Chapter 24: The Iron Demon
VROOOOM!
The sound was unlike anything this world had ever heard. It wasn't the gallop of hooves or the crack of a whip. It was a continuous, deafening roar of explosions trapped inside metal.
The wind tore at my face. My eyes watered, stinging from the dust, but I didn't blink. I gripped the makeshift iron tiller with white knuckles, fighting to keep the machine straight.
"FASTER!" Lucas screamed from the passenger seat.
He wasn't scared. He was laughing. His silk coat was flapping violently in the wind, his hair a mess, but his eyes were wide with the mania of a man seeing the future.
We were tearing down the main estate road at perhaps thirty miles per hour. To a modern human, that's a slow drive through a neighborhood. But in a world where the fastest travel was a galloping horse? We were flying.
We approached the estate gates. The guards stationed there froze. They saw a smoking, screaming metal skeleton barreling toward them without a horse pulling it.
"Open the gates!" Lucas bellowed, his voice barely audible over the engine.
The guards scrambled, throwing themselves against the heavy iron doors, swinging them open just seconds before we rocketed through.
We hit the public road outside the estate. It was dirt and cobblestone, uneven and bumpy. The car shook violently. Every pebble felt like a hammer blow to the chassis. The suspension I had designed—simple leaf springs—was barely holding up.
"The vibration!" I shouted over the noise. "We need rubber tires! Leather isn't enough!"
"I don't care about the comfort!" Lucas yelled back, grabbing the side of the frame to steady himself. "Look at the speed, Asher! Look at it!"
We bypassed a merchant caravan. The horses reared up in terror, their riders fighting to control them as the "Iron Demon" sped past. The merchants stared with their mouths hanging open, watching us disappear into a cloud of dust.
"Do you know what this means?" Lucas shouted, pointing a shaking finger at the horizon. "Logistics! War! We could move supplies from the capital to the border in two days instead of ten! This... this is power!"
I grinned. He got it. He saw the utility, not just the novelty.
But as I turned the tiller to drift around a sharp bend, a chill ran down my spine. I glanced into the rearview mirror I had rigged up—a simple polished silver plate.
For a split second, I saw something in the treeline behind us.
A flash of metal. A spyglass reflecting the sun.
The Entity was right, I thought, my grip tightening on the tiller until my knuckles turned white.
We are being watched.