Dead Man’s Hand (58 page)

I would never carry such a filthy weapon, but I hardly mind if my enemies think I
do. And the Condor can’t drop on me now, not when I’m flying well above the tallest
trees. I laugh as the wind tugs at my whiskers. If the Condor is on that boat, I have
him trapped.

I’ll have him soon, and then I’ll have my answers. I signal to the gunner on the airship’s
bow, to fire the traditional warning shot across the target’s bows.

Then there’s a sudden burst of flame on the
Great Columbia
, and suddenly I see a figure arrowing for the sky on a tail of fire, cloak rippling
as he rises.

It’s the Condor, and he’s somehow rigged himself out with a skyrocket, shooting himself
into the atmosphere to gain altitude so that he can drop on me. I snarl as I curse
the ingenuity of the man, and then I laugh.

I am the Commodore!
What does it matter who or what made me—? I am myself, here in my cocked hat and
epaulets, brandishing my sword on the swaying bridge of my glorious airship. It’s
far too late to quibble over origins, over who struck who on the Middle Fork… What
matters is the battle to come, the final confrontation between the titan of order
and the grand nabob of piracy. The last great fight of the Golden Age.

Can you see him? There—a swift shadow against the sun?

Can you hear it? Above the sound of the hissing steam, the thrashing paddles, the
scream of the whistles? The sound that brings a snarl to my lips, that causes me to
brandish my sword in defiance at the diving bogy in the sky…

Ky-yeeeee.

There were three Pinkertons. There were always three. One was a white man, one was
black, and the other was a Celestial. They may have been something else before, but
now they were Pinkertons. Same brownish-grey tweed suits, same bowler hats, same obese-caterpillar
mustaches lurking below their noses.

Simon Leslie was playing hold-’em in the parlor car when the train slowed between
two mesas in Monument Valley with a puff of steam and a sigh. Through the window he
saw the Pinkertons get off and march in a flawless triangular phalanx up the nearest
brick-red ridge. From the looks of it, they emerged from the express car in the center
of the train; maybe the railroad kept them stacked in crates with the sacks of parcels
and the safe where they laid, stiff-necked, their tattooed eyes open and unblinking,
waiting to be needed. They were nicknamed “Neversleeps” for a reason. Simon Leslie
knew. It had not been so long since he was one of them.

“Your bet, Si. Come on! You’re growing cobwebs.” The futures trader who got on with
Leslie in New Orleans wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was. Leslie reflexively
looked at his hand: it was still the Ten and Page of Pentacles. The turn had just
been set down, so the Eight of Wands, the Tower, the Empress and now the Queen of
Cups showed on the table. He had a modest gut-shot straight draw going, so he bet
half the pot.

“Christ on a Crutch, will you look at that,” said another player, a fat lawyer taking
his pretty young third wife to the West Coast for their honeymoon.

Everyone looked out the window: an array of Navajo warriors lined the ridge astride
soot-colored ponies, the feathers tied to their spears a-flutter in the breeze. They
looked like they had materialized out of thin air, but Simon spotted the shaman among
them, an emaciated crone wearing nothing but a cloak of raven feathers, shaking a
gnarled rattle of bone. No doubt they had been standing there the whole time, cloaked
in spirit, awaiting the train and the Pinkertons.

“They’re—they’re not going to attack, are they?” asked the lawyer’s wife, a short,
befreckled redhead who had been giving Leslie smiles he probably should have been
ignoring the whole game. He’d given her smiles in return he definitely should not
have. He didn’t have time for it. Not this trip.

“They wouldn’t dare,” the futures man said. “There’s been peace with the Four Corners
tribes for a generation.”

There was a time, not so far distant, at the beginning of the Awakening, that the
Navajo and the Ute and the Zuni and the Hopi would have hungered for war, along with
all the indigenous and oppressed peoples of five continents. The ancestor-worshippers
and dream-walkers and totem-bearers thought they could feel the yoke and heel of the
European easing from their collective necks, once all the spirits and spells from
the days before the Age of Reason returned in a joyous shriek to the world. The native
had been in touch with Supernature far longer than the colonizer, their touch with
the Invisible had not atrophied from millennia of smelting and steam engines and monotheism.
The Awakening, to them, was the first day of their inevitable return to power.

How wrong they were.

They forgot how adept those who seize power are at retaining it, no matter how
outré
the circumstances. Within a few years the enchantments and sorceries long-suppressed
by European churches thrust back into prominence and were ruthlessly employed by those
already in charge. There would always be those maddening fools who love the bosses,
who love a firm, guiding hand on their nape and revel in the harsh disciplining of
those who try and buck it. The Neversleeps were among the most feared of these servants.
Though outnumbered by stony-faced braves twelve to one, the trio marched unafraid
up the ridge to the lead Navajo warrior, resplendent in buffalo horns, to receive
what they believed, without any hesitancy or doubt, was always rightfully theirs.

Simon Leslie said, “What they’re doing now is
avoiding
a war.”

The poker players watched as the braves parted so two squaws could deliver to the
Pinkertons a handcuffed, hooded figure and accompanying baggage.

“Is that…” The redheaded newlywed squinted at the captive. “Is that a woman?”

“Not just any woman,” Leslie said. “That’s Nicola Tesla.”

His fellow players turned and gaped at him. “Not the atomist? The descendant of… of
you know?
Him?
”

Simon Leslie nodded.

“The savages were harboring her laboratory on their reservation? That’s where she
was hiding out?” Since the raid on her experimental cyclotron in Colorado Springs,
Nicola Tesla had been the West’s most wanted Science Criminal, with a million-dollar
bounty on her head. The Four Corners chieftains no doubt delighted in frustrating
the will of the Bureau of Animist Affairs by hiding her. Finally, though, a headman
competing for tribal supremacy had ratted her out, able to sow enough uneasiness with
the elder matriarchs about the risk of death raining down on them from Washington
for the sake of some white woman practicing electrical heresy that was as taboo to
their faith as it was to that of the hated Federals.

Fortunately for her, someone in the Bureau had, in turn, leaked news of her capture
and details of the prisoner exchange to Simon Leslie’s comrades in the White City.

“Poor girl,” the fat lawyer tutted as the Pinkertons enveloped their prisoner in the
center of their phalanx and returned to the train. “They’re taking her to San Francisco,
no doubt, to be burned at the stake.”

“Or shipped to the prison mines of Alaska Territory,” Simon Leslie said.

“Ain’t you just a font of useful information,” the futures trader said. “I don’t rightly
recall what you said you did for a living.”

“No?” As he said it the trader slapped down the river card: the Nine of Swords. He
had made his straight.

“I’m a gambler.”

The men at the table blanched. The redhead grinned.

“All-in,” Simon Leslie grinned back.

Once the Neversleeps were safely on board, the twisting, cord-like dragon towing the
train spread its wings with a snort and a roar and launched itself back into the shimmering
ley line coursing across the horizon and beat its leather wings toward California.

* * *

The redheaded bride’s name was Marion and she had spent her whole life until her wedding
day in Lafayette, Louisiana. She told Simon her new husband made love to her like
it was a necessity he tried to get over with as soon as possible, for she stood between
him and sleep.

When she stole into Leslie’s private sleeper berth he pulled her nightgown over her
head and left it there as he kissed every inch of her freckled skin and once she was
covered in goose bumps he picked her up by her bare thighs and lay her on the tiny
bed and made sure that she knew she was a rare delicacy to be savored and adored and
pleasured. She was not a means. She was an End. And she bit her long red hair to keep
from crying out.

After, he thought maybe he should wake her and send her back to her snoring husband
for her own safety, but she looked so peaceful lying in his bed he couldn’t bear to.
Instead he opened his trunk and popped open the false bottom to reveal The Clockwork
Chrysalis. He had waited long enough. They would be nearing the point in the Sierra
Madre—according to his guidebook and compass—where the Donner Party made a miserable
repast of itself all those years ago. He had chosen this as his disembarkation point
for a reason.

The Chrysalis creaked like an old battleship when he peeled it over his naked body,
most of it thick rawhide that somehow felt no heavier than a thin layer of oil on
his skin. The boots slipped silently over his feet and he pulled the hood down over
his head. He flipped through lenses of the brass goggles over his eyes and set them
to the widest aperture; within moments the great proboscis of the filter over his
mouth began straining his breath, bringing only the purest air into his lungs, free
of the stink of Enchantment.

The atomists of the White City originally designed the Chrysalis to prevent any skin
scales or stray hairs from leaving agents’ bodies while conducting anti-sorcery operations,
to say nothing of blood or saliva. Everything the body shed or excreted could be turned
against it by the enemy; scryers could find you anywhere in the world; diviners could
predict your next move with unerring accuracy; necromancers could cast sudden death
on you from hundreds of miles away.

But soon the White City realized that the suit could be so much more.

Leslie snapped the gun braces over his arms and strapped the brass duck’s-foot pistols
onto them, combustion-based projectile technology, simple possession of which had
been a capital crime for nearly one hundred years. He stepped gingerly over the naked
woman in his bed to the sill, slid the glass open and pulled himself onto the roof
of the train car, closing the window with his heel before the whistle of wind could
rouse Marion from her slumber.

The train cleaved through snowcapped peaks and rolling carpets of pine with nary a
sound, except the occasional sheet-on-a-clothesline flap of the Li Ying Lung dragon’s
wings. The night air lashed at him but even though he felt as naked and vulnerable
as a newborn he did not feel any cold. The paucity of oxygen at this altitude made
his lungs clench but after a few seconds of crouching atop the sleeper car, carefully
listening to his heartbeat, he brought the rhythm of his breath under control. The
brass electrodes studding the inside of the Chrysalis helped greatly with that. They
captured his bioelectric field and redistributed it inside the suit, where it could
not be hijacked by mediums or magic-users.

Such a manipulation of the psychic lacuna led to depression and erratic behavior in
all but the most mentally disciplined operatives; Simon Leslie had had to spend a
year mastering meditation techniques all but unheard of in the West to endure the
sense of insignificance and hopelessness that enveloped him once he cloaked himself
in the Chrysalis’s self-contained, absolute reality. He was cut off from self-deception,
unmoored from myth, the caul of perception was ripped away, leaving nothing but what
truly is, independent of him, in its stead. Unless his mind correlated most or all
of its contents, the experience could crush his soul, by convincing him in an instant
that he did not have one.

On the plus side, the Chrysalis also rendered him completely immune to magic.

He bounded from car to car. Innumerable (highly illegal) micro-filament wires crisscrossing
the Chrysalis turned his second skin into a giant eardrum; vibrating through his soles
he could hear snoring widows, the squeak of hip flasks being unscrewed, the tinkle
of lantern glass: a parlor car. Then, the clatter of plates, the laughter of dishwashers
trying to out-mock each other: the dining car.

Then, he bounded to the next: he heard silence beneath his feet. This would be the
express car he had seen the Pinkertons return to when the train stopped in Navajo
country.

He flexed the tendons in his wrist, rotating the guns that crowned them until, with
a pneumatic hiss from a catch pressed in his palm, a tiny projectile sprang out of
the multi-barreled pistol and stuck in the car roof. He hopped back to the car edge
as the clockwork timer on the top whirred to detonation.

The split-second, right before: his breath catching, pulse racing like a thoroughbred,
thrilling to the randomness of life without thaumaturgy, the keenness of a skate down
the razor’s edge, without horoscopes that definitively told him what the next day
would bring, without love enchantments to spark others’ desire, without the certainty
magery’s manipulation of reality brought. The joys of not-knowing: this was why he
risked his life and the eternal servitude of his immortal spirit to serve the White
City.

He hadn’t really lied to his fellow poker players when he told them he was a gambler.

He just didn’t name the game he played.

The (
obscenely
illegal) plastic explosives inside the bolt blew a hole in the roof of the express
car three feet in diameter; Leslie leapt through boots-first with the last cascade
of wood and shingle.