by Rance Denton
“What makes you think that when he stole Blackpeak’s memory of him,” Thirteen asks, leaning forward to place the vial into my palm, “he wouldn’t do the same to you?”
The vines unwind from around my bloody wrist. I stare down at the vial. My blood becomes ice. It hits me. The realization.
“Is this mine?” I ask.
“It’s what I could find. Even broken memories leave debris.”
I stare at truth. A mind is a mind is a mind, as vulnerable as a newborn fawn.
The Magnate had done it to others. Which meant he’d done it to me.
“Why dig out this,” I say, “and not whatever you want to find out about the Well?”
“You have to want to give me the Well.”
“Why would I?”
“Because of all the beings you’ve ever met,” Thirteen tells me, “I’m the one you can trust the most.”
I pry the cork free with my thumb. It falls between my feet.
When I breathe, the liquid shimmies up the inner confines of the crystal, as if crawling through the air toward my tongue…
I drink it, not because I want to, but because I have to. It tastes like sunshine, like sweat, like—
—whiskey, clear as urine, in a tiny glass in my hand, and I wonder if I’m supposed to drink it or just stare at it, because (the pieces fall into place like words in a memorized sequence) I’m thirsty as hell from a long day baking out in the sun on a horse’s back, and I hadn’t even had the time to drop my shoulder-satchel before here he was, trying to get me tipsy.
“You know how to shoot, Mister—”
“Faust,” I say.
“Do you?”
“Enough.”
“That’s encouraging,” he lies. “Either way, you’ll get practice enough here to get even better. Just try not to kill anybody without reason. Blackpeak’s rowdier than hell.” He tops off his own whiskey. His face (it’s a blur, a shimmering smear, and I can’t quite place it) catches a line of sunlight. “You can sit.”
So I do. My feet are swollen lumps, bulging in my boots. Long day of travel. Long weeks of it. “Retirement?” I ask.
“Pursuing a passion,” he tells me, then tops off his whiskey. “Heart’s only got so many beats left in it. I’d prefer not to spend the ones that remain under Kallum’s thumb. You met Kallum?”
“On paper.”
“Keep it that way,” he says. “Man’s a snake.”
When he stands, he stuffs his thumbs into his belt-loops. He unlatches a rusted key from his belt and tosses it down to the table. I take it. It’s mine.
He surrenders it all. There’s some talking, and some exchange over formalities as I finish a finger’s worth of whiskey and he fidgets like an impatient meerkat in his seat, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, but always watching me. (It’s an hour or two, but it snaps and flickers by in vague, unmemorable flashes. It stitches itself together into something-like-whole.) The sun gleams orange, like a molten coin. The day is almost done. This is my first day in Blackpeak, and it’s just like any other day, and it starts the same way—
“And always ends the same,” he says. “Keys, rules, and whiskey. So that just about does it. I don’t think there’s much more I can pass along to you except the throne itself, Mister Faust.”
He’s at the front door of the marshal’s office when he turns. From his chest, he unpins a battered star and places it in my hand. He shakes my other one with business-like firmness. We’re standing, the tips of our boots touching, and I see the lines drawn on his face. We shake hands for what seems like years…
“I never got your name,” I say.
“Fitzpatrick Gregdon,” he tells me, and grips my hand with all the might of a gunmaker’s vice. “Former town marshal of Blackpeak, Texas, as of this very moment.”
“Pleasure,” I oblige.
“All mine,” he says. “Not that you’ll remember.”
He leaves me in that room by myself, with the taste of gold on my tongue and the after-pressure of his grip still aching in my hand. When he’s gone, I look down at my hand to see a faint smear of blood where his thumb had curled around the back of my hand.
I sleep that night better than ever before.
Ashes
I remember this much: the moment Nycendera’s blade struck Illemone’s Heart, the power within fired off like a primer. There was a flash, green and hot and blinding. All at once, the wailing cry of a hundred voices rose up in a storm as one magic tore into another.
It was Miss Lachrimé Garland who told me about the sandshades. About how they screamed in unison, how they clawed at their silver eyes. How the flesh just unspooled and melted, and like boneless dolls, they crumbled away from their victims, all of them reaching out for something they couldn’t see.
Grady Cicero told me about the silence, the deadlands quiet that brushed across the town in the seconds after they all fell. He told me it was because there were folk laying dead, clutching their guns or their children, and that while the world couldn’t believe such creatures had come to be, it believed even less that anyone could have survived at all.
He said he picked through all of them, one by one, trying to find survivors. He told me later how Nabby Lawson slipped away in his arms, and he said to her, “I love you,” and she smiled and they both smiled and she never stopped smiling, and of all the lies he’d told in his life, it burned like a red coal in his throat.
For two days after, deranged in a sleepless fit, Paul Fulton buried sixteen bodies – at least, that’s what Aremeda De Santos said. Nobody could convince him to let them help otherwise, said he threw a damn riot and hollered, “I’ve got to bury somebody,” and struck gashes in the hard, rocky Simpkin earth for hours on end until holes formed and he filled them with men and women.
Eliza gave some right nice prayers, somebody said, standing on the rubble of the Simpkin porch with her Sunday skirts snapping. But when the words came from her, they said, she stared at a spot in space, spoke wooden and quiet, and seemed just as happy to think of nothing at all.
Others said the town pulled together, mostly because nobody understood a damn word that came out of Emp’s mouth, so they just followed suit and thought, to hell with it, let’s just do what he’s doing. So they doused fires and started putting boards on busted windows.
When word travelled, they said that you could see the smoke as far as Crown Rock, stretching like a smear across the sky. They said they blamed the chaos in Blackpeak on bandits, and that alone was enough of a reason to avoid sending help. Because the best thing to do, they said, was just to pray and hope for the best from as far away as possible.
And others, they said, told tales about a marshal coming back from the dead – he ate a bullet, they said – he tore men to ribbons with wind from his hands, they said – and it was worth a laugh, and that was all.
They said. They said.
They said they found me on the outskirts of the town, tossed out like garbage, my hand still clenched around the memory of a knife, but grasping at nothing.
They said Peggy Winters hoisted me like a sack of feed and brought me to the Horseshoe Junction Inn.
In the wake of it all, Blackpeak thrived. It took a few days to shake loose the darkness. They had to tell me all about it, about the clean-up, about the repairs, about the funerals, because I don’t remember the aftermath. Not a moment. Not a hair’s breadth. Not a blink.
I remember something else entirely.
IS IT DONE?
“As best as it can be.”
AND YET YOU LIVE.
“Do I?”
AT THE BEHEST OF BOONS AND GIFTS.
The blinding flash faded. I was left standing on that sea of stars, looking up into the fractured edge of the Shattered Well. The pinkish light of an alien horizon fell across my face. If I could have slept for a thousand years, I would have. “Does this end, all this juggling about with my brains like I’m some kind of circus trick?”
WHEN IT MUST.
> “He’s dead. I saw to it. Whether or not it’s what you wanted, I got it done. No more Magnate on your back, no more hound-dog sniffing you out. Christ almighty, did you put Rufus through this kind of hell?”
THE PREVIOUS SERVED HIS PURPOSE ADMIRABLY.
“Which was what, exactly?”
TO DRAW YOU INTO MY ORBIT.
There were lines that had been toed, crossed, then rubbed away altogether. I glanced down at my body – at the image of my body, it must have been, because of all the sensations in this strange plane, I felt almost nothing at all – and tightened my fist. Still four fingers. Still caked in blood.
The Mark, like a black sickness, crawled inside the prison of my veins, spread into the cracks of my palm, and coiled toward my elbow.
I sniffed. Burnt flesh still greeted my senses. Scorched black, the triangular coin seared into the middle of my chest refused to budge, even when I pried at it with a fingernail. “Blackpeak’s got a short memory. It has to. Either it’s a matter of survival, or the last hint of human hope too damn stubborn to break away. They’ll move on from the Magnate. So, too, can you.”
MORTAL RACES POSSESS INSURMOUNTABLE RESOLVE, IF ONLY TO DESTROY AND DEMOLISH INDISCRIMINATELY.
“Optimism,” I said. “Try it sometime. With the Magnate gone, ain’t nobody around to care much about you.”
YOUR MAYOR KALLUM STILL IS.
“You really afraid of that lump of whale meat?”
HUMANS PRY.
“If your solution is for me to kill him,” I said, “you can cram it wherever you manage to cram whatever it is you’d cram, if you can even cram at all.”
The pressure in the air intensified. My lungs shuddered. Wasn’t exactly a keen idea, I reckon, to piss down the leg of a…being such as it. But to hell with it.
IS KILLING NOT ONE OF YOUR FINEST TALENTS?
“When someone deserves it.”
AND HE DOES NOT?
“Not by my measure. Not yet. Him being a bug up your ass or a bee in your bonnet isn’t hardly reason to give him a leaden lullaby. Not by my standards. The Magnate, he took what didn’t belong to him, and he damaged and destroyed in the process. Kallum, he’s greedy, sure, but dangle a side of beef in front of a dog and kill it for snapping, that’s not on him. That’ll be on you. That’ll be on us. That’ll be on me.”
I’d spent too many hours listing back and forth like a boat caught in the winds of these beasts and powers. I wanted a beer. And a goddamn cigarette. Simple man, simple pleasures.
WE WILL EXPECT MUCH FROM YOU. UNDERSTAND THIS, it said. BE EVER VIGILANT. OUR PRESERVATION IS YOUR PRESERVATION. SHOULD WE FALL, SHOULD WE BE CONSUMED, CONDEMNED, COMPROMISED, OR DEFILED, YOUR CONTINUANCE SHALL BE SEVERED. Like a tiny, black heart under my flesh, the Mark began to tremble. UNTIL WE CALL UPON YOU AGAIN…
“Wait. Wait.” I held up my hand into the air. “What the hell you mean, my continuance?”
FOR A SHADOW TO EXIST, THE SUN MUST BURN.
A sucking, tugging sensation on the back of my neck, my spine.
Dragging me away. Dragging me away from it, away from this world—
“How close did he come?” I asked the endless beyond. “How close did he come to finding you?”
A begrudging surge of pleasure rolled through the air. A MAN CAN DIG WITH PICKS AND SPADES FOR CENTURIES AND NEVER FIND THE WELL.
For some reason, its easy confidence and know-it-all demeanor set my anger off like a match. Here it was, demanding protection, like I only existed to fulfill some watchman’s clause.
IN ALL HIS LIFE, NO MATTER HOW DEEP THE MINES GREW OR HOW POWERFUL HIS CRAFT, HE TOOK NO INCH WHICH I DID NOT ANSWER WITH A MILE.
Everything faded from view. I fell back, like liquid, into the universe.
The Shattered Well’s distant voice reached down after me.
HE NEVER EVEN CAME CLOSE.
My mind found my body somewhere. I suppose it knew just where to find it. I heard voices across the way, so I drifted toward them until my eyelids opened, burning like blisters.
“—will have some volunteers in a few days, I imagine, to head back down there to gather what they can,” said Miss Garland. “What wasn’t destroyed, anyway.”
“Much of it is still intact. And quite viable.”
“What kind of goods?”
“Your kerosene. Your whiskey. Tobacco. Dried meat, salt, flour—”
“Any number of commodities that drive people to killing if they don’t have their share, then. Is there any potential of danger if we go to retrieve the products?”
Heartbeat in my head, tha-thum, tha-thum, pulling me out of the valleys of sleep.
“You’ll encounter no opposition.”
“None?”
“The mines are the realm of dead men.”
A marathon of cool water trickled down my forehead, crawled to my collar, silencing a wild, feverish heat.
The second voice, all sharpened steel – Nycendera the Herald – said, “Fire will serve useful should the Magnate’s tunnels possess any stragglers. Tell your men to bring their torches. They’re quite fond of those, after all.”
“Reckon,” said a third voice I instantly recognized, “I res’ awn up a day’er two, I wone have ainy trouble tearin’em sandbags apart wi’ my hanes, jes’ you watch.”
“Preserve your strength. There will be opportunity enough to bloody and be bloody,” said Nycendera.
“Shaw.” Peggy spit. “Shaw.”
“In a few days’ time, we’ll reassess the state of things down in the mines,” said Miss Garland. “I take it most of the men who worked in that vicinity won’t want to return too quickly to their previous tasks, what, with the knowledge that their workplace was a glorified slaughter-pen. Regardless, Blackpeak is in your debt. Can we repay you?”
“Yes,” the Herald said. “You can leave.”
“Some’a us cain’t jes’ up and leave. We got thangs here,” Peggy said.
“The Shattered Well cares nothing for your sentiments, your possessions, or your claim to land which has never been yours. This is poisoned land, dangerous and infected. The longer you linger in its midst, the greater threat it poses to you. Greedy souls with greedier desires will keep coming, drawn by the promise of what they’ve read in their books or heard carried on whispers.”
Miss Garland’s jaw clenched so tight, it rippled the blanket of darkness around me. “Then we will greet them as we must.”
“We live heah,” Peggy said. “Ain’t no runnin’. Ain’t no such thang.”
In my brain, there was a little wink of light. Priests say that’s the face of God when you’re about to die, dragging you closer to Heaven. I waited a long time before I finally said fuck it and started swimming toward it…
I woke. Outside, day had given way to night, and only a dull oil-lamp flickered on a bedstand. I drew up in bed and goddamn if every muscle I had didn’t scream a thousand curses at me just for doing so.
The sheets peeled back. I touched the skin where the flintlock had all but torn me in two. All that was there, though, was a pooch I could blame on too much beer and too much stew.
The Shattered Well could drive a hard bargain with clever tricks like this.
“She’s not here,” said a voice in the darkness. “She left. Hours ago.”
By the smoke-stained curtains, I placed myself in one of the rooms of the Horseshoe Junction Inn. The fabric flickered in and out of an open window. From a seat in the shadows, Miss Garland threw me exactly what the painful moment needed: a little white stick. “Never met an angel so sweet,” I said, as she brought the oil-lamp close to me so I could light the cigarette.
I smiled. She didn’t. Her dark face, written over with too much thinking, might as well have been coal. She felt my cheeks, my forehead, looking for signs of fever. Unsatisfied, she went then for my jaw, my cheeks, pried my mouth apart like I was a child who’d eaten a rock. “The hell,” I barked.
Her finger slashed along inside my mouth. “Hold still
.”
“The shit is this about?”
“Hold still—”
“You mind telling me—”
“Hold still, goddamnit!”
She rammed me back against the headboard and the pillow. She peered into my open mouth like a barber trying to find a rotten tooth. I could see her so close here, smelled the stomach acid and stale drink on her breath. Her eyes swam in pools of strange, confused tears.
Her finger finally found what it was looking for: at the top of my mouth, lodged there like a stone, was a misshapen bullet.
Miss Lachrimé Garland collapsed back on her chair and took a swig from a glass of bourbon. “She told me to pass along a message. When you were well enough to receive it.” The cigarette seared the top of my mouth. “Are you well enough, Elias Faust?”
Whatever it was that made Miss Garland retreat into herself, I couldn’t tell, but I was too weary to be frustrated. “Only as much as you think I am, Miss Garland.”
She licked her dry lips and said over her glass: “’Other places, other beings, other worlds, they felt the rules bend here. Like a ripple in the ocean. They know there’s a Well here. They know now,’” Miss Garland said, staring not at me, but at the coin burnt into the center of my chest. “’They know. And like all creatures hungry for hope, they make their way. They approach.’ What in God’s name is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer. Her knee jittered under her skirt.
“What have you dragged us into,” she asked, before spitting on the floor between her feet. “You should be dead. Now I’m here talking to you, delivering messages from one strange thing to the next. All the time wondering exactly what’s been going on, or what even did go on, and why, when all the blood and shit rolls downhill, it always comes to stop at your boots. From Everett to lynchings to swarms of men made of sand and skin.”
I swallowed hard. “Miss Garland, it’s done. Whatever didn’t make sense is dead and gone.”
