The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  “How, Clyde?” Jacob was almost within range. Three quick steps, and he could grab the man’s wrist, twist until the gun dropped.

  Clyde smiled, teeth stained dark with his own blood. “Like this.”

  Then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  *

  Alvarez found Jacob at the pump on the brothel’s back porch, rinsing the grit of Clyde’s skull from his face and hair.

  “Jacob.”

  The general was a large man, and carried his fat with authority. Two soldiers flanked him, all confidence returned. One stretched out a hand for Jacob’s revolver, and Jacob stared at him until he withdrew it.

  “I wasn’t sure we’d see you again, after last time.”

  Jacob shook his head, remembering the smell of burning flesh. “That was bad business.”

  “And now this.”

  The general snapped his fingers, and a soldier produced Clyde’s automatic. He handed it to Jacob. The gunslinger racked the slide, then popped the magazine release. Empty.

  “The shooter drifted into town yesterday,” Alvarez said. “Claimed he’d been salvaging up at the hellroad, him and some mute partner. Came across a cache of guns—not rusted out, but fresh and loaded. That was about all anyone could get out of him before he got strange, quit talking. And then—well, you saw what happened.”

  Jacob handed the pistol back. “So why are you telling me?”

  Alvarez smiled and produced a leather purse.

  “I want to know whether those guns are real.” He frowned down at his honour guard. “You saw how my men handled things. We’re on our own out here. There’ve been three raids since you came through last. The nearest town is Salban, a few days down the tracks, and we haven’t heard from them in months—the men I sent with messages never came back. It’s fine to hunker down and say we’ll look after our own, but sooner or later our luck is going to run out.”

  The general tossed the purse to Jacob.

  “That’s yours whether this drifter’s cache is real or not. You ride his backtrail and see if there’s any truth to his story. If there is, you take a gun for yourself and lead us back for the rest, at which point you get that much again.”

  “That it?” Jacob asked.

  “Almost.” Alvarez turned toward the doorway. “Olivia?”

  A girl stepped onto the porch. She was no prostitute—couldn’t have been more than fifteen—with long, dark hair and pale skin that said she didn’t spend much time in the fields. She paused at the doorway, eyes closed and head cocked, then took several careful steps forward. Crossed arms held a leather-stitched pad of paper to her chest.

  “Olivia will be going with you as my cartographer. Not that I don’t trust you, but I’d like to have some verification of your route before I send a pack train out with you.”

  Jacob looked to the girl, who still stood with eyes closed, swaying slightly. “A blind girl?”

  Alvarez touched her shoulder. “Olivia, please show Mr. Weintraub what you do.”

  With uncanny certainty, the girl produced a stick of charcoal and began to sketch. As Jacob watched over her shoulder, a landscape took shape. Scrub hills above a withered streambed, a dented pot hanging over a fire—

  He jerked backward. “You were spying on me.”

  The girl’s laugh was high and honest. Alvarez smiled.

  “We didn’t know you were coming until you arrived.”

  “But the campsite—”

  “—is Olivia’s gift,” Alvarez finished. “She sees memories. And she can draw anything she sees.”

  Jacob looked uneasily toward the girl. Alvarez caught his expression. “It’s a gift from God, Jacob. We don’t truck with witches in Kennet.”

  “I never said you did.” Jacob’s attention was still on the girl. He addressed her directly. “You can read minds?”

  The girl turned toward him, face weaving side to side in a seeking motion. “Only pictures, here and there. Places work best.” She flipped to a fresh page. “Think of somewhere you’ve been.”

  Jacob thought for a moment before choosing another campsite, one far beyond the range of Alvarez’s scouts. The girl’s sticks began to scratch.

  On a whim, Jacob added a five-point buck hanging from a tree. He fixed the image in his mind and held it.

  The girl stopped abruptly. “It won’t work.”

  “What?”

  She waggled her charcoal at him. “Memories and imagination are different. In your memory, the whole picture is there, whether you know it or not. Imagination is like dreams—details exist while you focus, and disappear when you focus somewhere else. You can’t lie in a memory.”

  Jacob looked to Alvarez. “So she’s here to make sure I don’t take more than my share.”

  “Precisely.” The general grinned. “You leave at first light.”

  *

  By noon they’d seen the last of the farmers’ shacks. With Jacob leading, they followed their man’s trail northeast, weaving around ridgelines and patches of thornscrub. Behind him trailed the girl’s horse, a plodding beast that carried both rider and supplies. Jacob had angled for a mount for himself, but animals were valuable. Unlike Jacob.

  The girl was another story. While she moved with easy grace within town, fingers only rarely brushing a wall or shoulder, she made no objection when Jacob demanded the horse on her behalf. The last thing he needed was her stumbling over every unfamiliar rock.

  The heat of the first day sapped their strength, and conversation was sparse even once they made camp. The girl—who insisted Jacob call her Olivia, no “Miss”—proved just as adept around the campfire, helping to curry the horse and prepare dinner. As he watched her build a frame of sticks on which to hang the cook pot, Jacob found he couldn’t keep quiet.

  “How do you do that?”

  Olivia’s smile said she’d been waiting for the question. She hooked the pot handle with a stick and levered it farther out over the fire. “You mean, how do I move so well?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl sat back on her haunches. “You saw the drawings.”

  “Alvarez said you draw memories. Places.”

  She stirred the stew. “Places are easiest, but you’re making new memories all the time. Sometimes I catch them as they’re forming. They help me keep my bearings.”

  “So you’re seeing through my eyes?”

  Black hair shook. “Just flashes. I can’t control it—they’re there and gone. But the longer you focus on something, or the harder, the easier it is to catch.”

  “I see,” said Jacob. Then a thought occurred to him. Squatting down, he looked hard across the fire at the girl, holding his gaze on her. Though still narrow-hipped and rangy as a month-old chicken, her body was young and strong, and her skin was clear. He focused, letting the picture settle into his mind.

  “Oh!” The girl’s cheeks flushed, and she busied herself with the cooking. After a moment, she said, “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing,” Jacob said, and went to forage for more scrub grass.

  The second day saw them leave the worst of the badlands, vegetation increasing as the waves of hills began to roll rather than crash. From her seat on the horse, Olivia sketched landmarks. At one point they flushed a rabbit, a little mutie with fringes instead of ears, and Jacob shot it, tying it up with the rest of their supplies.

  They smelled the horse before they found it. The thing lay at the base of a gravel berm that ran between the trees in a straight line ten feet high. The way its limbs were twisted, the horse had clearly lost its footing, yet Jacob had a feeling the animal was done for long before it took its final stumble. The flesh on its bloated, fly-covered sides had been whipped bloody.

  “Somebody rode it to death.”

  Jacob half-expected tears, but Kennet was a farm town. With one hand over her mouth to shield against the stink, Olivia asked, “Was it him? Clyde?”

  Jacob was already digging through the bags lashed behind the saddle. Mo
st were empty, yet in the last one he found what he needed. He held it up to the light.

  “Cartridge,” he said. “Right calibre, and never reloaded.” He stood and pocketed the shell. “Yeah, it’s him.”

  “What do you think he was running from?”

  But Jacob wasn’t listening. Instead, he grabbed her horse’s reins and pulled all three of them up the berm. At the top he stopped and peered down its length, to where its narrow corridor disappeared into the woods.

  “What is it?” Olivia asked.

  Jacob kicked one of the metal rails, making it ring. “Railroad tracks,” he said. “Most of the hellroads were connected by them, to supply the siege castles. They should take us northeast though Salban, then on to where we need to go. Our man must have tumbled off the rails and just kept running in a straight line.”

  “But what was he running from?” Olivia repeated.

  Jacob looked down at the dead horse, festering in the midday sun.

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out.”

  *

  The tracks made travel quicker, and miles churned by. Late in the day they came to a river. Above it, the rails stretched across the rushing current, but the ties between them had all rotted away, and their quarry’s tracks turned south for more than a mile before the river widened out and shallowed.

  They crossed the waist-deep current with Jacob in the lead, guiding the horse with one hand and holding his gun belt overhead with the other. The girl rode, despite protests that she was better suited to finding footing on the invisible river bottom, and held the rest of their gear above water, dress tucked up under her legs.

  The sun was getting low by the time they reached the far bank, and as soon as they regained the tracks, Jacob opted to make camp. As hot as the days could be in these parts, nights were equally cold, and he had no desire to spend this one freezing in waterlogged clothing. He set to work dragging deadfalls to the river’s edge, and soon they had a fire burning.

  Jacob hung his shirt up to dry. He was prepared to suffer through the time it took to dry his lower half—then remembered the girl was blind. Feeling unreasonably exposed, he stripped down to his smallclothes and hung his trousers up, taking the opportunity to wash in the river. Afterward they sat on opposite sides of the fire, Olivia drying out the hem of her dress, Jacob enjoying the fire on his front and the cool breeze on his back.

  “What do they mean?” Olivia asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Your tattoos. What do they mean?”

  Jacob startled. “How do—?”

  She smiled. “You were looking at yourself in the river. I didn’t see anything else, I swear. Just the tattoos.”

  Jacob realized he’d crossed his arms. So much for propriety. He let his hands drop, exposing the black bird shapes that marked each shoulder, wings spread toward biceps and neck.

  “They’re ravens,” he said. “Huginn and Muninn—the names mean ‘thought’ and ‘memory.’ Their story is very old.”

  “Will you tell it to me?”

  Jacob shook his head. “Not tonight. It’s a long story.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  Jacob’s stomach tightened. “That’s an even longer one.”

  The girl slumped back. Rather than press the issue, she pulled out her pad and began sketching. After a few moments, she held it up, displaying a perfect rendering of the decaying railroad bridge.

  Jacob made an approving noise. Mollified, the girl turned to a new page and began tapping the charcoal against her lip, leaving a stain.

  “Will you tell me about the Rapture?”

  Jacob tested the cooking meat with his belt knife. “I’m no scholar.”

  “Yet you know about the hellroads.”

  Jacob shrugged. “Only enough to avoid them. You probably know as much as I do.”

  Olivia snorted. “All anyone in Kennet knows is how to plant crops and get drunk. We haven’t had a proper priest or god-scholar since before I was born. And who teaches a blind girl?”

  “A blind girl with a talent.”

  She waved the charcoal irritably. “A talent half the town thinks is witchcraft, and the other half couldn’t care less about. If it wasn’t for General Alvarez letting me stay in the hostel past my debut, I’d already be popping out babies for some farmer too ugly to find a normal girl.” She began chewing on the charcoal, blackening her teeth. “So humour me.”

  The girl had fire. “Fair enough. What do you already know?”

  Pretty lips twisted in a smirk. Olivia clasped her hands in front of her, a caricature of a child at catechism.

  “Once upon a time, the world was Paradise, but people forgot their place. God sent his angels to collect those who had kept faith, then gave the world to demons, that through suffering we might prove ourselves. For seven generations we fought, forcing them back to Hell. And now we live as best we can, awaiting judgment.”

  She stopped and dropped her hands. “That’s it.”

  Jacob nodded. “It’s true enough. After the hellroads opened, people fought—but the way I understand it, we lost. It took a long time, but by the end, the demons had us on our knees. And then, just when it looked like they’d finish us off, they turned and marched back into their portals.”

  “Why?”

  Jacob lifted his hands. “Who can say? Maybe they’d done what they came to do. Maybe we redeemed ourselves in the fighting, the way the priests say.” He took a drink from their canteen, then spat into the fire. “Maybe they’re just waiting.”

  The girl shivered. “Tell me about the ancients.”

  Jacob smiled. Maybe Olivia wasn’t a child, but she still wanted a happy ending, even if it meant telling the story backward.

  “Before the Rapture,” he began, “people had factories that could make anything they needed. They lived in buildings twenty stories tall, and flew through the sky in hollow birds. People lived for a hundred years, and some—what?”

  Olivia, whose charcoal had been drifting idly over the paper, suddenly dropped the stick. She stared at him through closed eyelids.

  “What?” he demanded.

  The girl was shaking. Jacob made to wrap her against the cold, but she shied away like a kicked dog.

  The drawing pad caught the firelight. Sketched in light but clearly discernable lines was the profile of a city, its towers soaring above blooming tress and a wide river. In the background, an arch rose.

  Jacob’s gorge filled his throat.

  “You’ve seen it,” Olivia whispered.

  The gunslinger struggled to keep himself under control. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “You’re imagining things.”

  “That’s not how it works. You—”

  Jacob snatched at the pad, tearing the page free. His arm jerked, and then the crumpled sheet was in the fire, blackening and twisting into a red-lipped curl of ash. For a moment, the flames grew and he was somewhere else, somewhere far from the blind girl and the silent landscape.

  Control returned. As gently as he could, he took the pad and closed its leather covers, then set it down on her pack.

  “No more stories.”

  Olivia made a small sound, and the two lay down on opposite sides of the fire. Though her eyes were closed, as always, Jacob could tell from the girl’s breathing that she was too keyed up to sleep.

  No, not keyed up—scared. Of him.

  Again Jacob saw the drawing of the towers, edges bending and blazing. His tattoos itched.

  Sleep was a long time in coming.

  *

  The demons caught them completely off guard.

  One moment they were at the river’s edge, scrubbing out their breakfast dishes. The next a demon was rushing from the bushes, catching Olivia under the arms and sweeping her up against its armoured chest.

  The thing was tall—maybe seven feet—and Olivia’s legs kicked as she writhed in its grasp. Above her head, a misshapen face like a crimson ant’s stared at Jacob with bulging, multifaceted eyes, its mo
uth two tusks of bone that pointed downward in an ivory beard. The rest of the head was a mass of black tendrils and leathery flesh.

  Jacob looked to his gun belt, lying on his pack a full fifteen feet away. The creature followed his gaze. Bladed fingers touched the girl’s throat.

  “Don’t.” The creature spoke without moving its mouth, voice deep and hoarse.

  Jacob showed his palms. “All right,” he said. “No guns.”

  His foot came down hard on the raised lip of his plate, launching rabbit meat and silverware into the air. His hand dipped, caught the hunting knife as it rose, and flipped it underhand in a lazy arc. The blade tumbled across the intervening distance and slammed into the demon’s forehead just inches above Olivia’s own. The pair went down in a tangle.

  Two more demons charged from the brush.

  Jacob dove. He hit the ground flat, almost knocking the wind out of himself, but his fingers touched the weathered grips of the revolver. He drew and rolled, coming to rest on his back.

  The gun roared. Jacob fired twice, left hand fanning the hammer. The first shot caught a demon in the eye, spinning it halfway around. The second took its partner in the chest, the heavy slug knocking it backward.

  Jacob rose up on one elbow, barrel tracking across the tree line, yet no more demons emerged. The world was suddenly and terribly quiet.

  Olivia scrambled madly. Jacob bounded to his feet and caught her just as she was about to rush headlong into the fire. He held her still as she struggled, feeling her heart beat against him like a frightened bird. When he was sure she’d stay put, he let go and approached the corpse of the one who’d grabbed her.

  “Don’t!” she sobbed. “It’s a demon!”

  “No,” Jacob said. “It’s not. Look through my eyes.” He reached down and tugged his knife free of the creature’s insectile skull.

  The thing’s face came away with it. Underneath the blackened wire of the eyes and the stained wood and bone of the mask, the sallow features of a man stared up, blood trickling down to pool in his eye sockets.

  The girl recoiled further. “I don’t understand.”

  Jacob cracked the cylinder on his revolver and replaced the two spent shells, dropping the empty brass into his pocket. Fully armed again, he reached down and pulled off one of the corpse’s bladed gloves, handing it to Olivia wrist-first. He kicked the thing’s shin, then used the toe of his boot to lift stained canvas, revealing wooden stilts.