Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  “Ruan’s not bloodthirsty,” Huang objected, feeling the need to come to his rival’s defense despite what Ruan thought of him. “He just sees it as doing the job properly, and saving us the trouble of having to do it all over again later.”

  Zhao nodded slightly, clearly unconvinced. “Perhaps. But you might try to remember that your neck was once a job Ruan wanted to do properly, and you might want to wonder whether he thinks it still needs doing, at that.”

  Huang grinned. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  The last of the bandits who’d harried the crawlers on foot was now leaping down into the channel, and to safety. The snipers continued to plink their shots against the crawlers’ armor, but even they were retreating one by one from their entrenched positions to the safety of the gully’s floor.

  “That’s the last of them,” Zhao said in a voice scarcely above a whisper. Perhaps he, too, was afraid that the convoy might overhear, and spoil the surprise that awaited them. “Won’t be long now.”

  As if in response, there came a low hissing sound from the direction of the ring of crawlers, as the first of the detonators began to strike alight.

  “Get down,” Huang said urgently, sliding back down the cliff wall, motioning to the few bandits on either side who had chanced a peek over the ledge.

  Zhao hunched down beside him and covered his ears. Huang, remembering Zhao’s long experience with these kinds of explosives down in the mine shafts, followed suit, squeezing his eyes to narrow slits for good measure.

  They felt the explosions as much as heard them.

  And then it was over.

  Even at this distance, the bandits were pelted with a rain of red sand and shards of rock, even splinters of metal sheared from the crawlers themselves. Luckily few of those in the shelter of the channel received any noticeable injuries from the shrapnel, and these were bandaged easily enough. Huang just tried not to think too long about those who had been inside the crawlers and the risks to them.

  When the rain of dust and debris slowed, and the cloud kicked up by the half dozen explosions cleared, Zhao and Huang chanced a look back over the channel’s edge to see how well the plan had worked.

  Huang’s plan, it transpired, had outperformed anyone’s expectations. It was just as well that there wasn’t much of a market for the goods and materiel carried by the convoy, because little of it survived the blast. For that matter, the crawlers themselves scarcely survived the blast, with only twisted shapes of blackened metal and smoking ruin remaining where the sickly yellowish green crawlers had been only moments before.

  The explosives had been plunder the bandits had won from another convoy some time before, but Zhao and the others had seen little use for the stuff before now. They had worked in mines, after all, and having been miners, they would always be miners in some matters. To them, explosives were of use in clearing rock, in blasting passages in the skin of the planet itself, and little else besides. Of course any number of them had lost fingers or limbs, or fidelity of hearing, or even loved ones to unintentional blasts, but they still did not think of explosives as potential weapons.

  Huang, without any real experience with the stuff, couldn’t help but see it as both weapon and tool. Buried strategically in the locations to which the crawlers were most likely to flee, in his estimation, the explosives would do to the convoy what no amount of weapons fire could ever accomplish, shredding them open like cans of rations, without putting a single bandit life in jeopardy.

  Of course, the blasts would put the lives of the convoy’s drivers and guards in jeopardy. Worse, it was likely to end them all together, snuffed out like candles in a gale-force wind. But there was the slightest possibility, Huang was sure, that the drivers and guards might escape the conflagration, by either taking to their heels, or being thrown clear of the explosion by the blast’s concussive force, or any number of other hypothetical situations. That any of these hypotheticals was so improbable as to approach impossible was not a matter on which Huang dwelt. So long as it was possible that he had not just engineered the murder of dozens of people, he was able to sleep at night, if fitfully.

  He resisted the temptation to think of the hypothetical dead as “innocent” people. Who was innocent, in the final analysis, after all? Zhao? Jue? Ruan? Hardly. Huang himself? Well, as much as he tried to avoid violence whenever possible, necessity had forced him into an impasse from time to time, and he could not deny that his own hands had come away dirty, as Zhao’s colorful euphemism had it. But if he was responsible for ending one life to save another? Was that worth the cost? Were the lives of miners he would never meet worth the price of his own bloodied hands?

  Huang wasn’t sure, but the possible solutions to the equation plagued him by night and day.

  Gamine’s stomach grumbled, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt full. The midday meal was only a short time away, after she finished the morning services, but she found it difficult to work up any enthusiasm for her meager rations. Hunger seemed to be a constant companion these days.

  It wasn’t that there wasn’t food. The Society of Righteous Harmony probably had more food at its disposal now than it ever had. Ever since they’d moved south and west to the outskirts of Yinglong in the Great Yu Canyon, supplies had been easier to come by. Yinglong had originally been founded as a farming community generations before, and though it had grown in the intervening years until it was the largest town north of the Tianfei Valley, it was still the center of a wide agricultural network. Most of the nearby farms were all Combine operations, but those who labored in the town’s markets and transport depots were sympathetic to the Society and willing to cut Gamine’s people deals on supplies and produce, sometimes going so far as to look the other way while Society followers “accidentally” made off with bundles without paying.

  So there was more food on hand than Gamine had seen since she left the Chauviteau-Zong residence. The problem was that there seemed to be more and more mouths to feed with each passing day, and even their plentiful supplies could stretch only so far.

  Gamine sometimes wondered just what it was about the Society that so appealed to these new converts. The early camp followers who had formed the first core of the Society had been the displaced and dispossessed, men and women with nowhere else to go. For them, the Society had been a kind of refuge, and they had found in the Society’s teachings—first from Master Wei and then increasingly from Iron Jaw—a message of hope for a better tomorrow.

  But many of these more recent arrivals were not cut from the same cloth as those early followers. These were not homeless refugees, searching for any kind of shelter and security they could find. These were men and women who left behind gainful employment to come and join the Society. Some even brought children, whole families closing up their homes in the villages and towns and opting instead to live in the ever-growing tent city of the Society of Righteous Harmony. In recent months, there had even been children born among those already living in the camp, new life beginning just as their parents had left old lives behind.

  The camp was situated on the western edge of Yinglong, between the town’s edge and the foot of the canyon walls, their knobs of rock rising above the dust and loose debris on the slope, the tops of the walls towering so high overhead that they could scarcely be seen from this vantage point. Sheltered between the canyon walls and the town, the camp was largely spared the ravages of the dust storms that blew from time to time across the canyon floor, excoriating everything in their path. But the high walls also meant that shortly after midday the sun disappeared from view, and the camp was plunged into shadow almost as dark as night, though the skies overhead were clear and bright. It was a strange, twilit existence in the camp, with the day being the brief interval between the sun rising over the spires of Yinglong to the east and passing beyond the canyon wall to the west, and the nights seemed never to end.

  Perhaps this endless twilight had something to do with Gamine’s strange moods. She�
��d read that people who lived at Fire Star’s poles, mining frozen water from beneath what remained of the ice caps, had constant sunlight during the summer solstice, when the sun shone directly on them, and continuous darkness during the winter solstice, when the planet’s axial tilt pointed the pole away from the sun’s rays. In those seemingly endless days of eternal night, it was said that a person’s psyche suffered, and that people fell into deep depressions that would not lift until the sun rose once more above the horizon. Was it any wonder that Gamine, who now saw the sun for just a few short hours each day, was similarly affected?

  Gamine was tempted to lay all her dark moods at the feet of the towering canyon walls, and to ascribe her glum outlook on the ever-present shadows. But still she could not escape the thought that it was instead some premonition that so affected her, some presentiment of danger or misfortune waiting just around tomorrow’s horizon.

  Could it be Master Wei’s ill health, perhaps, caught up to him at last? Could she be sensing the stealthy and relentless approach of death coming for the old man? He seldom climbed from his sleeping pallet these days, and when he spoke, it was only to ramble about people and places long gone, lost in Wei’s childhood long before Gamine was born. Having taken leave of his senses almost entirely, he recognized nothing about his present surroundings, just looked around him with a fool’s half smile and confusion in his eyes. He had taken to calling Gamine by the name of his long-dead sister and had decided that Temujin must be his own grandfather, and it seemed that he derived some comfort from seeing the two of them, however briefly. The others in the camp, when they chanced to visit Wei’s tent, were likewise assigned roles from the old man’s childhood—this one a farmer for whom Wei had worked in the harvest season, that one the magistrate in the village in which he’d been born—all of them made confused and unwilling players in this impromptu theater of unrelenting memories that took up the mendicant’s twilight days.

  But no. Gamine wasn’t worried about death taking the old mendicant. If anything, death would be a kind of release for Wei, finally severing the last ties with the present away from which his mind and spirit had long before turned. With death, he would be allowed to move on to whatever waited beyond the veil of the living world. The Society, taught by Wei himself in more lucid days, held that the afterlife was a place of unalloyed joy and comfort, peopled by all of those who have preceded us in this life, and where each would be given their long-overdue rewards, everything they lacked for in life being given to them a hundredfold. There was no hunger in that blessed place, no pain, no loss, no loneliness, only endless satiation and comfort and bliss.

  Gamine spoke about the afterlife in the homilies often, talking about the ways in which the powers rewarded those who had served them faithfully in life. She talked about the afterlife as much because of the evident comfort it brought to so many of the listeners as for any other reason. It was as if the simple act of hearing about the promise of deliverance in the afterlife helped the listeners forget, if only for a moment, the pain and strain of their torments in the here and now.

  But while Gamine was happy to repeat Wei’s words about the blissful afterlife when speaking the homilies to the assembled faithful, she did not believe in it herself. Or at least, not entirely. There was some small part of her, it was true, that fervently wished for there to be such a place of reward and rest, a part that looked forward to setting down the burdens of life and passing through the gate of death into a more serene place. But a larger part of her thought the whole thing was an empty promise designed only to comfort those who had nothing to comfort them in life.

  Gamine hoped there was a life after life but suspected that if one existed, it would bear the same resemblance to Wei’s simplistic wonderland that a landscape depicted by a master painter bore to a child’s scribbled rendering of the same scene.

  When Gamine had finished the revelation, performing the “iron jaw” routine with Temujin’s drunken assistance, the sun stood atop the towering canyon walls above them. By the time she returned to her tent, to her simple midday meal of rice and salted fish, the sun was dipping behind the wall and out of sight, and the line of shadows marched inexorably toward the camp.

  When she had finished eating, she left her tent and went to check on Master Wei. He was sleeping, for which she was thankful, since she often found it a chore to play the part of Wei’s long-lost sister, listening to him rattle on about places and things that she had never seen, could hardly imagine. Tender scenes of the family gathering together for an evening meal, after Wei and his father had spent the day farming the family’s allotment. Pilgrimages to holy shrines in distant provinces—to White Rock Temple, where the martyrs were put to the sword by the warriors of the Mexic Dominion in ancient times; to the Temple of Peace, which commemorated the place where the Guanpu Emperor set foot on Fire Star; and once even as far as the waters of the Great Southern Basin. Gamine hadn’t been to any of those places, but even if she had, it would not have been beside a loving father or holding hands with a doting brother. She couldn’t help but begrudge the old man these memories, as jumbled and confused as they were, and it was with a sigh of relief that she let the tent flap fall closed once more and turned away, leaving him snoring irregularly inside.

  Before she was halfway back to her own tent, though, Temujin came stumbling up to her, eyes wild.

  “Best shift yourself, my little sprite,” he said, out of breath, his mustaches stained and matted by wine from the jug that sloshed in his hands. “Time to cut our losses and scarper, you ask me.”

  Temujin started to continue past her, but Gamine shot out a hand and grabbed hold of his arm. “What are you talking about? What are you running from?”

  The old crook glanced back nervously over his shoulder and chewed his lower lip. “Constabulary, by the look of them. Guardsmen.” He shook his head. “Or maybe soldiers, at that—I couldn’t rightly tell. But either way, it’s men in uniforms with swords and guns, heading our way with a will, and that’s never good news for those in our line of work.”

  “And what line is that?” Gamine cocked an eyebrow. “Preaching? Ministering to the needy?”

  Temujin’s lip curled in scorn, but after a moment he began to nod slowly. “Yes, that might be the best way to handle it, now that you mention it. Play it straight? We’re what we seem to be and nothing more?” He scratched his neck thoughtfully. “All right, we’ll try it your way. But I reserve the right to take to my heels if it goes south, and you’re on your own lookout then.”

  Gamine released her hold on his arm. She decided not to explain that, so far as she was concerned, ministering was their line of work. That Temujin had taken her response as a suggested strategy just made him that much easier to handle.

  “They’re coming from the direction of the town, I take it?” Gamine looked back the way Temujin had come, where the light of the sun still shone on the ground.

  Temujin nodded and took a long draft from his wine jar.

  Gamine smiled, though in her chest her heartbeat began to quicken. “Then I expect we’d better see what they want.”

  They were soldiers, not guardsmen. That much Gamine was able to see right away. Bannermen, to be precise, the elite all-terrain military force. At their head was a man with an officer’s rosette picked out in gold thread on the black fabric of his tunic, over his heart. His light eyes and pale skin suggested he was of Briton extraction, or perhaps Vinlander, but while his head was shaved in the Manchurian style, clean shaven from the forehead back to the middle of the scalp, the hair that fell in a braid down his back was fair, the color of straw, which gave him more the look of Deutschland or Norge or Sverige. Above his right eye was a distinctive cross-shaped scar, and a slight sneer tugged up the corner of his mouth.

  The fair-haired Bannerman’s hand rested on the hilt of the saber hanging at his side, a pistol hanging from his belt on the other hip. Though he’d drawn neither weapon, he watched Gamine and her people through narrow eyes that
suggested it would take only a single wrong step on their part to prompt him to action.

  “You’re in charge here? The one they call Iron Jaw?” The Bannerman raised an eyebrow and gave Gamine an appraising look. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough.” Gamine crossed her arms over her chest. “Who are you, and what’s this about?”

  The fair-haired man nodded, lips slightly pursed, and spread his hands in a shrug. “Have it your way.” Then he straightened and continued in a more officious tone. “I am Bannerman Kenniston, and I have orders to remove your people from this area.”

  “Remove?” said one of the Society followers standing behind Gamine, sounding alarmed and insulted at the same time.

  Gamine narrowed her eyes. “Just what do you mean by ‘this area,’ anyway?” She glanced from side to side, indicating the dirt at their feet. The shadow of the canyon wall now fell across her legs, its forward line falling on the ground just between her and the Bannerman. “Here?” She took an exaggerated step to one side, and pointed to the place where she’d been standing. “There?” She smiled. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Gamine realized that she probably shouldn’t taunt the man, considering that he and his dozen or so friends were all heavily armed, but somehow she couldn’t help herself. There was something about his overly formal manner that reminded her of someone, and she simply reacted instinctually. It was a matter of moments before she consciously recognized the similarity to Madam Chauviteau-Zong’s prim manner.

  The Society followers behind her, though, saw only a bare slip of a girl standing up to a squad of Bannermen with a smile on her face. That story would be shared around the camp in coming nights, more proof that the powers shone upon Iron Jaw.