Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) (6 page)

“We’ll find her quickly,”
Kali said, “and then figure something out.”

She didn’t sound like she
had any more idea as to what that something should be than he did.
He had always hoped his life would be better after Cudgel Conrad
was removed from the world. Apparently, he had hoped for too
much.

• • • • •

Kali heard the scrapes of
shovels before the landslide came into sight. Clouds scudded across
the sky, hiding the first rays of dawn, but she could make out more
of her surroundings than she had an hour ago. She and Cedar hadn’t
seen the airship recently. She hoped that meant it had drifted over
to the other side of the river and that the crew had no idea which
way its prey had gone.

Expecting the Hän to be
the ones digging, Kali started to head out of the trees to talk to
the men with the shovels. Cedar caught her shoulder before she did
so.

“I asked Tadzi to get
some people to help dig,” she whispered, “in the unlikely chance
that my cave wasn’t entirely destroyed and that some of my goods
survived.” Specifically, the body of her airship.

“What people?”

“Kéitlyudee and her
cousins.”

Cedar considered the dark
shapes moving among rocks. “That may be who you asked for, but
that’s not who’s there.”

“How can you tell?” Kali
frowned at the diggers. She couldn’t make out faces in the poor
lighting, and she didn’t hear anybody talking. There were more
people out there than she would have expected for just Kéitlyudee’s
family.

“I can tell.”

“They’re not Mounties,
are they?” She grimaced at the idea of Cedar trying to track down
her new nemesis when the authorities were already up here
searching.

“No.”

“Who else would be up
here?”

Cedar hesitated.
“Scavengers would be my guess.”

Indignation flooded Kali.
“Looking for treasure in my old workshop? How did they even know
the workshop was here? I kept that secret. I had booby traps.”
Realizing her voice sounded squeaky and her words were coming out
quickly, Kali forced herself to take a deep breath, though she
glowered at the shovel wielders poking through the rubble.

“You’ve had quite a few
people up here helping you with the airship,” Cedar said, sounding
irritatingly reasonable.

“Not mealy-mouthed miners
with shovels. Maybe that Amelia woman, if she is who blew up my
flash gold, told them to come up here and root around. Oh, I want
to strangle her.”

“Someone might have
simply come up to investigate the explosion and then found
something valuable that had flown free.”

“Stop being so
reasonable, Cedar. I intend to strangle someone.”

“How will you get her to
work for you, rebuilding your airship, if she’s been
strangled?”

“I’ll think of something.
I’m creative.”

“Of that I have no
doubt,” Cedar murmured. “I’ll poke around, see what I can
find.”

“See if you can find a
way to roll these freeloaders back down the hill to Dawson.”

“Now, now, I can only
deal with one of your enemies at a time.”

“Really? I expect more
from my future chief of security.”

Cedar waved his fingers,
then glided into the shadows. He was too good of a man to point out
that since she no longer had an airship, she couldn’t rightfully
hire a chief of security for it.

Kali folded her arms and
glared at the rock field. How could she get rid of these
scavengers? She doubted stomping around and cursing at them would
convince them to leave. Every time a shovel scraped against stone,
it made her teeth grit. What if they
did
find something of
hers? If nothing else, her coin purse was somewhere under that
mountain. She could use those coins, especially now that she would
probably have to bribe someone to skulk into town and buy food for
her.

She stalked through the
trees toward the trail, not sure what she meant to do. Perhaps if
she dug out a few of her own traps and reset them, that would
discourage scavenging.

A thud sounded, followed
by several clacks as a boulder rolled down the slope, banging and
bouncing until it cracked against a stout tree and came to a stop.
It occurred to Kali that she would have struggled to move such a
solid rock on her own. It would have taken a long and sturdy lever.
These people might actually be doing her a favor,
if
she
could keep them from making off with her belongings when they found
something. Maybe she could let them dig throughout the day, or
however long it took them to reach the cave, then scare them away
somehow.

The sound of voices
drifted up from down the trail. More scavengers with shovels? No,
they weren’t speaking French or English—they were conversing in
Hän.

Kali waited until the
speakers came close enough for her to see. There were four of them,
one about Kali’s size and the other larger, probably men.

“Kéitlyudee?” Kali
guessed.

The young woman jumped at
her voice, skittering off the trail into the trees. A moment later,
she warily whispered, “Kali?”

Kali couldn’t blame her
for being twitchy. She had been pawed over by that monstrous
murdering pirate before Kali had been able to free her, and bravery
hadn’t come naturally to her before, either.

“It’s me,” Kali said,
waving for the men to come forward. They hadn’t jumped off the
path.

“What’s going on?”
Kéitlyudee asked, rejoining the group.

“Opportunistic
greed.”

“Pardon?”

“Come over here, please,
and I’ll explain. Are these your kin?” Kali thought she recognized
at least one face in the growing light.

“Yes. We brought tools
for digging. Did you already find helpers? My cousins were hoping
to earn some coin to buy some luxuries before winter.”

Yes, wasn’t
everybody?

“That can still happen.”
Kali drew the group to the side, using the trees to stay hidden
from those toiling by the dim dawn lighting. “Those people up there
weren’t invited. Would you and your relatives be willing to keep an
eye on them for me? Let them dig, but if they’re able to get into
my old workshop and find any valuable tools or if there’s anything
left of my airship, find a way to shoo them off. No, wait. You just
watch them.” Kali tapped the tools in her pockets. “I’ll see if I
can make something that might scare grown men away. Maybe you can…
I know. Go out there and pretend you’re just there to scavenge,
too, but mention how angry the Hän spirits are about the explosion
in this sacred land.”

“This isn’t sacred land,”
Kéitlyudee objected. “That hill over there used to be called
Rutting Wolf Knoll.”

“Which would surely make
it sacred to the wolves.”

“Kali...”

“Look, they don’t know
what’s sacred and what’s not. Just make up a story. Please? I could
do it, but I’m, ah...” Should she mention that she and Cedar were
no longer on the right side of the law? She had better. If all
these people were here because of her smashed workshop, the
Mounties would think to look for her here too. “Cedar and I have to
stay in hiding because I broke him out of jail, where he was
wrongfully incarcerated. Unfortunately, the Mounties don’t realize
yet that it was wrongful.”

“Yet?” Kéitlyudee sounded
bemused. Or maybe that was bewildered. “Will you be correcting them
of their misconception?”

“Uh.” If Kali had any
idea how, she would, but her chat with the last Pinkerton agent
hadn’t gone well, and she couldn’t imagine the Mounties would think
favorably of her after she had added a back window to their jail
cell. “Maybe I can think of something. In the meantime, watch those
fellows, will you? I’m going to see if I can make this mountainside
a touch eerie.”

• • • • •

Cedar wasn’t surprised
when he did not find Kali where he had left her. He did run into
the Hän woman, Kéitlyudee, who directed him vaguely toward the
trees downslope. She and her kin were digging near Kali’s workshop,
trading wary glares with six Dawson men who probably resented that
the new group had intruded upon their scavenging. They weren’t
Mounties, but Cedar kept his back to them, so they wouldn’t glimpse
his face. Full daylight had come, and he expected the authorities
to head in this direction eventually. He had spotted the airship
further down the river several times. Apparently, they thought he
and Kali had run much farther in that direction than they had. Of
course. Wouldn’t it be foolish to linger less than two miles from
Dawson’s borders?

He scooted down the
slope, slipping on gravel and loose stones. In the aftermath of the
rockslide, he was happy to reach the trees. He had felt vulnerable
investigating that charred crater, since it was out in the open. If
the soldiers on that airship had a quality spyglass, they might be
able to see him from across the river.

“Kali?” Cedar called
softly, hearing a faint banging.

Was she
making
something? Normally, he wouldn’t find that odd, but he couldn’t
imagine what materials she had found to use out here. Ferns? Moss?
Dirt?

The banging stopped.
“Down here.”

He found her in a gully,
assembling pieces of bark to make a… He couldn’t guess. “It looks a
little small to drive up the hill and run those diggers off the
land.”

“Making a steam-powered
digger-runner-offer would be hard with bark and twine.”

“Well, you are a talented
woman.”

She tore her gaze from
her work for a half second to give him a quick smile, but it didn’t
last long. “I don’t have any flash gold left, so I’m left with the
mundane.”

“Was that the last of it
that you used on my cell wall?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t scowl at him
or give him a look of regret or condemnation, but he grimaced,
feeling guilty, nonetheless. He lamented that she had used the last
of her father’s legacy—and such a useful energy source—on him.

“Fortunately, all I want
to do is fool some greedy scavengers,” Kali said. “You’ve heard
someone blow on a bottle and create an eerie sound?”

Cedar nodded.

Kali lifted what was
starting to look like a bark chimney, so he could see a hole in the
ground under her. “There’s a hollow down there that animals
sometimes use for a den, and that happens sometimes in this
spot—I’ve heard it on a windy day. I’m aiming to enhance the
effect.” She glanced toward a tree branch where she’d woven
something that looked like a fan blade out of fern leaves. It was
fancier than anything he could have assembled. “And providing my
own wind. On command.”

“You think an eerie noise
will send greedy scavengers running?”

“If it’s accompanied by
tales of sacred Hän grounds, I’m hoping so.” She glanced up. “I
don’t suppose you found any tracks?”

“Actually, I did.” Cedar
lifted his chin, pleased that he could tell her that it had been
worth it to spring him from jail. “It was hard, since so many
people have been tramping around this morning, but I found some
tracks that had to belong to a woman. They were too small for those
clodhoppers up there. Unless you or Kley—I still can’t pronounce
her name—wandered over the ridge and into the woods to the south, I
believe they may have belonged to your intruder.”

“A woman.” Kali clenched
her fist.

“Yes, most definitely,
and now that I think about what Kley was wearing this morning, I
can say for certain it wasn’t her. She’s got soft hide shoes on.”
Cedar knew it was Amelia for another reason, too, and was about to
explain when Kali spoke again.

“Amelia. It must be.” She
stood up, her bark project forgotten. “How far did you follow the
tracks?”

“Not far. Just on the
other side of the ridge there are a couple of skid marks where
something landed.”

“That flying contraption
she used? We destroyed it, blew its boiler to tarnation and
back.”

“Reckon she fixed it. Or
made another one.”

Kali groaned. “We can’t
track her all the way back to her lair then, not if she took to the
air.”

“Maybe, maybe not. She
was flying low for some reason—maybe because she knew an airship is
in the area and could spot her. There’s a lot of broken foliage
leading away from the landing spot. At least initially, she kept
heading south.”

“Away from town,” Kali
mused.

“Maybe she has a workshop
cave, just like you.”

“She’s nothing like me,”
Kali snapped, but her ire did not last. Her shoulders sagged, and
she sighed. “She’s a lot like me. I regret… I don’t understand why
she insisted on being enemies. I would have liked...” She
swallowed. “It would be nice to have a tutor or to be an assistant
to someone older and more educated who does the things I’d like to
do. Not the alchemy and magic, but she’s an engineer too. Why’s she
out to ruin my life, Cedar?” A plaintive note had entered her
voice, and hurt swam in her eyes.

Kali was so tough most of
the time, putting up a wall around her real feelings so a man might
never know they existed. It was easy to forget sometimes that she
was a woman and she could be hurt the same as any other woman, the
same as any other
person
.

He stepped forward,
lifting an arm in invitation. “I could hold her down so you could
ask her. Forcefully.”

Since she was busy with
her project, he wasn’t sure if Kali would accept the hug, but after
hesitating a moment, she leaned against him, her chin drooping to
her chest. Having her work and her flash gold destroyed seemed to
have affected her far more than the fact that she’d marked herself
as a criminal. Even though Cedar could understand her feeling of
loss, he worried that the choice she’d made to free him would
become a regret for her long after she had moved on to other
projects and perhaps built another airship. He hoped she wouldn’t
come to resent him.