by Will Madden
He could make it out now. “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” A remix of the 1998 duet track with Willie Nelson. It was loud.
A gangland invasion. However improbable, no other explanation existed.
Calmly, Arnold Fleck folded his newspaper and laid it on the table. He unbuttoned his shirt and hung it neatly on the back of his chair. Strolling down the hall, he stepped into to a small room with no obvious purpose. From a secret compartment above the dummy fireplace, he removed a sweet-smelling bottle, from which he applied oil to his arms and chest until the flesh glistened. Next, he reinforced both wrists with a roll of tape. To his body, he strapped a pair of throwing axes.
Getting down on one knee, he screwed together the two halves of his three-meter footman’s pike. He performed this ritual the same way he prepared his cue for an afternoon game of snooker with his neighbor, Hals Crick. Both men preferred snooker to billiards because it was joyless to watch and even less fun to play.
In his hands, Arnold tested the balance of the polearm. As he gazed down the shaft, he thought of the length of years that had past since he last engaged in street combat. He wondered if his muscles remembered the gestures of war, if they could still perform with precision.
Years ago, when he had smuggled this weaponry into his home under cover of darkness, he had been thinking about the defense of his property and the safety of his family. None of that entered his mind now. The music that came booming down the road had awoken some long-forgotten corner of his psyche. Either he would vanquish his enemies today and bathe his limbs in their blood, or he himself would be slain at their hands. It hardly mattered which, the fight itself was the thing. The stink of engagement, the blood and sweat and shit and screaming!
Amen, something cried aloud in his soul. Sweet God, amen.
Having thus invoked the witness of heaven, he snuck out the servant’s door, in pursuit of the raucous sound.
He wasn’t prepared for jet-powered horses. He simply wasn’t.
On the other hand, the Pestilence wasn’t prepared for Arnold Fleck.
The knights jetted along the mountain roads, trailing streaks of light behind them liked bright-colored snakes from an old-fashioned arcade game: yellow red blue and green. From the palatial houses looming above the roadside hedges, the air itself seemed to ripple as they passed, specks of residue sparkling in their wake.
Just as clouds envelop the highest peaks, so too the nightmarish riders clung like a mist to Mt. Myrtle, thick and churning upon her crags. They shook the earth with the thunder of hooves, the combustion of engines, the unrelenting bludgeoning of subwoofers.
Once, twice they raised dust on the pathways, three times to announce their business. This task completed, the Pestilence powered down their steeds and drew them up in the town square. Bubo Skymole cut the music.
In the center of the plaza stood a glass pyramid, the eponymous installation which semiannually, upon the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, fragmented the sun into seven distinctly-colored lances of light, each striking and illuminating one of seven crystal statues that stood about the plaza in a circle, exquisitely crafted anthropomorphic representations of the seven cardinal virtues.
Which are: Temperance, Fortitude . . . Cleanliness? Who the hell knows.
Every March, and then again in September, school children were carted up from Dodoville in sticky busloads to witness the miraculous event. The town council sent out a lavish cheese plate and informed the children that the Prismites had very much desired to greet them, but unfortunately, everyone had planned other engagements months before the movement of the sun had been scheduled.
From his saddle, Abhoc swung a hammer at the head of (what may well have been) Patience. It shattered into a thousand pricks of glittering light.
Brum spoke. “Eyes about you. That romp through town ought to draw out their security personnel. Better to fight them here than to challenge them door-to-door.”
They waited.
Gradually, shadows began darting between the columns of the porticoes at the edge of the square.
A landscaper with garden shears. A charwoman with a washing board and wooden pail. Abhoc could barely make them out. But he had been in the face-mashing business long enough to notice when someone was forming a perimeter.
“Surely not those lot?” he said quietly.
“Aye,” said Brum. “Don’t underestimate them. Their household tools will be optimally weighted for lethal force.”
The washerwoman began to twirl her bucket over her head and about her shoulders. The motion struck Abhoc as . . . nunchuck-ish.
“Seriously?” he said.
Abhoc turned to see a tailor approaching on his flank. By size and stature, the man looked like a fifty-year-old schoolboy. Impeccably crisp creases dropped from just above his inseam, and his shoes were polished to a razor shine. He removed a tape measure from around his neck and wrapped it twice around his knuckles. The dark curly arm hair below three-quarter-rolled cuffs bespoke a quiet dominance.
“The deadliest warriors you’ll encounter today,” observed Brum, “top graduates from the most prestigious schools of domestic ergomachy in the world.”
“What’s . . .”
“Like, butler kung fu.”
“I refuse to believe that’s real,” said Heckley.
“Wait till you get a serving fork in the throat then! Prissytown believes it’s uncouth for guards to patrol here, so they disguise them among the help. Plus, having them beat out carpets saves on wages.”
A man in tiny shorts and sweatbands stepped out from behind the glittering statue of Fiscal Responsibility.
“Is that tennis instructor really going to come after us with his racket?”
Brum soothed his steed against the gasoline scent of an approaching auto mechanic.
“Aye. Power up your laser bucklers,” he said. “His balls will conceal edged weapons or combustibles.”
The smaller green knight was keying the touch screen on his saddle console.
“En garde, Sir Bubo!” shouted Heckley. “The charwoman behind you is gonna scrub those freckles right off your nose.”
Beep bop boop beet toot tweet! went Bubo’s display. Furiously, his fingers continued to type and swipe.
“Hold them off a few,” he said. “I’m searching my armory databases for tactical weaknesses in the local combat liveries.”
“Smart thinking,” Heckley conceded.
“Two masseurs and a dog walker,” shouted Brum, “four o’clock.”
“Afraid of nothing, me,” said Abhoc, gnawing his lip. “But I don’t even wanna know what that wet nurse is going to try.”
Heckley spat on the ground. “Yeah, you do. You sir freak.”
From one of the roads that emptied into the plaza stepped a man in linen slacks. His body was vested with standard melee weapons and he didn’t seem to have come from any domestic task at all.
“Who the fuck is Rambo over there?” asked Abhoc.
Noticing eyes upon him, the man brandished a pike the length of two men. The end shone with a diamond glint.
Brum’s horse whinnied as he turned it sharply in the newcomer’s direction. “That, sir knight, will be the master of the house. We take that one alive. For ransom.”
The pikeman assumed a battle stance.
“If that’s a diamond tip,” said Heckley, “do you think it could pierce your mount’s barding?”
“God give him the courage to find out.” Brum set his teeth and spurred his charger. The massive horse accelerated under its own power as the lance aimed for its quarry’s heart.
“I don’t see how that is going to keep him very alive,” Abhoc said to Heckley.
The blue knight chuckled. “You’d be amazed what a body can ransom for. We do it at the Archive all the time.”
Abhoc shrugged. “Maybe I’m just not sentimental,” he said, “but if it can’t chat nor eat toast no more, I don’t want it.”
Brum lowered his visor.
The
pikeman beheld a yellow demon with two heads and six limbs, snorting and sparking the ground with its hoof falls as it bore down upon him. His feet shuffled upon the flagstones.
For an instant, the flash of a smile crossed his face.
Then he turned and ran, the pike clattering on the ground behind him.
Breathing heavily and covered in sweet, Arnold Fleck reached his eight-car garage. After all these years without killing a man with his hands, it seemed a pity to retreat from those knights in the plaza, but he’d simply had no choice.
The opportunity was too big to turn down.
Opening the garage door, Arnold beheld the Duesenberg roadster he was supposed to be working on. You couldn’t smell a drop of oil in here. Every few months he would order a new part to replace one he had moved to a museum case on the wall. Hals Crick would come over and look between the car and the part. Arnold would say where the part was purchased, whether he’d needed it custom made, how much trouble it had cost him to have it shipped up here on Mt. Myrtle. Hals Crick would look between the part and the car. Cloths were removed, cloths were replaced. Otherwise, nobody touched anything. The ritual took over an hour.
Arnold’s involvement with Dodoville gangs began at the tender age of eleven. His first job had been to euthanize the wounded after a street fight and collect their valuables for his ganglord’s war chest. Later, as he took on more dangerous work, fellow operatives encouraged him to spend his share of the spoils on fast pleasures. In this business, you never thought past the next job or the next orgiastic all-night celebration. But Arnold found that left you with empty pockets in the morning, overeager to accept the next desperate job. Wouldn’t he live longer if he thought about his future?
A keen observer, Arnold developed a knack for anticipating the outplay of gangland power struggles. Over his tenure, the balance of power in the underworld shifted drastically three times. Three times he had changed allegiances at the ideal moment. He had functioned as a key operative in the rise of the theater empire of Rhadamanthus Flynn, of Dr. Cynthia Pack and her botanists, and finally of Jaxon Stahler’s Consortium.
Then he pocketed his earnings. Gangland respected the canny renegotiation of loyalties, but to squirrel away the rewards of valor was too highbrow for a lowlife. Each organization had valued his knowledge and experience, but they always considered him a stale breath in the room.
Duesenberg. Even the word sounded like a slow death by dysentery.
Arnold got used to being disliked by his peers. When he finally wanted out, no one was sorry to see him go. Up on the mountain with you, they said. Where old oracles belong.
Now he performed everything in his life with a bloodless boring decorum. When he was finished, he double checked to make sure it was boring and bloodless enough. Over his many years of cheating death, Arnold never imagined the payoff would be pretending to work on classic cars—yet he wasn’t sure why he should have expected anything else.
Sometimes at night, he thought back on the magnificent bastards he had outsmarted and outlived. Now they were getting their revenge, he thought.
Well, until today. Today the sanctity of his hearth and home was under attack from savage horseback marauders. Today belonged to him.
Crated away behind the half-empty shell of the Duesenberg was Arnold’s real project, a fully functional gasoline-powered ballista whose meticulous upkeep and ongoing improvements was his life’s only joy. He called it the Queequeg. A classical machinist in Winnipeg had designed it be the most deadly accurate anti-horse spear cannon this or any side of the Middle Ages. With a twenty-first-century digital targeting system, the specs claimed it could drive a 2.5m ashwood projectile through the eye of a racehorse at full gallop. The titanium alloy spearheads were guaranteed to stick in the side of a tank.
Unboxing the Queequeg with the enemy outside, Arnold felt like a bridegroom before his virgin bride. He unbuckled the knife belt from his waist and let it fall to the floor. Pulling himself up into the operator’s seat, he allowed the suspension spindle to adjust to his weight. As his hand wrapped around the custom steering apparatus, fitting his thumb into the divot of the launch button, he gasped involuntarily. With a half key turn, the engine turned over and purred. Arnold shifted a handle, causing the tension mechanism to draw back and lock into place with a satisfying click. A bolt dropped into the firing groove from the side-mounted quiver. The targeting system responded to the lightest pressure from his hand, directing the bolt with a motor-assisted swivel that shifted the seat beneath him, keeping his eye aligned with the crosshairs.
Arnold Fleck fell into a reverie. The old battles, the narrow escapes, his enemies’ delicious screams of agony and fear.
In his day, he had butchered aluminum workers, theater ushers, botanists, tchotchke salesmen—the most vicious gang operatives Dodoville had ever seen. But one thing had always been missing from his life, one enemy he had never confronted: the Horselords, the Kolkhek region’s primeval threat. Now he could almost smell the stink of their perspiration.
As a boy he had daydreamed about living in the fifteenth century, the hoofbeats rolling off the mountain in waves of terror, himself standing in a doorway, ready to gut them all with a stove poker or whatever.
Fifty years of fantasy. Today he would fight them. Live or die, he would finally be whole.
On his cell phone, he dialed Anne’s number.
“Honey, I need you to roll out the extra ammo cart onto the driveway.”
“Are you mad? What cart?”
“For the Queequeg. The Horselords are here.”
“What, for dinner? Listen, Feefo, I can’t play right now. Kathrine Lady Corner-of-Essex-and-Marsh is showing me the new dresses she bought her Pekingese.”
“The Horselords are attacking.” With relish, he licked his lips. “Just like we always dreamed.”
A strangled gurgle on the other end. He heard the phone fall to the ground. A dog yapped in fear and rage.
“Anne?”
A distant piercing cry.
“Anne! Are you all right? Anne!”
“Don’t kill them all till I get there,” she said.
Arnold forbade the love to enter his voice. “There’s only four. Get moving quick.”
Back in the town plaza, the Pestilence had their hands full.
As knight commander, Brum could not leave the field, so Heckley lowered his lance and charged after the fleeing pikeman. With a good pick, he could slide the point under the leather straps across his chest and haul him off the ground. If he missed low, he’d spear him through the shoulder. Just as good.
The landscaper, however, caught Heckley’s lance in his gardening sheers, jamming the weapon in his hands. With a powerful wrench, he twisted the rider off balance and pulled him from his horse. Heckley hit the ground at a roll, bouncing back up to his feet. He swore bitterly as he watched Arnold Fleck make an escape.
The tailor addressed Abhoc, snapping the tape ruler wrapped around his fists. “Face me,” he said, “if you think you measure up.”
Abhoc twirled the axe in his hands. “Puns? Is that your special power? Gonna leave me in stitches?”
The tailor smiled wryly. “Look at you, m’lord,” he said. “presenting yourself like a barbarian. To succeed as a knight, you must dress as a knight, conveying chivalry down to the smallest detail of your attire. Otherwise . . .”
The small man flicked his measuring tape like a whip. The metal tip struck Abhoc so sharply on the nipple, the knight screamed in his saddle. The horse, too, reared at the sudden crack and turned to bolt.
Abhoc regained control of his mount and gave it his spur. Vanquishing the distance between them, he grabbed the tailor by the shirt and hoisted him up.
As his feet left the ground, the tailor spat out a pair of sewing pins from between his teeth and stabbed them together into Abhoc’s wrist, all the way down to the heads. With a flurry of movement as crisp as his creases, he broke free of the hold and landed softly.
Abhoc gr
unted as he pulled out the needles with his teeth, then brought his horse around again. “Don’t make this personal, old man. You may be crafty, but you are just the tailor!”
“Sew I seams!”
The tailor removed his vest and held it in front of him like a matador. He motioned for the knight to bring it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the prism, the tennis instructor whistled for Brum’s attention. The knight turned to see him on the balls of his feet, shoulder width apart. He held the racket in front of him, as if awaiting a volley.
“Combustion shield!” Brum cried. A kite-shaped plane of light appeared on his wrist guard. Holding it in front of his face, he set his lance and charged.
Brum totally got served.
The instructor raised the racket above his head and drove a peach-sized sphere toward Brum with an overhand smash. It whistled through the air and exploded against the barrier of light with enough concussion to drive his mount back and break its stride.
“You’ll get no love from me,” said the instructor with a wicked grin.
“Jesus Harthur Christ,” Brum cried, clenching his chest in agony. “You just lobbed a bomb at me, but that was painful.”
The instructor bent at the knees and readied himself for another volley. Brum lowered his lance and aimed for the heart. His opponent awaited the charge with nerves of steel.
At the last instant, the instructor hopped lightly to one side and brought the racket around in a backhand slice. A metal plating on the rear of the racket made brutal contact with the head of the lance, releasing a shower of sparks and bending the tip.
“Break point,” said the instructor dryly.
“Listen here, saucy! I’ve some tennis for you too.”
Brum drew his war hammer, an ugly thing heeled with a vicious spike. With an off-hand blow, Brum caught his opponent heavily on the back of the skull, dropping him to the ground as his head broke open like a ripe melon. The instructor lay there in a puddle of blood and bone.
“It’s called sudden death,” he said.
