Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  “Now you have to understand, in those days a recoon skin was as good as a couple of gold pieces…”

  Remming raised his glass, then stopped. Armstrong was looking half drunk already. It was part of the role they were playing to drink Roth’s booze, but it wouldn’t do to get potted while you were supposed to be guarding the city boss, even if it worked out you weren’t called on to pull your piece. He put the glass down, vowing to watch his own drinking. Damn, but it was hard not to get carried away when the city boss had such good stuff. He’d have to look into whether there was anything like this hooch that was affordable on a guardsman’s salary.

  “So about the fifth round,” Roth was saying, “Cochrane’s traded the landlord that same coonskin five times now. So he figures he better call it quits before the fellow catches on. He gladhands all around, pulls up stakes, and moves on, leaving a party in his wake. Naturally he won the election, and a few months later he gets to thinking that landlord is now one of his constituents, too. And he’s probably figured out Cochrane’s scam by now.

  “So what does Cochrane do? He sends that landlord the full price of the drinks he bought on that coonskin that night. But the landlord, he sends it right back, with a note that says, ‘That coonskin is mounted on the wall in my bar, and the story I get to tell out of this is worth more than the price of the drinks. You got my vote any time you run for office.’”

  They all laughed—some legitimate laughter, in appreciation of the joke, some dutiful, because it was the city boss who told it, and Remming was amused to note which guard laughed which way.

  Roth transferred the baked pastry containing the steaks onto plates, which he handed around. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “and lady, our steaks are done. Let’s repair to the dining room. Jim, if you’ll get the asparagus,” he said to Remming. “Harry, the potatoes there? And Sarah, maybe you could grab that sauce? There’s a ladle for it in that second drawer.”

  The guardsmen, dressed as Jim, Harry, and Sarah, complied and made their way in procession into the dining room. They ranged themselves around the table, placing their respective dishes in the center and their personal plates at their own places, and Roth took his place at the head of the table.

  “Lady and gentlemen,” said Roth, still standing. Remming wondered if the rest of them should stand up again, but no one else seemed about to, so he kept his seat. “Though we gather as private individuals, the truth is, we are here to continue the work we do for the benefit of Bay City.”

  This is it, thought Remming. If it’s going to happen, it happens now, or very soon.

  Then the lights went out.

  36. WOLF

  “They’re moving,” Morgan’s voice said in my earpiece. Roth and the ringers were going from the kitchen to the private dining room. More time passed.

  I kept thinking I saw something move, but when I focused on it, it was only the wind rippling the grass. Then I thought, wait a minute, there isn’t any wind, as the voice of the Wolf Spirit said in my ear, “Believe your eyes, not your mind.” I looked up and saw Hancherow come around the corner of the building. It seemed as if the grass suddenly surged up toward him and he went down. A ripple moved away from him across the grass.

  “Bogie, northeast corner,” said Morgan. The ripple of grass had shown on infrared.

  “Move in!” I said quietly into the headset.

  Only two of the five responded. I had to assume the others were dead, or at least out of the action. As I began to move, the lights in the building went off. I broke into a run. Robles appeared from my left, and a strangled cry came from my right. Anders was down, his leg caught in what looked like a bear trap. I didn’t stop to wonder how the Beast had managed to rig that.

  “Robles,” I said, “get him loose.” I headed for the building. I could see the stark white glare of the emergency lights inside. As I reached the door I heard breaking glass and shots being fired.

  “Breach, room zero,” said Morgan. The small dining room. Bursts from an automatic, and twice the blast of Roth’s hand cannon of a revolver. I flung open the front door and stepped in as Rok vaulted the mezzanine railing and dropped to the main floor. We converged on the door to the private room and I threw it open. Only two figures still moved inside.

  One emergency light was out. The other was skewed at the opposite wall, limning the wall beside it in sidelight. The room had been redecorated with what I thought was a rather tasteless splatter effect. At the center of the room stood the silhouette of the Beast—tall, rangy, naked, moving like a panther. Long, light-colored fur stood up on his back, which I realized with a start had been his camouflage; this had to be the moving grass I’d seen earlier. Armstrong, Remming, and Whaling lay bleeding out on the floor. Beyond the Beast Roth was stirring, struggling up from the floor, the big, old-fashioned revolver in his hand. The rime of the emergency light outlined his figure. The Beast carried two swords in his clawed hands. I wondered why he bothered, having seen what his claws could do. Then I saw it. They were Railwalker blades.

  “Roth,” he growled, stone grating over stone, the abrasion of mountains. “Micah Roth.”

  Roth came to his feet and raised the revolver. His voice was hoarse and harsh when he spoke. “I know you. I know where you come from. I freed this city from Crichton and ran it for twenty-seven years. Did you think I wouldn’t defend it with my life?”

  The hand cannon roared twice in the confined space of the room. The Beast spun backward, staggered. He straightened, and Roth fired again, twice more, solid body shots, as the old man found his eye for shooting. But this time, though the bullet struck his chest, the creature only shuddered back a step.

  “Roth!” I shouted. “Head shot!” But Roth’s next pull clicked on an empty chamber.

  The Beast turned and saw me where I stood in the doorway, one hand still on the opened door. I saw his teeth in the dark as he smiled and growled, “The Railwalker!”

  Two Railwalker blades in the Beast’s hands. Then I knew: the Hicks Junction massacre. The guards from Monteague and Santa Brita, Wiley and the Boar. The swords were Death Singer and Whisperer, and there was no doubt about how the Beast had acquired them. Call me a fool, but I holstered my gun and drew Windsteel. The sword whickered as the blade came free. Bullets seemed to have little effect on this creature anyway. If this Beast thought he could kill me with my fallen brothers’ stolen blades, let him try.

  He launched himself at me. I stepped back, and as he reached it I slammed the door, throwing all my weight against it. He struck it with an enormous crash and a crack, and the wood of the door gave. I jerked it open again and aimed a sword stroke at where I thought he’d be, but with an amazing recovery he dove under it, tumbling to his feet in the main dining room.

  Even as he came to his feet Rok was on him, his blade singing. The Beast backpedaled, parrying, then halted his retreat, standing his ground as he and Rok exchanged a flurry of cuts and parries, weaving a web of bright steel in the glare of the emergency lights. I couldn’t help feeling a certain anxiety. With firearms or hand to hand I’d never seen Rok lose a fight. But the sword was not his best weapon.

  Rok ducked under the Beast’s stroke, came up inside, and struck with the pommel of his blade, snapping the monster’s head back. The Beast staggered, and Rok followed, staying close in, striking hard with elbows, fists, and hilt. The Beast got in one shot to Rok’s face with his left sword hilt. Rok’s own speed of reaction spared him having his skull split open, but he couldn’t dodge the blow entirely. The force of the blow threw him across a table. Blood sprayed in his wake.

  The Beast sprang after him, and Rok came up to meet his cuts, blood flying from his wound. A shot rang out, and the Beast staggered back. A large groove had been chewed out of the horny plating that covered his chest. He screamed a song of rage and pain in a language I’d never heard.

  Morgan stood by the base of the stairs. Her Gunspire magnum smoked in her hands. She calmly took aim again, but the Beast turned, hurling one
of his stolen blades as the gun went off.

  A sword can’t be thrown with any accuracy, so throwing it is just a distraction, an inconvenience. Rok knows this as well as I do, so he should have ignored it and attacked again immediately, instead of glancing at Morgan. Maybe the Beast’s apparently supernatural prowess had him thinking he could do something impossible. I don’t know.

  And maybe he was right. Morgan parried the thrown sword with her gun, and in passing the blade sliced her arm. Those blades are so sharp, it doesn’t take a lot of power to cut with them, and the Beast had put a lot of power into that throw. She dropped the gun and clutched her arm. And then she screamed, but not with pain.

  In the split second Rok’s attention was diverted the Beast had lunged, driving his blade into Rok’s chest. Rok’s parry was late, and my Bear went down. There was another shot, from the other side this time. The Beast staggered, and Auden advanced through the front door, firing his service piece repeatedly at the Beast. The rounds were like thunder inside the restaurant, and my ears rang. The shots jolted the creature, staggered him back away from Rok, but did not seem to penetrate. The slide on Auden’s pistol locked back—he was empty.

  I moved in, cutting at the back of the Beast’s neck. He either heard or sensed me. He turned as I came in, slapping my sword aside with Death Singer, which he still held.

  Auden leaped to Rok.

  The Beast and I faced each other en garde. He shifted the sword from his left hand to his right. So he wasn’t perfectly ambidextrous. That was good to know. Beyond the Beast I saw Morgan rush to join Auden at Rok’s side.

  I dismissed my wounded brother from my thoughts. Morgan and Auden would do everything they could for him, and I couldn’t afford to become distracted as he had. The Beast and I circled each other, swords poised.

  The Beast lunged. I backed away, batting his cuts aside, watching how he delivered them. Once I thought I had a feel for his style I moved in hard. I feinted, got past his guard with a cut that should have handed him his head. He twisted his shoulder into it. The blade glanced off, though it shook him. Horny growths like organic armor covered much of his body. Like the bullets, my sword only bit chunks out of this stuff and did not penetrate. His quick return tried to serve me a steel dinner, but I wasn’t biting, and danced away.

  The stolen sword he carried, Death Singer, keened as it slashed through the air. Its tone sounded sour to my ear, and I remembered that the Beast was not bonded to this blade as Wiley would have been, or as I was to Windsteel. The blade might not actually work against him, but it wouldn’t play to his strengths as Windsteel would to mine.

  We fought back and forth across the restaurant floor. He got through my guard, barely—a glancing cut to the arm—and again; now my cheek stung, my vision swam. We stared at each other. I was bleeding now from the cut on my face, and where he’d caught my left arm with a shallow cut. Head pounding, panting, flashes of lightning in my eyes. He was grinning, breathing easily, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed.

  The Beast charged me again, lunging. I parried, sidestepping, and took a big chance on a disarm move. It worked. Death Singer went sailing. His left claw flashed out at me, and I leaned back. The claw missed my face by a whisker.

  You’d think that the man with the sword had the advantage in this situation, but I didn’t. The Beast had two hands he could use independently as weapons, five razor-sharp knives on each, and he could parry my strokes with his armored limbs. I had one weapon for both offense and defense. I concentrated on avoiding those claws and finding vulnerable points to slash or stab at. I slashed at his throat. He ducked and delivered a kick to my midsection that dashed me over a table and into the wall. The impact brought another of those flashes of lightning. I came up again, rebounding off the wall. My head was pounding, and I could hardly breathe. I cut at his head and he slipped sideways, spinning. His elbow caught me behind the head, and lights exploded before my eyes as I went down. For a moment the pain lancing out from my head obscured everything else. I didn’t feel my body hit the floor.

  There was a snap, and Windsteel shivered in my hand. I rolled away, nothing but the instinct for survival driving me now, my vision swimming. I forced myself to my feet and brought up the sword, to find it was half a sword.

  The Beast stalked me slowly, smiling, sure of his kill. I was stunned. Windsteel was a Sierra Mutant blade, forged by a sixth-generation Osoto. Sierra blades, and Osoto blades especially, did not break. It must have been against the floor, and the Beast had stamped on it, using the leverage provided by the tsuba, the hand guard, against the floor. I shook sweat and blood out of my eyes and dismissed the thought.

  The Beast lunged at me. This time I moved under him, gripping the broken remains of my sword, edge turned up. I buried it in his armpit, then worked it like a lever, slicing muscle and tendon. Blood sheeted from his armpit. He twisted away and kicked. I followed him as he moved, but his kick connected. My legs went out from under me as if I’d been hit by a tram. We both went down. I landed on top of his arm, the remains of my sword skittering away.

  The Beast roared and surged upward, gushing arterial blood. I grabbed onto that arm and was dragged up as he staggered to his feet. For a moment I thought he was going wherever he wanted, taking me along; but then that horny armor that was all that still connected the arm to his shoulder gave way. I fell to the floor again, clutching the arm. Through another flash of white light I saw him fall to his knees. He pitched forward onto his face and lay motionless as the blood pumped sluggishly from his shoulder. It slowed to a drip.

  37. HARTSHALL

  Darkness.

  Hnahna.

  She was Creator and Destroyer, the great snake that encircled the world, the vast ocean that could engulf, the cosmic cunt that gave birth and sucked all things into death at her pitiless bottom. She was Mother Goddess, but never Mother or Mama. From the very dawn of his awareness, she had been Hnahna. Arbiter of his pleasure and his pain. Center of his heart and of his universe. Giver of milk, and drawer forth of milk. Hnahna.

  He had failed her.

  He had always feared this very thing the most. He had failed her, and she had turned her face from him. The world grew dark and cold, the many realities he had inhabited in his life narrowing down to this single pinpoint of light, vanishing into darkness. No ecstasy, no Hnahna to embrace him, just the cold and the dark. The no-thing.

  Nothing.

  38. WOLF

  I lay panting, covered in the monster’s blood, embracing his severed arm. Then Morgan was at my side, asking, “Are you okay?” I nodded and she vanished again, presumably returning to tend to Rok.

  Gage appeared, crouching. His hand snaked warily to the Beast’s throat. He looked up, saying, “He’s done.”

  Roth appeared too, at the edge on my vision, the big revolver still clasped in one hand, a towel in the other. He looked from the body of the Beast to me. I dragged myself into a sitting position. Roth offered the towel. I took it and wiped at my face.

  Light flashed again. I thought I was seeing more lightning, then realized it was the spotlight from an ornithopter shining through the windows. Morgan had already signaled someone to come for Rok. The doors burst open and EMTs rushed in. They loaded Rok’s inert body onto a stretcher and hustled him out to the ’thopter. I nodded at Morgan, indicating she should go with them, and she hurried out in their wake. Auden stood looking after them, his hands red to the wrists from his attempts to slow Rok’s bleeding.

  I listened to the ornithopter take off with my two partners, then levered myself to my feet, looking dazedly at my broken blade.

  “So,” said Roth, looking at the body of the Beast. “He was a mutant after all.”

  I looked over at the body. “No,” I said. “He was a shapeshifter. Look at his shoulder. He was trying to close the wound over before he bled to death.” It was obvious when you looked at it. Smooth, pink skin had formed all around the edges of the wound. But it hadn’t worked.

 
“You take any serious damage?” asked Roth.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Look like you could use a drink, though.”

  “I’ll see about the power,” said Gage, and he headed out the back.

  “I need a wash,” said Auden, and he turned toward the men’s room.

  Without speaking Roth and I shuffled wearily toward the other room. Neither of us really wanted to have our drink over the Beast’s body. Roth opened the door to the private dining room, glanced at the carnage inside, and shook his head.

  “Kitchen,” he said, letting the broken door swing shut. I followed him into the kitchen. He was handing me a glass when the regular lights came back on. We both blinked in the new light, and the emergency lights went off. Roth was pouring the third glass as Gage returned from the kitchen door. A moment later Auden joined us, and Roth poured another.

  We all drank in silence. Then Roth sighed, and said, “So you were right on both counts. He was after me.”

  “No, I was wrong,” I said. “You may have been his mission, City Boss, but in his heart, he was after us all.”

  I needed a shower and about twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep. But first, the hospital.

  Rok looked shrunken amongst all those tubes and wires, half his face covered by bandages. I’d have expected him to look like Frankenstein, a warrior of his size lying there in the hospital bed. Instead he looked like a shriveled old man, an ancient fairy caught in a web of technology. Morgan sat beside the bed, clutching his hand.