by Scott Lynch
He hurled a small dark bottle at Gaunan. Her blood-drenched metal foot met it in mid-air and it shattered, spraying her with a very mediocre lager but doing no real damage.
“And some rice wine, and some cactus brandy.” Bottle after bottle flew from his hands; she swatted them all to shards and spray.
“Not to your taste? Try the Orinost Whiskey,” said False Note, letting fly with the last and largest bottle. It, too, exploded at the point of a kick, and Gaunan didn’t seem to care that the sharp-smelling contents splashed all over her.
“Well, surely you won’t mind if I smoke,” said False Note. He flipped one of his cigarettes into his mouth, struck a long match against his boot, and brought it up in one smooth arc.
Then he flicked it straight at Gaunan, a little wheel of wood and sulphur fire sparking in the twilight. She kicked it away with a contemptuous expression. I assure you her expression changed when the whiskey caught with a whoosh of blue and orange flame. Suddenly, she was half-enveloped in alcohol fire, screaming and flailing, her mechanical legs stamping as they burned.
“No,” screamed Genon, “separate! Separate and roll!”
There was a sound of spring-loaded mechanisms firing. Gaunan disengaged from her legs, which remained upright and blazing like torches. The rest of her toppled into the dirt, where she heaved herself around wildly trying to smother the flames.
Genon, madder than a bull in a red cape factory, rushed False Note. “BRASS TIGER,” he yelled, curling his impeccably sculpted hands into brutal claws.
My master played hard-to-get and those metal fingers shredded railings and planks all around him. The two of them moved through a storm of wood splinters, the repair bill for Anjhou’s pavilion rising with every flash of brass.
“Paper lantern,” my master said, seizing one of the unlit globes that had managed to survive the assorted onslaughts. He ducked one more sweep of Genon’s deadly arms, then popped back up and slammed the paper globe down on top of Genon’s head. Temporarily blinded, the man clawed at the lantern, and False Note unleashed a flurry of punches with the rhythm of a galloping horse. He pummeled Genon, chin and chest and stomach, until the lantern-headed man was teetering like a lost drunk.
“Music of the spheres,” said False Note mildly. Then he gave Genon a mighty kick between the legs. The man sailed off the porch and landed on the high street a few yards from his sister, where he flopped around moaning. No doubt he wished that certain other portions of his anatomy had been replaced with unfeeling brass.
His sister, badly burned and gasping for breath, had managed to beat the live flames down. Her metal legs flickered with fading tongues of fire, but she didn’t look eager to reclaim them. As False Note strolled toward her, she raised her hands meekly, then let herself fall back to the ground, coughing.
My master seemed satisfied. He recovered the silver pistols, re-loaded, and holstered them. Then he took a long drag on his cigarette and looked up at the airship.
“You spun coins with these people?” he yelled.
“And I made sure they won.” The voice was a woman’s, and it might have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so hard. “Knew if they could get the bulge on you I had the wrong man.”
“It’s been fifteen years, I think.” False Note took a last drag then flicked the dying cigarette at Gaunan, who flinched away from it in horror. “But I’m the right man.”
The woman plunged from the airship, straw-colored hair and black silk coat fluttering like wings. She didn’t bother using the anchor ropes to slow her descent. She simply landed, full of calm arrogance, as though the laws of gravity were quaint customs she chose not to observe.
The green fires of the abandoned mines were just starting to flicker in the distance as Winter Sky faced my master on the high street.
7
“Those aren’t your guns,” she said.
She was heartbreakingly beautiful, but the heartbreak was all for things lost. There was nothing gentle in her, nothing giving. She looked even younger than me, but she was a blade that had never even been fitted for a scabbard. Pale scars furrowed her left cheek and funeral pyres smoldered behind her eyes.
“They were recently donated to my cause.” False Note rested his hands on the butts of the pistols. “They’ll do for starters. I suppose you’re implacable in this business?”
Winter Sky reached under her coat and drew out a lever-action rifle with the stock and barrel both sharply cut down, what some folks call a ‘Mare’s Leg.’
“I tell you, old man,” she said. “as I tell the earth and the sky and the gods, that tonight I put you down in the dust. If anyone lights a pyre for you when I’m done, they’ll be strangers to you, and if anyone prays, they’ll be prayers for torment, and if anyone remembers your name it’ll be when they’re scraping something off the bottom of their boots.”
“You’re going at this in the right spirit,” said False Note. “Stray!”
“Stay where I am and don’t move an inch?” I said.
“Precisely.”
They faced each other at twenty paces in the shadow of the airship, and the light fell on them like gemstones— pale jade from the haunted mines, translucent diamond from the moon, and rich bloody red from the dying sun. Then they moved, and thunder tore the twilight, and they painted constellations of fire in the air between them.
I can’t describe it in any other way. Neither of them ducked, dodged, or flinched. Hands blurred, hammers fell, spent brass sailed into the night, and bullet met bullet, without fail, without exception. They reloaded calmly, as impossibly fast as they shot, and then they resumed. Dirt spattered between them as shot after shot was swatted down. They were shrouded in the sparks of perfect negation, fusillade after fusillade. They fired faster and faster with each round, until the torrent of gun-blasts roared like a beast and smoke swirled around them like fresh-born whirlwinds.
At last it stopped. My ears rang from the noise and my mind whirled. False Note and Winter Sky staggered out of the smoke, and at first I thought they were hit. Then I saw the bent barrels of the silver pistols, and the Mare’s Leg broken nearly in half. In their last furious rain of lead they’d managed only to disarm one another.
False Note tossed his guns aside and stepped toward her, palms up, clearly offering open-handed combat rather than conciliation. She threw her own broken weapon down and shook her head.
“Fire and smoke,” she said. “You go the way you’ve lived. Or I do.”
“There’s a game,” said False Note, “maybe more of a ritual, for people like us. You might have heard of it. Four hands, one chance.”
“Feet on the floor and one beneath the hammer,” said Winter Sky. “Get your real gun, old man.”
“You’ve earned it,” he said. He turned and walked past me, toward the teetering wreckage of Anjhou’s porch. Winter Sky followed him like a baleful ghost. Something passed between them that even my fear-whetted senses couldn’t grasp at. In his place I never could have turned away from her, but somehow he accepted that getting back-shot was an impossibility. An aesthetic impossibility. It was art to them, an art more important than life.
The table we’d been using sat in the only corner of the porch that hadn’t been demolished. Each of them stood behind a chair, and False Note took up the satchel I’d fetched. He unbuckled it, reached inside, and drew out a long-barreled revolver.
Then I had some answers.
The gun was fashioned from dark metal, and its surface crawled— the whorls and designs there, almost like reptile skin, led my eyes around in disquieting patterns. It wasn’t engraving. I would almost describe it as mottling, from some chemical action or sinister internal quality.
I had heard of that weapon. I had heard that there was one and only one like it in all the west, and no doubt, honorable reader, you have at some time heard the same. It has no past, no known origin, no chain of stories and owners. It came from darkness and wrought darkness in one pair of hands.
Man and gun had been called
by the same name.
“Mourning Song,” whispered the woman.
False Note had vanished. With each step up to the porch, with the act of drawing forth that dread piece of iron, he’d cast off a lie and made himself whole again. That gun belonged in that hand, and seeing it there was akin to realizing that I’d been traveling with a demon all the while, and hadn’t known it until he’d unfurled the wings from his back and spread them to the sky. He was Mourning Song.
My eyes stung from building tears. “Oh, gods,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” said Winter Sky.
Hope Breakers, they’d been called. The enforcers of the Steam Barons. Never formally hired. Never acknowledged. East of Sedoa, it’s dangerous to even say the name. They’re still out there, still flying no flags, but everyone knows who lines their pockets and who calls them down.
Calls them down on villages that won’t surrender choice parcels of land to the railroads. Calls them down on men and women who refuse to drive another iron spike for starvation wages. Calls them down on desperate agitators trying to break the chains of company towns.
There were and are Hope Breakers, and above them all, casting his shadow over a thousand shallow graves, rode Mourning Song. For twenty years he’d spread misery, for fifteen he’d vanished into legend. Now it seemed that someone he’d wronged had finally grown old and powerful and interesting enough to draw him out of the shadows.
“Where?” I said, looking directly at Winter Sky.
“Two Moon Springs,” she said. “I doubt you’ve heard of it. There’s no town there any more.”
“I’ve heard of… that sort of place,” I said.
“Railroad baron wanted our wells. Wanted the townfolk to sell them for an insult. You could get more silver by smelling a coin purse. Promised they’d ‘administer’ them fairly, which meant they’d suck the wells dry for steamer engines and sell us our own dreg-water back at jackpot prices. So my folk told the railroad to go kiss a mule’s ass. Next sunrise, Mourning Song and all his hard cases were lined up at the edge of town. Like the railroad had expected that answer. I was seven years old.”
Mourning Song nodded. He broke his long dark pistol open, but let Winter Sky continue.
“Some of the folk thought they could fight, but they were wrong. Mourning Song had everybody caught and lined up, and his thugs smashed some buildings for wood. Then they started building a gibbet.
“All the women in Two Moon Springs had beautiful long hair, and all the men had the same, or beards. Mourning Song told them they would cut it all off themselves, and from it they’d weave the nooses with which they’d be hung while the children watched. If a single noose broke, the children would die too, but if the people wove well, the children would be spared.”
“And the people of Two Moon Springs,” said Mourning Song, as he opened his wooden box and selected a single cartridge, “even the ones that were not parents, loved those children very much. So they wept, and cut their hair, and they wove. But one of them didn’t mind his work closely enough.”
“So Mourning Song shot him when his noose snapped,” said Winter Sky. “Then he and his men turned their guns on us, while our mothers and fathers were still kicking. While they could still see.”
“My orders were to close that town down and put a righteous fear into the heart of anyone who’d try to follow its example.” Mourning Song slipped the cartridge into his gun. “All my life, I pursued excellence in all things. Excellence in every last detail.”
“That morning you failed,” said Winter Sky.
“That I did,” said Mourning Song. “I was sure I’d kept my word and killed every last one of you.”
“Forehead crease,” said Winter Sky, raising a hand and tracing a line across her hairline. “Knocked me cold. You know how they bleed like mad, too. I must have looked deader than ten ghosts. And then when I woke up and I was the only living soul in the whole town, I swore I’d master any art I needed to hunt you down and send you to hell, even if it took a hundred years. Turns out I needed fifteen.”
“Last word’s not written yet, girl.” Mourning Song set his pistol down in the middle of the table, gently, and thumbed the hammer back. “Four hands.”
Winter Sky shrugged her coat off and rolled up her shirt sleeves. Mourning Song did the same. Then they sat down facing one another and put their hands on the table, palms down.
“One chance,” said Winter Sky.
“Feet on the floor,” said Mourning Song, narrowing his eyes.
“And one beneath the hammer,” said the woman.
As she breathed the last word, each of them grabbed for the pistol. Yet they adhered firmly to the rules of the duel— their boots were planted firmly on the planks of Anjhou’s porch. Their bodies were steady, their heads were level, and their arms and hands were blurs snapping, punching, blocking, and rebounding around the pistol.
I watched in profound awe and disquiet as they fought, feeling like an intruder to some secret temple ritual or supernatural event. They made and deflected more attacks between each breath I took than some pugilists throw in a complete fight. Their neck muscles stood out like cords. Their jaws were clenched, and the sweat on their brows beaded and ran in the eerie confluence of sky lights and mine lights. Blood spattered; it ran from their palms, their knuckles, their wrists, and still they strove to reach the pistol.
How long it lasted, the gods know. My head swam and my heart pounded. I had seen False Note… Mourning Song… toy with opponents before, but this was all of him, everything he had, all the stuff of his life and spirit burning in a desperate flare, skill outside any lines my imagination could draw. Winter Sky met that skill. She matched it. And then she exceeded it.
Orange fire flashed above the table, and the sound of that gun was like heaven’s thunder. Mourning Song toppled backward, taking his chair with him.
8
“Stray,” he croaked.
I walked up onto the porch slowly, balancing on debris. Winter Sky was still in her chair, the pistol lowered, and her eyes were unfocused; whatever she was seeing at that moment was for her and her alone. Mourning Song has been hit low, below the sternum, and a dark stain grew on his shirt as I watched. He held his hand out, and I didn’t take it.
“What the hell did you ever need me for, anyway?” I said.
“I can’t undo what I did,” he wheezed. He could still speak plainly enough, but it was obvious that blood and air alike were going places they weren’t meant to go inside him. “And I can’t pretend I repent it. But when I found out Winter Sky was after me… when I found out why, I knew I could get one last thing right. I knew I could end the story properly.”
“You let her kill you?”
“No! Wouldn’t have meant anything… if I’d just given it to her. Wouldn’t have meant anything to her! She had to be able to take it. Had to be able to face me down and best me. Either I would fix my mistake, or that mistake would fix me.”
“I still don’t see where I fit,” I said.
“I took her family from her,” said Mourning Song. “I took everyone she loved. So it couldn’t be right… if she killed me when all I had to lose was my life. If she killed me when I didn’t have anyone I cared about, even a little.”
“Gods and ancestors!” I shouted. “So I’m just… a pet! Just a brush stroke on your damned canvas!”
“The world’s the canvas,” said Mourning Song. The color was running out of him, now, and shadows were pooling around his eyes. Winter Sky stood up at last, reloaded the dark pistol, and snapped it closed.
“You got anything else you want to say to him?” she said, gently.
“Yes.” A thin line of blood trickled from his lips, and he strained to raise his head. “Stray, I—“
Winter Sky shot him, punching a hole in his right lung. I was so numb I didn’t even flinch from the noise. Mourning Song the gun roared again, and Mourning Song the man was knocked prone, his heart smashed, his words stolen right out of his throat
.
She’d frustrated his final desire; taken from him the very last thing he’d ever wanted to do. I reckon she got that part right. Though one could argue that in besting him thus she’d finished his design as perfectly as he could have wished. I don’t know, honorable reader. I can’t wrap my head around it. Versions of the truth chase each other around the question like moons and sun across the sky.
It was excellence in the very last detail, for someone. The gods can say who.
Winter Sky faced me then, the gun still smoking in her hand.
“If we wanted to get down to the fine print,” she said, “it would have been a more perfect symmetry if I’d killed you while he was still alive to watch.”
I said nothing and I pleaded for nothing. Was I brave? Was I tired? Sometimes they bring you to the same place.
“What’s your name?” she said at last.
“Str… Andus,” I said. “Andus Cadwallader.”
“Get water.” She slid Mourning Song into the holster formerly occupied by her Mare’s Leg. “Then get a horse. Pick a direction and never let me see you again.”
I stumbled past the corpse of Mourning Song’s horse, past the now-unconscious Brass Halves, past the bodies of the trackers who’d never get paid. I calmed Silverheels’ horse down and filled water bags from the town’s smaller well. Then I rode north, without any real plan except burying Ghost Lantern under the horizon behind me.
Winter Sky was still standing on the porch as I rode out, staring down at Mourning Song’s body, lost in her thoughts. Her airship swayed and weaved in the moonlight, and the spectral fire of the mines glowed at her back. I saw this, then I turned my eyes north and never looked back.
I rode across the steppes for two days before a cargo airship swung low and hailed me, its captain curious as to what an obviously unarmed and half-witted young man might be doing in the middle of bugger-all nowhere. I happily bartered my horse for passage to their next destination, Sedoa, where I remained thereafter and where I now ink my brush for the last few words of my tale.