He didn’t have a choice.
Chapter 5
A Nightmare
There was still blood on Ansen Kane’s knuckles when he fell asleep a few thousand miles away from Bleake Farm. Unlike a normal person, after performing the ritual of killing—Two lives, he thought with a mixture of pride and revulsion—Kane had no trouble allowing unconsciousness to take him. In fact, he welcomed it like he welcomed the cold steel of his gun’s trigger and the smooth feeling of the white wood the grips were made from.
He lived on the outskirts of Low Town, a small mining community much too close to the Infected Lands. From his dooryard, he could see the Teeth—a vast mountain range in the distance stretching high into the clouds above. He had crossed both the Teeth and the Infected Lands once before, and he hadn’t planned on doing it again; not unless he had to.
After the shooting in the Proudpost, he knew he would have to leave. His identity had been compromised; those in the saloon had learned his true name and seen what he was capable of. He was a gun knight, the last gun knight, in a time when claiming that title on the other side of the Teeth would get him strung up in the town square, put on display as a heretic, a traitor to King Goroth.
His mind drifted to images from thirty years past, the dark night he’d shot then King Zoroth through the heart, stopping him before his dark magic could consume the world.
Outside of Kane’s hovel, the storm that had threatened earlier now raged and the wind blew hard, so hard the walls moved in and out as if they were breathing. But these walls had withstood many storms. This one would be no different.
From a leak in the roof, water dripped, filling a steel bucket. Ding-ding-ding. Kane knew that if he drank from that water, his insides would burn and he would be that much closer to death. His body would reject it. He would vomit blood. Blood would leak from his nose, his eyes, and his rectum. Over time, with prolonged consumption of the water, his brain would turn to mush, he’d lose his hair and teeth, and perhaps he would catch what they called ‘the waste-away.’
Why was this water so poisonous? There was no definitive answer. Only one entity knew for certain, and it was elusive. Ansen Kane had been looking for that entity for much of his adult life.
Believed by much of the world was this:
Centuries ago, the Reckoning happened. Civilization was all but wiped from the map, and those that survived the devastation did so underground. But the world had cracked and split, some oceans rose, some drained, others burned away. Most but not all of prior recorded history was lost. Through the event, it is said that magic leaked out from within the planet’s core, changing humanity, plant life, topography—virtually everything.
What caused the Reckoning, no one knew for sure. Some believed it was God’s smite; others blamed the planets and the strange stars above them…but most blamed the human race, for they were an ignorant species.
Lying in bed and snoring soundly, Ansen Kane was greeted by a vision. It was not a pleasant one. In it he saw a wall of flames, and the face of a woman he had not seen in a long time. The last time he had seen her, she was dead, but in the dream she lived.
For a time.
He had also not seen a shadow creature since that night at Aendvar Point, decades ago, yet here was one in his dream. The shadow creature killed the woman, and Ansen Kane shot up from his thin mattress. The covers were on the floor. He was bathed in sweat, his shirt and his shoulder-length black hair sticking to the back of his neck and forehead. He felt lightheaded, but worst of all, deep down in his killer’s heart, he felt a scabbed-over wound open and the pain flood out.
He spoke a name softly into the dark of his hovel.
“Cora.”
* * *
Like most of the nights he had been awakened by the sour dreams of the past, sleep did not find Ansen Kane again. He lay in bed for a long time; it could’ve been minutes or hours, the only constant was the rain pattering against the roof and the bucket filling.
He thought of Cora. He thought of the open sore on his heart.
“No,” he said. “She died. You watched.”
But in his voice was the slightest modicum of doubt. Had she been alive all this time, in hiding? Had he lived his new life while she lived hers? And was she dead? Was the nightmare true?
All the questions without answers filled his head like the acidic, poisonous rain filled the bucket. He did not like this feeling, just laying there thinking of what could have been or should have been.
So he sat up. He stoked the fire and hung a coffee pot full of fresh water over the flames. As he waited, he took his gun belt and holster from the bedpost, buckled it around his waist, and removed the revolver. Then he disassembled it and set to cleaning the parts, a ritual as old as time and as sacred as prayer to a gun knight. Such a ritual was learned at a young age, early on in his training. He had found over the years that besides increasing the accuracy and range of the pistol, it relaxed him.
When the coffee was done, he sipped at it, enjoying the warmth and the bitter taste. He put the gun back together, slowly. He loaded six shells into the cylinder, spun the weapon on his finger with the dexterity of a professional, and holstered the weapon.
Suddenly, the storm raging outside stopped. The sun made its first appearance, the weak morning light drifting in through the windows. All was quiet.
So quiet that Kane heard the rider coming from nearly a mile away. With a flick of his hand, the revolver was out of its holster again, the cold steel filling his palm.
He peeled back the shabby curtain over the hovel’s front window and saw the man approaching on horseback. Kane’s eagle eyes placed the face immediately. It was Donny, the piano player from the Proudpost, and he was pushing his horse like he was running from Nightflayers.
Kane, as calm as the wind outside, stepped from his hovel onto the dirt dooryard. Already the ground had drunk the poisonous rain, and dust kicked up from the heels of his boots. He holstered the revolver but kept his hand on the butt as he watched Donny get closer.
Two minutes later, Donny pulled back on the reins, and his horse stopped short, snorting heavily. Don, too, was out of breath, as if he’d been the one who had run here.
“Crowne,” he greeted, catching his breath. He climbed down from the mare.
“Donny.”
“They—they’re coming.”
“Who?” Kane’s grip on his weapon tightened.
“The deputy and his men—well, he ain’t the deputy anymore. I tried to tell them...” Donny bent over, rested his hands on his knees and gasped for breath, “… I tried to convince them…it was self-defense.”
Of course, Kane thought.
The deputy. He should’ve known, should’ve expected that. Jensen Watts had given him trouble before. Whenever Kane met the deputy’s eyes, he could see the mistrust. He probably could’ve seen it had he been blind. Now Watts had a reason to bring him in.
Donny continued.
“He…killed the sheriff last night. Shot him in cold blood after they disagreed about what to do with you.”
“Has he gone mad?”
Donny stood up, took another deep breath.
He was wet with the rain, and a sickening feeling passed through Kane. Had Donny come all this way in the poison just to protect him?
I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve to be treated with such respect, a knight gone rogue like myself, he thought, but quickly put it out of his mind. Somewhere else in his head, he could hear Stark yelling at him, demanding he go numb.
“‘The battlefield is no place for emotions, and life is a battlefield’,” Kane whispered.
It was the mantra engraved into his brain from his training. He could hear Stark’s voice, the old leader and white magician, as clear as day. But he was gone with the rest of the gun knights.
“What?” Donny asked. “What did you say?”
Kane shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You have to go, Crowne. You have to go now.”
> “I know.” History tends to repeat itself, doesn’t it? he added mentally. “But my name is not Crowne, Donny. My name is Kane. Ansen Kane. The men who came into Wallace’s last night, they were right.”
Donny didn’t act surprised. He was an older man, older than Kane was by maybe two decades.
“Son, I knew the moment I saw you that you weren’t of the normal garden variety outlaw. I’ve been here in the outer territories for years. I’ve seen more outlaws than you could believe, but I ain’t never seen one like you. Nor have I seen a weapon like that one you got on your hip. But that’s okay. I ain’t gonna ask your business. We all got stories. We all got secrets. Nothing special about that. And maybe you’ve done some bad things, maybe you’re a true outlaw, a true killer, a true rebel of the crown—I don’t know, don’t much care, either. But contrary to belief, we ain’t our pasts. We’re more than that. And I know you got a good heart. That’s the only reason I’m warnin’ you about Watts. So get out of here while you still—”
A ripple of thunder cut Donny’s speech short.
Except, it wasn’t thunder, because the sky was clear and the storm had passed.
It was a gunshot.
Donny clapped his hands to his breast, and his lips parted in a shocked expression of pain. From in between his clenched fingers, bright red blood flowed.
He looked down at his newly stained hands, and said, “I think I’ve been shot.” He fell to his knees in the dirt and then landed on his face. Dead.
On the horizon now were seven riders. In the lead rode Jensen Watts.
Chapter 6
Custody
It seemed Ansen Kane had lost some of his reaction time as he grew older. Skills, Stark always said, were like knives. If one didn’t consistently use them, the blade would go rusty and dull.
Stark was correct.
Last night’s events in the Proudpost were the first time in too long that Kane had fired his sacred revolver.
As he stood there looking at the approaching riders, another shot sliced through the air. Kane was just standing over Donny’s body, looking at his corpse with disbelief as the thirsty ground drank up the man’s blood. The shot was off, though, and blew a hole as wide as a dinner plate in the front of his hovel.
Donny’s horse reared and took off in the direction of the Infected Lands, where it would become some mutated creature’s dinner, but more importantly, it wouldn’t become Kane’s way out of here.
He would have to fight.
The next shot was much closer, drilling a hole in the desert ground, sending a spray of hardpan dirt and sand up in a cloud.
Kane ripped his gun free of the holster, aimed, and pulled the trigger. With his left hand, he palmed the hammer, aimed, and pulled the trigger again. His hands moved in a blur, so fast, the untrained eye would have difficulty seeing them.
As the echo of his shots hung in the air, two of the riders up ahead dropped from their horses.
But the others kept coming, moving with the ferocity of an approaching storm, Watts still in the lead.
The only way out of this alive was to kill them. Kane knew that and accepted that.
He would’ve killed them had they not shot Donny, but since they had, he would make them suffer. Each shot would be calculated for pain. There would be no shots to the brain or the heart.
Ansen Kane had quite liked the piano player, but he was gone now. In order to survive, Kane would have to do something he wasn’t wholly ecstatic about.
He dropped to his knees, grabbed Donny’s body, and lifted him up. Out here in the desert on the outskirts of Low Town, there was not much in the way of cover. His hovel was built with thin sheet metal and patches of dry wood and clay. Bullets would obliterate it.
A body, in the right places, held up pretty well against bullets—the meat, anyway. It was the vital organs within the body that didn’t hold up so well.
Donny wasn’t very heavy. Most people in Low Town were lacking in the way of proper nutrition, and most were skin and bones, but one thing Donny had going for him was old age. Age had caught up to him in the gut.
With Donny propped against him, his back facing the oncoming riders, his blood soaking the front of his shirt, warm and sticky, Kane retreated to the corner of his hovel.
A couple riders broke from the pack and went around the other side of the shelter. Kane wouldn’t worry about them yet. He aimed for the three coming down the dirt road.
Two shots fired, and the two riders on either side of Watts flew off their mounts, the horses scattering. He turned around and saw one of the riders that had broken from formation circling the well in the back. It was Dewberry, a straw-haired man in his forties. He was in the Proudpost nearly every night and always stank of booze and body odor. He had once been on the police force in town, but was removed due to an assault on an innocent man a year back. Kane wasn’t very fond of him. That didn’t matter, though; he would’ve shot any man riding him down, even if it had been his own father.
Or Stark.
Dewberry’s rifle blasted. A puff of gray smoke obscured his features.
Kane was driven back on his boot heels, but he was unharmed. The shot landed in Donny’s back with a thump and a spray of blood.
Dewberry was a decent shot, it seemed. Maybe he hadn’t been drinking yet.
Kane cocked his revolver’s hammer back and pulled the trigger. The shot rippled through the air and caught Dewberry in the throat. His horse pitched him forward and sent him into the well, where his body crashed through the cover and eventually splashed at the bottom.
The other rider broken from formation was one Kane didn’t recognize. He was a dark skinned man with a beard braided thrice. This man saw the extent of Kane’s gunplay and yanked on his horse’s reins, turning around and heading back the way he’d come.
“Ansen Kane!” Watts called from the front of the hovel.
The fact that Watts had used his true name didn’t sit well with the gun knight, but he didn’t respond.
“You’re under arrest on suspicion of murder! Get out here!”
“Suspicion?” Kane called back. “You have two eyes, don’t you? I took out all your men. It’s just you and me, and if I were you, I wouldn’t like my chances.”
Kane set the corpse of Donny on the ground, pushed him up against the hovel’s westernmost wall. He bent down and closed Donny’s staring eyes with a brush of his fingers.
“I like my chances,” Watts called back.
“Do you?”
Kane leaned forward and peered out. What he saw caused him to lower his weapon.
The men he’d shot, save for the one at the bottom of the well, were back on their feet. Their horses were gone, but their guns were not. One of them had a hole in his chest. His ribs stood out visibly, as did his vital organs, which seemed to no longer be working. Another was missing part of his face, and the top left side of his head was caved in, a bloody mess where Kane’s bullet had taken him.
Watts laughed. “Five against one,” he said. “And we can’t die. I certainly like our chances.”
The men walked forward, the slack-jawed expressions of the reanimated on their faces.
“Shadowfiend!” Ansen Kane shouted. “Souleater!”
“That’s right.”
This type of dark magic had been missing from the world for many years. Kane knew it would be back, could feel it in the air and see it in his nightmares, but of all the places he never expected to see a shadowfiend, Low Town topped the list.
Stark’s voice spoke in his head. Know when you are beaten. Relinquish control; gain it back later.
Stark was right. How was Kane supposed to battle the undead without any extra shells? He was no magician. He was just a fool with a quick draw and good aim. The rest of his ammunition was in the house, a place he currently couldn’t get to, from his position.
Kane uncocked his revolver and tossed it in front of him. The weighty weapon landed with a muffled thud, sending up a cloud of dirt. Then K
ane stepped out from his cover with his hands up.
Watts was smiling, but the other men were not. The dead must’ve been incapable of emotions; such things had died with them. Perhaps Kane could wait them out, fight until the spell that had brought them back wore off, and then face Watts alone…but there was no telling how powerful the dark magic was. Or where it came from, for that matter.
And Ansen Kane wanted answers. He would not get them if he put a bullet in Watts’s head.
The time for that would come later.
“You’re smarter than you look, Kane—or should I call you Crowne?” Watts said. “I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you that you were nothing but trouble.”
“You got me.”
The dead ambled forward, their blank eyes staring at Kane.
Watts climbed down from his horse. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pulled his pistol free from his holster. This weapon was not a relic of the Long Ago, rather, it was one that had been forged recently. This kind of weapon was cheap; they rarely shot straight, but Kane didn’t want to chance it—especially at this close of a range. He was liable to have his stomach pumped full of lead. So he stood stock-still as Watts came for him.
With his free hand, Watts pulled a pair of shackles from his pocket. Kane stuck his hands out, palms down. He had every intention of surrendering.
Watts must’ve thought otherwise, because he swung the butt of his pistol against Kane’s temple. The pain was immediate.
So was the darkness that took hold of him.
Chapter 7
To the City
Isaac buried his mother. It took him all night. By the time he was done, he was covered in dirt and he smelled terrible. He buried Cora just past the property line, in the trees, beneath a beech she’d often called the most beautiful of the forest. The grave was shallow and the lines of the rectangle were jagged, made by the shaky hands of a boy too numb to feel much of anything.
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