Laura Anne Gilman - West Wind's Fool: and Other Stories of the Devil's West

by Gilman

  The ridge was lumped like the bare bones of a skeleton, dusty-dry and rust red. Not even moss grew on them, here under the blazing sun.

  Hard rock was good. Hard rock was safe.

  For now, experience told him. Don’t you dare relax.

  There were strips of jerky in his saddlebag, and another canteen of water, half-full and stale, but drinkable. The piebald could graze and drink when they came to pastures, but Jack had not sat to a meal without worry since longer than he could easy remember.

  “No,” he said, thinking back. “Two weeks past? The riverboat, coming up past Louistown.”

  Water was safe, too. Water and stone.

  Stone was better, though. The devil couldn’t reach through that much stone.

  “You played. You lost.”

  The gambler had a jovial look that Jack had distrusted at once. But only a fool trusted the man who held the deck, and Jack had prided himself on being no fool. Young, yes, and green, he owned to that, but never foolish. He sat warily and played carefully and never bet more than he could afford to lose. That was how you got to be old, in the Devil’s West.

  “I played and I lost and you’ve taken your winnings,” Jack said. “And now I’ll be stepping away from the table, like a sober man.”

  More sober now than he’d been an hour before: the dealer had a run of luck that could only be cursed, and every card that turned called out for mortals to beware, until the river turned and drowned him, once and for all.

  And the other men at the table had breathed a sigh of relief, that it had been Jack, and not them.

  “Leaving, broke and sober. Tis often the fate of mortal man,” the dealer agreed, and his jovial expression was only kind. Jack’s left hand flexed, feeling for the gun that did not hang by his side.

  You removed your weapons before you sat at the table. The saloon girl with the saucy eye held it for him, his gun and his hat, and no way to reach either before he was dead. The fact that every soul in the saloon was in the same boat did not warm Jack, not with the way the dealer watched his face, and not his hands. This dealer feared no powder and shot, nor an arrow from ambush, or a knife in the dark.

  Jack had known who he played with, when he slid his coin across the felt. That had been the point. That was why men came here, to test their luck. He swallowed, the sick feeling he had at the loss⏤everything he had, from cash to horse⏤eclipsed by a worse sensation in his gut. Not two years on his own, and he had failed, utterly. The devil cherished the prideful, his mentor had warned him, the better to break them of it.

  “One more hand, to win it all,” the dealer said, and his hands moved over the cards, shuffling them without sound. “One more hand to win it all, and more.”

  It was a devil’s bargain, in the heart of the devil’s town, and only a green-sapped fool would have taken it.

  But Jack-as-was had not been as wise as he thought.

  The rock eased his pain, and Jack slept soundly on its hard embrace, no darkly sounding whisper searching for him, poisoning his rest. That knowledge had been hard-won and cherished, that through the solid rock and shifting water, the bones and blood of the earth, the devil could not call.

  Before the sun rose, he woke, curled under a rough blanket, still fully dressed save his boots, those tied to the piebald’s saddle to keep scorpions or worse from making them a home.

  He had played that final hand: and lost. The fruit of his bargain, the payment of his debt: Seven years and seven and seven again, he was bound. The devil’s dog, the devil’s errand-boy. But there was a loophole: if he did not hear the call, he could not be summoned. If he could not be summoned, he could not do the devil’s work.

  It must amuse his master to play this game, to let Jack play at it, the days and weeks he could avoid the call, only to yank him back the moment he came within reach. Seven years and seven and seven again to pay, and nearly sixteen of them gone now, along with even the memory of the things he had hoped to regain. Sixteen was eight twice: numbers of protection, for normal men, but there was no protection for Jack, save water and stone, and that lasted only so long. If he died while bound, he was the devil’s forevermore.

  Jack had long ago lost the taste for living, but he had no intention of dying any time soon. He rose, and stretched, saluting the morning sun stretching clear across the face of the outcrop, the sky still clouded and dim behind him.

  “Human.”

  Jack turned and spun, reaching not for the pistol that once pressed against his thigh but the packet of herbs he now carried in the holster, the dried bits catching in the wind as he scattered them, a free-moving arc of glittering brown-green.

  “That’s hardly polite,” another voice said, this time behind him, and it sounded both amused and hurt. Two? More? Or one demon, inhumanly fast?

  Magicians roamed these lands, and demons, and the devil. Jack feared none of them, any more, but lack of fear did not mean lack of caution.

  “You came to us, and slept in our home. We came merely to say good morn, and you react…thus?”

  Two… no, four, or five, from the shadows that crept around him. Slender and dark-skinned like savages, bare in their skins, dark hair long and wild, braided with feathers of impossibly bright colors, like a fancy-girl’s beads. Like humans, until you saw them move, joints turning too smoothly, eyes glittering too bright. Until you saw the shimmer like heatstroke, under their skin.

  The herbs had pushed them back, but they had not fled.

  The horse, dumb beast that it was, shifted its weight from leg to leg, but did not otherwise react. It had seen far worse, in its time under Jack’s leg.

  “We don’t scare you?”

  “Only a damned man isn’t cautious around demon,” Jack replied. He couldn’t tell which one spoke, they moved so restlessly, and he didn’t want to watch their mouths, not so close to those glittering eyes. “Never heard of your kind taking to hard rock, before.” It wasn’t a question⏤even a damned man did not ask a demon questions it might answer.

  “You know many demon, then, human. To carry bane, and not a pistol, to wear the sigil instead of a cross?”

  He’d never worn a cross, not even back then. The sigil on a thong around his neck wasn’t much more use⏤but it showed a certain amount of respect. Demons and magicians knew the Hanging Man, who had been here long before the bleeding god.

  “I’m the devil’s Jack,” he said, having no desire to play their game. “You may have heard of me.”

  They hissed, but did not back away. The devil had no claim on them, as soulless as the piebald. But they would⏤most like⏤not interfere with his dog, either.

  “We grant you the use of our rock,” one of them said. “You may remain as long as you like.” Mocking: they knew he could not remain, dared not stay too long.

  “I may leave freely, then.” Again, not a question, but merely to confirm: to make them agree, and not slide a card out from their sleeve.

  “Yes. Yes, blasted human, you may.”

  They could not. Their words, the tone of their words, gave them away. They had been bound to this hard ridge⏤some magician exercising his power, for some reason only magicians understood.

  A wise man and a damned man both avoided thinking too much why a magician did anything.

  “You could stay, and amuse us,” another one said. “We are so terribly bored.”

  That was why they had come to him, then. Something new on this barren ridge, to distract them. He felt no pity: they were demon. And yet, to be trapped on this ridge, for however long, was not a fate he would wish on any creature.

  He had spoken truth, earlier: demon did not take to hard stone. They lingered on river banks and in shadowed caves, not here under the hot dry sun. “No doubt some terrible act angered a magician that he bound you here, with no release.”

  “Not so terrible. Not so anger-making. He was far more terrible than we, and woe to the human who bore him. His magic would have ripped him from her womb, and burnt her to ashes from
the hot malice in his bones.”

  Magicians were made, not born. Self-made, given to the madness of the winds. But there was something in the demon’s tone that made the story ring true.

  Not that Jack would ever know, one way or another. Yet, demon had no reason to lie for sheer meanness; they were no more evil than a tornado, merely set on having their way no matter what another might wish or do.

  Much like humans, he knew. It was a rare soul who came at you with unselfish good. It simply wasn’t the way the world had been made.

  This ridge offered a night of safety, but a lack of evil did not mean a lack of harm, from tornado or demon, and a wise man got out of the way of both.

  “I’ll water and feed my hoss, and be gone,” he said. “No need to fret yourselves on my account.”

  They stared at him like wolves in winter stare at elk, and he lowered his head and set his shoulders, same as the elk might do. Do not mess with me, his posture warned. You might win, but you would not like the cost.

  They stared, and then scattered, gone as swift as they’d come, and the piebald and he were alone on the rocky ridge.

  The ridge ran some distance toward the north, and Jack walked it through the morning, not pausing when the sun reached devil’s peak and bore down on him, rivulets of grimy sweat sticking his shirt and pants’ legs to his skin. The piebald’s girth was loose, its step slow and steady, and every now and again it reached over to nip at Jack’s hair in a gesture of what he thought might well be affection. Or hunger.

  “Grazing for you, soon enough,” he promised it. “Just a bit longer more.” The ability to stretch his legs without worry was sweeter than fresh water. He would have to leave this haven soonish, and be on his way, but not just yet.

  He thought, safe on rock, of his mother, and his sister. His teachers, back East. His first riding companion, near twenty years back, who had taken the green youth, new-come to the Territory, under his arm and taught him how to survive.

  Old Matthew, who’d died north of Smithtown when the savages overran their camp. Died by his own hand, rather than be taken captive. “Never let them take you,” Mattie had said. “Never do anything other than by your own free will. Promise yourself now, to never give up that will.”

  He had been, in the end, no better a student to Matty than he had been at hauling a plow.

  Those memories were only safe on rock, and they never did him any good. Jack forced his mind to considering each step, the colors and striations of the rock, the crunch of his boot heel on timeworn rubble, and the sough of the wind against his ears, until his brain went numb once more.

  Finally, the day came to a close, and while the ridge ran on a while more, there was the blur of blue shadow in the distance that told Jack there was a town off to the south.

  People⏤settlers and traders, common folk⏤were wary of him, knowing without being told there was something gone wrong with him, but he missed hearing them speak, even when they did not speak to him. To sit, briefly, at a table, and pretend he could stay… it broke him, every time, and yet still he could not resist.

  If he was fortunate, his master would have no summons for him.

  Briar, the sign at the boundary-line named the town, and it seemed well-called: sparse and spare, the color of deadwood and sand. But the buildings were sturdy, and the children clean and strong-limbed, and the sound of their play was the first thing he heard, when he rode into town. They were isolated enough, out here, they need fear nothing come up on them without warning from the lookout perched above the church spire.

  “Trust in God but Watch the Border” was inscribed at the archway of that church, and Jack stared at it a while before riding on. Churches were rare here, where the devil held sway. The saloon looked clean and orderly, and Jack barely hesitated before swinging down off the piebald’s back, wincing as his soles touched dirt.

  Silence. Silence in his head, silence in his bones.

  Looping the piebald’s reins around the post, he gave it a pat and a cube of close-hoarded sugar, and went through the sand-brown doors of the Briar’s Last Hope.

  As usual, the folk gave him a wary circle: other strangers might be pestered for news, or begged for a story, but they left him to his table and his whiskey, the girl serving him a plate of something that looked well-marbled but tasted of gristle and bone. He ate it, and the dry potatoes, and drank his whiskey, and let the noise wash over him, better than any bath he’d ever had.

  And then it came.

  No words: there were never words, only the command. The game was over, for the nonce: He had all-unwitting come where his master wanted him, were men waited, dreading, unknowing, for his hand on their necks.

  Ten men of Briar, sold of their own free will to the devil, waiting only to be claimed.

  “All right,” he said, as though he had a choice. His meal done, he would rise up⏤no more avoiding the dirt that clung to him, now that the deed was done⏤and walk through the town, and find who had taken his master’s coin.

  Whatever border they sought to guard, whatever god they trusted, it had not been enough.

  They were waiting for him when he came: nine of them, gathered on the church steps.

  “Avram ran,” the oldest of them said, when Jack put one foot on the faded wooden steps, and looked up at them, his hat angled back so they could see most of his face in the light coming from the open door behind them. “He broke and ran when we knew you were coming.”

  Word had spread: like the demon, the townsfolk of Briar had heard of the devil’s Jack. “But you waited.”

  “We did what we had to do. Our children are safe. That is all that matters.”

  Their calm was almost disturbing. The damned bargained. The damned wept. The damned offered you everything they no longer possessed. They did not stand like god-fearing men.

  “The border. On your sign. What is it?” You could ask humans questions you did not of demons. They would lie just as easily⏤but they did not always, and there was no risk in listening.

  They looked at each other, the nine men of Briar, and if they wondered at his question, they did not show it. Finally one, neither oldest nor youngest, spoke. “A magician lived here, back before there was a town. Bitter and sour, and not able to stop fiddling with things that would not be under his control. And in his fiddling, in his disregard for what was natural, he called up the briar-rock from the breast of the earth, and let loose abominations on the land. The founders of this town contained it, somehow. Built a border around the town. But they left no instructions, no grimoire we could follow, when the ground rumbled underfoot last year, and the first abomination returned.”

  It had the sound of a story long-told, worn with the repetition. And cleansing silver would do no good against demon, not so many, not when they held a grudge. “You’ve no magicians, none to hire or lure, to strengthen the barrier? ” Better to bargain with a magician and risk his whim, than sell your soul outright.

  Another man, a freeman from his skin, as upright as the others, spoke then: “There was no time. The devil was there.”

  “Yes. He often is.” Jack’s words were dry, but the townsmen took them as solemn gospel.

  “And now you will take us.” The freeman again, resigned.

  He was the devil’s dog, sent to retrieve what was owe. “Yes.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  He could not tell who had asked that question, a voice within the group. “Yes.” Now, and forever. That was what it meant, to give over to the devil. Not a great pain, not always, but a never-ending one. The sour bile of regrets; the loss of hope; the abandonment of fleeting, innocent joy for the more grim knowledge of sorrow. He felt them all, scraping at his insides.

  They would exist within that pain, their soul’s protection forfeit, for the rest of eternity. For protecting their home.

  Sixteen years of taking the devil’s price had hardened Jack to regret. But these were good men. Honest men, who had waited for their fate. Looking at them, some
thing inside Jack rebelled.

  “Go make your peace with your families,” he said. “No memories will save you now, but there is no reason to leave them with pain.”

  Lie to them, he meant. Give them a pretty story to believe. They won’t, but they will remember that you tried.

  “I’ll be back come dawn. Don’t make me have to find you.”

  He had some hard riding to do, before then.

  The moon rose low and cold in the sky, and the devil pinpricked him the whole ride back to the rock ridge, but Jack gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw and did not relent, even when the pricks became jabs, and the jabs drew blood from his skin.

  The devil was always there, but he could not be everywhere. So long as he did not turn his full attention here, Jack had a chance.

  No. Jack had no chance. He let the thought go, became empty and bare as the grasslands around him, all life hiding away the closer he came to the demons’ rock.

  They met him on the lowest ridge, five sleek shadows glowing and shifting under the moonlight. This was their time, their place, and he was no longer a stranger to them, that they would hide their true form.

  He had never thought to gamble, again. Never thought to bargain, or hide a card in his sleeve. Had thought he had nothing left to place in the pot.

  He stopped, the horse’s hooves barely settled on the rocky spine, and called to them. “What would you risk, to be entertained?”

  “What would we not, to no longer be bored,” came back the answer. “Have you come to be our fool, human?”

  “I am already my own fool,” he said. “But if you can manage it, you will have entertainment⏤and strike a blow against the memory of the magician who bound you here.”

  That had their attention, he could tell by the way they paused in their restless, graceful swirl.

  “Tell us more.” A swirling demand, five voices as one.

  “Those who stood against the magician, those years ago. The humans. Their descendants sought to continue their work⏤and sold themselves to my master, to do it.”