The Scarlet Star Trilogy

by Ben Galley

  There was a breeze too, one that made Lurker look over his shoulder when it first blew. Merion turned as well, but all he saw was an empty row of fenced-off gardens, and a pair of scrawny pigs licking at a trough. The breeze tasted sweet, as though it had come straight from a meadow. But there was a bitterness mingled with it, as if that meadow hid a pride of starving lions, waiting to rip you to shreds.

  ‘There aren’t any stars,’ Merion mumbled. ‘You can normally see stars.’

  Lurker did not reply. He just quickened his pace.

  The house was dead and dark save for one tiny candle on the porch, fluttering its last breaths. Its orange fingers barely illuminated the figure standing in the doorway, arms crossed and slouching. She must have noted something in their pace, Merion thought, for his aunt was already halfway down the steps before they had a chance to take a ragged breath and shout. The air was still hot, despite the bitter breeze. Merion’s brow was heavy with sweat. The growing sense of fear did not help.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, skidding to a halt in front of them. Lurker tipped his hat despite the urgency of the situation. Merion had to hand it to him. Manners came first. Death and destruction could wait.

  ‘Shohari war party,’ Lurker rumbled, ‘Jake saw them to the west, just over that scraggy pair of hills. Their shamans must have calmed the wraiths,’ He cocked a thumb back towards the town.

  ‘How far away?’ Merion piped up, not sure whether to be terrified or excited. His thoughts instantly turned to Rhin, even despite the faerie’s recent behaviour.

  ‘Not far enough,’ Lurker hissed. Jake cawed sharply twice and Lurker nodded. ‘Mayut said this day would come. We got an hour, maybe less. They’ll wait until the night’s good and dark before comin’ in, like a trident.’ Lurker jabbed the air with three fingers.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Like a big fork, Merion,’ Lilain told him.

  ‘Worker’s camp in the middle, town either side.’

  Lilain shook her head. ‘How do you know?’

  Lurker grunted. ‘It’s what they always do. Why change something if it works?’

  That seemed to throw a shiver down Lilain’s spine. Merion felt it too.

  ‘In the house, now,’ Lilain beckoned to them. Her voice betrayed just the faintest hint of fear, as if her mouth had been pulled tight at the corners. ‘I want you inside and the door locked, and no arguments.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Lurker bobbed his head. Merion said nothing.

  Only once the key had rattled in the lock did Lilain scratch her head. ‘We’ll be safe, if you’re here, right?’ Lilain asked of Lurker.

  Lurker shrugged. ‘Maybe, but there ain’t no guarantee. They might just shoot or fry us on sight. Or set the house afire without even knockin’,’ he muttered.

  ‘Fry us?’ Merion whispered, his face aghast. He had quickly ducked into his room to warn Rhin, but the faerie had just shrugged and patted his sword. Merion shut the door tight behind him, and Lurker gave him a knowing look.

  ‘Figure of speech, Merion,’ his aunt interjected.

  ‘Magick, boy. The most dangerous kind.’

  ‘Lurker! Will you stop it?’

  Merion narrowed his eyes. ‘I’m not scared,’ he asserted.

  ‘We’ll get on the roof,’ Lilain said. ‘They won’t look up there, if they come looking at all. We’re on the opposite side of town, thank the Maker. I knew there was a reason I bought a house in the Runnels,’ Lilain rambled.

  ‘Get Long Tom,’ Lurker said in a low voice.

  Lilain scowled at first, but then, with a bite of her lip, her face softened, and went sliding back to well-restrained agitation. Just a twitch, here and there, to show she was human.

  ‘And give the boy a gun too,’ Lurker added, half-hiding behind a cough.

  ‘I don’t want a gun,’ Merion replied flatly, but Lurker dismissed him with a wave.

  ‘You need a gun, Merion. You’re ain’t fighting grade yet,’ he said, before bending a knee so he could talk up rather than down. Somehow, that was more patronising. ‘You don’t know what magick is until you seen a shaman on the loose. It ain’t pretty, but shit me if it ain’t impressive. And loud. And hot. A leech you may be, but right now you need a gun, like a real man of the west,’ he said.

  Merion was adamant. ‘I don’t want a gun,’ he repeated, chasing them up the stairs as the two of them galloped to Lilain’s study.

  His aunt hissed down the stairwell. ‘Take a gun, Merion. Better to have one and not need it, than need one and not have it. That’s what my father, your grandfather, always said.’

  Merion caught her at the door to her dishevelled study. He lowered his voice to a growl. ‘And it was a gun that killed my father, your brother, and I will not consort with the horrid things. They’re ugly. And evil!’

  Lilain moved to put a hand on her nephew’s shoulder, but Merion shrugged himself away. He stood there, defiant, and watched her face fall, and made no apologies for it. Perhaps she was sorry, and by all rights she should be. If she wanted to pat shoulders, then maybe she shouldn’t make a habit of ruining lives.

  When finally she had caught herself, she shook her head at him. ‘The gun is as evil as the person who holds it. It’s a machine, not a monster.’

  But Merion was adamant. ‘No, I want some shades instead. Electric eel, or a sprite.’

  ‘You’re not ready for sprite.’

  Merion stamped his foot. ‘Yes I am!’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Lurker murmured from the study. He was busy unlocking a chest buried under a stack of books.

  ‘Lurker!’ Lilain snapped. ‘You just said …’

  ‘What? He is,’ he said, and waved his hands in surrender. ‘Better to have it and not need it, right?’

  Lilain sighed. It wasn’t like her to give up so easily. ‘Alright,’ she relented. ‘Give him The Mistress. I’ll fetch some shades.’

  ‘The what?’ Merion asked.

  There was a loud click as Lurker’s key found its teeth. ‘Ah,’ he said, grinning, ‘here she is.’

  Some men love guns more than they love women. Lurker was one of these men. The way he held a gun was evidence of this fact: the way that at one moment he might be caressing its sides, and then the next he was hefting it onto his shoulder, or whirling it around. Certain parallels could be drawn here.

  Merion scowled as Lurker held her up. The Mistress. If she had been of the female species, she would have been a tremendously ugly specimen. A revolting lady, all bolts and sharp edges, with a long grey pipe for a snout and copper teeth for a smile.

  Merion held her in both hands and sneered. ‘This isn’t a mistress.’

  ‘Not a mistress, boy, The Mistress,’ Lurker corrected him. He was loading his own gun, Big Betsy, and Lilain’s long, twisted-barrelled rifle, Long Tom. It had some sort of skinny telescope just above the trigger.

  Merion looked down at his gun and wondered why his was so special. It looked as though it had been stretched out, and instead of six barrels it had just the one, with a revolving breech near the wooden grip. A hammer-like protrusion sat just above his thumb when he held it.

  ‘Six shots. Every time you shoot you crank that back. Don’t put your finger on the trigger ’til you’re sure you want to pull it, unnerstan’ me? And number one rule: keep that hammer forwards when you’re not shooting. Even if you don’t manage to shoot one of us dead, you’ll bring the whole war party down on our heads. Keep that in your mind,’ Lurker lectured him. ‘Now, on the roof, boy.’ Lurker pointed towards a window, and Merion gulped. Was this really happening? Was there really about to be a war?

  Could this week get any worse?

  The breeze had turned colder, taking the sting out of the hot night. Merion found himself shivering as he climbed on all fours to the apex of the roof. The gradient was hardly steep, but the wooden shingles wobbled under every step. All Merion could think of was how heavy the gun was at his hip.

  When he reached the apex he put his back agai
nst the rickety chimney and faced south and west. The desert was black like the sky, and where they touched, they almost became one. Merion could not remember ever seeing a night so black, so devoid.

  The only light was from the town itself, bleaching a garish hole in the darkness with thousands of lanterns and torches and candles. Light glowed like a river of lava through the jagged edges of sign-boards and rooftops, splashing against the tall cranes of the worker’s camp and the spikes of pitched tents. Every few seconds a lonely shout, or a smashing of glass, or the squeak of a fiddle would catch on the breeze and come floating to his ears, muffled and malformed.

  There was a shadow in the west. Even in the dark he could see it, and see it moving too, padding silently across the sand, or so Merion imagined.

  In his mind’s eye he could picture the braids trailing in the wind, the colours of the war paint beginning to catch the light of the town, inching nearer with every thud of tough heels. He could see their long spears, blackened with soot as Lurker had told him, held low but ready, their flint knives, dipped in poison, and their arrows, dipped in the blood of whatever animal or poor soul they had killed last. He could imagine their fierce eyes, unblinking, their rigid cheeks cutting the air.

  ‘I can see them,’ he whispered.

  ‘Mhm,’ Lurker grunted. ‘Nothin’ we can do now ’cept raise the alarm. Give these poor bastards an equal chance.’

  ‘But the Shohari …’ Merion started to say, but then he thought of Calidae, and of Castor, and what should happen if the town were overrun. ‘An equal chance,’ he said.

  Lurker pointed his six barrels at the sky and emptied each one. When he was done, he hunkered down to reload and watched with a grim expression on his face. Shouts grew loud on the fell breeze. Lights burst into being on each and every rooftop, and suddenly the ground became as bright as the night sky had failed to be. A single, lone gunshot rang out in answer to Lurker’s, and then a scream that sent a shiver through every single person who heard it. The shadow in the west galloped on. Bugles sounded now, from the lordsguards. The shadow had been spied. Bright torches burnt away the night, revealing the monsters it had been hiding. The war cries began to rise. Drums began to sound.

  Lurker pressed a small spyglass into Merion’s hands, and the boy put it eagerly to his eye. He could see them now: lithe, lanky figures, swarming into the light like a horde of locusts, right into the sheriffsmen’s firing range. Their spine-chilling undulating war cry was momentarily drowned out by an explosion of fire and smoke from the guns. Bullets flew like hornets. The night began to crackle. All around the edge of town, puffs of pale smoke began to rise, dribbles of grey on an otherwise black canvas.

  It felt wrong to think of fireworks, but Merion was guilty as charged. He recalled a night when he had been very young, standing on a box to peer out of Harker Sheer’s highest window, his father’s steady hand on his back. They had looked down upon the fringes of London, watched it sparkle and shimmer. Fell Falls looked the same, only this time there were no children duelling with sparklers, no popperkins or Jack Flashes being thrown in doorways, only bullets and powder, and the hack and slash of sword and chipped stone. No laughter or giggles, just the screaming of men and Shohari being shown the colour of their insides.

  A great spout of flame burst up from the work-camp. A tent soared into the sky with wings of fire. There was more screaming, and this time the frenzied whinnying of horses. Something moved amongst the Shohari, even less human than they were. It screeched like a tortured wolf. Its shape, painted black as pitch against the fire, was nothing short of terrifying.

  ‘Hear that?’ Lurker asked. Merion nodded. The whole town had heard the creature. He could imagine children shivering under their beds at the sound of it.

  ‘Lupus,’ whispered his aunt, crawling up the roof behind them. She had Long Tom slung across her back. Merion had never seen her so menacing.

  ‘The Norsemen first told tales of them, stories from a time when they braved the ocean to settle here in America, a thousand years ago or more. More desert wolf than Shohari—a twisted bitch of a creature. Only ever see the females, never the males,’ she lectured.

  ‘My vials?’ asked Merion.

  Lilain reached inside her pocket and brought forth three long vials. ‘Eel, sprite and roadrunner, just in case. Rather have you running than fighting.’

  Merion held onto them as if they were solid gold.

  ‘It’s customary to pay your letter,’ she said, with a hint of a smirk.

  Her attempts to lighten the mood were not working. Merion turned back to the battle, filling his ears with the rattle of constant gunfire. He wondered how many bullets it would take to win the night—or how many spears, for that matter. There came a rally of fire from the work-camp, and more screeching pierced the sound of battle. Merion caught the faint echo of a cheer on the ill breeze.

  ‘If this town survives the night, that lupus has an appointment on my table,’ Lilain muttered to herself.

  There came a chattering cry from above. It was Jake, circling the rooftop. Lurker wrapped his hand a little tighter around Big Betsy, his finger sliding almost imperceptibly down to the trigger.

  ‘What is it?’ Merion asked.

  ‘Shamans,’ Lurker grunted, and lifted a hand to point to a new kind of terror, emerging out of the darkness.

  Lilain unslung her rifle and lay down so she could rest it on the roof. Merion pressed the spyglass harder against his eyeball, as if it would bring the action any closer. There is a terrible fascination to war: part horror, part hope.

  The two shamans were glowing white hot when they broke through the hastily-made barricade of dead bodies and cartwheels. Bullets melted inches from their skin. Guns grew too hot to hold. Powder caught inside casings. Soon enough the edge of town was a drumroll of gunfire, pitted only with screams and the shamans’ slow, ominous chants. A third joined them on the dusty battlefield, which was now swiftly turning to glass. Lightning crackled from his fingers. Merion sat up like a meerkat. The fighting pressed deeper into the town. A thick crowd of Shohari had gathered behind their Shamans.

  Bottles trailing heads of flame began to rain down from the rooftops. They exploded in deadly flashes of hot blue and spitting green. Shrieks and wails filled the air as Shohari were consumed in flame. Alcohol never failed to solve a problem in Fell Falls.

  ‘Moonshine,’ Lurker mumbled. It was a fine tactic. The blinding, searing clouds of fire halted the advancing Shohari and the shamans long enough for the lordsguards to bring up their rifles and Gatling guns, and for the sheriffsmen to shore up the flanks, pouring into the alleyways and side streets. There were more bullets, and more screams. Merion drank it all in through the bulbous eye of his spyglass.

  As soon as the flames had cleared, the guns began to fire. Wave after wave of bullets met the Shohari ranks. All that could be heard above the thunder of rifle-fire was the deep, rapid pounding of the Gatlings. Rounds spat from its mouth like water from a gargoyle in a storm, shredding the iron bones of the Shohari to splinters and making a sordid memory of flesh and skin.

  Bricks and boulders chased the flaming bottles, pouring into the bloody chaos. One caught a shaman square in the forehead. He sank to his knees as the blood began to pour. His hands clawed at the air, wrapped in hot magick. Bullets melted inches from his fingers like raindrops striking a window. Hot metal pooled around him in glowing puddles. As he raised a hand to wipe the blood his eyes, his spell began to falter. His skull must have been split in two. The bullets crept closer. Flecks of hot metal kissed his bare skin and black cracks began to show in his white-hot skin. When the bullets finally met their mark, the shaman was consumed by the very magick that had kept him alive. He vanished in a burst of scarlet flame, and all throughout the town, in the streets, in the bedrooms and in the basements, every single scrap of flame burnt scarlet too.

  It was a moment forever to be remembered by whiskey-slicked lips in saloons, whispering of how the moonshine flames had tur
ned blood-red. Merion saw it with his very own eyes. It was a massacre. Straight and cold.

  The lordsguards and their Gatling kept firing until the cries of the Shohari signalled utter defeat. The warriors scattered in every direction, only to be met by sheriffsmen waiting in the dark, or sniping from outhouses. The ferocity of their prey had shocked them, that much was clear, and now the carpet of their own dead littering the centre of town proved too much. Even the Shohari are not immune to the claws of fear.

  Horns and drums sounded in the desert as they fled. Merion watched the dark shapes scurry across the fire-painted desert, their own shadows nipping at their heels. Merion frowned. He did not know whether to feel pride or sorrow as the cheers began to ring out across Fell Falls.

  ‘They fought bravely,’ Lurker hummed as he watched the Shohari disappear.

  ‘Some aren’t done fighting yet,’ Lilain whispered.

  Lilain was right: the fire still burned ferociously in the main street, but only in one place, in amongst a pile of fallen Shohari. Before anybody could stifle the cheers or raise a shout, lightning began to flicker through the dead. Searing blue tentacles reached out to probe the bodies and their oozing bullet holes, as if searching for a soul that was still alive. It soon found one.

  A scream cut through the cheering like a sword through butter. Guns began to sing again, but not a single bullet could make it through the curtain of heat and electricity. Two figures rose up out of the dead, shrugging limbs and shattered spears aside. The fire shaman burned fiercely, pressing the lordsguards back and turning one side of the postal office to charcoal. Bricks rained once more. Planks began to spin down through the air. Even sandbags were being tossed, but still their magick raged. The Gatlings were melting; Merion could hear their mechanisms screeching. For a brief moment, it looked as though the shamans would tear a path straight through town.