His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  All around me, drawn out from my own pain, silver triangles floated in the air, unseen to anyone except me. And they were all mine to channel, to tear in half, to rip asunder…

  In the center of the town, a mangled tree – it had never been there before – stood, leafless and half-alive, a mouth-sized knot in its trunk open in a silent scream.

  I threw my will at it.

  The bark exploded, shredding another sandshade nearby. Out of the crumbling branches, Miss Lachrimé Garland fell to her knees, gasping for breath. She tugged her skirts out from around unnatural roots. A sandshade fell on her, talon-blade winking.

  Without missing a beat, her little pistol found its voice. Pop, pop. “Elias Faust,” she shouted. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  HIS WORK WAS FRAGILE. IT IS YOURS TO UNMAKE.

  Sandshades poured out of the alleyways, more and more of them. Nycendera, despite the arrow in her shoulder, came forward to slice her way through them. They fell apart around her. Miss Garland tangled with another, and its talon-blade leaped out for her, dipping for her mouth.

  I couldn’t get there in time.

  “Lookit may, y’ ugly sumbitch!”

  From behind the sandshade, Peggy Winters’s interlaced fists crashed down across its hooded skull. She grabbed it with her brute hands, and literally tore the creature like a rotten old dress. I grinned; God, I couldn’t help but grin like a goddamn maniac.

  I ran. I don’t know toward what. I don’t know why. Or I did, but I didn’t realize it until my feet took me across the square. Another sandshade rushed toward me. “Come on,” I roared, and took bead on its bulbous brow. “Come on, and try it, you damn hatrack.”

  Its teeth pulled apart. A black tongue emerged.

  “You can’t kill all of us,” it teased.

  Then it shouldered a shotgun and took aim.

  I was quick enough. Just barely.

  I rushed the sandshade. I checked the barrel with my shoulder from underneath just as it discharged. The world went silent for just a moment. I rammed my knee into the cold flap of its stomach, then pushed it back to the stairs of the Crooked Cocoon and leveled my pistol.

  When Nabby Lawson came flying out from the saloon’s doors with a fire-iron raised above her head, neither me nor the sandshade really expected it. So it took us by surprise. Me, mostly. Because the cast-iron hook fell across its nose from above and blasted the sandshade’s face into powder, and I don’t think much else surprised it ever again after that.

  “Cissy,” she barked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cissy!”

  And she pointed with the fire-poker toward a massive, man-sized bundle of thorns and branches thrown up like some dried hairball against the lattice of the Crooked Cocoon’s porch. Shit. It came back to me: Grady Cicero’s thorn prison. With the remnants of the concussive pain still rocking around inside my head, I caught a glimpse of the thin threads of silvery power still binding the vines together.

  I cut them apart with a frantic slice of my left hand, peeling the remnants of the Magnate’s power away like the skin of a fruit.

  Cicero crawled out a moment later. A bloody and punctured mess, he emerged from the thorny husk, staring at the world with confused and frightened eyes. He still had his Yellowboy cradled in his arms. Elation filled me up like good whiskey. I kicked his fallen bowler toward him. “You dropped something.”

  “You,” he gasped, “look like shit.”

  “Charmed,” I said.

  “Down,” he snapped.

  Just as I squatted, Cicero slipped a round from his belt, racked it into the Yellowboy, took aim where I’d been standing, and blew a hole into a sandshade’s throat. It pitched over me, flailing and howling.

  ENDING THIS PROBLEM WITH MAIN FORCE, the Well said, WILL BE A FRUITLESS TASK.

  “How many of these are there?” Cicero asked.

  “Too many to count,” I heard Miss Garland shout.

  I crushed my heel down on the sandshade’s head. “The Magnate was a busy man.”

  “He dead?”

  “Close enough,” I said.

  “Precision work, as usual,” Cicero said.

  Pop, pop, pop.

  A rain of bullets began to splash across the ground near us. I threw Cicero behind a stack of crates outside the saloon. Bullets snapped across the other side of our flimsy cover. Ducking my head, I said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I abandoned sense a long time ago,” Cicero said, “just about the time I wandered into this fucked up town. Hey, Nabby!”

  “The hell you want,” she said, squatting around the other side of the porch.

  “Good to see you. After this wildness—” Two more gunshots tried for us, “—you want to celebrate?”

  “Maybe they’ll have lucky aim and save me from that fate,” she said.

  Cicero grinned at me. “Women.” Then he popped up, got a glance, and fell back down. “Up on top of Levinworth’s place. Two of them, taking as many pot-shots as they can.”

  “Think you can knock them off?”

  “Eh,” he said. “One round left.”

  It was, I realized, just a matter of holding out our hands against a tidal wave. With every sandshade that fell to the ground, two or three more emerged. Unfazed by the ringing gunshots from above, Peggy Winters continued to swing her wild arms, knocking them aside like tiny twigs, while Miss Garland fought off a sandshade’s swiping fingers and jabbed a stolen talon-blade five, six, seven, ten times, into its guts. Then she threw the body into the wreckage of a burning building and watched as it went up like a flash.

  But this wasn’t right. It didn’t fit the rules. Sure, not much fit the rules, but the brain couldn’t help but try to piece together some logic.

  “They shouldn’t be alive,” I told Cicero. “Power’s supposed to fade when the wielder dies. Saw it with my own eyes when I killed—” Bisbin… “—one of the Magnate’s men. So why aren’t the shades falling to pieces?”

  “You sure the Magnate’s snuffed out?”

  “Damn sure.”

  Cicero narrowed his eyes at me.

  “Have faith,” I said. “I pulled a whole damn building down on the bastard.”

  Nabby Lawson knocked another sandshade with her cast-iron poker. The moment I saw the crown of its skull, I took aim. It fell motionless.

  The Shattered Well was right: they’d overrun us without much effort, and I imagine with enough time and stubbornness, they’d become more numerous and our ammo would become far too scarce. If destruction was the aim, I wondered, as another round flashed over my head and blasted one of Poindexter’s windows out, then how?

  I only had a few minutes. I lowered a trembling hand down to my belly to feel my gunshot wound.

  My palm fell across a slight pudge of exposed skin.

  I jammed my finger into my navel.

  That was the only hole there.

  What greeted my four fingers was the plane of my belly, completely unscathed from the Magnate’s shot. The skin was as fresh as a babe’s, and not even scarred.

  I almost felt the Shattered Well smile.

  ASSURING YOUR SURVIVAL IS OF MUTUAL BENEFIT.

  “This is your doing?”

  A TEMPORARY ACCOMMODATION.

  Cicero snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You still with me, Marshal?”

  CONSIDER IT POWER BORROWED. TO ENSURE BALANCE.

  Balance.

  And blood.

  Playing proverbial mumbly-peg with powers far greater than I could ever be had already lost me two fingers and netted me an almost incalculable series of aches and pains. Whatever costs I’d owe when this was done, I didn’t have time to consider. Not when I looked up and saw a stream of sandshades spilling into the Horseshoe Junction Inn and saw the flash of gunshots and wildfire.

  Which is when it hit me. Like a damn brick tossed off the top of the building.

  Why the sandshades still lived.

  Why they hadn’t simply fal
len apart with the Magnate’s demise.

  “I need to run,” I said to Cicero, preparing to sprint. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Few words strike more fear in my heart.”

  “Your crack-shot all prepped and polished?”

  “I won’t miss,” he said, “just as long as I know the target.”

  I nodded. Then I told myself something I hadn’t told myself in quite awhile.

  Breathe.

  I ran, faster than I’ve ever run in my life, until my lungs howled in protest and the world exploded in tiny blurs in front of my vision. Near one of the alleys, I saw Emp trading blows with a sandshade. I could have stopped to help, too, if the target of my attention wasn’t so close, laying in the sand…

  Right next to Nycendera’s wounded horse.

  Illemone’s Heart, winking in the morning sun.

  Because it wasn’t the Magnate’s power at all that had given birth to the sandshades. It had never been his to begin with. He’d only been the channel for it, the living saddlebags of something else’s influence.

  Power borrowed. From the creature he thought he loved.

  I plucked the gilded locust-thorn from the soil. The sandshades above the livery got a bead on me.

  “Cicero,” I shouted.

  I threw Illemone’s Heart up into the air above Blackpeak. It tumbled and gleamed.

  A glint. The flank of the Yellowboy across the way. Cicero, cheek to the rifle-butt, followed his target.

  Crack.

  Illemone’s Heart, as if jumping, leaped even higher. A ricocheting bullet whistled off past my ear. I expected those few moments to be my last: both of the sandshades wouldn’t have had a problem finding my brainpan, and while I wondered if bullets travelled faster than murdered magic.

  But their shots never found me.

  A slobbering mass bounded with glee up the side of the livery. It leaped across the siding, to the awning, then up, up, until…

  A bestial snarl ripped the air. A greeting. Then yellow jaws opened, snapped.

  Spitjaw.

  The second sandshade reared around to aim at the four-legged intruder attacking its friend, but lurched forward as another dog-like figure leaped on it, and together, my companion Constantpaw and the sandshade fell two stories to the street.

  I don’t know what it was that I expected. Maybe, with Cicero’s successful shot, some kind of pressure relieved from the air, enough that those black-clad figures popped like blisters in the sunlight.

  It didn’t happen that way, though. In fact, nothing at all happened.

  Shot out of the air, Illemone’s Heart rolled harmlessly across the sand of Blackpeak’s square, and landed right between my feet.

  Completely unharmed.

  Fully intact.

  Shit.

  Out of my peripheral vision, I watched as a sandshade dragged Nabby Lawson, her skirts torn and her boots flailing, into the street. Poindexter rushed it from behind, but caught a hammer of invisible force in the chin and flew back through the front doors of the Crooked Cocoon.

  In desperation, I pulled my Colt, and unloaded the last few rounds right down at Illemone’s Heart. It jerked, rolled, spun, but never suffered a blemish or a scrape.

  The sandshades darkened the day. Blackpeak’s defenses started breaking. A crowd of sandshades split Miss Lachrimé Garland and Peggy Winters apart, and a whole crew of shadows dragged the powerful fistfighter down into their midst. Miss Garland cursed at them, spit at them, tore at them with her hands. A cracking flash of thunder-and-lightning caught her in the chest. She crumbled near the town hall’s grand black door.

  It had all been worth a shot. Just hadn’t been good enough.

  One of the buildings came pouring down like liquid as all of its supports crumbled into ash and fire. Emp stumbled away from it, firing both of his pistols blindly at the sandshades bearing down on him. They took the bullets, jerking, flinching the whole way, but swarmed him, dragging him down to the earth.

  Fewer and fewer people stood upright anymore. Even Cicero was up Shit Creek: he swung his empty Yellowboy at the nearest sandshades. “Give me a fight, you fucks,” he demanded, knocking a sawed-off shotgun out of one of their hands while another simply shuffled in, raised its gnarled fingers, and began to spit out a string of words.

  Cicero dropped the rifle. He collapsed to his knees, eyes bulging, throat twisting in invisible hands.

  IS THIS ALL YOU HAVE?

  Three sandshades grabbed Nycendera by her head. They drove her to the soil. Too many of them.

  “We aren’t built for this. We tried.”

  They straddled her. One pulled a knife from its rotten boot.

  AND YOU ARE SATISFIED WITH THIS?

  “I’m tired,” I said. “We all are.”

  The Shattered Well surged with displeasure at that response.

  Fuck it.

  Constantpaw put up a better fight than most. She howled, bit, snapped, swiped, but I heard a yelp as a gun discharged. The stink of burnt hair came floating through the air.

  A talon-blade scraped against Nycendera’s throat. She had nothing left.

  Peggy Winters’s cursing voice fell quiet.

  I didn’t think watching a town die was going to be so easy.

  I had no means to change it – my veins had been milked dry of their temporary power, and no more triangles winked in front of my vision. I just sunk to my knees, waiting for Blackpeak to fall in around me. Nobody would remember these people, and even less would know exactly how they perished. History books don’t catalogue horrors like these. Those, they reserve for tall tales, for gossip and rumor, all of which fall into obscurity at some point or another.

  With Illemone’s Heart between my knees and a sea of black-cowled sandshades turning their attention to me, I saw death…

  …and on the black doors of the Blackpeak town hall, I saw a familiar jade knife, still stuck there, long forgotten.

  Which is when Xa’anshangerrad’s words poured into me from several hours before.

  Even powerful spellcraft, when stretched too thin, promises to shatter like glass under the fist of any other magic turned against it.

  My face went cold. My body followed suit.

  If a bullet couldn’t do the work…

  “Lachrimé,” I called out. “The knife. Get the knife. From the door!”

  Her dress smoking, she reached for the handle, and with a tug, wrenched it from the wood. She threw it into the street. It tumbled, still fifty yards away.

  But it landed at Cicero’s feet. Even with his throat being crushed by the sandshades’ power, the hard-headed bastard gritted his teeth, reached for the blade, and swiped his hand at it. It bounced end-over-end toward me, a little closer, before his final breath came whistling out of him.

  Even with a hellish pile of bodies on top of her, Peggy Winters managed to crawl, covered in blood, the few feet toward the knife. With what must have been a legion of sandshades on her back, she grabbed it.

  She threw it, too.

  It was Nycendera’s power, that blade, embodied and persistent, so when it skittered by her, instead of grabbing at the sandshade about to slit her throat, she pushed her palms at the air and blew the knife toward me with a last inkling of colorless, immaterial force…

  It stuck into the ground ten yards away.

  Dumb as an ox, Rat the coyote emerged from a mass of shades, loped up to the knife, and locked his jaws around the handle. Then, easy-as-you-please, just as every sandshade in Blackpeak seemed to collapse in on me, with their ripping hands and their knives and their guns and their reality-bending spells, it was Rat that dropped the magical knife against my knee and waited patiently for praise.

  I took it up. I raised it in the air. I screamed.

  Something else cried out in agony from across worlds.

  Illuminated before me, imposed on a spiritual layer of the world, I envisioned the hundreds of golden tentacles lashing and snapping, connecting those brokered souls to this obj
ect, to this place. Anchoring them to their bodies. Tethering them to Illemone’s power.

  They tore the town apart. Tore my friends apart. Tore me apart.

  I stabbed Illemone’s Heart.

  The magical blade broke Illemone’s Heart into a thousand pieces. A flash of green blinded me, seared me like a flash of lightning—

  Then everything went quiet.

  Now

  When I finish speaking, he holds an empty crystal vial, hardly the size of a finger. He stares at me through it with one of his thirteen eyes. “Doesn’t it ever fascinate you, how fragile it all is? Just a few pounds of meat, some sparks of inspiration and thought. Everything you are hinges on the health of that nugget of fool’s gold floating in your skull-water.”

  “It does its job best it can,” I say.

  “But does it?”

  You think about that kind of frailty too much, it ruins you. One good bullet could slice through every happiness you’ve ever known. Take a bad fall off the saddle, and you might as well be busted fruit.

  I tug at the thorn-shackles. Blood seeps free.

  His voice dares a new kind of tone. Sympathy. “You really don’t know, do you,” he says.

  “I know what I know.”

  A surge of pain sparks in one of my left hand’s fingers. I glance down, only to feel a pinch of agony as my fingernail peels up out of its base, and from beneath it, a bulging, too-fat voidworm with skin like a wrinkled sock crawls free.

  Thirteen plucks it up. He crushes it inside his fist until its innards blow out like curdled cheese between his knuckles.

  Inside me, the other voidworms howl in pain.

  “I can’t blame you, Elias Faust. Or the tenderness of your mind. But what you’ve forgotten is how much you’ve forgotten. No weapon wields the sheer destructive capacity of a man given too much free rein. The Magnate was clumsy. Too much meddling, too little finesse. Murderers always leave blood,” Thirteen says, “whether on the floor, or in the mind. The worms just follow the trail…”

  He squeezes the juices from the voidworm into the vial. It fills with a putrid yellow. He shakes the fluid inside. It glows like crushed fireflies. Inside my head, a spark ignites: an uncanny recognition, like seeing your own smile on the face of a distant relative. Something mine, but belonging to someone else…