His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  Breathe, Faust. Goddamnit.

  “—and yet, he spends too much time blinded by his own desires. Be with us, Blackpeak, clear of sight as we are: you have seen otherworldly occurrences, oddities of power and curiosity, and if I have succeeded in anything, it was removing the old guard that kept you from wishing and dreaming fully.”

  Breathe.

  “Marshal Faust believed you but criminals, outlaws, misfits, and vagabonds.”

  Breathe!

  “I see you as men and women who do not fit in bottles, but as those who break them.”

  They’d watched his crew maim and kill. I couldn’t expect much from them. Eventually, somewhere along the line, everybody starved. Most for food. Some, just for purpose…

  A stinging command tore like thunder through my brain.

  BREATHE, it commanded.

  So I did. I breathed.

  I shot back into my body.

  My eyes snapped open to see the spinning moonlight.

  Blood rolled out of my nose like a rushing stream. I choked on the heat of burning metal. Realizing the wholeness of my body was damn near miraculous, but it didn’t exactly promise comfort, either: I rolled over and spat out a mouthful of broken teeth, and likely would have expected more blood…

  …if the damn gunblast heat hadn’t already scorched the new hole closed.

  Coming back to life wasn’t easy. The effort of it nearly killed me.

  I shook the rattling pain out of my head. I tasted lead. Flicked my tongue. Felt the flat edge of a bullet lodged into the top of my mouth.

  Sight and sound and all the other senses hammered away at my brain. I pushed up to my knees, then to my elbows, and clapped my hands to my face. No permanent holes. No tears in my cheeks where I thought the gas and fire would’ve blown them right out.

  I spit out a whole lump of wet, fibery junk. Ribbons of the skin inside my mouth, black and burnt to a crisp.

  The whole town stared in my direction. The sandshades too.

  Magnate Gregdon watched in disbelief.

  One of the sandshades began to cut across the intersection toward me, talon-blade at the ready.

  The old man flicked his hand. One of his bullets struck a silver eye. The sand-filled corpse fell to the soil.

  “New plan,” the Magnate said.

  He looked at me the way hungry urchins fawn over food. The metallic halo he’d formed of Cicero’s bullets came apart, falling harmlessly to the ground. The Magnate grabbed me with his free hand by my neck. His fingers dug divots into my throat.

  Old bastard as he was, that hadn’t limited his strength one bit. He smashed me back against the outside wall of the general store. “How,” he said, frantic and wild. “Tell me. Now.”

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  Behind him, Miss Garland said, “You’d do damn well to unhand him—”

  Never taking his eyes away from me, the Magnate lifted his gilded locust-thorn and squeezed it with such ferocity that I thought it’d split his hand in two. Miss Garland uttered a surprised “Urp!” as one of her reaching arms began to flake and crack. Like disease, woodgrain crawled up her arm underneath her dress-sleeve. Then it spread to her cheek, her chin, and she whispered, “I’m – I’m glad you’re alright, Eli—” before her mouth locked into stillness.

  Miss Garland became the only tree in the town of Blackpeak.

  My heart punched a drumline in my chest. I tore my eyes away from my friend. “This what happens to dreamers? You turn them into your own personal topiary?”

  “It touched you,” he barked. “It’s the only explanation. It’s the only way you could have survived.” Now he spoke to himself with a heated excitement. “God, it makes sense. It’s the only way. Shades,” he said, letting me go, waving my pistol like a rallying-cry in the air. “Subdue this trickster bastard. Now that he’s shown us he refuses to die, I want him alive.”

  They were on me quicker than dogs. A whole gang of black robes poured onto me, all their teeth and black nails and stinking skin, all of them grabbing at me and hitting me.

  “You break him,” the Magnate warned, “and I’ll give you back to the spirit broker to be shredded into little bits, you hear me?”

  At least their beating was this side of gentle: their punches didn’t unhinge my jaw, just shook it up a bit; their blows to my stomach didn’t tear me in two, just knocked the wind out of my sails a few times over. They dragged me down. I saw the world in panels of stilled motion between their legs.

  “The rest of these dirty pieces of garbage, round them up,” the Magnate cried out. “If they try to flee, if they try to fight, end their lives.”

  On the ground, Cicero grabbed for his .44. A sweep from the Magnate’s arm sent Cicero skittering across the town square until a cage of thorns blew up out of the sand and wrapped around him in a tumbleweed-knot.

  He screamed inside his prison of briars as the thorns chewed into him.

  The other sandshades – the Magnate’s endless lot of them – began to go for the masses. Though they didn’t wield the same power as their not-so-noble leader, they performed cruel work on those townspeople: they summoned up rings of fire to wrangle fleeing folk; they flung out whips of thorns from their hands and shredded up running feet. Others just shot.

  They lifted me so I could watch as men and women and children were pulled from their rickety homes and flats and shoved into the dirt. Sandshades rushed the Crooked Cocoon and the Horseshoe Junction Inn, only to tear whole gaggles of the drunk and distracted from their pleasures and corralled them into the town square. The occasional denier or struggler took an executioner’s bullet to the brain.

  The sandshades came in droves, like bugs crawling out from a broken piece of driftwood. “While I’m gone,” the Magnate commanded, “drag Kallum out of his fucking bed, even if it takes twelve of you to do it. And don’t let these people get away from you. They’re scared, and they’ll continue being scared until they see what I’ve come for.”

  While the sandshades held me, Magnate Gregdon approached, then gave me a powerful punch to my stomach. I slumped. He stuffed my pistol into his belt, then grabbed up my right hand. Finding nothing there, he muttered, “It’s here. It has to be,” before he scooped up the left. “Ah. There it is.”

  He forcibly unfurled my fingers.

  In the middle of my palm was a black blossom of ink. A perfect, painless starburst, and in its center, raised up like a faint lump, a tiny cube beneath the surface.

  “Plans change. If I can’t have it, Elias Faust, then I’ll have you.”

  “Whatever you want,” I said, “just take it. You leave these people their lives, you can have whatever you want, even if it means killing me a second time.”

  “Those aren’t the rules, Faust. Curtis showed us as much. You can’t just kill a man and steal what’s been given to him.”

  He jerked his head toward the sandshades.

  “Bring him home. Tonight, we reach out to the broker.”

  Systematically, the black-clad figures forced townspeople into the square at gunpoint. Several of the sandshades converged and moved their hands in jerky, wild patterns. Out of nowhere, a fire leaped up from the earth, set a prison of golden flame ablaze around the townspeople. They shrank away from it, piling atop one another, cringing like rats.

  I’m not a smart fellow, but it doesn’t take brains to see a ruse or a ploy: play with a man’s mind, you got to play with his heart first, and to play with his heart, you need to slide a knife inside the creases of the armor to get at his softer parts. Blackpeak might have been on my shit-list after Nycendera, and while I knew that for every good soul there were ten more awful ones inside these city limits, I’d always been a damn halfwit at math. If I didn’t own this, more people would die, like I almost had.

  Like I should have.

  For all the messages the Magnate had thrown my way in these past weeks, I didn’t need the Eye or Billy Gregdon’s spellcrafted paper to hear this one loud and clear:


  Obey. Go with them. Or watch as he turned the town into his own personal death museum, filled wish ash-heaps proclaiming my failures.

  “You want me?” I said. I rocked my head back and smashed it into the sunken nose of the sandshade behind me.

  That one fell away, but two others leaped on me.

  I kicked. I bucked.

  They pummeled me, laughing and hacking the whole time, until the world faded in and out of vision.

  The Magnate shouted out over the townspeople like a carnival barker. “Blackpeak bears value somewhere below her skin. I’ll have my fucking Well, and I’ll have my fucking Wish, and I will turn this place into cinders and mud around me to get it.” Then he handed my pistol to one of his sandshades. “Edward Sloman,” he said, staring over the rim of fire. “Is Edward Sloman here?”

  Murmurs. Mutters. As they dragged me away, a silhouette stood. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” it said.

  “Do you remember me, Mr. Sloman?”

  “You don’t look familiar.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the Magnate said. “Not to you. Do you know what the most wonderful part is, about having stolen any memory of myself out of your little pisspot of a brain?”

  Sloman shakily shook his head.

  “It doesn’t leave much else left to destroy,” the Magnate said.

  My Colt, in that sandshade’s gray hand, blew a slimy lump out of the top left-hand corner of Edward Sloman’s skull. His body fell into the crowd.

  They knew, now. They knew, and so did I.

  No part of the Magnate’s words were anything but promise.

  They pushed me down until my face hit sand, then threw a rough whip of rope around my arms and belly, rolling me up tighter than a cigarette. As the reeking sandshades drifted around me and laughed with their horrible, dead-man breath right into my face, I took it.

  I had to.

  I was built for this, wasn’t I?

  They threw their rope over the horn of the saddle of a black horse, one that seemed to look at me with a surge of sympathy. But that was the way with all horses, loyal beasts.

  I looked back at Blackpeak, tiny and insignificant and full of frightened people, as the butt of a pistol struck the side of my skull.

  They dragged me through the night.

  It was the laughter I remembered.

  I don’t know where they took me. Sense of direction was shot to shit. Sense of time, even worse.

  Blurry faces of smeared black and gray floated above me. Cold hands dug into my pockets, tore at my clothes, pulling at me like meat on a bone. A pat at my breast. “Tin cigarette holder. Some matches.”

  “Any other weapons? Don’t want any problems from here on out.”

  “You see me looking?” The echoing words bounced all around me. “You want to be sure, how about you do the looking, instead of asking me over and over, ‘Any other weapons?’ like a pecking goddamn hen. ‘Any other weapons? Any other weapons?’”

  “Do as you’re commanded, shade,” came the order from the second voice, who drifted into my vision just long enough for me to see him: a spindly body, draped in robes the color of old red wine.

  They found Oarsdale’s pistol, tucked in the back of my britches. They slid it out. Another hand found something in my right pocket. It had to twist and bend the Bible-sized volume to get it out.

  Red grunted. “The Collected Works of Shakespeare.”

  “The Marshal’s a well-read man.” A pause. “You think it’ll happen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The broker.” Shining silver eyes stared down into me. “You think the broker will agree to it?”

  “I think it’s best we just stand by and support the Magnate in whatever choice he presumes is best.”

  Quietly: “You think he’s losing his touch?”

  “I think with talk like that, you best hope your skin stays stitched up tight to keep that sand where it belongs.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “And I’m just saying, you’re still alive because the Magnate allows it, so if you have to fuse your lips shut to keep from saying stupid shit, then do it. This is the closest the Magnate has gotten to the Shattered Well, and the broker’s got just as much invested in his success.”

  “You think the broker will agree to it? Faust’s not like me or the rest of the shades.”

  “We’ll work with what we have. Enough bullshitting. He got anything else on him?”

  “Not that we haven’t already found.”

  I tried, desperately, to pull my eyes all the way open. Blinding light forced me to squeeze them shut. My brain swam. A sea of dizziness overtook me.

  “Ivanmore will be here soon enough,” Red said. “When he comes, send him to me directly. I want him to examine Faust before we do anything else with him. The Magnate’s been waiting for this day, and I’d prefer not to disappoint him.”

  I sank back down into unconsciousness, no matter how hard I bucked against it. It dragged me down like black oil, covering me.

  34

  Fading in and out. When consciousness came, it came with words. Words from other people. Again. I lay still, watching shadows flicker against a rocky ceiling. Whole body felt wooden, hollowed of everything except…pain? If it was pain, it was less the jagged bite of it and more like a dull warmth. I worked my jaw in circles, then opened my eyes and tried to find a pinpoint. An anchor. Anything.

  “He’s awake.” Red’s voice, who struck me as the leader of whatever group of dipshit ragamuffins decided to answer to him.

  “He won’t be for long,” added another voice. I could see this new face more clearly. It was about as dead and waxy as alive could be: the fellow’s white cheeks hung like loose fabric, and his eyes sat on crescents of black skin. His name was Ivanmore. Blackpeak’s trusty undertaker. “Christ on the cross, looks like he took a beating.”

  “The sandshades got frisky with him,” Red said. “What did you give him?”

  They talked over me like I was just a puddle. Ivanmore’s face began to melt. Red, like a bloody vapor, paced behind him. My heartbeat sang an anthem in the back of my head. I reached out, tried to grab one of them, but they all sank, drifting away...

  “A little laudanum. Some methanol. Chemicals I’ve got are meant for the dead, not for the living.”

  “Just as long as he survives.”

  “If he dies, it won’t be from what I gave him. But being a mortician doesn’t make me a fucking doctor.”

  “Closest thing we have,” said Red.

  Red grabbed hold of my chin. He turned it left, turned it right, looking into me. “The Magnate’s orders are to do what you need to do to keep him intact, keep him alive and hale, within reason. Please tell me there aren’t any broken bones.”

  “Pain’s a distant memory for him at the moment,” Ivanmore said. “Corpses are my specialty. The living ones, that’s where my expertise ends. The hell’s Gregdon got planned?”

  There was a pause until the leader said, “Magnate wants Faust to meet with Partridge,” with something like disappointment, even regret.

  “Is that right.”

  “Yeah,” said Red. “Yeah.”

  “What’s the use of that,” Ivanmore said, “but to open up old wounds?”

  “If you can’t kill them, then you have to put them through their paces, or geld them so they don’t buck. I imagine the Magnate’s already conferred with the broker and struck a deal that suits them both. Faust won’t be like the others.” I felt a cold, bony hand pat me on the cheek like I’d been a really good dog. “Not every day you get to build something new out of a man while he’s still alive.”

  “There’s no coming back from this,” Ivanmore warned.

  They lifted my hand. Bent it back at the wrist. Ivanmore sucked his breath in through his teeth. They showered that blotch of blackness on my hand with their full attention. I turned my head. “The fuck you two gawking at,” I garbled.

  “A shiny new toy.” Red jerked his g
aze up – there were no bits of silver that I could see – and he stepped away. “Do what you can with him. Make sure he’s clear enough of mind to think on his own. If there’s anything the Magnate would want, it’s his autonomy. For now.”

  When I felt my wounds being cleaned, my skin being wrapped up under bandages, the veil of the drugs splashed over me. Before I could do anything else, I was gone again.

  I woke standing in front of a dead man, looking into the blank canvas of his face and wondering how long until I’d be next.

  God, I felt like hell.

  I’d lost a grip on time. Could have been out for five seconds or five years. Sensations came back to me little by little, spilled into me like color onto a painting. I could feel my heartbeats slamming, trying to split my skull in two. All of my veins were on fire. I had a bag of rocks in my stomach.

  The chamber I was in was entirely dark except for three standing torches of flame that lit up the walls and floors. Christ, if the headache wasn’t bad enough when I’d woke up, seeing those fires was like staring into hot suns. I expected the comforts of a home, like a hearth and a table to eat grub at and a pisscan.

  But I was in a cavern.

  Brown rock crawled up the walls and reached toward an unlit ceiling. Underneath my feet crunched little shards of stone. A tunnel with a black mouth led in from one of the walls. Place was stifling hot, like it hadn’t gotten any fresh air in years.

  Chained to the wall, the corpse might as well have been a curtain. Its scant clothes sagged in tatters off its thin body. A swath of waxy gray hair covered its face. The white cheeks wore a big, full beard that even death couldn’t have thinned. When the haze blew away from my mind, I recognized that face, with its too-still grin of too few teeth.

  “He took things further than he was supposed to.”

  A flutter of motion caught my eye around the entryway. A small figure took small steps in my direction until it stood right between the torches. I didn’t see a face. Just a blood-red cloak and a tall, pointed hood that seemed to stand up on its own will. Hanging at his hip was some kind of cudgel, its head fat and adorned with decorative stones.