Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Gabriel grimaced and turned away from both the man and the comment.

  “Whatever the devil promised you, he cannot change that,” the magician said, and for the first time, there was neither mockery nor threat in his voice. “He cannot change what you are. And he has no wish to.”

  “I know.”

  Gabriel left the magician standing in the gloaming and went to the fire circle, where Isobel had gathered a handful of twigs and small branches, waiting for him to set the new coalstone he’d acquired in the mining camp. It was smaller than his old one and twice as expensive, but it did the trick.

  “You should have your own,” he said, kneeling to light the kindling. “A rider should always have the means to make fire, unless you’ve learned to snap your fingers and make it spark?”

  Her smile was a faint, wan thing. “Looking to be rid of me soon?” Her voice was low, and she was not looking at him, staring instead into the slender, flickering flames.

  He sighed, sinking back onto his haunches. “No. And even were we not on the trail of this thing, not for some weeks yet—I’ve not taught you nearly as much as I should have by now, and letting you out on your own would disgrace my name.” The fact that they’d been distracted and beset for much of that time was no excuse, nor were her own surprising—not surprising, but startling—abilities. Not the first time, Gabriel cursed the devil for sending them out unprepared, ignoring the fact that Isobel was, in fact, no less prepared than any other novice. No other novice was asked to do the things she was asked to do.

  If the devil had known what waited for her . . .

  “I’ve been thinking.” Her voice was low, and she still wasn’t looking at him, but her fingers were no longer tightly clenched, and her shoulders were not hunched forward. He took that for progress.

  “Yes?”

  “The boss didn’t tell me anything. He threw me at you, threw me out on the road, and didn’t tell me anything. Not about what I should be doing, not about . . .”—she made a vaguely desperate gesture at herself—“any of this. Why?”

  He’d just wondered the same thing, so he had no answer for her. Even if the trouble they’d found was unexpected, had the devil not known what would wake in her? That sort of carelessness seemed impossible, and yet the alternative, that he had intentionally not told her—

  That felt right, actually. Cold, harsh, possibly cruel, but right. The Territory was no gentle place, and its lessons were equally harsh.

  “I think . . .” He wasn’t certain, but he had to say something, not leave her sitting there, looking at him like that. “I think that there are things we need to learn on our own, that being taught, or being told . . . it wouldn’t stick. Or we’d take the wrong path because we already knew what lay down the other.” That scratched uncomfortably close to home, striking the same sore place the magician had already touched tonight. No one had warned him. Would he have listened if they had?

  “So, he didn’t say anything because . . . you needed to learn on your own, not what he said was best, not what someone else had done, but what you would do?”

  She drew sharp, shaky breath in, and he thought maybe something he’d said had been right or close to right.

  She was sixteen. Never mind the law, she was too young to commit to anything, much less this. Too young to be so ruthlessly broken, her confidence, however foolish, destroyed, only so the devil could remake her. He bit his tongue and waited.

  There was a faint rustle of grass, and the magician sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, his face lit by the fire, yet still in shadows.

  She looked up, and Gabriel was struck anew by the fineness of her bones, strong under sun-weathered skin, and thought again that she would become a handsome woman. And a terror with it, he thought with no little pride. If she survived.

  “I could have done anything, gone anywhere,” Isobel said. “But I chose this. I chose . . . this.” Her right hand made a gesture, fingers spread, making a half circle from her stomach, her thumb pointed inward. “Never mind that I chose for the wrong reasons, not understanding . . . not knowing. I made my Bargain.”

  And at that, she’d had more freedom than he. Gabriel tried not to be bitter over the fact.

  “And?” The magician leaned back, comfortable as though there were a wall to support him, and rested his hands on his knees. “Why should I care?”

  “You . . .”

  “I can’t help you in this. I can’t guide you or mentor you or whatever lies they tell you any more than your companion over there can.” His voice had no gentleness in it, the sharp crackle of fire, the cold cut of winter’s wind. “Whatever you call it, witchcraft or medicine, it’s power you hold, and there is one truth of power, Isobel Devil’s Hand. And that is that there is no moderation, no easement, no gate to shut. You set your fingers to the bones, stirred the dust, and breathed it in. Now it will remake you as it sees fit.”

  “The boss . . .”

  “What is your boss, little rider? Understand that, and you will understand yourself.”

  Gabriel shifted, intentionally making noise, and they both looked at him, the tension breaking enough that he could breathe again. “That sort of thinking is better done rested and on a full stomach. Farron”—the name felt odd in his mouth, as though speaking it gave the magician more heft than he’d had before—“we’ll need fresh water to soak the beans.”

  He couldn’t see the magician’s face, but his voice painted a picture of eyebrows rising high in surprise. “You’re sending me to errand-boy to find a creek?”

  “Or you can conjure some out of the air; I don’t have a particular care,” he said. “Just do it.” He was going over their supplies in his head, counting what they had left from De Plata, feeding three instead of two. “I’m going to go set some traps, see if we can have fresh meat in the morning. Iz, build up the fire and bury—”

  “Bury the potatoes and toast the bread. I know,” she muttered, and for a moment it was just the two of them again, with nothing more required than preparing a meal and getting a good night’s sleep.

  “And use the last of the molasses,” he warned her, “before it turns on us.”

  She smiled at that, as he meant her to, while he moved away to see what he could do about the morning’s meal.

  Everything else would wait until they had some sleep tucked under their ears. He hoped.

  Isobel woke before sunrise, her body slipping from sleep to wakefulness with ease. She breathed in and opened her eyes, the trails of starlight overhead casting the world in a silvery light.

  A faint movement caught her eye: a tall shadow a ways from camp, performing a slow, graceful routine. Her lips shaped his name: Farron Easterly. To her left, across the faint glow of the coalstone, Gabriel slept, a blanket-covered lump, but she knew that the faintest unfamiliar noise would wake him, alert and armed.

  “What is your boss, little rider? Understand that, and you will understand yourself.”

  Farron’s words had followed her into sleep, but she had woken with no more clarity. She thought of all the things she had taken for granted, living under his roof. The Old Man. The devil. Powerful enough to claim the entire Territory, to keep truce with native tribes for generations, to give dearest hopes and darkest desires for a price. . . . She had lived her entire life under his roof and never once wondered what he was.

  She thought now of his ever-shifting face, how his eyes could be gentle one instant and cold the next, how he never need raise his voice to be heard everywhere, over anything. She thought of his hands dealing cards, shuffling decks, curled around his glass, holding the cigar he never smoked, the sweet smoke rising into the air.

  The Devil’s Hand. His Left Hand. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, watched the silver ring glint as it caught the starlight, thought of the signet ring on the boss’s left hand, to match Marie’s, and imagined it on her ow
n. A tool. A pawn. Not Izzy any more, not really.

  They called him the devil because he offered temptation, Gabriel’d said. Outside the Territory, they said that. Inside, he was the boss. The Old Man. But what was that?

  Understand that, and you will understand yourself.

  Gabriel threw off his blanket and sat up just as the first rays of light stretched into the sky, and the horses stamped their feet, grumbling for food.

  First things first. Deal with what the storm had blown in, stop it from harming anyone else, and then she could worry about all the rest.

  Assuming there was a rest to worry about then.

  “It’s not as easy travel, but if we head across here, we’ll pick up the road to the high plains,” Gabriel was saying. He had a map open against the saddle, smoothing the weathered canvas, but he wasn’t looking at it; she knew he’d more maps in his head than could ever fit in a saddle roll, and she wondered how many years he’d had to ride the roads to learn them like that.

  He saw her frowning at the map and said, “It’s as much knowing as it is remembering, Iz. A rider’s trick; nothing special about it. You feel the road, you ken where it is under you?”

  She let her thoughts drift a moment, feeling the now-familiar, reassuring hum of the road below them, then nodded.

  “Follow it.”

  Reach down and sense the sense of the road itself, he meant. Touch the presence that made a road a road instead of a trail or a path or . . . well, an ordinary road, the way she’d always thought of it before. She hesitated, remembering the exhaustion of the day before, then firmed her courage. A rider’s trick, Gabriel called it. He could do it, Devorah could do it, therefore she could do it. This was nothing compared to what she had already done.

  She closed her eyes, trusting Uvnee to keep them steady, and let herself slip down, from neck to shoulders, down to hips, knees, into her heels, and then pouring from her soles, toes tipping forward in the stirrups as though to reach for the ground beneath them, aware of the round warmth of Uvnee’s belly under her legs, the warm sun overhead, the delicate, crisp breath of the air on her skin, the distant thumpthumpthump pulse of the road neither welcoming nor warning but simply being, endless rolling miles coiling in and out, a pattern on the Territory she could only barely begin to see.

  This wasn’t like tracking the storm or searching for their lurker. The air pressed against her skin, and the stone drew her in, and underneath the pleasure those sensations brought, she vaguely remembered she was meant to do something, see something, understand . . . The high plains. She was supposed to be finding the high plains from where they were, see the map . . .

  Oh. There. Suddenly, Izzy understood why Gabriel refused to explain so much: there was no way to describe the sensation. It didn’t happen, it had already happened; the knowledge didn’t arrive, it had always been in her, waiting for her to understand.

  Was this how he found water, too? Was it simply a matter of knowing to find?

  The thumpthumpthump drew her in, a sensation of slipping, falling forward but not falling at all, being drawn neither swiftly nor slowly but as though one heartbeat lasted forever. She was in Uvnee’s saddle, her legs pressed against the horse’s bulk, the air on her cheeks and sweat on her scalp under the brim of her hat, the low sound of Gabriel’s voice saying something, and she was leagues away, running straight and flat, the air thin and brittle, hoofbeats and wings, the low sound of a man chanting and women speaking in languages she did not know, the softness of clay and the brittle taste of snow still on the mountains.

  She could follow it further, she knew. Instead, she drew back, cautious of wandering too far, losing her way back. She followed Gabriel’s voice, the smell of leather and horse, the feel of the reins sliding through her fingers. She opened her eyes and looked up, felt the road continue on under Uvnee’s hooves, felt herself drawn forward without conscious design, the thumpthump in her veins. Something was on the road ahead of them, something that should not be there, something that offended.

  And then she was snagged with knifepoint talons, dragging down her arm, yanking her to the side. A snake’s hiss in the wind, the shift of rocks and the high amused howl of a coyote under the scream of a Reaper hawk, and under it all the soft shhhplash of water over rocks, the low chant of words she didn’t understand, the smell of the boss’s cigar, and the flickerthwack of cards laid down on the felt.

  Who is your boss, Isobel?

  She almost understood, almost, and the scream of the Reaper became a man’s voice, high and pained, and the connection broke as Uvnee started under her and Gabriel swore. They both pushed their horses into a forward trot, Gabriel in the lead this time, Steady guided by his legs while both hands were busy loading his carbine with skill Izzy would have admired some other time. She was too busy now, pulling the longer knife from its saddle sheath, feeling the handle warm in her grip and wishing they’d had more than a handful of lessons in how to fight from saddleback. Strike away, not in. Keep the blade and the battle as far from Uvnee’s head as possible. If threatened, Uvnee will kick, he’d said; do not let her kick at you.

  And then they were on the scene, the source of the sense of offense, the should not be.

  Five men dressed in rough brown homespun. One down on the ground, curled in on himself—the one who had screamed?—and three others in ready position around him, wooden staffs held in a two-handed grip, while the fifth man grappled with their attacker.

  It should not have been a contest. The attacker was slender and pale, bare of any clothing save a clout around its nethers, hair the red of sunrise, long and loose like a girl’s, near to its waist and braided with white feathers that fluttered as it moved, limbs twisting in ways more like a snake than a man, impossible to contain.

  Izzy gasped, pulling Uvnee up too hard. That pale skin glittered, like icicles melting. Her knife would do no good here, nor Gabriel’s gun. But Gabriel was out of the saddle, flinging himself on the combatants, and she felt herself slip from her saddle as well, not to join the battle but to circle around, going to her knees next to the wounded man. He did not seem to be bleeding but gasped as though someone had knocked him in an unfortunate place. Izzy sat back on her heels, one hand on his shoulder, uncertain how to proceed.

  “Vade foedae rei, quaro monstrante spiritu malum!” the fifth man called, his voice low and frightened, shaking, his hand lifted to show something dangling from his fist. “Quo egressus es ex inferno, et vade ad excutiendam!”

  “That’s not going to work,” Farron told him dryly. The magician had caught up with them and now stood there, arms crossed, lips pressed together to stop a wolfish smile. The mule peeked from behind him, brown nose twitching as though it, too, wanted to laugh.

  Gabriel finally got his hands around the demon, then slapped the heel of his hand against the creature’s forehead, hissing something in its ear. The demon let out a cry, bitterness and outrage wrapped around an ululation, before collapsing in a thick cloud of white dust that left both Gabriel and the brown-garbed stranger coughing, covering their eyes and mouth.

  “Silver and threats,” Farron said. “Now, that works.”

  The demon gone, Izzy tried to check the injured man, to see if he’d taken any actual damage. But the moment she reached for him again, he scrambled out of the way, scooting on his backside as though she’d come after him with a heated poker.

  “You’re more terrifying to him than the demon,” Farron said, coming to stand next to her. He showed his teeth to the man next to her. “Ella no va a dañar su alma inmaculada,” he said. “Crecer un par ya. Oh wait,” he said, switching back to English. “You gave up your pair already, didn’t you?”

  “You’re no one to talk,” Gabriel said, tying the horses’ reins up and turning to look over the five men. “¿Quiénes soy y por qué estáis en el camino?”

  Spanish, Izzy recognized belatedly. He was asking them who the
y were and why they were on the road. But why . . . She looked over the men more carefully. They were staring back, eyes flicking from Farron to Gabriel, their eyes slipping over her oddly. They did not wear trousers but rather coarse brown coats belted at the waist, with hoods that could be pulled forward or—in at least one case—cowled around the neck. To the side, clearly cast there when they were attacked, were shoulder packs as long as a man’s back and braced with willow lattice where they hooked over the shoulder. They had no visible weapons save the staffs they still held at the ready, but Izzy could see they were tipped with iron at either end, and kept her hands visible, her body still, in case one of them should suddenly decide she too was a threat. Her gaze slid upward to the leather thongs around their necks, clearly visible against their cloaks. Not the devil’s double-loop nor the marshal’s tree, but— Her eyes widened. “They’re priests?”

  The boss was tolerant of folk crossing borders, but not so tolerant that he’d allow this.

  “Friars,” Gabriel said. “Not Jesuits—Spain’s not overfond of them these days. Too tolerant of the heresies, too well liked by the natives.” He pushed his hat back on his head and studied the men, his eyes narrowed. “Dominicans? Franciscans?”

  Izzy had no idea what Gabriel was asking, and a glance at Farron was no help: he’d gone back to folding his arms across his chest and leaning against some invisible support, smirking unbecomingly. “Does it matter?” he asked. “They’re no friends of yours nor mine. We should have let the demon eat them.”

  The friar who had been doing the actual fighting took a step forward at that, raising his staff, and Gabriel stepped between them, arms outstretched. “Pax, pax. Farron, close your mouth.” Then he turned to glare at the men in robes. “Not that I’ve any love for your kind, Spaniard or Church. Tell me why we shouldn’t call that demon back and let it finish you.”

  The men gathered together in a defensive clump as though convinced that Gabriel could, in fact, summon demon, and their leader glared back at Gabriel, although the way he swallowed told Izzy he was not as confident as he wished to appear.