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Tin Swift(30)

By:Devon Monk


“Near on,” Bryn shouted out. “It’s a cold trail, isn’t it?”

Cedar nodded and walked out of the cell. He took a few extra steps to the stone wall at the end of the hall, a wall burned by fire. “Wonder why there’s a burn mark here? Not a convenient place to start a flame.”

He pressed his fingers against the dark smudge of soot on the wall.

A shock ran through him like lightning striking near his boots. The Holder had been here, and burned here. And over the shock of that knowledge rolled the distant song of Mr. Shunt.

Cedar glanced up. There was a fist-sized hole in the roof. He didn’t know how it was possible to propel a chunk of metal through the sky to land a state away, but he was sure a piece of the Holder had burned its way through the roof and landed where he was standing.

“It landed here,” he said. “And someone must have picked it up.”

“Time’s up, gentlemen,” Alun called out. “Load your guns.”

“It’s gone?” Bryn said.

There was a rising noise outside, something that sounded like a matic thumping with full throttle steam just on the edge of Cedar’s hearing. He’d heard that kind of noise before, but couldn’t place it. A train? A steam wagon?

“It’s gone.”

“And you’re sure?” Bryn stared at the hole in the roof.

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” Bryn pulled his rifle. “Let’s go find out where it went.”

Bryn jogged down the hall. Cedar followed.

Alun and Cadoc Madder were stationed in front of the broken windows on either side of the door, which was about to be pounded down.

Cadoc Madder shot grapeshot blasts into the faces of the unalives who were trying to clamber through the window to the left of the door.

“So nice of you gents to join us,” Alun yelled as he uncorked a bottle with his teeth and splashed it over the faces and hands of people trying to shove their way in through the window to the right of the door. The shutter was burned and busted into splinters on the floor at Alun’s feet, along with four or five unfortunate, and very dead, bodies.

“You find our Holder, Mr. Hunt?” he asked as he waved the burning kindling at the undead at the window, setting hair and skin on fire and sending them lurching back a step or two.

“Saw where it burned through the roof. It was here, landed here, likely a month ago.” Cedar strode over to Mae, who had Rose semi-awake and sitting and was trying to wrap a long strip of cloth around her chest to hold down a thick, wet-herb-smelling compress.

“See any indication of where it got off to?”

That tickling at the edge of Cedar’s hearing was still rising, growing louder, coming closer. A steam engine pushing hard. But not a train.

“No.” Cedar shot the man trying to wedge himself through the window near the stove.

“No idea at all?” Alun asked, taking aim with his shotgun and unbraining three people for his effort.

“Can it walk on its own?”

“It cannot,” Alun said.

“So someone took it,” Cedar said. “We get the women the hell away from Vicinity, then I’ll hunt it down.”

Mae finished buttoning Rose’s dress and pulled her coat closed. “The women can stand on their own feet.” She helped Rose up, and pulled her gun.

Rose looked ghastly pale, but she licked her lips and nodded. Mae’s attention had done her some good, but she certainly wasn’t up to fighting the undead mob outside.

“I don’t suppose you have a spell that might help us out, Mrs. Lindson?” Alun asked.

“No, Mr. Madder. Magic doesn’t work to harm people. Not even the undead.”

He laughed and madness rode the rise of it. “Oh, magic can do terrible harm, Widow Lindson. To dead and the living alike. But only in certain hands.”

“Bryn,” Cedar said, “did you see a back door?”

“Nothing by the cells.”

“Then we fight, make a path to the wagon,” Cedar said. “Mae, take Rose there near the desk. When I yell for you to run to the wagon with her, you do that.”

“Wagon’s unhitched,” Cadoc Madder said as he reloaded his gun, unconcerned about the undead hands scraping the air just inches in front of his face.

Cedar swore. He’d forgotten. If the women made it to the wagon, they couldn’t drive it safely out of here. And Rose couldn’t sit a saddle to ride out on her horse, even if the horses were unharmed.

“The Holder?” Alun asked again. “Are you sure you have no idea which general direction it got off to?”

Cedar knew, had known from the moment he touched the burned patch where the Holder had smoldered.