by Perrin Briar
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Book 2
Perrin Briar
Part One
Goleuni and Outlaws
Chapter One
The dirt track wound its way through the forest like a great snake, and all the woodland animals hissed and chirruped and cooed at it, not one visible behind the leafy foliage. And then, as one, as if a composer led them all, they stopped as a black stallion walked the dirt track, the rhythmic clip-clop of his hooves on the hard dry earth somehow foreboding with its fleet of foot.
The man riding the horse had his black Stetson pulled down, so his eyes and face were not visible. His body swayed in time with his stallion’s steps like they were one. Both had their heads down, looking at the ground before them. They might have been sleepwalking. They turned a corner, and after a moment, judging the danger was clear, nature took over and continued its night song.
Thick blankets of bright moonlight lay over the forest and made the world almost as bright as the sun, the day’s brooding brother. The horse’s hoof steps bounced off a sheer cliff wall that ran alongside the dirt road. And then the hoof steps raced away from it, and had a tinny quality, sounding like it was echoing down a wide enclosed space. The horse came to a stop. Neither the horse nor the man looked up. The man dismounted and stepped toward the wall.
There was a large rent in the side of the mountain, as if a giant spear had pierced it. The cave entrance was wide at the bottom and tapered off to a tiny crack at the top that spiralled off to one side. There was a fall and rise of a sound inside that had the unmistakable cadence of a man’s voice. It was faint, but it was there. The man crouched down and stepped into the cave. The moonlight stopped at the entrance, too frightened to enter. The inside was blacker than a demon’s armpits.
“…don’t care what you say,” a voice said in a whispered tone. “I heard a horse’s hoof steps and you can’t convince me I didn’t.”
“I’m not trying to convince you you didn’t hear hoof steps,” a deeper voice said. “What I’m trying to do is open your mind to the fact that it might not have been a horse’s hoof steps. It could just as easily have been a wild ass or a deer.”
“Sounded like it had shoes on to me.”
“And what do shoes on a horse sound like, exactly?”
“Sorta tinny-like.”
“Tinny-like?”
The man in the Stetson moved farther into the cave. His boot scraped on an unseen rock.
“Did you hear that?” the first voice said.
“Will you stop saying you heard something?” the second voice said. “You’re giving me the willies. And even if it was a horse out there, how’re we to know if it’s a good guy or a bad ‘un? We won’t know till it’s too late, in which case I’d prefer not to know.”
“Hello?” the first voice said. “Is someone there?”
“Will you leave off?” the second voice said. “You always think someone’s there! You need to get your head checked if you keep hearing voices.”
“I didn’t hear voices. I heard footsteps.”
“It might be a bear. You’ll attract it to us if you keep going on.”
“I’m no bear,” the man in the Stetson said.
The two men yelled in startled surprise, their echoing cry smothering the man’s comment of: “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I told you there was someone out there!” the first voice said. “Say, sir, did you by chance happen to come on a horse wearing shoes?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” the man said.
“Told you!” the voice said.
The other voice grumbled.
“My name’s George,” the first voice said. “This here’s Lou.”
“Nice to meet you, George and Lou,” the man said. “What say we take this conversation outside? It’s tricky having a conversation in the dark.”
“That there’s the problem,” the second voice said. “We can’t get out on account of the fact we’re tied together.”
“And why are you boys tied together? If I’m interrupting something, I can come back later…”
“No, no!” George said. “A pair of guys put us in here. Real tough nuts.”
“They were,” Lou said. “But there were more than two of them. Must have been four or five.”
“Or six or seven of ‘em I reckon,” George said.
“To catch you boys, it must have been a lot of fellas, ay?” the man said.
Lou wasn’t sure if the man was mocking them or not without seeing the expression on his face.
“How long have you boys been in here?” the man said.
“I don’t know,” Lou said. “It’s tough to tell without sunlight.”
“I can understand that, sure,” the man said. “But say you had to guess, how long would you say?”
“About a day and a half, I’d say,” Lou said. “Maybe two. Sorry to be a stinker, but do you think you could help us out of here before asking all these questions? We’ve been in here a while and it’s damned uncomfortable.”
“Of course,” the man said. “I don’t know where my manners are. I’ll come to you and slice the ropes off. Don’t move.”
There was the sound of a sharp knife slicing through thick fibres and the thud of boots on the rocky ground.
“Can you boys walk all right?” the man said.
“Good enough to get outside, I reckon,” Lou said.
“Watch your heads,” the man said. “The ceiling’s mighty low.”
George and Lou came blinking into the moonlight, but even that was too bright for them, and they had to cup their hands over their eyes. They stretched out their arms, breathed in the cool fresh night air and let it out, all in one smooth movement.
“Jesus, George!” Lou said. “You’ve gone and lost a good ten pounds!”
“You reckon?” George said. “You haven’t lost nearly anything at all!”
“I was already rake-thin before I even went in there,” Lou said.
Lou wore a pair of overalls that looked like they were a pair of hand-me-downs from an accident prone brother. They were soiled and the knees had been worn out. Both George and Lou’s faces and clothes were covered in dirt and crud. He doubted if they looked much better before they went inside the cave.
They couldn’t have been more at odds with the man before them. He wore a sharp black shirt and fancy trousers that matched his Stetson. He was short but stocky, broad chested and judging by the lack of hair protruding out the side of his hat, bald as a coot. At his hips he wore a pair of pistols with matching silver handles, carved into the shape of a bull’s head.
“Do you have any food on you?” George said. “We haven’t eaten much for days.”
Lou and George massaged their wrists and ankles, working the blood back into them.
“It feels good to be able to move again, don’t it, George?” Lou said.
“It sure do, Lou,” George said.
“I honestly thought we were going to die in there,” Lou said. “Thank the Lord you came along, Mister.”
“Speaking of finding people, I’m looking for someone. I was wondering if you might be able to help me find him.”
“We’ll certainly do our best,” Lou said. “What’s his name?”
“Stump,” the man said. “Elian Stump.”
The odd couple shared a look and a smile.
“We know him, all right,” George said. “He was the one who tied us up like this!”
“Was he now?” the man said.
“Yes, sir,” Lou said. “My friend and I here were making our way through the forest when we came to a small clearing. There was a wagon with its wheel snapped off. We offered to help and right the wagon, and they accepted. They were a nice bunch of folks, or seemed to be. No sooner had we got the wagon on its wheels than fifteen or twenty fellows jumped out from the foliage.
“Now, normally I’m super quick, and I could have taken them all out before any of them had time to draw breath, but we were tired from having changed the wheel. That was their plan all along I suspect. Anyways, the men were led by Stump. They tied us up, took all our fancy clothes, money and guns, and left us in the cave to rot.”
“Did Stump say where he was going?” the man said.
“No,” Lou said, “but if they’re passing through this place, there’s only one place they could have been going.”
“Crossroads,” the man said with a smile, revealing two gold incisors. “Do you remember if he had a young lady with him?”
“Young lady?” Lou said. “No. Can’t say he did.”
The man nodded. He reached into his pocket and came out with a sizable money bag. He took out a silver coin and handed it over.
“Get yourselves a hot meal when you get to town,” the man said.
“We’d sure appreciate a ride into town,” Lou said, rubbing his hands together.
“I’ve only got space on my horse for one of you, not both.”
“I’m afraid we come as a pair,” Lou said.
Lou and George got to their feet with a rock in each hand. They were too close for the man to be able to draw. The man held up his hands.
“Now boys,” he said, “let’s not have any trouble.”
Lou and George stepped forward, grabbed one of each of the man’s guns and trained them on him. They dropped their rocks.
“You’re going to rob the man who saved you?” the man said.
“We would’ve saved ourselves eventually,” Lou said. “You just cut the waiting time down some.”
George climbed into the saddle. Lou got on the back. The stallion had no problem with their weight. Lou took the gun from George.
“And there was me thinking I was your saviour,” the man said.
“You were,” Lou said. “It’s just now we’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
“You boys do know that what goes around comes around, I trust?”
The man had a dangerous twinkle in his eye that Lou didn’t care for.
“What’s he talking about, Lou?” George said. “A carousel?”
“What he’s saying is because we did this to him, later somebody’ll do it to us,” Lou said.
George looked worried.
“That’s not right, is it, Lou?” he said.
“Of course not, you ninny. He’s just trying to scare us into giving him his horse and guns back. I almost forgot. Give me your money bag too and your holster.”
He did.
Lou tucked the money bag into his front pocket and put the holster on. George pulled roughly on the reins and the horse took off. The man watched, unconcerned, as the horse got to the top of the road. Then the man with the Stetson wet his lips and whistled a single tone.
The horse came to a juddering stop. George flew forward, head smacking the back of the horse’s head, while Lou slipped off the side, one leg trapped in the stirrup. The horse turned and bolted back down the road, dragging Lou behind him. He slowed to a canter, and then a stop, before the man in the Stetson.
George, exhausted with the effort it took to cling onto the horse’s neck, slipped off and onto the ground, landing on the ample cushion of his backside. Lou lay clutching his leg. It was badly twisted, still hanging from the stirrup. The man calmly approached Lou, bent down and unbuckled his gun belt.
“Please…” Lou said. “Please… My leg…”
The man in the Stetson stared down at Lou, face cold and hard as he strapped on his gun belt. He pulled Lou’s leg out from the stirrup and let it strike the floor. Lou hissed through his teeth, growled and muttered a hundred different curses under his breath.
“At least you get to die under the stars,” the man in the Stetson said.
He turned the horse around to face the direction George and Lou had gone.
“We never caught your name, friend,” Lou said.
“That’s because I never threw it out,” the man said. “But I’ll give it to you if it means so much to you. I’m Bill. Some folks know me as the Bull.”
George and Lou shared a look.
“You’re Bull Bill!” George said.
“Your powers of deduction astound me,” Bill said.
“Just our luck to run into you here, tonight,” Lou said.
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” Bull Bill said. “It’s divine intervention. And it was divine meeting you boys. What can I say? It came around.”
Bill clucked his tongue twice and the horse started forward. They tilted their heads forward and resumed their calm, almost sleep-like gait.
“The world has become a dangerous place,” Lou said.
“I’m scared,” George said. “Hold me.”
“This couldn’t get any worse.”
“Yes it could.”
“How?”
George watched the shrinking back of Bull Bill as it disappeared around the corner. A smile came to his lips.
“We could be Elian Stump,” he said.
Chapter Two
The cogs and sprockets and levers ticked, tocked and clanked, all the pieces twisting and turning, popping in and out, working in, to Gregory’s eyes, a seemingly random combination, with no system or element of predictability about it at all. But yet it worked.
The inner workings of the clock took up two entire walls of the huge room. A giant pendulum swung through the middle of it like the vibrating tonsils of a yodelling monster. At the back of the room was an unmade bed and a desk in the corner, laden with papers and journals.
The clock face was built into the opposite side. It was old and stained yellow. The hands swept across the face in slow movements, their shadows stroking the floor like they were gesturing to something.
Sat in the centre of the wall were three intriguing objects: a cog, a wheel and a chain. They were connected together as a single upside down teardrop. They were the colour of gold, but shimmered unlike any piece of jewellery Gregory had ever seen before. Or had he? A distant, and yet probing, memory poked at him. But in the same instant it came, it went. The light seemed to emanate from the pieces themselves, and not from another source. Their effervescence made the ugly cracks in their surfaces all the more visible. The cracks somehow looked wrong, against nature, like a scar on a beautiful woman’s face. It should not have been.
There were half a dozen men and women standing around it wearing long white coats, setting up equipment they carried from large black bags. The most senior, a balding man who barely reached up to Gregory’s shoulder, stepped forward. He took small bird-like steps, his long nose protruding from the middle of his face like a beak, and on either side of it his glass lenses made his eyes huge.
“Dr Slyman?” Gregory said, taking the man’s lady-like hand. “I’m Gregory Ascar. I sent for you and your team. Thank you for coming at such short notice.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr Slyman said. “Our most prized benefactor. I must say, I was most surprised when I received your summons. I was under the impression you considered our research in steam-powered technology to be of the highest priority.”
“It is,” Gregory said, “but something came up and we need your expertise.”
Gregory led the doctor to the golden tear pieces. He pointed out the cracks.
“I want it fixed,” he said.
Dr Slyman peered at the cracks through the most powerful part of his lenses on the end of his nose.
“Seems sim
ple enough,” he said. “Although I did wonder why you didn’t send for a time keeper instead of us scientists. Surely they could do more good than us.”
Gregory looked the doctor over, judging him.
“I have reason to suspect this clock is more than just a clock,” he said.
“What reason?”
“I saw something I cannot explain any other way. I’d like for you to analyse it and prove me wrong.”
The doctor pursed his lips and cocked his head to the side.
“Very well,” he said.
“We also require someone to go through the papers on the desk,” Gregory said. “There might be prevalent information on how to fix it there.”
“Certainly.”
“I will station a unit outside the clocktower entrance. I put them at your disposal. They will see to your every need.”
“Thank you,” Dr Slyman said, placing a strange piece of gear onto his head that made his eyes even larger. “I’m sure it won’t take long for this clock to reveal its secrets to us.”
The doctor re-joined the other white coats by the clock, peering at the crack through his headgear. The doors banged open and Richard came in, panting and slightly out of breath.
“Brother,” he said, eyes flickering over the white coats.
“What is it?” Gregory said.
“News,” Richard said. “I have news of Stump’s whereabouts.”
Gregory cast a glance over those in the room.
“Come with me,” he said.
The streets of Time were small and narrow, the majority not paved with man’s stone, but nature’s dirt. Chefs threw uneaten soup and mashed vegetables out into the street, while those living above the shops tossed out their chamber pots, turning the road into a filthy waterlogged sewer.
Gregory and Richard walked along the boardwalk that hugged the edge of the road. Stepping on one side of the planks made the other end flip up, so they either fell head first into the plate glass windows of the stores, or slipped down the plank into the muddy recesses of the road and got crushed by a carriage or horse. But Richard and Gregory had mastered these kinds of streets long ago. They strode beside one another, timing their steps so the planks only wobbled in their fastenings and didn’t flip up.
