by D. J. Butler
Cal ran, his moccasin-clad feet slamming ball-first into the soft dirt of the hillside as he tore up it, as fast as he could make himself go. He threw a quick look over his shoulder, and almost tripped.
There were two of them, and they were gray. They looked soft, or muddy, slippery and half-formed. They looked like nothing so much as clay men, faceless, featureless, naked, terrifying, like something a child might mold out of riverbank dirt and play with, only six feet tall and running. Their breath hissed out of ragged, flapping mouths as they came, and their bare gray feet thumped and rustled on the hillside.
They were right behind him and running faster than he was. He was doomed.
At least he could protect Sarah. If he died but she escaped, that would be a noble sacrifice and a fair trade. He’d do it for love, and the Elector would be proud of him. He might call Cal a hell of a fellow at Cal’s funeral and bury Cal in his own lambskin Mason’s apron.
Cal swung his head back around downhill and then let the motion carry him into a turn of his whole body, shoulders first, arms swinging around, feet planted. He whipped the pack in his left hand up like a comet—
and then down—
and released it, hurling it straight into the chest of the first not-a-man.
It whooshed breath out but made no other noise as it staggered and fell back, entangling the legs of its companion and buying Calvin enough time to shrug off the other pack and free up his tomahawk arm. As the second not-a-man stumbled over its companion and lunged at him, Cal struck as hard as he could with the war axe, burying it deep in the clay thing’s head.
The clay creature didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.
It landed on Calvin with its elbows, pounding him in the chest and wrapping its cold wet hands around his neck. The creature wrenched the tomahawk handle from his grip. The not-a-man’s fingers were long and clammy, and Cal struggled to breathe as he fell.
The stink of mud and clay clogged his nostrils. He was being attacked by a river bottom.
Cal pushed, but the monster was stronger than him and it bore down, crushing his windpipe with its cold fingers. He stared up into the eyeless space where a face should be and saw only blank, merciless nothing. The mouth opened, showing only darkness, and hissing the vegetable stink of a swamp into Cal’s face. His own fingers dug into the moist clay of the not-a-man’s chest, scrabbling large slippery furrows but gaining no grip. He felt his lungs emptying and the skin of his neck beginning to tear.
He thought of his lariat, looped on his hip, but he couldn’t imagine it would hurt this enemy. Cal had no weapons that could do any damage to this thing.
He was going to die.
He heard Sarah running down the slope and he tried to call her off, but could only wave and gasp out useless choking sounds. He wanted her to run, to escape, Sarah his love, Sarah whom he could marry after all, because she wasn’t a Calhoun, she was a Penn, and Eldritch, to boot.
Sarah whom he would never marry because he was going to die under an avalanche of fighting mud-man.
Sarah, who was allergic to silver.
Silver and magic didn’t mix.
Cal’s head started to spin as he fumbled for his belt, and knew the rest of his life might be measured in moments. He dug into the purse, grateful that Obadiah Dogsbody hadn’t found it, and even more grateful for his own thrifty habit of saving.
His fist closed around several coins—at least one of them had to be silver. He pulled the fistful of change from his purse, and slapped it into the thing’s face.
Aaaaaaaaooooowwwarrragh!
The creature arched its back and howled, its humid, earthy exhalations filling Calvin’s lungs as it let him go and he was able to suck in air. His neck stung; he was bleeding.
The thing had eyes now, one in its forehead and one in its cheek, each formed by a dull silver Pennsland shilling and each spluttering and emitting a foul yellow smoke as the silver burned its way into the clay. Cal saw his blood on its fingers and shuddered at the nearness of his escape. The not-a-man reared back, clawing and slapping at its own head, and tumbled away down the hill.
Rraaagraaaaaaooggh!
Calvin swallowed cold night air into his chest and dragged himself to his feet. The second not-a-man, its balance recovered from tripping over Cal’s pack, hesitated. Cal scrounged another shilling from his purse and raised it over his head like a weapon. He just needed a sling, and he’d be King David Calhoun, shooting mudmen Philistines in the face with money.
“Git back, you…thing!” Sarah reached his side, and he was foolishly proud.
“Cal, what did you do?” she panted.
Waaaraaawraaaagh!
His vision firmed up and he stepped forward, threatening with his shilling. The wounded not-a-man disappeared into the trees, still bellowing in pain and scratching at its own head, and its companion hissed and then retreated, disappearing into the shadow.
Calvin grinned weakly and checked his purse. “Don’t be vexed with me, dear. I jest spent half our savings.”
* * *
Obadiah whistled a drinking song as he approached the camp: “To Anacreon in Heaven.”
Even just whistling the bawdy parts reminded him of his sweet poppet and brought a smile to his face. She’d rejoin him in camp soon, and he looked forward to it. He’d dawdled on his return path, in part because his foot still troubled him but also to give her more time and in the hope that they might arrive at camp together. He imagined holding her, being kind to her, giving her gifts, and receiving her tender smiles.
He’d released the Nashville men. They had protested strongly, especially the one named Angus, who had cursed a lot and threatened to go retake the girl. Obadiah had a hard time understanding their objections, but he had been firm, and pointed out that they’d already been paid, and their services were no longer needed.
Eventually they had given up trying and left. Angus, in particular, had fled in a full sprint.
Obadiah finished the verse verbally as he strolled into the firelight, “the myrtle of Venus wiff Bacchus’s vine!” In Obadiah’s absence, the Right Reverend Father had lit a small fire, but he had pitched no tent, and he sat on a fallen log in his tall black hat and his cloak, looking expectantly at his servant.
“Well?” Father Angleton asked in his high-pitched nasal whine.
Obadiah wanted to ward off any grumpiness on the priest’s part, and offered the last of the second wineskin to the priest. “Drink, Father?”
Angleton rose to his feet, brows knitted. “Obadiah, have I dreamed true? Have you failed me again?”
There was a dangerous edge to his employer’s voice, and Obadiah willed himself to be sober as he tamped the stopper back into the skin. “Nay, sir, I’ve ’ad mickle great success tonight.” He cleared his throat and spat into the leaves.
“You’re drunk, Obadiah Dogsbody, and you’re alone. Explain to me this great success you believe you’ve had.”
“Ah, aye.” Angleton would be happy once Obadiah had explained the matter to him. “I trow this must look a mite surprisink to you.” He straightened his back and collected himself. “I sent the men off, you see. An’ the wine—” he looked at it cheerfully, “I took it from the girl.”
“I don’t care about the men!” Angleton roared.
Obadiah shuffled back a step.
Angleton pressed forward, spittle flying out of his mouth with every word. “And I certainly don’t care where you got your wine! Where’s the girl? You remember the girl, don’t you? The girl with the deformed eye? The girl whose hair I bound into a lodestone so even you could find her? You took her drink apparently, so you must have seen her—where is she?”
“She be comink, she be comink,” Obadiah hastened to reassure his master. “I did see ’er, as you well wot was the plan, an’ she be comink ’ere. She’ll be ’ere by and by.” He smiled to put the Right Reverend Father’s mind at ease.
Angleton backed away from Obadiah, doubt in his eyes. “Is someone bringin
g her? Did you send your Nashville men to get her?”
That might have been a good idea. Obadiah could have gone with her, and then the Right Reverend Father wouldn’t be so nervous. “Nay, she be comink ’ere on ’er own.” He widened his grin. “Released wiffout bond, as a magistrate might say it.”
Angleton’s look of confusion faded and was replaced by a suspicious stare. He reached into his purse and pulled out a silver coin.
“Be that a gift, Father?” Obadiah was flattered. “You needn’t, sir.” Still, he held out his hand, rough palm up. It was starting to feel to Obadiah as if Yuletide had come early this year. He half expected to hear the firing of celebratory guns.
But Father Angleton reached up and pressed the money against Obadiah’s forehead. Obadiah was startled, but submitted. He felt nothing, other than the coolness of the coin on his face and the slight humiliation of being touched by his master in this fashion.
“Where’s the girl?” Angleton asked him.
“Blast an’ confound it!” Obadiah roared, surprising himself. “Wayland’s blood, but that scab-eyed wee witch hexed me!”
“Yaas.” Angleton’s teeth ground together. “The fault is mine. After your first failure, I should have gone myself. She defeated you completely, Obadiah.”
“That she did,” drawled a lazy mountain voice from outside the circle of the fire. Its owner was a tall Appalachee youth with a long Kentucky rifle crooked in his arm, its muzzle aimed not at Obadiah and his master, but near enough that it could be immediately brought to bear. “And I reckon she done a powerful job of it, too, from the gump look on your face as you was traipsin’ about the woods tonight.” The cracker spat into the brush.
Obadiah growled and reached for his the hilt of his broadsword—the man would only get one shot off with that rifle, and Obadiah calculated he’d likely miss, in the dark and the excitement, and then Obadiah would cut him down. Then Obadiah noticed several other long-bodied mountaineers lurking in the shadows, all armed with rifles, and he paused.
“’Erne’s teef,” he said, “but you be a right coward. Aye, ye be all a bunch of cowards, the lot of ye.”
“Says the armed desperado as goes about kidnappin’ girls,” rejoined the mountaineer. “But we ain’t here for no ruckus.”
“Be ye not?” Obadiah felt a curious hollowness inside, and it seemed to him Father Angleton’s hex-dispelling coin had taken something from him. Life was flatter, duller, harder than it had been ten minutes earlier.
“What do you want?” Father Angleton spoke up.
“Name’s Calhoun,” the rifleman said. “Shadrach Calhoun.”
“You won’t shoot me,” the priest told him. “I am chaplain to the Philadelphia Blues, and the personal confessor of the emperor.” He sounded as wary as Obadiah felt.
“We ain’t gonna shoot you,” Shadrach agreed. “You’re on Calhoun land, and we come to welcome you.”
“We’ll leave,” Angleton offered, his voice smoldering, and turned to go, but Shadrach swung his rifle up and stopped the man.
“No, you won’t,” he contradicted the priest. “Not yet. Every priest has e’er come onto Calhoun land, we ain’t let him leave without he preached us a sermon first. I reckon a half hour ought to do, so long as it’s a half hour of solid noisy hellfire and brimstone. Approximate, as I ain’t got no hourglass.”
“I can certainly preach to you about the Day of Judgment,” Angleton said sharply. Obadiah saw the fire in his master’s eyes and was a little nervous, even though the Right Reverend Father was snapping at the Appalachee. “The great and terrible day when all will stand naked before the Lord to be judged for our sins.”
“I reckon that’d be perfect.” Shadrach Calhoun he raised his rifle, pointing it at Obadiah, and his shadow-hidden companions all took aim as well, surrounding the strangers with a bristling hedge of firearms. “I reckon I’d git a great deal of benefit out of a noisy hellfire and brimstone sermon ’bout how we appear afore the Lord on Judgment Day. And I reckon it’d be especially effective iffen the preacher and the congregation—” he nodded at Angleton and Obadiah, “both demonstrated the finer theological points in dramatic form.”
Obadiah didn’t understand, but he had a sneaking suspicion that his evening was about to get even worse. “What do you intend?”
“Ain’t it obvious?” Shadrach drawled slowly, and then spat a great brown squirt at Obadiah’s feet. “I mean I want to hear this sermon, and I want you and the preacher both to be like the man said. Nekkid afore the Lord.”
“I only regret that you are not emissaries of Father Christmas instead, ma’am.”
CHAPTER SIX
Bill drifted back down the bluff and onto Smuggler’s Shelf feeling shaken. He had been troubled enough about the young frog’s death when the lad was a gallant nobody, and only reminded Bill of his own Charles; knowing he was the chevalier’s son made Bill downright uncomfortable.
He thrashed his way with both arms through a thicket of brittle reeds, boots splashing in thin mud, and emerged onto the sand.
Well, Bill would pay off his debts in the morning—later tonight, if he could find Etienne Ukwu—and then figure out what to do about the chevalier. Maybe nothing, maybe the chevalier wouldn’t know who had killed his son.
No, that was unlikely, given how publicly Bill had challenged the young man, and how he’d told the onlookers and the seconds that he, personally, William Lee, was affronted by the Frenchman’s attentions to his actress lover. That was more than unlikely, it was delusional.
Was this why Don Sandoval had insisted that Bill challenge his romantic rival in Bill’s own name?
Was Bill being set up?
Bill reached into the pocket of his coat and wrapped his hand around the grip of the pistol that was still loaded and primed, just in case.
He could simply apologize to the chevalier.
But dueling was a hanging offense, no matter how generally it was tolerated, and the chevalier was New Orleans’s chief officer of the law. Even if the chevalier himself didn’t come after Bill, how many of his gendarmes would get the notion they could curry favor with their master for the low price of a single bullet?
He could run. To the Ohio, or the upper Mississippi, or across the river to the lands of the free horse people.
But first he had to deal with the Spaniards.
Under Bishopsbridge, Don Sandoval and his two bodyguards waited in their yellow coats. In the moonlight and shadow, the yellow looked like sickness. They looked like three men covered in pus and vomit.
Don Sandoval sat on his horse and in front of him, blocking Bill’s path to his employer, stood the two bodyguards, hands on their belts. Bill sized up the two toughs and chose the one he’d kill first—the older one, the one who had probably seen more action and looked calmer.
“Twenty looeys, suh!” Bill called, keeping his voice as jocular as he could. He bowed slightly, sweeping his hat off with his left hand but keeping his eyes on the three men.
Don Sandoval raised a white handkerchief and dabbed at the corner of one eye with a mock tragic air. “Good-bye, Señor Dollar Bill.”
His men grabbed for their guns.
Bill didn’t bother to pull the horse pistol from his coat; he simply swung it up, still in the long pocket, and fired right through the fabric.
Bang!
The older bodyguard dropped in a fountain of blood, one gun snagged in his belt and the other leaping from his dead fingers into the night.
As Bill fired, he charged, and the world about him slowed. Don Sandoval yelled something in Castilian, struggling to keep mastery over his suddenly bucking mount. The surviving bodyguard, surprise registering on his face at the unexpected annihilation of his comrade, pulled his guns from his belt—
and Bill flung his broad brimmed hat, spinning it like a skipped rock, into the bodyguard’s eyes.
Bang! Bang!
Both the bodyguard’s pistols went off. His aim was spoiled by the hat in his face, but
one of the bullets hit Bill anyway; he felt it punch into his left shoulder and push him a little off-center, but Bill was a large man and his forward charge was not slowed. He crashed into the bodyguard with all his weight and all the strength in his legs pounding down behind his big, bony knuckles.
Bill’s aim was put off by the bullet, so he missed the man’s nose and pounded his jaw instead, and the Spaniard’s strangled cry of pain and the satisfying crack! made by the bone as he connected told Bill his attack had hit home.
Lucky hat.
The merchant’s mount got the better of him and bolted. The other horses followed, ripping out tethering stakes and galloping away.
“Damn you!” Bill whirled away from the flailing bodyguard. He hated to turn his back on an enemy who could still fight, but rage at his betrayal boiled within him, overwhelming cool trained fighting habits.
He threw himself at the body of the dead bodyguard, landing fully prone on the man with a jar that sent lightning bolts of pain from his own shoulder into his chest and arm. He gritted his teeth against the agony and jerked the pistol from the Spaniard’s belt. Resting his elbows on the dead man’s chest to steady his aim, he squinted at the retreating horseman, and shot the horse.
Bill was rewarded with a whinny of surprised pain and the sight of Don Sandoval hurtling from the animal’s back onto the sand, and then he heard the steel rasp of a blade being drawn behind him.
Bill threw himself sideways and the attacker’s knife slashed down into the corpse with a meaty thunk! The bodyguard shouted incoherently, spitting syrupy blood from his dangling mouth, and Bill spun on his shoulder blades to kick at the man with both his feet. The Spaniard was stooping low to free his knife, so one heavy boot smashed his jaw and the other caught him in the belly, sending him staggering away.
Bill risked a glance over his shoulder as he climbed to his feet; Don Sandoval was struggling to get up. Perfect. Bill drew his sword and faced the Don’s bodyguard, bloodied and unsteady on his feet.
If only he had reloaded his other pistol.