Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (10 page)

Pinch appraised him for a moment. “You're one cool motherfucker, Cockayne,” he said. “You could do well in Steamtown. I've always got an opening for a man like you. A real good opening, right by my side.”

Cockayne cast an eye at Inkerman, who grunted uncomfortably. Cockayne tipped him a wink as Pinch continued, “All you have to do is talk, Louis. Talk to me.”

“I've told you all I can, Thaddeus.”

Pinch sighed. “Take him back to the pen.”

Inkerman and three of the thugs waved their guns at Cockayne, and he moved ahead of them to the swing doors that let out on to the dusty street, illuminated by oil lamps and ringing with the sounds of the coal mines that surrounded the center of San Antonio working into the night.

Pinch said, “Same time tomorrow. If you lose, I will kill you, you know.”

Cockayne shrugged. “No you won't. Not while you think I know something.”

Pinch turned away from him. “Don't be too sure, Louis. Just tell me everything you know about that goddamn dragon before it's too late.”

*   *   *

The pen was a single-story stone building on the edge of town, nestled between two strip-mining sites where slaves toiled day and night to bring up the coal that powered Steamtown. It was one big cell, windowless, with iron bars dividing it from a thin office. Inkerman was the nominal sheriff of San Antonio, but since the former governor had driven Steamtown's secession from British America along with the other Texas townships back in 'fifty, law in the town had been a brutal, ad hoc affair. Justice was delivered swiftly and mostly without ceremony, at the end of a gun or a rope, and often at the whim of Pinch (who'd taken over the family business from his daddy), Inkerman, or one of the revolving cadre of deputies. As a result, the pen was rarely in use—imprisonment not often being a sentence passed down by Steamtown's law enforcers—and Louis Cockayne was currently its sole guest.

Inkerman chewed on a strip of beef jerky and regarded Cockayne with his little rat eyes, leaning his fat ass on the corner of the desk in the office. The door leading outside was tantalizingly open, the sounds of the Steamtown night drifting in on the warm breeze, but the cell gates were locked resolutely tight. As if to drive home the fact, Inkerman twirled the metal ring jangling with half a dozen keys around his pinky, then clipped it to his gun belt—from which Cockayne's revolvers hung.

“I have a very long shit-list these days, Inkerman, and you're right at the top of it,” said Cockayne quietly, glaring through the bars.

The sheriff snorted. “Pinch'll get your dragon to fly with or without you, Cockayne. The best you can hope for is a quick death.” He stroked his battered holsters. “Might even use your own guns on you.”

Cockayne patted his pockets—not for weapons, since he'd been summarily stripped of anything he might use against Pinch or his men—but for his cigarillos. He located one and beckoned to Inkerman. “Light?”

Inkerman grunted, but Cockayne had heard full well Pinch telling the fat idiot that Cockayne might be a prisoner, but he was an old friend of Steamtown, and had to be treated with a bit of respect … as long as he was alive. Inkerman pulled out a box of matches and said, “You know the drill.”

Cockayne raised an eyebrow then pushed his face, the cheroot between his teeth, into the gap between the bars. He raised his hands backward, fingers splayed, so Inkerman could see he wasn't hiding anything. Inkerman struck a match and held it at arm's length while Cockayne puffed on the cigarillo, then backed off again.

“You're still scared of me,” said Cockayne through a cloud of bluish smoke.

“I ain't a cretin.” Inkerman shrugged.

Cockayne watched him through narrowed eyes for a moment then turned away. Inkerman said, “I'm going back to the saloon. There are three boys outside who would love to blow your nuts off. Best just go to sleep, Cockayne, and think of how you're going to make your dragon fly.”

*   *   *

The dragon flew, all right. From London to the Gulf of Mexico it flew, in one seamless journey. It was faster than a dirigible, but the trip was still a long one. Cockayne had forced himself to stay awake because he didn't know whether his control over the dragon's strange pilot would hold if he fell asleep, and he didn't fancy waking up to find himself falling down to the dark Atlantic far below.

How
the damned thing flew, well, that was quite a different matter. Cockayne had watched from the banks of the Nile as the Rhodopis Pyramid had collapsed and the magnificent brass dragon, its wings glowing in the Egyptian sun, rose from the ruins. He'd pursued it in the
Yellow Rose
to London, where mad old John Reed planned to blow Queen Victoria and all in Buckingham Palace to kingdom come. He'd watched Gideon Smith, that spunky hick from the sticks, try to clean Reed's clock for him … and nearly get his ass handed to him on a plate until Lucian Trigger took matters into his own hands.

And he'd spotted an opportunity—he was Louis Cockayne, after all! That was what he did!—to take control of the brass dragon they called Apep and ride off into the sunset, sitting on what he knew was a winged, fire-breathing gold mine.

He just didn't have a clue how the goddamn thing stayed up in the air. Within the head of the dragon was a cockpit, fashioned by the hands of ancient Egyptian craftsmen two millennia ago. The cockpit contained one seat in age-faded cowhide before an instrument panel with five recesses. As far as Cockayne understood it, the thing had remained dormant until John Reed and his undead guardians obtained the five lost artifacts that fit those holes: a roughly hewn figure from ancient Egypt called a
shabti
; a ruby ring that had sat in the coffers of the British Royal Family for who knew how long; a small box inlaid with jewels and gems that had been buried by smugglers on the North Yorkshire coast; a golden scarab, latterly in the vaults of Castle Dracula in Transylvania; and an amulet that Reed had discovered (and which had set him on the path toward his damnation) around the neck of a mummy being studied in Boston. These were the things that somehow powered the dragon.

All that was needed to fly it was Maria.

Cockayne had to admit that even he had felt a pang of doubt right at the moment he'd stolen Apep from under the noses of the others. Maria was integral to the flying of the thing—an automaton, but damn near a real woman. Beautiful, too. She was a clockwork girl with the living brain of a murdered prostitute, but that wasn't all that was in her head, by all accounts. The key to the whole mess that had left Reed and Trigger dead was the Atlantic Artifact, a doohickey from God knew where that was somehow connected to Maria's brain by the scientist Hermann Einstein and was responsible for bringing both Maria and Apep to life.

He'd felt a pang of doubt, because that kid Gideon Smith was obviously in love with Maria, clockwork girl or not. Cockayne had seen stranger things—but not by much. He could hear the wail from Smith as he'd absconded with Maria, once he'd figured out that the only way to communicate with her was with that golden apple John Reed had stolen from the lost valley of Shangri-La up in the Himalayas. Once she was plugged into Apep, Maria somehow
was
the brass dragon—all she needed was her long-dead pharaoh Amasis to command her, and Cockayne was happy to step into that role. Thing was, it also meant that Maria spoke only ancient Egyptian, which Cockayne was a bit rusty on. Good thing the golden apple allowed the holder to speak and understand any language. Nice, useful bit of equipment, that.

Pity he'd lost it.

Cockayne had driven Maria across the Atlantic, coming in low over the coast of New Spain and up into the Texan lands below the Wall. He'd had Maria do a couple of victory rolls over San Antonio, then ordered her east, into the lower peaks of the heavily forested Appalachian Mountains. It was one thing to show off the merchandise to men like Thaddeus Pinch, but it was quite another to go flying straight into Steamtown with the goods. There was careful negotiation to be carried out first.

Cockayne had been worried about what would happen when Apep landed—Maria's clockwork body packed a mean punch. But it turned out that as long as she was plugged into the dragon, her real personality was subsumed beneath the overriding Apep identity, so he'd just left her sitting in the head of the dragon while he went to make arrangements.

They'd landed the dragon in darkness, in one of the wilder regions of the mountains. There was a one-horse town ten miles away, and he'd hidden Apep beneath some foliage and trekked there for supplies. There was no Pony Express office there, and the mail service wouldn't go within a hundred miles of San Antonio anyway. But he'd managed to buy the services of a young gun to take a message to Steamtown, offering Apep for sale to Thaddeus Pinch for the cool sum of five hundred thousand pounds.

It took two weeks for the rider to return with an answer. Cockayne had no idea how Pinch would respond—after all, he still owed the King of Steamtown a pile of money, and the one time he'd been given the opportunity to pay off his debts (by taking charge of a slaving expedition to Africa) Gideon goddamn Smith had scuppered his plan and freed his cargo in Alexandria. Thaddeus had every right to be pissed at Cockayne, but Cockayne also knew that the boss of Steamtown's interest would be piqued. Pinch had seen his little aerial display, of course, and the response he sent back with the rider was brief and to the point:
Bring me your dragon
.

So Cockayne, glad he could stop living rough like some backwoodsman, had saddled up Apep and headed west.

Which was when everything went south.

*   *   *

If Cockayne had no knowledge of how Apep flew, he had even less idea as to why the bastard thing fell out of the sky like that. One minute they were flying into the setting sun, Maria's hands playing over the control panel, pulling the invisible strings that maneuvered the brass dragon through the sky; the next she was sitting bolt upright, her pretty little features contorted in pain.

“What the hell's going on?” demanded Cockayne, then remembered he'd stowed the golden apple in his leather satchel. He retrieved it as Maria began to babble in ancient Egyptian.

“Charging complete … initiating fusion … preparing schematic download…”

Cockayne swore and rubbed the apple with his sleeve, as though it were some kind of lamp with a genie in it. “I thought this damn thing was supposed to make us speak the same language.”

“… commencing fusion…” said Maria. “Oh!”

Apep bucked wildly, throwing Cockayne off his feet. He landed hard in the brass cabin—not made for passenger comfort—and the apple rolled away from him. Maria continued to speak in a low monotone, but he could no longer understand the tongue. Not that it mattered; he had other things on his mind. The brass dragon spiraled upward and then began to dive, and the golden desert rushing toward them was the last thing Cockayne saw.

Until he woke up in Steamtown. They'd crashed fifteen miles northeast of San Antonio, by all accounts. Cockayne was beaten up, but alive. He was in a bed in a whorehouse, with Pinch standing over him, when he woke.

“I got your dragon,” said Pinch. “How about you show me how it flies, then I'll show you my money?”

The dragon had been brought in on the back of a trailer pulled by three of Jim Bowie's Steamcrawlers, which Pinch had taken possession of following Bowie's death. Cockayne didn't mention that he and John Reed had had a hand in that. Louis Cockayne had done business with Steamtown many times, but that didn't mean he was one of Pinch's cronies. He followed the money, and in the matter of Bowie, the British Crown had been paying very well indeed.

Pinch had soon enough hauled Cockayne out of his sickbed and taken him to the dragon. Louis had tapped brass plates here, twisted on joints there, rubbed his chin and hummed and
ahh
ed. But it hadn't taken Pinch long to realize that Louis was playing for time.

“What the hell's up, Cockayne?” Pinch had demanded. “You busted the goddamn thing? This is exactly as we found it.”

Cockayne touched his bandaged head. “Think I took a bad knock, Thaddeus. I'm having trouble remembering right.”

What Cockayne was really having trouble with, though, was the fact that while Apep seemed in good order, it was lacking one or two things. Namely, all the artifacts in the instrument panel and the Golden Apple of Shangri-La.

Oh, and Maria.

*   *   *

That was two weeks ago, and Thaddeus Pinch was losing patience, fast. He knew Cockayne was holding out on him, but couldn't for the life of him see why. He'd even shown Cockayne four tea chests stuffed with British pound notes. All he had to do was show Pinch how the dragon flew.

Cockayne sighed and lay down on the bunk in the cell, listening to the ever more raucous sounds of Steamtown. Without Maria, Cockayne couldn't make Apep fly. And if Apep didn't fly, Cockayne's days were numbered. Pinch might like him, but even the King of Steamtown had his limits, no matter how lucky at cards Louis Cockayne was.

He pulled his hat down over his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come.

“Oh, Maria,” he murmured. “Where the hell are you?”

 

8

O
F
M
ONSTERS
AND
M
EN

Gideon smiled absently as the maid poured him tea from a silver pot, trying to tune out Bent's retelling to no one in particular of the previous evening's events in the garden.

“It was effing amazing,” said Bent, spraying the white tablecloth with pieces of half-chewed egg. “Blam! Down went one. Blam! Another. But the third had a blade at Lyle's throat … I thought he was done for. I mean, Gideon's not a bad shot and all that, but he'd not picked a gun up until month ago. Still, I should have had faith in the Hero of the Empire.…”