Steamborn (25 page)

Jacob was surprised to see that the streetlamps were already on. His mom had said something about dinner when she brought the last round of food for them, but he hadn’t really thought about how late it was getting. He was surprised they hadn’t seen Alice yet either.

Ambrose stood outside the door. People walked by on the street behind him, and even a few carriages rattled by. Ambrose waited for Jacob to get the door pushed open a few feet before stepping inside and helping him close it again.

“Probably best not to put your gloves on display with the doors open,” Ambrose said.

“Agreed,” Charles said. He released the tensioner and lifted another nail glove off the device. “What did the city have to say?”

Ambrose frowned and cracked a knuckle on his left hand. “You have your gold, for as many as you can produce.”

Charles nodded. Jacob expected him to smile or celebrate, but all the old man did was nod.

“And?” Charles asked. “If you came here with nothing but good news, I’m sure you wouldn’t look so nervous.”

“I’m not …” Ambrose started before he sighed. “It’s just … the city smith was there. He had his hands on the glove.”

“Oh?” Charles said. “And is that prat going to create his own version now? And by ‘his own,’ I mean copy mine exactly?”

Ambrose frowned. “He said he recognized the make of the cartridge. I’m pretty sure he knows you designed it, but I swear to you I didn’t tell him.”

Charles froze. “Well, that may accelerate our timetable to some degree. The city still agreed to pay me?” Charles asked as he turned around and gripped the edge of the workbench.

“Yes.”

“Would he …” Jacob started. “Could he recognize your vacuum flask?”

“Probably,” Charles said.

Jacob grimaced and squeezed his forehead. His words tumbled out in a rush. “I dropped it in the catacombs. Benedict picked it up. He said something about knowing it was a tinker’s work, but not sure whose.”

“Damn,” Charles bit off the word.

“I’m sorry,” Jacob said. “I didn’t mean to drop it or—”

Charles held up his hand. “It is no fault of yours.” He glanced at Ambrose, and then at Jacob. “There is bad blood between us, me and the city smith.” Charles pulled off the gloves he was wearing—with little square bits of rubber worked into the fingers—before rubbing his face.

“How so?” Ambrose asked as he narrowed his eyes. “I know you’re not fond of the smith. Hell, none of us are.”

“You know his full name is Newton Burns?”

Ambrose nodded.

Jacob recoiled. Newton Burns was a name that tainted the pages of
The Dead Scourge.
His slaughter of the enemy—be them soldiers or families—earned him an apt title. He may have been hailed as a hero in Ancora after the war, but the writings of Archibald in
The Dead Scourge
painted him as a monster.

“You know he was a killer in the war?”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Ambrose said. “You kill or you die.”

Charles let out a humorless laugh. “I always hated that motto. Newton was a murderer, Ambrose.” Charles crossed his arms took a deep breath. Some of us tried to stop him during the war, tried to have him put on trial. Parliament eventually pulled him away from the front lines, but they were slow to do it. He never saw a trial for his war crimes. The ways he killed, and the people he killed … I always worried he’d come after me and mine for our interference.”

“He’s looking to make an example out of someone,” Ambrose said. “Crime has risen since the Lowlanders moved into the Highlands. He’s convinced Parliament that a public punishment would set things right.”

“Why do they even listen to his rhetoric?” Charles almost spat the words.

“He has influence,” Ambrose said quietly. “His wife’s brother runs the local police, and he’s well connected with the knights. The men and women I know in Parliament still feel he was a hero in the Deadlands War, and his opinion carries a great deal of weight because of it.

“The Butcher of Gareth Cave,” Jacob said, his voice not much above a whisper.

Charles and Ambrose both turned to him.

“Where did you hear that name?” Charles asked.

“It’s in
The Dead Scourge.
Archibald, the author, he wrote a lot about the Butcher. There’s a whole chapter in there. He’s … he’s a monster.”

Jacob shivered as he realized who he’d stolen from over the past couple years. Every time he took something from the city smith’s workshops … If he’d been caught, what would have happened?

Ambrose reached down to the back of his heavy work boots. The old leather was separating a bit, and Jacob wondered what he was doing as he peeled it down the length of his calf. Coins clinked together in the leather satchel that Ambrose had hidden away.

“A false boot?” Jacob asked.

“One of my favorites,” Ambrose said with a smile. He pulled a clasp locker closed. Some of the kids called them zippers, but Jacob always preferred its proper name. “Now then,” Ambrose said, hefting the coins and bouncing them in his hand. “This is one hundred gold.”

“A hundred?” Jacob almost shouted. He’d never seen that much money in one place before.

“How many does that cover?” Charles asked.

“Five gloves.”

Charles nodded slowly. “We were able to assemble seven today. Take five and come back in two days with five hundred gold.”

Jacob almost fell off his stool.

“Take some extra cartridges with you today. Prove to them how useful they can be. Put that bastard smith in his place.” Charles tossed one of the gloves into the air and Ambrose caught it.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Ambrose said.

“The money or the smith?”

Ambrose only smiled as he stacked the nail gloves into a leather backpack.

“I’ll have some heavier gauge gloves for you next time,” Charles said, “but they’re only for you and the repairmen. I won’t charge for them, and you shouldn’t let Parliament see them. They’ll fire bolts that can fasten steel to stone, but they could also be used as a weapon.” Charles laced his fingers together and met Ambrose’s eyes. “I did not build these things to kill.”

“Finish as many as you can by tomorrow night. I’ll bring the gold, but do me a favor?”

Charles raised an eyebrow.

“Pack your things. Whatever you need to make an escape. Whatever you may need to set up shop somewhere else. Just … just be ready.”

Jacob watched Ambrose leave and then locked the door behind him. He shivered, remembering stories of what Parliament did to those considered traitors. Jacob pulled his stool closer to the bench.

“Let’s get a few more done tonight,” Charles said. “Then I’m afraid we better get some packing done.

Jacob and Charles didn’t speak much that evening. They assembled gloves as fast as they could until Jacob almost fell asleep on a box of nails.

Charles sighed and released the tensioner as he finished the spring box for another glove. “Let’s get some sleep.”

Jacob yawned and nodded, following the old man into the house. He set the glowworms out and started packing, making sure to include some Bangers and Burners in his backpack. It wasn’t until he finished some time later that Jacob realized he was thirsty. The plush rugs and carpets silenced his footsteps when he started back down the spiral stairs.

He was almost at the bottom before he heard the voices. Jacob crouched in the shadows on the landing at the second floor. A Jumper scampered by on its way to snack or sleep or whatever it was Jumpers did in the dark places of the city. Jacob strained his ears, and could just make out Charles’s words.

“I’ve already talked to the girl’s mother, and now I’m asking for your blessing. If what Samuel just learned is in fact coming to pass—and I fear it’s true, considering what Ambrose said—they
are
going to come after us.”

“You’re asking us to let you take our son away from the protection of the city walls.” Jacob’s mom was almost hissing at Charles.

A lower, quieter voice said something, and his mom fell silent. In Jacob’s heart, he knew his dad was speaking. He couldn’t see his mom and dad. Only Charles’s white hair was visible from Jacob’s hiding spot.

“He’s right,” Charles said. “The trade routes have been shut down. I’d take you both with me if you were well, but you’re not. Bat managed to buy enough medicine to get you through a month, but then what? You won’t be able to get more where we’re going, and I believe you’ll be safe here once we’re gone.

“Damn you, Charles.” Jacob could hear the tears in his mother’s voice. “If they come for him, you take him with you. You keep him safe.”

“No one is safe, Mags” Charles said.

“Then as safe as you
can
keep him,” she said, biting off the words.

“On my word.”

Charles’s footsteps echoed when he started down the hallway. They grew louder at first, and then trailed away into the distance.

Jacob’s parents were whispering, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Why wouldn’t they be able to come too, if Jacob and Charles had to leave? His dad was better. Was he really still sick?

Jacob crept back to his room and stood in the doorway, no longer worried about being thirsty. He didn’t know what to do, but he remembered something Charles used to say. You can never have too much knowledge. Jacob picked up
The Dead Scourge.
What Charles and Ambrose had been saying put an awful new angle on one of the most terrible chapters Jacob had read. The Butcher was the city smith, and the city smith wanted to make an example out of him. The city smith wanted them dead. Jacob wanted to know more about the man. It didn’t take long to find the first chapter that mentioned him.

The Butcher of Gareth Cave. Some simply called him the Butcher, and some dared not say his name aloud, as though he’d become an omniscient specter who could find them at any time, in any place.

Little did I know, I’d already met the Butcher when I was much younger. I’d shared a classroom with him in Ancora. Our families worked the mines together. It wouldn’t have been a stretch for me to call him a friend, but whoever he’d been before the war, that boy was dead. The man I’d met, the Butcher, knew only death in his heart and steel in his hands.

While I was taken aback at the acceptance and penetration of Biomechs in the Deadlands culture, the Butcher saw it as an abomination in the gods’ eyes. His fear of them became an unyielding hatred.

Gareth Cave was what we’d call a blacksmith’s shop in Ancora, but it was also a hospital run by an old inventor who knew more about Biomechs than anyone else in the Deadlands. We were in Gareth Cave when it happened, when the Butcher earned his name in blood.

A small girl, maybe ten, maybe younger, sat patiently beneath the blade and wrench of the old inventor. She only winced while the man pivoted her leg, detaching it from the mount in her thigh. After changing a myriad of parts, the man reattached the limb and had her test the new leg by kicking a steel plate. It buckled like it had been hit by a battering ram, and the girl giggled.

She was the first to die. An axe to the forehead. The Butcher had been a smith for a few years, and he had more than enough strength to split the girl’s skull and follow through into the old inventor’s chest. There was silence in the cave following the shock of those murders. It hung in the air like a fog, until a woman screamed.

The Butcher broke her neck and then crushed her husband beneath his boot. The Biomechs there were in various states of disrepair, and though they may have been more powerful when healthy, the Butcher slaughtered them in their weakened and wounded states. I can still hear the sounds. The terrible screams, the bodies breaking, and the men shouting for him to stop. The Butcher began killing our own men, his own Ancoran blood, when they tried to stop him. He gunned them down.

I ran from that nightmare, and it is a shame that will haunt me until the end of my days. Had I tried to stop the Butcher, I would have died, but there are many days I feel that is the fate I should have embraced.

In the end, Gareth Cave was no longer a welcoming refuge for all peoples of the Deadlands. It was a grisly tomb.

Remember what he did. He is no hero.

Jacob closed his eyes. His imagination ran wild, showing him the Butcher on a rampage in the hospital, killing Peter, and the doctors and the nurses and Bobby, all because he’d made them new limbs of metal.

Sleep did not come easily.

The next day passed Jacob by in a blur of nails, springs, and mesh. They’d finished fourteen nail gloves by the time the sun started to creep below the city walls and the light seeping through the cracks in the door became an orange fire.

Jacob pushed his fingertips together and frowned.

“Sore?” Charles asked as he pulled the spring box together for the fifteenth glove.

“Yeah. I think it’s from loading all the cartridges and leveling the followers.”

“You just need to build up some calluses. Then you can do this all day.”

“I’m pretty sure we just did this all day,” Jacob muttered.

Charles laughed. “I can’t argue with that.”

“You really think Ambrose will bring five
hundred
gold?” Jacob asked.

“I do. Ambrose is well aware of the time his builders could save. His family has lived in the Lowlands for almost a century.”

Jacob could scarcely contemplate how long a century was. That would be his father’s grandfather’s grandfather? He squinted as he tried to figure it out, finally giving up with a shake of his head. “Do you mind if I go out for a bit?”

“What for?”

“Well, I need to rest my fingers, and I haven’t seen Alice at all today.”

“Worried about the little miss?”

Jacob frowned and rolled a nail across the bench. A glass jar clinked when the nail bounced off it and rolled away. “Did you talk to her parents last night?”

Charles froze in the middle of wiping his hands off on an old oily rag. “You heard that, hmm?”

“I was coming down to get a drink. I heard most of it.”

“Yes, I spoke with them. The city smith knows my work, and because of that flask, it’s a solid theory he knows it was you in the catacombs. That puts Alice in danger too.”