Cedar pushed up, moving on instinct alone, unable to feel his body. He somehow got to his knees, and looked around him.
Wil lay still on the ice, a short distance away. How had they gotten so far from each other? He was too still, though Cedar saw his chest rise once and fall. Breathing, but barely.
Mae stood on the riverbank, just downstream from him and Wil. She’d pushed her hat off her head, and stood with her rifle aimed at Mayor Vosbrough.
The mayor was dressed in rich green velvet, a black fur coat, a top hat, and fine black leather gloves.
Cedar recognized those gloves. Vosbrough had done something to him, hurt him, wearing those gloves. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Was it just his memory of Father Kyne being beaten filling his mind?
Beside Vosbrough stood some kind of strange matic. It looked like a headless man, taller at the shoulder than Vosbrough’s head, and wider to match. On its back was a tank wrapped in tubes and hoses that draped over its shoulder and strapped to its arm. Those hoses and wires were wound tightly between small glass tubes filled with colored liquids.
And in the center of its leathery chest was a copper contraption with a glass orb marking the direct heart of it.
Cedar blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. For he knew, without a doubt, that inside that glass orb wrapped in copper and glowing with green glim light was a Strange. Was the Strange trapped in that monstrosity, or there willingly?
“Put your gun down, witch,” Vosbrough said. “This is only a small portion of the weapons at my disposal. Weapons my family has devised and tested. This is only a small portion of the great advances we will use to bend the world to our favor. You have a choice. Be a part of this new age, the Vosbrough Age, or be crushed under the wheels of our domination. Choose your side.”
Cedar tried to call out to her, to tell her to put the gun down so Vosbrough wouldn’t shoot, but nothing more than a groan escaped his lips.
But Mae was already bending to set her gun on the ground at her feet.
“Is that your pet, witch? I didn’t expect him to be breathing after that fall into the river. Although I do wonder why you are out here so intent on killing yourselves.”
“We are looking for the children who have gone missing,” Mae said. “Something you and your men should be doing.”
“Why? They are just casualties in our struggle with the Strange. We need the Strange for our devices, so we draw them here.”
“That was the sound of horns in the night?” Mae asked.
“Yes. A device, a generator, calls the Strange, and a netgun in the hands of my men traps them. When transferred into these batteries and mixed with glim, the Strange have remarkable, and powerful, properties.” He tapped the glass globe in the center of the headless matic. The Strange there jerked away from his touch.
“It is the perfect use for the Strange. We harvest and harness them. With the Strange under our control, the witches at our service, and a nearly unlimited supply of glim and gold, the war is won before it even begins. We will own and rule this land and any other that suits our fancy. You, Mrs. Lindson, are looking at your new king.”
“I am looking at a dead man,” she said quietly. “And a fool.”
She lifted her hands, whispering the words to a spell.
Cedar struggled up onto his feet—and fell. The cold, the pain, dragged at him as surely as a weight around his neck.
Mae didn’t turn toward him. He didn’t know if she could even hear him trying to call her name.
Vosbrough pressed something that looked like a telegraph key at his belt, tapping out a message, and the headless, bloodless creature fueled by Strange and glim raised its weapon at Mae and fired.
Chapter Thirty-two
Captain Hink’s head felt like a swarm of bees had taken up hiving there. He’d gotten hit in the head, along with more than a few good thumps in the side, during that jail brawl. He’d lost blood and the lump on the back of his noggin was making him see double between blinks.
In any normal circumstance after a brawl like that, he’d hit the sky, hole up a while, and drink away the pain until the world straightened out again.
But he was without his ship, without booze, and stuck in a dying man’s church. He was also the last chance Rose Small, the Madders, the Hunt brothers, and Mae had to grab up the Holder and finish off finding the young folk.
He’d told Rose to go. He told her he’d be fine. And he supposed that was true. For as long as their ammunition held out.
“So what weapons do we have left?” he asked.
Miss Dupuis and Mr. Wicks, who apparently had been in the middle of a conversation, both looked over at him.
“We’re surrounded, correct?” he asked as he walked to the back windows and looked out.
“What supplies do we have to fight with?”
“Who said we have decided to fight?” Miss Dupuis said.
“And who said you are the one to make the decisions around here?” Wicks asked.
“I was a captain in the war,” Hink said.
“I am your superior,” Wicks said. “Is there another language in which you’d rather I say that, and in which you might understand? Pirate, perhaps? Or fists?”
“Guns,” Hink said, ignoring his yatter and talking to Miss Dupuis instead. “How many do we have, how many do they have?”
“Father Kyne doesn’t appear to own anything but a hunting rifle. I have my gun, Wicks has his, and you have yours.”
“Bullets?”
She shook her head. “We have two sticks of dynamite, though. We can make a stand, but we won’t win a firefight.”
“This is Sheriff Burchell,” the man yelled. “We’ve given you time to put your guns down, walk out, and turn yourselves in so that justice can be done. If we don’t see every man and woman out here on the ground in front of us in one minute, we will be forced to take care of this in a much less civilized manner.”
“How many men out there?”
Wicks pulled off his glasses and wiped a clean white cloth over the lenses. “Sheriff and his deputy, and the posse they rounded up. Perhaps thirty men, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Dupuis?”
“At least that, yes.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hink said.
“Do you have a plan?” Miss Dupuis asked.
“Of course I have a plan,” Hink said as he pulled his gun and strode out of the kitchen toward the front of the building. “Keep shooting until I run out of bullets.”
Chapter Thirty-three
“Mr. Alun Madder,” Rose said, her good hand sliding down to her gun, “you must know that I respect you and your brothers for those fine deviser minds of yours. And I certainly can understand when a brain slips a cog and goes off to wander down a whimsical path. But you will never have my body as a bargain for your gain. Never.”
Alun regarded her through sharp eyes. “Rose Small, I find myself becoming more and more fond of you as time goes by. I agree. Your body is your own. Perhaps I misspoke.”
She kept her hand on her gun. She knew that the Madders used words like a watchmaker used tools: precisely and with intention.
“Then respeak yourself, Mr. Madder. Clearly.”
“We come from…old blood, we Madders. Blood that stretches back for more days and years than people have numbers for. We are uncommon men, and we walk the earth by choice, for reasons of our own. Old blood brings with it certain advantages. You’ve seen only the barest hint of the things we know, the things we can do.”
He paused, and Rose was glad for it. She found it hard to breathe when he was speaking. Alun Madder and both of his brothers were miners, devisers, and brawlers. But sometimes, in the rare moments when the flame of their humanity was uncovered and let burn free, they were more than just three men: they were a force, a unit, brothers like none she had known. And when one of them intended to use words to capture your attention, even breathing seemed an unnecessary distraction.