Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [41]
The autogyro flew up over the stern, blades whirring. Lines of sand provided traction on the icy boards as Yasmeen made her way aft, where Archimedes landed lightly on the deck, his face flushed with exertion and laughter. Around them, Vesuvius’s crew gave him a hearty cheer, and he bowed, sweeping lower when he caught sight of Yasmeen.
“Not their captain, but my captain,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have you. Within a day, you’d be strapped to a whipping post for disregarding my orders.”
“That’s true enough,” he said, straightening. Heat flared in his emerald eyes as he looked her over, and Yasmeen stiffened. Oh, he’d ruin everything. From his silver tongue would come a suggestion of where she could whip him and order him about, the crew would hear it, and then she’d have to string him up naked from the side of Mad Machen’s ship.
His gaze caught on her face. Relief slipped through her when he said, “I have followed one of your orders, however.”
So he had. He’d bathed—and shaved, though he hadn’t needed to exert himself to that degree. She liked a rough jaw.
“And here I am, at your disposal,” he continued. “What do you require?”
She turned toward the stairs and gestured for him to follow. “Only a conversation, Mr. Fox. And I hope to soon have a gift for you.”
Ivy Blacksmith hadn’t yet named her submersible, but Yasmeen had heard the crew members call it The Copper Prick. Yasmeen could see a faint resemblance in the cylindrical body and the rounded head, but she thought the name was wishful thinking on their part—the width of the capsule was as tall as a man, and in length was three times a man’s height. From there, the resemblance in shape ended. The tail tapered off into a propeller set over a pair of flat rudders, and she’d never encountered a prick with a raised bump on the shaft similar to Ivy’s glass observation dome in the capsule’s hatch.
Perhaps she was more selective in her pricks than Mad Machen’s crew.
She led Archimedes amidships and stopped near the port rail, where they could watch the activity around the copper submersible without standing in the crew’s way—and where they could speak in relative privacy.
“Is this my gift?” He gestured to the submersible. “I already have my own, you realize.”
God’s truth, men were all the same. But he also appeared suitably impressed by the machine—as any man ought to be. “Your gift is the copy of your sketch, if all goes well. Depending upon the sort of person you’ll have to steal the original back from, you’d be wise to put distance between you before she has a chance to realize it’s missing.”
His gaze snapped to hers. “She?”
He knew, Yasmeen saw immediately. His expression resembled that of a man who faced an oncoming battalion of war machines, with a mob of zombies closing in from behind. For all of his frivolity, for all of his charm, this man was also deeply aware of the dangers the world threw at them.
“I can’t be certain,” Yasmeen said. And it seemed strange that the elite guard would steal such an item—they didn’t steal anything, unless it were necessary. But who could say what another person considered necessary? “But Miracle Mattson learned about the sketch from Franz Kessler. You’ve heard what happened to him?”
“His throat slit. That wasn’t you? In her express, Zenobia said you were coming to speak with him.”
“I didn’t arrive in Port Fallow until after it happened. But a woman was there, watching the house. I had no reason to think she knew anything of the sketch at the time—not until I heard from one of Mad Machen’s men that you were hiding in a crate, and paid him a sous to look for a woman in a robe. Were you truly hiding?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“If I thought I was her target. So you knew what she was. How?” Not many New Worlders recognized a gan tsetseg woman.
“I’ve seen Temür Agha’s guard.”
Temür Agha. Fifteen years ago, the general had crushed the rebellion in Constantinople by razing the city to the ground. Of royal blood, cunning and ruthless, his name inspired terror across the empire—including the ruling houses in Xanadu. Even