easily as he took his next breath, should Evan make one misstep. But he had been commanded to interpret, and perhaps the truth would set him free. “Is it he, or is it the Ambassador, Senor de Aragon?”

  The commander’s eyes widened, and he flicked a glance at the majordomo. “You speak treason, senor.”

  “I do no more than give voice to what your own mind is telling you.”

  “It is a lie.”

  “Perhaps. Mine is an uncertain science, and there is not as yet much research into the workings of the brain. But if you believe the Viceroy has lost his power, and both you and the witches are seeking to find it and give it back to him, then I wonder whose loyalties are really illuminated here? For there is no treason in being loyal to one’s prince.”

  “Sir,” the majordomo whispered, “you must not let this man speak such things aloud.”

  The commander cleared his throat. “And what of the dragon? What of this witch who has the power to melt a sword of Damascene steel and burn me to death?”

  “I do not know,” Evan confessed. “But perhaps it is part and parcel of what we have just said. If the Californios do not make peace with the witches in your prince’s name, perhaps it may mean the melting of many swords and death to many men.”

  The majordomo chuckled. “You place too much importance on the feeble powers of women, sir. Las brujas are only beggars and outlaws.”

  And yet the Ambassador himself was afraid of them. “De Aragon wishes to exterminate them, so they must be some threat to him. He believes they possess magic.”

  “He believes they possess gold,” the commander said bitterly. “And to some, that is all the magic any ruler requires. You have my thanks, senor. I will think upon what you have said.”

  Evan would have asked him more, but the interview was clearly at an end. So he gave his best society bow, and the majordomo and the guards escorted him along the colonnade and out into the parade ground. When they would have twisted up his arm for the return march, the majordomo shook his head.

  “Leave him. He has done the commander a service, and you will no longer treat him like a miscreant.”

  The guards exchanged a glance, then nodded. Evan was escorted back to his cell in silence, though the taller one couldn’t resist giving him a shove in the back when he hesitated on the threshold of the cell.

  His three mates were awake, their eyes gleaming in the retreating light of the lantern. “Didn’t expect to see you back,” Joe whispered as the sound of boots faded. “What happened?”

  “They wanted me to interpret a dream.” Even to himself, it still felt unreal.

  “Whose dream?” Barney said. “And did you?”

  He settled onto his pallet, feeling suddenly exhausted. “I did. The fort commander had a nightmare. He met a witch in the road who turned into a dragon and burned him up. That was the scream we heard.”

  For the first time since he had been imprisoned, Evan was startled to hear Joe laugh. It was a high, unrestrained sound, dancing on the edge of hysteria.

  “Shut up!” Barney told him savagely. “Do you want to bring them down on us? Evan, how did you interpret that?”

  “The witch and he were both looking for something the Viceroy had lost. His power, I believe.” He gazed at them. “Gentlemen, I am convinced that when push comes to shove, the Ambassador may not command the loyalty we thought he did. There seem to be those who see him for what he is—grasping at a kingdom that does not belong to him. Who do not support him in their hearts, despite their building of dams and imprisoning of travellers. And that just might be turned to our advantage.”

  “If we can stay alive long enough to make it turn,” Barney observed.

  Yes. There was that.

  Chapter 5

  Alice, Lady Hollys, had never really understood what compelled her best friend, Lady Claire Malvern, to cross entire continents and set the captains of industry at naught in order to come to the assistance of the people she cared about.

  She understood now.

  They had had a busy couple of days in Resolution, the dusty riverbed ruin in the Texican Territory in which she had been born and raised (if one could use that word). The town, such as it was, had nearly been destroyed by the battle between the air pirates and the mercenaries guarding the Californio Ambassador’s train. Even yet, the funeral pyre of the soldiers who had been killed by the desert flowers prior to their departure still smoked. When the wind was right, well, you simply moved upwind before the smell of charred human remains got to you.

  “Captain?”

  Alice turned from her dismal contemplation of the bonfire to see her navigator, Jake Fletcher McTavish, leaning against a rock looking filthy and exhausted. Since she was also filthy and exhausted, she belatedly wished she’d laid claim to the rock first.

  “We’ve finished loading the crates of the mechanical horses and hunting cats.” Jake wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve. “Captain Hollys wants to know how much of the other cargo—bullets, rifles, and such—we’ll take. He says the Texican army can use them immediately if they find they need to.”

  “The army doesn’t believe in mechanical horses?” she asked rhetorically. Across the rutted field, the tall figure of her husband of only a week hefted long wooden crates of arms onto the last operating vehicle in
Resolution—a steamcart they’d found in one of Ned Mose’s sheds. “They prefer to send living creatures to their deaths in battle?”

  “I have to admit I’d like to see one in action.”

  “Uncrate one, then, and have at it.”

  Jake’s exhaustion vanished. “For true, Captain?”

  Sometimes her cynical, frighteningly competent navigator was just a nineteen-year-old boy who loved to tinker. She smiled in spite of herself. “For true. Take Benny with you. Once you get one going, I’ll come and have a look. Might be a valuable thing to know how they work, one of these days.”

  If the Texican Territories actually went to war with the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. If Gloria wasn’t dead, and she succeeded in her mission to stop it. If Evan and she were together and could help one another.

  If. Alice was coming to hate that pallid yet powerful word.

  Never mind. She and Ian and Jake and Benny, her newly promoted gunner, had their work cut out for them here. The Texicans didn’t believe their neighbors to the west were preparing for war. They could deliver all these armaments to them in Santa Fe as proof, but the odds of Alice being recognized not as Lady Hollys, but as Alice Chalmers, the daughter of air pirate Ned Mose and the woman who had sprung a prisoner from their blasted pinnacle cells, were pretty high. The less she showed her mug there, the better.

  With a deep breath, she forced her tired limbs to move down the slope to where Ian was loading the cart.

  “Where has Jake gone?” Ian stretched, as though his back had kinks in it. He didn’t resemble a baronet in the least. While his face bore the lines at the corners of the eyes that all aeronauts did, from gazing into the clouds, and his face was tanned from years of flying, his body was muscled from hard work and capable of pulling the heavy crates out of the train cars and on to the cart with one heave. No smooth hands and fashionable dancing shoes for her man, no sir.

  “I’ve set him and Benny to firing up one of the horses,” she said, coming around the corner of the cart and giving him a kiss just because. Besides, the Hollys sapphire flanked with two diamonds set in gold on the fourth finger of her left hand said she could. “You never know when it might be handy to know how to ride one.”

  “Are you planning to lead a charge?”

  “No, but you know what happens to the best laid plans.”

  “I do indeed. So when the boys satisfy their curiosity and yours, I still believe we ought to deliver the lot to Santa Fe.”

  “You’d be on your own, then. I’m confined to quarters when Robert Van Ness is within five miles.” The commander in charge of the garrison knew her smiling face all too well. “Besides, how do we know they’d use them to defend the border? They might send them to Mexico City to fend off trouble there.”

  “That is a concern, I grant you.” Ian gazed into her dirty face as though he didn’t even see the grease and dust. “But I have a feeling you have already made an alternate plan.”

  She smiled into his eyes. “As a matter of fact …”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Alaia’s people are scattered across the mesas and canyons from here to the Rio de Sangre Colorado de Christo. If I’ve heard one tale of caves full of gold, I’ve heard a dozen, but the caves do exist. What better place to stash a hold full of arms than in the country that will need them, with people who may not get so much as a glance from the army once war is declared?”

  He considered this, examining the question from every side. “You have a point.”

  “I usually do. And these folks aren’t savages. They’re as capable of using steam and metal as anyone—why, I saw one of Alaia’s boys riding a version of a mechanical horse when we left Santa Fe. It was mostly for show, but still.”

  “I thought you were half unconscious,” he said with a laugh. “Trust you to perk up when there’s a mechanical device anywhere near.”

  A whoop drew their attention across the battlefield to Swan, who bobbed at her lines with her cargo ramp down to receive the contents of the wrecked train. Jake and Benny had a crate open and its packing material scattered all over the ground, much to the joy of their three hens, Mrs. Morse, Soot, and Rosie the Second, who were already belly-deep in seed heads and dry hay.

  With the legs on, the mechanical horse’s withers were taller than Jake, who was no shrimp. The way he went through food, he was going to be as tall as Ian soon.

  “He’s going to need help to get the head on and the guns installed,” Alice said, one hand shading her eyes. “Come on. I have to see this.”

  The boys might have had no trouble with the mechanical’s legs, but the rest of it was both heavy and complicated. It took Alice and her crew the rest of the afternoon to put the thing together, and when it was finished, there was no doubt it was a thing of beauty.

  A terrifying beauty.

  Its bones were pistons, its tendons and muscles plates and hydraulic tubing. When Jake completed its ignition sequence, steam issued from its nostrils. The operator rode behind the head and neck, just over the engine, which was protected by armored plate, and from where he operated a matched set of repeating guns and a rocket launcher mounted in the chest.

  Alice set her wrench down on a rock and looked around for the hens, who had deserted their hay when the mechanical had begun to steam.

  “Well, Jake, it’s ready for you to ride.”

  “Me?” He looked horrified and elated at the same time.

  “This was your idea. It’s only fair you should take it for its maiden voyage. Just don’t go too far. If something fails, we’ll never be able to drag the monster back here.”

  Jake scrambled up the left side foreleg, where pegs protruded from the plates, and settled into the metal saddle. “For my next order,” he said, “I’ll ask if these come in a pony model. It’s a wee bit big for me.”

  Truly, he did look like a child mounted on a Clydesdale.

  “Where is the acceleration bar?” His hands settled naturally on a pair of levers in front of his knees. “Never mind. I think I found it. The neck seems to act as a shield, and these braces here—” He indicated them by giving them a kick. “—protect my legs.”

  He pressed the levers forward and the horse began to move—not, as one would expect, like a horse might in the flesh, but as the wheels of a locomotive did, under moving pistons and turning gears. Faster and faster the legs moved, Jake whooping in exhilaration with an edge of alarm, down the length of the field to the riverbed, along it, and then in a wide turn, back again.

  He took aim at one of the empty, ruined houses and yanked on a handle. With a whine and a shriek, a rocket sang out of a tube running under the length of the mechanical’s stomach. It detonated on the house with a blast that made Alice cover her ears and yell, dropping to the ground in fright with Ian’s arms tightly around her, while the three chickens flung themselves up the ramp into Swan’s belly in a flapping cacophony of alarm. When Alice clambered to her feet again, it was to see Jake, white as smoke, hauling the machine to a stop near Swan’s stern.

  The rocket had destroyed not only the house, but the entire cluster of its neighbors—Ned Mose’s included—leaving nothing but a smoking crater. Dust and soot spiraled thickly into the air in a cloud like a grave marker.

  “Sorry,” Jake said hoarsely.

  Ian closed his mouth with a snap. “Do not be sorry. We wanted to know its capabilities, and now we do. I must say, I would not wish a weapon like this leading the charge at the head of the wrong army.”

  “She was right to want to stop this,” Jake said, climbing down much more slowly than he’d gone up. “What kind of monster could conceive of such a thing, much less sell it to the highest bidder to use on innocent people?”

  By she, Alice could only guess he meant Gloria. “The more I think of it, the more I’m convinced these mechanicals don’t belong with the Texicans. It’s lucky they don’t believe us. Can you imagine what would happen if they decided someday to take a war into the Canadas? Or
to the Navapai?” It did not bear thinking of. “Maybe we should disassemble everything and melt it all down.”

  “Once the war is decided one way or another, I think that an excellent plan,” Ian said. “Either that, or refit this thing into some kind of cargo conveyance.”

  “It was built for war,” Jake said flatly. “I for one volunteer to send one of its own bombs into the whole lot and then set a course for home once we’re finished here.”

  “Done,” Alice said.

  “I shall hold you to it, Captain,” he warned. Something in his tone told her he was utterly serious—that in fact, he might have Gloria in his mind at that very moment, and the impossible mission she had set out to accomplish.

  “I hope you will,” she said mildly. “Now, let’s get this thing into the bottom-most cargo bay, where the landaus go. It won’t fit in any of the others, and I don’t fancy wasting the rest of the day taking it apart again when we might have to use it sooner than we think.”

  Luckily the mechanical had a non-attack mode meant for simple movement, and Jake used the other lever to steer it into the largest bay, where he made it kneel amidships. They tied it down so it would not fall over and send poor Swan heeling with the massive shift of weight. The crates where the other members of its herd lay in pieces were arranged about it, to keep the weight distributed evenly and Swan in trim.

  Then at last it was time to pull up ropes and take crew positions. Alice gazed out the viewing port at what was left of Resolution—ruined houses with shabby wood tops and stone bottoms as a safeguard against the flash flooding, a smoking crater, and a broad field pitted with bomb blasts and littered with unusable steam chariots and pieces of rail car.

  She was never coming back here again. With a feeling of relief and a glance at her husband, she pushed the lever that sent power from the boilers into the engines. “Vanes full vertical, please. Up ship!”

  And they fell into the sky, wallowing a little with the sheer weight of the mechanicals in the hold.

  “Course, Captain?” Jake asked formally from the navigation table.