Steamborn (31 page)

“At least we’re in this together,” Alice said. She squeezed his hand and looked back out at the mountains.

The trail took two sharp switchbacks before evening out again. They were narrow, and the sheer drop-off was dizzying. It was pretty obvious they were past the parts of the mountain path that were once frequented by Ancorans.

Charles and Samuel came to an abrupt stopped when they turned the corner and reached a flat section of the trail. Three men stood across the path. Two were shoulder to shoulder with halberds at the ready, blocking the trail behind the third. Jacob knew the man in front, and worry gnawed at his gut.

“I knew you’d follow the old trails,” Captain Lewis said as he rested his hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword.

“Captain?” Samuel said. “Why are you here?
How
are you already here?

“He took the old lift,” Charles said.

The captain nodded.

“Risky move, that. How’d you know it wouldn’t collapse?”

“I had little doubt it was still functional. I didn’t expect you to go underground.”

Charles pumped the slide on the air cannon, and the captain started to draw his sword.

“Stay your hand. You move that slide again, and I’ll run you through.”

Jacob’s heart sank. Any hope he’d had that the captain wasn’t there to capture them evaporated.

Charles laughed, and it was a cold sound. “Run me through?” He pumped the slide again. “You’ll be dead before you take two steps.”

The captain unsheathed his sword, started forward, and stopped dead as the slide racked for the third time. Charles leveled the cannon at the captain.

“I have no desire to harm you or your men, but I’ll kill you if you come for us. You sent knights to find us in the underground, to kill us all. How could you do that? How could you break the oath to protect all people of Ancora?” Charles snarled. “To twist it so violently that you can justify killing children and old men?” His voice rose, full of such venom Jacob barely recognized it. “On sword, on blood, you are an oath breaker.”

The captain cursed and threw his sword to the side of the trail. “They have my son, Charles. Do you understand? They’re going to kill my
son.”

“There are only a handful of tinkers who know how to build those transmitters, and only one as good as me. I intend to find him.”

Captain Lewis narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying, Charles?”

“I can’t allow you to imprison us, to
execute
us. I intend to break the alliance before it forms.” Charles narrowed his eyes. “If Dauschen allies with the Deadlands, you’re all dead anyway. What harm is there in letting us try to stop it?”

The captain said nothing.

“I give you one chance to restore your honor. Tell the knights we fled into the Lowlands. We snuck out with a group of repairmen.

“My son …” The captain’s eyes flicked from Charles to Jacob and back. He pushed the palm of his hand against his forehead and grimaced. “Gods be damned.” He turned to the knights behind him and almost whispered the words, “Stand down.”

“Sir?” one of the knights said as he glanced at his companion. He looked shaken, his halberd no longer poised to strike but lowered to the ground. “Our orders.”

“You have new orders. Stand down and let them pass.” The captain looked up to Charles and asked, “What of the city guard?”

“Dead,” Alice said as she stepped around Samuel, a knife hidden behind her wrist. “You sent them into a nest of Widow Makers.”

“It wasn’t my order, girl.”

Charles gently grabbed Alice’s wrist and shook his head once.

“What did you do to stop it?” Alice snapped, jerking her arm away from Charles.

The captain frowned at her words. “Just leave. All of you leave. Charles, you know you can’t return to Ancora after this. The city smith would put you to death.”

Charles returned the air cannon to its holster. “One day, Captain, the city smith and I will have words. I rather think he’ll find that to be a very bad day.”

“Where will you really go?” the captain asked as the party passed him by.

“Into the Deadlands,” Charles said. “I’m afraid that’s the only place we’ll find the answers to this mess.”

“The Deadlands? Are you mad?”

“I’ve been accused of worse.”

“And what will you say to the Steamsworn, Charles?”

“They are our allies,” the old man said.

The captain hesitated. “And do you think the Forgotten will welcome your return? Do you think they won’t remember what you did to them?”

Charles paused and looked back at the captain. “The Steamsworn understand war, my dear captain. The fact we fought against each other fifty years ago does
not
mean we can’t be allies today. Let Parliament pull your strings for now, but try to remember your oath, your promise to protect all the peoples of Ancora. You were a good man once.”

The captain said nothing as Charles turned away. Jacob glanced back before they rounded the corner of the trail. The captain stared at the ground, his shoulders slightly slumped. Jacob focused on the crunch of gravel beneath his boots. He didn’t think the man wanted anything to do with cutting off Jacob’s hands. The captain only wanted Peter back.

“We should have captured that Walker back up the mountain,” Samuel grumbled as his armored boots rang against a large stone in the gravel path. “It feels like we’ve been walking for hours.”

“Sure,” Charles said. “We don’t have a lasso, or a harness, or a saddle. I’m sure that would have ended well.”

Samuel looked over his shoulder and smiled at the old man. “Leave me to my complaints, would you? I don’t know what else to do with myself.”

The air grew thick around them as they descended through a fog bank. Jacob couldn’t see more than three feet off the side of the cliff, and he wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or a whole lot worse.

“Why haven’t we seen anything?” Jacob asked. “I thought we’d be fighting off hordes of invaders by now.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Charles said. “You don’t have to impress Alice.”

Alice laughed and bared her teeth at Jacob.

He started to protest, and then he watched Alice walking beside Samuel, laughing with him. Jacob could take a little embarrassment if it meant Alice could laugh.

Charles harrumphed beside him. “You’re pretty smart for a kid.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“My point exactly.”

Jacob stayed with Charles while Samuel and Alice led the way through the dense fog. It wasn’t long before the world became a lighter gray, and eventually they broke through the base of the cloud bank.

“Wow.”

Jacob stared at the vista before them. A long trail led down the mountain, and from where they were, he could see the far mountain pass in the southeast that would lead them to the Deadlands.

“You can see the Bull’s Horn,” Alice said. She pointed off to the two ancient mountains that curved up around the pass, forming the horns that framed the road in the distance. “Looks different from down here.”

“Charles,” Samuel said. “We can’t walk that distance in a day.”

“Actually, it’s about a day from the base of the mountain to the Bull’s Horn. The pass into the Deadlands is an easy one. It’s what’s on the other side that worries me.”

“We’ll need to find a place to stay before nightfall,” Jacob said. He looked toward the sun. It was already descending to the far side of the mountain range. A pocket of wild Walkers streamed over the rocks below them, arcing out into the plain, only to disappear into another outcropping of rock.

“We have a few hours yet,” Charles said. “Worried about the Red Death?”

Jacob nodded.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Alice asked. “All we have is Samuel with his oversized toothpick and an old man with an air cannon.”

Samuel ruffled Alice’s hair, and she looked intensely irritated with the gesture. “I saw a girl with a blade tucked behind her wrist.”

“That’s better suited to cutting dinner,” Alice said.

“Where are we going?” Jacob asked. “I mean, the Deadlands, I know, but what about tonight? We don’t want to get caught in the open.”

Charles glanced back at the sun. “We have a few hours, I think. Should give us enough time to get into Cave.”

“We’re taking the kids into Cave?” Samuel asked, and the surprise on his face made Jacob leery.

“What is Cave?” Alice asked.

Charles rubbed his beard. “You think of the Lowlands as the poorest part of Ancora, yes?”

“It is,” Alice said.

“There are people who can’t afford even the Lowlands, or at least they couldn’t when the walls went up. They made their own district in the caves on the plain. It’s not far from the mountain.”

“It’s just poor people?” Jacob asked.

“And people who don’t want Parliament interfering with their business.”

“Pirates and cutpurses,” Samuel said as he eyed his gleaming Spider Knight armor. “Don’t get too attached to the place, Jacob.”

Two more hours of hiking put them on the plains. Jacob held out his hands and let the tall grass brush his palms.

“It’s beautiful,” Alice said, pointing toward the Bull’s Horn. “You can see a pod of giant Pillies in the field.”

At first, Jacob couldn’t see what she was pointing out, but then one of the gray stones moved not a hundred feet away. The antennae flipped into the air before the Pill-Bugs returned to grazing on the grass.

“They’re huge,” Jacob said.

“At least twice as big as mine,” Alice said before she frowned. “Well, when I still had some.”

Jacob squeezed her arm as he walked by. Alice had loved those bugs, and he knew she missed them.

“You could eat off one of those for a month,” Samuel said.

“We’re not killing a harmless Pilly just so you can snack,” Alice said as she narrowed her eyes.

Samuel flashed her a smile and started moving down the flattened path through the grass.

“Almost there,” Charles said. “See the door in the crevasse?”

Jacob didn’t see anything but the rock. He let his eyes follow the path, and it ended near the mountainside. There, outside the field of grass, he could just make out a tall gray metal doorway. It blended into the stone on either side, almost impossible to see at a distance.

Charles hefted his backpack, adjusted the shoulder straps, and started forward. “Let’s see who’s home.” It wasn’t long before they were off the trail and standing before the entrance to Cave.

A steel knocker with intricate brass inlays hung from a rusted iron hook. It wasn’t until he got closer that Jacob realized the brass was shaped like a skeletal hand clutching a steel orb.

“That’s a …” Jacob frowned as he tried to think of the word. “What’d they call it, Alice? It was in
The Dead Scourge.”

“It’s called a Devil’s Hammer,” Alice said as she reached up and slammed the weighted metal into a dented brass plate. The two quick raps sounded like a muffled gong, and the sound echoed behind the doors. “It’s an old symbol from the Deadlands, adopted by the Forgotten.”

Something slid within the door—some unseen mechanism—and then nothing.

“Are they not opening the doors?” Alice asked.

“Just give them a minute,” Charles said. He gave the barrier a two-finger salute. He seemed to be looking at something higher up the door, but Jacob couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Are the Forgotten here?” Jacob asked.

“I’m sure some visit the caves on occasion, but I doubt many of them would ever want to be so close to Ancora again.”

Jacob turned around and looked up the mountain. Ancora hid behind a cloud bank, high above. He watched for a moment while the clouds shifted, offering glimpses of the peaks where he knew the city was nestled, before a noise drew his attention.

Another mechanism, louder and heavier, shifted within the door before a puff of dirt blew out beneath it. The right side swung open, only enough to allow one person through at a time. Samuel stepped through first, followed by the rest of the group, before the door boomed closed once they’d all crossed the threshold.

“It’s so dark,” Alice said. She squinted at the shadows.

“They haven’t shot us yet,” Samuel said, “so at least there’s that.”

“Come on,” Charles said. He walked toward a faint lantern deep inside the cave.

“Charles von Atlier,” boomed a deep voice from nowhere and everywhere. “Halt and state your purpose.”

Charles’s silhouette froze in front of Jacob and slowly turned toward the voice. It spoke from above them, somewhere in the shadows.

Charles crossed his arms slowly before he asked, “Who here knows that name?”

“State your purpose.”

“What is this?” Samuel whispered. His hand settled on the hilt of his sword.

“Protocol. Keep your hand off your sword lest they take it from you.”

Jacob didn’t know if Charles meant Samuel’s sword or his hand, but they both sounded bad.

“I am Charles von Atlier, smith and tinker of Ancora, survivor of the Scorpion’s Trial, ally to the Steamsworn, and I seek only rest and refuge for my friends.”

A shadow moved close to the doors, and Jacob almost yelped when a cloaked man stepped into the dim lantern light. His cloak bore the color of stone, leaving him invisible until he moved. “Then enter our city of Cave, tinker, and journey well.”

“Can I ask you a question, Cave Guardian?”

The cloaked form nodded at Charles.

“Does the Rock Inn still exist here?”

“It does.”

“Do they still offer transportation? We had to flee Ancora with no mount.”

The cloaked man pulled his hood back and Jacob stared slack-jawed. The man’s eyes were slightly canted, and his gaze was intense as he looked over everyone in their party. His skin was darker than any Jacob had seen before, even more so than that of the travelers from Dauschen. Jacob had heard stories of people born to the Deadlands, but this man’s skin rivaled the night sky.

“Stop staring,” Alice said as she jabbed Jacob with her elbow. “You’re being rude.”

“I just … I didn’t mean … He’s … I …” Jacob fumbled for words, and then for an apology, but the cloaked man only laughed.