His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  double-leg-lengths

  melted away like fat.

  Once I rooted-and-sniffed a Very Fine Hare, wire-haired and arrow-eared, and Constantpaw with her constant paws wore the hackles of a Huntingpaw until both of us, we bit-for-kill and crushed

  and crushed

  and crushed

  but not so loud Constantpaw said you cannot

  absolutely should not

  chew-the-bones and so with belly full we

  tha-tha-thum, tha-tha-thum, we ran.

  Many double-leg lengths had we to go, but the Rotsmell-and-Blackstink pulled us. The Others caught up to us and as One we ran,

  tha-tha-thum

  tha-tha-thum

  to join in our voyage.

  First there was Spitjaw whose jaw ever-was-wet and on his head gleamed the ever-scab of a furious tooth, and too came another who was called Rat who sometimes lost-his-path and slept-too-long and weighed down he was

  So greatly weighed down

  with a bundle I

  Bit-for-play

  But he bit-for-kill

  and Spitjaw said to him no for Rat burned with an anger so to blow it off we ran, tha-tha-thum, tha-tha-thum until the Burnball fell behind the great beyond and the Shimmerball awakened tall and fat—

  So refreshing and so alive were we all on this One Great Run that Hill could not tire us and Stream could not slow for as

  One

  nothing could break us.

  Greater and greater grew the Rotsmell-and-Blackstink until it was right before us.

  Constantpaw said to me, it was good to Run This Run with you once more, Gravelfoot.

  Spitjaw said to me, this was a fine way to live-but-not at your flank, Gravelfoot.

  Rat said to me nothing, for Rat was very stupid.

  Goodbye, they said, goodbye, until we Run This Run again—

  —woke with a mouthful of sand and a headache that was brutal as a ball-peen hammer.

  I peeled my damp face off the ground. I spit a bloody knot of hair into the sand. It was night. Like day had just vanished in a snap. My feet and hands wore tattoos of raw, wet blood, skin cracked from the heat. Trails of sand stuck to me. My knees were scraped to hell.

  Gravelfoot’s weathered paw sat on the ground beside me.

  One of its clawed toes fell to ash, then blew away in the wind.

  Shaking, I looked up.

  Goddamn if I didn’t see, just beyond the next hill, a whole horizon of squat buildings with withering facades and slate roofs. A steeple reached up into the night sky like a finger trying to pierce the moon.

  Blackpeak.

  I got to my feet. My spine and ribs and stomach all screamed at once. Then the cramping came, and I spent the next few minutes engaged in any number of violent unpleasantries as my body made damned sure I knew I’d put it through absolute hell.

  When I looked up, three pairs of reflective eyes stared at me from a nearby hillock.

  Constantpaw approached me first. I recognized her immediately, with her loping legs and rhythmic stride. Her tongue lolled out. She lowered down her head to the ground, heaved, and sicked up a puddle of foam and spit.

  The Eye rolled into the dirt.

  Behind her circled another coyote, its tired breaths blasting out as hot steam from its black nose. This one, more wary than the last, paced back and forth behind Constantpaw. In the starlight, I caught sight of a crude, hairless scar gouged in its forehead. Spitjaw, then.

  Which left just one more, who sauntered like an off-balance ape, as though one of his legs was just a bit shorter than the others. “Rat,” I said. But the poor bastard’s yellow eyes seemed to look off in separate directions, and when I reached to him, he flinched and skittered. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, it’s fine, it’s just—”

  A row of hairs shot to attention on my neck. Instinct set itself aflame inside my chest. I spoke. But she spoke. Wetness cracked inside my voice. My throat scraped its way through the sounds.

  “It’s Gravelfoot. I’m Gravelfoot.”

  It…wasn’t English.

  Rat settled back on his haunches and dipped forward. On his back was a cumbersome load, like little doggy saddlebags. In the bags, carefully folded, were my belongings: my bloody trousers, my oiled duster, my leathers carefully bound up like a Christmas knot. The sandshade’s talon-blade. Oarsdale’s ornate flintlock. And of course my pistols, half-cocked, lathered with moist coyote-sweat.

  I drew away from Rat, who suddenly snapped at me: not a warning, but gentler-like, if you can consider slobbery jowls and yellow jaws friendly.

  Bite-for-play.

  If I stood there too long and considered the nature of the boon the Quicktooth had given me, rest assured it’d damn well pull my mind to pieces. So I didn’t. I’d gone from there, thirty miles away at the Western Elbow, to here. Miracles, maybe. Or just happenstance. Or sheer luck. Weirdness abounded. Sentient coyotes. Creatures of sand and fury. Men who chose to be forgotten by the world.

  And a Shattered Well, that souls would scramble for and murder over and build a whole world in their image just to uncover.

  Even a world had its skin, and the Magnate intended to peel it back to get to the heart beating beneath it.

  Constantpaw, Spitjaw, and Rat slinked away from me. I wrapped Gravelfoot’s paw in a strip of fabric and crammed it into my duster pocket.

  Then I plucked up the Eye.

  It’s been awhile.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  So have I.

  “We have a lot to talk about.”

  I tried to keep it from you, Faust. Nothing exposes a man’s hand like the reasons for his enterprise. Desire’s a goddamn weakness, let me tell you.

  “How’ve I gone this long,” I said as I started walking toward my town, “without knowing about this Shattered Well, whatever the hell it is?”

  Some barriers have to be crossed before you understand the world the way I do. You’re seeing the world with one pair of eyes. I’m seeing it through a hundred.

  The coyotes didn’t follow. I felt emptiness behind me. They fled. They were right to. “What’s this worth to you, that you play with all this dark shit just to make your ends meet?”

  You haven’t read the books. You haven’t sought out the knowledge. You hardly have a stake in this, Elias. The Shattered Well – and any other Well like it – is a man’s opportunity to submerge himself in elements and ideas entirely foreign to our natural brains.

  “What makes you think you’re the man meant to find it?”

  Any man can find it if he looks long enough. I just intend to be the first.

  “So it’s about a thirst for power,” I said.

  It’s more than that.

  “Conquest?”

  Over what? Blackpeak? I sensed his laughter. That’s rich. That’s real good, Elias. But let’s avoid talking in extremes. I’ve got no interest in being embattled over this with you. There’s no right or wrong here.

  “Both your sons are dead, Gregdon. I’m not even sure why, really.”

  You have kids, Elias?

  “I don’t even have a dog.”

  Then I caution you in trying to moralize with me using my boys’ deaths. I raised them up as well as a man could. They might have gone sour, but I loved them. Still do. Always will. Chrissake, Faust, what’d you even know about them?

  “Nothing,” I admitted.

  I dragged my way back into Blackpeak on the tail of the Magnate’s words. Before my eyes flickered morsels of my imagination: Gregdon boys like phantoms darting this way and that, pure and young and long-untouched by the same spite they’d carried in Blackpeak.

  Things change, Elias. They will for you too.

  I wandered up the middle of the main street. The moment I knew I was so close, fatigue started to tear me apart. I scuttled across the gravel, caught sight of the Crooked Cocoon, heard music and cheer, saw my office not far beyond…

  Which is when the handful of oily shadows emerged from the alleys and star
ted to walk in my direction.

  The Magnate’s voice vanished from out of my mind and echoed across the intersection.

  “She was right, Elias. Somebody was going to make a move.”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  Magnate Gregdon’s boot-heels crunched in the dirt as he moved toward me. He swept a cowl off his bald and liver-spotted skull. This time he was clean-shaven. Meanwhile, his compatriots – three sandshades, I realized, by the tightness in my bowels – converged on him. Couldn’t see their faces, but I could see their silvers.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Anymore it wasn’t about broken laws or infractions. Frankly, I didn’t know what it was about. Maybe a little bit of rage. Mostly a lot of confusion. A little pinch of surprise. All of them – Curtis, the Magnate, Nycendera, the Quicktooth – had dangled me over this pool of greater knowledge. To hell with sandshades. To hell with Shattered Wells.

  To hell with the Magnate.

  I went for my revolver.

  I’d barely cleared the holster before, not even raising his hand, the Magnate clenched a fist at his side.

  A shock of agony shot through my arm, deep as the bone. A hundred straight-razors cutting invisibly.

  Slicing my nerves into frays.

  I looked down. My fingertips jittered and danced like little bugs. I couldn’t feel the gun in my hand anymore.

  The Magnate raised his hand. He flashed his golden artifact: the gilded locust-thorn, its points bathed in his blood. His palm, littered with old scars and scabs, had endured that abuse before. His nostrils flared with exasperation. “You would, wouldn’t you. You would try to end this with a gun.”

  The grip intensified. My arm went numb.

  The sandshades, curious and enthralled, drifted closer.

  “They were fine boys, once.” The old man’s brow knitted together. “You ruined them.”

  His palm turned upright. My elbow twisted. One of my fingers leaped out to lay against the trigger of the Colt.

  My teeth mashed together. I stared at my arm, thought about the muscles, the bones, tried to shoot my thoughts into them, command them, will them to disobey him, something. “How did it happen,” I asked, attempting distraction. “What made them go bad?”

  “I did.”

  His pinky finger stuck out the way you might flick a fly.

  Invisible force wrenched my jaw open, almost unhinging it.

  I watched as the bones in my wrist flexed and my Colt turned to regard me.

  Then I shoved my pistol between my lips. The sight scraped the ridge of my mouth bloody and raw.

  All of it against my will.

  The Magnate leaned close. I couldn’t run. I smelled his blood. It ran as free as water. “My William and my Curtis were good young men, Elias Faust. They loved their mother. They loved me. They praised their God, they knew their letters and numbers. God, they were good,” laughed the Magnate. “Before my eyes they grew up. Crown Rock’s very best, one destined for preacherhood, and the other, if you believe it, for poetry. Maybe professorship. Smart boys. Prides and joys. But the Shattered Well doesn’t open its gates to men who create good children. It opens for men who do what is necessary.”

  He hardened his stare. Looked not at me, but into me, past me, to old days.

  “Better to break them down into people I wouldn’t miss so bad when the time came for them to die. Better they be reckless, wasteful, abrasive; better they fight and spit and drink and fuck than cost me the greater part of my heart. I’d always love them – always – but not liking them so much?

  “It made it so much easier.”

  The tiniest little cracks in his face. Wetness glistened on his palm as he wiped a hand across his eyes.

  “All spellwork requires pain, Faust. Sometimes a man puts himself through the worst of it just to get what he most desires.”

  I stood in the middle of Blackpeak’s lone intersection, a stupid puppet. Mouth full of metal. Tongue burning with gun-oil. The Crooked Cocoon Saloon rattled cheerful, drunken noise not fifty paces away. Their world was so small, those drunkards and miners and farmers, that not a one of them had dared to even look at the night beyond their bottles of beer and whiskey-glasses.

  Magnate Gregdon patted my cheek, like a father to a son.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for being such wonderful help.”

  He let me feel the cold trigger.

  I couldn’t help it. I started to scream, a noise swallowed up by three-and-a-half inches of metallic cylinder.

  My thumb reached up like an inchworm to the pistol’s hammer.

  Drew it back.

  A gray-faced bullet cycled into the chamber.

  Longest four seconds of my life. One. Two. Three. Fou—

  The Magnate choked out a laugh. Feeling faded back into my body. He pried the gun out of my fingers, which sprang to life, mine again.

  “Christ almighty,” he said. “You should have seen your face, Elias. That made my night. You should have seen your face.”

  Relief poured into me. My body was mine again. Mine.

  I slumped forward, catching myself on my own muscles like a cap tossed on a hat-rack.

  “I couldn’t possibly be that cruel, Elias. Not to you.”

  He smiled at me. Can’t shake that kind of smile. The way it disarms. The way it warms you from the inside out.

  He rammed the Colt into my mouth.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  A burst of noise. Fire. A million pounds of pressure.

  Then I—

  Now

  “Then you what?”

  Thirteen doesn’t need me to tell him any of this. I know that. He knows that. He’s just lining up facts in rows as fine as gravestones. The room’s dull light turns sickly and pale, but it’s not real; that’s the worms, burrowing deep, finding levers in my brain – or what’s left of it – and throwing them. It’s the dusty, summer-night smell of crushed fireflies that comes next, sweeping over me. The sharp odor of combusted gunpowder, like sulfur and egg. He’s going deeper.

  Smells stirred from my darkest parts and brightest moments.

  This is what he wants, somewhere floating just under the surface—

  It isn’t Nycendera. Or the Quicktooth.

  A whiff of old beer. Then, clinging to the ridges at the back of my throat, a too-heavy smell of metallic blood, driving me to gag.

  He doesn’t want the Magnate either. They’re all debris.

  He wants what they lead to.

  The voidworms—

  (Did I create that? That name? Or has it always been there, just pried out of me before I remembered to call them that?)

  —slither through me like I’m mud, because even Thirteen’s subject to precious vanities: he wants the Shattered Well too, the way they all want the Well, because it seems the world bends in around the Well, and everything – everything – tumbles toward it before long…

  “Then I was gone,” I tell him. “Quick as can be.”

  Part VI

  The Well

  31

  So I died.

  No muss, no fuss. I liked simple things. I liked smoking and bad books. I liked long summers and black skies pin-pricked with stars. I liked dust under my fingernails and the bleat of a harmonica four houses down. I liked mornings so bright, so sweaty, so new, that you couldn’t help but bitch and moan about being alive when that sun beat down on you. I liked living. I liked simple.

  So of course, dying broke the mold, because I didn’t expect it to be so goddamn complex.

  Don’t believe them when they say it doesn’t hurt.

  I screamed inside and out. Every nerve in my body gave a righteous howl. Sure, it might have only lasted a split-second, but what they refuse to tell you is this: time, to pain and agony, knows no boundaries. It stretches on like warm taffy, every piece of you begging, thrashing, praying to stay alive. It’s not easy, because every instinct in your body explodes like wildfire and Regret and Fear and Could-Have and Never-Did,
they turn tail and flee and crash into one another and…

  And then it just stops, and you wonder if it ever was at all.

  I was tranquil, like an endless black sea, windless and vast.

  32

  I sat on a creaking bench. In my thumb, a splinter, pried up from the gray wood. I sucked at it. In my boots my feet swelled like sodden bags of sand. Underneath me a dinghy swayed, giving heaves and rolls. I grabbed the sides of the boat. It wasn’t but a little slip of a thing, like an orange-peel cast into a sea.

  A lone white sail hung above my head. No wind. Even if I was stranded, I at least had the time to take stock of my surroundings before the panic set in. In the flat, dark water, I floated. Not an island in sight. Not a speck of land. I was going to—

  STARVE HERE? said the sky above me, as the words wrote themselves in lines of starlight.

  I opened my mouth to respond, tasting saltpeter and fire.

  Smoke curled out from my mouth.

  I picked a grain of unburnt black powder from between my eyeteeth.

  Was I going to—

  WITHER TO BONES? the sky wrote.

  I leaned out over the edge of the boat to look at myself in the water. What greeted me wasn’t my face, but rather, a rush of vertigo so intense I thought I was about to keel forward and fall ass-over-teakettle straight into…

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t water below me. Just hungry blackness, a void of far-Northern sky littered with twinkling stars and infested with swirling snakes of gaseous light, the kind that leads voyagers to ice and ruin. If I fell there, I’d fall for years, for centuries, into space and time.

  I flattened myself like a child against the bottom of the boat until the spinning stopped and I stuttered, “Oh my God, oh my God.” As I lay fighting back terror, my mother’s voice stirred out of an old memory. Feeling sick? she asked me. Gonna throw up? Hey, if you feel somethin’ hairy tickling your throat, it’s your asshole, swallow quick! and we laughed and I didn’t feel so sick no more…

  I missed her.

  I missed thinking of her. I’d almost forgotten…