Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Gabriel wouldn’t let her drown. Not if he could stop it, anyway.

  Following her first instinct, she made herself comfortable in the middle of the road, the post-marker directly in front of her. The ground was sun-warmed but hard, and the dust clung to her skirt. She rested her hands on the ground, the grains of salt still clinging to her palms pressing into the dirt, then she lifted her left hand and made the devil’s gesture again, circling out and in toward her rib cage.

  “Show me,” she whispered. “Maleh mishpat.” She felt the words echo inside her ears, drumming like rain on the roof, washing through her body, and though she still didn’t recognize the language, she understood what the words meant. Fulfill justice. Be filled with justice.

  That time, she was half-prepared for the sensation of being spun, the ground under her backside cradling her even as it swallowed her, standing in the middle of the night, thick black clogging hunger need need hunger seeking taking swallowing consuming searching eyes eyes turning looking at her looking seeing her how hungry coming at her coming too fast too—

  The ground spat her back up, and something hit her hard, swooping her up and tossing her into the air, into a saddle. The reins were shoved into her hands, her fingers closing around them instinctively even as she struggled to open her eyes, and then she was moving, her body leaning forward, legs closing around Uvnee’s ribs, elbows tucking against her own body as the mare surged forward.

  Behind her, she could feel it, despite her pounding head and skitter­stop heart, the overwhelming sense of hungersearchingtaking reaching for them even as the horses galloped back down the road, instinct sending them fleeing from whatever had been woken in Clear Rock.

  The horses ran until they ran themselves out, gallop slowing to a trot, and then falling into a slow walk. Izzy could feel Uvnee’s chest blowing, her ribs rising and falling with a bitter rasp, and leaned her cheek against the mare’s neck, tears wetting the sweat-damped hide. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice cracking, not sure what she was apolo­gizing to or why. She had only a hazy memory of what had happened: the last thing she clearly remembered was Gabriel stalking away while she made herself ready to . . . to what?

  Her fingers were numb from clutching the reins and Uvnee’s mane, but she forced herself to ease upright, unclenching and stretching her fingers, and only then did she realize that Steady was stopped a few paces ahead of them, his proud head dropped, his rider leaning against his side, stroking his neck and making sure that all the straps and packs remained secured on his saddle.

  “You okay?” His voice was raspy too, and he didn’t turn to look at her.

  “I think so.” She risked looking behind them, although she knew that Gabriel would not have stopped if it wasn’t safe. The road behind them was clear, only puffs of dirt still swirling in the air. How far had they run? “It didn’t follow us.”

  “I’m pretty sure we didn’t outpace it,” Gabriel said, still petting Steady’s neck. “I don’t think it wanted to leave the town.”

  She thought of what she’d felt when she called up the storm, and shuddered. She should have tried to contain it, not call it out. Now it was there, awake, alert, and coiled inside the town, and she still had no idea what it was, or where it had come from—or why.

  As they watched, a small brown smudge came into view down the road, a familiar, irritated set to its ears. Despite herself, Izzy smiled, surprised at the relief she felt that had little to do with the return of most of their supplies.

  “We need to name the mule.”

  “What?”

  It seemed impossibly important now. “We almost left it behind, and it kept up. It deserves a name.”

  Gabriel turned his head just enough to look at the mule trotting toward them, then at Izzy, as though certain he’d told her this before. “His name’s Flatfoot.”

  “Flatfoot?” She shook her head, finding some refuge in teasing him, as though they hadn’t just barely outrun something terrible. “From the man who named his horse Steady, I should have guessed.”

  From the shaky grin he gave her as Flatfoot finally reached them, Izzy thought maybe Gabriel was taking the same comfort in their exchange.

  “Do you think . . . it’s okay to just leave it there like that?” She was surprised at how ordinary the question felt, as though they were discussing if they should make camp there or ride farther on.

  “First rule of the road, Isobel.” And just like that, his voice was serious again. “Don’t pick up more than you can carry. You tried, and you failed.”

  She winced, but he went on, relentless.

  “You almost got us killed. Or . . . whatever it did to everyone else in that town. And going back there to cut it off from the road, whatever you did back at Widder Creek, isn’t an option. It’s still there, it’s gotten a taste of you, and we are not getting within reach of it again. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” The mule had reached them now and rested its head against Izzy’s leg, pushing gently. She reached down to scratch its ear. “Sorry, boy,” she said to it. “I’m glad you didn’t get eaten.”

  “It’s just us out here, Isobel; we need to think of ourselves first. Supplies, some rest, get to our next destination. You can send a message back to Flood from there if it will ease your mind. And maybe they’ll know more there. Maybe word’s gotten out about what happened.”

  Izzy gave the mule’s ears one last scritch, then settled herself back into the saddle and gathered the reins again, letting Uvnee know it was time to walk forward. “I suppose.” The mule let out a groan but stayed at Uvnee’s heels.

  Gabriel was right. And yet the memory of that storm driving through the mountains itched at her, not letting her thoughts rest. Why had it come to Clear Rock? And how long would it be content to stay there? What was it?

  “How did I know how to do that?” was what came out of her mouth instead. “I mean, I, that was—”

  “You took the devil’s Bargain; you expect nothing to change?” His voice, though gentle, carried a hint of both scorn and amusement. “You see things when you take the road. Things you can’t explain, things you don’t understand. Things nobody understands. Just the way the Territory is.”

  “It’s not like that outside?” Beyond the devil’s hold, she meant. Across the River in the States; over the Knife in the Spanish lands.

  Gabriel snorted, unamused. “If so, I never saw it. You cross the river, and things are . . . different. The Territory has its own way of doing things. The dime store novels have that much right, at least. Though they paint your boss a little different.”

  “Oh?” Anything, anything to keep her mind off what they’d left behind.

  “They dress him up like a greenhorn dandy, all lace and flash.”

  Izzy tried to imagine the boss fancified like that and shook her head.

  Gabriel kept talking. “We call him the devil because they did first. The tempter, the deceiver. The bargain-maker. They don’t understand. Not him, not the Territory. Folk who come here, they’re mostly desperate. But when you’re born here . . .” He stumbled over his words, something he wasn’t saying, or didn’t want to say, she thought. “It’s hard to be anywhere else. Even the air feels wrong.”

  She had thought about leaving, hadn’t been able to fathom it. April—even unhappy, she’d seemed shocked at the idea of leaving. But her parents had left. Had they been born here? She’d never wondered before. “Why?”

  He shrugged, a casual motion that she could tell wasn’t casual at all. “You’d be best off asking your boss that, not me.”

  “But you—” She was about to ask about his time back East when Gabriel’s head went up, his gaze on something on the road ahead of them. Izzy tensed until she saw what had caught his attention. A man walking along the side of the road.

  They’d gone days without seeing anyone down in the grasslands. Finding some
one here in the hills? She understood why Gabriel tensed, but all she could wonder was if this man had come from Clear Rock, and if he could tell them what had happened there.

  “Stay behind me,” he said.

  “One man alone isn’t a threat.”

  “Bandits put out lures sometimes,” he said sharply, and she subsided, letting Uvnee drop back a pace. She remembered the four men they’d met the first day out, and how easily they could have been trouble if there hadn’t been a haint-bounty they’d wanted more.

  They kept walking, the horses moving faster than a man on foot, until they were near abreast with the stranger. He was tall and lean, dressed in drab-colored trousers and a long coat of the same hue, his head bare, sandy hair tousled and long. All in all, she thought, he was as unremarkable as the rocks on either side of them, and colored much the same. Then he turned to face them, and Izzy took back all her previous thoughts. His skin was rough like a man who’d spent his life in the wind and sun, his nose a sharp beak, his forehead a high dome, and the eyes that studied them were as dark and deep as the earth itself.

  The smile that he flashed them, though, was that of a predator, a coyote upright on two legs. “Well met, well met indeed, on this dusty and not quite so deserted as I’d thought road! Well met, my friends.”

  “I’ve no claim to call you friend,” Gabriel said, his chin lifting, “and you none to so name me.”

  The stranger blinked, but the smile didn’t waver, and something prickled all over on Izzy’s skin, some sense of things not right. Nobody should be that friendly out there, particularly not when Gabriel had been rude in return, not unless they were up to no good. Even green to the road, she knew that.

  The stranger cocked his head, gaze still intent. “You are riders on the dust road, not marshals nor brigands but honest souls. Why should we not be friends?”

  The burn on Izzy’s left hand flared as he spoke, almost as though someone’d touched her palm with a hot brand, and her hand clenched into a fist, then released, dropping limply against her thigh. She knew, even the moment Gabriel named the stranger.

  “Honest souls have no truck with magicians.”

  “If you ever see a magician, run. Do not pause, do not speak, by all that you value, do not catch their attention, just run.”

  Izzy stiffened her spine against the shock and watched the magician warily. She was the Left Hand of the Devil and she would not run. But she was no fool, either, to think the creature in front of them harmless—or even benign. She knew what the common folk whispered about magicians, that they’d sold their soul entire to the devil for the power they held, that the things they could do were a twisting of power for evil.

  The boss had set them straight on that late one night. Two magicians had been causing a ruckus northward in the Territory, so much decent folk got tired of it and sent a rider for the boss to put things right. Only, the boss said he didn’t have any hold on magicians, any more than he did on demon. “They are what they are,” he’d said, leaning back in his chair, toying with the cigar he’d cut and lit but never drew into his lungs, watching it burn down bit by bit. “Like wind and drought, you live through ’em, you don’t control ’em. Trying’s pure foolishness. Just be polite if they look your way, and eventually they’ll get bored and move on.”

  The magician was looking clear at them, and Gabriel had already been rude. Izzy’s thoughts were razor-sharp, rain-clear, aware that she couldn’t trust anything she read, aware that everything hinged on this moment. Polite, perhaps, but she’d learned that polite and the road didn’t always ride together, and the magician hadn’t seemed to take offense at Gabriel’s words. . . .

  “What do you want of us?” she asked.

  Sandy eyebrows raised, mock surprise. “Why do you assume I want anything?”

  The mule snorted, a rude, wet sound, conveying Izzy’s own disbelief perfectly.

  “Perhaps,” the magician went on, “I merely seek companionship on the road. Seeing as how darker things have begun traveling it.”

  Her eyes narrowed, the razor of her thoughts cutting clean through his words. “And would you know anything of that darkness?”

  “No more than you, devil’s daughter,” the magician said. “Oh, yes, I know you, or know the mark you wear, at least. You have the smell of your boss about you.” He lifted his nose and sniffed once, a showy affair, and then tilted his head and smiled at her, though his eyes remained dark and still. Dangerous eyes, she thought again. Not a coyote—a wolf.

  As though hearing her thoughts, that smile this time showed too many teeth. “I bear no grudge against the Master of the Territory, little Hand. I am not your foe.”

  She could feel Gabriel’s tension, and the way he waited for her to respond. “I believe you,” she said, finally. “But I don’t trust you.”

  “You’d be a fool if you did, and I would lose all respect for you. But there are weaker links that have bound allies before.”

  “Allies in what?” Gabriel asked, suspicion in his voice. She might halfway believe the magician when he said he meant no harm, but her mentor didn’t.

  “In discovering the source of the darkness,” the magician said, as though that ought to have been obvious to a child. Dark eyes narrowed, staring at her. “You know of it. You have seen it?”

  There was something hungry in the magician’s voice, and Izzy forced herself not to give way before it. If he was a wolf, then she would be a horse, or better yet a buffalo, and he would beware her hooves.

  “What do you know of it?” she asked in return.

  “That it chills the wind and trembles the earth, disturbs the bones. But I do not know the what of it nor the why. I would know these things.”

  There was a hunger in his voice, naked and unashamed, and some sense of him was clear to her then.

  “I am Isobel,” she said abruptly. Gabriel might object, but the magician offered them no obvious threat and spoke of things that she had seen in her vision, that had scratched and worried at her thoughts. For that alone, she wanted to keep him near. “My companion is Gabriel.”

  “Farron Easterly.” And he made a sweeping bow, long limbs surprisingly graceful, his hair falling over his shoulder before he flicked it back. “A fortuitous meeting, indeed.”

  Magicians took their surnames from the winds, the boss said. Eight winds, each with their own strengths—and weaknesses. But he’d never said what those weaknesses might be, and she had never thought she’d need to know.

  “You’ll need to walk if you travel with us,” Gabriel said, accepting her decision but clearly not pleased with it. “The mule already bears a load.”

  The magician—Farron—took no visible offense. “I shall endeavor to maintain the pace, to avail myself of your companionship.”

  And then he smiled again, a too-wide, too-pleased grin, and Izzy thought she might have made a mistake.

  Letting the magician tag along had been a terrible idea.

  Gabriel paused while unsaddling his horse, took off his hat, and rested his forehead against Steady’s neck, gathering strength from the solid muscle and calm breathing. He’d called an early halt to the day the moment they’d come to an acceptable place to set up camp, although “acceptable” meant only that they’d gotten far enough away from Clear Rock that he no longer felt overly twitchy.

  But at least one cause of his unease had come with them, striding alongside the mule with a pace no human could maintain, cool and talkative as a crow.

  Magicians were dangerous. Unpredictable. You avoided them; you didn’t travel with them. And if one of them asked to travel with you, you took off in the other direction; you didn’t say yes! What had Isobel been thinking?

  “Damned if I’ll ever understand women,” he said under his breath, aimed only for Steady’s ears. “And girl-women least of all.”

  The magician chuckled softly behind him, an
d Gabriel jumped, his hand already on the grip of his knife before he gained control of himself again.

  “Your mistake is in thinking of her as a woman.”

  He turned, leaving his hand on the weapon, and stared at the magician. “Beg pardon?”

  “She is female, assuredly. Subject to all the ills and frailties of that flesh. But she is also the Hand, rider. You have no understanding of what that means.” The magician looked up at the sky, not bothering to shield his face from the setting sun. “And neither does she.”

  The magician’s tone, half-mocking, half-thoughtful, didn’t help Gabriel’s mood. “And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell us.”

  The magician tilted his head and smiled brightly at him. “Now, where would the entertainment be in that?”

  Gabriel sighed. This had been a terrible idea.

  Isobel no longer required guidance when they set up camp, and he left her to it, moving away from the campsite only long enough to find a patch of nopales nearby, gathering enough of the flat, spiky paddles to griddle for dinner. It wouldn’t be particularly satisfying, but he’d survived on less, and worse, before.

  He knelt next to the area he had cleared for a fire, placing the coalstone in the center and asking it to burn. It stuttered slightly, then warmed under his touch, warning him to move away before flames emerged. Not that they needed much of a fire: the night promised to be comfortable after the day’s warmth, and they didn’t need a large fire to cook on, only enough to keep the night at bay.

  “The coalstone’s dying, isn’t it?” Isobel said, coming up next to him.

  “Coalstone don’t last forever,” he said. “I’d meant to trade for a new one when I could. But we seem to be having bad luck with that.”

  There was a weighted silence, then she asked, “Do you think that’s all it is? Bad luck?”

  He sat back on his heels and looked up at her, thought of how he’d first seen her in the devil’s saloon, hair pinned in a fancy knot, a pretty dress and a sweet, sly look on her face. The figure watching him now was sun-baked despite her hat, the tip of her nose and the stretch of her cheekbones darker than the rest, her eyes shadowed and tired, her hair a long, messy braid flipped over one shoulder, her hands ragged-nailed, holding not a tray or fine glassware but her knife and a whetstone.