His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  Over his shoulder I saw them rounding the corner in the town square, all moving as one mass, and my blood ran as cold as Montana winter.

  I saw the torches first, tossing yellow light into the air. Smelled the kerosene-soaked rags. Felt the earth trembling underneath countless feet. Waves of disappointment and anger washed over me all at once. Their faces glowed like beacons, some obscured by kerchiefs and hats and hoods. The whole crowd moved like a single entity. If a hand didn’t carry a makeshift torch, then it held some kind of weapon: pitchforks jabbing at the air, pick-axes, some even with bottles held by the neck. I started hearing their voices, too. Curses. Shouts. Unintelligible. Righteous.

  Laughter, too.

  “They amassed right outside the town,” Cicero said. “I saw them lighting torches, went to take a gander, like I had some business knowing. You see what kind of righteous shit you’ve gotten into me? Heard them talking among themselves. Bad shit. Make your blood run cold shit. You think they really mean this?”

  I went for the Colt stuffed in my pants, wanting that comfort that only cold steel could give.

  Wasn’t there.

  “No time for bullets,” Cicero said.

  “Ring out a shot or two, the cowards among them will scatter. You could do the honors, Emp.” I nodded to César.

  “And leave the ones who really want to put a dent in your skull? Don’t let your pride be a bludgeon, Faust,” Cicero said. “You’re a good man, but you’re a man. Don’t underestimate the overwhelming power of people doing foolish things in large groups. Bullets frighten crowds, not conviction.”

  Their call-and-response billowed up in the night.

  “We don’t stand for God-forsaken murderers.”

  “Kill it,” the crowd said.

  “This is our town. This town belongs to us.”

  “Kill it,” the crowd said.

  “Our town, our land, our people. It killed our boys—”

  “Kill it, kill it, kill it.”

  “—so we kill it, if we gotta.”

  There must have been twenty or thirty of them, shoulder-to-shoulder, carrying their fire. They didn’t so much stomp or storm in as ooze like burning oil through the streets.

  In seconds they’d be on us, and probably tear us into ribbons if we stood in their way. The horse Cicero had borrowed from the livery gave a tremor. I glanced at it, then at Cicero. He said, “Bad idea,” as if he could read the words on my brain like one of my folded-up novels. “No time for posturing. You’re not a marshal anymore, Faust. You’re one of them, and if you aren’t one of them, you’re an obstacle.”

  “Someone has to do something.” I reached for the horse.

  He yanked me back by the collar.

  “I’m asking you,” said Cicero, before putting himself between the crowd, the horse, and my poor ideas. “You’re not a city boy, Elias, but I am. I can sure as hell read a crowd. You have nothing on this. Knock you right the hell out if I have to. I’m begging you. Riots destroy men’s senses, boils them down to beasts.”

  A fireplug of a figure came swirling out from a nearby building, crashing into a collection of men with torches. “The hale you doin’ marchin’ through heah lie’ dat?”

  “Get out the way, bitch,” someone said through their teeth.

  Which the bitch promptly knocked out.

  “No place for this, for y’all, for any’a dis—”

  A throng of firelit shadows converged on her.

  “Ya wanna speak it,” I heard her spit, “then you godda backet up wid sompin’, boy.” Another blow, and another man fell into others.

  I started to move. Cicero threw me back.

  “I’ll get Peggy,” he said. “Get the prisoner. Just go.”

  He unreined the horse and gave it a hauling crack across the ass. It darted toward the crowd. They all splashed against the buildings on either side of the street. Cicero descended into the crowd without any additional sound. They poured in on him.

  None of them would listen. None of them, in their hoods and their hate, would have time for noise like mine. Torchlight crept toward my feet. I scrambled back, grinding my teeth together as – shit, shit, shit – I stormed back up the stairs, past César, and blasted into the office…

  …just as the voice leaped into my brain.

  It’s a pity what unchecked fear can do to people, isn’t it?

  César followed me and watched the procession through a window. He pressed his face against the glass. Firelight danced on his cheeks.

  As far as motivators go, though? Fear’s a poor one, the voice said.

  Nycendera was up when I got near the cell. Her sharp stare pierced through the bars. Her body moved like a wiry feline. She gleamed brighter, almost blinding.

  As far as catalysts to action go, do you want to know what I prefer?

  “Emp. Key. Now.”

  Humility. I think humility’s one of the strongest motivators there is.

  The front door flew open.

  I realized only then why the voice had found me again. I looked down into my palm. At some point, I’d dug the tiny mirrored ball-bearing out of my pocket and clutched it like a precious gem. If the cold metal of a gun couldn’t help…

  Two figures exploded into the office, one donning a loose sack with sloppily-cut eyeholes, the other a kerchief across his mouth. Emp reacted immediately. He lashed out for one of the intruder’s temples with a pistol-handle. It cracked across an upraised forearm. He moved into their space, driving one of them back against the wall with the heel of his boot. In the same motion, he yanked the keys off his belt and tossed them in my direction.

  They skittered across the desk, hopping once, twice.

  I caught them in my free hand.

  While César traded blows with the sack-head, I fumbled the key into the lock. The Herald grabbed the bars, looked at me, then thrust her face out between the rusted iron. “Why?”

  The key turned. “What’s right,” I said, “is right.”

  “Why.”

  “Nobody deserves to die just to make other people comfortable.”

  Frustration mounted. She shot a hand through the bars and grabbed my wrist. With iron fingers, she turned my palm upright and pried it open. I saw myself in the silver ball. She saw herself too. It lay perfectly in the canyon between the lines in my skin. Right atop of that burnt patch of skin.

  Oh, he said in my head. She’s got a sense, that one.

  “Why,” she demanded again.

  She pushed me back with a vicious palm. I barely managed to keep hold of the bearing.

  I fell into the kerchiefed figure right behind me, blowing the air out of him.

  His palm engulfed my face. He threw me back into the desk. I collided with it, all sharp edges hitting sharp edges. Meanwhile, César and the one in the sack wrestled over the Mexican’s gun. I tore the desk open, grabbing my Colt.

  Classic Faust. Killing. And why? Because it’s easy?

  In the corner of my eye, I saw César go for a boning knife sheathed in the back of his gunbelt. His assailant tore the pistol away, then cracked him across the side of the brow with it. César dropped.

  Then the gun was on me, and Edward Sloman, the owner of the general store, said to me from under the sack: “Sorry, Elias, but I can’t let you shoot my friend. Slide him your gun, nice and easy. All we want is the gold one.”

  I put the Colt on the floor, nice and easy, and nudged it toward Kerchief with the edge of my boot. It slid and spun.

  “This what you really want?” I asked Sloman.

  Kerchief picked up my Colt. He leveled it on the Herald. Outside she could have probably had a chance, but behind bars and surrounded by brick, a bullet was bound to hit its mark.

  With all those mysteries at her fingertips, she summoned none of it.

  The rusted cell door moaned open, and Kerchief stood right in the doorway, blocking her exit. “Knees,” Kerchief said. “Now.”

  Nycendera’s chest rose, fell, rose, fell. With
her fingers interlaced behind her head, she kneeled. From his belt, Kerchief took a length of rope.

  His knee nearly cracked her jaw in two. She folded. Mercury drooled to the floor in long strings. He lashed the rope about her neck, once, twice, three times, and just as she tried to twist and fight against it, he yanked. He dragged her from the cell.

  No. Not like that. God, not like that.

  “You want to be stained by this?” I said to Sloman. “Associated with it for the rest of your days? You want to grow old with this?”

  “I want to grow old,” Sloman said.

  Flopping and twisting like a hooked fish, Nycendera’s body scraped across the floor. I saw her eyes in a flash: bloodshot, corners gone red, almost squeezing out her sockets. Whatever secrets lingered in her veins either refused to leap out right then, or simply couldn’t.

  One of her fingernails snapped free of its base as she grabbed hold of a floorboard.

  Kerchief wrenched her out the door.

  It’s out of hand, Faust. This whole thing, it’s simply gone awry.

  Every time he spoke it was an anvil screaming sparks and fire in my head. Edward Sloman crammed his weapon into the small of my back. “This isn’t about you, and it’s not about me. We’ll do what we have to do. Town’s got no beef or trouble with you, but any friend of a problem like that is a problem for all of us.”

  “Don’t cross this bridge,” I warned him.

  “Just don’t interfere. That thing’s not got much of a life after what it did, but you still have one. This is your voucher – for all you’ve done for us before now, you hear?”

  He shoved me aside and stormed out.

  If I went out there, they’d tear me to pieces. They’d have their corpse. That much hate, it scorches and scours and slaughters; I’d have no sense to talk into them. Not that they’d hear. But I couldn’t handle that hellacious cackling, that teasing, that joy—

  “Bring her on over here,” someone bellowed.

  “Look at me, you fuckin’ monster.”

  “Christ, boys, she’s petrified! Sling her round this way. No, this way.”

  “That horse. Get that horse.”

  I tightened my fist around Joshua’s silver ball until my fingernails tore into my skin.

  Out the window, a small resistance pulsed from within the torchlit crowds. I saw Cicero’s too-red face as he barreled, bloody and exhausted, into two men who beat the hell out of him with blunt sticks. Then there was Peggy Winters, holding her own, throwing enough elbows that the sleeves of her dress were torn and red.

  Then I saw her. Nycendera. Thrashing. Being dragged by one man toward another two who held the horse – Cicero’s horse – by its reins.

  It would only take a few seconds, if the horse ran fast enough…

  The torches would do the worst of the work afterward. Melt her, even if they couldn’t burn her.

  “What will this cost,” I said to the silence of my office.

  Very little, really.

  Nycendera managed to slip the knot. She took on all of them. They came down on her with torches and bludgeons. The girl made of gold never tired, though her graceful motions collapsed. She became a lunging, lurching mass. She broke one man’s nose with her forehead.

  I swallowed.

  “Help me,” I said. “Please.” The words rang out in the air, reaching for nothing and everything all at once. Disembodied and fragile, almost like they weren’t mine. They echoed off the corners of my office before settling like dust into the cracks.

  See? That wasn’t so hard. Sometimes all it takes…

  “…is a little bit of resignation.”

  In my palm, the silver sphere shuddered.

  It leaped out from between my knuckles and shot across the room, right between the bars of the cell, where a waiting hand snapped it out of the air. The palm – old, craggy, covered in a mass of liver spots – turned upward. The ball rolled into its new owner’s grip.

  Where there’d been nobody but moments before, now he was.

  “Elias Faust,” Magnate Gregdon said. “There you are in the flesh, murderer. And now, so am I.”

  He sat shirtless on the bunk in the jail cell, his spine bent like he was reading a book. When he stood, I saw how age had chewed away at him. His arms were twigs, the flesh of a once-hale man hanging like rooster-waddles from his elbows. A sunken chest peppered with hair looked more like parchment than skin. “Looks like you’ve got something of a problem on your hands.”

  He wiped off a bit of lather from the underside of his cheek. A spot of it still clung on.

  It was some morsel of knowledge garnered from the silver ball that told me this was the Magnate, the man whose voice had played interloper in my skull. He wore a pair of loose pants that only stayed upright by virtue of frayed suspenders, one strap on, the other hanging free. A hayfield of whiskers covered the left side of his face, but the right was red and angry, freshly trimmed.

  I found it hard to look at him. My nerves shot to the ends of their registers. The din from outside became a murmur. “It’s you been talking to me? From—” it sounded crackers, “—beyond?”

  “One and only.”

  “How,” I said. “How does it work?”

  “Don’t start jabbering stupid questions you and I both know there’s no time to answer. All I had to do was knock you down a few rungs so you could admit there was something you couldn’t handle. Was that so hard?”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Fine question to ask the man whose son you shotgunned out a window.” He peered outside, his gaunt face wearing the color of fire. “Goodness, Faust. Blackpeak’s quite a sight, and here you are calling me during my weekly ablutions.”

  “That woman doesn’t deserve to be torn apart like a dog.”

  “You have a shirt around this place anywhere,” he said.

  “They’re killing her.”

  “Maybe a splash of aftershave—”

  “You going to just stand there?” I said.

  They pulled her down to the dirt. They kicked at her ribs.

  “Dash of cologne, maybe?”

  They lashed rope to her throat, heaved the end over a wooden lamp-pole, then tied it to the saddlehorn of the horse.

  “No,” I screamed against the glass. “Fuck this. Goddamnit, old man, aren’t you going to—”

  His hand shot out. The liverspotted skin of his palm split open like a slash-wound mouth.

  A swarm of black insects flew in a cloud and struck my face. I screamed. Their stingers jabbed into my lips and gums. The skin swelled. I clawed them away, but only pulled away handfuls of sand. My lips melded together and refused to move.

  “Composure,” the Magnate said, “is as essential as silence. You pick one or I pick the other for you. For Chrissake, boy, if you can’t manage to keep your heart from skipping a beat at the slightest hint of danger, I don’t know how you managed to survive this long.”

  Nothing about him made sense. Not how he’d been speaking to me, not how he’d emerged from the walls, not how he’d called trickery and corruption right out of his own skin.

  “Problems aren’t choosy. Wavering on the threshold produces no result. You want this problem fixed, then wrap yourself in it. I know you tried.” He stepped over César’s unconscious frame as he approached the door. “You let your associate talk you down. He saved your life. Granted, it only evens the scales. They’ll just take her life as a result. That’s the rotten fruit of hesitation. You’re either in, or you’re out.”

  He knew. He’d heard. I see you, the paper had said.

  Without a shirt, the spindly fellow went right outside, into hell. I followed him.

  From his pocket, he produced the strangest little item: a golden artifact roughly the size of a fist, covered in countless spikes and thorns. He clenched it, until tiny spots of blood sprang out on his fingertips.

  Then, with red palms, he pocketed it again, and observed.

  The cruelty just kept draggin
g on and on, as all awful things do. The Herald’s heels scraped long canyons in the soil. Seconds clicked away like hours. Kerchief laughed and they were all laughing and it was so loud and in her last moments, right as Edward Sloman slapped the ass of the frightened, wide-eyed horse, Nycendera chose to watch me.

  The horse neighed and shot like a bullet from a gun.

  The rope slithered like a snake up and over the lamp-post.

  Hooves pounded out an earthquake.

  “Now or never,” Magnate Gregdon said. “Time’s right.”

  He shook out his hands like washrags. His fingers snapped to attention.

  Then he clapped.

  Our world is in constant motion. Everyone’s moving, shuffling, breathing, heaving, coughing, shaking, scratching, walking, creaking, yawning; it’s this stream of going-going-going, never truly starting or slowing down to its ending, because that’s life. People bicker and dance and swoon and kiss and laugh and crumble. The wind beats, the sky slides, the earth does its Copernicus waltz. By chance we don’t fly off it, but we sure as hell crash against one another trying to hold on. It’s all deafening noise.

  When it all stopped moving, the silence could have broken me in two.

  The lynchmob stood stark still. On their torches, the fire froze in its hungry dance. Their faces, locked in stupid fury, refused to move. The town square had become a wax-sculpture museum, an unmoving testament to this terrible moment in time.

  The horse, half-stride, still sought freedom, but without motion.

  Nycendera, two inches from death, might as well have been an artist’s drawing, suspended midway through a yank. Her spine bent at a grave angle, her neck at odds with it.

  Her bones wouldn’t have lasted but another breath.

  When the Magnate walked, his boots crunched craters into the gravel. “Hardly any rush in watching time move by when you can just slip between each second and give the world the nudge it needs. You might not understand this, Elias Faust, nor do I expect you. Simply accept it, do not question it, and consider it the favor I provide you.”