Dead Man’s Hand (59 page)

Inside, the Pinkertons were ready for him; their heads had transformed beneath their
bowler hats into blazing phosphorus eyeballs—a metaphor-made-flesh, embodying the
advertisements of their detective agency prior to the Awakening:
We Never Sleep
. They blasted him as one with a ghostly fire that would have ignited anyone else
into a screaming bonfire of agony. But he wore the Chrysalis, with the shaded lenses
snapped over his goggles, so he didn’t even get spots in his eyes.

He leapt toward the nearest Eye and flicked his wrists a different direction and twin
Tamil katar blades shot out of the brass braces. With the left dagger he sliced through
a retina the width of his face and was already moving away as gelatinous white burst
out of it, turning and spinning and burying the right dagger up to its hilt in the
chest of the second Eye next to him.

The third Eye, intuiting further attacks against the Chrysalis would be useless, turned
the stream of his spirit-fire onto the floor of the car, blowing a hole in it nearly
as big as the one Leslie’s explosives had blown in the roof. Though the Chrysalis
rendered him immune to magic, those people and things outside it were still very much
mune
. But Leslie pinwheeled sideways away from the eruption and unloaded the explosive
rounds from the fan-like pistols into the Eye’s midriff. He was dead before the blowback
smashed him against the wall.

Nicola Tesla sat on the railroad company safe, amidst bags of mail inside the express
car cage, handcuffed to the bars, hood still over her head. Leslie dug the keys out
of the jacket of the Pinkerton slumped against the wall and opened the door.

When he pulled the bag off her head she sneered at him. “Edison stooge.” Slight Serbian
accent, darkly beautiful, same knowing baleful gaze as her famed ancestor. She spat
on the floor at his feet.

Leslie groaned through the small speaker set in the front of his mask. “Ms. Tesla,
I am nobody’s stooge.”

“
Doctor
Tesla.”

“Mr. Thomas Edison may have founded the White City, but we operate solely on the universal
principle of returning science to the world. We should be allies.”

“Your Edison publicly recanted science to save his neck. My great grand-uncle did
not and he burned. Your secret society was founded by a thief and a coward and nothing
good will come of it.”

He jangled the keys in front of her. “I take it then I am too morally compromised
for you to accept my help?”

She pouted. She was beautiful. “Go ahead,” she said, turning her face away.

She sprung to her feet as soon as he unlocked the cuffs and opened a medium-sized
steamer trunk in the corner of the cage. Leslie recognized it as one of the pieces
of baggage the Navajo had turned over with her. “I’m afraid we need to leave your
things behind,” Leslie said.

“Not this.” She removed a long mahogany rifle with a steel sphere at the end of a
filigreed brass barrel.

“What do you have there?”

“An apparatus for generating, intensifying, and amplifying electrical force in free
air.”

“Ah.”

“A lightning gun,” Dr. Tesla said slowly.

“Yes, thank you, I know what a lightning gun is.”

“How should I know? I am sure you have received all sorts of erroneous notions from
the followers of that degenerate Edison.”

“Ma’am. The War of the Currents ended over a century ago. This is no time to declare
that hostilities between your family and the Edisons have resumed. We have mutual
enemies to unite against.”

She sniffed. “It would appear I have no choice but to accept the aid of my inferiors.
Very well, then; take me to your White City. I have no doubt your clock-punchers and
patent lawyers will benefit greatly from someone with genuine scientific knowledge.”

“No doubt,” Leslie said dryly.

He helped her through the hole in the roof then hoisted himself up. As soon as the
mountain air hit him he was brought up short by the crackling of the wireless in his
ear. The White City always maintained radio silence during delicate operations such
as this.

“Si. Si, can you hear me? Our three on the train went blind, so you must be there.
Say hello to your old friend.” Morgan Ash’s deep mahogany laugh froze Leslie’s blood.
Ash was the First Ward Boss in Manhattan. His former employer.

“Possession of wireless radio technology is a Class A felony which carries a sentence
of up to twenty years in prison,” Simon Leslie said. Tesla looked quizzically at him,
but he held up a finger for the explanation to wait. “Ah, but that’s right—the rules
don’t apply to you, do they?”

He could almost hear Ash ensconced in his suite in the Dakota Hotel overlooking Central
Park, a cigar in whichever hand wasn’t holding the receiver. “For your information,
Si, I am not violating our sacred ether with electromagnetic radiation in order to
transmit sound, but rather a spell cooked up by the boys in Applied Thaumaturgy that
resonates with your transceiver in much the same way.”

All this talk of “ether” was, of course, pseudoscientific nonsense. But with magic
the bosses had the power to force their pseudoscience on the world and make it true.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to chat, Morgan. Kind of in the middle of something.”

“So you are. But I don’t believe you’re quite aware of what that something is.” The
chuckle again. “The leak inside the Bureau of Animist Affairs, that told the White
City where the handoff for Dr. Tesla would be, and which train? The source of that
leak would have been me.”

Simon Leslie stood up straight as a roar echoed from the rear of the train. He looked
down to the caboose and saw a second dragon, a Ying Lung Wang, an enormous purple
blue creature with a long funnel-like snout, as it oared its sea-turtle flippers through
the borealis of the ley line. Pinkertons covered its leather-plated shell, enormous
head-eyes glowing beneath bowler hats.

The sky above them rippled and flashed and an airship descended from the clouds—a
gondola swarming with Pinkertons hanging from a sinewy P’an Yin Lung, fur-like licks
of white fire straggling from its jaw.

Dr. Tesla grunted, and Leslie looked at her, and was surprised to find her smiling.

“You have fallen for a trap, Edison man,” she said. “I was just bait. They want your
Chrysalis.”

* * *

The Neversleeps poured over the turtle dragon and dropped from the sky, spitting gouts
of white flame and whirling sigils of burning gold. They were mostly humans, but he
saw
Sidhe
and dwarves mixed among them too, and that made Simon Leslie think of the Homestead
Strike, in which Morgan Ash had ordered him, as leader of the local Neversleeps, to
summon the dwarves’ ancestral enemies from their former home in the Nine Worlds: the
monstrous two-headed Ettin. The giants had scooped up diminutive miners six at a time
and popped them into razor-lined mouths and crunched down on them like popcorn. After
that day of horror Simon Leslie resolved to find a better way to live, or die trying.
Fortunately the White City found him.

But now it seemed like he would die anyway.

“I would
strongly
advise giving yourself up, Si,” Morgan Ash purred in his ear. “Ain’t no shame in
it. We sent numbers enough to crush the Four Corners, much less one traitor and one
extremely misguided Slav bitch.”

Tesla yanked back the lever on her lightning gun and cried out a curse in Serbo-Croatian
(“
Nabijem te na kurac!
” he thought he heard) as blue tines crackled out of the metal sphere, zigzagging
through the night and finding the Pinkertons wherever they were with the unerringness
of falcons and stiffening them with electric fire.

“Seeing as how we have history, you and I,” Ash rambled on, “I promise you, once you
get to The Tombs, the inquisitors won’t torture you too much. Sure, the judge’ll order
a requisite number of Hexes of Excruciating Pain, but beyond that the severity of
the interrogation is largely up to the discretion of the presiding officer. Which,
just so you know,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “will be
me
, regardless of what copper’s name is actually on the register.

“I’ll only ask you to name a few names,” Ash continued. “Five? The main atomist leaders.
Where the White City is. How you’ve managed to keep an entire hive of damn heathens
invisible from our scrying mirrors.

“And, of course, our experimental thaumaturgians will be going to town on your leather
jumpsuit. They’ll crack it. Trust me, they’re smarter than a barrel full of Teslas.
If they can’t find a spell to get past the Chrysalis’s defenses, shit, they’ll write
one. Don’t think they won’t.”

“
Down!
” Leslie cried, and Tesla ducked dutifully, allowing him to blow the Pinkerton who
had landed behind her off the train with a booming round to the chest. The cloud dragon
overhead had managed to overtake the dragon pulling the train and was dropping off
Neversleeps to outflank them. They could not survive a two-front war. Leslie leapt
forward, grabbed a protesting Tesla and bounded back to the express car, dropping
through the hole he’d made so they could regroup behind the imposing iron safe.

“This doesn’t look promising,” Leslie said in an off-handed way. He could barely hear
himself over the throbbing pulse in his neck. He nodded at Tesla’s silently steaming
lightning gun. “Busted?”

“Bite your tongue. Overheated. Give it ten seconds of cool-down.”

The roof erupted in a roar of unearthly flame that blackened and ripped whole chunks
off in plumes of embers. Within seconds it would be gone, and they would be fully
exposed.

The man and the woman looked at each other. Their short destinies were written plain
on each other’s faces.

Then, the woman had a spark.

“Your Chrysalis, it self-generates a localized bioelectric field, yes?” She feverishly
snapped open compartments and undid screws on the lightning gun.

“
I’m
generating the field, the suit just keeps it in continuous circulation in a closed
system… Hey, don’t break that down, we can still use it—”

“No, no we can’t. We need to eliminate more of our enemies at once.” She removed a
small metal box from the side of the gun. “We’ll use the cavity resonator. It can
expand the Chrysalis’s bioelectric field.”

“But the field is self-contained. How can you attach your resonator to it?”

“We need to breach the—”

“No!”

“Listen to me—”

“The first rule of the White City is
you never breach the Chrysalis
—”

She slapped him. He barely felt it inside his leather mask, but she kept talking.
“That’s Edison talking! Use your imagination, man!”

Before he could respond, the flaming roof of the express car collapsed and the room
filled with Neversleeps. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through the far
door into the adjoining car. Passengers already awakened by the sounds of chaotic
battle all around them began screaming once they saw the mosquito-like proboscis of
the Chrysalis. They rushed to fill the aisle to get away from them; the fugitives
managed to hop and weave around the masses but the column of Pinkertons slammed into
them, forestalling pursuit.

Morgan Ash radioed, “Hellfire and damnation, boy, don’t you know when your bell’s
been rung? I promised my kids I’d read ’em a bedtime story before their nanny puts
’em to sleep.”

Through two more sleeper cars and a combine they ran, to burst through into the first
and final car, little more than an open platform in the center of which the driver
sat in the Lotus position. He was a Celestial, of course, communing with the dragon
in a single conjoined mind to keep its simple lizard’s brain calm and pliant. The
Celestial sprang to his feet when the intruders burst through the door and launched
into a high-pitched call in Cantonese for Fire, the Element of Greater Yang, but Simon
Leslie scissor-kicked him sideways off the train before the third syllable. The Chinese
hit a fir tree by the side of the ley line and dropped like a stone to the ground.

Nicola Tesla crouched by his waist with a utility knife, pressing down on the Chrysalis,
probing for a good place to make the incision. “We are doing this, yes?”

He was taken back when she looked up at him for his response. It was the first time
she had solicited permission from him; perhaps it was the first time in her life.

“What about the other passengers?” he asked.

“What about them?”

Simon Leslie shook his head. It was insane. The whole thing was insane.

“Go ahead,” he said.

He groaned as if it was his own flesh cut when Tesla made an incision in the Chrysalis
just above his pelvic bone to remove an electrode from its underside. This she inserted
in the box-shaped resonator, which she then hooked to his belt. From inside the second
skin he could feel the nature of himself alter; the breath caught in his throat. Though
the bioelectric field was invisible, as he pulled Nicola Tesla closer to him he could
feel it envelop her; her cheeks suddenly flushed looking at him, and he knew she felt
the same way too. A sudden conjoined intimacy, not borne of word, deed, or desire,
but real all the same, and it moved both of them deeply.

A small ladder led to the ceiling hatch of the “engine,” and from there they hopped
onto the muscular ripple of the dragon’s back; its scales were cold and shiny and
impossibly smooth; he lost his footing several times until he started to grab onto
the ridges of the lizard’s vertebrae and use them as handholds to pull himself along
its back. A Li Ying Lung was mostly a serpent, with two vestigial limbs dangling on
either side of its undulating expanse. Uncoupled from the mind of its human handler,
the dragon huffed and roared with irritation at the two pests skittering across its
skin, amber eyes roiling with confusion, but the leather harness attaching it to the
great bulk of the train prevented it from flexing its back and hurling the interlopers
off.