Bloodrush (Scarlet Star Trilogy #1)

Chapter 5 - Lilain

"These creatures are strange. I've never come so close before. Not to these ones, with their castles and their slaves and their money. They exude it. Flaunt it. The ladies are draped in it. The lords drink it down by the glass, or roll it up and smoke it. I't's as if their status depends on how fast they can spend their money. If I weren't running for my life I would stick around a while longer, teach them a lesson in frugality."

May 6th - 1867

Steel and iron. That was all that could be heard. Not the chuffing of the colossal engine, not the grating crunch of black shovels on coal. Not even the chuckling, or the whispering, or the heated debates of the other passengers. Just iron. Just steel.

They battled one another continuously; each creak and bang and thud each trying to outdo the next. The clear winner were the wheels, of course, and the sturdy tracks they continuously rolled against. Merion felt every rivet, every scratch, every little crunch and squeak. It was an incessant clattering that had been hammered into the very bones of his body.

Merion prayed for water and coal stops. He prayed for towns and stray cows. Hell, he even prayed for women tied to the tracks, as he had seen in penny dreadfuls. Anything to quieten the wheels for just a moment, and let him hear the wind, or the trees, or the piercing whistle of the engine, to know there was something else beyond the cacophony.

Days had knitted together and formed a week. Merion had spent the sunlight hours with his face pressed up against the window, watching every mile roll past. Taking every inch of his new home in. No matter how sure he was that he had seen every sight the Kingdom of America had to offer, there was always something new. Something different. He felt as though he had seen several kingdoms, not just the one.

In New York he had seen towering spires the like of which even London could not boast, overlooking a bay of mud and old warships. In Pittsburgh he had seen wild forests, darker than the woods of home. So dark he couldn't fathom how far they must have stretched. In Chicago he had heard an ocean called a lake, and seen a city so sprawled and stubborn, he wondered if it would ever end. On the way to Cheyenne he had rumbled across prairies and grasslands, fenced only by the distant shadows of rolling mountains and the first fingers of desert. And still, he hadn't seen it all.

At first, Wyoming didn't seem all that bad. Chugging through the dawn-lit hills outside Cheyenne, Merion had been pleasantly surprised by the amount of green. Sure, there were no forests or trees, nor a great deal of rivers, for that matter, but there were shrubs on the ground, and that's all that mattered. He had heard no more talk of danger and keeping his skin on above the thundering of the wheels. He even went as far as to enjoy the hot morning sun coming through the dusty window, far hotter than anything he had ever experienced at home. His skin pricked under its rays.

It was then it all started to change. The moment he reached Cheyenne.

It was a small city, compared to Chicago and New York. In fact, it was actually more of a town. But Merion kept that to himself, in case he accidentally offended anyone. He alone stayed on the platform as the locomotive was pulled away to make room for the next. For a while, he wondered if he would have the carriage to himself, but as he stood there sweating in the hot sun, his fellow passengers began to arrive, one by one.

The first didn't give Merion any real cause for concern. Neither did the second. Though by the third, Merion was starting to notice a pattern, and it was a pattern that began to make him rather nervous indeed.

No women. He noticed that first. The passengers lining up alongside him were all men. And, to Merion's sarcastic delight, they were the sort of men that looked very fond of dark doorways and sharp implements. That much was evident from the things attached or hanging from their bullet-studded belts. Guns and knives and other such tools built for bodily harm.