Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  “’Scuse me,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “There someplace I can run around here that isn’t totally paved, like a park or something?” I’ll run on pavement from time to time, but as I get older I become more aware of the effects of the repeating impacts on concrete or asphalt. You can’t really Parker very extensively without spending some of your time running on pavement, but I’ve come to prefer the feel of real earth under my feet, at least part of the time. The guard chuckled.

  “You running to something, or from something?” he asked.

  “I’m running from amateur psychologists. They scare the piss out of me.”

  He pulled a face. “You could try Riverwalk Park,” he said. “Go out the tower’s south entrance, follow your nose for three blocks, you can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took the stairs, jogging up and out into the street to stay as warmed up as possible. He was right about not being able to miss it. South Street dead-ended right into the park. Riverwalk Park was maybe fifty or sixty feet wide at that point, and ran three blocks or so east, and quite a bit farther to the west, where it paralleled the riverbank, running down the hill toward the waterfront. I turned right and headed west.

  I vaulted a fence, ran along a bench and jump-stepped to the top of a retaining wall, running along it until it swung north, where I left it to continue parallel to the main path. Some of this wasn’t strictly kosher by real Parker standards. The whole point of Parkering is to travel along the most direct, efficient, and natural route possible, flowing around, over, or under obstacles along the way. In deliberately choosing a path full of obstacles when a clear one was immediately to hand, I was sort of stretching a point for the sake of staying in training.

  The nice thing about Parker running is that unlike just plain running or jogging, your mind can’t be anywhere but focused in this very moment of the run. You can’t be re-playing an argument you had with someone that morning, or thinking about what you’re planning for tomorrow. It takes mindfulness and full concentration. If you go over a wall, there’s no telling what you might encounter on the other side of it, but whatever it is, you’ve got to be ready to deal with it. For the length of my run, at least, I would have to forget about the Beast and his victims, and exist wholly in the here and now.

  Most people seem to prefer to run in the morning, or maybe it just seems that way ’cause mornings are more convenient for most folks. Me, I prefer the afternoon. I like ending my run with the Salute to the Setting Sun. I retraced my path back up the hill. My back was now to the west, and in front of me the park was lit with an intense red-orange light. I arrived back at the top just in time to turn and see the sun’s disk beginning to sink into the western sea. I raised my arms and performed the Salute. As the disk sank into the horizon, it seemed to grow larger, and its orange glow turned to deep red, as though it was absorbing blood from the sea. Several minutes later it was just a line, and then a pinpoint of light. And then just a glow in the sky.

  The twilight times are when the walls between worlds become thinner. Points where the flow changes. It happens at noon and midnight, too, but not so strongly. Even without any special training, at noon and midnight you can sometimes sense these changes. At dawn and dusk, you can see them.

  I turned from the now-vanished sun to find an elderly mutant sitting on a bench staring at me. He was one of the ones they called a “gray” type—skinny limbs, long fingers, largish head with big, dark eyes, evocative of the popular conception of a space alien. He was wearing several layers of filthy clothing, and shoes that did not match. Beside him on the bench was a stuffed duffel bag, which he rested an arm on. It was tied closed with a piece of stocking.

  “You worshiping Soul-Are, Railwalker?” he rasped.

  “We don’t think of it as worship, grandfather,” I said. “Soul-Are isn’t a god, it’s just the way of things. We try to work with it, instead of struggling against it.”

  “Mutual respect,” he grunted, nodding. “Diggit. Heard you talking to that falling sun. He talk back?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You ask him about the Beast?”

  “No.”

  “You figure the Beast’s part of Soul-Are?”

  “Everything is.” I was wondering if this was going somewhere, or the old one was just rambling, making conversation. His serious stare seemed to make that unlikely, but sometimes you can’t tell with a mutant.

  “Your Old Man Sun can’t tell you anything about a creature o’ darkness.” He levered himself to his feet and shouldered the bag. “Sun, he don’t know from darkness. He only know from light. But light, he shape what the darkness is.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He turned and walked off into the darkening park.

  “Thank you,” I finally said to his retreating back. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  When I got back to our rooms in the CA Tower I found Morgan sitting on the couch, cleaning her sword. We’re all pretty good about maintaining our gear, but Morgan’s very particular about Darkwater. She had one ankle propped on the opposite knee, and her foot was bouncing. She was either angry or ambivalent about something, possibly a little of each.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I was having a crass, selfish moment.”

  “About what?” I couldn’t see her eyes for the poofy black bangs she wears, like a character out of one of those animes she likes to watch. The rest of her hair hung down her back in a long braid. Despite the bouncing foot, her hands moved slowly and evenly as her long, thin fingers drew the cloth across the shining blade, almost caressing it. I looked at her bouncing foot again.

  She stopped polishing the blade, sat there with it on her lap, looking at it. “Nobody’s talking about it, y’know? ’Cause it would sound bad to say it out loud. But at Hicks Junction, we lost more than two brothers. We also lost two swords.”

  Morgan held her sword up, looked up and down its length. Darkwater was damascened, almost charcoal gray, with slightly lighter liquid patterns. Her style with it was like dark water, sparkling and powerful and treacherous. Every Railwalker is matched to their blade by a sensei; but the sensei do not assign a sword to a person. The sword chooses the person.

  “They’re works of art,” she said. “Works of spirit. They’re supposed to be destroyed with their bearers or returned to the Roost.” It wasn’t as if a Railwalker blade had never been lost, but it was a rare thing.

  “They’re also weapons of death,” I said. “And those who carry them should be accountable. But even the order can’t guarantee that.”

  “Yeah, well it sucks. And that’s ‘what’...”

  “Okay.” I thought about what she’d said. “Well, obviously someone’s talking about it, or you wouldn’t know they hadn’t recovered the blades.”

  “I talked to Omnia. She was on the team that went down there after.”

  “Twenty-three Blessings on her for it. It’s not a job I’d want.”

  “Like you wanted this one?”

  “Right.”

  INTERLUDE: BLADE WEAPONS

  Isao Suddeth was nearing 80 years of age when Bane of the First Five brought him to the Railwalker Roost in upstate New York. Suddeth had been taught the art of bladesmithing in Japan, by his maternal grandfather, the great Hideo Nakamura, and he had been making swords for most of his adult life. His blades, while based on Japanese models and principles, also showed the influence of American culture, though more often in their decoration than in their form.

  Suddeth established his forge at the Roost and taught his craft to three apprentices, all of whom were mutants. After Suddeth’s death, when the order opened their chapter house in New Frisco, two of Suddeth’s apprentices, John Hobbs and William Osoto, relocated to the nearby Sierra area, where there was a large mutant population. At their forge there they took apprentices of their own, and within two generations metalwork (most particularly swords and knives, but also other metalwork) from w
hat would be called the Sierra Mutants would gain an almost mystical reputation.

  Nor was that reputation undeserved. Isao Suddeth may have worked with and for the Railwalkers, but Hobbs and Osoto were most certainly initiates to the order, branded with the famous eye tattoo, and there is no question that they and their apprentices were trained in shamanism and magick.

  A story popular around 200 AC or so depicted Suddeth embedding the first Railwalker blade in a cement block, and although many tried, only Brick could draw the blade. This rather obvious grafting of the Arthurian “sword in the stone” legend to the story of Brick seems like transparent mythologizing. Yet more reliable accounts do suggest that Suddeth subjected Brick to some sort of test or trial before presenting him with the sword Ravenwing.

  Dudley Boer,

  Blade Weapons of Post-Crash Merica

  Salle Publications, Newyark, 321 AC

  The surface of the chest-high cement block was scored to imitate a wooden crate.

  “With your bare hands alone,” said Suddeth, seating himself on the bench.

  “I know your rules,” said Brick. He walked slowly around the block, studying it. He came back to stand before the old man. “You created this yourself?” he asked.

  Suddeth nodded. Brick studied his face for a while, and then nodded himself. He walked back to the cement cube. He circled it more slowly this time, stopping to peer closely at the engraved lines that imitated the edges of boards. Finally he stepped to one corner, placed a hand low on one side, and applied pressure with one finger high on the opposite side. A large section, comprising most of the top and one side, slid smoothly free and pivoted away. It revealed, in a hollow in the base of the cube, the silk-wrapped form of a sword.

  “Very good, Railwalker,” said Suddeth. “The crow grows into a raven.”

  Ravenwing: A Railwalker Novel

  Gordon Gray, Coldspring Press,

  Newyark, July 287 AC

  11. SANTA BRITA

  Lantz sipped his scotch and followed the burn down. It was nice, the warmth moving at his center. Like a sense of belonging was nice, having buddies you could count on. Guys like Jack Pauls, guys who had your back when you went down, into the dark, like that shot of whiskey going down, into the guts of things, bringing maybe not light into the darkness, but warmth, a hot burn of red at the end of a long, dark path. Lantz liked being a Santa Brita guardsman. Their name tags only showed their first initial, so to the uninitiated, he was Patrolman “Q. Lantz.” Most of the boys called him “Quid,” which was the common term for the Santa Brita dollar, so that was alright. Better than Quentin, which is what it said on his birth certificate; only the administrative types ever called him that. Even the chief referred to him as Quid.

  Santa Brita was a guardsman’s town. The city boss, Jaworski, was a former guardswoman herself. After the Union Riots, Jaworski had run on the law and order platform, and had taken power in a landslide-election. Anti-union, pro-industry, Jaworski kept the trains running on time. And she employed lots of guardsmen.

  After a long silence, letting the sounds of the bar wash over him but not really hearing the chatter of the other customers or the twangy music on the juke, Pauls had turned to Lantz and said, “Lemme ask you something.”

  Lantz looked at Pauls, wondering what was so serious all of a sudden.

  “If it’s none of my business, feel free to say so. But I am your partner. You know I’ll be cool, and nothing will go any further.”

  “Yeah, sure...” said Lantz, making a “go on” motion with one hand.

  “So, what went down with you and the Grinder, anyway?”

  Lantz felt himself following that shot again, down into the dark, and instead of standing by his side, this time his partner was pushing him there. Not that he blamed him. If their positions had been reversed, Quid Lantz probably would have asked the same question some time earlier. He was actually surprised at Pauls’s forbearance in waiting this long to press the issue. He stared at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, wondering if that same mirror had been there five years ago, at the time of the Union Riots, back when Jaworski first came to power. Probably it had been replaced, at least once, that mirror. Crazy times back then, chaotic times; probably every damn mirror in the city needed to be replaced, and some of them never had been, by choice. There were people had problems looking in the mirror the first year or so after the Riots, Lantz among them. He’d had some sleepless nights, but he’d got over it. He knew his stories were far from the worst. Although this one was bad enough.

  Somehow, he didn’t think the Bone Grinder had ever lost any sleep, or had any trouble with mirrors. They’d called the man “the Monk” in those early days, before the Riots. He was dubbed “the Bone Grinder” afterwards. His name tag said “V. Caine,” and that was all anyone knew. It was his habits, of course, that earned him the tag “Monk” among the guard. Didn’t drink, didn’t fuck, as far as anybody knew, women or men. Always on time, precisely. Worked out regular, regular practice on the gun range, knew the regs book forward and backward. You’d think a guy like that would be a stickler for procedure, but he wasn’t. When the chief first assigned the Monk to be Lantz’s partner, Lantz had no idea just how far outside the rules the Monk was willing to go.

  Lantz stood, sighed, and looked at Pauls. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  Outside the air was cooler, the late summer breezes coming in from the zones. It was late, only a few people left on the streets. As the two guardsmen walked slowly down the street, Pauls said, “I’m sorry, I shoulda thought of that. You didn’t want to talk about it in there.”

  “I ain’t exactly falling all over myself to talk about it anywhere, Jack,” said Quid. “But I figure you got a right to know.”

  “Okay,” was all Pauls said, letting Lantz find his way to the story in his own time. They walked in silence for a block or so.

  “You remember that guy, Amira?” Lantz said at last. “Worked for the Unions?”

  “Real heavy duty fighter, martial arts and all that? Used to bodyguard sometimes for that Union leader, what was his name, Kwant or something?”

  “That’s the one. You know the Monk was the one took him down?”

  “Yeah, I heard that. Shot resisting arrest, right?”

  Lantz chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Yeah, the Monk shot him. Eventually.

  “It was back about the time the Riots started. Amira had become a real pain in the ass, and the powers that be had decided to ‘bring him in for questioning.’ The Monk and me were assigned to it. Unofficially, we were told, it didn’t really matter what his condition was, even dead was okay, as long as we brought him in. At the time, I wondered if they meant they’d rather we brought in his corpse, but I was a guardsman, not an assassin, and besides, I figured the Monk would want to do it by the book, so I was looking at we were gonna bring him in alive, if we could. Messed up, maybe, but alive.

  “So we go down to the place we were told he was staying—a little transient hotel off Becker. Grungy little joint, dunno if the bell worked or not, but we didn’t bother trying, y’know? We just head in and up the stairs to the fifth floor, where Amira’s supposed to have a room.

  “Well, we get to the fifth floor, and somebody must have tipped him off, because guy’s coming out of his front door, a backpack over one shoulder. I’ve got my piece out, but the Monk still hasn’t touched his. Amira turns and sees us, he just drops the pack and stands there with this cocky smile on his face, and he goes, ‘What, only two of you? My reputation must be slipping.’

  “Now, here’s where it starts to get weird. The Monk, he takes off his gun belt and hands it to me, and I’m looking at him like, ‘What the fuck?’ and trying to keep one eye on Amira at the same time, and the Monk goes, ‘No. Only one of us.’

  “And then I get it—the Monk wants to go one-on-one with this guy. Amira’s got a rep as the most badass fighter the union guys have, and the Monk is gonna measure himself against him. Or that’
s what I thought.

  “‘Hold your fire,’ the Monk tells me. ‘No matter what happens.’ Well, I nodded, but inside, I’m thinking, shit on that, if this thing goes bad, I’m gonna plug this union bastard. So I set down the Monk’s gun belt, but I keep my own piece out and ready.

  “They circled each other in that hallway for a minute, and then they went at it. Man, I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I’m thinking, shit, this is like an exhibition fight people would pay big bucks to see, and it’s going on in this grungy little hallway with nobody watching but me. Up and down that little hall, with kicks and punches and head-butts, faster and harder than you’d believe, and moves I never seen before, on both of ’em.

  “But that part of the fight, it don’t last all that long. Pretty soon, the Monk gets in a kick to Amira’s knee, and I could hear the bones snap. Must’ve hurt like a sonofabitch, but Amira just grunts when he goes down, and he never loses his guard. He’s down there on one knee, skootching around to face the Monk as he circles him. I open my mouth—I’m gonna tell the Monk okay, man, he ain’t going anywhere on his own; you beat him, let’s take him in. But I seen the look on the Monk’s face, and I shut my mouth again. The Monk takes a couple more shots, which Amira manages to block, and then gets in a good kick to the head. Amira’s down, one hand and one knee, and the Monk stomps on that hand, all he can give it, and I hear more bones snapping and crunching.

  “This time I do speak up, and I go, ‘Okay, Caine. Enough, man. Let’s take him in.’

  “He looks up at me, and he don’t say a word, but I swear, the look in his eyes, he was ready to come after me, never mind I had a gun in my hand. So I shut up again. I go to turn away, ’cause whatever the Monk’s got in mind, I know I don’t want to see it, but then I realize, if I’m gonna stand by and do nothing, if I’m gonna let this happen, the least I can do is have the guts to watch this poor fucker’s last moments.