His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  You could feel the angry static crackling in the air like an oak fire. I felt the sudden urge to hold the Colt tucked underneath my jacket. I saw César in the corner thinking about his gun. We locked eyes. At least we agreed on something.

  Kallum had everyone’s attention now. He brandished the wrapped trophy.

  The object he shook free looked like smoke-filled glass, glowing and brilliant. As long as a hand from palm to fingers and as sharp as a fang, it looked almost unreal: a see-through artifact, shaped like a witch’s finger.

  “She came to murder,” Kallum proclaimed. “She came to destroy.”

  The point of her strange, green-stone knife gleamed in Kallum’s hand. It looked just like the ones Nycendera wielded in the street, but stronger, more vibrant, more real. Like the others had been but drawings, or hastily-formed copies. It pulsed, a blinding beacon, flashing like some just-awakened eye of the world.

  Nycendera leaped up from her chair, cast her shackled hands out before her, and snarled, “Mine!” like a damn petulant child.

  And the shard damn near obeyed.

  Almost.

  We all watched like bug-eyed crows as the sliver of jagged gemstone tore itself away from Kallum’s hand and flew toward Nycendera.

  Or tried.

  Morgan Kallum had no reputation as a physical being. Despite skin as loose as an old shoe and some pockets of age that sagged him down rather than wrinkled him up, he reached out with a young man’s quickness, and as the artifact shot out, he caught it again.

  Holding it tight like a man fiercely clutching a kite in the wind, Kallum said, “César.”

  The young man snapped into action.

  He jammed his gun against the back of Nycendera’s round, shining skull. The hammer clacked like a beetle's legs.

  Bromley launched to his feet.

  Judge Fairchild smacked the head of the foot-long mallet four times on the table. Each smack sounded like a smaller-caliber gunshot.

  People began to get to their feet, some filtering out of the town hall like scared rats, others flattening to the walls. My heart beat a thousand gallops a minute, and my hands shook in little sweaty fits.

  “You cannot have what is mine!” Nycendera said.

  Kallum stared over the precious jewel. “You present a clear and viable danger to our town. Look at you, trying for a weapon in plain sight.”

  “It is no weapon,” Nycendera began, her skin flickering like wild flame.

  Kallum nodded his head. A command.

  César’s arm jerked. Wood struck Nycendera’s scalp. She teetered, half-turned, then crumbled.

  What ran out of her wasn’t blood, but quicksilver, syrup-thick and pouring out of her broken skin like a melting mirror.

  “Order!” Judge Fairchild cried. Right. Wishful thinking.

  Because really, once people started running past, it didn’t matter what was up or down anymore. They’d seen something strange happen in front of them and their minds began to create reasons, explanations. Control blew out of Fairchild and Bromley’s courtroom like the hairs of dead dandelions.

  It wasn’t smart, going for my gun. Gunmetal was a comfort. I drew and stared down César, but kept my finger just outside the trigger guard.

  “Are we really doing this, Faust?” Kallum asked.

  I shrugged. “Step back away from her, Emp,” I told César.

  Kallum began to wrap the gleaming shard again. “I knew you’d fuck this all to high hell.” The light faded from his face as he tucked the object, bound in Miss Garland’s napkin, in a pocket near his heart. “You find ways to basically shit in my wallet every day, even if you haven’t even unbuckled your pants.” I didn’t see it all. I couldn’t. Whatever Kallum had tangled himself up in, Nycendera had all his ire. “Why do you honestly care if she’s safe?”

  “Why do you care if she’s dead?”

  Bromley and Fairchild did their best imitation of statues. With guns out, the two of them were paper-thin problems at best. Bromley, the underarms of his brown vest stained with hot perspiration, slumped down into his designated chair.

  Kallum sucked on his teeth. “Alright, Faust. This is an easy game to play. I don’t like it, but I’ll abide. Getting things ugly in the town hall is a damn bad habit. César?”

  “Si.”

  “If you’d please.”

  He turned his barrel away from the golden woman’s head.

  Slow, slower than molasses, so I wouldn’t flinch, he poised the barrel in my direction.

  Tightness invaded my throat. I lay my finger across the trigger.

  Kallum, cooler than a pig’s muddy underbelly, patted the lump beneath his jacket. “You shoot him, you’re just another disposable stiff that deserved a bullet. I imagine Salgado’s had his share of men pointing guns at him in his time, so I wouldn’t chance that particular game of chicken. He’s the law right now. Come off it, Faust. I don’t want to smell gunpowder. Shit makes me sick.”

  César had glare heavier than a bag of ingots. Maybe it was because he knew he had the upper hand. Maybe a streak of hard-ass authority. He didn’t shoot, though, and I didn’t either.

  I loosened my fingers one by one and let my pistol hang from my fingertip. I lifted my arms. César approached me and yanked the gun out of my hand. He stuffed it in his belt.

  In front of Judge Fairchild and Bromley, the Mexican soldier locked a pair of stirrup-like cuffs on my wrists and drove me down to my knees.

  In my closed left hand, I rolled a silver ball-bearing around in my palm.

  22

  One cell. Two prisoners. César shoved Nycendera inside and locked my wrist to the bars. I yanked on general principle, click-clank, click-clank. The gold woman crumbled to the hay-stuffed mattress. Still shackled, she cradled her skull, its surface cracked like a polished eggshell. I sat in a sweltering ray of sun squeezing in through the window and boiled inside and out.

  Whatever she was, it wouldn’t matter once Bromley and Fairchild meted out their judgment behind closed doors. Kallum had tugged those fucks like jittery puppets, and the whole town hummed with excitement and fear. I could feel it rattling through the windows, pouring down the streets, because without something to hate, most folks just drifted around like ghosts and filled the air with complaints about time and money.

  I spit on the office floor in front of César Salgado’s boot-tips and said, “You happy with yourself, Emp? You knocked her to high heaven.”

  “Just good to know she bleeds.”

  At my desk, César pulled open a drawer and brought out the bottle of unlabeled whiskey I usually kept there. He pushed a ring of rusty keys aside with the bottom of a glass. He shoved my gun in a drawer for safe-keeping.

  “Thought you were a responsible marshal,” I said to him.

  “Was a responsible soldier, too. And soldiers drink.” He poured a glass.

  “She needs medical attention.”

  “You plan to give it to her, señor? Because nobody except you seem to care about this mess. Bad habit, caring too much. Same old song, eh? Gringos roll in here, think they can change the world for the better just by looking at it. She bleeds,” he reasoned, “she dies. Mayor will see to it in time. Or maybe she dies right there, and that’s alright too.”

  Newly-appointed Emperor César grabbed his keys and went out to sit on the porch, whiskey in tow. All in a day’s work. With one boot on the rail, he wiped fingerprints off his sixgun.

  The sun leaned closer toward the horizon. Christ, I had to piss. Nycendera’s gold hands, segmented like a suit of armor, were covered in silver muck. She rolled her thumb down her cheek and stretched herself up like a creature unfurling into light. “What was it,” she asked, “that you expected to accomplish, interrupting their trial?”

  I squatted down, rested my wrists on the cross-rails of the bars, and leaned my head into the cool metal. “It was just a parade for them.”

  “Then let them parade if they so choose. If that is my end, then I shall meet it.”<
br />
  “So you hang your hat up, just like that?”

  “When you found me in the alley,” she said, “I tried to keep you away. You refused to obey the signs.”

  “You didn’t exactly do a damn good job of putting them in my language.”

  She gritted her glass teeth so hard I heard them squeak. “When the rules of the natural world begin to fall away, most creatures flee. Smart creatures flee. They survive. They obey an instinct to preserve themselves. It is either by design or by sheer stupidity that you lack the ability to understand.”

  Being lectured in natural fundamentals by a walking, talking antique. Nice. “So this is what I get? I pull your ass out of the mud, I basically throw myself at Bromley and Fairchild’s mercy for you--”

  “I did not request to be the tool of your misplaced heroism. You have undone precious works, Elias Faust, just by being. Now your Mayor has an object of great value merely because your friend put more trust in him than in you.”

  “You mean your knife?”

  Her hands, still shackled, lashed out. They struck the nearby wall. She barked, “It is not a knife.”

  If I thought about Lachrimé too much, I’d feel something — and right now, I didn’t have space or time for feeling. “Then why’d you use it like one?”

  “I did not use it. I used a—” A pause, to search inside for the right word, “—a memory of it, brought to the forefront of my mind and made whole. A simulacrum.”

  “So these spikes, you just...think, and they’re there?”

  “You have your bullets. These?” A wisp of light sprang from her fingers, took on a green, tooth-like shape. It flickered, then vanished. “These are mine, and I use them as I must. They are a likeness, an object made of substance and will, and nothing more.”

  “Then why not use them to set yourself free? Fight your way out of this all?”

  Her reptilian eyes fell on me. They softened like jelly. For a minute, behind them, I saw…

  An ocean of stars…

  A shifting sky of quicksilver tides…

  Breathe, man.

  “Bending reality to free myself does not give me freedom to break the rules of the world in which I find myself living. I ended those men. If I am to die for the misdeed, it is best. You were not supposed to know of me, Elias Faust. Compromising your awareness is not a mistake I will make again, whether I am destroyed, or whether I have fled.”

  She peddled riddles, and though questions formed like smoke in my brain, they fell apart by the time they got to my tongue. I wanted to know things, ask questions, demand answers. Ask too many, though, shit gets real. Those are trails you can’t track back. Bridges out of ignorance burn quickly underneath a man’s boots and land him on unfamiliar shores.

  For now, she was just a woman.

  One made out of gold and secrets.

  Everything in its place. That was easiest.

  Outside, the world became red and dull and night fell on it like a shadow.

  “Will they kill you too?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “Some folks have it easier here.”

  “In Blackpeak?”

  “And beyond.”

  Sure, I’d be done in Blackpeak. They’d wrap me up in a nice bow and give me a nudge into the Texas badlands. West of the Pecos River, that was where you threw your skeletons and bad decisions. But I’d still have my skin. Clean slate. Kallum, Fairchild, Bromley, they’d consider it a victory. They’d say things over their cool lemonade like, Sure, we might have killed that girl who fell from the stars, but at least we kept that white man alive.

  Why, of all the specks in the sky, did Nycendera choose this one to land on?

  “When Lachrimé found you, why didn’t you push her away too, and avoid all this bullshit in the first place?”

  “Because I did not believe humans to be so petty. Because I was not sent here—” Nycendera’s head dipped toward a shadow out front, “—for her.”

  Outside, a familiar voice nettled César Salgado. “I want an audience with him,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Who are you to tell me no?”

  “Marshal.”

  “My ass,” Lachrimé Garland said. “Nothing more than a mustached hotspur to me. So how about you get up and go bring him out here so I can have a word or two with him. Kallum’s orders.”

  “Welcome to go inside, mi amiga.”

  “Oh, we’re friends now?” She snorted. “I’m not talking to him in there where it can overhear. Play me for a fool all you want, sweetheart, but don’t confuse me for one.”

  Nycendera’s cold lips creaked back and tightened into a line. “I will be very happy to hit her.”

  I whispered, “That’s what got you into this situation in the first place.”

  “Hit, not maim.”

  César came in a moment later and thumbed through a series of rusted keys, squinting drunkenly at them. “Other one,” I reminded him, before he found the right one. He grunted when he worked the key, and my shackles fell away in a clatter.

  He pushed me outside with a few sharp jabs from his finger. There stood Miss Garland with her dark hands on the hips of her dress, pacing like a metronome, buzzing with tension.

  Just as I was about to say something, her rigid finger shot out and crammed itself against my lips.

  “Don’t,” she hissed. “Just don’t. Because some stubborn garbage is liable to fall out of you like buffalo shit.”

  César flashed a pair of fingers. “Two minutes.”

  “Two?” Lachrimé’s eyes flashed. “Nothing worthwhile ever got done in two minutes, but I wouldn’t expect a boy like you to know that one way or the other. Don’t worry, he’s coming back.” She grabbed me by the upper arm. “Frankly, he’s too daft to run anywhere and too clumsy to capitalize on the urge even if it struck him.”

  Miss Garland led me through the tight crease of a nearby alley. I waited for it to fold over and over on itself the way the world had when we’d first found Nycendera, but it never did. Blue night had mostly taken over the sky now. Just when I expected Lachrimé to stop, maybe shove me against a wall, rip into me about what a fool I was, she kept pushing, pushing, until we came to a pathetic excuse for a fence. Nothing but the flat, purple lands lay beyond.

  “Leave,” she said, “just for a few days. Maybe take a sabbatical in Crown Rock or give yourself a few nights under canvas. When I turn my back, just make sure all that’s left are footprints.” She didn’t ever look me in the eye. She clutched herself, reached in and found that simple steel in her, that matter-of-factness that Lachrimé Garland always wielded.

  “You should have come to me,” I said.

  “Some things just aren’t as easy as you want them to be, Faust.”

  “Yeah? You belong to Kallum now?”

  When she struck me open-handed across the face, it left fire on my cheek. Howling started in my ears. Ringing. I shrank just about to the size of a penny.

  She wiped her palm off on her skirt and cleared her throat. Her voice plateaued, something cool and rock-hard. “Kallum doesn’t know I’m here. He’ll be beside himself when he finds out. You don’t seem to understand, Faust, that it’s a matter of picking the right battles at the right times, and for every one you start with your gunpowder, there’s twenty more I’m fighting otherwise. You’ve got the whole wide-open world if you want it, just snap your fingers and it’s yours. But Blackpeak’s all I got, and if I’ve got to hold onto it until my skin’s rubbed raw, I’ll do it. I’ll do it however I must, blood ot not.”

  Breathing hard, her shoulders lifted and fell like a bellow. I didn’t doubt her. Not then. Hopefully not ever. Violence wasn’t always gunshots and knife-wounds. Sometimes it was a stare. Sometimes it was the cold quiet, fragile as glass.

  In that moment, the world fell still enough for me to hear voices in the distance, carried on the breeze, chanting “Kill it, kill it,” with every falling boot.
r />   23

  Shit.

  They were coming for the girl made of gold.

  “No, Faust. You can’t go back there.” Lachrimé grabbed my elbow, dug her nails into me like I could have shed oil. “You have to leave.”

  “You serious?”

  “As a grave.”

  The bottom fell out of my stomach. I tasted my own breath, hot like smoke and acid. She didn’t want me to be there. She wanted me out there somewhere, feet planted firmly in useless soil, somewhere I could do nothing at all. “How much did Kallum pay you for it?”

  “It wasn’t about the money.”

  “Just because you’re a good businesswoman doesn’t make you a good liar,” I said, and tightened my fists. I’d been rolling that silver ball bearing around and around.

  God, I knew; I knew I should have just stayed back.

  It wasn’t my job anymore.

  “You know what men can do when the world shows them something that could be a danger to their power, their status, their bodies.” Lachrimé went for my hand, but I yanked it away. I struck myself over the heart, a few heavy blows to convince me my blood was still pumping, that my heart was still there. “Doesn’t make it sound, but my God, you saw what she’s capable of. Doesn’t some part of you fear it, what this invites into our world?”

  The men grew louder.

  Which is when someone shouting my name came thundering on a horse up the middle of the street, a breathless Paul Revere in the night.

  “Faust,” they shouted. “Faust!”

  I turned from Miss Garland, hoping she’d stay here. Hell, half-hoping I would, too.

  My feet clapped up the alley as the figure emerged from a cloud of blue dust thrown up into the moonlight. The horse frothed white hot. Grady Cicero all but crumbled out of the saddle. “There you are,” he heaved. “We need to move – and fast.”

  César stood on the porch, thumbs in his belt-loops, giving me a hard stare. “I’m in custody,” I said.

  “Yeah, I heard. But we’ve got problems far bigger than that right now, and Mexico here’s going to have to make some fucking concessions.” Cicero threw the reins over the hitching-post, scrambling frantically. “I ran back as quick as I could the moment I saw them. They’re coming, man. They’re coming, so we’ve either got to haul ass or do something really stupid really quickly, because…”