by Pratt, Tim
Insubstantial hands gripped the thief's throat, and he grunted and started toward the fire and the smith's tools. The hands fluttered, faded, returned. She'd been tired anyway, she said, and now she was grievously wounded. Her hands of air and fire were tired. Still, his vision dimmed and he fell to his knees near the anvil. He reached out and gripped a pair of iron pincers. He struggled to lift the heavy tool, but managed to press it to his throat.
The woman screamed anew, and the invisible hands withdrew.
The thief laboriously gained his feet and stepped toward her. The ball of iron was almost invisible now, burning its way deeply into her guts.
“We could have had such fun,” she said, coughing up smoke. “You would have lived forever, if you'd just agreed to serve me."
“I think I might have figured out a way to do that anyway,” the thief said. He struck her in the face with the iron pincers.
It took him almost a full week to eat her body. She had no organs or bones, just soft, spongy meat throughout, which both relieved and disturbed him. Her flesh tasted like nothing at all, but it still repulsed him to cut and consume her.
The stories said that the Fair Folk had no souls, and so he wondered whether eating her would have any effect—what good was ingesting the spirit of a soulless thing?
But the night he finished her, he had strange dreams. And when he climbed the ladder and emerged into the dark forest, he discovered that he had hands of air and fire, and could move things with a thought, and feel them from far away.
As the years passed, he found that he did not age as men did, nor did he take wounds.
And so he felt satisfied, at last, that he was a master thief.
That's my story, boys. And now the sun's near gone, and you should go home, yes?
Ah, the questions, the questions. What became of the thief? Well. Long after he ate the woman who was not a woman, after many years of wandering, he began to ponder his weakness. Because you see, along with his hands of air-and-fire and his long life, he'd also acquired the woman's weakness. He could no longer touch iron—the metal grew cold if he even put his hand near it, and he knew it would burn him if he touched it.
But he thought to himself, Am I not, at bottom, a man? Could I not, perhaps, overcome this weakness, if I only had the right meal?
The thief thought back to the woman's suggestion that he could eat a smith to gain familiarity with tools. And the thief thought, Yes—perhaps I'll eat a smith, and gain his ease with iron, and the metal will vex me no more. For it is amazing how many things in this world are made of iron, boys, not least of all this cage. The thief had never eaten a man—he'd kept that vow all those years, because the woman did not count as a human, you see—but he thought the time had come to forget silly vows, just as he'd forgotten the face of the captain's daughter.
So the thief came to a village, and took a room in an inn, which had a ram's head on its sign, as many of them do. And the next day he went to the smith's. He was uncomfortable around the horseshoes and the anvil and the hammers but managed to put on a peaceful face. He hailed the smith, intending to inquire after a bit of work and then kill him and spirit his body away for a leisurely meal.
The smith looked familiar, and from the way his eyes went wide, the thief knew he recognized him, too.
Ah, boys—your own eyes are wide. Is this a familiar story?
The smith looked just like the old keeper of the inn, the one the woman had killed that first night the thief traveled with her. Casting back, far back in his memory, the thief thought that this, perhaps, was that same village, grown a little larger, but still the same. He realized the smith was the innkeeper's son all grown-up, that with his father dead he'd had to apprentice to a trade other than inn-keeping.
The son recognized the thief, and in his face it was clear that he remembered the witchery, remembered the murder and seeing the thief fly away.
The thief threw out his hands of air and fire, but the smith had iron all around him, and a hammer in his hand, and the invisible hands rebounded from those things.
The smith struck our thief with a hammer, and knocked him down, and the thief woke in a cage—yes, like this one, very like—with a grievous burn on his face from the hammer's iron. The thief tried to escape, but he could not open the cage himself, because his hands could not touch the iron bars, neither his real hands nor his other ones.
And now, my boys—the moral.
I fear I have misled you. There is no moral. Because a moral comes at the end of the tale. If I stayed in this cage, and died, there might be some lesson to be learned from my long life. But my life hasn't ended yet, and so it's a poor time for accounting, before the ledger's even closed.
Because I can still grab you, brats, despite this metal all around. I can reach my hands of air and fire through these bars and grasp you lightly by the necks, as I've done now. And you, smith's son ... you'll go, and take—and steal—your father's smallest hammer and chisel, and come back here in the dark, and break this cage open. If you don't, I'll squeeze your friends until they're blue, and then black. And if you serve me ... perhaps I'll teach you secrets, and show you wonders.
You only look afraid, now, but you'll learn to look happy, and hopeful, and bright, in time.
And after you release me, perhaps we can find something good to eat, yes?
Bleeding West
Kentucky Tom Granger stood in the dust-beaten main street of a town called Tolerance and faced the Spirit of the bleeding west. Wooden buildings lined the hardpacked street, discolored to gray uniformity by the sand-laden desert winds. Tom had crossed the Arizona border to reach the town, but Tolerance was not in Arizona, or any other state, either. Tolerance was simply in the west.
The seventeen badges pinned on Tom's ragged shirt glittered in the high sunlight, one for each lawman he'd killed since coming west. An ancient razor-strop hung around his neck like an untied scarf. His twice-great-grandfather had fought with the Kentucky volunteers in the War of 1812 and helped skin Tecumseh, the Indian chief who fought with the British, in 1814. The dangling strop, made from the flesh of Tecumseh's back, constituted the Granger family's sole heirloom.
Tom wore a pair of Colt .45 Peacemakers with plain wooden grips. He didn't go in for ivory inlays or engraved initials. Tom's guns were killing tools, and in their simple utility he found a powerful symbol of a lost time.
The Spirit of the bleeding west stood under the high noon sun, nevertheless casting an impossible shadow that stretched all the way to Tom's feet. The Spirit didn't move, and Tom couldn't make out anything but its huge hat, and its hands hanging motionless above its gun butts. Tom coughed, then pulled his bandanna over his nose. He'd grown accustomed to dust over the years, but the dust in Tolerance seemed thicker, dryer, and more abrasive. This dust could get into his lungs and slice like diamond chips until he spat blood.
Tom drew a deep breath through his bandanna. “I want to ride with you!” he shouted.
The Spirit, a faceless silhouette, did not react.
A wet, gurgling laugh came from Tom's right. He turned, drawing his gun, and saw a man leaning against a hitching post in front of the Trail Blossom saloon. A dead horse lay beside him in a broken-legged pile, still tied up. The man (or thing, Tom thought, gripping his guns more tightly) wore a black banker's suit and a bowler hat. His gray skin glistened, and while his green eyes had no pupils, Tom could see the amusement there.
Tom lowered his gun. “What's so funny?"
“Oh, nothing,” the thing in the suit said. “Just thinking how one man's hell is another man's heaven.” He cocked his head. “Come on in, stranger. I'll buy you some firewater."
“You'd better not be laughing at me,” Tom said. He glanced up the broad street. The Spirit of the bleeding west had moved on, but it wouldn't go far.
“Stranger,” the thing said seriously, “in Tolerance, I'll do anything for a laugh."
Broken glass crunched under Tom's feet when he entered the Trail Blossom.
Overturned tables and chairs littered the sawdust-covered floor. A few men sat in the back, playing cards, and they looked up with sharp-eyed curiosity when Tom and the thing came in. A blonde woman dressed in red (and little enough of it) sat at a busted piano, tinkling keys at the high end of the register. The bar was as utilitarian as Tom's guns. People came here to drink, screw, and gamble, and the place made no pretense to any other purpose.
The thing in the suit lifted a fallen table with one hand and set it upright, then placed a pair of chairs beside it. “Have a seat, stranger. Want a drink?"
“No.” Tom sat down, sizing up the heavyset bald bartender and the five card-players in the back.
“No?” The thing sounded surprised. “I don't think I've ever offered to buy a man a drink before and been turned down."
Tom tipped back in his chair. “They say the drunker Doc Holliday got, the faster he drew. I'm no Holliday. When I get drunk, I can't shoot straight, and there might be shooting today."
“Suit yourself,” the thing said, and went to the bar. He returned with a shot glass and a thick deck of oversized cards. He sat and shuffled the cards deftly. He had seven fingers on each hand, and delicate webbing between them. “I'm Cosmocrator,” he said. “Call me Cos."
“Tom.” He looked at the cards distrustfully. He'd met a fortune teller in Missouri who read his future with cards like those, and she'd predicted his death in a dry gutter. “Those aren't Tarot cards, are they?” Tom rubbed his single Texas Ranger's star with his thumb.
“No, no. Just a homemade deck. Cards are rare here, valuable as gold. I used to have Tarot cards, but when I came to Tolerance, the pictures changed.” Cos made a sour face. “Death became a big cowboy with a straw in his teeth. The Hanged Man hung by his neck instead of his feet, and the Lovers...” Cos shivered. “The Lovers wandered in the desert, raving, and they'd gouged out their own eyes. I don't like to look at them anymore."
Tom took that in thoughtfully. He was not as dumb as most people thought—perhaps not as dumb as his profession demanded. “Then it's true. This place, Tolerance, stands outside the rest of the world, and the Spirit of the bleeding west still rules."
Cos riffled the cards. “The Spirit lives here. Deserts are hard places, stranger."
“Not anymore,” Tom said bitterly. “The frontier's gone. The gangs are all broken up, the boomtowns are busted, and even the law's gotten fat and lazy.” He touched the Ranger's star and remembered one lawman with a scar on his cheek who hadn't been fat or lazy, not a bit. He'd almost been too fast for Tom.
“Oh, I don't know,” Cos said, grinning. His teeth looked like shards of broken seashell, poking up crookedly from bloodless gums. “There's a sense in which all deserts are one desert. Not in the particulars, maybe ... but they have the same nature. Merciless. A proving ground. Isn't that why you came?"
“I expected a different place,” Tom said. “You can't ride anywhere without tripping over fences and families these days."
“You expected the James gang,” Cos said sympathetically. “Stagecoach robberies. Tombstone at its peak. Sharpshooters. Men calling each other out. Right?"
Tom nodded. “But Doc Holliday's dead of tuberculosis, Frank James is shot in the back, and Wyatt Earp's retired, for good this time.” He took the strop from around his neck and stretched it between his hands. “I came west too late."
“So you looked for Tolerance. To find what the west lost."
“The spirit,” Tom agreed.
“He lives here,” Cos repeated. “Same as the djinns in any desert. First cousin to Shaitan from Arabia, only different in the details. The hat. The gun.” Cos smirked. “The sexual diseases."
“I don't know what you're talking about."
Cos sipped his whiskey, not even throwing back the shot like a real man would. “I don't expect you do."
“What are you doing here?” Tom nodded at the poker players. “Those boys are human, at least, men and gamblers and likely fighters. What made you seek out Tolerance?"
Cos laced his hands over his gut. “I'm not from the west. I come from the east, the far east, a different place, ruled by different spirits ... including the big one who made the earth. In the early days, I was given dominion over the tenth part of the waters. But then came a conflict ... a showdown, you might say ... and I sided with the upstart, a djinn named Shaitan."
Tom nodded. He didn't know if he believed Cos, but the story sounded almost familiar, in a sideways sort of way.
Cos shrugged. “The big spirit didn't like that, and as punishment, I'm forced to wander the earth's deserts, and never touch water again.” He wiggled his webbed fingers. “The big spirit has a pretty uncomplicated sense of justice.” He looked at the ceiling. “Speaking of which, there's some justice coming soon in this town. Or Law, at least, which is the next worst thing."
Tom caressed his badges. “I've dealt with the law before."
“Not like this.” Cos turned over a suicide king. Instead of a sword, the king held a gun with an absurdly long barrel. “You've fought agents of the Law. This is the Law himself, the Lawman, and the ghosts of all your victims ride with him.” Cos turned over a red ace and whistled. “He won't be interested in you, though. He'll go after the Spirit, and kill him, and Tolerance will turn into another ghost town, and the bleeding west with it."
“Not if I can help it,” Tom said. “He'll have to climb over me to get to the Spirit."
“Well, hell, of course,” Cos said without looking up from his cards. “It wouldn't be the west without a showdown."
A high wind rattled the windows. The gamblers in the back of the room exchanged nervous glances. One with long sideburns said “I call” in a reedy voice. The men showed their cards, and the winner raked in the pot without anyone fussing or complaining. They looked at the saloon's batwing doors nervously, though Tom didn't see anything out of the ordinary. The saloon girl stopped tinkling the piano.
“Last call!” the bartender yelled.
“What the hell?” Tom said. “It's high noon!"
“It's always high noon in Tolerance,” Cos said. “At least, it always has been. I think night could be falling."
The gamblers put on their dusters and hurried out. The saloon girl followed. Cos smirked at them. The beefy bartender came over, twisting a rag between his hands. He nodded to Tom, then put a hand on Cosmocrator's shoulder. “You leaving, old son?” Sweat beaded on his bald head and ran down his nose. “He's coming. Can't you hear the wind?"
Cos flipped another card lazily. “Why should I leave? I've already been sentenced by a higher law than his. I might stay to see how it plays out."
The bartender looked at Tom, his bloodshot eyes panicked as a broken-legged horse's. “You'd better saddle up, stranger. The Lawman's on his way. Tolerance won't be a haven for the likes of us anymore."
Tom tipped forward in his chair. The legs thumped hard on the board floor. “You're leaving?” he said, his voice low and smooth as a viper's crawl. “All of you?"
The bartender smiled nervously, laughed a little. “It's death to stay. Death and, hell, justice. It's been a good place, but we knew the end was coming...” He shrugged. Cos watched the exchange with appraising green eyes.
“It's a war,” Tom said. “A war to save the last bastion of the old west from the rule-makers and the fence-builders.” He stood up fast and kicked his chair away. The bartender flinched at the noise. “If you leave, instead of fighting, you're no better than any other deserter."
The bartender frowned and spat. “Stay and die if you want. I'm leaving.” He started toward the door.
“We shoot deserters where I come from,” Tom said quietly, and drew. He didn't give the bartender a chance to argue or change his mind. People who fought under threat of murder didn't fight their best.
Tom shot the bartender in his startled face, and winced at the loud report.
Cosmocrator raised his glass, looking at the dead bartender. “Rest well, partner,” he said.
&nbs
p; “I'll get the others,” Tom said, not pleased by the prospect of gunning down the gamblers and anyone else who tried to run, but determined to do so. He stepped into the dusty street.
The gamblers from the Trail Blossom lay in a neat row in the center of the street, shoulder touching shoulder, the soles of their boots facing Tom. The saloon girl lay there, too, her red dress already dulled by the blowing dust.
“Yellow,” a voice said, and Tom froze. He'd heard that voice in his dreams, hard as a gun barrel, cold as a winter night on Boot Hill. The voice of the west. “Yellow, every one.” Tom turned his head and saw other dead men and women lying farther down the street, and doubtless dead people filled the cross-streets, too.
“I'm not yellow,” Tom said. He swallowed. “Sir."
“Look at me."
Tom looked at the Spirit of the bleeding west. It sat mounted, in a cracked saddle, and Tom guessed it would stand at least seven feet tall. Built like a normal man, but bigger in every proportion. Tom felt no surprise when he saw it had no face, just a tattered hat throwing more shadow than it should have. A straw dangled, clenched in unseen teeth. The Spirit wore chaps of a strange, too-pale leather, and its huge guns matched Kentucky Tom's exactly, except they were a little bigger. The Spirit sat astride a black horse-shape, a mount composed of coal dust, mud, barbed-wire, and rocks, with shiny bullets for eyes. The Spirit, or its mount, smelled of gunsmoke and blood. “Nice badges."
“I earned every one,” Tom said, looking into its dark non-face.
“Saddle up,” the Spirit said. “Ride with me."
Tom's horse had died days before, ridden beyond exhaustion and abandoned in the desert. “I don't—"
The dead horse tied to the hitching post stirred, then pulled itself laboriously upright. A broken bone stuck out of its right foreleg. It turned its sightless head to Tom and whinnied. Tom felt a shudder of revulsion, and suppressed it. He put his hand on the saddle horn and swung onto the horse's back. The horse sagged under his weight, and Tom had a horrifying vision of breaking its spine and falling right through its rotten body, but the horse stood firm.