The devil’s devices might be tough to crack, but the sweet inside was worth the trouble. Without the vial, the matic rattled like an unbalanced flywheel, the clatter inside it slowing, the steam cooling, until it lay still, a lump of useless metal, cold unto dying.
Jeb brushed the bits of glass off his tongue and smacked his lips. He stared at the matic a while or two. He had to get moving, had to get walking again. Where there was one matic, there would likely be more. Enough to slake his hunger. A dead man didn’t need food to fill his belly. He needed glim to fuel his brain.
He pushed back up on his feet. His hand wasn’t working as well and his shoulder seemed out of joint. Fighting the matic did him harm, but that would not stop him from finding LeFel. Would not stop him from returning to Mae. He took a few steps more—then a thought came to him. He should take himself a weapon.
The rope was a good weapon, so he took the rope. The matic’s arms were strong and long and sharp like a scythe, so he took two of those too, hooking them over his shoulders.
Satisfied, he started walking. Toward the rail. Toward the end of Shard LeFel’s life. Toward his Mae.
He made it quite a ways. Up off the scrabble of stone. Up onto a path through scrub that reached as high as his chest. Far enough his shoulder found its way back into the socket. Far enough the thin forest gave way to rolling hills with very few trees. He took the easiest path—along a tumble of boulders to one side that became a sheer rock wall on the other. The rail was out there. And he aimed to find it.
By and by, as he worked his way slowly through the dark, he heard them.
Matics. Clattering over the ground, thumping, skittering over the stones. They were coming. Coming for him. More than one. More than two.
He looked out far as he could see. There, through the scrub, cresting over the hill and pouring down toward him. Matics. He counted up to four, but more kept coming. So he stopped counting. Jeb found himself a stone to put at his back with plenty of room in front of him for swinging. He tugged the thresher arms off from over his shoulders and stood his ground.
Two of the matics spotted him. He licked his lips, already hungry for the sweetness in their heads.
The matics rushed.
Jeb Lindson smiled.
Then he started killing.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Shard LeFel rarely slept. He had found no use for nights spent dreaming of death.
But tonight he was more restless than most. He waited outside the rail carriage, pacing the length of the observation platform, waiting for the return of the tickers he had sent to bring him Jeb Lindson’s head.
The night was calm, a summer breeze mewling through the treetops. LeFel could feel his life ticking away like water through his hands. It was terrifying, this slow descent into death. If his brother only knew what he had cursed him to suffer.
Three hundred years of dying.
He’d torture him slowly for that, over months, at the least. Years, if he could.
The waning moon was tomorrow. It would be his last day alive, his last waning moon whose light would guide his return home. After three hundred years of searching, devising, making, and breaking, it came down to a mere twenty-four hours. If he didn’t open the door before dawn, he would succumb to the sleep eternal.
The last component necessary to open the door out of this mortal world was the witch. And she was just moments away from being his. And now, knowing she was close, her magic nearly in his hands, LeFel could not hold still. Instead, he paced, the thunk of his heel and the tap of his cane metronome to his urgency, his need.
With his curse broken, the door open, the rails hammered down, he could fulfill his promise to the Strange and set them free from their pockets and nooks and nightmares. He would be their king, giving to them bolts and wire and steam to make whole their bodies. He would set them free to travel the iron rails laid down from shore to shore. Free to feed on mortal fear, blood, and marrow.
His brother had done all he could to stop the Strange from entering the mortal world, from supping on the humans here. But Shard would give the dark ones their desire. The mortals would die, Strange sicknesses, Strange blights, plagues, and madness, until the humans were erased from the land.
Shard would watch the fattening of the Strange with glee. He knew what it was to be a despised shadow. He knew what it was to be feared, hated, imprisoned. He understood hunger so very, very well now. That knowledge was a gift his brother had unknowingly given to him.
It was time for the Strange to hunger no more.
It was time for his death to end.
It was time to use the witch for his own desires.
The hulking frames of his rail matics, devices that pounded, ripped, hauled, and hammered, rested like slumbering metal giants along the edge of the forest. Shadowed except for where the rising moonlight rubbed iron and steel to a mercury shine.
The men who worked the rail were either in town drinking and carousing or else sleeping in the tent town up the rail nearly a mile or so.
He had seen nothing of the Madder brothers since earlier in the day, which suited him fine.
The brothers were part of the king’s guard—he was sure of it. They hunted the Holder, and had stayed only a step behind him all these years, traveling faster through their underground tunnels and mines than he could on iron and wheel. They might suspect he had the Holder kept safely under lock and key, but they could not know that he had all parts of it assembled, could not know that he had it here, in his keeping, nor that he intended to use it this waning moon.
He was certain they did not know what else he possessed in the other two railcars: his menagerie of matics, and the door forged between worlds.
LeFel chuckled. It had been a game well played. He had trumped their moves, one for one, always a step ahead. Three hundred years among mortals had taught him nuances of deceit that had kept the king’s best hunters, best devisers, best guards, stumbling behind his trail like blind fools.
The air suddenly washed cold, carrying ice and fogging LeFel’s exhaled breath.
LeFel looked down into the darkness.
Mr. Shunt stood at the step at the bottom of the train-car platform, his face tipped up, lost in shadows even though the moon poured full upon him. The strong stink of oil and blood and burned flesh hung about him like a pall. He had been undone again. Mr. Shunt’s uncanny ability to stitch himself up, no matter how much he was taken apart, was one of his more useful attributes.
“Why have you returned to me, Mr. Shunt?” LeFel asked. “Do you carry the witch in the corners of your cap?”
“No, Lord LeFel,” Mr. Shunt whispered, his voice rusty. “The witch is in her house, at her hearth. Beyond my reach.”
“It. Is. One. Small. Thing,” LeFel said, biting off each word as if it were poison. “One small mortal!” He inhaled, exhaled, but still anger shook him. “A frail woman. Are you so weak that you cannot reach in and take her?”
“The dead man.” Mr. Shunt’s voice was just above a growl. “The tie between them—the magic—still holds her safe.”
LeFel held very still though rage tore at his reason like a storm.
“Perhaps aligning my interests with you was a mistake, bogeyman.”
Mr. Shunt jerked as if the words struck him flat across the face. But he wisely held his tongue, and narrowed his eyes as he watched LeFel pace.
Finally, LeFel came upon a second plan. “Since your arm is too short to reach her, we shall dig her out with a twig. Come,” LeFel ordered.
He turned and opened the door, striding into a dark interior striped by moonlight. He knew the Strange would follow. He had all the things Mr. Shunt most craved—the door, the Holder, the key, and power.