Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  Still, I did not want to share even these half-formed plans with the Condor.

  “You’ll be returning to your old habits, then?” says he.

  “Aye,” says I. “It’s the river for us.”

  There was a glint in his eye. “I will see you there, no doubt,” says he.

  “Sir,” says I, “I would expect nothing less.”

  He bowed, and so did I. And so, between us, the silent promise was made—we would have our final battle somewhere on the Sacramento some time before General Scott arrived, and it would settle matters between us once and for all.

  “You know,” begins I, “if you hadn’t joined the wrong side, that time on the American River—”

  But that was as far as I got, because at that moment a man ran into the room shouting “Fire! Fire!” and that was the end of the party.

  San Francisco had been set alight. We were up the next day and a half fighting the flames, and despite our efforts half of the city burned.

  The Nihilist was suspected, though it had to be admitted that the city had already burned two or three times without his efforts. Judging by what had happened in the past, it would all be rebuilt quickly.

  Once the flames were extinguished, I returned with my crew to the New World and pulled the boat off the mud. The miners returned to their diggings. And I advanced my plans.

  I would swoop back to San Francisco one night, I thought. We’d swarm aboard an ocean-going ship, then tow her out to sea and set sail. I hated the thought of abandoning the New World, so we’d tow her as we sailed away.

  For Hawaii first, I thought. Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom and might not honor a foreign arrest warrant.

  And if they did, I would escape. I had grown very good at escaping.

  But first, I wanted to keep my promise to the Condor, and I found that a perfect opportunity beckoned. The miners had been hoarding their gold in the Sierras while Professor Mitternacht was ruling his little kingdom of Tyrolia-on-the-Bay, and now that supplies were coming into the port again, they were eager to go to what remained of San Francisco and help themselves to its comforts.

  It was announced that commercial steamboat service would be resumed with Great Columbia, the first grand boat to leave Sacramento City for San Francisco carrying passengers. There would be fireworks, speeches, and a band.

  Of course it’s an ambush. They want me to attack; they wave the gold beneath my nose to make sure I take the bait. The boat will be packed with militia.

  I will intercept Great Columbia, of course. And the Condor will defend it. And so we will meet, perhaps for the last time.

  So here I am, now, standing on the bridge, the New World lurking on the sweet gold-bearing waters of Steamboat Slough with steam up and weapons ready, waiting for our sentries on shore to signal Great Columbia’s arrival. I’m prepared to hear Ky-yeee as the Condor arrows out of the sky to engage me in final battle for plunder and freedom. And maybe, when I finally beat him and have him at my mercy, I’ll finally have answers to some of my questions.

  What are you? I’ll ask. A crusader for justice? A madman in a cloak?—but not simply a madman, but rather a madman who has so infected Alta California with his own brand of lunacy that an entire host of strangers are now donning masks and swirling capes and brawling over the flood of gold coming down from the Sierras? Fellow lunatics who, like me, would have simply gone about our lives if we hadn’t somehow been chosen to share the Condor’s dream?

  Without the Condor, the Nihilist wouldn’t have burned the city, and Professor Mitternacht wouldn’t have choked all those people with his gas. I would be a miner up to my knees in cold muck, thinking simple thoughts of a warm fire, a bottle of whiskey, and maybe a girl.

  Who are you? I will demand. It’s time I knew. Southern planter or Mexican caballero or fiend from Hell, I will know his name. I will know his station. I will know what drove him to this.

  He will not want to tell me these things. But I will make him.

  I will not kill him. I am not fated to be the one who ends the tale of the Condor.

  But I am game for other methods. If I must, I will hang him upside-down over a burning pit, and that may loosen his tongue.

  For he has assigned me this part, and I will play it till it breaks me. Or him.

  I see the flag signal now, my lookout waving frantically. Great Columbia is on its way.

  I call out orders. Up the anchor! Fill the boilers with fuel! Full speed! Stand by the guns!

  And then I smile. Cast off the airship!

  For I have not been idle since I made off with some of Professor Mitternacht’s gear—and the Austrian engineers I’d abducted were very happy to cooperate with my plans once I’d explained that the alternative was to be strung up by their former slaves. The result is that I now have a modest airship of my own, powered by what my engineers are pleased to call a Lichtätherkompressor, the Aetheric Concentrator, which I gather works by compressing an invisible fluid alleged to fill the universe. Which may sound like airy German metaphysics to you and me, but it seems to lift my little aerial barge with fair efficiency for all that.

  The Commodore’s Fancy isn’t as massive or magnificent as the Schrecken—it’s only a platform fifty feet long—but it’s still one of two flying machines in all the world, and my heart gives a great surge as we lift off New World’s Texas deck, and suddenly we see the great winding watercourse of the Sacramento below us, the ash and willow and cottonwood, and the beautiful picture below us.

  See how the smoke boils from the stacks of the New World, the fine white foam flies from the paddle wheels! Hear the whirr of the airship’s great propeller! Ahead, see the white gingerbread lace of the Great Columbia, the decks packed with miners bringing their gold to the markets! See the sun glinting from the muskets and weapons of the militia, who think to ambush me even as I ambush them! See their confusion as the Commodore’s Fancy darts toward them! No doubt they think of Mitternacht’s fluorine bombs and tremble.

  I would never carry such a filthy weapon, but I hardly mind if my enemies think I do. And the Condor can’t drop on me now, not when I’m flying well above the tallest trees. I laugh as the wind tugs at my whiskers. If the Condor is on that boat, I have him trapped.

  I’ll have him soon, and then I’ll have my answers. I signal to the gunner on the airship’s bow, to fire the traditional warning shot across the target’s bows.

  Then there’s a sudden burst of flame on the Great Columbia, and suddenly I see a figure arrowing for the sky on a tail of fire, cloak rippling as he rises.

  It’s the Condor, and he’s somehow rigged himself out with a skyrocket, shooting himself into the atmosphere to gain altitude so that he can drop on me. I snarl as I curse the ingenuity of the man, and then I laugh.

  I am the Commodore! What does it matter who or what made me—? I am myself, here in my cocked hat and epaulets, brandishing my sword on the swaying bridge of my glorious airship. It’s far too late to quibble over origins, over who struck who on the Middle Fork… What matters is the battle to come, the final confrontation between the titan of order and the grand nabob of piracy. The last great fight of the Golden Age.

  Can you see him? There—a swift shadow against the sun?

  Can you hear it? Above the sound of the hissing steam, the thrashing paddles, the scream of the whistles? The sound that brings a snarl to my lips, that causes me to brandish my sword in defiance at the diving bogy in the sky…

  Ky-yeeeee.

  NEVERSLEEPS

  FRED VAN LENTE

  Monument Valley, Near Navajo Territory, Northbound on the Northwest Pacific Express, 120 years after the Awakening

  There were three Pinkertons. There were always three. One was a white man, one was black, and the other was a Celestial. They may have been something else before, but now they were Pinkertons. Same brownish-grey tweed suits, same bowler hats, same obese-caterpillar mustaches lurking below their noses.

  Simon Leslie was playing hold-’em in th
e parlor car when the train slowed between two mesas in Monument Valley with a puff of steam and a sigh. Through the window he saw the Pinkertons get off and march in a flawless triangular phalanx up the nearest brick-red ridge. From the looks of it, they emerged from the express car in the center of the train; maybe the railroad kept them stacked in crates with the sacks of parcels and the safe where they laid, stiff-necked, their tattooed eyes open and unblinking, waiting to be needed. They were nicknamed “Neversleeps” for a reason. Simon Leslie knew. It had not been so long since he was one of them.

  “Your bet, Si. Come on! You’re growing cobwebs.” The futures trader who got on with Leslie in New Orleans wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was. Leslie reflexively looked at his hand: it was still the Ten and Page of Pentacles. The turn had just been set down, so the Eight of Wands, the Tower, the Empress and now the Queen of Cups showed on the table. He had a modest gut-shot straight draw going, so he bet half the pot.

  “Christ on a Crutch, will you look at that,” said another player, a fat lawyer taking his pretty young third wife to the West Coast for their honeymoon.

  Everyone looked out the window: an array of Navajo warriors lined the ridge astride soot-colored ponies, the feathers tied to their spears a-flutter in the breeze. They looked like they had materialized out of thin air, but Simon spotted the shaman among them, an emaciated crone wearing nothing but a cloak of raven feathers, shaking a gnarled rattle of bone. No doubt they had been standing there the whole time, cloaked in spirit, awaiting the train and the Pinkertons.

  “They’re—they’re not going to attack, are they?” asked the lawyer’s wife, a short, befreckled redhead who had been giving Leslie smiles he probably should have been ignoring the whole game. He’d given her smiles in return he definitely should not have. He didn’t have time for it. Not this trip.

  “They wouldn’t dare,” the futures man said. “There’s been peace with the Four Corners tribes for a generation.”

  There was a time, not so far distant, at the beginning of the Awakening, that the Navajo and the Ute and the Zuni and the Hopi would have hungered for war, along with all the indigenous and oppressed peoples of five continents. The ancestor-worshippers and dream-walkers and totem-bearers thought they could feel the yoke and heel of the European easing from their collective necks, once all the spirits and spells from the days before the Age of Reason returned in a joyous shriek to the world. The native had been in touch with Supernature far longer than the colonizer, their touch with the Invisible had not atrophied from millennia of smelting and steam engines and monotheism. The Awakening, to them, was the first day of their inevitable return to power.

  How wrong they were.

  They forgot how adept those who seize power are at retaining it, no matter how outré the circumstances. Within a few years the enchantments and sorceries long-suppressed by European churches thrust back into prominence and were ruthlessly employed by those already in charge. There would always be those maddening fools who love the bosses, who love a firm, guiding hand on their nape and revel in the harsh disciplining of those who try and buck it. The Neversleeps were among the most feared of these servants. Though outnumbered by stony-faced braves twelve to one, the trio marched unafraid up the ridge to the lead Navajo warrior, resplendent in buffalo horns, to receive what they believed, without any hesitancy or doubt, was always rightfully theirs.

  Simon Leslie said, “What they’re doing now is avoiding a war.”

  The poker players watched as the braves parted so two squaws could deliver to the Pinkertons a handcuffed, hooded figure and accompanying baggage.

  “Is that…” The redheaded newlywed squinted at the captive. “Is that a woman?”

  “Not just any woman,” Leslie said. “That’s Nicola Tesla.”

  His fellow players turned and gaped at him. “Not the atomist? The descendant of… of you know? Him?”

  Simon Leslie nodded.

  “The savages were harboring her laboratory on their reservation? That’s where she was hiding out?” Since the raid on her experimental cyclotron in Colorado Springs, Nicola Tesla had been the West’s most wanted Science Criminal, with a million-dollar bounty on her head. The Four Corners chieftains no doubt delighted in frustrating the will of the Bureau of Animist Affairs by hiding her. Finally, though, a headman competing for tribal supremacy had ratted her out, able to sow enough uneasiness with the elder matriarchs about the risk of death raining down on them from Washington for the sake of some white woman practicing electrical heresy that was as taboo to their faith as it was to that of the hated Federals.

  Fortunately for her, someone in the Bureau had, in turn, leaked news of her capture and details of the prisoner exchange to Simon Leslie’s comrades in the White City.

  “Poor girl,” the fat lawyer tutted as the Pinkertons enveloped their prisoner in the center of their phalanx and returned to the train. “They’re taking her to San Francisco, no doubt, to be burned at the stake.”

  “Or shipped to the prison mines of Alaska Territory,” Simon Leslie said.

  “Ain’t you just a font of useful information,” the futures trader said. “I don’t rightly recall what you said you did for a living.”

  “No?” As he said it the trader slapped down the river card: the Nine of Swords. He had made his straight.

  “I’m a gambler.”

  The men at the table blanched. The redhead grinned.

  “All-in,” Simon Leslie grinned back.

  Once the Neversleeps were safely on board, the twisting, cord-like dragon towing the train spread its wings with a snort and a roar and launched itself back into the shimmering ley line coursing across the horizon and beat its leather wings toward California.

  * * *

  The redheaded bride’s name was Marion and she had spent her whole life until her wedding day in Lafayette, Louisiana. She told Simon her new husband made love to her like it was a necessity he tried to get over with as soon as possible, for she stood between him and sleep.

  When she stole into Leslie’s private sleeper berth he pulled her nightgown over her head and left it there as he kissed every inch of her freckled skin and once she was covered in goose bumps he picked her up by her bare thighs and lay her on the tiny bed and made sure that she knew she was a rare delicacy to be savored and adored and pleasured. She was not a means. She was an End. And she bit her long red hair to keep from crying out.

  After, he thought maybe he should wake her and send her back to her snoring husband for her own safety, but she looked so peaceful lying in his bed he couldn’t bear to. Instead he opened his trunk and popped open the false bottom to reveal The Clockwork Chrysalis. He had waited long enough. They would be nearing the point in the Sierra Madre—according to his guidebook and compass—where the Donner Party made a miserable repast of itself all those years ago. He had chosen this as his disembarkation point for a reason.

  The Chrysalis creaked like an old battleship when he peeled it over his naked body, most of it thick rawhide that somehow felt no heavier than a thin layer of oil on his skin. The boots slipped silently over his feet and he pulled the hood down over his head. He flipped through lenses of the brass goggles over his eyes and set them to the widest aperture; within moments the great proboscis of the filter over his mouth began straining his breath, bringing only the purest air into his lungs, free of the stink of Enchantment.

  The atomists of the White City originally designed the Chrysalis to prevent any skin scales or stray hairs from leaving agents’ bodies while conducting anti-sorcery operations, to say nothing of blood or saliva. Everything the body shed or excreted could be turned against it by the enemy; scryers could find you anywhere in the world; diviners could predict your next move with unerring accuracy; necromancers could cast sudden death on you from hundreds of miles away.

  But soon the White City realized that the suit could be so much more.

  Leslie snapped the gun braces over his arms and strapped the brass duck’s-foot
pistols onto them, combustion-based projectile technology, simple possession of which had been a capital crime for nearly one hundred years. He stepped gingerly over the naked woman in his bed to the sill, slid the glass open and pulled himself onto the roof of the train car, closing the window with his heel before the whistle of wind could rouse Marion from her slumber.

  The train cleaved through snowcapped peaks and rolling carpets of pine with nary a sound, except the occasional sheet-on-a-clothesline flap of the Li Ying Lung dragon’s wings. The night air lashed at him but even though he felt as naked and vulnerable as a newborn he did not feel any cold. The paucity of oxygen at this altitude made his lungs clench but after a few seconds of crouching atop the sleeper car, carefully listening to his heartbeat, he brought the rhythm of his breath under control. The brass electrodes studding the inside of the Chrysalis helped greatly with that. They captured his bioelectric field and redistributed it inside the suit, where it could not be hijacked by mediums or magic-users.

  Such a manipulation of the psychic lacuna led to depression and erratic behavior in all but the most mentally disciplined operatives; Simon Leslie had had to spend a year mastering meditation techniques all but unheard of in the West to endure the sense of insignificance and hopelessness that enveloped him once he cloaked himself in the Chrysalis’s self-contained, absolute reality. He was cut off from self-deception, unmoored from myth, the caul of perception was ripped away, leaving nothing but what truly is, independent of him, in its stead. Unless his mind correlated most or all of its contents, the experience could crush his soul, by convincing him in an instant that he did not have one.

  On the plus side, the Chrysalis also rendered him completely immune to magic.

  He bounded from car to car. Innumerable (highly illegal) micro-filament wires crisscrossing the Chrysalis turned his second skin into a giant eardrum; vibrating through his soles he could hear snoring widows, the squeak of hip flasks being unscrewed, the tinkle of lantern glass: a parlor car. Then, the clatter of plates, the laughter of dishwashers trying to out-mock each other: the dining car.