Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel Read online

  Fields of Iron

  A steampunk adventure novel

  Shelley Adina

  Moonshell Books, Inc.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Excerpt: Fields of Gold by Shelley Adina

  About the Author

  Also by Shelley Adina

  Praise

  Introduction

  Book 11 in the Magnificent Devices steampunk series!

  “What do you propose, sir?”

  He held her astonished gaze as he went down upon one knee. “Why … I propose. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife, so that I may accompany you to San Francisco de Asis and help you stop this war?”

  Gloria Meriwether-Astor, determined to end the invasion her father and a power-hungry diplomat started, has found safety with the witches of the river canyons in the Wild West. But how can one young lady without so much as a hat to her name challenge a kingdom? Confronted with the solution—marriage—she has two choices: accept the help she needs, or return to Philadelphia alone and a failure.

  So, in the company of riverboat captain Stan Fremont—the dashing rogue she must now call husband—she sets off for the capital to negotiate with the Viceroy. But with an entire country mobilizing between herself and her objective, the attempt could mean her life—and the life of the one person she is beginning to care for …

  “She makes hard choices because they’re right, because of principle, because of morality—perhaps even out of a need to change her family and her business’s legacy: but Gloria’s is ultimately the most unselfish path and that is unexpected.” —Fangs for the Fantasy, on Fields of Air

  * * *

  For Linda McGinnis

  with thanks to Derrik Senft for the use of his shop

  Chapter 1

  Somewhere in the Wild West

  February 1895

  The witches who inhabited the canyons and tributaries of the mighty Rio de Sangre Colorado de Christo had controlled its sandstone fastnesses for fifty years. La bruja who went by the name of Mother Mary had been the first child born to a member of the original band of runaways, escapees, and criminals. A former dance-hall girl who had run away from an abusive husband and a worse lover, Mary’s mother had accumulated a number of companions on her journey to freedom—whores, Navapai laborers, even a Canton scientist who had been forced to be a laundress by the railroad company. Mary had grown up knowing no father, but many mothers, sisters, and friends. They had found the river and its bewildering series of canyons, tributaries, and caverns, to say nothing of its ancient, abandoned cliff dwellings, to be a more welcoming home than the towns of the Texican Territory, and had taken up residence in a country where no one would find them.

  Slowly the word spread among the abused, the dispossessed, and the destitute in the desert reaches of the Wild West, and deep into the southern reaches of the Texican Territory that ended at the azure Caribbean, that if one could only get to the river, one could find safety and food and employment. For the witches did not merely haunt and hide. They built. What they lacked in physical strength they hired or invented. The Canton scientist specialized in steam-powered and hydraulic engines, and was only too delighted to teach any who cared to learn about how to control the flow and speed of the river, how to go up and down the seven-hundred-foot cliff faces with the ease of a house spider, and how to construct the underwater traps with which they inspired terror in the hearts of the invaders from the west. These were the enemy—men from across the mountains who coveted the power and commerce the river could make possible if they could only get their hands on it.

  Oh yes, they coveted the river and its power. But the witches had no intention of giving up their fierce independence or their arrangement with the small but cheerful armada of steamships plying the races and reaches of the river. No one outside of those echoing canyons could understand how the steamships could navigate the rapids. Most believed the boats to have been wrecked years ago. Some believed there had to be powers of magic or time travel at work.

  And so the stories spread.

  But the witches knew, and smiled, and counted the gold that bought more iron and more supplies and seeds for their crops and the occasional pretty gown.

  Gloria Meriwether-Astor sat upon a wonderfully carved stool made of silvery driftwood from a faraway ocean and tilted up her face for Ella Balboa, Mother Mary’s daughter and the girl who had saved her life the week before. With her fingertips, Ella rubbed white paint into Gloria’s skin from hairline to throat, and then picked up the paintbrush with its load of black.

  The bristles tickled as she traced whorls and webs and flowers around Gloria’s blacked eyes, a pattern that, when it was completed, would look like lace upon Gloria’s skin and render her completely unrecognizable. Una bruja.

  “So what happened to the Canton scientist?” she asked, doing her best not to move her lips.

  “Jiao-Lan climbed the starlight stair about fifteen years ago, but before she did, she was able to teach two generations of girls what she knew, including her daughter May Lin. One of her students, Stella, is probably the smartest of all of us. She’ll be heading upriver with May Lin soon to add some improvements to the original mechanisms that control the rapids. She’s been teaching the younger ones, and they’ll take over when the time comes.”

  Ella blacked Gloria’s nose and added a flourish between her eyes, then tilted her head to examine her handiwork. “Blue lips, I think, to set off these roses, and I have a crown of silk roses for you. I think pink and blue go better with your hair, though tradition tells us red, for love and blood. Oh!” Her brown eyes, starred with long lashes, widened with an idea. “We could play brides!”

  Gloria laughed, and was surprised to find that the paint did not stiffen or crack. Considering the hour and a half that Ella had taken to create her work of art, she was grateful that a single smile would not spoil it all.

  “My dear friend, while I confess to having been the unwilling recipient of a number of proposals, it seems that playing brides will indeed be as close as I ever come to that happy estate.”

  “Oh, no,” Ella said quite seriously as she applied pink paint from a tiny pot to this spot and then its opposite on Gloria’s cheeks, where presumably there were roses. “You are so beautiful. I am quite sure that had you not left your former life, you would have been married within the year.”

  “And I am quite sure that you are sweet to say so.”

  Gloria could not tell if the other girl’s color changed under her own paint, but her gaze dropped in embarrassment at the compliment.

  Gloria went on, “Fortunately, there is more to marriage than beauty on one side and wealth on the other. My friend Claire Trevelyan Malvern has found love and companionship with a man who is her equal in intelligence. While my standards in that regard must be set considerably lower, I aspire to such a union, too.” She paused, gazing past Ella’s shoulder up at the wide ribbon of brilliant blue visible from the stone veranda on which they sat, where the canyon walls admitted a view of the sky above. “I am willing to wait for the right o
ne,” she said softly. “And to remember that a man’s worth is not measured by social skills or wealth, but by temperament, and generosity, and courage.”

  “Men aren’t the only ones with those qualities.” Ella carefully applied blue from another pot to Gloria’s lips, and then stood back to admire her handiwork. “Could you not make a home among us? Because you know, there is plenty of generosity and courage and intelligence among our ranks, if that is what you’re looking for.”

  “I have seen that already,” she agreed. “May I see what you’ve done?”

  Ella waited a moment, as though she expected Gloria to say more, and then got up to fetch the mirror. It was silver, with a chased handle, and could have held its own on any dressing-table in Philadelphia. Gloria held it up and gazed upon the wraith it reflected.

  “My goodness, you’re talented. No one would know me—all they can see is your beautiful art, Ella. Now I truly feel like one of you.”

  The other girl dipped her head. “Gracias, amiga. It was my pleasure. Will you have the crown and veil now?”

  “Oh, why not? In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  The much abused canvas pants in which Gloria had spent much of the past two weeks had finally given up the ghost when she had climbed the hidden spiral stair up to the witches’ main palace in the cliffs a few days ago, and she had been obliged to raid the coffers in the storage rooms. Nothing would force her to part with her custom-made corset with the gold coins and her mother’s ring sewn into the lining, but now she wore a ruffled, bleached cotton skirt with several layers of point lace, and the embroidered blouse Ella had given her on her arrival, cinched at the waist with a corselet of tanned and polished leather. Along with the gray wool blanket and boots she had brought with her, she also now possessed a chemise edged in lace, a linen shirtwaist, and a brocade waistcoat with no fewer than four hidden pockets, as well as a short canvas duster against the night’s chill. If she could only come across another pair of pants that fit, she would have nothing left to wish for.

  Now, her white blouse and creamy skirt would have to do for playing brides, a thought that made her want to giggle. She had never played brides in her life. But with Ella, who may have been past the age of making her debut but still possessed the innocent joy of childhood, it seemed like just the thing to while away a warm late February afternoon while they waited for Captain Stan and his crew to come back with news of the war brewing in the west.

  Ella climbed the stone steps and Gloria heard her opening and closing a chest in one of the rooms above. She came down a moment later bearing two veils over her arm and two crowns of silk roses.

  “Where did the veils come from?” she asked curiously, dipping her head so that Ella could lay the filmy square upon it, with one long point falling over her face. It was edged six inches deep in the most beautiful embroidery Gloria had seen since— “Why, this looks like Burano lace, from the duchy of Venice.”

  “I don’t know.” Ella fitted a crown of pink and blue roses over the veil and handed Gloria the mirror once more. “Things come on Captain Stan’s boats and we never know where he gets them. Sometimes I believe it’s better not to know. Oh, don’t you look like a bride, to be sure!”

  Gloria gazed at her reflection. She certainly didn’t look like any bride she had ever seen—not like Claire must have looked in the ivory satin Worth gown Gloria had sent as a wedding gift two months before. But all the same, the lace was delicately sumptuous, and the rose crown made her feel rather regal, if one overlooked the face painted to look like a celebratory death’s head.

  “For we are the dead,” Ella had explained to her the other day. “Many of us have grown up on the river, but many have come here from the Fifteen Colonies or the Texican Territories or the seaside temples in the southern jungles, to leave their lives behind and be reborn as the dead. So we celebrate both death and life. Besides, it frightens the stuffing out of the Californios if they get a glimpse of us.”

  “Your turn.” She set a smaller veil on Ella’s glossy brown curls, and crowned her with red and white silk roses and trailing black ribbon. “I think we make a beautiful pair of brides, don’t you?”

  Ella turned this way and that, then brought the mirror over so they could look into it together.

  “Dearly beloved,” Gloria said, laughing, “we are gathered here today in the presence of this lizard and that pair of eagles to witness the union of … whom? Ella Balboa and …”

  Gloria couldn’t see Ella’s eyes very well behind the embroidered mist of her veil, but she could see a glimmer of a white smile.

  “Never you mind. It’s a secret.”

  “Ah, a proxy wedding,” Gloria said. “Very well, let us proceed. Ella Balboa and Meredith Aster, standing as proxy for a person unknown. Do you, Ella, take this—” A chugging sound echoed up the canyon and Gloria stopped. “Is that the boat?”

  “I think it is. Finally! Come, let’s go meet them.” Ella pulled off her crown and veil, and headed up the steps at a run, Gloria right behind her. “We may keep the crowns, but we mustn’t let Mother Mary catch us soiling these veils. She’s saving them in case there’s ever a real wedding here one day.”

  Gloria contained her impatience as Ella carefully folded the lacy squares into their trunk, then smoothed her hair and set the rose crown back on it as they ran down the passage.

  The others had clearly heard the Colorado Queen’s engine, which had a distinctive wheeze Gloria suspected needed a mechanic’s attention. She and Ella were joined by several others streaming out onto the lowest of the terraces, where the dock was. A few yards upriver was a stone building containing the engine that controlled the great underwater chain that ran from here to the opposite bank. The wreckage of a number of the Californios’ attempts at invasion lay along the banks and submerged in the deep waters of this section of the river. Ella had told her that in the late summer, when the river was lower, you could see the hulls and the pale shapes of skeletons.

  Captain Stan leaped across the gap between deck and stone dock without waiting for a gangplank, and waved his shabby bowler hat at the witches waiting on the terrace. “I have news!” he shouted, pushing his navigation goggles up on top of his head. “We’ll just tie her off and be up shortly. How about something to drink? Spying is dry work.”

  Sister Clara, who was Mother Mary’s second in command and the chief provider of food, snorted and turned away to chivvy her usual helpers into setting up tables and bringing out a welcoming feast. It wasn’t until everyone had helped him or herself to flatbread, spiced meat, and vegetables, and had a tin mug to hand containing anything from cactus juice to lemonade to whiskey, that Mother Mary finally said, “Well, lad? You’ve kept us on tenterhooks long enough. What is the situation downriver?”

  Captain Stan swallowed his whiskey with the air of a man who believes that mouthful to be his last. “It isn’t good, Mother, to be blunt. What Miss Aster tells us seems to be true.” He glanced at her, and Gloria primmed up her mouth.

  Of course it was true, for heaven’s sake. If he had been so foolish as to think she was making it all up, and had wasted precious days going downriver with the intention of proving her wrong, that was on his head. She had never misled them in any way … except perhaps in the matter of her real name. That she was not prepared to divulge to anyone.

  “The Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias has somehow got hold of a massive piece of machinery they call el Gigante,” the captain went on. “We had not been in the water meadows an hour before we saw it stumping along in the distance. The entire town is talking of it.”

  “What is that?” Mother Mary asked. “The Giant? Is it a train?”

  “No, far from it. In shape it looks like a man as tall as a building, and in purpose it is a weapon.”

  Gloria sat bolt upright, as though lightning had passed through her. “Yes, it possesses a cannon in one arm and one of Mr. Gatling’s rotating guns in the other. I told you about it before. It has a pilot’s chai
r in front of a viewing port in its chest, room for a crew of two, and great hydraulic legs.”

  Captain Stan gazed at her with a mixture of astonishment and annoyance, his mug dangling empty from slack fingers. “What else do you know of it?”

  “I did not know its present location,” she said. “If it is the same one, the Californio ambassador to the Fifteen Colonies brought it out here on his train, having purchased it and all the other armaments and munitions I told you about from the Meriwether-Astor Munitions Works in Philadelphia. I last saw it firing at me, moments before I was blasted off the top of a hill near a town called Resolution, in the Texican Territory.”

  Eyes wide, Ella covered her mouth with her fingers, and Clara and Mother Mary exchanged a glance.

  “The soldiers called it el Gigante, but in practice it is a steam-powered mechanical behemoth, operated from within by its crew. But—” She fell silent as a new thought struck her. Who could the operator be, if the man who had had that responsibility had been drowned in the same flash flood that had nearly taken her own life? How had it covered all those miles between Resolution and the water meadows known as Las Vegas? It had been on the battlefield when she was taken from Resolution by the Californios as a prisoner on Silver Wind, so how had something so enormous been conveyed here without that great locomotive?

  Frankly, it was impossible.

  “There must be two of them,” she murmured. “This must be the first, sent out in a previous shipment.”

  Then why had it not been among the manifests she had read before embarking on this godforsaken journey?

  “Anything else you can tell us, Miss Aster?” Captain Stan inquired with silky civility.

  “It cost ten thousand pounds to build,” she snapped and, too late, realized her mistake.