Knight and Shadow

by Flint Maxwell

  The crowd swayed and jostled against one another. But beyond them, there came something else.

  A great, swarming black cloud.

  Kane could see clearer, but he would know what that cloud was even if he had gone blind.

  * * *

  Coming down on the heels of the shadow creatures, Isaac and Swan rode like their lives depended on it. The thought crossed Isaac’s mind that they should’ve been fleeing in the opposite direction, away from the danger, not toward it, but such was the life of a hero. And though he wouldn’t call himself one yet, he still had a promise to his mother to fulfill.

  The horses drifted onto the hardpan and drew parallel with the main drag. Between the buildings, Isaac saw a man struggling on a rope, and another standing just below him with a rifle raised. The armed man wore weapon on his belt that gleamed despite the lack of light, as if it were of the same magic as the Dwellers.

  “That’s Kane!” Isaac shouted, pointing to the man in the noose. He looked exactly like the man he’d seen in his prescient dream. As Isaac shouted, the first wave of screams exploded in the air.

  The black shadow creatures had sliced through the back of the crowd with their elongated claws.

  “They’re here for him,” Swan said. “We have to cut him loose.”

  But there was no time. Soon the shadow creatures would be on Kane, and soon they would take him or kill him, if the rope and the large man aiming his rifle at Kane didn’t first.

  Isaac reached into the burlap sack and pulled the revolver free.

  He couldn’t cut him loose, so he would have to shoot him loose.

  He offered the gun to Swan. She shook her head.

  “Me? Isaac, I’ve shot a gun but a few times in my life. I’ll miss and blow his head off.”

  “But you’re a warrior. If anyone can do it, you can,” he said.

  She pushed the gun toward him. The screaming was so loud that she nearly had to yell to be heard.

  “Isaac, now’s the time I’m supposed to tell you to believe in yourself, to take a deep breath, aim, and fire the shot, but that’s storybook bullshit. You might miss, you might not. All I know is that you gotta try! Quit being scared and do it!”

  Isaac, nearly bowled over by her words, took aim.

  He pulled the hammer back.

  And he fired.

  The thought of the gun bucking the wrong way and blowing his head off was nonexistent, and for the first time since he’d set out on his journey, the gun felt right in his hand, like it belonged.

  The muzzle exploded with a flash of light and a crack of thunder that dampened the chaotic sounds of the shadow creatures and the crowd fighting one another.

  Isaac’s eyes had closed as a basic reflex; when he opened them, he saw Ansen Kane—or the man he presumed to be Ansen Kane—fallen in the dirt, curled up in a ball.

  He had done it.

  “Keep that gun ready,” Swan warned him. “Come on!”

  They left the horses behind and charged into the battle.

  * * *

  It seemed an angel was watching over Ansen Kane. As he saw the shadow creatures come down from the rocks and begin their scouring of the people of Low Town, his weak hands were giving out on him. On top of that, Watts was pointing a rifle at his face, finger on the trigger.

  That threat was removed, thankfully, when the shadow creatures tore their first throats out, and Watts became distracted.

  But then Ansen’s hands could no longer clutch the rope, and he was slipping…slipping…drifting into blackness…into death.

  A gunshot rippled through the air—not from a regular gun, either, but from a gun knight’s sacred revolver.

  But they are all gone, his frantic, dying mind said. They’re—

  He didn’t get to finish this last thought.

  The rope snapped, and air rushed into his lungs, so sweet and needed, even tainted with the tang of death. Then it was all knocked out of him when he hit the dirt road.

  Still, he was free. He was still alive. Hurt pretty badly, but still alive.

  He lay there a moment, trying to catch his breath. As much as he wished he could continue lying there, continue recovering, he couldn’t. The shadow creatures had found him, conjured by a magic much darker than what had revived Watts’s reanimated soldiers, and he needed to escape while he was still breathing, while his heart was still beating.

  Slowly, he rose to his knees. His vision had come back to him, and he scanned through the chaos, looking for that glint of silver from his brother or sister’s revolver, but he saw no other gun knight, and his heart sank lower in his chest—if that was even possible.

  They were all gone. They had been for thirty years.

  But now wasn’t a time to harp on such things. Now was a time for action. On his knees, he began to crawl for the Proudpost’s batwing doors. In there, he could find something to free him of his binds.

  As he moved, a man’s head rolled past him, blood spraying from the severed neck. A shadow creature stood over Kane and shrieked with its gaping black maw.

  “Of course,” Kane said, just as the creature swiped down.

  Kane raised his shackled wrists to fend off the attack, and the sharp claw sliced through the binds as easily as the bullet had sliced through the rope. Now his hands were free, but he currently didn’t have a weapon.

  “Thanks,” Kane told the creature before dodging another killing blow.

  His back shuddered up against the gallows. He was on his knees, and the creature ran for him, sputtering and spitting its mist. Kane dove to the right. Wood splintered as the creature threw its shadowy body into the pole.

  Kane, acting on autopilot, grabbed the biggest and nearest piece of wood, and when the creature, momentarily stunned, came at him, he thrust the splinter into its mouth. The screaming cut off. The monster raised its clawed hands to its maw with no luck; the damage was done. It dropped, writhing on the ground, then vanished in a dark, heavy mist.

  Again, the urge to stop and rest came over Kane. Had the heat of battle and the need for survival not been so alluring, perhaps he would’ve listened to that urge. Instead, he got up, standing with a bent, nearly crippled posture.

  People were still screaming as they died. Guns were going off, but most of the bullets were deflected by the shadow creature’s shields. A man yelled out his wife’s name and received no answer.

  Kane focused, listening past all of that. As his ears tuned out everything else, he heard the sound of whinnying horses, and changed his destination from the Proudpost to the stables.

  The new plan revealed itself, and with it came a new burst of energy. Pain still riddled his body, but his adrenaline won out. He forced himself to stand a bit straighter, forced his pace faster, too. He ran with his head down, hoping to avoid another run-in with the shadow creatures.

  He would’ve made it, if rough hands hadn’t grabbed him around the back of the neck and thrown him down in the dirt.

  Those hands belonged to Jensen Watts.

  “Nice try, you bastard!” Watts screamed. There was blood and dirt on his face. His shirt was ripped down the side. “You’re not getting away that easy. If I can’t get my money from you, I’m gonna get your life.”

  With a great, sweeping kick, he caught him in the ribs.

  Kane gasped for breath and fell face-first into the dirt again, tasting it, feeling the grit between his teeth and on his tongue.

  Another kick came, whistling through the air, but Kane was able to shift his elbow down to block most of it. Still, the pain was unreal.

  Watts drew his regular pistol from his belt. On his other side, the revolver still hung, gleaming muted light from its barrel—Kane’s revolver, his sacred weapon.

  The sheriff bent down and grabbed Kane by the hair, pulling with great force. “You’re gonna look at me as you bleed out, you traitorous piece of scum.”

  Kane did, but then he started laughing.

  Watts’s face screwed up in confusion. “You don�
��t laugh! You don’t get to fuckin’ laugh!”

  “I do,” Kane said.

  And he raised the revolver he had taken off of Watts’s belt. He pulled the hammer back with one weak thumb, and the machinery moved as smooth as ice. Then he pulled the trigger, and the shot took Watts in his protruding stomach.

  The sheriff stumbled back, gripping the wound, blood seeping out from between his locked fingers, his eyes wide, his face a mask of pain.

  “Y-you shot me,” he said.

  Pulling himself up, filled with rage, Kane aimed the revolver again. It felt so right in his palm, like the hand of a long-lost lover.

  “I did,” Kane said. “Now I’m gonna kill you.”

  The mask of pain transformed into one of rage. “You go ahead, it won’t change a damn thing about who—”

  Kane pulled the trigger again. This shot sheared away Watts’s blubbery, red face and shattered his skull into oblivion. He fell, landing on his stomach in the dirt with a muffled thump.

  Watts would terrorize no longer.

  “I’m too old for monologues,” Kane said, and he hobbled away toward the stables.

  But it wasn’t easy. Rarely anything in his life was easy. The shadow monsters, drawn by the sound of his revolver, were coming for him. He felt them at his back. Judging by the weight of the gun, he only had four shells loaded into the cylinder. He had no spares.

  Kane turned around. Over a dozen shadow creatures formed a semicircle around him. Their mouths hung open, their dark fangs jutting out. Heaps of bodies lay between them and Kane—the townspeople, most mutilated beyond recognition. The streets ran red with their blood.

  Those that weren’t mutilated, that were only dead by way of a slice of the claws or a crack of their neck, slowly stood up. Reanimated.

  Kane sighed.

  The shadow creatures were masters of dark magic, born into it, raised in it.

  But Kane was a master of the gun.

  Now the bodies of the townspeople faced him, waiting behind their dark puppeteers. Blood stained their clothes and death stained their eyes. Kane counted twenty-five adversaries.

  Four shots.

  One broken gun knight.

  He cocked his revolver and took a deep breath as the shadow creatures crept forward, the sounds of hell rumbling deep within their wispy sternums.

  “Let’s do this, then,” he said.

  He aimed his weapon at the middlemost shadow creature. Pulled the trigger and the gun sprayed its familiar fire. This first shot blasted through the creature’s conjured shield, carrying on through its head, taking two of the reanimated townsfolk with it, with still enough force to bury into the walls of the Proudpost at their backs.

  There’s my freebie, Kane thought. He cocked the revolver again, the cylinder turned.

  “Kane!” shouted a voice from his right. “Ansen Kane!”

  He wouldn’t turn his head, the risk was too great, but he saw out of his peripherals something stranger than shadow creatures this far west.

  It was a boy, a young man.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, yet in his hands he held a gun knight’s revolver and a bandolier full of shells.

  With two stuttering steps, the boy lunged forward and threw the weapon and ammunition. Then, from his back, he drew a great sword, one almost as big as he was. Kane had no choice now but to look. For a split second, he and the boy caught eyes, and wasn’t there something familiar in those eyes?

  Behind the boy came a tall, well-muscled woman. She had close-cropped golden hair and wore full knight’s armor. She, too, pulled a sword free. The blades glinted with the firelight.

  Kane wasted no time in bending and picking up the other revolver. In that second before it filled his empty hand, he recognized the pattern of thorn branches inlaid on the hilt.

  “Cora,” he said under his breath, and the familiarity of the boy’s eyes suddenly made sense.

  He grabbed the bandolier and looped it over his shoulder, both guns in his hands now.

  “All right, let’s get to work.”

  He cocked the hammers back and pulled the triggers simultaneously.

  The iron gave him strength, and he dropped three shadow creatures and two townspeople with those two bullets.

  Screaming, the boy and the tall woman rushed into the crowd, all whirling blades of steel.

  A shadow creature lunged at the young sir, and he spun away, stumbling over the corpse of a bloodied man. Kane shot the creature before it could bring its great claws down upon his head.

  The woman kicked out with an armored leg and sent two townsfolk back into the railing of the Proudpost’s porch. The wood splintered, and they fell through. Nearly as quick as Kane was with a revolver, the woman stabbed both of the men through the neck, ending their second, unnatural lives.

  Then three shadow creatures sliced through the air toward Kane. He dove, ignoring the crunch of his bones and cartilage. When he landed in a crouch, the guns did their killing trick again. The three shadow creatures were evaporated, turned into a dissipating cloud of mist.

  But there was still more, and the adrenaline, the high of the battle, was beginning to wear off.

  Kane reloaded one of the guns as fast as he could.

  Roaring, there came another shadow.

  Kane shot it, but it wasn’t a killing blow. It only knocked the monster back a few feet. And then it kept coming.

  Kane’s bones and fingers ached miserably. His heart beat faster than it possibly ever had, and he felt tired, so tired.

  By the time he aimed the newly reloaded weapon at the shadow, it was almost too late. Its claws were poised for Kane’s head, on their way down.

  He tried blocking the blow with his left hand revolver, and mostly managed, but the gun went careening out of his grip, landing somewhere on the road behind.

  Stunned, his brain syrupy with pain, Kane raised the other weapon, aiming to put an end to this creature once and for all.

  But the creature’s claws, poisonous with its terrible black magic, hacked through the air.

  Right for Kane’s throat.

  Chapter 25

  Sacrifice

  Isaac’s heart stopped in his chest. A shadow creature was coming for his throat, and he was not quick enough to block the blow.

  Luckily, Kane shot it from a great distance, exploding the monster’s head in a rain of mist.

  For a short moment that felt much longer than it was, Isaac stood there, contemplating just how near death he had been as the battle raged on. But, like Kane, he knew there wasn’t much time to contemplate anything. There was only time for action.

  He shook off the experience and plunged into the thick of the fight against these townspeople that really weren’t people at all. Some evil had invaded them. Some evil had brought them back from the dead.

  Three men pushed Swan up against a wall, except they weren’t men at all. They were dead bodies, brought back by some weird magic; their faces snarling, bloody messes, their eyes blank, devoid of all emotion. Just looking at them brought a fear unlike any other Isaac had felt into the center of his heart.

  Despite this terror, he raised his sword and went for them.

  He thrust out with the blade and stabbed a man in the ribs. It was then the others paid him attention, turning with their blank, dead faces to meet his own.

  Swan, now free, swung her sword in an arc and decapitated both men. The third one lunged at Isaac, and he took a page out of Swan’s book. Spinning, his weapon lopped the man’s head off with ease.

  Behind them, Kane’s revolvers thundered.

  Isaac turned to see one of the shadow creatures knock Kane’s gun to the dirt, towering over him.

  “No!” he screamed as the creature raised its other claw, preparing to slice Kane’s face off.

  He didn’t drop his sword, but he should’ve. He sprinted across the street, running at the creature with as much speed as his legs could muster.

  The creature’s downward
motion stopped, and it turned its head, looking at Isaac with its rough, black features and its eyeless sockets.

  Isaac, teeth bared, barreled into the shadow, a move that didn’t do much. The creature stumbled backward, but seeing as how it was barely made of anything besides mist and magic, Isaac simply passed through it.

  He felt ice and death and loneliness, all horrible feelings, but on top of all these feelings, the most painful and blaring was pain.

  As he hit the dirt, he thought he may never move again. His bleary eyes focused on his arm. Through the thick material of his shirt, a deep cut ran down his flesh, red and sizzling. The shadow creature’s claw had opened him up.

  Isaac closed his eyes, drifting into the darkness, hearing the muffled explosions of Kane’s revolver.

  * * *

  Kane saw the boy coming and he tried yelling for him to stop, but he couldn’t find the strength. His throat had closed up, and the boy was moving too fast.

  The boy hit the creature and shouted in pain as its claw, once poised for Kane himself, raked down the an arm.

  It was Kane’s turn to scream. One last burst of manic energy came over him, and with his hurt left hand, he palmed the hammer of his revolver down and pulled the trigger with his right index finger at rapid speed, squeezing and squeezing again until he heard a dry click-click-click.

  The remaining shadow creatures, at least a half-dozen and all coming toward him and the boy, exploded into their death mist.

  Vaporized.

  Kane dropped to a knee, smelling the familiar, welcoming aroma of gunsmoke and death.

  A sick and humorless smile stretched across his face. Relief. Confusion. Pain.

  In the distance, the woman who arrived with the boy stood stunned, her sword wavering by her side.