by Rance Denton
No, not stones. Pieces of teeth.
How inviting.
The man held up a hand gloved in black leather. “I’m not here to hurt you,” Red assured me. “I’m just here to talk. And if all goes well, to help you understand the gravity of the situation.”
“Who the fuck are you,” I said, a regular master of etiquette.
“A man. No more, no less.”
“You a Gregdon?”
“We’re all Gregdons. He used to be too. Until the law caught up with him.”
“Then why the hell’s he chained to your wall?”
“Partridge had a lot to answer for. He got overzealous. He had his orders.”
“Which were?”
“Not to get caught.”
Red went into his robes and withdrew a sheathed talon-blade. He threw it on the floor in front of me. “We broke him out on his way to Huntington. You should have seen his face, Faust. He could have shit a brick. He didn’t know whether to be pleased as punch or beg for forgiveness. He knew why we were there. Of course, now it’s up to you to decide whether arresting Partridge was the kindest thing you could have done for him, or the cruelest.”
Then Red tossed something else.
I caught it.
Cold as ice in my palm.
Shining like silver.
An Eye.
We really need to stop meeting like this.
I clenched my hand around the metal sphere. Since waking up a few hours ago with a slug of cooled metal embedded in the top of my mouth, I knew parts of me were missing: parts of my insides, probably parts of my outsides. Holding the Eye filled those canyons, and all I wanted to do was not let go…
Don’t let my friend guilt-trip you, Faust. Partridge was bound to slip up one way or another. Brutes like him don’t last too long in a world of civilized men.
A tug from within my hand. The Eye wrenched my arm toward the sagging form of Partridge Gregdon. Red lingered nearby. He raised his palm, and like a puppet’s jaw, Partridge’s head lifted at an unseen touch. The man’s face was a misshapen prune of wrinkles and bruises. In the right eye-socket, a gleaming orb of silver. The left was just a little fleshy pocket, wanting for its sight. “Go on,” Red said. “Put it in. Right where it belongs.”
“Do it your own damn self,” I said.
Don’t be resistant, Faust.
Red’s hood twitched. “It’s not a difficult request. What was this man to you but a terror on your town.”
A man who ruined a mother’s life.
I said, “He worked for you. He did your bidding.”
We are allies in this, Faust. Partridge disobeyed me, and he disobeyed the rules of your town. What honor do you have to give him?
They’d mutilated him. Just like Keswick Everett. They’d plucked out the soft dollops of his eyes. I noticed the hearty stitches crawling on his skin underneath his collar, keeping his flesh pieced together. Like he’d been peeled open, filled, and closed back up…
Revulsion came on with violence. I threw up. “You did this to him?” I asked. “You made him into this? Like the rest of them?”
If obedience cannot be encouraged, it will be forced.
“He suffered little pain as a result of it,” Red said.
It’s a kind ending for an outlaw, the Magnate said.
Partridge no longer breathed, but he’d dodged the full look of death, too. He resembled more a scarecrow than a man at all. Would he bleed sand, too, like the others? “What happens if I put the Eye back in?”
What happens for you when the rooster crows, Faust?
“Go on,” Red said. “You know you’re curious.”
“Will it hurt him?”
“He doesn’t exist anymore.”
Partridge fled that form the moment I strangled the life out of him on that goddamn road, the Magnate added. What we get back when the ritual is done isn’t always the same. Bodies are just husks. Bodies are just there to be filled with one soul or another.
I licked my lips. Surrendering the Eye would provide me with answers to questions I didn’t dare ask.
So instead, “Why don’t you just put it in yourself,” I said.
I want you to see how it works.
Oh, I’d already had an idea. “S’all some kind of twisted skin-circus, and you want to make me a part of it, I wager. Can’t beat him with a bullet, then make him join you with a yoke.”
You’re of indescribable value to me, Elias Faust.
“You were damn primed to put me down not too long back.”
Red cleared his throat. “That was before he knew.”
“Before he knew what, exactly?”
In the palm of my fist, the Eye gave a jumping-bean shudder and a faint surge of sweltering heat. Palpable anger. The Magnate’s anger.
That the Shattered Well decided you were worth giving a Mark.
It was exactly as Curtis said, wasn’t it? The more I communed with this Eye, the more I wanted it. The tighter I wanted to hold it. A whisper in your mind, no matter how kind or cruel, served a strange and constant comfort. You were a part of something. Something larger, something with purpose, even if you were blind to the beast. And in a too-hot shithole like Blackpeak, being a particle in a larger whole gave the heart a morsel of food it didn’t have before. Now, more than ever, the hooks dug deeper; I didn’t want to get rid of that Eye, because—
Because since the Well, I barely felt held together by threads. I floated somewhere between all these joints and skin, disconnected and lonely.
It made sense why a boy named Joshua found such comfort in such a tiny piece of metal.
“It took something from me,” I confided. “When it spoke to me, it took…something.”
A pause.
Close your eyes. Feel for a moment. Reach into yourself.
“What do you want from me?”
A chance to trust in a future I see, Elias Faust. It requires sacrifice.
“I’m tired,” I sighed.
Yet another thing we have in common. What did it take?
“I couldn’t even be sure.”
With time and patience, we could scour the maps inside you, all the nooks and crannies, and find out what it stole, Elias. I’ve already begun.
I opened my hand to look down into my rounded reflection in the face of the silver. Was he looking back?
You don’t need the Eye anymore. I know you, and I will be with you.
Behind me, drifting closer, Red’s voice came with smooth guidance. “Ours is an amazing world, Marshal. Live long enough and you’ll see too many things that don’t make sense to anybody but you. Cracks in reality. Rifts in the possible. Awesome secrets hidden away beneath the reasonable and the mundane.”
The difference between you last night and you today, the Magnate added, is that the you of today doesn’t need to be afraid.
Was it all it took? Just to slip it in, push it into the socket?
“Is belonging your only reason for being a Gregdon?” I asked Red. “Honestly, is it?”
“I’ve lived a hard life. Worked hard. Played hard. It’s nice to relax.”
“So what’s kept him from turning you into one of his waltzing sandbags?”
“I listened, I said ‘Yes,’ and I learned how to shut the fuck up.” He pointed two fingers at a nearby torch. He gave a flick. Orange fire sputtered in the bronze torch-bowl, then burped up a huge tongue of blue fire. He motioned to the other two torches. Sickly light splashed across me, across him, across the half-living, half-pin-cushion formerly known as Partridge Gregdon chained to the wall.
Go on, Faust. Get your answers.
Red nodded to me. I figured what the hell, this was all my second chance for some reason. I pinched the Eye, and then with my thumb, crammed it into Partridge’s lonely, sagging socket.
The flaps of his skin dragged it in, the quivering lids of his eyes like clumsy fingers wrapping hungrily around the Eye. It vanished. Then Partridge’s wrinkling face snapped to life. His mouth hinge
d open. The tongue lashed and licked. The silver orbs of his eyes spun and spun until they stopped and found me.
Partridge Gregdon lunged for me, both his fists shooting outright, palms open, wanting to tear me into fucking shreds. He screamed behind a blast of rotten breath, “You murdering sack of shit, Elias Faust. I’m going to chew you to pieces!” The chains locked, but his chest kept coming until, like a raging dog, I thought he was going to break them all.
“The hell you mean,” I said, “this bullshit about he don’t exist anymore? He sounds just about right as rain to me!”
The spark at the center of our being holds no dominion over memory. His mind, or what remains of it, is still as much him as is his body. He remembers you. And he still hates you with a passion.
“Then what’s the use of waking him up?”
Partridge’s snapping teeth crashed together like pistons.
So you can finish what you should have months ago.
“You see what they done to me?” Partridge roared. “You see what they done?”
Red’s foot nudged the talon-blade toward me.
“Time’s a-wasting,” he said.
The words and sounds that poured out of Partridge might as well have been a hyena’s chatter. He slobbered and spat, sprays of sand and filmy spittle. His dead muscles jerked and rippled, but not even those could snap the rusty chains wrapped around his wrists.
“You want him dead,” I told the voice in my head and the voice in red, “do it your own damn self. I’m not one for bloody errands.”
Of all people to hold fast to such righteousness…
“Killing half-men to satisfy your sick games ain’t exactly my idea of a fun night.”
Red hovered impatiently, walking paths behind me. “He can make you, if that was what he wanted to do.”
He’s right. You know that. With just the right application of pressure…
A charley horse throbbed right in front of my elbow. My arm flinched out. Hand splayed open toward the knife on the ground. No. He wasn’t going to do that again to me. My mind was my own. I ground my teeth and snapped the heel of my hand out so that it struck the wall not far from Partridge. “Get out of me.”
But my fingers screamed silently, wanting the steel.
“No,” I said. “No.”
I jerked my elbow back. A nearby wall in the cavern was there, just far enough away for my fist. Without thinking, I hammered my knuckles into the wall.
I want to see that killer in you.
“What will it prove?”
Another punch. Stone chewed into my knuckles.
I was mine. I was mine.
Elias Faust, capable of terrible things…
“Things I did because I had to.”
Then how are we any different?
An unseen wind rolled across my arm, hooked me by the hand, and dragged me away from the wall. I skittered and slid toward the talon-blade, my feet and hands moving the way they wanted to. Trembling hands withdrew the talon-blade from the sheath, and Red, he was just laughing, loud as you please. Steel slid free. My fist gripped the handle. Commands bypassed my brain, slipped right by my inner wherewithal and shot straight into my limbs…
I gave it one last burst of will. Feeling sprang back into my fingers.
I screamed and pummeled my fist into the stony floor. Just to choose to do so.
Please, Elias.
“You can’t take a man’s choice from him,” I said.
And yet you can take a man’s children.
“It’s not the same.”
Of course they’re not the same, but they’re both equally heinous.
My knuckles left a lopsided smear of blood on the brown stone.
So the choice is yours, Faust: do as you’re asked, or do as you are commanded.
Above me, Partridge continued to rant and snarl and twist like a bony storm. Red had come closer, a torch in one of his hands, its light a blinding ball of heat and fire. Do as another pleases, but not as they demand you, and retain responsibility. Do as you’re told, as you must, and the heart suffers nothing.
Which man was I? Which Elias Faust did I want to be?
Bidden by a madman’s magic, I raised the talon-blade. I might as well have been a million miles away, watching from afar. Partridge’s silver eyes snapped left and right in a blind and bestial fit of madness. Flecks of stone and rust rained down on me as he wrenched at the chains. “You want him dead?” I gasped. “Is that what you want?”
I want to see you at your lowest.
“You have me. You have it. But not like this. You want me to bend and break? Then speak my fuckin’ language, Magnate.” I locked gazes with that half-man suspended in front of me. He deserved that steel. He deserved no explanation. I’d witnessed but one of the cruelties he’d done, among what I damned well knew was a list that defied numbers.
If what the Magnate wanted was Partridge’s death, he’d have never wasted whatever craft he wielded on him.
If his greatest desire was to fully break my will, he’d have never teased me with even the slightest hint of control over my own body.
These were amusements. Testing the waters. Examining pliability. Chemistry, but with people and hearts and instincts.
“Take off his chains,” I said, “and give him one last shot at me. For old time’s sake.”
That’s not how this works.
“It’s a risk. You not a gambling man?”
He could kill you. Right now, with that Mark on your flesh, I can’t chance it.
“Then why play this game at all, with me and him?”
Silence. Nothing but Partridge’s slavering breaths and Red’s flickering torch. Just two steps and a flick of my wrist and I could have opened Partridge’s throat without a second thought. I owed Miss Fulton as much.
But this wasn’t about Partridge. He was disposable.
This was about me. My lengths. My limits.
The Magnate didn’t have hold of me right then, so I turned away from Partridge, stared at the otherwise silent Red, and raised the talon-blade.
I slid its point right against the soft meat underneath my jaw. The point scraped my stubble, nearly pierced the skin like a needle popping through fabric. Red flinched like a squirming child. Instinct governed him. He went for something under his robes. The wooden handle of a – what, a pistol? A hewn shotgun?
But then, like a lightless strike of lightning, he went stark stiff. Dangling like a doll on an unseen string.
No. The Magnate’s voice came with a warm wind of softness along the contours of my thoughts. No, Faust. That’s a foolish way to do this.
“Is it? I reckon a little push, and I’ll have another chance at this dying thing.”
That would render all of this very useless.
“But you’d be one step behind.”
It chose Rufus. Then it chose you. It would choose someone else.
“Not without delay. I could delay it.”
You won’t.
“Won’t I?” I pressed the knife. Fluid crawled down the crease of my throat. “I got a hint on how the other side feels, thanks to you. I got less compulsion than anyone else to stick around. It hurts like hell, but only for a second.” Even if that second never ended. “’Course, none of this matters, does it? Tweak reality; make me pull the knife away, if it pleases you.”
I won’t do such a thing.
“It didn’t stop you before.”
Before was before. This is now. For a moment, he sounded like his son. Allow a man his vanities, Faust, for once in your life. I take no pleasure in forcing another’s hand. Don’t flatter yourself, Elias Faust. You are special to me – today – for convenience, and nothing more. You’re less a prized possession and more…the cobbler’s favorite hammer. A known quantity, but ultimately replaceable.
We’ll do this your way. The way I expected we would from the start.
A shuffle of robes. Red, now of his own volition, stepped back through the lone entryway, takin
g his torch with him. A parting gift, he threw his knotty cudgel from his hip onto the floor in front of me.
Spinning wildly in their sockets, Partridge’s silver orbs had eyes for nothing but me.
The chains holding Partridge Gregdon crumbled away in specks of rust and steel.
Have your honor, Faust. Choke on it, for all I care.
35
We both went for the club at the same time. Red had thrown it right on the dirt floor between us. When I moved, my whole body revolted. My ribs felt like they were flapping around inside of me. Legs felt like they were sprinting through molasses.
Partridge’s first free strides were huge, leaping things, matching two, even three of mine. Driven with animal power.
A split second before we collided, I dropped to my ass on the ground and slid across the rocky floor. I grabbed the club in one hand and came up double-fisting: a talon-blade, a cudgel, and every part of me ready to—
The palm would have blown most of my teeth out of my mouth if it weren’t for sheer fortune. I stumbled back. “I owe you that,” he said. “I owe you a thousand more.”
My talon-blade skittered across the cavern floor.
I was never much of a scrapper, which is why having a weapon is good. Don’t matter how big you are, you got a weapon, you’ve got an advantage. I still had the club. After I got to my feet, I clobbered him across the temple and cheek with the cudgel. It was like I’d just smashed a sledge into a stone.
But whatever stuff the Magnate put in these sandshades of his, Partridge barely seemed to blink. Like pain wasn’t a factor. Just a distraction. He launched out a booted foot. It crashed into my chest, threw all the air out of me, and knocked me into a stone wall. I tried to keep my footing and suck in air at the same time.
“We should rethink,” I said, holding my hand up in front of me, “how we’re going to resolve these differences of ours, Partridge.”
He charged me. I was waiting for him when he did. I set my feet and railed on him with the club. It whapped across his chest, just underneath the ribs and above the stomach. No bones collapsed, no skin broke. He folded like fabric, grinned his yellowed teeth, and hooked around with a fist.