by Alex Wells
There is a hole through the world. I stand at the bottom of the well.
Through the outwash of light, he made out stars, and they were not the stars in any night sky Tanegawa’s World had ever known, and the single moon that passed overhead was not either of the planet’s moons. He watched the stars wheel in fascination, season after season, and they did not behave as stars should in a universe where gravity was the law and mass was conserved. Air whispered down into the bottom of that well, a few molecules carried in molten threads of magma that glittered with planetsong in harmony with the one he had simply awoken one day knowing.
Too much. He began to disintegrate again, and he did not think he would find himself a second time. He retreated from the light and sound, to a distance where he could begin to think again and try on the concept of who am I for size. He rolled the idea of self over his fingers like knuckle bones and tested each configuration until one made sense to his addled perception.
The Bone Collector. That was right.
Through an unknown distance of time, over multiple branching paths, he smelled familiar blood, so much of it. Perhaps now, perhaps in the future, the two were indistinguishable to a mind filled with blue and light. He longed to lick it from the lucky grains of sand, even as the quantity of it filled the remnants of his human heart with unease.
He should wake up. Would wake up. Soon.
A soon of relative time.
Chapter Thirty
Coyote knocked on Hob’s office door and let himself in without waiting for her to say anything. Dust streaked his coat and fuzzed his black hair gray.
“You always do that?” she asked, looking up from the scuffed ceramic dinner plate on her desk. Twists of ash and melted bits of metal sat on it; she’d been practicing calling up fires and putting them out, making heat without flame. She had a notion to figure more out about her own witchiness, without Old Nick riding her ass. Damn, but she wished he would have let her pick his brain about it. He’d always had tricks up his sleeve for everything.
He shut the door, a slightly amused smile on his face. “Never bothered Old Nick.”
“I ain’t Old Nick.”
“I see that. Doing a bit of the…?” He wiggled his fingers at her, like a stage magician.
She snorted and shoved the plate onto a corner of her desk. “How’d the job go?”
“Smooth and easy. We… liberated the equipment. I also found a box of processors, thought we might see about upgrading the computers in the motorcycles a little.”
“Think they’ll be able to handle the heat and everything?”
“I handed them over to Hati and he said he’d get it all tested out before he sticks anything into a motorcycle that’s headed for combat. But the company doesn’t tend to send things out of Newcastle if they don’t think they can take a little rough handling.”
Hob nodded. “Good work.”
Instead of taking that as the signal to get going, Coyote sat down in the chair in front of the desk, stretching his legs out with a sigh. “You look pensive, boss.”
“Nice word for it.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the overflowing scrap of twisted metal Nick had always used as an ashtray, already flicking open the silver case with her other hand. The words of the government spy, Rollins, still haunted her: contaminated. She didn’t trust him, but she found herself believing that. It fit too many other things she’d seen from the company, and heard from the Bone Collector. Maybe voice of the world was a desert looneyman’s way of saying contaminated. “Yeah. I feel pretty damn pensive.”
“Want to tell me why? I think that’s the sort of thing I ought to know, if you’re going to saddle me with this second-in-command job.”
“Didn’t hear you complain at the time.”
“It would have been a stupid idea to question your authority just then. You looked liable to shoot someone.” He gave her a wide-eyed look, the light catching the odd green flecks in his eyes – which brought to mind other eyes she’d seen lately, brown with the same green flecks, under black hair. Though the man’s face hadn’t looked anything alike.
“You got any brothers?” she asked, leaning back on the chair.
Coyote’s face went dark, his expression closing off in an instant. “Rude.”
“I don’t mean to pry just for the sake of bein’ nosy. Just saw someone when I was out and about yesterday, looked an awful lot like you.”
Coyote shrugged. “I don’t come from Tanegawa’s World. If I did have any siblings, for the sake of argument, I don’t think you’d be likely to see any of them here.”
“Fair enough.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?” His gaze flicked to the ash tray. “You seem to be… thinking quite a bit.”
“Ha, no, was just a point of curiosity.” She lit her new cigarette with a snap of her fingers, took a long drag as she leaned back. “You comin’ from off world, though… folk out there even heard of this place? Give two shits about it?”
Coyote shrugged. “It cropped up in the more… yellow news from time to time, all sorts of conspiracy nonsense, particularly since it’s a company world and connected to the wealthiest corporation the galaxy’s ever known. But you get stories like that every other week in the tabloids, this or that lost colony world, only in this new one we’ve exclusively found, all the humans have evolved in the last centuries to be part lizard and they all have tails, isn’t it startling. It’s all bollocks. Why?”
Hob shook her head. “Still rollin’ it around in my brainpan.” If there were hundreds of other worlds like this one, they probably had all the same problems. Maybe there were government spies crawling through all of them, asking snippy questions, but she somehow doubted it. “Found out the next several places the witch hunt’s goin’, and I’ve a mind to poke my nose in at the next town they’re set to hit. Tercio.”
Coyote gave her a look of disbelief. “Considering you’re pretty damn witchy yourself, that strikes me as a bad idea.”
“Company won’t be there in force for three days.” When his eyebrow went up, she shrugged one shoulder. “I got sources.”
“Good for you. Taking after Old Nick already, I see.” The sarcasm in his tone was thick enough to paint a wall. “Is there a job to be had?”
Hob sighed. “Not somethin’ that would bring in money. I feel like I should go, see if there are witchy folks around, and get them the hell out.” It still gnawed at her, the way Nick had tried to call witchy folk kin of a sort, then in the next breath say they couldn’t be helped. She’d seen a pile of regret on his shoulders she didn’t intend to pick up along with his old coat. She had enough regrets of her own already. Maybe some day, she’d have to draw the line between an us and them, but if Rollins was right and everyone was contaminated, there wasn’t much them left except for TransRift.
“And where would you take them, once you have them out?”
“Different town. Or maybe take ’em by Pictou, see if the Bone Collector has a place for them first.” But if he was gone… no, she told herself, asleep. Thinking anything darker made her stomach ache.
“I don’t know much about the Bone Collector, so I’ll just have to assume that would work. But how do you propose to find these people? No one advertises this. It’s too dangerous.”
“I don’t know. Again. People in Tercio have heard of us. I thought mayhap if we showed our faces, some might come and find us in the hopes of savin’ their own hides.”
“It’s possible, I suppose.”
“But.”
“Which ‘but’ in particular are you thinking about?” He laughed. “There’s so many to choose from.”
“It’s not a job. It ain’t for money.”
Coyote sat up, leaning forward. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Hob. As long as there is pay when the end of the week rolls in, you send us to do whatever you think needs to be done and no one needs to be the wiser.”
She frowned. “Don’t seem all that honest.”
“We work f
or you. Just like we worked for Old Nick, when all was said and done. This isn’t only a job. We live where we work. We have to keep it a place that we want to call home.”
And have to be able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning. Some of the men probably weren’t overly burdened with conscience, but she planned to hold on fiercely to what shreds she had. She’d suffered too much and too personally at the hands of such men to want to become like them. “There’s money enough for now. I’ve got another job I can send a crew on tomorrow that’ll bring in a big payout. Escort across the hardpan, black market. Small crew to Tercio ain’t but a drop in the bucket.”
“Then pick your men and get going. It’s a long ride.”
“You gonna come?”
“You call the shots.”
She pinched her cigarette off. “Me, you, Freki, Geri. Four-man crew ought to be more’n enough. Don’t want anyone thinkin’ we’re rollin’ in to invade or nothin’. Go let ’em know?”
“Want me to tell them what it’s about?”
“Do it. Freki and Geri grew up with me. They got no problem with witchiness.”
Coyote smiled. “We all served under Old Nick, you realize. And I don’t think a man among us missed your little display when you stepped into his place, if he’d somehow managed to ignore every other bloody time one of you played with fire. Perhaps we deserve more credit than you give us.”
“I got a naturally suspicious mind, I guess.” Habit ingrained by the paranoias of Old Nick. How much of his paranoia had been similarly ingrained, and how much of it learned? She’d never know. “You’re right. I ain’t bein’ fair.”
He held his hands heavenward for a moment. “It must be the end times. A Ravani just admitted to being fallible.”
Hob snorted. “Get the fuck out of my office.”
“That’s more like it.”
* * *
It was a long ride to Tercio, one that required they stop for lunch in a dune field. Then they were off into a stretch of canyons floored with hardpan, steep walls on either side and long flats that stretched straight for kilometers. Tercio was built into the wall of one wide, dry canyon, some buildings carved into the rock, others sprawled out around it to take best advantage of the shade. It made the town strangely linear, long but narrow. Tercio was an older town, at least three times bigger than Rouse.
Early evening shadows engulfed Tercio as they came to the gate. No guard hailed them. That alone had Hob’s shoulders singing with tension as Freki went around to one of the side doors and jiggered it open so he could let them in.
The streets just inside the gate were empty. Geri started to say something, but Hob pulled her helmet off and signaled the others to do the same. The mine works were silent, not even the normal rattle and clank of the chain drive for the cars. The air sang with tension, the sound of a gathered crowd thunder in the distance. Hob tilted her head, listening, and then pointed south, away from the mine, toward the church steeple tipped with a frilly iron cross.
People filled the street near the church, too numerous to fit in the square. The Wolves drifted in as close as they could on their bikes, better for a quick getaway, but parked before the crush got too tight.
A scaffold rose above the crowd, nooses hanging from it. The sight made Hob’s blood run cold. People in the towns weren’t supposed to have guns; that was for the security men. So when they wanted to execute someone without involving Mariposa directly, they tended to get downright old-fashioned about it.
Hob scanned the crowd, signaling the three men to fall in behind her. She didn’t like leaving the motorcycles unguarded, but as tense as the crowd was, she wanted her men watching her back. She caught a glimpse of the conductors of this mob over the heads of the mostly shorter people: on the steps of the church, the town’s preacher with his mouth open and angry, and a man with a crew leader’s stripe on his shirt sleeve.
She saw a little clear area not far from the scaffold, three people surrounded by some burly miners, and forged that way, applying elbows and knees as needed. There wasn’t a swatch of green Mariposa uniform to be seen; they’d probably retreated to the guard shack as soon as they smelled the crowd turn ugly. And if this was to do with the witch hunt, they probably had orders to not interfere with such things.
Closer now, she made out the preacher’s words over the rumble of displeased talk, things about not suffering a witch to live. Some in the crowd nodded along, but most looked grim, unhappy, like this was a thing that had to happen, but they didn’t like it one bit. Good. Grim could be reasoned with, if she talked fast enough.
“Oh, I don’t like the look of this,” Coyote murmured.
“You ain’t the only one,” she said back.
“Play it smart, boss. We don’t have a big enough gun to punch a decent hole in this crowd.”
Two of the three people in the circle were miners: a young man with floppy brown hair barely more than a boy, and a grizzled oldster that had a scar puckering his chin. The third was a brown-skinned young woman with black hair and dark eyes, her frame ill fed and ragged. More important was the fact that her tattered clothes looked like something out of a farming town – if you dragged them through the desert for a week – so she probably wasn’t from Tercio.
Hob shouted, “There you are!” and pointed at the young woman. “I been lookin’ all over for you.” She tried to shove past one of the guards, then got shoved back in return.
Geri caught her like it was just part of the plan, pushed her upright, and then grabbed the miner by the shirt. “You watch who you’re gettin’ rough with,” he snarled.
“That’s my cousin you got there,” Hob shouted. “The fuck you people doin’ to her?”
Silence spread through the crowd as soon as the commotion started. The preacher man paused on the church steps, glancing at the crew leader, who yelled at Hob, “The hell do you think you’re doin’?”
She turned to face him. “I come to your damn town to pick up my cousin, and you got her all trussed up like some kind of criminal. The fuck is wrong with you?”
“She don’t look much like you.”
“An’ I’m sure all your goddamn cousins are your spittin’ image,” Hob retorted.
The preacher interjected, his tones all smooth and round, “The woman has been accused and found guilty of witchcraft. She hasn’t said a word in her defense.”
Hob glanced at the young woman. Her eyes were huge, her expression confused. But subtly she pointed to her throat, gave a little shake of her head. Hob looked back at the preacher, “That’s ’cause she’s fuckin’ mute, ya moron!” Someone near her laughed; she took it as a good sign.
“She has still been convicted–”
“Of what? You seen her turn someone into a frog? Light a thing on fire with the power of her mind? Fly through the air? What’d you see?”
“She has an unnatural air to her,” the preacher said, drawing himself up.
“An unnatural air? Are you fuckin’ serious?” Hob laughed. “You just want to fuckin’ hang her ’cause she’s a stranger, right? You think she’s an easy target ’cause she got no kin here?”
There was a hurried, whispered conversation between the preacher and the crew leader. Then the crew leader yelled, “Let her go with her cousin. But you better get her the hell out of my town, right now.”
One of the miners grabbed the woman and all but threw her at Hob, then scrubbed his hands on his pants like he was wiping away dirt. Hob caught her; the woman was shaking like a leaf, her face gone so pale her skin looked almost yellow. “You go with Freki now,” Hob murmured to her. “Nice and slow. He’ll keep you safe.” She nodded to Freki, and then looked back up toward the preacher. From the corner of her eye she could see Freki hustling the girl through the crush, shouldering anyone out of his way who didn’t move smart enough. “We’ll be out of here in short order, don’t you worry one bit. So much for the goddamn hospitality in Tercio. We’ll be lettin’ the whole damn world know.”
> A miner nearby frowned. “Hey, it ain’t like that. Times are hard.”
“Times aren’t ever that hard,” Coyote, still at her shoulder, remarked.
Hob pointed back at the two men still being held. “And what’d they do, by the way? They got an unnatural air about ’em too?”
“Ellis stands accused of lighting fires. Harding brought down lightning on the town.”
“So what, Harding here was walkin’ around when some lightnin’ struck? Ellis been around a couple of fires ’cause he’s careless with his cigars?”
“We don’t have to answer to you!” the preacher shouted.
“No, you gotta answer to your god, and I hear he’s got a warm place for liars!” she shouted back. Someone grabbed her by the collar. In a flash she had her revolver pressed under the stubbly chin of a man much brawnier than her. “You better think real hard about the way you want the next five seconds to go,” she said to him.
He let her go and Geri shoved him away, but she kept her revolver out, let the people around her see the bone butt on it. “In case you ain’t figured it out yet, I’m the new Ravani. And you know that means I ain’t gonna stand by and let a couple of innocent folk dance at the end of a rope just ’cause you’re scared of your own damn paymasters.” It was one hell of a line to draw, and Old Nick was probably spinning in his grave. Or who knew, maybe he was smiling up from hell because she’d been goaded into doing a thing he’d never had the guts to do himself.
“The Weatherman is coming in the next few days. More than just those two will die if we don’t take care of them first,” the crew leader said. “Father Matthew could tell they were the ones the Weatherman would take. God guided him. We don’t have a choice.”
“You got a choice. You always got a fuckin’ choice. Give ’em to me. I ain’t scared of the Weatherman.”