His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  I strode between the bodies of men consumed by rage. I was afraid if I touched them, they’d awaken. I found Cicero. He’d been driven to the ground under heavy fists.

  Instinctively, I reached out to touch him. To help.

  “No,” the Magnate said. “Not him. He will take his beating. That’s the price one pays for nobility, wouldn’t you say?” From his left pants-pocket, he withdrew a handful of dried peanuts. He cracked the shells. “Pushing against the tide always hurts, even if it’s the proper course of action.

  “And look at this one. Biiiig drink of water,” he said, circling the mid-swing Peggy Winters, whose dusky skirt flared out around her ankles like a ringing bell as she put her elbow against a lyncher’s chin. Blood on his face looked like red gems.

  He crunched a peanut.

  The swelling around my lips subsided.

  The Magnate took his handful of broken shells and carefully deposited them in one of her skirt-pockets.

  We continued on, moving our way through the stilled chaos. I passed my hand through the air near some torchflame. “Don’t chance it,” he warned. “It would still burn. Nothing here stops, exactly, despite being stopped.”

  “Did you stop—” I stuttered. “Did you stop time?”

  “Hardly. Time doesn’t stop,” he reasoned, peeking at me from underneath a lyncher’s elbow. “It marches on. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, petty pace, all that. Think of it like…” He popped another peanut in his mouth, then sought out words simple enough to explain the inexplicable. “Time didn’t stop. Watches still tick, minutes still pass, hearts go thump. Nobody’s got the juice in them enough to stop the world spinning, Faust. Trying that would pop you like a boil, and probably everyone in a twenty-mile radius.” He laughed. Good laugh. I could have liked that laugh.

  “Then – then how?”

  “I stopped the perception of time,” he said. “The way their minds understand it, the way their bodies react to it. Theirs—” he pointed at the few people around him, “—and ours, a little bit.”

  “How’d the fire stop?”

  “It’s still burning bright and dangerous. Better to uphold the aesthetic. Brains are fragile things, Elias. It’s better we believe it, too, as much as we possibly can. I’d hate to bust that skull of yours with mere ideas before having the chance to do anything else to it.” He dug into his other pocket and found a folded straight-razor.

  He tossed it to me. It soared over the still-life of the Herald.

  I caught it in both hands.

  “About three-and-a-half minutes before this clever bit of work falls apart around us,” he said. “Time to nudge.”

  So with the straight-razor unfolded, I began to saw the rope like hell. I cried and I didn’t know why; I couldn’t not cry, with this pressure hammering inside my brain, fierce as a rail-driver. Sweat poured out of me, so much that my grip almost slipped right down on the razor.

  Her eyes hadn’t ever left that place where I was standing.

  I think they hated me. God, I hope they did.

  I said, “What do you get out of this, other than some kind of one-up on me?”

  He grinned. “Come on, Faust. Choke this town as I might want to do, Blackpeak’s best interest is still my main priority. I want this town. It harbors secrets. I’ll have them as time and circumstance allows. Watching the snake eat its own tail over something as petty as bigotry and fear? You can’t do any spellwork fine enough to suck out that poison from a place.”

  Spellwork. The word, foreign and strange, hung in the air.

  “You know this place?” I asked, the rope almost halved.

  “Hell if I don’t. I lived here too. Well before you took away one of the two sons God gave me. Two minutes, ten seconds.”

  “Yeah? These folk have never mentioned you before. Just knew your boys,” I said.

  Some peanut-skin fell and got caught in his chest-hair. “You know how legends come to be?”

  “They do legendary things?”

  “They get forgotten first.” He chewed another peanut. “Then, as legends do, they rise up out of the dust of history, and they leave their footprints in the paths they tread through culture. The present forgets them – sometimes by happenstance and sometimes by force – and the future carves their name in stone, to be remembered long into new centuries.”

  “By…force?”

  “Why wait for them to forget you,” he said, “when you could make them? Just to prove to yourself that you can?”

  It was only from Partridge’s lips that I’d ever heard word of him. Nowhere else had I ever encountered any mention of Old Man Gregdon, of a Magnate. The name Gregdon had barely been a fart in the wind before the Gregdon Twins with their carousing and drinking and their capital-fucking-T. This man was just a smear on the window of the whole town, washed away by a bit of clever rain.

  “One-minute, thirty seconds,” he said.

  With his razor, just one across his throat. Just one…

  It’s why I never played cards. My poker face was shit.

  “Not a good idea, whatever you’re thinking, Faust.”

  A pale finger lifted. He waved it at the top of a nearby building.

  There, perched like a gargoyle, was a misshapen figure in a flapping cloak. Another one stood on the crest of the town hall. Yet another crouched on the awning over Edward Sloman’s general store.

  Staring at me, silver-eyed, ready to pounce.

  “You came prepared,” I said.

  I clicked shut his straight-razor and chucked it to him. He caught it.

  “Had plenty of time.” The Magnate smiled. “You really don’t remember, do you, Faust?”

  He threw me the ball-bearing. I snapped it out of the air. It landed smack-dab in the middle of my palm, right where the little burn smarted—

  A little burn. A little…

  …burning, that whiskey, going down and coming up too. My feet dragged like bricks through the sand. Who did Kallum think he was, canning me in favor of some bristle-chinned little shitshoe. And that goddamn walking gold-nugget slithering her way into town, she was going to die. But there were options, there had to be…

  I shouted at the ball bearing, “You wanna pour your words into my head, you invisible motherfucker? Then do it. Do it, righ’ now, b’fore I fuckin’…before I fuckin’—"

  I reared back my arm to throw.

  Which is when that ball-bearing started to burn like a sun in my fist.

  Is this what you really want to do?

  I hissed. Opened my palm. It glowed hot as a cigarette cherry. I tried to shake it free.

  “Ged’off me,” I barked.

  The impossible isn’t impossible, Faust. There are ways.

  “What, you my goddamn friend now?”

  A mutual beneficiary.

  “I don’t need no goddamn friends,” I shouted, and drank.

  Not every problem can be shot at. Some need to be finessed.

  “Or some jus’ godda get thrown out.”

  That voice sighed as I spent my time kicking like a mule at a trough because why the hell not, boots were tough, and feet were stupid. You going to spend your night arguing at me?

  “Argue at whoever the heck I want to, Mister Brainbabble.”

  I’ve had more charming conversations with rocks.

  “Yeah, well.” Another swig.

  Faust. The girl’s life. Do you want it saved?

  “What’s it matter to you?”

  Nothing.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped. “Yes,” Pause. “Yes. Christ, absolutely. How do I fix this. How do I set it right-side up?”

  I will give it to you.

  “At what cost?”

  None.

  “You don’t make any sense.”

  Unnecessary blood is unnecessary blood. Despise you as I do – and I do despise you, Elias Faust – I still possess a heart. But you need to ask. You need to bend a knee.

  I swallowed vomit. I ground at my nose, burnt from s
nuff and cigarettes. What else did I have to lose?

  You need to ask, and I’ll be ready.

  And then all that whiskey had to come back out from somewhere, so it did…

  …and like a sky having its clouds wiped away by a barcloth, I remembered.

  I’d already asked. The other night. Drunk as a loon.

  It was the Magnate’s final cracking peanut that broke my reverie. That, and the way he said, “Forty-five seconds,” and snapped his fingers in Nycendera’s direction.

  Motion poured into her. She crashed to the ground and clawed with abandon at the rope, her motions from minutes before bleeding right over into these. Frantic. Unyielding. She swiped at air, at anything and everything, then promptly wrenched at the rope and doubled over to draw in precious air.

  When she found the frayed end, she looked up at me. At us.

  I said, “Go. Now. There isn’t time. You need to go.”

  She licked at a trickle of silver that had welled in the divot above her lip. I helped her to her feet. Or tried to. Her forearm slashed out in the air and knocked me away. “Do not touch me.”

  “This is your chance,” I said. “You don’t get another.”

  “You were not meant to give this to me.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “He did.”

  Between the statuesque figures frozen in the midst of their hate and murderous schemes, she glanced at the Magnate, who looked almost fragile among the immobile crowd. Their attentions met.

  It was Nycendera who unraveled first. She lunged forward, her arm snapping out like a whip. At the edge of her fingertips, inhuman light exploded: out of some sort of greenish rift or split gouged in the air, a jagged tongue of jade appeared as if withdrawn from a tiny pocket in reality. The magical blade slipped into her palm, humming with power. One of those damned conjured things.

  She threw it at the Magnate.

  He swiped a hand into the air.

  The weapon stopped mid-flight, barely a hair from his nose.

  And there it hung, quivering, its momentum fighting against whatever wonder he’d worked.

  “We have mere seconds,” he said. An outbreak of perspiration gleamed on his half-shaved face. “Whatever intents, aims, or discomforts you possess, abandon them.”

  “I will owe my existence to no one,” she said, never taking her stare from the Magnate.

  “You don’t,” I interjected. “Consider this an apology. For all this.”

  “Carried on the back of dark company, that means very little,” Nycendera said.

  “I take it you two know each other?”

  The Magnate’s whole throat tightened. It was beginning to wear at him, this extended exposure to whatever-the-hell he called it: his craft, his magic, his talent. “Names on the wind, Faust. The minute you break out of your very limited scope of reality, you need never meet someone – or something – to know of it. Ripples in the water, Herald, am I right?”

  Nycendera’s narrow features gave a twitch of recognition.

  “Ripples in the water,” she said.

  Jesus, it was like watching snakes rear up and flare at one another. “I don’t want to shake my dick in the middle of this little pissing contest, but this is not the time and definitely not the place. I asked for his help. Me. We need to leave it at that.”

  She passed by Kerchief, and with a petulant swipe, tore the bandana from around his mouth. “This is mine, now,” she proclaimed.

  Touching her throat where the lashed rope still dangled like a necklace, Nycendera crept back, sliding between the outstretched arms, grasping hands, and surging legs of her captors. She jabbed a finger in my direction and said, “Below our feet lingers that which should be claimed by no man. This one yearns. He knows. I smell it on him, like sickness. Do not be just another fool. This is your chance.” My words came from her like an echo. “You don’t get another.”

  The woman turned and fled.

  Fled, but with an unnatural speed. Blurring like a slow-moving bullet.

  Or a fast-fading dream.

  The Magnate’s vitality crept out of him, leaving him frail as paper. He balanced this tiny morsel of the world on his fingertip. It began to fall apart.

  “What does it cost you,” I asked, “to compete with reality like this? It’s got to cost you something.” A heavy wind could have torn him asunder. Maybe if I huffed, and I puffed…

  “There’s always a cost, Elias Faust.” He held the golden object again, with all its edges and barbs. Clenching around it, his fingers looked like tiny tubes of paper. “The costs must be paid. Sacrifice. Of the self, of others. Payments of pain and blood. Do you know how much pain there is, truly? Do you fathom even a fraction of it? Blood drying in the dirt of plantations in Georgia and South Carolina. Agony festering in cities, polluting the earth. Pain to be gathered up, taken back, and breathed out into the world as something better.

  “And you’ve put so much of it there, Elias Faust. You killed my boy. I helped tonight, with parlor tricks,” he said, his lips peeling back from his gums like bits of tanned leather, “but you already made sure the blood-price was paid for them, well before you even realized it.”

  Crackpot philosophies and machinations. The shine in his eyes was a devil’s: he believed every word. I stared into the face of a man forgotten by a town, a wraith that had ejected himself out of time and memory and humanity.

  “What price did I pay?” I breathed.

  “Ask Keswick Everett. Ask Joshua Fulton.” The Magnate’s grin split a canyon across his face. “I’m sure they’ll help you see.”

  Which is when everything exploded.

  Exploded into motion, into screams, into shouts of “Hang her, hang her,” like a bonfire full of noise and color and movement. Cicero got pummeled to the ground. Peggy Winters thrashed several men like wheatstalks. Horse kept sprinting like a bat out of hell, and it carried its way off through the town on a wave of dust, a flapping tail of rope unwinding up over the wooden lamp-pole and snap-snap-snapping off behind its hind legs.

  A hellacious cheer of victory and satisfaction flew up from the crowd.

  Until it simply stopped.

  They realized.

  “The fuck she go,” somebody asked a friend.

  I saw Kerchief just a few feet away, starting to discover his disappointment. He and Edward Sloman stood together like lost children.

  I went for Kerchief. I punched that sonofabitch right in the jaw.

  I stole my pistol from his sweaty hand, and in the middle of the crowd raised it, fired right into the air. Once, twice, three times. Four, five—

  The sixth shot I fired into Edward Sloman’s kneecap.

  He didn’t drop so much as he formed into a howling puddle on the ground. He grabbed at the wet remnants of his pants.

  “Enough,” I bellowed.

  The whole town made me sick. I despised their smug, confused, and questioning faces, their coal-stained stubble, their damning eyes. I wanted to burn their ragged clothes, tear each one of them down. A gaggle of bigots and wishers. A crude collection of unlikable souls purged from the rest of the world. The crowd spread from around me. I stuffed the ball-bearing into my pocket.

  Edward Sloman looked up, teeth gritted. “How’m I gonna walk?”

  I crunched the heel of my boot into the damp beef of his knee. His scream split the night.

  I reloaded each cylinder in my Colt from my belt. I took my time. Blackpeak watched. Give them a show, they’d watch.

  Sloman’s grungy hair shone with sweat. I grabbed a handful and dragged him like a doll across the ground.

  Toward the floating knife.

  Nycendera’s spell-forged blade still hummed in the air. Perhaps with a flick, it would have kept flying until it hit the horizon. By what means it trembled there, suspended, I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. I heaved Sloman’s face up until his lips grazed the point.

  “This never happens again.” Breathe. “This. This?” I pointed with my barrel toward
the scrabble-marks in the sand, the hoof-prints, the hints of blood and spit. Toward Cicero dragging himself up off the earth, and Peggy Winters putting her broad belly between him and a group of lynchers whose steam had started to fade. “Never again. Not tonight, not any other night. Any man or woman that thinks their hatred is enough reason to rewrite law forfeits their right to citizenship in our town.

  “Do it, and I will drive you out without hesitation, and without question. I’ll break you if I have to. There are limits and there are lines. I’ll observe them, I’ll keep them, and you sure as hell won’t cross them. If I saw your face tonight, you know I know who you are. I’m glad to know who you are.” It just kept coming and coming. “I’m glad to know what you’re capable of and what shade of cowardice boils inside you. I’m glad to look you straight in the eye and never forget what torch you held, what pitchfork you raised, and what a brave soul you swore you were as you just about dragged a woman to her death.

  “And if you wore a mask,” I warned, glancing at one man in a crumpled hood, “wear it for the rest of your days. Stitch it to yourself for all I care. Whatever face you decide to show the world, you bury this foul shit so far underneath yourself that you pray it never surfaces, never dares to leak out, because I will see it, I will smell it, and I will bury it with you. Tell them, Mister Sloman,” I said, staring not at the crowd, but at the knife as I pressed his teeth up against the jagged point. “Go on. Tell them.”

  His lips hesitated. “Never again.”

  “Louder.”

  “Never again.”

  “Am I clear,” I said, finally cutting my eyes across the lot of them.

  A wind snapped through the town square, daring the silence.

  You’d have thought the whole planet went to sleep.

  “Am I clear?”

  You could see the questions bursting in their faces. What had happened to their prey? Where had she gone, here one moment and then, like a flash of lightning, vanished the next? I wondered what it had been like for them, whether that span of time-that-was-not-time had been a long, sleeping eternity, or whether it had been just a blink. Hiccup-quick. Hardly anything at all.