Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  Ten men of Briar, sold of their own free will to the devil, waiting only to be claimed.

  “All right,” he said, as though he had a choice. His meal done, he would rise up—no more avoiding the dirt that clung to him, now that the deed was done—and walk through the town, and find who had taken his master’s coin.

  Whatever border they sought to guard, whatever god they trusted, it had not been enough.

  * * *

  They were waiting for him when he came: nine of them, on the church steps.

  “Avram ran,” the oldest of them said, when Jack put one foot on the faded wooden steps and looked up at them, his hat angled back so they could see most of his face in the light coming from the open door behind them. “He broke and ran when we knew you were coming.”

  Word had spread: like the demons, the townsfolk of Briar had heard of the devil’s Jack.

  “But you waited.”

  “We did what we had to do. Our children are safe. That is all that matters.”

  Their calm was almost disturbing. The damned bargained. The damned wept. The damned offered you everything they no longer possessed. They did not stand like god-fearing men.

  “The border. What is it?” You could ask humans questions you did not ask of demons. They would lie just as easily—but they did not always, and there was no risk in listening.

  They looked at each other, the nine men of Briar, and if they wondered at his question, they did not show it. Finally one, neither oldest nor youngest, spoke. “A magician lived here, back before there was a town. Bitter and sour, and not able to stop fiddling with things that would not be under his control. And in his fiddling, in his disregard for what was natural, he called up the briar-rock from the breast of the Earth and let loose abominations on the land. The founders of this town, they contained it, somehow. But they left no instructions, no grimoire we could follow, and when the ground rumbled underfoot last year, the first abomination returned.”

  It had the sound of a story long-told, worn with the repetition. “You’ve no magicians, none to hire or lure, to strengthen the barrier?” Better to bargain with a magician and risk his whim than sell your soul outright.

  Another man, a freeman from his skin, as upright as the others, spoke then: “There was no time. The devil was there.”

  “Yes. He often is.” Jack’s words were dry, but the townsmen took them as solemn gospel.

  “And now you will take us.” The freeman again, resigned.

  He was the devil’s dog. “Yes.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  He could not tell who had asked that question, a voice within the group. “Yes.” Now, and forever. That was what it meant, to give over to the devil. Not a great pain, not always, but a never-ending one. The sour bile of regrets; the loss of hope; the abandonment of fleeting, innocent joy for the more grim knowledge of sorrow. He felt them all, scraping at his insides.

  They would exist within that pain, their souls’ protection forfeit, for the rest of eternity.

  Sixteen years of taking the devil’s price had hardened Jack to regret. But these were good men. Honest men, who had waited for their fate. Looking at them, something inside Jack rebelled.

  “Go make your peace with your families,” he said. “No memories will save you now, but there is no reason to leave them with pain.”

  Lie to them, he meant. Give them a pretty story to believe. They won’t, but they will remember that you tried.

  “I’ll be back come dawn. Don’t make me have to find you.”

  He had some hard riding to do, before then.

  * * *

  The moon rose low and cold in the sky, and the devil pinpricked him the whole ride back to the rock ridge, but Jack gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw and did not relent, even when the pricks became jabs, and the jabs drew blood from his skin.

  The devil was always there; but he could not be everywhere at once. So long as he did not turn his full attention here, Jack had a chance.

  No. Jack had no chance. He let the thought go, became empty and bare as the grasslands around him, all life hiding away the closer he came to the demons’ rock.

  They met him on the lowest ridge, five sleek shadows glowing and shifting under the moonlight. This was their time, their place, and he was no longer a stranger to them, that they would hide their true form.

  He had never thought to gamble again. Never thought to bargain, or hide a card in his sleeve.

  He stopped, the horse’s hooves barely settled on the rocky spine, and called to them. “What would you risk, to be entertained?”

  “What would we not, to no longer be bored,” came back the answer. “Have you come to be our fool, human?”

  “I am already my own fool,” he said. “But if you can manage it, you will have entertainment—and strike a blow against the memory of the magician who bound you here.”

  That had their attention, he could tell by the way they paused in their restless, graceful swirl.

  “Tell us more.” A swirling demand, five voices as one.

  “Those who stood against the magician, those years ago. The humans. Their descendants sought to continue their work—and sold themselves to my master, to do it.”

  The swirl picked up again, disdainful. “That is your business, not ours.”

  The fabric of his shirt stuck to his skin, pasted by sweat even in the cool night air. “Ten men, my master claims.” Nine who waited, and one who ran. “What would you do for an entire town? Yours to observe, to entertain you, without any cost to yourself.”

  “Ours? No cost?”

  “My master cannot touch you, not here, not bound as you are.”

  That was not the same as no cost, but he was playing on their boredom, and their greed, to blind them. “An entire town, brought here, for the length of the lives of those who swore their oath,” Jack said. “The natural life, and no more. When that last man dies, the town goes free.”

  Dying, bound to the rock… Jack did not know what would happen to their souls. But they would be unclaimed, and therefore not belong to the devil. Perhaps their god would intervene.

  The swirling slowed, paused. He had their interest, now.

  “Can you do this? Can you hold them to you, secure within the stone?”

  He had his cards; he did not know what they held.

  “If willing, we can.”

  That was enough. They haggled over terms for the rest of the night, Jack making them each one agree to every term. And when the moon set but before the sun returned, they had a bargain.

  “They will agree? They will be bound?”

  Jack shifted in his saddle, feeling his bones ache, exhaustion gnawing a hole in his skull. “They will have no choice.”

  * * *

  The men were waiting, as he knew they would be, on the steps of the church. No children played on the planed sidewalks this time, no women gossiped in the stores, no youths recited lessons, or brought in the cows.

  Briar waited.

  “Is it time?” a voice asked.

  Time, and past. He stared at them from the back of the piebald. “What would you give, to stay with your family?”

  “You make a joke of our fate?” The youngest spoke, his face pale and tight with grief, while the others stirred uneasily around him.

  “I’m asking you a question.” Jack’s temper, unused to dealing with people this long, frayed thin. “Answer it, or be damned. Would you break oath, give yourself—and your families—over to a lesser evil, to keep your souls and save them from heartbreak?”

  It was too late to save them, too late the moment they made their deal. But there were different levels of damnation.

  “Yes.” Not the oldest nor the youngest, nor the speaker from the day before, but a slight, slender man with the look of a storekeeper about him, narrow-faced with sideburns too large for his chin, and spectacles perched on his nose. “Whatever price, it cannot be worse than what we have already pledged.”

  “Nathan,
be quiet,” another man said. “There is always something worse.”

  A town of foolish men, but not fools, it seemed.

  Jack, bluntly, told them what they faced.

  “Decide now,” he said, cutting off any discussion. “You who made the bargain must seal this the same way, else it cannot work. Ten souls bound, either way you go.”

  “We are only nine,” Nathan said.

  The oldest man, their leader, looked to Jack. “The devil’s dog will deliver the last. Will you not?”

  Jack did not answer the obvious, but merely waited for them to decide.

  As he had told the demons, they had no choice.

  * * *

  Nine men and their families, and the family of the tenth man, and the ties they had made—it was nearly two hundred souls and their households Jack led to their fate. Briar was left near-empty behind them, but it was a sturdy town; it would survive. And this time, Jack thought, they would know to lure a magician and heed their town’s warning.

  Nearly two hundred souls, all of them willing, he led to the rock’s spine, and delivered them from the devil.

  The hollow of the stone was barely a dozen feet long and half that across. But it was large enough to contain them, and give them the illusion of land stretching beyond. A man’s lifetime was only so long, even the youngest of them, and once the nine died, their children and children’s children would be released, unstained by their fathers’ folly. The demon gathered above the hollow, stretched on their flat stomachs, watching the town rebuild itself the way humans watched a game of dice.

  Jack, forgotten, gathered the reins and swung up into the saddle. Digging his heels gently into the piebald’s sides, the pair moved down off the rock and onto the endless plains. The devil did not hold a grudge. This one time, Jack had outplayed his hand and taken the pot. But one game changed nothing: he had a missing man to chase down and deliver unto the devil.

  Obedience kept him alive. If he lived long enough, he could outride his own damnation.

  In the Devil’s West, only a fool asked for more.

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  Alta California, Spring 1852

  So here we are, sitting in ambush on the Sacramento River down below Sutter’s Mill, and I still don’t know what it’s about. Of course I’m not a complete raving imbecile, I know the ambush is about the gold that’s coming down the river. What I don’t understand is why I’m dressed like Admiral bloody Nelson, and talking like a toffee-nose imbecile, and waiting for a man dressed like a carrion-eating bird to swoop down on us.

  I want the gold, but more than that, I want answers.

  When I first arrived in Alta California, I found myself a lucky man. I served as a topman on one of the first merchant ships to sail through the Golden Gate after Commodore Stockton secured the place, and therefore I was one of the first to hear of the strike on the American River, where gold nuggets were said to be just lying on the ground. I promptly deserted my ship—along with the other sailors, and all the officers, too.

  I got to the gold fields ahead of the rush. I wasn’t a forty-niner, I was a forty-eighter. And by Jove, I found those nuggets just lying there, and more than a few of them.

  But it wasn’t long before you had to do more than stroll along the riverbank to find gold. You panned up and down the stream, hoping to find enough ore to justify building a rocker box or a sluice box. You could stand or squat in freezing water for hours, and often enough you found nothing at all. Tens of thousands of people were flooding into the territory—not just Americans, but Mexicans, Chinese, Mormons, Australians, and even a gang of Kanakas from Hawaii. Turn your back for an instant and your claim was gone, and maybe your gold with it.

  It was impossible to carry on alone, so I recruited a gang of fellow gold-seekers—we called ourselves the “Gentlemen of Leisure,” though we were anything but. I tried to get as many sailors as I could, because sailors know how to do things—build structures, haul ropes, stow supplies, handle the canvas we used for our tents. About half were English, like me, and the rest came everywhere from Tipperary to Timbucktoo. Soon they were calling me “Commodore”—as a joke, like.

  There was absolutely no law. No constables, no judges, no sheriff, and no military because all the soldiers had deserted and run to the gold fields. If you had a dispute, you settled it yourself.

  Settling one of those disputes was what brought me up against the Condor.

  The winter of ’49 had settled in, and most of our party decided to take the Sitka steamboat down the Sacramento for a little vacation in San Francisco. We’d staked ourselves a decent claim on the Middle Fork that was bringing in a steady amount of income, nothing spectacular but regular. Some of the more ambitious of us argued for striking off to other parts in hopes of finding better paydirt, but we decided to postpone that decision till the spring.

  There were a couple lads who offered to stay on the claim over the winter, which should have made me suspicious. But I was eager to spend the gold I felt burning in my pockets, and if I felt any doubts, I brushed them aside.

  When I had first landed in San Francisco, it was a little mission station called Yerba Buena, but the place had the new name now, and it was a fine time we had there. The growing town was a perpetual buzz of activity, because it was in the act of transforming itself from a tiny settlement of a few hundred people to the city it is now. We paid nothing for lodging, because we moved into one of the scores of abandoned ships in the harbor. That allowed the Gentlemen of Leisure to spend our money on the things a sailor enjoys: drink and ladies. Though it has to be said that both were expensive.

  Still, I managed to save enough of our funds to buy supplies for the return trip and the mules to carry them. So it was that we rollicked into our camp on the Middle Fork one fine April day, only to find a bunch of Australians working our claim. Working with our flume, which we’d built, and our sluice box, which we’d left in place back in December.

  If I’d had an idea that any of this was going on, my approach would have been more cautious, but instead I just strolled right into the camp leading one of our mules and blinked in surprise at all the activity going on around me. And before I could think, I opened my mouth and shouted out.

  “What in blazes is going on here?”

  One of the Australians waded out of the shallows and confronted me. He was a well set-up cove, over six feet tall, with tattoos sprawling all over his powerful arms. He wore a Bowie knife in a scabbard at his waist. He loomed over me like a big redwood, and I didn’t like the look of him at all.

  “We’re workin’ our diggins, mate,” he says. “You have any objections?”

  I recognized those flattened Australian vowels and was reminded that most of the inhabitants of that country were convicts—and that the British didn’t transport prisoners thousands of miles for little offenses. This might be a criminal gang, for all I knew.

  Still, I brazened it out.

  “This is our claim,” says I, “so you lads will just have to hook it.”

  “You wasn’t here when we arrived,” says the digger. “All we found was an abandoned cabin and some moldy old tents. So this claim is ours now, I reckon.”

  It wasn’t till later that I figured out what happened. The two chaps we’d left at our claim were among those who had argued for striking off to find better diggings, and that was just what they’d done: they’d taken our remaining supplies and equipment and gone upriver, and either they’d planned to be back in time to meet us or they hadn’t. I wouldn’t know, as I never saw either of them again.

  “I con it thisaway,” says I. “You lot just move on now. Keep the gold you’ve taken—you’ve worked for it. But this claim is ours. You can ask anyone up the Middle Fork or down.”

  I was bolder now, because the Gentlemen of Leisure had come up behind me, all nine of them, and I knew I wasn’t alone. By now we were an experienced, well-equipped party, and each of us had a Colt Dragoon pistol, and as
well we carried some old Hall carbines and brand-new Sharps rifles for hunting. I had a double-barreled shotgun strapped to the pack saddle of my mule, and a big knife at my side.

  If the Australian saw any of this, he decided to disregard it. I could see color rising into his face like a red tide.

  “You abandoned your claim, and now it belongs to the Sydney Ducks!” he says, gesturing at his mob. “You clear out, or you’ll get thumped!”

  Instead, it was me that thumped him. Remember that I was a sailor, and had been at sea since I was a boy. I’d been hauling rope and rigging all that time, and the sort of labor I’d found in the gold fields wasn’t the sort to soften me. My hands were covered in callus as thick as my little finger, and as hard as horn.

  So what I did was slap the Duck across the side of the head with one of my hard, hard hands, and he was knocked silly. He sprawled unconscious to the ground, after which I turned back to the mule to unstrap the shotgun.

  My own lads were quick to brandish their pistols and rifles, but the Sydney Ducks weren’t so slow, either, and came roaring at us with shovels and picks and knives and pistols of their own. Bullets whirred through the air. I yanked the shotgun from the lines holding it in place, drew the hammers back, and fired the first barrel at one of the Australians that was coming at me with a shovel. I’d been hoping to kill a grouse for dinner, so the gun was loaded only with birdshot, but it struck him in the face, and he reeled back howling.

  That was when I heard the cry of the Condor for the first time, a high-pitched Ky-yeee that echoed from the granite walls of the Sierra Nevada, and then there was a great thumping crash between my shoulder blades, and I went down face-first in the gravel. While I lay stunned, trying to decide whether or not I’d been shot, I heard a wild volley of pistol fire, and a series of meaty thwacks followed by the sounds of bodies falling. My head awhirl, I staggered to my feet, and I turned around to see the most preposterous sight I’d ever seen in my life.

  This was a man dressed in a feathered costume, with a large red hood pulled up over his head and down over his face, with only his piercing blue eyes peering out. Add to that a hooked beak made of boiled leather that hung over his mouth and a kind of contraption mounted on his shoulders beneath a streaming cloak.