Copperhead (7 page)

Despite her relief, she had had experience with rescuers. Rescuing a woman was helpful, kind—but generally also an excuse on the rescuer’s part to talk to her. She appreciated his audacity, but that sort of fellow was always harder to tactfully get rid of. Telling them you were married didn’t always stop them.

And she worried that this one had followed her. How could they have coincidentally ended up on the same trolley? Was he interested in her, or did he have another, more dangerous motive for turning up twice in her life tonight?

Helen turned back from watching the boor go, pasting a pleasant smile of thanks on her face, ready to parse the man’s motives, feel him out.

But he was gone. The folks around her were watching the drunkard leave. The
dwarvven
grandmother had her knitting needles thrust outward, watching the boor leave with a fierce expression on her face. The mysterious man must have taken the opportunity to vanish in the other direction, into the crush of bodies. Helen felt oddly put out.

Attention started to shift back her way, and Helen quickly turned her gaze back to the bag, shutting out the curious stares. Focus, she told herself. Be smart for Jane. She needs you now. There’s something in here that will tell you exactly where she lives, more than vaguely
by the wharf
. There must be something in here that will help. The ironcloth, perhaps. Make a veil out of that, like Jane used to wear. That would give you some protection.

No, not you. Focus. What would help
Jane
?

The leather book had a ribbon bookmark in it. Helen opened it to that page and saw a list of names. Then suddenly, thinking, she turned the leather-bound book upside down and flapped its pages, wanting something to fall out. But there was nothing. She looked on the outside of the carpetbag to see if she could find an address, but she was not surprised not to. Jane had always been secretive. She had vanished to the city after their little brother, Charlie, died, and Helen hadn’t known where she’d gone till much later, till long after Mother died, long after Helen had given up standing by the door every night, wishing her last remaining family member would walk in.

Vanished. To the city.

To a place where she had gone for sanctuary.

Abruptly Helen stood. There was one person who might be able to direct her to her sister’s whereabouts.

*   *   *

The night was cold and Helen was tired of walking by the time she neared the foundry on the river. The factories were more here—the smell and smoke greater. But the bits of fey were fewer. Helen saw hardly any as she picked her way down the river-splashed streets, across cobblestoned patches of street as well as rutted packed dirt, hard and frosted with ice crystals. Slush patterned her stockinged legs, the tops of her feet, slid into her bronze heels. Even in the frozen air there was a thin smell of river and sewage and fish.

A form lurched up to her in the dark. Helen gasped and jumped away as its arms swung toward her like a dead thing. In a moment of stark memory she saw a battlefield long ago, saw a familiar farmer fall to the fey, then rise up just like this as a fey took over his dead body. Lurching with stiff arms, trying to make the limbs obey the new mind.

“What’s going, pretty?” said the man drunkenly. “How much then?”

Helen’s heart kept up its mad pounding rush. She did not have a jar of bugs, she did not have a rescuer, but she was not going to be helpless. In the moonlight she turned square to the man and said with all her will, “Go home. Go home.”

He wavered. “Don’t wanna go home. Wanna drink and a pretty.”

“Drink yourself into oblivion for all I care,” Helen told him. “But not with me.” She glared at him until he finally backed down, staggered away.

She breathed carefully, making her heart slow. Her silk dress and stockings were too thin for the cold air. She wrapped her wool coat more tightly, tucked her gloved fingers under her arms. She should be wearing her furs, as ridiculous as that would be in this part of town. Where was that damn foundry?

The square, redbrick building opposite looked vaguely familiar. It had certainly not been papered with that line of identical posters five years ago, though. Yellow posters with a red seven-headed snake, and the words
ONE PEOPLE! ONE RACE!
repeated twenty times on the wall in case you missed the first one.

She touched the curling edges of the very last poster and closed her eyes, trying to visualize the twists and turns she had taken. She had visited Jane once at the foundry, five years ago now. If she thought about it the right way she could almost see it; she was so close.… Eyes half-shut, she moved quickly and with purpose, down another block, around some stairs, and suddenly there it was, the iron fence sharp and forbidding. Her eyes opened against the black night and she stared at it, uncertain now how she had gotten there.

Or was it simply that she didn’t know what to do now that she had arrived?

There was an iron hydra coiled on the gate. That was a new feature.

Helen shuddered as she touched it, the iron cold and firm through her lilac gloves. What was she getting herself into here? She had thought of this as a safe place, because Jane had always spoken of it as her haven. But zealotry could override logic.

She waited, shivering. Then behind the gate, as if he had always been standing in the shadows, she saw him. The man who ran the foundry; what was his name? Niklas. Tall and broad, wrapped in warm leathers against the night.

“What’s a fey groupie want here?” he said. “Couldn’t wait till morning to get a new mask?”

Of course. The iron masks came from here. She had forgotten. Oh, wouldn’t Jane have had a biting remark for her about that? The careless rich, who don’t even know where their salvation comes from. “No,” Helen said. “I mean, yes, I need one badly. I can pay.…”

“Of course you can. And extra for interrupting my dinner. Wait.” He melted away into the night, leaving Helen straining her eyes to see into the tangle of iron and machinery behind the bars. The yard was more crowded than she had remembered it, more filled with hulking boxes with gears and spokes and arms, machines that seemed half-alive under the blue moonlight. She remembered it as a yard of dirt and seagulls and rusting scrap metal, but now it was thick and dense. An enormous metal tower built in front of the old shop building blocked out part of the sky. It was chained with long loops of thick iron links. Everything smelled of soot and hot metal.

“Here it is,” he said, for he was back again. Niklas held the mask up for her inspection. A plain solid iron mask with mesh wires over the airholes. Identical to the one she had had, to the one all the women had. As if they were anonymous, all these wives, a mass of interchangeable women. A funereal army. “Now pay up.” He named a price and Helen fumbled through her coat pockets as if she would have money inside, but she didn’t, she never did, because you didn’t do that, you simply received credit at all the shops. The change the chauffeur had given her was gone for the trolley; there was nothing that would approach the cost of a full mask.

“Bother,” she said. Lying, said, “I’m sure I have something here,” because you did that sort of thing to stall for time, and she didn’t want him to disappear with her mask and leave her there in the cold on the street at the gate of a foundry she wasn’t sure how she found or if she could find again. She pulled up Jane’s carpetbag and rifled through it. Nothing … nothing …

“Why do you have that?” Niklas said in a low voice.

“Oh!” said Helen. “You recognize it? I’m trying to find her. I’m her sister. And she—I’m trying to find her flat, but I don’t know the address. That’s actually why I came here. To see if you knew.” She smiled up at him, trying to be her winsomest self, but she sensed it was going to have little effect on this big barrel of a man.

“Why should I give her address to you if she doesn’t want to be found?” said Niklas.

Helen stopped short. “That’s not the question I was hoping you’d ask,” she admitted.

“Which is?”

“How can you prove you’re her sister? Because that I’ve thought over and I came up with three different ways on the trolley here. One. We’re exactly the same size. Two—”

He grunted, interrupting her. “How’s the trolley running these days?”

“Slow,” she said. “It stopped twice tonight, and everyone was complaining that they’re always late to work.” It seemed as though she went up in his estimation for riding the trolley. Perhaps Niklas had an affinity for all that machinery; perhaps he liked its populist nature.

Perhaps he understood that it meant she was serious about finding Jane.

Silence, during which Helen felt the cold sinking further, creeping into her marrow. “There are an incredible number of boors on the trolley,” she added, knowing as she said it that his estimation of her would go back down. But she hated silence; it made her mouth say things. She stamped her feet in place, wishing he’d invite her inside if he was going to stand here and interrogate her. She opened her mouth to say so when the giant spoke again.

“Again,” said Niklas. “Why should I help you find her if she doesn’t want to be found?”

“Because she’s in trouble,” Helen said gently. “She was doing a facelift. It was going fine and then I went downstairs and Mr. Grimsby—of Copperhead, you know—turned on this machine and then everything went to pieces. The air went blue and roaring and the lights went out. And when I went upstairs Jane was gone. She must have run.…” She shook her head helplessly. “I just don’t know. And now—”

“And now?…” There was a dangerous rumble in his voice. “There’s worse?”

“Jane said Millicent said the fey are rising up,” she said in a hushed voice, watching his fingers tighten on the mask. “Led by … well, no, they didn’t know. Some follower of the Fey Queen, they thought.”

“The Fey King,” he breathed. Helen turned big eyes on him. “Trumped-up, self-proclaimed, of course. Ordinary fey are indolent and leaderless. But every so often, one comes along with the willpower to bring them all to heel. That one is here in the city now.”

Helen swallowed. “How do you know?”

“Been studying how to capture the blue demons,” he said calmly. “But then you’ve seen that, you said. Since I turned one of the machines over to our leader for further use and investigation.”

“To … to Mr. Grimsby?” She could hardly hear him say “
our
leader” without shuddering.

“He’s continuing to make improvements to best capture and destroy the blue demons. For my part, I have found interrogation with cold iron to be useful.”

Helen’s eyes traveled to the iron building by his forge. Her heart thumped in her chest. How could Jane have such a fondness for this man? He chilled her marrow. “So I have to find Jane,” she said faintly, “before it’s too late.”

There was more silence, which she barely stopped herself from filling with a variety of pleas.

At last he spoke. “Three blocks north, two blocks east. Over the pawnshop there.”

“Thank you,” said Helen. “Thank—”

“There’s something broken in this city,” he said. “Blue scum all over it. Something’s broken and it started with Jane and that
havlen
woman and whatever happened six months ago. Jane told me she’d received a nasty letter this summer. A death threat.”

Havlen
was a derogatory
dwarvven
term for mixed-race human and
dwarvven
—Helen vaguely knew the woman Niklas referred to, someone who worked for Edward Rochart. But a death threat? “Oh no,” said Helen.

He steamrollered through her worry. “Jane didn’t say more. And she shouldn’t be mixing herself up with these facelifts—she was getting herself in over her head, I told her. Messing with power she couldn’t control. They should all just be shot, the lot of them. That would take care of that nonsense. We fought.” He exhaled. “Well. I guess I was right. Don’t take any pride in that.” Suddenly a hand was squeezing her shoulder—he had pushed it through a gap in the gate, and was standing right there, huge and frightening. “You find her,” he said. “You find her and make her stop.”

*   *   *

Helen hurried down the route Niklas had instructed. The night air was bitter on her bare face. She felt around in the carpetbag, pulled out the ironcloth, pressed it to her skin. Perhaps it made her feel safer, but it made it impossible to see in the black night. There weren’t as many gaslights down here, but there were orange-yellow rectangles where taverns let out patrons, spilling into the cold night. And bits of blue. She put the ironcloth away and hurried faster.

Niklas’s words rang through her head. “They should all just be shot, the lot of them.” The Hundred, he meant. And yet Niklas himself was ironskin, cursed just as Jane had been with fey that scarred his skin and emitted a slow stream of poisonous emotion. Helen felt nothing but compassion for The Hundred, the women who had only wanted to be prettier. But perhaps she was alone in that.

Helen had to circle the block before she found the grungy brick building with the three iron balls denoting pawnshop. There was an iron staircase on the outside. Yes, this was the sort of nasty place Jane would run to, something surrounded by iron. Wearily Helen climbed the stairs—and found a locked and no doubt iron-chained door. She banged on it, calling “Jane, Jane.” But no one came.

Helen jiggled the door handle helplessly, thinking of the long, hopeless walk home. She did not realize how thoroughly she had longed to find Jane here until she wasn’t. The frigid iron of the staircase seeped up through the soles of her shoes to her already numb toes; her fingers were curled stiff against the cold.

And then the door was opened from the inside.

Helen looked up, startled, at a figure wearing an iron mask. A lump of disappointment formed in her belly. This person was too tall.

“Oh, hurry in out of that nasty cold stuff,” the person said, quite heedless of the safety protocol that dictated one should spout clever greetings to make sure the fey were not invited over the threshold, lines ranging from the formal “An’ ye be human, enter,” to the cheeky lower-class admonition: “Stay out.” Helen realized after she spoke that it was a woman, despite the fact that she was wearing slacks. Her heavy, dark brown hair was cut in an asymmetric bob that fell across one of the mask’s eyeholes, and the thick scent of jasmine perfume lingered around her. “You must be looking for Jane,” the woman said as Helen entered, stripping off her lilac gloves and blowing on her hands.