The Iron Duke (30 page)

“My sister writes them.” He looked to Mina, who realized that her mouth had fallen open. “I’m a salvager, not a writer. But if turning my work into a popular adventure allows her a measure of independence, she can continue using my name as long as she likes.”

“I see.” Her voice sounded deep. Across the table, Yasmeen’s eyes had narrowed at Fox, and made Mina wonder if she’d need her armor, after all. “That’s very good of you, sir.”

“I try.” Fox’s gaze moved past her to Trahaearn. “So you’re continuing on to the Ivory Market? I saw that Haynes was dead. Are you after the
Terror
?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve only read the story in the newssheets. Have you got another version, captain?”

“I don’t know their version. I don’t read them.”

Scarsdale looked up. “I’ll tell you how it happened.”

Blowing out a mouthful of smoke, Yasmeen rolled her eyes. “You weren’t there.”

“So I’ll make it more exciting. But first, a drink.” He lifted his glass. “To Baxter. A damn fine man. I daresay not a one of us would be here if not for him.”

How true.
Mina would likely still be at home if the admiral hadn’t been killed. She drank deep, and noted that although Trahaearn’s glass had remained untouched throughout his meal, he drank to his friend.

He hadn’t drunk
or
talked much. She liked his quiet. The others always seemed to be laughing and moving and gesturing, but Trahaearn sat, solid and strong and quiet. If the pillows hadn’t been here, she could have leaned against him, and not worry at all that she’d be jostled about.

Scarsdale raised his glass again. “And to
Bontemps
. A good airship should never fall into a madwoman’s hands, or into the sights of a Royal Navy firebomb squadron.”

Yasmeen snorted into her glass, but drank. Trahaearn’s face was more solemn as he took his.

“A fine ship,” he said.

“And one more to our lovely inspector, for her quick and lovely mind . . . and her opium gun.”

This time, Trahaearn smiled as he drank, meeting her gaze over the rim of his glass. Mina grinned at him, suddenly very glad that he’d bribed the Lord Regents.

Fox set his glass back to the table. “Are you married, inspector?”

She laughed. Truly, what an absurd question. “No. I never will be.”

His frown smoothed away, and he shook his head. “I forget the English are not Brits. An unmarried lady would never travel without a chaperone in Manhattan City.”

Ah, yes.
A bounder girl was only worth as much as her virtue. No wonder all of them were prudes. Their dresses only had to lift above their ankles, and they were ruined. “It doesn’t matter for us,” Mina said. “We’re all already compromised.”

“By the Frenzies?”

“Yes,” Trahaearn said, and the rough note in his voice made her turn to look at him. He stared back at her, with a beat at his temple that said he held himself under rigid control. What for?

“Yes,” she echoed.

Behind her, the birds chirped. Mina frowned. The silence that had fallen was thick and uncomfortable. She looked from Fox to Yasmeen to Scarsdale before she realized why. They all knew a Frenzy had come only a few months before the tower had fallen. And nine years ago, she’d been old enough to be affected.

She glanced at Trahaearn again, and something in the way he looked at her made her stomach hot. She stared down into her drink. It was bottomless. Truly, amazingly bottomless. And if she drank enough, it would cool the burning in her gut.

He asked her quietly, “You don’t remember, do you?”

Her brows lifted. Why would he think that? “Oh, I
do
,” she assured him.

“Dear God, you
asked
.” Scarsdale pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is why we dare not attend dinner parties.”

No, Mina appreciated it. Trahaearn didn’t pretend. He didn’t make silly conversation. And when he said something, she didn’t always like it, but she liked knowing what was in his head.

He flicked a glance to Scarsdale. “He said your mother didn’t remember the Frenzy when you were conceived.”

“Oh, well. My mother is very good at not remembering things that she doesn’t want to.”

“But you do.”

Oh, yes, she remembered. The loss of control, the overwhelming need—and the terror of knowing that it wasn’t coming from within her, but from the Horde.

“I remember,” she said, and sighed. “And my experience was less horrifying than what most buggers went through, I suppose. At least I didn’t get with child, and was with someone I knew.”

His face darkened. “Who?”

Scarsdale groaned. “I say, inspector, if this isn’t something you want to talk about—”

“My friend Felicity.”

“Oh.” The bounder leaned forward. “Pray, then. Do talk about it.”

Yasmeen threw an olive at him. The tension and silence around the table broke into laughter, and Mina laughed with them, glad she was able to. Glad to pretend it didn’t matter.

Except when she met Trahaearn’s eyes. They said that she didn’t fool him.

“That’s not why I’m here,” she said to him. Out loud. Mina didn’t even know what she meant, but he nodded and looked to Fox.

“Have you heard anything of a Black Guard?”

Mina’s hand flew to her mouth. “You can’t ask him,” she hissed. “What if he
is
one?”

The duke shrugged. “Then I’ll kill him after he tells us.”

Yasmeen shook her head, pulling out another cigarillo. “Not until he’s paid me for the remainder of his contract.”

“You’ll be compensated, captain.” Fox leaned toward her, holding a spark lighter. She stared at him as he lit the end, then as he leaned back and lit his own. He looked to Trahaearn. “I’m not Black Guard. But I have had a run-in with one of their men.”

Yasmeen smiled faintly. “And which story was that?”

“I didn’t let her write it. With people like this, you don’t take the chance that they’ll recognize themselves in one of those stories, and inadvertently send them your sister’s way.”

Mina liked him very much for that. “What happened?”

“It was about three years ago. I usually do salvage work, but now and again I’ll be hired as a guide. Usually by researchers or scientists. Sometimes people with too much money and not enough sense. This one said he was a historian, and that he’d come across a document detailing the location of da Vinci’s clockwork army.”

Scarsdale snorted. “You believed him? That legend is as old and as false as my mother’s teeth.”

“No. But he had money enough for the fee Bilson and I charged, and an airship. But—”

“What airship?”

Fox glanced at Yasmeen. “The
Mary Katherine
.”

The captain shook her head. She looked to Scarsdale, who seemed to study her face before slipping his arm around her waist and hauling her into his lap. She settled against his chest with a smile.

Strange, and . . . intimate. Mina tore her gaze away. Fox appeared startled, too, and it seemed with an effort that he turned to Trahaearn again and picked up the thread of his story.

“But once on the airship, we only needed to spend about five minutes with the man before we realized he wasn’t a historian. Educated, but not specialized. When I told him that the location he had was farther east than the Habsburg Wall, it didn’t mean anything to him.”

It didn’t mean anything to Mina, either. She knew the Habsburg Wall had stood for almost fifty years as the strongest defense against the Horde’s approach into Europe, but the reason why a location farther east meant something kept slipping through her mind.

“What should it have meant?”

“Da Vinci designed his clockwork soldiers after the wall was up. Everything east of Austria was already Horde territory. Even if the legend had merit”—he glanced at Scarsdale, then quickly away—“the army wouldn’t have been constructed on that side of the wall. But Pope insisted that we take him to the location he had, regardless. So we flew on.”

Mina leaned forward. “What did you find?”

He smiled slightly, reached for his wine. “First, let me tell you about the journey there. It was a two days’ flight, and Bilson and I escaped Pope’s company for all of thirty minutes. By the second day, I’d have locked myself in the privy if I could.”

“Was he so unpleasant?” The member of the Black Guard who’d killed Baxter hadn’t been, at first glance.

“Not his manner. Not his physical person.” He frowned, drawing on his cigarillo. Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t have the talent for description that my sister does. Just that after every conversation, I felt unwashed—and I’m a man who’ll run for a month through swamps, with my clothes caked in dung and zombie blood, before I find a bath. Somehow, he always got round to bugs. And specifically, the control the Horde had had over buggers, and what sort of acts they were all made to perform. Without ever crossing what my grandmother would have called polite boundaries, he managed to suggest perversions that were . . . were . . .”

Mina followed his gaze and almost dropped her wine. Scarsdale had lowered his head to Yasmeen’s neck, and was slowly tracing his tongue up the column of her throat. She arched her back with an audible purr. Fox stared at them, then looked down into his drink before throwing the contents back.

Trahaearn didn’t appear to notice the display. “What perversions?”

“Incest during the Frenzies. Humans mating with animals and bearing offspring. Experiments where—” He broke off, shaking his head. “You’ve heard them all. And I’ve heard them before, too. Had conversations, genuine speculation whether any of it could be possible, and it didn’t turn my stomach like Pope did. And he was obsessed with the animals. Jesus.”

“I like animals.” Laughing, Scarsdale glanced up from Yasmeen’s throat, then yelped when she dug her fingers into his thigh. He caught her hand and licked the inside of her wrist. “I like you, too, love.”

“And when we arrived,” Fox’s voice sounded a little too loud, but it brought Mina’s attention swinging back to him, “we found a Horde installation. A laboratory, with a package waiting for him.”

“Resistance smugglers?”

Fox looked to Trahaearn. “Yes. I recognized it, too. So I asked what he intended to do with it.”

Trahaearn’s lips quirked. “Of course you did.”

Mina was lost. “What kind of smugglers?”

“Horde resistance,” the duke said. “They fund their rebellion by smuggling Horde tech and weapons to the New World. I’ve picked up dozens of packages the same way.”

“But this one wasn’t tech,” Fox said. “It was a weapon, of sorts—a plague.”

“What?” Mina’s heart dropped to her stomach. Even Scarsdale and Yasmeen looked up from their pillow.

“Modified from the strain that killed so many of the Horde fifty years ago. Apparently, they wondered how the bugs had resisted it, so they experimented until they found a strain that affected buggers. Not intending to
use
it. Just to know. But the resistance got their hands on it and sold it. And unlike the Horde, Pope intended to use it.”

That was much more than they’d ever learned from the assassin in Chatham. “And he told you all of this?”

Fox’s grin was sharp and dangerous. “I can be persuasive.”

“What else did he say?” Trahaearn asked.

“That even if I killed him, the Black Guard would endure. And that it would never be defeated.” Fox shook his head. “It sounded like the type of speech that comes before a man jumps off a cliff. And the next thing, he’s running outside, yelling for the zombies. So I shot him.”

“Better than the zombies,” Scarsdale said.

Yasmeen watched Fox through narrowed eyes. “Except that one didn’t deserve the mercy of it.”

Maybe not. More importantly—“What of the plague?”

“Bilson and I destroyed it, and flew home.” He looked away from Scarsdale and Yasmeen. “I haven’t run into others. And I suspect that Pope wasn’t running on a full load of coal. But there was money behind him, and someone had contacts inside the Horde.”

“And they were looking to kill buggers,” Trahaearn said.

“Yes.” Fox’s gaze darted across the table again. He abruptly stood. “I’m sorry. I must be up early tomorrow. Good night, inspector, Scarsdale. Captain Corsair.”

With a stiff bow, he left.

Mina blinked at the sudden change, then realized that Yasmeen was lifting her mouth from Scarsdale’s. She lay against the pillow next to him with a sigh. “Thank you, James.”

He stroked her hair. “You have to stop hiding.”

“I will when you do.”

With a laugh, he glanced at the duke. “I doubt I ever will, now. The captain has turned his life around.”

“So determined to destroy everything.” Though Yasmeen rolled her head to look over at Trahaearn, she still spoke to Scarsdale. “It’s unfortunate he stopped before getting to you.”

“How true.” With a short laugh, Scarsdale picked up his glass. “Shall we raise another to Baxter?”

Trahaearn frowned at them before shaking his head. “I’ve already had too much to drink.”

He stood. And as abruptly as Fox, he left.

Mina stared after him. From across the table, she heard another purr followed by a soft laugh. And she didn’t want to be here anymore.

After several attempts to get up, she finally made it to her feet and followed him.

 

 

The airship had begun to sway, making it difficult to walk
down the passageway without bumping into the bulkheads on either side. Uncertain whether she was seeking air or Trahaearn, Mina climbed the ladder to the main deck and made her way forward. Sharp wind bit into her heated cheeks. Gas lanterns lit her path and threw deep shadows behind stanchions and capstans. Near the bow, a coil of rope knocked into her foot, and she almost tripped against the side. A warm hand caught her wrist and steadied her.

From his seat on the wooden chest—
her
wooden chest!—Trahaearn rose, and somehow managed to link his fingers through hers. His calluses scraped her palm as he locked their hands together.