by Bill Fawcett
Renault’s revolver lay near his hand, except that it was not his revolver, it was Thad’s. Where Renault’s gun might have gone I had no idea. From the weapon’s condition we assured ourselves that it had been discharged, one cartridge having been fired. I did not mention that I had seen Chet fire that round.
I admit I could not fathom what had happened, even knowing more about events than the townsfolk. Chet had somehow taken and hidden Renault’s weapon, had given Uncle Thad’s Colt to Renault, had persuaded the Frenchman to stand in the center of the room, had killed Renault with a silent shotgun, and then had fainted. I did what my ma and pa had taught me as a child, and I stayed quiet.
In all the confusion, Vasquez joined us. He and I took charge, gathering up Chet’s possessions and Uncle Thad’s gun. We conveyed Chet to our hotel and summoned a doctor. Not long after, French soldiers came, demanding to take possession of Chet. But the two of us, joined by Texas soldiers and then townsfolk, our guns outnumbering those of the Frenchies, persuaded the intruders to leave.
I will notify you when I know Chet’s fate.
Mr. Simmons informs me that I should end this letter with the words “your obedient servant,” and I have informed him that such words are not for men. So I will say instead that I am,
Chet’s friend,
Henry Pfluger
June 7, 1891
From Chester Lamb, Salt Creek, Republic of Texas
To Morris Levitt, Chicago, Illinois, United States
My dear Morris:
When I last wrote you, it was to let you know of my thoughts and activities the day before I was to die in a duel. After writing you, I prayed, then undressed and went to bed.
Some time later, I woke out of a fitful sleep with a thought fully formed in my mind.
The thought was the sum at the bottom of a column of numbers, except that the numbers were facts I had not hereto added together. I will remind you of some of them.
A hound who hated all men yet wagged its tail as Renault and Ma de moiselle Sophiepassedby.
The faintness of Renault’s voice, which required an effort to hear.
His lack of gallantry toward his ladies, his willingness for them to do all labor for him.
“He has never touched me.”
His lack of vulnerability to bullet or blade.
The ghastly image of Benjamin Franklin’s body, the metal mask shielding his features from onlookers.
The sum of these facts formed a new number, a new idea, and at that moment, I thought I knew how to defeat Renault.
Yet victory was not assured. My only assurance was that if I fled Salt Creek, or agreed to collaborate with Renault, then I would survive.
After a time, I determined that I could regard only with contempt the Chester Lamb who would decide in favor of assurance under those terms. I dressed in a hurry, took myself to Vasquez’s room, and knocked. He emerged, alert.
I told him my thought, and he assured me that pursuing it could not make his fate any more uncertain. I issued to him a series of instructions, some of them so ghastly that he had to fortify himself with another swallow of tequila. But he did dress and depart.
I returned to my chamber and commenced the task that would prevent me from joining Vasquez. I began to write. I wrote in haste and without consideration for style or brevity, for time was short.
Hours later, I collected the results of my labors in a pasteboard box, added my bottle of ink and a pen, and returned to my bed, where I was finally able to drift off to a short but restful sleep.
I awoke with the dawn and made preparations for what would be either my last day on earth or Renault’s. That is to say, I shaved, dressed, ensured that my derringer was loaded, and wrote a set of letters that would be posted in the event of my death. I descended and ate a hearty meal in the dining salon.
As I was drinking my last coffee, I saw Vasquez and Mr. Simmons through the window as they arrived on the buckboard. Simmons stayed with the wagon, his expression mournful, while Vasquez alighted. Moments later he was before me, grubby and weary but reporting success with every errand he had been charged to complete. As proof in part, he presented me with a bag containing Simmons’s shotgun and Thad’s Colt with its new grips.
The Kid joined us then. He tells me he has faithfully recounted all that he observed from that moment to the point I was carried to the hotel, so I will not revisit all those details.
You will recall that the Kid danced away from my table with the Frenchwoman.
In the moments after that, Renault stared at me again. “You have given us privacy so that you might accept my offer without that one overhearing?”
“No. Your offer is for men without honor.”
His face registered no disappointment. “Then you truly think I am in some danger.”
“I do,” I assured him. “Which I will demonstrate. But first, tell me—are you so fast on the draw that if I were to hold my weapons aloft, pointed at the ceiling, you could still draw and gun me down before I had you in my sights?”
“Yes.” There was no arrogance or even confidence in his tone. He answered as if I had merely asked him whether the sun was up.
“Will you, then, give me that small head start? Allow me to have my guns in hand so that I might die like a man?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. I am reaching for them now. I will not turn them on you until we are both ready.” So saying, I slowly withdrew Thad’s Colt from my pocket and held it pointed upward. I repeated the action with my derringer. “Would you mind if I cocked both weapons before we do this?”
He gestured like a host offering a sideboard full of delicacies. “Be my guest.”
“Thank you.” I cocked the Colt, then the derringer.
“Now, Monsieur Lamb?”
Instead of responding, I clamped my eyes shut and pulled both triggers.
I did not aim my weapons before doing so, and because I gave no hint that I was ready to be shot, Renault had not even begun to move before I fired. Tremendous reports sounded in both my ears from inches away, deafening me. The rounds from the weapons crashed into the ceiling—or so I assumed. I did not hear or see them do so.
I stood, knocking my chair back into the partition, and sidled past the Kid’s chair. Keeping my legs pressed against the tabletop so that I would always know where I was, I moved around the table, past Mlle Sophie’s chair, and sat where Renault had been.
He was not there now. There was, in fact, no warmth in the wood beneath me to indicate anyone had recently been seated there.
I waited for the gunshot that would kill me, all the while hoping it would not come. And it did not.
I set the guns aside on the table and dragged the manuscript box to me. My eyes still shut, I threw off the box top. Within, by touch, I located the bottle of ink and the pen I had placed therein. They lay atop the papers I had written the night before, and I also assured myself that those pages were oriented correctly.
By touch alone, I unstoppered the bottle, dipped in the pen, and scrawled two words at the bottom of the topmost piece of paper. I transferred that sheet to the bottom of the pile of pages. Then, by memory, I began reviewing the words I had previously written and those I had just added.
I have those pages still, so I can quote them exactly.
While the Baghdad Kid and Renault’s lovely companion continued their oddly graceful dance to music only they could hear, I maintained my grip on my firearms and smiled at my opponent. “I am as great a sorcerer as the one who made you, Renault,” I told him.
His tone remained indifferent. “Summoned me back from my reward, you mean.”
“Made,” I insisted. “And the final step in my own enchantment will be the pulling of these triggers, an action even you are not fast enough to forestall. No—do not move, for I have you at my mercy, and I know your secret.
“You are not real, Renault. You do not exist. Ah, I see by your expression that I have struck to the pink. Your maker created twelv
e ideas, gave them volume and color and motion, but you do not exist as a physical thing. That dog, Mustard, could not hear or see or smell you, hence it wagged its welcome only to Mademoiselle Sophie as she passed. You barely whisper—we lean close, anticipating words, and we hear them, but it is only our own attention that makes this possible. Were you to be alone, all alone, with no one able to perceive you, you would fade away to nothing, which is why one of your ladies is always present. It was the sad mistake of Benjamin Franklin that he discerned part of your nature, but not all—he did not realize that hearing you would doom him as much as seeing you, and so you slew him.”
He shook his head, a flicker of true fear beginning to manifest in his eyes. “Someone who is not real cannot kill—”
“It is the belief of your victims that kills them, not bullets that do not exist from a gun that is not real. As the faithful can sometimes bleed spontaneously from their palms, side, and feet in emulation of Christ’s suffering, your victims accept their deaths and so manifest bullet wounds— wounds which, if opened, would yield no bullets.”
He was silent. At such a time, I would expect a mortal man to demonstrate frantic thinking in search of a way out, but he did no such thing.
“But do not grieve,” I told him. “Life is not your state, and death is not your fate. As you are unreal, so you are imperishable. You simply go to a place where you can no longer do harm.” So saying, I pulled the triggers of my weapons.
A tremendous roar shook the saloon, buffeting my ears, and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. And in that moment, Renault faded away like a specter glimpsed from the corner of the eye as one awakens.
Renault stared about himself, his expression one of wonder.
The estate was not great of size. He could see it to its borders in all directions, marked by a battlement- topped stone wall so high and featureless that he knew he would never be able to climb it. He was trapped here, contained until the day he might be needed once more.
But to be bound in such a place . . . To the south of the grass- topped hill on which he found himself was a village tucked away in a well- watered valley in the rolling land. Distant voices of singing came to his ears. All around him, the slopes of the hills were covered with vines heavy with grapes. And on the hilltop to his north, a house—a mansion of many wings and stories, white walls reflecting the bright summer sun, roof capped with rust-brown slates richly contrasting in color with the vines.
Renault took it all in. Then, for the first time in the century of his existence, he allowed himself the shadow of a smile.
My ears ringing but my heart light, I touched the pasteboard box that now held Renault, his mysteries and his dangers, within. His fate was sealed, with the fate of his fellow paladins soon to follow.
I sat back to await the return of the bartender. A brandy would be my modest celebration. And perhaps a cigar.
At the very end of the page are the words I penned while my eyes were closed, their letters awkward and overlapping but legible:
THE END
I was in the act of stoppering the bottle of ink when a great weariness and darkness overcame me. I collapsed onto my manuscript box and lay as insensate as the dead.
Why did I falter so? I do not know—such matters are, for the time being, beyond me. It seems possible that the same mental exertions that allowed us to hear Renault’s words were duplicated in the act of imagining him out of existence, and stole strength from me much as a sudden illness might. I did discover later that Mlles Sophie and Laurette, the first outside with the Kid and the second back at Fort Cow, also collapsed at about the same moment, each of them taking a full day to recover.
In the first moments of my long sleep, other events I had set into motion transpired.
Behind the saloon waited Vasquez and Mr. Simmons with the buckboard. As soon as he heard my gunshots, Vasquez consulted his pocket watch and waited for one minute to the second. He informed me later that it was the most nervous minute of his storied career.
When that time had elapsed, he retrieved a dire object from under the blankets in the wagon bed—Thaddeus Hobart’s body. In the long hours of the previous night, Vasquez had pressed Mr. Simmons and Miss Eliza into service. They had dug Thad out of his grave, removed his outer garments, and cleansed him of the dirt we had heaped upon him—a gruesome, cheerless series of tasks.
Eliza and her father had entered town with the morning light and made purchases with money from me and Vasquez: gray garments closely resembling Renault’s and a pair of ivory pistol grips. Meanwhile, at the farm, Vasquez performed the most grisly act of all, firing both barrels of the shotgun into Thad’s face.
Yes, Morris, you do not have to convey to me your discomfort at these words. Please weigh my plan against the benefits it has brought us, and will continue to bring, before issuing your final judgment.
At the farm, Vasquez and the Simmonses assembled these components into a credible simulacrum of Renault’s body, a replacement for the body I believed did not exist in physical form. Then Vasquez loaded the body onto the wagon, the revolver and shotgun into the bag. He and Mr. Simmons drove into town.
Now, one minute after the gunshots, Vasquez carried the body through the back door of Bust, bolting the door behind him. Mr. Simmons drove on.
Vasquez deposited the body on the floor. In those same moments, the Kid, out front and knowing nothing of these activities, held the citizens of Salt Creek at bay with his guns and force of will.
Finding me unresponsive at my table, Vasquez still nobly did as instructed. He took Thad’s Colt from my table and placed it near Thad’s hand. He returned my derringer to my pocket. He carried me to the floor opposite the false Renault and deposited me there, then lay the shotgun across my breast. Finally, he returned my ink and pen to the manuscript box. He concealed himself in the storeroom to wait.
There it was, my solution. It had seemed to me that even if my speculations were entirely correct, if the townsfolk came into Bust and found me there alone, with Renault gone, they would never believe him dead. This, perhaps, would allow him to return. My thought was that if all saw a body they thought was his, they would believe Renault truly dead, leaving him no place on this earth to return to.
Mademoiselles Sophie and Laurette did not awaken until after the body was buried and so were unable to issue denials that it was his.
I knew none of these details. For three days, I lay unmoving. I am informed that during this time the Baghdad Kid wrote you with dire misgivings about my fate. Yet I recovered.
News of my mysterious accomplishment did reach the capitals at Austin, New Orleans, and Washington in rapid fashion. Upon my regaining consciousness this morning, I was informed that as soon as I was fit to travel, I would be escorted by a unit from Fort Montague to Austin and a conference with President Hogg at the new Capitol building.
So now I, possibly the most valuable man for thousands of miles in any direction, am packing for a trip to the Texas capital, where I will tell my story.
Nor, if mishap befalls me en route, will the secret of Renault’s death be lost. You have this letter, and other letters of instruction I have written have now been dispatched to trusted friends to be opened in the event of my death or disappearance. The paladins are doomed, and the stranglehold the French Empire has on the world is, though they know it not, is at an end.
What, you ask, of the other participants in these events?
The Baghdad Kid carries one of my letters with him. He has chosen to stay at Salt Creek for now. He enjoys the attention the townsfolk lavish upon him, but the confusion in his eyes suggests he now considers steering a new course with his life. From his spoken thoughts, I would not venture to say it will be a better course, merely a different one. He has given me Thad’s Colt in payment of the bet he owed me.
Vasquez rides with me. He asserts that soon I will be at the center of calamity, and it is at such places that profit can be made. I suspect he is correct, but I think, too, that he lon
gs to put my methods to the test against other paladins. He wishes to see this part of the world shake itself free of the Empire.
Ma de moiselles Sophie and Laurette chose to depart Salt Creek but also eschew French-controlled territories. Their brief words on the subject suggested that they are delighted to be free of Renault but might have cause to fear French punishment. Laurette is bound for Nuevo Mexico in the hope of making a new life there. Sophie, greatly daring, has chosen to dress as a man and will accompany a cattle drive bound for Kansas. Her destination from there is Chicago. If, Morris, you are reading this letter and a comely Frenchwoman has placed it in your hands, it is she, and I ask of you that you use my resources and your influence to help her begin her new life.
As for me, the life I knew is over. From now until the last paladin is gone, I will be too valuable to the Republic of Texas and the United States of America to control my own destiny.
Too, I have noticed changes in myself. With each room I enter, some part of my mind tells me, were I to pluck the Colt from my holster, I could in an instant calculate the exact angle, elevation, and timing I would need to place a bullet in the heart or brain of every individual I saw. I had not that facility before.
Renault is within me. And, too, I know he is in the pasteboard box I carry among my possessions. I confess that the link between us makes me fear that someday I, too, will find myself trapped in leaves of paper, never to escape.
Au revoir.
Your friend,
Chester Lamb
Aaron Allston is a New York Times bestselling novelist known in particular for his work in the Star Wars universe. Before making fiction his full- time career, he wrote role- playing game supplements, contributing to the Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, and GURPS lines. He has been inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame. He teaches writing workshops across the United States. More information is on his website: www.aaronallston.com.