Peacemaker (The Flash Gold Chronicles, #3) (6 page)

While she waited, she
watched the airship veering inland, smoke still wafting from the
charred hull. Maybe it would crash, the pirates would abandon it as
unsalvageable, and she could claim it for her own.
That
thought warmed her
cold limbs more than a little. If the hull was in decent shape, she
could commandeer it and not have to construct one from scratch. Oh,
she’d want to build her own engine from the ground up—no telling
what piecemeal garbage these pirates were using—and she had ideas
for dozens of modifications, but if she didn’t have to build that
cursed hull, she’d save months of construction time. She flexed her
cold fingers. Maybe a few digits endangered by that saw as
well.

Her mind filled with daydreams of
reconstruction, Kali almost missed Cedar slogging out of the water
downstream. He had sheathed the sword, but he was still carrying
that bag, a small but bulging canvas tote. It made him lopsided as
he strode toward her. Some of the glitter had faded from his eyes,
but he was still grinning. “Are you all right?”

Kali wrapped her arms around herself for
warmth. “I could have done without the bath, but I suppose dropping
onto land would have been worse.” She gave him a once over, decided
he was uninjured, and headed along the bank toward her bicycle.
Puffs of steam still wafted from its stack, and nobody seemed to
have bothered it. The skirmish had cleared the river of boat
traffic.

“
True.” Cedar strode along
beside her. He pointed at the airship—it was drifting on the other
side of the river now, going nowhere fast. “It looks like your
grenades proved useful.”

“
Of course,” Kali
said.

He walked in silence for a moment before
glancing at her and asking, “Aren’t you going to ask what I was up
to in there?”

“
Judging by the sounds,
you weren’t attending a quilting bee.”

“
Nope. I had to fight my
way out of their cargo hold. At first I had a notion of
singlehandedly taking control of the ship, but there were a lot of
them, and they were well-armed and reasonably accurate with their
firearms.” Cedar touched a rip in the sleeve of his duster. “They
cured me of my notion, but I was able to make my way up top, and I
spotted some of their stolen loot on the way.” He hefted the bag.
“I figure this might be that old man’s claim earnings. Getting it
back might ease his crankiness a tad.”

“
Huh,” Kali
said.

It sounded like a good adventure, and she
might ask for more details later, but she wanted dry clothes first
and a blanket around her shoulders. Having the sun come out would
be a nice perk, too, but if anything the fog was growing
denser.

Cedar sighed. “I see you’re still a hard
lady to please.”

“
I’m pleased.”

“
You are? How would one
know?”

“
I’m listening to you
instead of contemplating upgrades to my next batch of
grenades.”

“
I see,” Cedar said.
“That
is
a high
honor.” He probed one of his soggy pockets, pulled out a knot of
beads, and handed it to her.

Kali untangled the snarl to reveal the patch
of decorated hide he’d been fiddling with all through supper the
night before. “Good that this survived, I guess,” she said, not
sure why he was showing it to her.

“
No,” Cedar said, delving
into a different pocket. “
This
survived.” He pulled out another talisman, this
one unknotted. “
That
I found next to the sack of gold.”

“
Oh, hm. What do you think
the pirates are doing with an identical one? Is it something they
found? Or are they behind the murders?”

“
It didn’t come up when we
were slinging bullets and curses back and forth at each
other.”

Kali shook her head and tsked. “Men are such
poor conversationalists.”

“
There were a couple of
women shooting at me too.”

They crested a rise and came to the crater
the airship had blown into the trail. Kali slowed down. Her bicycle
waited on the other side, but so did two people. One was the old
man from the boat, and the other was a boy of ten or eleven years.
He had raven-colored hair and bronze skin with a face still chubby
with baby fat. He stared at them—no, at Cedar—with opened-mouthed
astonishment.

“
That’s mine!” The old man
stabbed a finger at the sack.

“
Figured it might be.”
Cedar laid it at his feet.

The old fellow grabbed it, dragged it
several feet, sent slit-eyed glares at Kali and Cedar, then whipped
out a small black revolver and aimed it between them. “You two stay
right there. And you too boy.” He backed away, holding the gun with
one hand and lugging the sack of gold with the other.

Cedar watched blandly. Kali shook her head.
The old man caught his heel on something, tripped, fell onto his
backside, and cursed mightily. He stuffed the revolver back into
his belt, hefted the sack with both hands, and jogged—if one could
call such lopsided, wobbly staggers a jog—back to his boat.

“
Grateful fellow,” Cedar
observed.

“
Less good than you’d
think comes out of helping people in these parts,” Kali
said.

The boy was still staring at Cedar, eyes
wide, jaw slack. When he noticed Kali looking at him, he clamped it
shut and swallowed.

She was about to try talking to him in Hän
when he tilted his head back to look Cedar in the eyes and said,
“That was amazing.” He pointed toward the sky half a mile across
the river, where the airship was descending into the woods. “I saw
you fighting. All of them at once! Up on the deck. I could see it
all from here!”

“
Just making the best out
of a tricky situation,” Cedar said. Though he spoke as if his
heroics had been inconsequential, he did give Kali a pointed look,
as if to say, “See? This is how you’re
supposed
to respond to my
heroics.”

Kali propped her hands on her hips and told
the boy, “I was up there doing stuff too.”

He blinked at her, a blank expression on his
face, then focused on Cedar again. “Where’d you get that sword?
That’s the beatingest pig sticker I’ve seen.”

Kali gave the boy a closer look. He wore a
hooded caribou jacket, and she assumed he was Hän, but his command
of English was excellent, if one could call the local miners’ slang
English.

“
It’s from the Orient,
though I got it down in the swamps of Florida.” Cedar drew the
blade. “Do you want to see it? I could show you a few
moves.”

Kali lifted a hand, afraid the “boys” could
play at swordfighting all day if she let them, but the youth’s
shoulders slumped and he did not accept the sword.

“
I’m no good at fighting,”
he said, “on account of my leg.”

For the first time, he took a couple of
steps, and Kali noticed a pronounced limp.

“
What happened?” she
asked.

“
Couple of summers back, I
climbed up with a smoker to get some honey from a bee hive. The
branch broke, and I fell a long ways and broke my hip. Medicine man
fixed me up the best he could, but…” He shrugged, eyes still cast
downward.

Cedar took the boy’s hand and put the hilt
of his sword in it.

“
What’s your name?” Kali
asked, heading over to check the bicycle for damage—and to see how
she might get it around the crater that had destroyed an eight-foot
swath of the trail.

“
Tadzi,” the boy said, his
gaze riveted to the blade. He took a few experimental swings and
grinned.

“
Tadzi, have you ever seen
anything like these?” Cedar held up the beadwork
patches.

The boy lowered the sword and scrutinized
them. “No, sir. Not very good work.” His face brightened. “Want to
see something I made?”

“
Yes,” Cedar
said.

Kali knew him well enough to hear the hint
of disappointment in his voice. What had he expected? That a
ten-year-old kid would know something about talismans of power?

“
That’s very good,” Cedar
said.

Kali glanced over to see what the boy was
showing him. Some sort of block of carved wood. Cedar caught her
eye and crooked a finger.

“
We should get going,”
Kali said, though she came over to check on the youth’s handiwork.
She froze when he held up a carving of an elk, a seven-point bull
elk. Though the entire figurine was no larger than her hand, she
could count each individual tine on the antlers. They even appeared
fuzzy, like the real thing. “That’s beautiful,” she
breathed.

Tadzi twitched a shoulder. “I can do
scrimshaw, too, but ivory’s hard to get. That time with the honey,
I was hoping to trade for better tools. It didn’t happen. I got
stung a bunch, on top of breaking my hip.”

Kali could certainly understand going to any
lengths in pursuit of one’s passions. “Don’t get discouraged. You
do real fine work.”

She caught a strange expression on Cedar’s
face.

“
What?” she
asked.

“
Just wondering if I
should be jealous of a ten-year-old boy,” he said.

“
Why?
” Tadzi stared up at him—he only came up to Kali’s shoulder,
so he had to tilt his head way back to look Cedar in the
eyes.

“
Because she’s more
impressed by your carving than by my skirmishing skills, even
though I navigated heaps of pirates fighting harder than Kilkenny
Cats, retrieved that surly fellow’s gold, cut the belt that held up
the captain’s pants, and escaped the mob by leaping over the
railing from forty feet in the air.”

Tadzi turned his
incredulous stare onto Kali. “You
are?
”

Kali shrugged. “I get to see him do stuff
like that all the time. Though—” she nodded at Cedar, “—you didn’t
mention the part about the captain’s pants.”

“
They fell clear to his
ankles and hobbled him like a horse,” Cedar said.

“
Nice. Tadzi, are you from
Moosehide?”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

“
How did you learn such
good English?” When Kali had been a girl, it hadn’t been spoken at
all amongst the tribe, and only a couple of men who negotiated with
traders and trappers knew any at all.

“
I’ve been working at it
real hard,” Tadzi said. “I talk to any white people I can. Someday,
I want to…” He chomped down on his lip and eyed the ground. “I
shouldn’t say.”

Maybe he was someone like Kali had been,
someone who always knew he would leave someday. “Can you take us
there? Introduce us to the medicine man?”

Tadzi brightened. “Can we
ride there on
that
?” He nearly threw his shoulder out of joint in his eagerness
to point at the SAB. “I saw its smoke, and that’s what made me come
down here. I bet riding it is a hog-killin’ time.”

“
There’s not room for
three,” Cedar said.

Kali gave him a frank look.

“
Oh.”

“
You’re tough,” she said.
“You ran through that whole dog-sled course beside me.”

Cedar patted the boy on the shoulder. “Looks
like I’ve another reason to be jealous of you.”

Moosehide lay on a flat stretch of land next
to the river, with a tall, craggy ridge guarding it from behind.
The fog had finally cleared, and a dozen canoes and fishing boats
floated in front of the camp, several with nets stretched between
them. Square moss houses squatted alongside the shoreline, and
those people who weren’t fishing worked out in front of them,
drying and cleaning the catch.

A few ornery nerves
tangled in Kali’s belly as her little group approached the camp.
Would anyone remember her? Would anyone care that she had returned?
She sniffed. Not that she
cared
if they cared.

“
Are they likely to be a
problem?” Cedar pointed at a trio of men lurking in the trees to
the side of the trail. He was running alongside the SAB while Kali
drove and Tadzi hung on.

“
No,” Tadzi said, shouting
to be heard over the rumbling of the engine. “That’s my cousin and
his friends. They’re supposed to be hunting, but they’re likely
hiding from the chief and drinking again. When he finds out, he’ll
rustle up some punishment for them.”

“
I’d be more concerned
about that fellow watching us with a shotgun in hand.” Kali nodded
toward the trail ahead of them. It was a foregone conclusion that
nobody here had seen anything like her steam-powered bicycle
before. She didn’t think anyone would mistake it for some attack
vehicle and shoot, but one never knew.

“
He’s out in the open,”
Cedar said. “Likely a guard for the camp.”

“
Guards aren’t usual for
the camps. At least they weren’t when I was a girl.” Kali twisted
her head around to ask Tadzi, “Is there usually a guard out while
people are fishing?”

“
It’s on account of the
murders.”

Now Cedar’s head whipped about, and he
pinned the boy with a stare. “Murders? Have women been killed here
too?”

“
Not here,” Tadzi said,
“but we heard about our people being killed in your
town.”

“
It’s not our town,” Cedar
said. “We’re just visitors.”

Tadzi’s brow wrinkled.