by Ian McHugh
The officer argued. The shaman stood resolute. A soldier cracked his rifle butt into the back of the shaman’s head, and he dropped like a stone.
Easric’s mind went white, no thought but fear for the shaman’s life. He drew the young soldier’s revolver and rushed low through the grass.
He slid to a stop. There was only one reason to bring a shaman here.
He closed his eyes and cocked his head, listening. He groped the air with both hands like a panicking blind man, feeling.
There it was. Easric felt it; what no one had ever felt at Rose Mound, he felt it. A Crossing. It was thin and fragile. It slipped through his hands. He hadn’t training enough to part it.
Easric blessed Pearl Snow and her pack of cards. This was why she had sent him. Somehow a Crossing had been born.
The Empire had no use for such places. To them they weren’t sacred. They would tear it down for a rumor of gold unless he did something to stop them.
Rose Mound exploded as mining charges blew. From one side of the mound, dust plumed. Dirt and rock rattled down for a hundred yards.
The Crossing rippled in response. The air quivered; glimpses of a land beyond. And like a chasm had opened below his feet, Easric fell through.
* * *
A riot of color that made no sense, hurt his eyes, made him retch. Then:
Blasted land that had never known water. Deep purple sky. The fairy dust of unborn planets wove maypoles there. Close-by, stars. Not knowing their place, they fell and they fell and they fell. A morning star caught on the horn of the Moon and stuck there. Rose Mound was a desert rose, pink gypsum petals unfurling, tall as wizards’ towers; scent thick as love.
Easric was used to strange things. He knew a hundred Crossings, all in their lives’ winter, different than the physical world by nothing more than the angle of a shadow, or the scent of a flower that wasn’t there, or the North Star found in the West.
He knew of none like this one, not even a rumor. He’d believed the days of newborn Crossings long gone.
He spun, arms wide. He howled and he bayed at the confused stars and Moon, and he wept childlike with joy.
All was silent. Then from beneath the petals of living rock flowed bats in a black shrieking fog. They made up the spaces between the stars. They nudged the Moon and it rocked like a cradle. They swelled overhead.
Another explosion. A cataclysm. Falling home.
* * *
Chapter 6
In which our villain finds fertile ground for the seeds of his revenge.
Lieutenant Colonel Nasica didn’t believe Freedom Cordrey, not one word he said. “For all I know, you’re in with Dane thick as thieves.”
Cordrey blew smoke from a machine-rolled cigarette. They sat in Nasica’s headquarters. The table between them was covered by surveys and maps.
“If you think we’re friends, you don’t know Easric Dane,” Cordrey said. He set down his coffee. He lifted his hands and let his shirtsleeves fall and showed Nasica his wrists. “I can show you the rest of my bruises, if you like. I guarantee you, we ain’t anywhere close to friends.”
“All those do is remind me you’re an outlaw.”
“I ain’t an outlaw. Least not over here. To look at it one way, I’m your best friend. I never done nothing to Imperial folk. Never even crossed that river until Dane brought me here. Now Dane, he’s your outlaw. How many times has he busted up your men and hid behind that treaty?”
Cordrey nodded to the Lieutenant Colonel’s dog-eared copy of The Rosemond Gold and produced his own. “These books say the only thing keeping your military honest is Dane. These books make you all out to be fools. He’s more a hero than your own saints. That must smart. Especially what with the way he runs off with the General’s daughter in the end. You all let your wives read these books?” Cordrey smiled and smoke bled between his teeth. “You got a daughter?”
“It would be a sign of goodwill to hang you, Cordrey. Send you back in a box. Unless you have a point?”
“I’m thinking there’s a bounty on Easric Dane’s head. Under the table, quiet, so it don’t upset his admirers. That treasure you’re hunting, how much of it you give me, I deliver him up?”
“What makes you think you can deliver me Dane?”
“I got away from him. That’s tearing him up. You make a show of me, let him see where I am, there ain’t nothing that’ll keep him from coming for me.” He ground his cigarette under his boot. “It’s the kind of man he is.”
Nasica thought of his daughter. He thought of his wife, whose damn book it had been to begin with before he took it away and read it himself. He thought of the way the two had conferred over it, giggled over it, shot him glances, found him wanting.
Nasica stood. He took Cordrey’s coffee. He dumped it. He refilled the cup with a good brandy, then filled his own.
* * *
Chapter 7
In which Easric shows his compassion.
It rained dead bats.
The first pelted the ground not three feet before Easric.
He dropped to his knees and doubled over, hands clasped over his neck, knowing what was coming, having seen this before. The rain of gore came down. Bats smacked around him. They flopped. Entrails spattered. One struck him in the back. Another in the shoulder, and still they came down.
Five seconds they fell.
And when the horrible dull thunder of them stopped, he unclasped his hands and rose up and looked around.
There were hundreds of them, spirits all caught in the quake of the Crossing and too weak to live in the physical world. They were all of them dead but one. It was tiny, a pup. Its fur was silver-brown. Its wings were black. It was ugly and wicked looking. Who could figure spirits? It could have been anything. It chose to be a bat. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Easric reached for it. He thought of disease. He said to it, “You son of a bitch, you bite me, I’ll tear your head off.”
He picked it up. It bit him. Blood welled. He cussed it but held it no less gently. If he went rabid and died, it was his own damn fault for touching it. And he was pretty sure—almost sure—that a spirit could carry no earthly disease.
He opened his coat. The bat climbed inside it and hung by small claws from the lining. “I’m Easric Dane,” he told it. “I’ll get you home. I promise.”
* * *
Chapter 8
In which Easric gets his man.
Two unconscious guards later, Easric had himself two rifles. Along a patrol route on the border of the camp, he set up his distraction.
With his spyglass he’d seen Cordrey wandering the camp, free as you please. Cordrey had gone to a tin shack, looked around to see who was watching, then slipped in.
Easric told himself he was there to find the shaman and take the newborn spirit back to its home. He’d watched the enchanted auger bore its way down and thought about blowing it slivers. But now he was here, his head was filled with nothing but Cordrey and blood.
Five minutes later and far away from where he’d set his trap, Easric heard his rifles go off. A patrol had tripped the wire he’d strung. Shouts went up. Klaxons rang and soldiers ran, leaving unguarded space behind them. It was almost too easy.
* * *
“Sir, Cordrey’s gone,” the soldier reported.
Lieutenant Colonel Nasica shot standing and cursed.
“We were walking him through the camp like you said, and I don’t know how he did it, but—”
Two pops in the distance, klaxons and shouting. Nasica ran to the door. “It’s Dane. He’s here.” Men were swarming toward the gunfire. They were going the wrong way. God dammit, he’d been right and Cordrey and Dane were in this together. “They’ll go for that shaman,” he said.
* * *
Easric cracked open the door to the shack.
A lantern burned on a shelf. Its glass was soot-streaked, its wick needed trimming, and the light it spat had no substance.
The shaman stoo
d facing the door. The agates in his hair flickered like fireflies, green and enchanted. He’d been freed of his chains. They lay at his feet. Still, he didn’t move. Cordrey stood behind him, revolver pressed to the shaman’s temple.
Easric’s revolver was up.
“Close the door, Dane,” Cordrey said. “I’ve been trying to get this shaman to cross me over, but he don’t seem inclined. Maybe you can talk sense to him.”
Easric closed the door with his foot. Behind it lay an Imperial guard, throat cut.
“We got about two minutes, I figure, before the whole damn army shows up,” Cordrey said. “You got two choices. Tell this old man to cross us over, all of us, or take your chances with the army.”
The bat writhed under Easric’s coat, a claw dug into his chest. “You won’t kill him. You need him to get your damn treasure.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in it?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe.”
From outside someone shouted, “Corporal Dane, surrender!”
“Quicker than I thought,” Cordrey said. “Time’s up, Dane. Make your choice.”
Easric said nothing, stood there stock still, both hands on his revolver, waiting, breath slow and even.
From outside, “Five seconds, Dane, then we open fire!”
Cordrey cursed.
Easric smiled. “Your new friends don’t like you any more than I do.”
“Cross us over,” Cordrey said. “Cross us over now!”
Then the bat went crazy. It bit Easric on the chest. It gnawed. Its claws raked at him. Easric danced and threw open his coat to free the damn beast. It shot to the ceiling.
The shaman’s eyes went wide with delight.
Cordrey swung his revolver up toward it.
“No!” Easric shouted, and fired.
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Nasica shouldn’t have given Dane any warning at all. With the shaman freed, Dane and Cordrey could cross over any time they liked.
But there was good money in a living Easric Dane. In the Empire, the remains of saints were kept in reliquaries on trains. They made a circuit of the Empire, blessing the towns they passed through; inspiring young dreams of glory. To mock those damnable stories that made Dane out to be some kind of saint, some imaginative brass had commissioned a reliquary especially for him. It would make no circuit. Dane’s slow dismembering would be private, and a ticket to watch wouldn’t be cheap.
It would be a shame to blow the man to ribbons and let all that money go.
A shot came from within the shed. So much for the dream.
“Fire,” he said.
* * *
Cordrey lay, a neat hole in the center of his throat and spine shattered to hell. It would have been a perfect shot.
Easric was down on all fours by the shaman. From a furrow his bullet had made in the old man’s neck, blood spilled in time with his heart. Easric tried to cover the wound but a spray wet his hand, and it was warm and struck him like a voltaic shock and he couldn’t bear to touch what he had done. Worst of it all was the shaman’s look of bliss as the bat lapped his blood.
“Cross us over,” Easric asked him.
The soldiers opened fire and Easric fell to his stomach, and a Gatling gun rattled, rifles cracked, and bullets tore through the tin walls. Red rays from lanterns outside painted dust and debris. Bits of spinning metal nicked at him. The two men’s blood soaked into his clothes.
“Cross us over. Please. I can’t save it on my own.” He took the shaman’s hand, not believing the old man could hear him anymore.
The bullets didn’t stop, and the rays turned to sheets as the holes widened and merged. Timber cracked into flinders. Then the whole thing fell.
* * *
Chapter 9
In which our hero saves the world.
Easric lay for a year. Or a day. He lay as if he were dead.
Above him the spirit-sky shuffled its stars, never happy in whatever place they found; no different than men. The rose bloomed by degrees and released its perfume.
The shaman lay next to him. Easric couldn’t let go of his hand. He told him he was sorry. He didn’t ask forgiveness. There was none to be had.
Finally he rose. Clothes blood-heavy, they dragged at him. He looked a terror.
Cordrey lay there as well. He’d been a wickedly handsome man. It was a shame he’d also been a son of a bitch. Easric rifled the outlaw’s clothes, found the goddamn book that had started this all, and pocketed it.
The plain was puzzle-cracked, dirt dry as bones. His boots scuffed up dust as he walked. Someday there’d be grass. But just now there was nothing nowhere but the pink gypsum rose, the only place to go. It was a long walk.
His bat followed. It seemed he should fill the time by teaching it something of the world it had been born into. But he wasn’t a shaman. He didn’t know what to teach it, so he sang it songs. The only songs he knew were saloon bawdies. He couldn’t carry a tune, so he sang loudly instead.
He passed beneath the petal-eaves, undersides crusted dark by a million bats. He entered a grotto at the rose’s base. It was fathomless and dark. His eyes adjusted. Bright moonlight filtered in from somewhere, or perhaps it didn’t filter at all, but just was. He lay upon a dais, the cavern’s only feature as far as he could tell.
He thought what to do. He thought of all the men he would kill once he fell back through and how he would kill them, and how hopeless it was to think he could kill them all. And what would it prove, all those soldiers’ deaths, but that there was something here to die for?
And all because of a goddamn book.
He took the book from his pocket. He looked at the cover. He hadn’t looked like that since he’d been eighteen. He flipped past pages and looked at the engravings inside, text quoted beneath them, each portraying some bit of action or a dramatic and rugged landscape that was nothing like home.
He flipped to the end where Easric won. Where Easric got the treasure and got the girl. He read.
Easric and Beatrice stood within the entrance to a chamber fathomless to man.
“Oh, Easric!” Beatrice gasped. The sight before her stole away her breath and her knees weakened and she clove tight to her man. “It’s so beautiful!” And she wept.
The chamber was heaped with mounds of gold, precious gems, jewelry and gilt objects of art. There were overflowing chests and urns of all sizes, bolts of silk, jars of rare spices, rolled tapestries and carpets strewn on the floor. It was a horde worthy of a dragon, or the accumulated wealth of untold generations of banditti rapine. It glowed with a light all its own, and in that light Easric shone like the sun-bronzed statues of the Saint’s Way and Beatrice like a soft diamond by his side.
“But Easric,” Beatrice lamented, “However will we carry it all?”
“Never you mind,” consoled Easric, and he patted her delicate hand. “I’ve brought help.”
Easric spoke those magical words taught to him as a boy by those inscrutable March witch-doctors, and the spirits heeded his call.
THE END.
Unbelievable. And yet they had believed. And how could he blame them? Wasn’t it a similar hope Easric had every time he made a prayer to a dead spirit-stone; hope he’d find a miracle the next time he passed by?
He read the page again. Then he smiled and knew what to do.
They’d believed part of it, and that part had been true. He’d bet even money they’d believe the rest.
* * *
Chapter 10
In which Easric’s rivals are foiled again.
A week later the bewitched auger pierced the Crossing. No one had really expected it to work. The geologists and engineers were happily confounded. This was the hand of god at work.
Nasica lead them in, his second close behind, followed by the rest.
Their lanterns swayed at the end of poles, their light eaten up by too great a darkness. They were in a grotto with an exit to a blasted land with a sky full of madness. Nasica’s m
en were terrified of it and wouldn’t go out. So they went deeper in.
They found a stone dais on which lay an open book. Its spine had been broken and six pennies had been laid on the pages’ edges, three to a side, to keep them from turning.
Their lanterns swung over it. They huddled to read.
Then they looked around them at the immense empty space. No one dared say a word. Was this even possible? Well, of course it goddamn was.
Nasica drew his revolver. He clicked the cylinder around. All his men stepped back. Nasica thought of his commission. He thought of the money he’d invested—his personal fortune, others’ too. He thought of his wife’s smug look once she heard of his disgrace.
His second barked orders to start a thorough search.
“Don’t bother,” Nasica said. “We’re done here. It’s over. He’s taken it all.” There’d be nothing left, he knew. Not a coin, not a pearl, not a single thread of silk.
Easric Dane, he thought. Lawman, soldier, shaman, and saint all rolled into one, and god how he hated him. He aimed the revolver at the damnable book, thumbed back the hammer.
Then he lowered it slowly.
He snatched up the book. Coins flew.
“How much is this worth?” He thrust the open book into the face of his second, so he could see.
On the last page, just under “THE END,” scratched in lead in a blocky hand, was written: “Better luck next time. With love, Easric Dane.”
It was the only autographed copy ever of The Rosemond Gold, and it was worth a fortune.
Copyright © 2013 Don Allmon
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Don Allmon is a computer technician who spends his spare time working toward a master’s degree in nineteenth-century American literature. He lives in Kansas with many animals. His story “Bandit and the Seventy Raccoon War” appeared in BCS #103.
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COVER ART
“News from the Horizon,” by Tuomas Korpi
Tuomas Korpi is an illustrator, production designer, and matte painter from Finland. He has worked in the entertainment and advertising industry since 2005, including the last three years as an illustrator, designer, and visual director at Studio Piñata, a Helsinki-based animation and illustration studio. In his work he aims to combine the vivid impressionistic style and lighting with digital media and environment design. He likes to think of his personal works as frames from yet-to-be-made movies that leave the viewer space for their own imagination. See more of his work at tuomaskorpi.com.