Shae saw it first.
They hadn’t gone a mile beyond the lumicker’s wagon when movement caught her eye.
She’d been thinking of the Bone Pirate, of her ship, of the throne of bones, and then she’d glanced to the side, out across the great sea of browning grasses to the north. It was there, out in the distance, that she saw the metal man beneath the shade of the rain-heavy clouds.
She couldn’t count the number of times she’d wondered what it would be like to see an aluman move. Since the moment she’d first seen the one frozen in the river, so many months ago, she had imagined the long arms swinging, the wide legs driving forward, the crystal eyes aglow with what passed for its life. All that time, and she’d imagined that its steps would be slow. Powerful, but a careful, cautious, lumbering power.
The truth was nothing like that. The aluman she saw now, the metal man running across the dried grasses of the Greensward, was moving swiftly. Not a sprinter’s pace, but an easy run, its metal arms pumping. What light there was glinted off its silver head and body.
She pulled her horse to a stop. “Kayden,” she croaked.
Kayden reined in, followed her gaze. “Gods,” he gasped. “It’s headed for the open part of the line.”
“Where the lumicker was working?” Kayden nodded.
“If it gets onto the road …”
He didn’t complete the thought, but he didn’t need to do so. Shae could imagine it all. An aluman that got through that gap in the lumicklines could go wherever it wanted—to Homilden or Felcamp or some other village on the roads they’d not taken. There’d be no water-filled ditches to stop it. The only thing that would stop it would be blood.
“Warn the lumicker,” Kayden said. He lifted his reins as he kicked his horse forward, ducking the working lumickline and entering the open plain beyond.
Shae drove her mount into his wake. “What are you doing?” she shouted.
Kayden was picking up speed across the grasses. “I’m going to try to slow it down!”
“How?”
“I don’t know! Warn him! Get the line up!”
As Kayden pressed farther ahead, Shae angled back toward the road. In seconds, she was ducking under the lit lumickline once more. She turned in the direction they’d come, and her heels pinched into her horse’s flanks, urging it to move faster.
The grasses rolled by in a blur, like the shimmering that slipped past a ship’s hull at sea.
The rain had slowed up, but her speed nevertheless made it hit hard upon her face. The wind pushed back her hood and let her hair fly behind her. If she closed her eyes, she thought, she could’ve imagined she was astride the deck of the Pale Dawn.
But, of course, she wasn’t. She was a world away from her ship, from her seas, from anything she really understood. She was a world away, trying to warn a man who worked mechanical magicks about a metal man that was coming to kill him.
If the aluman didn’t frighten her so much, she would have laughed at the utter strangeness of it all.
Her horse carried her up over a rolling swale. She saw the wagon, and the lumicker still at work atop it. She opened her mouth to call out, to warn him of her approach, but in that same moment, a shot rang out across the plain to her right.
There was a time she wouldn’t have known what it was, but she’d heard it before—when Kayden had killed one of her shipmates aboard his airship. And again at the top of the Spire on that final fateful night, she’d heard it twice—once when she’d pulled the trigger, and once when Kayden had. It was the sound of a handcannon.
It meant Kayden was fighting the aluman.
The lumicker stood up at the sound, looking north. Shae shouted, waving one arm as best she could while still speeding her horse down the road.
The man raised something from his belt. It was like one of Kayden’s weapons—a tube atop a handle—but it was a brighter silver. And it had two tubes, side by side, instead of one. He raised it up and pointed it at her.
Mother, Shae thought, he thinks I’m a bandit.
The weapon in his hand flashed blue—lumick blue—and an instant later, her horse made a horrible sound and buckled forward, catapulting her out of the saddle.
She tucked in the air, curling up so that she could take the impact on her upper back and roll with the momentum. Even so, it was only the fact that she hit the ground between the main ruts of the road, where there was patchy grass and rain-softened earth, that kept her from snapping her spine.
Bruises blossomed down her body as she skipped to a stop.
For a moment, the world was spinning, and all she could hear was the sound of her fallen horse screaming. She didn’t think she’d broken any bones, but her mount had.
There was a thump from the other direction, and Shae let the sound of it focus her eyes and her mind. She sat up, saw that the lumicker had jumped down from his wagon. He wasn’t far away. His long coat swung behind him. He had the weapon up as he approached. He no longer had his pipe.
The weapon flashed blue again. There was no sound from it, but she felt something streak over her shoulder, whistling as it cut through the air. Behind her, the horse fell silent.
The lumicker moved a lever on the weapon, then pointed it at her chest. He squinted as he stared down it, one eye pinching toward his big grey mustache.
“Next one goes through your blood-pumper.”
Shae lifted her hands, a gesture that she hoped he would understand. “Aluman,” she said. She gasped, suddenly realizing how much it hurt to breathe, much less talk.
His footsteps stopped. “Aluman?”
A second shot from Kayden’s handcannons echoed over them. Louder. Closer. Shae pointed. “My friend, Kayden. He’s slowing it down.”
The lumicker stopped squinting. His gaze snapped from her to the lifeless lumickline beside them. Then he cursed, turned, and ran back toward his wagon, his long coat whipping in his wake. He hurtled himself onto the ladder that ran up the back of the wagon and threw himself up onto his tool-strewn roof.
Shae groaned as she heaved herself onto her feet. Everything hurt, but the pain could wait. The aluman was coming, and it had to be stopped.
And if they didn’t stop it, the pain wouldn’t last long.
She limped back to her horse. There were bloody holes in its chest and head. It was dead.
There was a sword under the saddlebags, and the straps holding it in place had been mercifully loosened by the horse’s writhing and fall. Shae pulled it out. She couldn’t imagine what good it would be against a metal man, but it was surely better than her fists or the little fangs she had at her hip. She slapped the scabbard belt around her waist and cinched it tight.
She hurried as fast as she could—her right ankle and left knee were sprained, she was certain—and reached the base of the wagon.
“What can I do?” she called.
There was a clang of metal. “Get up here.”
Shae climbed the ladder. There was a cloth rolled out across the wet roof, and various tools were lined up on it. She recognized none of them. The lumicker was kneeling at the stone pillar beside the wagon, which came up to his knees. She could see now that there had been a metal cap atop it, which he’d removed to access whatever was inside.
“Sorry about your horse,” he said once she’d joined him on the roof. He didn’t look up from his work.
“Wasn’t mine.”
He lifted himself up to look back at her. He saw the sword at her hip. “That all you’ve got?”
“And fangs,” she said.
His thick mustache lifted in something that might’ve been a smile, and there were wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes. He thought it was a joke. “Here.” He reached to his hip and pulled out the weapon he’d used on her horse. He tossed it to her. “Point. Pull the trigger. Give me all the time you can.”
“Like a handcannon?”
His eyebrow lifted up at that. “Yeah. Like a handcannon.” Then he bent back down into the pillar.
Shae nodded at his back, gauging the weight of the weapon. “I’ll try to draw it to me.”
The lumicker didn’t reply. He only muttered something to himself as he leaned over to swap tools.
Shae eased herself down the ladder, taking care not to slip on the wet steps, then walked down the road where the lumickline was unlit. She fit her hands on the grip of the lumicker’s weapon. Felt at the trigger and what she thought might be the lever he’d used. Then she looked north.
Kayden had fired two shots. There was no way he could reload his handcannons while he was riding and fighting. What, then, did he have against it? His sword? What if he was already dead?
Shae heard it then. The sound of metal plates sliding against one another. The sound of metal wheels turning against one another. The sound of the earth shaking as each mighty footstep struck the ground.
The aluman.
It came into view suddenly. Its eyes were a pale blue, and lumick glowed, too, from the seams between the plates on its chest, thighs, and arms. It was still running, but then it saw her—she felt it see her, a cold shiver of fear that ran down her spine—and it stopped.
For a moment, they faced each other. Then the aluman’s upper body turned slightly from side to side, taking its eyes from the gap in the lumicklines to the lumicker’s wagon and back again. Its arms made sounds as they shifted. Its clawed hands flexed in and out.
Then it came for her.
Shae took a step back out of instinct, and she felt ashamed. What would the Bone Pirate think? she wondered.
I am the Bone Pirate, her mind replied.
She stepped forward again. She raised the weapon in her hands and tried to line it up with the coming monster.
There were two pipes, and the lumicker had taken two shots. If the lever reloaded it, she might have more. But she couldn’t be sure.
So two shots. She’d need to make them count.
The metal man got bigger with each massive step. The pit of her stomach sank.
And then Kayden’s horse came over the ridge behind it. There was blood smeared across his face and chest, but he was alive, and he was racing after the aluman.
The head, she decided. She’d shoot for the head.
She glanced up. The lumickline was above her. It was still dead. It probably wouldn’t be alone soon.
The aluman was only a ship’s width away when Kayden caught up with it. He brought his panting, frightened horse up alongside it—how he had the animal under such control, Shae couldn’t fathom—and when the aluman reached out to swipe him away, he ducked under the arm just as he’d ducked under the lumickline along the road minutes earlier. Then he yanked the reins of the horse to the side, darting into the path of the mighty legs.
The animal was no match for the metal, but it was enough to entangle it. The aluman went down over the top of horse and rider, crashing with a horrific sound.
Shae screamed for Kayden and ran forward. But already the aluman was getting up with a grinding of metal; its hands made fists into the dirt, lifting its upper body off the ground. She stopped, aimed the weapon at its head, and pulled the trigger.
Kayden’s handcannon had roared and then kicked like an angry mule in her hand when she’d fired it. This did neither. It flashed, and she felt the wind as whatever it expelled rushed out from one of the tubes and plinked off the aluman’s plated head no differently than the rocks she’d thrown at the one back in Felcamp.
The aluman leaned to one side, letting its weight off one hand long enough to swipe at her. Shae jumped to the side, just in time, but tripped on something in the grasses.
As she fell down, the aluman stood up. There were wet sounds when it came upright.
Shae didn’t dare to look.
It came forward again, ignoring her as it walked past her toward the still-dead lumickline.
Shae got up, stared at its hulking back. For a moment, in her despair, she thought of trying to fling one of her fangs at it, but it was no use. The lumicker’s weapon was far more powerful, and it had done nothing against the armored plates of its head.
The armored plates.
Shae leapt at it from behind, planting her left foot on a plate at the back of its leg and using that to boost herself higher onto its back. It lurched in response, twisting at the waist as it tried to wrest her off. Her grip started to slip, but she managed to lift the lumicker’s weapon up to the back of its stump of a head. There was a seam there, the lumick glowing blue between the plates. She placed the pipe that hadn’t fired against that line. She pressed into it with the last of her fading strength. She pulled the trigger.
The weapon shook, reverberating off the aluman, out of her grip, and down into the grasses. Shae fell with it, bouncing down the metal man’s back and onto the ground.
Above her, the aluman shuddered. Ripples of light snapped around the hole she could see in the back of its head. There were crackling sounds, like the tiniest of twigs snapping.
It stepped forward, more hesitant now. Almost halting. It leaned against the lifeless lumickline, pressing forward as if it meant to snap the cable with its weight.
And then pale blue fire raced out from the pillar by the lumicker’s wagon, lacing along the line. It hit the aluman.
There was a buzzing sound. A loud crack. And then the lumickline was glowing steadily, pillar to pillar, and the aluman was still.