Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (30 page)

“None of your fucking business, bitch,” shouted Pinch. He raised his rifle and took sight along its length. “Now how about you hand over what's rightfully mine. I want my slaves, and I want my bride. Where's Maria?”

Rowena raised her own pistols. “Maria's not here. These people are free men and women, Pinch. And they're going to stay that way.”

“Your funeral, sweetheart.”

A shot rang out and Rowena tensed, but it was Pinch who leaped like a scalded cat as the bullet pinged off the hide of the Steamcrawler. She turned to find a figure standing behind her, clad in leather and furs despite the heat, leaning on a long-barreled rifle.

“And who are you?” she said, raising an eyebrow. She hadn't heard anyone approach.

The stranger put a finger to his weather-creased forehead. “I do not go by a name, ma'am.”

“Well, if you don't know your name, I'm taking it that you just fired that bullet. Would I be presumptuous in thinking you're on our side?”

*   *   *

The stranger turned narrowed eyes on Pinch. “I had to be sure. Had to be sure it was all going to work out.”

“Sure
what
was going to work out?”

He waved his guns. “This. All these different folks, black and white, from all corners of the world. All together here in one place.”

“And has it worked?”

The stranger gave a thin smile. “It has the potential to.”

“You! Nameless!” shouted Pinch. “You got no business here. This ain't your battle.”

“I sent a message with one of your boys,” said the stranger Rowena now realized was the Nameless. “Perhaps you didn't get it. Told him to tell you that this place was off-limits, that it's under my protection. I'm guessing you've got the message now.”

“That was then,” said Pinch. “Things've changed. This bitch blew up half of Steamtown. Cockayne roasted my deputy. Those are my fucking slaves.”

“Then I guess this is my battle after all,” said the Nameless.

“Now?” shouted Bent from the observation deck of the
Skylady III
.

Rowena nodded. “Now, Aloysius!”

“Have at you, you effing bastard!” he yelled, and the Hotchkiss roared.

The dirt in front of the nearest Steamcrawler exploded, one track spinning off the wheels. The occupants poured out, heading for shelter behind the other vehicles. Bent looked over the gun. “Eff me,” he said quietly.

Pinch sat down heavily on his vehicle. “Oh, you've done it now. Spirit or no fucking spirit, you people are—” His voice trailed off as he looked up and beyond the crowd. “What the shit?”

Rowena looked behind her, at the ridge that rose up beyond the creek. There was a figure there, dressed in black, masked and holding up a rapier.

“La Chupacabras!” she cried. The girl? Inez?

Then, rising behind her, wave after wave of whooping, hollering Indians, two dozen of them pouring over the ridge and down across the shallow water toward them.

Rowena ducked down as both sides started firing. Inez galloped up, dismounting in the shadow of the house. Rowena called, “Where's Gideon?”

“He's gone, with Cockayne and Maria.”

So Louis had made good at last. “Where?”

“The Alamo.”

She turned around as a bullet impacted in the stone wall. Despite the Yaqui, they were still outgunned. She couldn't put all these lives at risk. “Pinch,” she called over the racket. “Pinch! Stop shooting.”

He held up his hand and the Steamtowners paused. “You ready to give up?”

“Maria's not here,” she shouted. “Gideon has found her and gone. There's no point you being here anymore.”

Pinch shook his head. “I still need to pay you back for…” He paused. “Wait.” He turned to his crony, the one wearing the sheriff's badge. “The fucker's gone to get the goddamn dragon.”

Pinch turned to Rowena. “I'll be back for you.” Then he waved his hand, turned his small army around, and had them gallop and roll back the way they came.

The Nameless stood at her side, watching them go. “You may have sacrificed your friends, you know.”

“Maybe. But how many lives have been saved here? Gideon will understand. He's very big on the greater good and all that.” She shaded her eyes and watched the retreating Steamtowners. “I just hope he got a good start on them.”

 

22

T
HE
B
ATTLE
OF
THE
A
LAMO

From a small copse of trees on a hill they watched the activity around the crumbling white stone church. There was a long, low building to the rear—dormitories for the missionaries who had first set up the abandoned mission—and the area was enclosed by a wooden palisade fence. In the dusty plaza before the mission was a wide tarpaulin staked to the ground, the unmistakable shape of Apep beneath it.

“I reckon there'll be thirty, maybe thirty-five men,” said Cockayne. “I was hoping more might have fled Steamtown since Rowena shot it up and Pinch hauled off to the old mine.”

Far beyond, to the south, they could see the pall of smoke that hung over Steamtown. Gideon hoped that the slaves and women forced to work in the brothels had been able to escape. Pinch's hellish little town was dead, more or less. But if he got his hands on Maria and was able to fly the dragon, there was no guessing what fresh terror he would be able to work.

Gideon looked at Cockayne. “What do you think we should do?”

Cockayne turned to Maria. “You surprised me. You can ride a horse. Do you think you can shoot?”

“I didn't know I could ride until I did it,” she said. “I summoned some hidden memory … Annie Crook's, I suppose. Perhaps she went riding in Ireland in her youth.”

It was little things like this that brought Gideon up short, reminded him that Maria was not a flesh-and-blood woman, but the clockwork creation of the genius Hermann Einstein. She was an automaton with the brain of poor old Annie Crook, the tragic London shopgirl who had dared to love a prince and been murdered by the Crown—by his own employers, he reminded himself bitterly—for the good of the nation. Cockayne reached into his saddlebag and handed her a revolver.

“Let's hope Annie Crook learned to shoot as well as ride,” he said.

“Surely you can't be expecting Maria to fight as well?” said Gideon.

Cockayne raised an eyebrow. “This ain't London high society, Smith. We don't pack the ladies off to do needlework while the men do the important stuff. Unless Maria has any objections?”

She spun the chamber on the revolver and twirled the gun on her index finger, slapping it into her palm and taking aim with it rested in the crook of her other arm. Cockayne grinned, and Maria said, “None at all.”

“Maybe we should wait until dark,” suggested Gideon. “We could sneak in and—”

“And have our asses handed to us on a plate,” said Cockayne. “Look, Smith, as soon as Pinch realizes we're not at the mine he'll be hauling his little army right back here to defend his property. We've walked into the lion's den. We don't have the luxury of waiting for nightfall, of formulating plans, of sneaking around. Pinch'll be on our asses soon, and we want to be airborne in the dragon by then or we've lost.”

“So…?”

Cockayne drew both pistols. “Blaze of glory, Smith. It's all or nothing, win or lose, black or white. We go down there and we take back our dragon, or we die trying.”

Gideon gazed down the hill. “But it's suicide.…”

“Not if we win.”

Gideon looked at Maria. He'd only just found her, and now he was going to risk losing her again? “What do you think?”

She smiled. “Blaze of glory, I believe Mr. Cockayne said.”

Cockayne laughed richly. “All right. Let's make for the gate. Try to stick together.”

With that, he dug his heels into his horse's flanks and whooped loudly as it began to gallop down the hill. Maria and Gideon exchanged a glance, and she smiled and spurred her horse on also.

“Blaze of glory!” yelled Gideon, and followed them down the hill.

*   *   *

The mood in the Alamo was not good. Bernard Osterman had been put in nominal charge of the mission and given responsibility for looking after the brass dragon. It was a queer-looking thing, and he'd never have believed it could take to the air if he hadn't seen it himself before it crashed in the desert. There were thirty-two men at the Alamo apart from Osterman, and there were already rumblings of dissent and even mutiny. Mr. Pinch had gone off on some crazy mission and had taken most of the Steamtown men with him. Meanwhile, San Antonio had practically burned to the ground overnight; they'd watched the flames licking the dark sky, seen the groups of men and women—in twos and threes at first, larger mobs later—breaking out of the dormitories and making their bids for freedom. There was no one to stop them, though Osterman had ordered his men to at least try to shoot the packs of escaping slaves that passed anywhere near the Alamo.

Yesterday he'd had forty-seven men. Fifteen had absconded in the small hours. The rest wanted to know how they were going to get paid, what they were going to eat, and if anyone was stopping the whores escaping. There wasn't much left of Steamtown now, and that included loyalty; most of the men who had settled there had been drifters, criminals, murderers, and if the things that kept them in San Antonio—money, vittles, women, gambling, and the iron rule of Thaddeus Pinch—were now gone, then there wasn't much to keep them faithful.

Osterman stared at the dragon under the tarpaulin. Crazy thing. And it had caused all this trouble. If he were Pinch, he'd be ruing the day he'd ever set eyes on the thing. It had burned Steamtown to the ground without even flapping a wing.

“Mr. Osterman?”

He looked up at one of the young bucks. If he was asking about money, or food, or women, Osterman swore he'd—but no. The kid had news.

“Riders, sir. Three of 'em. Heading this way.”

“Three?” said Osterman. Didn't sound much like an invading force. “Maybe it's a message from Mr. Pinch. Maybe he's won and he's on his way back.”

“You want us to open the gate?”

Osterman shrugged. Maybe it was supplies. “Keep guns on them, but yeah, open the gate.”

*   *   *

“They're letting us in!” shouted Gideon.

“Then they're fucking idiots!” called Cockayne. “Okay, I've seen this place. When the gate opens the dragon will be right in front of us, staked down into the dirt. We're going to go straight through the plaza to the old church, around the dragon.”

“Around it?” said Gideon. “Why not straight to it?”

“They must think we're from Pinch or something, but they're pretty quickly going to realize we're not. We'll have a tiny window of opportunity, Smith, and it won't be enough to get the dragon fired up. Go right to the wall, get off your horse, and get behind it. Then follow me.”

They were two hundred yards away now, and the gate was fully open. There must have been some kind of walkway along the wooden palisade, because Gideon counted maybe ten men with rifles trained on them. He shouted to Cockayne, “Armed men. Should we…?”

“Yeah,” said Cockayne, then started firing.
“¡No rendirse, muchachos!”
he yelled. “Blaze of goddamn glory!”

*   *   *

Too late, Osterman realized he'd fucked up badly. Of the ten men on the palisade, six were tumbling, dead, to the dusty ground. And he'd only counted six shots. Whoever the riders were, they didn't waste bullets.

“Shoot, you assholes!” he screamed at the remaining four. He turned around, looking for help. The kid who'd come to him was looking frightened, as though he was going to piss himself. “Get to the long barracks, wake those lazy bastards up!”

The long barracks was where most of them slept when on Alamo guard duty. The mission itself was crumbling and mostly roofless, but it was still a church, and the Steamtown boys might have been the scum of the earth but none of them wanted to sleep there, so it was pretty much empty save for a few boxes of ammunition and supplies. Osterman stood before the mission and turned to face the gates, the dragon laid out before him. He checked his guns. Before he came to Steamtown he'd been a rifleman in the Boston Cavalry Division. They'd drummed him out for screwing the daughter of some Indian chief up near Canada. That was why he'd come to Steamtown, where they let a man take what he wanted and screw who he liked, whether they said yes or no or what. That was why he was going to do his job and defend the goddamn dragon.

The three riders breached the gate at the same time. He recognized one of them and quailed. Louis Cockayne. Best shot in Texas, they said. There was a man and a woman flanking him. Osterman swallowed and raised his gun. He was going to be the man to take down Louis Cockayne. Thaddeus Pinch would be kissing his boots for a year.

*   *   *

“Shit!” said Cockayne as the bullet whizzed past his ear. Gideon glanced at him then picked off a shooter with a rifle who was taking aim to his right. They were inside the mission, but there were men converging on them from all sides, the air singing with the passage of hot bullets. He saw Maria's gun jerk, and another man crumpled. In front of them was the dragon, and behind it a man in a battered brown hat, his gun raised. Beyond him was their goal, the white Alamo church, a brown door set into a porch.

“He's mine,” said Cockayne, and put a bullet into the shoulder of the man standing in front of the church, who sprawled backward into the dust. “Damn. Must be losing my touch.” Cockayne veered off to the right around the dragon, Maria to the left.

Gideon felt his heart pounding. Blaze of glory. Why did he always feel so alive when he was closest to death? The huge brass snout of Apep was in front of him beneath a flapping corner of the tarpaulin. He dug his heels in and the horse leaped forward, high into the air and over the covered wings of the dragon. Gideon couldn't stop himself from letting out one of Cockayne's whoops as his horse thundered into the dust, skidding to a halt before the Alamo porch.