His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  I thought about the pain.

  With what I could swear was going to be my last breath, I said to Gregdon with a smile, “I might have reminded you of some of your old tricks,” I said, “but you taught me new ones.”

  I jabbed my remaining fingers into the damaged gun-shot hole ripped in my stomach. I grabbed the hole and pulled, squeezed, tore until I felt the skin rip like fabric. This time, I was in control of the pain. I knew it was there, so I brought it to the surface until I screamed.

  I pulled it out of myself with invisible hands.

  Pulled it out of my broken stomach.

  Ripped it out of my forearm, where, like a sloppy surgeon, he cut in greed.

  I didn't stare at him as I did so, but up at the ceiling, at all the triangles I'd seen the first time I'd ever come to the Simpkin farm to encounter Billy and Curtis Gregdon.

  Just like the Magnate taught me, I launched my pain like a hot, invisible ball of emotion toward the triangles.

  I thought about destruction. Dreamed about chaos. Thought about those triangles spitting fire and brimstone. I willed my fury and agony into them. I fucking screamed.

  I believed in strength. I believed in something like miracles, but this one was an evil kind of miracle. Just wanted to balance the odds, then tip them a little bit in my favor. But I guess you think about that kind of shit enough, it starts getting otherworldly, starts making you believe in the impossible...

  I was desperate. I was sure.

  I’d done this before.

  I unleashed the triangles.

  One by one, like a whole posse of gun-toting madmen were outside of the Simpkin farm, the triangles started blowing inward, spraying rotten chunks of wood. The wallpaper tore apart. I could start seeing sunlight coming in through the holes. The whole room started to shake.

  But I knew it wasn't just the room. It was the whole shebang.

  The triangles painted on the rafters above started popping. Whole fistfuls of the supports came raining down. The Magnate stumbled along the quaking floor. Billy, too. Gregdon dropped the shotgun, but he scrambled for it.

  I realized there wasn't any reason to ignore the pain. Against every ripped muscle and wound, I stood. Entire time, I thought about those triangles. I snatched the shotgun out of Gregdon's reach.

  Billy came diving for me, but I blew him in half before he got there. Sand sprayed all over me. He fell apart like a ruined old doll, split in two. With a sound like old cracking bones, one of the beams broke free of the ceiling. It smashed down to the floor only a few feet away. The building shifted. It was starting to buckle. The walls cried.

  The Magnate pitched forward. In desperate need for balance, he fell to his knees.

  Illemone’s Heart, like a fallen gem, slipped out of his fingers. Bounced, clack-clack-clack, across the floorboards.

  On a whim, I reached my free hand out.

  The gilded locust-thorn could have just kept rolling toward the wall, but it had other plans. So by some miracle – and I knew, I knew it was because I reached out – Illemone’s Heart, gold and shining and covered in the blood of fallible men, shot through the air and landed in my palm.

  “Gregdon,” I shouted, turning the shotgun toward him.

  In his hands he molded some kind of fireball, like he'd just pulled it out of midair. The last threads of whatever power of Illemone’s he still had…

  “Give her to me,” he boomed, eyes bulging, spit spilling free from his mouth. “Give her to me, Faust!”

  I twisted my middle finger around the other trigger and let him have the shotgun's remaining barrel just as the swirling fist of flame and force pounded me in the chin. It lifted me up in the air, knocked me back into the wall, and set me aflame.

  The brittle wood of the wall's panels buckled behind me. I flew out of the Simpkin house as a burning man. My spine smashed into the porch-railing. I flipped over it, ass-over-teakettle, and pounded into the earth. Inside, the Magnate let out a wet, guttural scream.

  The walls gave out a final moan. The top floor of the farmhouse became too much of a burden for its brutalized belly to handle. The structure imploded, spilling onto its own guts. A plume of dust and dirt belched into the air.

  I didn't hear the Magnate anymore.

  Maybe I was burning. Maybe I wasn't. The sunlight beat down on my face and scorched me like I deserved it. The vision of thousands of little triangles, scalded into my brain, blinded me.

  Priorities, I thought, before I went numb.

  Yeah, I had a sense of those.

  40

  Being dragged by my arms. The world flickered in and out in front of me. Somewhere, I’d lost my vision, but it wasn’t that I’d gone blind.

  It was that my eyes weren’t mine any longer.

  A hardwood floor covered with mushed-up peas and crushed red potatoes. An overturned table. Good dishware was just a thousand little white pieces broken all around.

  A man kneeled on the floor, his hands tied behind his back. Lots of black dirt under his fingernails spoke of a hard day’s work. Name came to me like a feeling, an instinct, like he was a part of one of my own memories. Galbreth Simpkin. Crop farmer. One wife – Alberta Simpkin. Two young girls, Nell and Maddy Simpkin. Hard-working family, cut from fine stock, loved the Lord, toiled hard to make a fortune out of a tiny chunk of land – this land – in the Midwest.

  Good people. Knew them as well as if they’d been stitched into my heart.

  When was this going to stop. This fiddling in my brain. This weaving realities in the meat that drove my limbs, my feelings, my soul.

  Somebody had a gun held to the front of the man’s head. The gunman was a blur. Alberta and the two girls – one of them, Nell, was probably nine or ten, Maddy about fourteen, fifteen – were kneeling too, blindfolded. Big blotches of tears wet the burlap over their eyes.

  I knew the boy with the gun.

  I’d killed him. Twice.

  I tried to move, but couldn’t. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t change anything, like I was reading an awful book I couldn’t put down. I was trapped behind wallpaper, held hostage.

  “There’s nothing you need on our property, William,” said Galbreth Simpkin. “You can see it for yourself, can’t you? No crops are growing. The earth’s as fertile as sand and as wet as ash.”

  “It’s about what’s under the soil.“ Billy Gregdon angled the barrel of his revolver down to the floorboards. “Few hundred feet below is something my father’s got some interest in. Ain’t that right, Curtis.”

  “S’right,” Curtis said. While his brother did the dirty work, he was scraping black triangles onto the wallpaper with a fat piece of coal.

  “My family and I, what is it you want with us, William?”

  “We’re taking your land.”

  “Your father and I go back a long way, William. I’m willing to listen to whatever he might have to—“

  Billy silenced him with a flat hand. “There ain’t no niceties here.”

  “My daughters are afraid. Maddy’s slow, William. She doesn’t understand what this all means, why you’re here scaring her father, her mother, her sister. Put down the gun and we can discuss this calmly.”

  Billy aimed the gun at the two girls.

  Somewhere outside the vision, my body got tossed like a sack of meal. Hooves pounded the sand. I tried to stir myself out of it, but the scene knitted itself like a blanket before my eyes. One I couldn’t shake or pull away…

  “Please,” said Galbreth.

  “Which one’s the idiot,” said Billy.

  “We can work this out, William, between your father and I. We can work this out.”

  Billy blew out a breath. He tromped over to Alberta and the girls, crouched in front of them. He put the cold steel of the gun on the little one’s cheek. She flinched, made a little sound, looked around frantically as if she’d be able to see around the blindfold.

  “You got a name, kid,” said Billy. “Don’t’cha?”

  She leaned away fro
m the gun. Alberta started breathing in little gasps.

  “Yes, sir,” said the girl. “I’m Nell.”

  “You do arithmetic and all? You read poetry?”

  She nodded.

  “And your sister, is she an idiot, Nell?”

  “Father says the Lord gave her less than the rest of us, so it means we have to do just a little bit extra.”

  “You scared of this gun, Nell?”

  “I’d like to finish dinner, sir.”

  “Poetry’s for damn fools. Your Papa tell you that?” He jabbed the gun against her forehead. “You tell her, Simpkin. You tell this girl words and rhymes, they’re for dumbfucks and dipshits.”

  If I could’ve moved, I would have done anything for her. Would have smashed his skull into the floor.

  Galbreth started trying to scramble to his feet. “William, you sick bastard, you get that gun out of my girls’ faces before I—“

  The horse was riding fast and hard. Woodsmoke clogged my nostrils. But I didn’t want to go back there, not to reality, not yet.

  Billy stood. He raised the gun a few inches from Maddy’s blonde head.

  And then, carelessly, he fired, and—

  God, I’d never wanted to kill a man more than twice.

  The teenager’s body rolled back, collapsing with one elbow in a lump of spilled yams. Thick, black shoes stuck up in the air from under her skirt. Her right knee bent, unbent, bent again, before she went flat.

  “Jesus,” Curtis said. “Jesus.”

  “You see what happens when you act out of line, Simpkin?” said Billy as Nell blindly howled and Alberta crumpled over. The murderous kid’s eyes were on fire as he shoved the gun at Nell’s little brown-haired head. “You could have made it simple, old man,” said Billy, cocking his pistol, “but you didn’t, and my old man, he’ll tear the thoughts of you right out of Blackpeak’s mind so they never know about this. So they never know you ever lived in the first place.”

  Billy flinched. The gun barked. Nell fell still. The mouth of the gun adjusted. Alberta made a sound like a blatting sheep. Gregdon reworked the hammer. Another blast. Alberta fell over on her two daughters and never moved again.

  Galbreth never made it to Billy. He dropped down to his knees, his hands held out before him like he could just pick the pieces of the world up again. His mouth dropped open, noises that weren’t words scratching in his throat.

  “Curtis,” Billy said, leveling his gun at Galbreth Simpkin’s forehead. Curtis forced steady breaths as he stared at the slaughter. “I want to cover this place in triangles. I don’t want to stop until the walls are covered, until there’s no more ink left. I want to leave our mark, for you and me.” He walked around behind the kneeling Galbreth, whose eyes were locked on his family. “For the Magnate and the Gregdon name. Our spot. Our world. Our future.”

  “We don’t have any ink, Billy. I just brought coal—“

  Billy crammed the revolver into the back of Galbreth’s head.

  “When this Well belongs to the Magnate, it’ll all be forgiven. We’ll have done the right thing, and this place will be a monument to it all.

  “Use their blood,” said Billy Gregdon, “and draw triangles until there’s nothing left to draw with.”

  Galbreth Simpkin died with his family. I watched.

  God, I watched.

  Hate is a poor man’s emotion. Take away a man’s belongings, a man’s family, even a man’s soul, and what he’s got left is that little walnut in his heart: that too-hard bit of hate that drives him to breathe, to take another step, to go to the edges of the earth just to soothe that burning coal inside him. Hate is a poor man’s emotion, and while it doesn’t need to squeeze a man’s wallet dry, it’ll wring him out like a rag. Right then, with my mind lingering in some folded pocket of space, watching a family die, I knew hate. It carved itself into my bones.

  Give me one wish, and I’d ask right then to bring him back. To bring back Billy Gregdon, so I could pry my fingers into his cheeks and rip him in two. Tear him to ribbons. For what he did to people I didn’t even know. For the simple things he had the capacity to do, and the nerve to stay alive after doing them.

  IT IS A DESIRE WHICH CAN BE GRANTED, said the Shattered Well.

  Galloping. Up and down, up and down, like a body on a wild sea. Vision faded back into my eyes.

  I was slung, like cargo, across a horse’s backside.

  Nycendera heeled the brown beast like a bullet toward the streak of Blackpeak on the horizon. She’d shed her black cloak. The shot from Gregdon’s weapon had ripped a wild galaxy of metal skin off her back and shoulder, and some off her neck, but still, she gleamed gold. What was left of her right ear sagged like wet fudge.

  “You…you alive, Skullface?” I asked.

  “Should I be dead?”

  “Shotgun’s a shotgun,” I said.

  “Stop talking,” she commanded. “Do not allow stupid words to be your last.”

  And it was a good time to revel in silent amazement at the fact that I was, mostly, still alive. There was a lot of blood, but that was to be expected. Don’t get much done without a lot of bleeding. Good to feel accomplished.

  We crashed into the town like a wave, but it was already a shambles. As the light of a new day streamed across the ground, I smelled powder and fire and blood. There were gunshots, too. The popping gunblasts had a heartbeat rhythm. Woodsmoke was in the air, but I knew it didn’t come from a hearth-fire. It was death-smoke. Town’s-on-fire,-get-your-ass-in-your-hand-and-run kind of smoke.

  Welcome home, Elias Faust.

  I suppose it’s not worth the time retelling how it all was when me and Nycendera flew into the town’s limits. The Magnate’s sandshades were destroying everything they could reach: popping shots at innocent folks, calling down their flashes of thunder, and setting fire to pretty much every damn thing they could.

  In front of us, with Blackpeak burning like Hell itself had jumped up to eat it, there wasn’t much left to do but bring these shades to meet their maker.

  Die and sleep, or live and oppose.

  You can imagine which one seemed like a better option.

  Nycendera, painted up with her crude skull disguise, took an arrow, then threw me to the ground off her dying horse. She killed some. I killed some. You remember…

  But it wasn’t enough. There were so many of them.

  There was no time wasted on trophies of flesh or blood. The mass of them was a machine, powered solely for the swift destruction of everything that flickered in front of their eyes.

  We’d be next.

  The thunderous crowd came closer. I didn’t hear so many people screaming anymore. Made me think most of them was dead.

  Nycendera sifted through the dirt. When she found what she wanted, she lifted it up and showed it to me.

  “Did it speak to you,” she snarled, her English rolling out with all its sharp edges and crude angles. “Tell me. Tell me now.”

  It was a rock, about the size of a fist. Round. Just the right size to—

  “The Shattered Well. Did you hear its voice?”

  With fading strength, I lifted my hand.

  I clenched my fist. Around Illemone’s Heart.

  And showed her the risen lump of blackness that had started, since I’d taken a bullet to the mouth, its slow crawl up the skin of my wrist.

  The Mark. My Mark.

  She raised her arm, gritted her teeth, and swung the stone down at my face.

  What a prick.

  I fired, mostly on instinct, right from the hip. I felt the Colt jerk, but I never saw what happened. I got clobbered in the forehead with the stone anyway. I was thrown into a black sea and floated further and further away. The cold sensation of wood and metal in my hand started to vanish.

  I don’t remember my head hitting the ground.

  I don’t know if my shot landed—

  —right where I wanted it to, but I do remember seeing the sandshade behind Nycendera stumble back, its face h
anging open like an old torn boot where my bullet had cut it right in half.

  I tip-toed that line again. The line between life and death. That edge where I could have just fallen forward into darkness and turned to look back at life as I fell away from it. Slingshotted forward into that bleak place, it was only a tug at my heel that kept me from plummeting all the way in.

  NO, the Well said. NOT YET.

  Then Nycendera’s voice broke through the veil of death.

  “You are one of the Magnate’s children, now.”

  I’d survived a goddamn bullet; I’d survived two. Hell, at this point, I’d survived three. No way I was planning to let a rock push me that final few inches into the afterlife…

  I think the Herald knew that, too.

  “Whether or not you want to be, he gave you a particle of knowledge.”

  But I hadn’t wanted it. I didn’t ask for it.

  “It’s yours to use as you see fit.”

  Triangles began to emerge in front of my eyes, dragging me from unconsciousness. Glowing, brilliant, silvery, beautiful.

  “Yours to use as you deem necessary. So use it. Use it.”

  A firepit of agony exploded in my brain. A delayed reaction.

  New pain.

  What I remembered next was being on my feet, screaming, screaming, and witnessing a world around me that moved with agonizing slowness. I balanced somewhere between this world and what felt like ten others: that of the Shattered Well, Xa’anshangerrad’s white abyss, and that of death, the longest dirt nap, the final sleep…

  The Shattered Well slipped me back into my boots, stood me up, brushed me off.

  DESTROY THEM ALL.

  A town on fire. Sandshades dashing and slashing through buildings and people. I cast my hand out at one of them, and wild power filtered through my veins: I shot it, not with bullets, but with invisible force, and it disintegrated, just wind and ash. Another on the top of the livery caught my attention, and I slung my finger in its direction. A faint feather of power connected us for just a split-second before its body simply fell in half. Sand rained to the Blackpeak town square.