Lifemaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Fantasy (The Great Iron War, Book 2) by Dean F. Wilson

Author:Dean F. Wilson [Wilson, Dean F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909356115
Publisher: Dioscuri Press
Published: 2015-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

“She’s got a big mouth,” Mudro said, drawing up beside Jacob as he left the room. “No wonder the boy can’t keep his closed either. Learned it from her, sure didn’t he?”

“Sometimes it’s best to keep it bolted shut,” Jacob said. Not that I’ve been any good at that.

“The pipe’s good for that. If you’re smoking, you’re not talking.”

“Maybe I’ll take it up.”

“The problem is the limited supply of leaf,” the doctor said.

It’s limited because you keep using it all up, Jacob thought. “Best to keep it for the sick then,” he said. He thought of Whistler, who had not needed the pain-killing leaf for over a month, but who still needed bandages on the burns.

“She had the audacity to name me,” Mudro grumbled. “It took a long time for Rommond to trust me, and longer to get into his inner circle. I don’t need her raising more doubts about me in his mind.”

“Why did you join the Order?” Jacob asked. “Did you not feel like you were betraying Rommond?”

“I felt like it, sure, but he was in a bad state at the time. It was just after the whole Brooklyn disaster. He was a lot more daring with his tactics before. Then he didn’t want to risk anything that looked too dangerous on paper, anything that might get people killed. He blamed himself, of course. There isn’t any magic to make blame go away, that’s for sure. We all stuck with him for a time, but many of us became restless. The Regime was winning new ground, reclaiming land we’d taken with Rommond’s previous pushes. Taberah wanted to act, and there were a good few of us who felt the same.”

“Is that when the coup happened?”

Mudro chuckled. “It wasn’t a coup.”

“You’re the second person who’s said that. It kind of sounds like a coup to me.”

“We didn’t want Rommond out. We wanted a change in direction. Taberah started asking around for support for a leadership challenge. Word got back to Rommond quick, probably from the Copper Matron. She was always very protective of him. And boy did he act quick then. We all thought Taberah was done for. We didn’t exactly feel secure ourselves. But Rommond came up with a solution, a compromise for it all. He handed over the amulet side of the Resistance to Taberah, since it was an area she’d focused on so much before, and he let her take anyone who was willing to go with her. I’m not sure if he knew it, if he was just that confident, but not many of us left. Most of our crew are new recruits, and it was hard to get them. We’d take anyone.”

“That’s where I come in,” Jacob said.

“And Teller.”

“And him.”

“Really it’s just Taberah, Soasa, and myself left of the old guard. We had a few more from the Resistance in the early days, and a handful more that joined over time, but we lost most of them.”

“From Taberah’s carelessness?”

“A bit of that. But as Taberah would say, they knew what they signed up for.

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