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.
The boy slept on a cot to the left of the train car. Even asleep, he held his breath until Shard LeFel and Mr. Shunt passed him by.
Through the inner door, and into the largest section of the carriage, Mr. Shunt trailed Shard LeFel, a silent shadow. Here the wolf was kept. A creature of night, it stared at LeFel, copper eyes glowing. There was too much intelligence in those eyes, too much hatred.
LeFel struck the wolf with the cane as he walked by and the beast snarled. But it was not the beast that he needed. No. He needed something of dirt, of earth, of stone. Something of cog and wire and bone. Not here. Not in this carriage.
Only Strangework would do.
He stormed through the outer door and into the boiler car, where his remaining half-dozen matics hunkered, chained and waiting. Even though the steam had long ago cooled, the matics shifted as he entered, the spark of glim in each of them powering muzzles and heads to rise, ready to do his bidding.
LeFel paused and considered each metal creature. Which should he destroy to power his needs? Not the strongest, a hulking manshaped creature half-bent to fit within the car, piston hammers for arms. Not the swiftest, two beasts the size of dogs constructed of steel pounded so thin, you could see the shadow of the gears slowly ticking behind their curved ribs and knife-filled jaws. Not the deadliest, a heavily armored tractor with two self- loading, pivoted
No, it would need be either the rabbit-sized ticker suited for scouting or the whiskey-barreled self-propelled battle mace.
“Mr. Shunt, disembowel the small ticker, and take from it what you need.”
“Yes, Lord LeFel.” Mr. Shunt swiftly caught up the rabbit-sized ticker in his hands, and put to use his wickedly sharp fingers.
LeFel did not stop to watch. He strode straight down the center of the carriage, not looking right or left at the metal creatures that shifted closer to the shadows, then were as still as gravestones. He opened the outer door and crossed to the final car coupled to his train.
One witch, one human, one dead man, would not stand in the way of his immortality, his revenge.
He pulled a key from a chain in his waistcoat and unlocked the door. He threw the door open. There were no windows in this carriage. There was just the one door. No other cracks for anything large or small to enter or exit.
Shard LeFel stepped into the room and Mr. Shunt scuttled in, latching the door tight behind him and throwing the room into complete darkness.
“Light, Mr. Shunt,” LeFel barked.
Mr. Shunt snapped his fingers, steel scraping flint, and caught fire to an oil-drenched wick of a lantern he plucked from the wall.
Mr. Shunt held that lantern high, the golden light washing over the room like a silken veil.
The room was spartan, shockingly so when compared with the other two carriages. Walls were lined with worktables, benches, drawers, crates, and shelves of iron and wood. Tools glittered, hung above the workbenches, tools that could pry, vise, weld, rivet. No curved edges, no rich trappings, no comforts here. This room was a place of extrapolation, of bending metal to the fevered dreams of the mind. A place of devising in a way most uncommon.
In each of three corners of the room stood a creature of bolt and gear and bone. Similar to Mr. Shunt, the
