TALES OF THE FAR WEST

by Scott Lynch

  When he’d arrived, he’d expected his father to be angry. Instead, he’d found a hot meal waiting for him, along with a smile and a gentle request that Shen tell the story of his day’s adventure. He knew he’d find no such welcome waiting for him today.

  Shen raced back to the farm as fast as the Fury pack would carry him. As the black and oily column of smoke that stained the clear blue sky grew closer, his worry grew with it. By the time he could see through the pillar of blackness to the hungry gouts of fire, he hoped he might see his father trying to fight the blaze on his own, or maybe standing safe on the southern rise, mourning his losses.

  Shen brought the Fury pack lower as he neared the farm, and he spotted his father face down on the trampled ground next to their little buckboard. The man lay sprawled in the stretch of open turf between their humble house and the barn in which he conducted his experiments, the ones he said might one day revolutionize the Far West. He did not move.

  Shen wound his way around what he now saw were twin columns of smoke and brought the Fury pack down near his father with a practiced ease that would have made the man proud. He shrugged the amazing machine off with a haste that would have earned him a scolding and rushed to his father’s side.

  The man’s body felt heavier than Shen had expected, but he managed to roll his father over onto his back. A hole showed through the leather apron his father wore most days when he worked in the barn, and blood had seeped through it and stained his entire chest, both apron and shirt. His eyes gazed open and lifeless at the cloudless sky, no longer aware of the smoke that threatened to clog it.

  Shen grabbed his father by his shoulders and hauled him away from the flames, afraid that they would otherwise come to consume his body as well. He didn’t know what he would do with the corpse, but he knew that his father deserved better than that.

  Shen was soaked in sweat and his face was covered in tears by the time he’d dragged his father to safety. He knelt down next to the man then and, despite the fact he knew better, checked him for signs of life. They were at least a day’s ride away from the nearest doctor, and the Fury pack wouldn’t support the weight of them both. Even if his father’s eyes had flickered open, Shen knew that all he could have expected was to snatch one last moment with him or maybe to hear a few last words.

  He could not manage even that.

  He was bent weeping over his father’s body when the shadow fell across them both. Shen cursed himself. He had known that his father had not set fire to their buildings and shot himself, but his grief had overwhelmed him so that he’d forgotten to ask himself who had.

  Shen looked up to see a towering figure silhouetted against the lowering sun. He shaded his eyes with a hand coated with his father’s blood to get a better look at the murderer. He wished he hadn’t.

  The intruder stood taller than any man Shen had ever seen. He wore a large conical hat of bamboo, the kind favored by the people who worked in the rice paddies clustered around the inland sea known as the Shining Mirror. It had been bleached white like his leather coat and the leather riding chaps he wore, and it gleamed as if it had never seen dirt in all its days. Beneath the coat, the man wore a shirt and pants of the deepest crimson. A silver pistol hung from the man’s left hip, a gun belt of ebon-colored leather, its gleaming butt facing out toward the world. A silver mask concealed his face.

  The mask gave the man the face of a demon with large, angry eyes and wide, fat lips curled into a snarl around fangs glinting with menace. The eyes and lips bore holes through which the man could see and speak but Shen could see nothing inside them but the whites of the man’s eyes and the flash of his perfect, sharp teeth as he spoke.

  “I am an Imperial Marshal of the August Throne.” The man’s voice sounded low and raspy, as if he’d once swallowed burning coals. “I came here to offer your father a fair price for his glorious invention.”

  Shen’s gaze shot to where he’d left the Fury pack in the grass. It sat safely away from the flames that continued to devour everything his family had left. Soon nothing would remain but the pack and the clothes that Shen wore.

  “What do you want from me?” Shen said. His tears had dried, but his emotions still shook inside him, making him unsteady. “You see what you came for. Take it.”

  “I am no thief, boy,” the Marshal said, “but the Emperor’s will shall not be denied.”

  “What did you offer my father?”

  “One hundred gold talons.”

  Shen gasped. He had never known anyone to have such a fortune. Nobles of all sorts would have such riches, he knew, but he had never met any of them.

  “And what did you propose to take?”

  “His invention. And his name.”

  Shen stood then, leaving his father’s cooling form at his feet. “And you killed him when he refused.”

  “When he denied my first offer, I was compelled to make another. He denied that to his death.”

  Even standing, Shen had to crane his neck backward to take in the Marshal’s height. His father had told him of such men before, hands of the Emperor, the living god who sat on his distant throne. They acted with impunity, serving as judge, jury, and executioner. They recognized no other authority than that of the Emperor himself, and he was so very far away.

  Shen gazed out past the Marshal. On one side, the only home he could remember burned to the ground. On the other, the endless prairie of the High Plains stretched out for untold leagues. Between them stood the Marshal, and Shen knew he would allow no escape that he did not himself dispense.

  “I don’t understand,” Shen said. “What is my father’s name to you?”

  The Marshal’s even rows of teeth flashed behind his silver mask as he laughed. “The name didn’t belong only to him, boy, and the people he shared it with want it back.”

  Shen screwed up his face, confused. The thought that anyone would care about his father had never occurred to him. They had lived out here on this quiet plot of land by themselves for so long that Shen had assumed that no one outside of the Lees — the family that owned the nearest trading post — would even care if they lived or died, and then probably not for weeks.

  The Marshal had shattered that illusion.

  “Can’t a name be shared?”

  The Marshal nodded. “Things that can be shared can be sullied. These people were tired of the stain that your father left on their honor. They petitioned the Emperor to have it cleansed.”

  The Marshal put his hands on his hips and stood back to stare at the buildings as they became poisonous billows of smoke. “And so I have taken the necessary steps.”

  Shen rushed the Marshal then, his teeth bared and his hands out before him. He didn’t think then about the legends that surrounded the Marshals and their martial prowess. He didn’t think about himself for an instant. He could only think of his father, whose blood still stained his hands.

  As Shen charged at the Marshal, the man spun and backhanded him to the ground with a single, sharp blow to the eye.

  Stars flashed before Shen’s injured eye, and the world swirled around like a drunken dog in the other. He fell flat on his rear and remained there, waiting for the earth to stop swimming beneath him. He waited there for the man to draw his gun and place a single pistol in his heart. At least he would die in the same way as his father before him.

  But no bullet came. Instead, the Marshal crouched down on his haunches and stared into Shen’s eyes. He scratched the unshaven stubble on his exposed skin beneath his mask, and Shen spotted some of his own blood on the wrist of the man’s snowy coat. Shen reached up to feel his throbbing eye, and it came away wet, his blood mingling with his father’s on his fingers.

  “Why haven’t you killed me?” Shen asked.

  “You are your father’s sole heir.” The Marshal reached down and grabbed a handful of grass. He tossed into the air behind him, and the wind took it and blew it toward Shen’s burning home, where the flames consumed it. “You haven’t heard my offer
yet.”

  Shen’s eyes widened. “You’ll let me live?”

  The Marshal stood and dusted off his hands against each other. “And pay you handsomely to boot. In exchange for your father’s invention and your name.”

  “Why?”

  “Your uncle in Sedoa, I’m told, wanted you and your father dead. If he’d had his way, I would have been sent to scour every hint of you from the earth. In his infinite mercy, the Emperor instructed me to offer you this deal.”

  Shen stared at the man for a long while. He couldn’t read a thing about the person who stood behind that mask, and he soon gave up trying. He shifted his gaze to the fury pack instead, until he came to a decision, the only one he had left.

  “Who am I to stand in the Emperor’s way?”

  The Marshal laughed and held out his hand to help Shen to his feet. Shen accepted it.

  “Your father may have been a great inventor,” the Marshal said, “but you have a brighter future ahead of you.”

  “How’s that?” Shen strove to keep the bitterness from his voice.

  “You’re already far smarter.”

  Shen grunted, then walked toward the Fury pack. The marshal followed close behind him and watched him pick it up.

  “I’ll need to show you how to use it,” Shen said. “It can be tricky.”

  The Marshal rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. “Please do,” he said. “But you won’t be wearing it out of here.”

  “Of course not.” Shen held the pack up high and gestured for the Marshal to step forward. The large man did so and shrugged the pack’s straps over his shoulders.

  “How does it work?”

  “It has a Fury engine in it that draws in the positive and negative Furies from the air around it and pits them against each other until they are so exhausted that natural forces in the area no longer apply. In this case, that’s the force of gravity.”

  “I know what a Fury engine is, boy.” An edge of irritation crept into the Marshal’s voice. “How do I use the damned thing?”

  “Nothing could be simpler.” Shen pointed at the pack’s controls, which arched out over the shoulder straps on a set of reinforced brass tubes. “The one on the left controls the amount of thrust from the steam engine paired with the pack’s Fury engine. You just push the button to release the jet of steam. It comes out here behind you, so be careful not to let your legs drag too far back as you go.”

  The Marshal snorted at the thought of the machine hurting him, and Shen walked around behind him, checking connections and adjusting straps as he went. The Marshal was much larger than he, and it took a few moments to get everything right.

  “And the control on the right?” the marshal asked.

  “You swivel that about to control the direction of the steam jet. Again—”

  “Keep it away from my legs. Got it.”

  Shen came around the front of the Marshal and checked the straps to make sure they were tight across the man’s chest. “I don’t want you coming out of these,” he said.

  The Marshal grunted at him. Up this close, Shen could smell the man. He wasn’t a demon, as his mask implied, just a person of flesh and blood — the man who’d killed his father.

  “You haven’t asked me about the gold,” the Marshal said.

  Shen finished up with the final adjustments. “My life is worth more to me than any coins.”

  The Marshal fished a white leather pouch out of an inside pocket of his jacket, working it out past the Fury pack’s straps. It bore flecks of crimson across it, and Shen had no doubt whose blood had stained it. The Marshal took Shen’s hand and pressed the heavy pouch into it, the coins clinking against each other inside.

  “Don’t say the Emperor never gave you anything, boy.”

  Shen could see the man’s smirk behind his mask. He ignored and twisted a dial that sat on the strap on the Marshal’s left shoulder. As he did, the Fury engine thrummed to life, and the scent of a lightning strike filled the air.

  Shen gave the knob a hard twist then, and it snapped off in his hand.

  The Marshal glared down at him. “Take care, boy. That’s the Emperor’s property now.”

  Shen braced himself against the earth beneath his feet and shoved up against the marshal with all his might. Without the force of gravity to hold him to the earth, the Marshal sailed straight up into the air and kept going.

  “You can give it to the Jade Emperor,” Shen said, “when you see him in the heavens.”

  The Marshal reached out and grabbed the Fury pack’s controls. He pressed the button that let loose the jet of steam, and it shot him higher into the sky. He fiddled with the other control, but all it did was shake him about in the air like a marionette being played with by a child.

  “What have you done?” Panic rose in the Marshal’s voice. “How do I get down?”

  Shen held up the dial that controlled the Fury engine. “The gyroscopes my father implanted in the fury pack keep it upright, so the steam jet can only force you in that direction.”

  “Then I’ll just wait until the weather brings me back to earth.” The Marshal snarled at him. “I can be patient boy.”

  Shen shook his head. “If you don’t release the pressure in the steam engine, it will build until it has no choice but to explode.”

  The Marshal hung there in the air, already higher than the top of any tree. Shen could see him weighing his options. The man went for his pistol then and fired down at Shen.

  The Marshal moved almost faster than Shen’s eye could follow, but he’d expected the man to do something desperate. The moment the Marshal made his move, Shen sprinted away.

  The bullet grazed his thigh, cutting a long furrow through his flesh and knocking him from his feet. Shen tumbled into a painful roll and somersaulted back onto his feet, limping away as fast as he could manage. Other shots rang out, but they went wide and sounded farther and farther away with every pull of the Marshal’s trigger.

  After the Marshal fired all six shots, Shen risked looking back to see the man spiraling higher and higher into the sky. The recoil from the gunshots had kicked him higher than the eagles that sometimes circled overhead but had now vanished, fleeing from this stranger in their midst.

  Shen sat down then and bound his wounded leg and watched as the Marshal struggled against his fate. When, after several minutes filled with pleas and curses raining down from the sky, the Fury pack exploded, Shen did not smile.

  He stood on his feet, his leg already stiffening, and weighed the bag of the Emperor’s gold in one hand and the Fury engine’s knob in the other. Then he set off toward the setting sun, toward the west, where many leagues from here the great city of Sedoa lay sprawled and waiting on the Shining Mirror’s other side.

  _________________________________________________

  Matt Forbeck has been a full-time creator of award-winning games and fiction since 1989. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, and toys, and has written novels, short fiction, comic books, motion comics, nonfiction, essays, and computer game scripts and stories for companies including Adams Media, Angry Robot, ArenaNet, Atari, Boom! Studios, Del Rey, Games Workshop, IDW, Image Comics, Mattel, Playmates Toys, Simon & Schuster, Tor.com, Ubisoft, Wired.com, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids. He has fifteen novels published to date, including Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and the critically acclaimed Amortals and Vegas Knights. His latest work is the Magic: The Gathering comic book. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.

  SEVEN HOLES

  by T.S. Luikart

  He never sat, at least, not that Kana had seen. He perched, like a raptor, on the edge of seats. Waiting, watching, always. Even when they rode and now, while he was working, more than ever. She’d made him the tea he liked; he thanked her without ever taking his functional eye from the bed before him or its occupant.

  He sipped from the cup occasionally, with his right hand always, for his left never strayed far from
the hilt of the sword leaning against his leg. The sword she had heard whispers of long before she’d met him, or ever thought to. It was an Eldaire blade, but travel the West entire and you’d never see another like it. It was made of peach wood, lacquered with a mixture of pine resin and his blood. Along the cutting edges, the blade changed from wood to razored silver, without a trace of seam to be seen as if the wood itself had sprouted the metal. Seven holes pierced its length. He said he’d never sharpened it, not once, since the day he’d been gifted it, more than two decades before by a master swordsmith grateful for his daughter’s life.

  Kana believed him.

  They were sitting (perching) in a barn loft along the southern edge of the Mist Sea Valley, near the foot of the Eagles’ Claw Mountains. He was here because they’d summoned him with the promise of a challenge and a goodly quantity of silver. She was here because her mentor had saddled him with her for a year. “Good for both of you,” Asra-soah had said.

  Kana didn’t think Eldorah Tolnik thought so.

  The one on the bed stirred, groaning, and it was all Kana could do to not recoil. Perhaps his hand tightened, perhaps not, but Tolnik showed no other sign of having heard. Kana had watched six strong men wrestle the figure on the bed to the ground and bind it in rawhide ropes at Tolnik’s direction. Kana couldn’t think of “it” as a “him”, not after she’d seen it punch a man’s heart clean out of his chest and tear another’s head off.

  It still looked very much like a seven year old boy to her though.

  It was times like this that she was near convinced he could read her mind.

  “He’s just a little boy, Kana, nothing more.”

  She shook her head. “How can that be, Tolnik-si? I saw the things he did, how can you say he’s not possessed by a demon?”