Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Sailing across the saloon when some cheeky bastard threw me. He didn’t look that strong. Ugh, me back feels like shite. D’ye know where I am and how I got here?”

  “A block away from the saloon,” I told him, deciding it best not to tell him he’d been briefly possessed. “I don’t suppose you remember seeing anyone after you got thrown?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “All right,” Sheriff Hays said, “let’s get you back to the saloon.” We helped Collins up and walked him back, which took some effort because he really wasn’t in good shape. He’d need some rest and maybe a doctor, though doctors at that time were often more harm than help. I let the sheriff do most of the talking and wondered if the demon had abandoned Collins because of his injuries or if he was really smart enough to switch hosts while no one was looking. If he was, then Pastore hadn’t summoned some low-level imp anxious for destruction but something truly dangerous. Which fit perfectly with Sequoia’s alarm, but it still gave me pause.

  Once we had a moment to speak freely outside, I told the sheriff, “We will most likely suffer through a few more of these imbroglios before we catch up with the beast.”

  He squinted at me. “Are you talkin’ ’bout fights and usin’ a five-dollar word?”

  “Apologies. Yes. Dead people accompanied by the smell of sulfur nearby.”

  “Huh.” Hays grimaced and spat into the street. “Somethin’s been botherin’ me, Mr. Percy. Still not sure I believe in all this, but just in case: Say we catch up to this demon. Then whadda we do? ’Specially if it can give a man super strength and jump from person to person?”

  “We bind it and exorcise it.”

  “Exorcise, not exercise? You mean like with a priest?”

  “No, there are other methods I’ll employ.”

  “Am I gonna get to use these methods?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Shootin’ it won’t do anything?”

  “As the testimony of Mr. Stafford revealed, it will do plenty to the person it’s possessed, but the demon will simply choose a new host like Mr. Collins.”

  “Well, how are you gonna do anything to it?”

  “I’ll use the utmost caution to protect others, Sheriff, but will otherwise need to keep the process a secret.”

  “Figured you’d say that. Mystery and unknowable crap. It’s like goin’ to church.”

  “Ha! Yes, I see what you mean. Except I won’t ask you for a donation, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah, you’d better not. What are you going to do next?”

  “I’m going to take in the city, I think. Search for the beast in some other saloons. Now that he’s caused the death of five souls, he’ll be hungry for more.”

  “I’ll let you get to it, then. Let me know if you find anything.”

  He ducked back into the saloon to help Bill and his deputy with the crime scene, and I spun on my heel to look for new saloons. My plan was to stroll the streets and poke my head into each saloon to survey the auras of the crowd, in hopes of finding something unusual. It wasn’t much of a drain on my reserves and at least I’d get to know the town that way.

  Unfortunately, I found something unusual in the very first place I visited, which was so packed that I had to step inside to do a thorough job: Across the room, a faery wearing the glamour of a surly, dusty miner glowered at the other patrons, doing the same thing as I was: Searching for someone. Searching for me.

  The face underneath the glamour was a familiar one. He was one of Aenghus Óg’s boys, and, remarkably, he had a gun and wore gloves so that he could handle the iron. I exited with alacrity and prayed to the Morrigan that he hadn’t seen me. Then I prayed there weren’t any more faeries in town, or, if there were, they’d take care of the demon for me and I could simply leave.

  In the meantime, I needed to hide and not do anything to draw attention. I retreated to my room with The Pickwick Papers, after first retrieving Fragarach from the hotel safe, and told myself it was a perfectly logical course of action to lay low for a small while. This demon was clearly a threat to humans but not, at the moment, a threat to Gaia, and I could afford to wait out the Fae and let them believe I wasn’t in San Francisco. Give them a day or two or five and they’d move on.

  The demon didn’t move on, however. Sheriff Hays banged on my door in the middle of the night to report a new massacre in another saloon, which followed the same pattern: An incredibly lucky gambler drew plenty of attention until, suddenly, violence erupted and people died. That was food for thought, but I doubted I’d learn anything more by visiting in person, and I didn’t want to leave my room yet.

  “I can’t help unless you know precisely where the demon is this instant, Sheriff,” I told him, which earned me a clenched jaw and a glare.

  Once he left, I thought about the similarity of the incidents. The greater demons found it amusing to hunt via the seven deadly sins, and this demon appeared to have a pattern: He began by appealing to greed. The anger and violence necessary to harvest the souls was a necessary end but not the means by which he led them into temptation.

  I remember sitting in my room on a rather uncomfortable chair at that point and saying out loud, “Oh, shit,” and putting Dickens aside. “What if it’s Mammon? What if Pastore was crazy enough to summon the biblical manifestation of greed?”

  And once I framed my thinking that way, I knew what I had to do. Get out of town for a few days to throw off the Fae, sure, but I also needed to beat Mammon at his own game. I inquired at the front desk where I might be able to purchase a horse, and by dawn I was negotiating the sale of a recently captured mustang named Sally, about a hundred years before the song or the sports car came along. After breakfast I was outfitted and galloping south to round the San Francisco Bay. Once I got there on Sally’s own power, I dismounted, took off my shoe, and had a brief conversation with Sequoia, letting her know what I was up to and asking her to give Sally energy. With the elemental’s agreement and help, I remounted Sally and we headed west faster than Gandalf on Shadowfax, completely hidden from the awareness of Aenghus Óg and the Fae.

  —

 

  “It was a bowler hat, Oberon, which has a rounded top. Not a pointy wizard hat.”

 

  —

  Leaving a demon behind me didn’t come without a good measure of guilt. In all likelihood I was dooming who knew how many men to die as a result of their own greed. But if I stayed in town, I may well have spent the days I’d be traveling trying to catch up to the demon anyway and they still would have died. And if the demon truly started to drain Gaia, Sequoia would tell me and I could shift back. In the meantime, it was important for me to ditch the Fae and fetch some demon bait.

  We rode for a couple of days until we got to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Calaveras County, a good while before Mark Twain wrote about its celebrated jumping frog. By that time, Sequoia had communicated to the Sierra elemental what I needed, and it was waiting for me in a crevice of a granite cliff face that expanded into a small cave. It was an impressive pile of pure gold nuggets, the sort that dust-covered miners dreamed about, coaxed from the volcanic geology and collected for me in a shallow basin, ready to be stowed in my saddlebags. Just a small fraction of what would eventually be pulled out of those mountains, but it represented a fortune and the key to solving the problem of Mammon.

  There was a mountain snake guarding the hoard like a miniature dragon, though he wasn’t particularly motivated. He gave me a desultory flick of his tongue but otherwise ignored me.

  —

  “Hold on,” Granuaile said. “You had Colorado move all that gold here so that Coyote could use it. Why
didn’t you do the same thing back then?”

  “Well, Coyote wasn’t there to force me to do it, I guess. And I had to get out of town anyway. Plus, this was my first experience of any kind with mining. I’d never bothered with it before, preferring to let the earth keep her treasures.”

  —

  I got back to San Francisco near the close of business on the third of May, confident that the Fae would have given up and moved elsewhere by then. South of town, I dismounted from Mustang Sally and removed my right shoe so that I could draw upon the earth’s energy. I took the tiniest sip, just enough to unbind a gold nugget into gold dust and then re-bind it to my coat and hat and even my pants, with a few flecks on my face and in my mustache for good measure. I was no longer a drab English nobleman: I was a shiny rich young man, quite literally covered in wealth.

  It was not a plan without risk, but at that time in San Francisco, the only way to inspire more greed than winning big at gambling was to walk in with a huge haul of gold. Every new strike was cause for feverish excitement, and word got around fast when miners came in with their ore. My load of nearly pure nuggets and the gold dust on my clothes would cause instant excitement, and it did. I made it to the bank of Henry M. Naglee on Portsmouth Square just before close of business, and I had a significant crowd following me by that time, walking alongside Sally, eyeing the saddlebags, and licking their lips with thoughts of what must be in there. Their auras all churned with the angry orange tones of avarice, but none was a demon walking around in a meat suit. I didn’t give the name of Algernon Percy to the man who asked, “What’s your name, mister?”

  “Silas Makepeace,” I told him in a drawl I hoped sounded like the sheriff’s, making the name up on the spot, because you could still do that back then. Nobody in the crowd knew me as Algernon Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, so there was no reason to wear that mask.

  “You’re probably wearing a hundred dollars of gold dust on your coat. That must be some claim you have.”

  “I’d say it is,” I allowed, giving him a grin, even though I wasn’t too sure what he meant.

  “Where’s your claim?” someone else asked.

  “Same place as everyone else’s. In the Sierra Nevada.”

  “Yeah, but is it your claim or someone else’s?”

  “Mine, of course.”

  “So where is it?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “You gotta have it filed with the county anyway. Might as well tell us.”

  That was alarming news. I had not filed any claim or even known that was something I was supposed to do. That’s the danger of living away from the world: You’re going to have to come back to it sometime, and customs and laws seem to always change to your disadvantage. I’d expected and prepared for someone to try to take my gold by force, but the idea that someone could use a legal maneuver to take it had never occurred to me. But it sounded as if I had at least a delaying tactic at my disposal. “You might as well go look up the file, because I ain’t tellin’.”

  The man grumbled at that, but others laughed at him and said I was under no obligation to do anything but file my claim within thirty days of staking it out.

  Once the bank was in sight, I reached out to Sally and told her to run for it, leaving the crowd behind. If I let them walk with me all the way there, it wouldn’t end well. One or more of them would offer to help me carry all that gold in. And when I refused, they’d find a way to escalate. There’d be a fight, and my gold would be stolen by one or more of them. So this was my chance to leave them behind, and they had no warning of it since I’d given no audible command to Sally. A couple of them were knocked down, having drawn far too close.

  They shouted and chased after me, and in truth I had only fifty yards on them once I reached the hitching post, but it was enough to dismount and sling the saddlebags over my left shoulder, slip inside the bank, and close the door in some angry faces, shooting home a sliding bolt. Their shouts of dismay and fists hammering the door made me smile.

  “Hey now,” a querulous voice said. “You can’t just bar the door like that. This is a business, and these are business hours.”

  I turned my head and beheld a man with epic swaths of dark mustache sweeping down to billowy muttonchops on either side of his face. His chin was shorn clean, but his mouth would have been invisible under that mustache except that it was currently frowning at me, giving me a peek at a drawn lower lip. Predatory eyes glared at me over a long, straight nose, giving him the appearance of a hairy eagle. That was Henry Naglee, who eventually got out of the banking business and went on to be a vintner and a Union Army general in the Civil War.

  “I’ve got a whole lot of gold here, mister,” I hollered over the pounding on the door, shrugging my shoulder once to indicate the heavy saddlebags, “and these gentlemen were fixin’ to take it off me. If I could sell it to you first, I’d sure feel a lot better about opening the door.”

  Despite his insistence that the door remain open for business, there weren’t any customers besides me. He rose from his chair, which was situated behind a counter with a locked entrance, and emerged moments later with the jangling of a key, calling to someone unseen to come forward and help. Two men shortly appeared from the back, both impressively armed and bearded and ready to defend the riches inside the building. The three of them loomed behind me and shouted at the men outside to cut it out, the bank was closed. My pursuers gave up eventually but promised they’d see me later. That’s precisely what I wanted, so I taunted them and said through the door, “You do that.”

  Word would get around now: Some punk named Silas Makepeace brought in one hell of a haul, and they were going to find out where he got it. They’d be loud about it, and their collective greed would draw the attention of the demon for sure. One way or another, we’d run into each other. There was no chance he’d go anywhere else when so much greed was concentrated in this city.

  Satisfied that no one would be busting into the bank now, Henry Naglee pointed to my saddlebags. “May I?”

  “Sure.” I flipped open one of them and watched his eyes as he peered inside at the nuggets. They widened, but only a bit, before he confined himself to a short nod.

  “Very well, I see we have business to conduct, Mr….”

  “Makepeace.”

  “Welcome, sir.” He asked one of the armed men to remain at the door and told the other to watch the back door. “If you’ll meet me at that window, Mr. Makepeace, we can begin to assay your find.”

  It was a lot of waiting around after that as Henry Naglee weighed my nuggets on his scales, but I had thirty pounds of solid stuff there and then another few ounces of gold dust on my clothes, which we laboriously brushed off once I surreptitiously unbound it from the material.

  “Where you from, Mr. Makepeace?” Naglee asked me as he worked. “Sounds like you might be from the South.”

  “Middle of nowhere, Texas.” I hoped my accent sounded convincing. Mr. Naglee, being from the North, might not be able to tell the difference between Southern accents very well, and I only needed the identity to hold up a little while longer. “Got tired of cows and decided to come west and see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Looks like you’ve found the fuss.”

  “I sure did. Don’t know much about this claim business, though.”

  The banker paused and looked up at me. “You didn’t mine this from your own claim?”

  “Well, what if I didn’t?”

  “Then you must first prove that it wasn’t from someone else’s claim, and if it’s from unclaimed land, then you can file claim to it to prevent others from mining on it.”

  “Oh. And how do I claim land?”

  “First you must mark the boundaries of your claim with stakes—”

  —

 

  “No, Oberon, stakes, as in a wooden stake you drive into the ground. It’s a hom
ophone.”

 

  “And you’ve been so patient too.”

  —

  Naglee continued, “And once you’ve finished staking your claim, you have thirty days to file the boundaries with the county and pay associated fees and so on. I assume you’re an American citizen?”

  “Yeah,” I said, though of course I wasn’t. He didn’t question me, though, since I didn’t sound like I was from Europe.

  “That’s very good. The city passed a foreign miners’ tax a couple weeks ago that comes to twenty dollars a month.”

  I made no comment but learned later that that law was the first measure of many designed to discriminate against the Chinese, though of course it also would have affected men like Stefano Pastore. That might have been what pushed him to summon a demon rather than try to make a living at mining. Twenty dollars back then was like five hundred now.

  Once I’d satisfied him that I hadn’t jumped someone else’s claim, Naglee eventually named a figure, and I didn’t argue but just took what he gave me. It was plenty for my purposes, which was to draw greedy eyes in my direction. A certain pair in particular. And I’d thought of how to use the claim laws in my favor.

  When I emerged from the bank, clothes all clean of dust, saddlebags empty, but flush with disposable wealth, some of the unwashed men who’d followed me were waiting nearby. The sun was setting and I saw them silhouetted against the sky.

  “There he is,” one said, and another said, “Let’s go.” I was still a target. The wealth had changed from gold to various coins and bills, but I was a newcomer who didn’t have any friends or even a gun. And they had come to California thinking they’d get rich quick but didn’t, which meant I was the best opportunity they would have for a while. All they had to do was roll me. But I still had my sword, and once I threw the saddlebags over Sally’s back, I drew it. That slowed them down. They weren’t all wearing guns: Only two of the five approaching me had them.