by Scott Lynch
This was no tilled field. Unseen grasses with wheat-like caps scratched at his hands. Unnoticed stones tripped him up. This was wild grassland, the overgrown range of roving thunderbirds or absent goats.
It was presumably part of the homestead ahead—an angular shape on the horizon, solid lines against the waving grass, punctuated by a few square lights the color of sunlit bourbon. Redhand headed for it, thumbing his broken finger. He hoped for a barn, for rest out of the wind without having to bother anyone… especially anyone who could report his heading.
As he drew near the house, Redhand caught sight of shapes in the grasses—human shapes—eerily still, with big shoulders and broad heads shaped like the conical sedge hat Redhand wore. He closed on one of them and saw by the light from the house that the figure’s streaked green patina had the rugged texture of dark rust, like an engine left to the weather. These rusted drudges hadn’t done any work in years.
They stood in a semicircle around the north-facing front of the house, now, like totemic guardians. Each one was locked in a subtle bow, facing away from the house.
Beyond the house was a ramshackle barn disintegrating in slow motion, over years, and so ragged that Redhand could see the night sky right through it.
When he smelled the first whiff of burnt tobacco, he took cover behind a drudge.
“If you’re here to steal,” a man’s voice said from the porch, “there ain’t much for you.” Redhand heard a rocking chair creak and coast as someone got to their feet. “I’ll give you a bullet or two for free, though.”
Redhand scanned the night, dashed to another drudge, heard no sign that the homesteader heard him move. Looking back at the house, Redhand saw a slender figure, no hat, holding a long arm, probably an old Loyal Falcon—a large caliber revolving rifle popular west of the Periphery for a generation.
“If you’re passing through,” the voice said, “you’re welcome to move on or to come on up here, so long as I can see your hands.”
Redhand drummed his fingers on the shotgun in his belt. He glanced at Night Wolf, then toward the eastern sky. His stomach shifted, complained. “I don’t want to be no trouble,” he said, finally, to the house.
“Then keep moving,” said the voice.
“Could use a clean bandage and a drink, though,” Redhand said, stepping out from behind the drudge with his palms in plain view.
The figure pointed his rifle in Redhand’s direction. Redhand felt confident the first shot, from the hip, in the dark, would miss. If it came to that. “What’s your drink, stranger?”
“Tea?”
The voice made a scoffing sound. “I’ve got whiskey.”
Redhand stepped further into the light, his hands out at his sides, low enough to draw if it came to that. He could make out a halo of silver hair around the figure’s head. “Even better,” Redhand said.
The barred wagon meant to carry Redhand south through the scrub to his penance never made it to Drywater. Seeing an armored stage with a few gunmen as escort attracted bad attention. Bandits—some of them shooting from the top of towering red stones—picked off the driver, a horse, and one of the escorts as the wagon passed by.
The guards ran to the base of the stones for cover. The bandits ran to the wagon for its treasure. Two of them defended the wagon while the third smashed the padlock with a miner’s pick.
The wagon door swung open. Redhand looked up through his dreads, made eye contact with the lock-breaker from his spot near the door.
“There ain’t nothing here!” the bandit cried. “It’s a damned prison wagon!”
“Maiden’s tits!” another bandit yelled back, firing at the guards.
“You!” The first bandit drew his pistol and pointed it at Redhand’s face. “You worth anyth—”
Redhand grabbed the bandit’s pistol in both manacled hands, ducked his head to one side, and yanked the gun away. The bandit dropped his pick and backed away from the wagon. A guard’s bullet took him down.
The other two bandits ran off into the scrub and boulders, covered by their hidden riflemen.
After a long wait in the heat, to give the riflemen time to withdraw, the guards rushed back to the wagon. One of them came around the back of the wagon, far enough back for a good shot, his pistol pointed into the shade of the wagon.
Redhand was sat there, elbows on his knees, with the bandit’s gun dismantled on the floor before him. He looked the guard in the eye and made the rest of the ride to his sentence in Drywater on horseback, hands still chained.
When Redhand asked the homesteader for his name, the old man revealed the gap in his teeth with a thin smile. He might have been twice Redhand’s age. In an old peasant dialect, rare in the Empire now, he said his name was Modest Hare. Then he dropped the accent altogether and said, “I don’t get many Clever Folk out in these parts. That’s a name I was given during the war, though, by braver sorts than me.”
Redhand nodded at him, unsure if he should smile at that or not. Redhand sipped whiskey from a sturdy cup. The two men sat at Modest Hare’s rugged dark-wood kitchen table, crafted from a few stout planks worn smooth and uneven. A moth circled around the lantern on the center plank. The room rapidly fell into tangled shadows beyond the table. Room was packed with half-rusted junk metal leaned against every spare wall, stray wooden shapes stuffed into grain sacks, dusty potatoes piled in a basket.
“What sort of folk do you get out here, then?” Redhand asked.
Hare grinned to himself. “You tell me.”
“You live here alone?”
Hare shook his head and shot a dose of whiskey. “My kids,” he said. “They’re out on the range with our thunderbirds. Gone for weeks, sometimes.”
Redhand tilted his head. “This land yours?”
Hare nodded slowly. “It is. Long time, now. Seems longer. We still get rustlers out here—”
“And vagabonds,” Redhand smiled.
“—and vagabonds,” Hare agreed. “Worse than the wolves, Gods-damned rustlers. With the court on the move, at least the rustlers don’t always know where to look. It ain’t perfect but it beats leaving the thunderbirds out to be stolen at a thief’s whim.” Hare poured more whiskey, sipped at it. “Leaves me alone here a bit, though.” He looked either out the window into the nighttime or at his own reflection in it. Rushing Rabbit had just started its second run across the sky.
Redhand smoothed the gauze wrapped around his splinted ring and middle fingers, bound together for support. “I couldn’t do it,” Redhand said. When Hare looked at him, he added, “this house, all alone.”
Hare shrugged, got up, went to the cabinet where the bottle of whiskey was waiting.
“Learn to do it, like anything.” He came back to the table, set down the bottle and nodded towards Redhand. “What do you do, then?”
Redhand swirled his saki. “Some days it’s hard to say.”
“I’m not joking with you, stranger,” Hare said. His Loyal Falcon leaned against the cupboard nearby. Redhand’s shotgun was tucked politely in the umbrella bucket by the front door. “Who’s in my house right now?”
Redhand looked at him, said nothing.
“Thief?” Hare looked at him. They both sat real still. “Killer?”
Redhand finally said, “I’ve done a stretch.”
“Paid your debt?”
“Far as the Empire is concerned. Not to my satisfaction.” Redhand closed his eyes, took a breath, opened them again. “Maybe can’t.”
Hare waited. When Redhand didn’t say anything else, Hare sipped his drink and said, “I’ll tell you this, then, Clever one: I don’t always live here alone. My youngest rode off to tell folk in Kalsi about the crash.”
Redhand nodded. “Saw that, did you.”
“Saw that. Now, should I send you on your way now or come morning?”
Redhand shrugged. “What do you want me to—”
“Tell me what sort of man’s in my house,” Hare insisted.
“I’m no fugitiv
e,” Redhand said. “But there’s a man in Kalsi, son of a Steam Baron, who’s been looking for me since I finished my time.”
“Lawman? Marshal?”
“Twin Eagle. This ain’t business, though. Can’t close the case.”
“So you’re running.”
Redhand nodded, finished his whiskey.
“Can’t keep running,” Hare said. “Got to turn around, sooner or later, and fight.”
“There’s a whole lot of frontier out there. A continent wide enough to keep running until I die.”
“Sounds like you’d rather run or die, then. Keep your problems on your heels, ‘stead of putting them to an end.”
Redhand moved his head side to side in a way that said that was a little bit true.
“Now’s my time to run. I figure I’ll know when it’s time to stop.”
Hare swallowed some whiskey. “You can’t run toward nothing. You can’t ‘get away.’ There ain’t nothing there. You got to head toward something, got to have some place to be going to so you’ll know when you’ve gotten there. Otherwise there’s no way to know when to stop.” Hare moved his head to get into Redhand’s eyeline. “Right?”
Redhand nodded at him.
“Your past is always behind you,” Hare said, starting to slur his words a bit. “Can’t be anywhere else.”
Redhand watched him. Hare was showing his sleepiness in his eyes.
“You can stay here a few hours. Come morning—”
“I’ll be gone with the moons,” Redhand said.
Hare had a serious look on his face. “Good, then.” He took his rifle with him to bed. It wasn’t until he awoke that he discovered it was empty. The six cartridges stood all lined up on the kitchen table. Redhand and his shotgun were gone.
The fire had gone out and Walner was shivering in his sleep at the wreck of the Maiden’s Breath. He heard voices around him but wasn’t shaken out of his sleep until he heard the horses. The riders were already talking with the airship crew when Walner reached the gathering crowd.
Five riders, all men, sat on their horses in a cluster at the edge of the prairie’s black scar. As Walner approached, the leader of the riders dismounted and doffed his tall hat and goggles. He wore a red jacket with big black cuffs.
His hair, oiled in place, was as shiny and black as those cuffs. His holstered pistol seemed to be solid silver, like the buttons on his coat. He held up a brass badge stamped with the emblem of the Twin Eagles.
He squinted in the early morning light. The wind came across the prairie at his back. As Walner drew near, he heard the man speak. “This isn’t a rescue,” the man said to the crowd. “That comes later. I’m just here in search of my partner and the man he was after.”
Walner stopped walking. Put his hands in his coat pockets, against the wind. In one pocket he found his squeeze gun, loaded. In the other, Hollowaigh’s badge.
“Kalsi is sending coaches and wagons to retrieve you all,” the man said.
Walner leaned over to another stranded passenger. “Who’s this?”
“Twin Eagles,” the passenger said. “Looking for the bastards who brought the ship down.”
“Have any of you,” the Twin Eagle in the red coat asked, “seen these men?”
“I have,” Walner said, loud. “We were wrecked together back that way.” Walner pointed.
The Twin Eagle walked through the crowd to face Walner. “You and who? Who did you see?”
“Both of them,” Walner said. The Twin Eagle described Hollowaigh and Redhand. Walner nodded the whole time. “Your man,” Walner said, slowly drawing his hand from his pocket, “left this behind. He—I’m sorry—he died in the wreck.” He held out Hollowaigh’s badge.
The Twin Eagle took it, regarded it for a long moment, pocketed it himself. “And the other one?”
Walner looked over his shoulder to the west, then back to the Twin Eagle. “Ran off,” Walner said. “Southwest. Toward the river.”
The rail line, where Redhand found it, ran through the wide plain between two shallow hills, from horizon to horizon. The clouds above formed a vast bear’s paw with long, thin claws. The grasses below rippled in the wind. No train in sight.
Redhand headed to the tracks, then followed them south, away from Kalsi. Leagues south, the rail line forked north off the line that ran west to Prosperity, where the airship was once bound. If he could reach the fork, he could try to hop a train bound for Kalsi or Prosperity and be all the harder to track.
Without thinking about it, he cracked open the breech on the shotgun and checked the ammo inside. One empty shell, one loaded.
The prairie rolled gently down into rippling lands, all green beneath the bold blue sky. Grasshoppers leapt from the fields ahead of the posse. Marsdan and his men were an hour into their ride toward the river, stopping to scout the horizon with rifle scopes, when Marsdan cussed aloud.
Sailkirk, the youngest and fastest of the riders, heard him. He was a straw-haired teen with big, round eyes and last-year’s fashions. “What is it?”
Marsdan frowned, shook his head. “This isn’t right,” he said. He stood up in his saddle and looked back east. “Hollowaigh,” he said. “This is wrong.”
Sailkirk furrowed his brow. “I don’t—”
“Send them on to the river,” Marsdan said, pointing at the other three riders. “Just in case. Then you come back and meet me back at the wreck.”
“What are we—?”
“A hunch!” Marsdan yelled, spurring his horse and riding back toward the wreck.
Sailkirk rode up on Marsdan not long after and found him pouring over the dirt a few yards from Hollowaigh’s body. Broken timbers jutted from the ground all around. A footlocker stood almost upright nearby.
Marsdan had his goggles on, his hat off, and was measuring the depth of a footprint in the dirt when Sailkirk dismounted and walked up to him. Sailkirk knew better than to talk to him while he worked.
Marsdan stood up, walked away from his hat, and crouched again. Another print. “As the Celestial Court sees me,” Marsdan said, “I’m a plumb fool.”
Sailkirk waited for it.
Marsdan stood up and pointed east. “The bastard’s on foot, headed east toward the rail line,” he said as he walked past Sailkirk to the horses. “Let’s go.”
Sailkirk sprung into action, smiling. “That man, the passenger, he lied to us?” Sailkirk was up on his horse in a flash.
Marsdan fit his hat on his head and looked into the east, the sun shining off his lenses. “One thing at a time.”
Redhand hoped for a train bound south out of Kalsi even as he headed away from the town. He walked south, toward the fork, checking over his shoulder, sometimes walking backwards so he could see steam on the horizon.
He listened to the wind in the grasses. He looked at the traces he left in his wake and wished he had the time or the knack to cover his trail. Somewhere nearby, a game bird sang.
He passed young oaks and jutting boulders. He followed the tracks across a short wooden bridge across a shallow and dry gully. He watched the sun drift across the sky and wondered if a train would ever come.
Marsdan and Sankirk leaned forward in their saddles, their horses charging across the wild grasses. They leapt a short fence and tore across the property surrounding a peeling wooden homestead, its yard choked with rusted automata. Marsdan caught the glint of the sun off a spyglass or scope on the house’s porch as they rode by.
Redhand thought about the proper distance from the tracks to lie down and sleep, if it came to that, so that he could see approaching trains early but not be seen by pursuers. Maybe it was folly to try and make it all the way to the fork, he thought. He finally sat down to rest on a slight embankment facing the tracks and tipped his coolie hat back on his head. He’d take whatever train came, he decided. A train was a moving target. No better way to catch one than to wait where he knew one would appear.
Then he saw steam on the horizon to the north. It was a train headed s
outh out of Kalsi.
Redhand got to his feet but stayed low in the grass. He needed to jump onto a rear car without being seen and he would hardly have time to close on the train on foot. He needed to be close.
He saw the white steam billow. He watched the black engine grow closer in the glaring sun. He noticed the dust coming up off the prairie to the west, rising in the wake of at least one rider. Someone was coming.
Marsdan and Sankirk rode on toward the train. They could make out Redhand as a gray shape and sedge hat in the grasses near the tracks. Marsdan and Sankirk exchanged looks from horseback. Marsdan signaled for Sankirk to press on.
Redhand, meanwhile, dashed across the tracks just in front of the train, put it between him and his pursuers.
“Go!” Marsdan yelled over wind and hooves. “He’ll board the train!”
Sankirk pulled ahead. The train was a dozen mixed cars, with passengers and a bar up front and cargo in the back. It rattled and whined as it charged across the plain.
Sankirk closed on the train and came up beside its middle, keeping pace. He adjusted the scoped rifle in his saddle loop, so he wouldn’t snag it on his leg. He unsnapped the holster for his six-gun, then looked back at Marsdan, who was still approaching the train. Finally, Sankirk leaned out, put all his weight in one stirrup, grabbed hold of a railing on the side of a passenger car, and swung off his horse onto the car steps. Feet steady on the train, he stepped into the hollow at the rear of the car and drew his six-gun.
Something moved on the roof of the car. Sankirk spun around to follow the sound, found himself facing out the open doorway of the train car.
It was Redhand. Sankirk watched as he leapt from the roof of the train onto Sankirk’s riderless horse and spurred it away from the train.