Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (34 page)

“He was never a villain, not really,” said Gideon. “He was just doing what he thought was expected of him, in a way. Had Louis not challenged Pinch to a duel, the Steamtowners would have finished us off. Pinch shot him in a most cowardly fashion.”

“He lived by the sword,” said Rowena. “It was inevitable he would die that way. You mustn't blame yourself, Gideon.”

Maria squeaked as Bent picked her up and whirled her around. “And Miss Maria! Safe and sound!” He set her down and leaned on Apep's snout, rolling a cigarette. “So we got the dragon, we got Maria, and I'm presuming from that metal claw dangling from the dragon's nose that Pinch got his just effing desserts for his crimes.” He broke into a wide smile. “You know what this means? It means mission accomplished. We can go home.”

Gideon looked over to where the cavalry men were ordering the captured Steamtowners into lines. He saw Jeb Hart and waved at him. Bent took a long drag of his cigarette and said, “I suppose old Hart made good as well, in the end. We thought he'd effed off, and he was going to get help.” Bent hawked noisily, to grimaces from Maria and Rowena, then spat into the sand. “God. Look at the color of that. Gin deficiency, that is.”

Hart approached and took off his hat, nodding at them and looking curiously at Maria. Gideon said, “You got out of Steamtown safely, evidently.”

Hart nodded. “I saw things go badly wrong in the brothel and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Hightailed it back to the garrison.”

“I thought there wasn't going to be any official involvement in this mission,” said Gideon. “Governor Lyle talked about not wanting to antagonize the Texan warlords.”

Hart grinned and nodded to the columns of fresh black smoke rising above Steamtown. “Reckon it's too late for that. Besides, when I got to the garrison a military dirigible had just landed.” He coughed and indicated the covered wagon that the cavalry had brought with them. It was now being pulled by its four-horse team through the palisade gates.

Bent sniffed. “Here comes shit.”

“What do you mean?” asked Gideon.

Bent shrugged. “I can feel it in my bones. Trouble's about to climb out of that effing wagon.”

Gideon was about to say something when the canvas flaps were pulled back and a figure began to laboriously exit the wagon. It was only when he put his stovepipe hat on his head and turned around that Gideon realized who it was.

“Governor Lyle!”

“Mr. Smith!” said Lyle, already mopping his brow in the sun. He raised an eyebrow and wagged a finger in mock reproof at Rowena. “And Miss Fanshawe. I should have known you were up to mischief.”

“Apologies, Governor—” she began, but he waved her away.

“What's done is done.” He looked around, gazing at the dragon and then at Maria. “I see your mission was a success, Mr. Smith. And you have left Steamtown in, well, a bit of a state, to be frank.”

Rowena raised a tentative hand. “That was largely my fault, Governor. Apologies. I hope it's not going to cause too many problems.”

Lyle laughed. “You didn't particularly leave enough of Steamtown to cause problems. And you people aren't accountable; I am, but I had nothing to do with the attack on San Antonio. Captain Humbert and his men are here just to mop up.”

“But what are
you
doing here, Governor?” asked Gideon. “You're a long way from New York.”

Lyle smiled, almost apologetically. Bent murmured, “Here comes that trouble I was talking about.”

“Yesterday a passenger airship came in from London, the same one that brings the mail. There was a letter for me.” He reached into his jacket and withdrew a vellum envelope, sliding out its contents. He handed it over to Gideon and said, “You'll see it's signed by Mr. Gascoyne-Cecil.”

It did indeed bear the signature of the Prime Minister, countersigned by Governor Lyle. Gideon scanned the rest of the letter and looked up. Bent had been right when he smelled trouble. “I'm afraid I don't understand, Governor.”

“I have been in contact with London for some time regarding the situation with the Californian Meiji. The attack in the garden by the ninja that you yourself foiled was the last straw. I immediately contacted Whitehall, and they responded by return mail. Mr. Smith, the assassination attempt is being regarded as an act of war. I have been given carte blanche to take any action I see fit to protect British interests in America.”

Gideon looked at the letter again. “But this says—”

Lyle smiled again, but not with much humor. He nodded and said, “Yes, Mr. Smith. I believe further attacks on New York and other British enclaves are imminent, and only what we might call a preemptive strike can safely defend our people. Mr. Smith, I am requisitioning you and your dragon, and we're going to Nyu Edo.”

“No,” said Gideon. “Absolutely not. Maria isn't some kind of … of war machine.”

Lyle frowned. “Then what is she, Mr. Smith?”

She's the woman I love,
Gideon wanted to say, no, to scream. He wanted to tell the world, to sing it from the rooftops. She was the woman he loved, and he'd moved heaven and hell to get her back. She was not Mr. Walsingham's war machine.

And he realized, so suddenly it dried out his mouth and made his head swim, that he was wrong. Was it the desire for a happy ending that had moved Walsingham to dispatch Gideon across the world to rescue Maria? Or was it merely that she and the brass dragon were invaluable assets, that a world-changing engine of destruction and its pilot simply could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands?

Walsingham cared not a fig for Maria, only what was in her head. And he cared nothing for Gideon, did not believe in Gideon, not really. It had taken the distance Gideon had put between himself and London for him to see that now.

Gideon was just another soldier in the endless war fought to ensure Britannia ruled the waves. A highly decorated, much-publicized soldier, true, but just another resource. Mr. Gascoyne-Cecil might have signed that requisition order, but it would be Walsingham behind it, moving the pieces across the chessboard toward an endgame only he could see.

No, Gideon was not even a soldier. He was a machine, just as much as Maria—or at least a cog in Walsingham's unknowable, infernal device.

And the love a fisherman held for a clockwork girl amounted to nothing in all of that.

Lyle coughed. “Nyu Edo, Mr. Smith. We must strike now at the heart of the enemy. At
Britain's
enemy.”

Gideon looked at Lyle, suddenly exhausted. “We're going nowhere, Governor. Not until we've buried our dead.”

 

25

A
CTS
OF
W
AR

This was not, considered Gideon Smith, what he thought a life of adventure would be like.

As he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, he suddenly felt a longing for the life he had left behind. If he could turn back the clock, would he? If he could just go back to that night when the sea mist rolled in over Sandsend and stop his father Arthur from creeping out to take the
Cold Drake
fishing, only to die at the claws of the terrible Children of Heqet. Then he would never have met Bram Stoker, never have sought out Captain Lucian Trigger. Adventure would always simply be something he read about in the pages of
World Marvels & Wonders
and longed for from afar.

But he couldn't turn back time. It had all happened, and Gideon was—by royal appointment—the Hero of the Empire. The tales of Captain Trigger had been exposed as so many fancies and outright lies, and adventuring was not the pure, noble, tidy thing the penny dreadfuls claimed it to be.

He was standing up to his neck in the hole he had singlehandedly dug in the dry dust, seven feet long. He tossed the spade out and climbed up over the lip, accepting Bent's outstretched hand. The cavalrymen had wanted to help dig the grave, but Gideon had said no.

Louis Cockayne had died for him. Burying him was the very least he could do.

Rowena gave Gideon a canteen of water and he took a long draft as four of the soldiers laid Cockayne's body, wrapped in a Union Flag, into the hole. Captain Humbert raised an eyebrow at Gideon, who nodded, and they began to fill in the grave until there was just the slightest mound of earth displaced by the corpse of Louis Cockayne.

With the flat of his spade, Gideon drove a makeshift cross he had fashioned himself from two pieces of blasted wood from the stockade at the head of the mound, then laid down the shovel. He took out Cockayne's wallet from the back pocket of his ripped and dirty trousers. Inside was a faded photograph of a family group: stern-faced father, plump mother, three boys of varying heights. Cockayne smiled out from behind the shining eyes of the middle boy, aged just eight or nine. The thought of him as a child stabbed Gideon hard in his chest, brought prickling tears to his eyes. There was also a scrawled note in the wallet bearing the name of a farm in Connecticut.

“I'll have this sent back to his parents,” said Gideon absently. “I'll write them a letter.”

“What will you say?” asked Rowena.

“That Louis Cockayne died a hero.” All heroes died, sooner or later. He wondered when it would be his turn.

“Someone should say something,” said Bent.

Gideon blinked. They were all looking at him: Bent and Rowena, Governor Lyle, Jeb Hart, Captain Humbert and his soldiers.

“Me? I don't…”

“I think you should,” said Maria softly. “He thought so much of you, you know.”

Gideon smiled wryly.
Yes, maybe he did
, he thought.
And all this time I thought he hated me, considered me nothing but a country boy with ideas above my station
. He looked down at the photograph again, at the small boy who grew up to be Louis Cockayne.

We all start off as small boys with big ideas
, he thought.
Yes, I owe this to Louis Cockayne
.

While he gathered his thoughts, one of the cavalrymen began to play a low, sonorous note on his bugle, and the assembled company took off their hats and cast their eyes down at the grave. As the “Last Post” faded, Gideon looked up at the wild blue sky that Louis Cockayne would never see again.

“I don't know if I believe in good and evil,” said Gideon quietly. “My mother did; she was a churchgoer. My dad was a more … pragmatic man. He used to tell me that people weren't good or evil in themselves, but they sometimes did good things and evil things.”

He paused, collecting his memories. “The first time I met Louis Cockayne, he was bringing a cargo of slaves back from Africa to Steamtown. He threatened to have my friends and me killed. Then he stole Maria from under my nose.

“The first words he spoke to me were when he asked me what I was doing, a boy from nowhere, walking with such great people. I thought him a pirate, a villain. But Louis was right. I was in the company of greatness. And he was among their number.” Gideon smiled sadly again. “I just didn't know it at the time, and I don't think he did, either.”

Gideon watched a tear roll down Rowena's face and fall to the parched earth at her feet. “He thought it was funny, all this
Hero of the Empire
business. He'd have called it a crock of shit or some such. Louis Cockayne looked after number one. But what he didn't realize…” Gideon felt something well inside of him, a great sob he had to strangle back. Maria put a hand on his shoulder, and he took hold of it fiercely. “What he didn't realize was that you only have to do good things once for it to cancel out all the bad. And Louis Cockayne did good when it counted most. He came back and he was a hero, and he was my friend. And that's all.”

There was a long silence, broken eventually by the shuffling feet of Lyle. Now more than ever Gideon needed Cockayne's guidance. But Louis was gone for good, and Gideon couldn't rely on him any longer. He had to make the big, tough decisions himself. Gideon looked up and across the grave at Lyle. “Okay, Governor,” he said wearily. “If it's really what must be done, let's go to war.”

*   *   *

As the others moved away, Rowena stayed a moment, squatting down and running her fingers through the mound of dust.

“You were a bastard, Louis,” she whispered. “A bastard and a rogue.”

A breeze ruffled Rowena's hair. She smiled, imagining it to be the final, departing essence of Cockayne.
Couldn't shuffle off this mortal coil, huh, Louis? Not until you've heard me say it?

Louis Cockayne was a bastard and a rogue. But he'd made good. Whether Rowena fully agreed with Gideon that Louis's final blaze of glory absolved him of all his other sins, she didn't quite know. All she knew for sure was that Louis Cockayne was one of the few men she really could call a friend. And, yes, more than that. She remembered the night in the
Yellow Rose,
as her 'stat had been called then, in the Alexandrian night that felt so long ago now, when she had only just met Gideon Smith. Yes, she'd lain with Cockayne; had before, too. Things were different for the 'stat pilots, they didn't follow the rules of polite society. You took your thrills where and when you could, because you never knew when your number would be up.

And now Louis Cockayne was gone. Another picture to stick up in the Union Hall chapel, another candle to light. Charles Collier, Louis Cockayne.

My soul is in the sky.

Rowena looked at where Gideon and Bent were talking in low tones. Why did all the men in her life have to leave?
Please let it not be Gideon next. I hope to fuck you taught him enough, Louis
, she thought.

The warm breeze caressed her again.
Say it
, it seemed to whisper.

She sighed and smiled sadly. “You were a bastard and a rogue, Louis Cockayne,” she said. “But … I didn't hate you.”