The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1)

by Mark Reynolds

  The head mason fell to the next immediate tier and never moved again. In that respect, he was not unlike the wheelbarrow.

  Alex stared down at the man lying motionless, lifeless, looking like nothing more than a broken dummy of wax and wood splattered in red like fake movie blood. Only it wasn’t fake; everything was real! And he knew with a kind of cold certainty that if the man had not fallen out of his reach, fallen beyond the hammer’s lethal range, he would have hit him again.

  And again.

  Anything to stem the crimson rage storming inside him, burning like a fire, a savage beast starving for blood. And he would feed it, and feed it well. Let Janus be awash in blood until it ran clean of its evil.

  Workmen fled in a pell-mell dash, upsetting a second cart, bricks spilling across the walkway, bouncing and flipping end over end to crash upon the street below, small squirts of red dust bursting from them as they smashed apart. Dangerous; someone could get hurt.

  Who would care?

  Bystanders ran in fear, or fell to their knees, wailing and praying and rubbing their talismans and beads and nonsense juju. One or two simply collapsed into tiny, quaking lumps, blubbering inconsolably.

  The Red Knight has come.

  Alex looked ahead, new bricks and wet mortar already in a dozen stalls; a hundred more where the mortar had been dry for no more than a day. So where was the lady of dark November? Time was of the essence. So far, he had not encountered any real opposition, but Bartholomew said there were those who would fight him—fight the Red Knight. Fear of him was not absolute. The legendary grim warriors he unwittingly impersonated would stand against him. And if they proved no more than wishful folklore, the Sons of Light were only too real. Sooner or later, the fanatics would come; a few at first, determined to verify the ramblings of fleeing degenerates. But once done, once it was known, more would come. What then? Fight off an army with a few grisly weapons? Unlikely.

  He stared across the tiers, trying to get his bearings, trying to think straight. The Red Knight needed to find the witch. He needed to find Oversight. There was a witch sentenced that morning named Ariel November. There was a legend of the November Witch.

  Think, think, think! Remember, remember, the lady of dark November.

  Alex stopped, the toes of his boots poised on the edge of the walkway and empty space, and closed his eyes, trying to remember everything he could about the woman from the wasteland, the woman who had taken an interest in him, the woman he loved from the first moment he laid eyes on her though he did not know why or even if she felt the same way. He would do anything for her. Anything. But all Jack asked him to do was remember. Remember her dark hair and sun-browned skin, her eyes like dusky jewels. Remember her narrow waist and slender form, hands both delicate and deadly, artful and strong. Remember the way she smiled, infrequent and off-guard. Remember the smell of her skin as they embraced that one night, sweet like vanilla and chocolate, but something deeper than that, older; a smell like secrets, clean and powerful and preternatural like the wind before a storm.

  And there it was!

  He leaned back and rolled his head, taking in a deep breath of air, forcing all of the smells of the Wall of Penitence into his lungs. Amidst all of the atrocities of Janus, it was there, a smell he would recognize anywhere, as unforgettable as it was maddeningly desirable.

  “Oversight!”

  And in the strange silence of the brick and tile canyon along the darkest part of the city, he heard it, a word so softly spoken he could almost have believed he had never heard it at all. “Alex?”

  His eyes snapped to the direction of the sound, an empty stall past the workmen’s abandoned tools. There on the ground, next in line to be imprisoned in the Wall, a woman craned her neck to see him, struggling against the ropes that bound her hand and foot, left her helpless. Though beaten and disheveled, there was no mistaking her. Oversight!

  He ran to her, dropping the pry bar and hammer, and scooping her up, holding her to him, amazed at how light she felt to him, how small the feeling of her as he cradled her, wanting to comfort her and finding himself unable to speak, holding her head to his shoulder as she repeated his name over and over.

  He seated her gently against the wall of the empty alcove, drawing a knife from his boot and sawing at her bonds, all the while rambling. “I thought I’d never find you. I wasn’t even sure if you were here, or if you’d already been put in the wall, or what. I’m …” He stopped, realizing her skin was ice-cold, her body trembling. He looked into her face, saw the tracks of tears, saw bruises, old and new, her suffering like a brand across his heart. In the Wasteland, Oversight had been as eternal as stone, the desert whirlwind, the burning sun. Janus had committed the most unforgivable of sins: it had broken something meant to last forever. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t get here sooner. Maybe I could’ve … I mean, maybe I—”

  She placed her fingers to his lips, offering him a gentle smile. “It’s okay,” she said, slowly taking the knife from his hand. “I can cut myself free. Can you get us out of here?”

  He looked at her a moment, trying to work it through, trying to make sense of everything. He wanted to nod and say yes. He wanted to get her free of this city, this world. But he didn’t know the way; Lindsay never said; neither did Jack.

  And the Red Knight wanted retribution; blood for blood paid back a thousand, thousand times over.

  Barely an inch from his head, one of the tiles exploded in a shower of dust and fragments, struck by a lead ball the size of a penny. Alex spun around, crouching tight against the narrow corner of the stall in front of Oversight, shielding her. Down on the street, men in black, red crosses emblazoned upon their chests, were pointing pistols at him, old matchlocks more at home in a museum than a gunfight.

  (Now!)

  The Red Knight pulled his guns and opened fire.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Leland asked.

  After breakfast at a diner—scrambled eggs, thank you very much, and lots of coffee with cream and sugar—he filled up at a gas station on the edge of town; $4.37. Wherever they were, whenever they were, there was no such thing as an energy crisis or OPEC or even inflation.

  Then they drove south.

  From morning to evening, they just drove south.

  It was insane. Or maybe he was. Maybe he had control issues, something to be worked out with his therapist, two-hundred an hour, a solution from another time, another life—a life of OPEC oil prices and leveraged buy-outs, Wall Street’s Wrecking Ball. But right now, he would settle for a simple answer to a simple question: where were they going?

  Lindsay did not reply, only staring out of her window at the setting sun, a distant pink glow lost behind the thickening haze in the sky.

  The road south proved little more than a blue line on an interstate map connecting the dots of one small town to the next, most little more than recovering dustbowl crossroads, shop-front signs offering to barter: CASH OR TRADE. Bland expressions on nameless faces watched them pass, movie extras with no interest in the yellow cab passing through. Shotgun shacks and ramshackle farms surrounded by sparse fields of thin, yellowing corn and thick spans of weeds gave way to wood-lined roads where autumn gold dusted the edges of the leaves.

  All in all, Leland thought he was being a pretty good sport about this. It wasn’t until after their third stop, a roadside café serving stew and biscuits from a communal pot—the peculiar aroma casting doubt on the exact origins of the meat—that he began to press Lindsay for answers. He did not demand that she tell him where they were headed, or what they would find there, or even what it was that they might be looking for. He drove on in silence and mostly she did the same. Sometimes she craned her head and looked out the windows as if searching for something, maybe landmarks. But she said nothing to him one way or another, only letting him know when she wanted to stop, usually with a brief, disappointing remark of being hungry or thirsty or needing to use the bathroom.

 
It was afternoon before he realized that she only informed him of the reason so he wouldn’t suffer any false hope over whether it had something to do with their final destination.

  While stopped at a pump station run by a fearsome-looking dimwit in coveralls, a crude mix of Neanderthal and Tolkien, Leland noticed something new about the trees. They were greener here. He was certain this morning that the world was on the edge of winter, but it looked like approaching summer as they pressed southward.

  “Do you know where this road goes?” Leland asked the thick-browed attendant, the man’s under-bite so severe that his top lip was concealed by a bottom row of teeth, large and chiseled.

  The attendant’s head turned down the road then came back to Leland. “South.”

  “I know that, but what’s south of here?”

  Beetle-brow shrugged and Leland was reminded of a man who delivered mail around the corporate office. The man looked like the attendant except for the vicious teeth rising like a ring of tombstones from his lower jaw. And the mail carrier smiled more; he liked to tell knock-knock jokes, most of them bad. Leland didn’t suppose this man much cared for jokes of any sort.

  He paid for the gas and was about to leave when something caught his attention.

  Standing on the station porch was a small girl in a sack dress, one eye bulging and milky gray, her ears pointed and long; some kind of defect or mutation. She smiled at him, revealing gaps of missing teeth. Sitting beside her was a tall, long-limbed creature, a strange rawboned cross between a greyhound and a mountain lion, its front claws ending not in the pads of an animal but in thickly knuckled fingers with blackened nails. The creature regarded him with pale, lamplight eyes, narrow slits of black.

  “What’s that?” Leland asked.

  “That’s my kitty, Snowball,” the little girl replied. “Do you wanna play?”

  Snowball leaned its wizened face up to him, lids low and sleepy … and spoke. “Got any smokes?”

  Leland frowned and shook his head, unable to keep from staring. “No. Sorry.”

  “Fuck it.” The creature looked away, grumbling. Then it stood on all fours, skeleton-thin, coat patchy with mange, and sauntered off.

  “Mr. Quince,” Lindsay said, touching his sleeve and startling him. “We have to go. It’s getting worse.”

  And they were again heading south. That was all he knew; all anyone seemed to know … except for Lindsay, of course. They were going south, the leaves turning greener as they went. And it was getting worse.

  It was the falling darkness that finally forced the question, the closing night a painful reminder of how long he had been in this cab. The stiffness in his joints, the pain in every muscle that endured a long, grueling day that was poorly begun and would, by all appearances, end just as unpleasantly. He kneaded the question over and over in his mind, massaging it until it appeared in the air of the cab like a conjured spirit. “Where are we going?”

  When she did not reply, he repeated his question, clearing his throat to get her attention.

  Lindsay turned to him slowly, looking at him with a somnolent expression. “Huh?”

  “I was wondering where we were going. I was also wondering if this was someplace we were going to find tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime next week.”

  She shrugged noncommittally.

  “Well, can you at least tell me if you think we’re close? Should I plan to find a place to pull over for the night?”

  She turned back to the window. “We won’t find it tonight.”

  “No?” he asked, surprised to have learned that much. “Well, should I find a place to pull in? We could stay at a motel or something. Or just park along the road somewhere and get some sleep. I’m tired.”

  “We can’t stop.”

  “Why not?” he demanded.

  “We have to keep going, so we can get there before they do.”

  “Before who gets where?”

  “The doorway.”

  Just then, Lindsay gestured wildly at the windshield, Leland’s lapse in concentration causing the cab to drift into the oncoming lane. It was empty, but Leland swerved back just the same, angry and embarrassed as the cab jerked and righted back into the correct lane.

  “You should pay more attention when you drive,” she scolded. “We’re going south. We’ll find the doorway there. That’s where we’re going.”

  Leland’s heart was still slamming against his chest, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment and maybe a bit of fear. He hated being told what to do. He hated more being wrong. He hated most that it was a seven-year-old girl doing these things he hated. “That’s the second time you mentioned a doorway,” he snapped. “Not just south, but south to find a doorway. You never talked about it before now. Tell me what it is. Maybe I can get us there faster if I know what I’m looking for.”

  “You can’t. Just drive south. We’ll get there okay as long as we keep going.”

  “But what is this doorway? What does it look like? How … tall is it?”

  She shook here head. “I don’t know. I’ll just know it when I see it.”

  “How, when you don’t even know what it looks like?” he pushed.

  “I just will.”

  “Comforting.”

  He let the silence stew between them for a minute or so, long enough for her to get comfortable against the door, to nearly sleep. Then he said: “So where are we going?”

  * * *

  The Red Knight’s hands fell upon the sandalwood stocks, drawing his guns and firing in the same blinding, singular motion.

  And each shot drew blood.

  And each shot killed.

  The Sons of Light fired back; Alex heard their rounds spang into the wall, tiles popping and shattering about him. He knew they wouldn’t hit him. As he started firing down into them, he could see their expressions and he knew this skirmish was already over. Self-righteous ire collapsed into cold, shivering terror as they looked upon him, and knew him for what he was. Not myth or prophecy or symbol, but real. They could see him now, see the red that filled his eyes, guided his hands and poured through the strange weapons he carried. They could see the crimson rage of the Red Knight.

  And they were horrified.

  A dozen fell dead to his rain of bullets before Alex pulled back against the wall, squatting low, calves aching with a kind of fierce exhilarating tightness, a call to action. He slammed the revolvers back into their holsters, reaching back for the .45 and the Glock before he realized it was unnecessary; the melee already over, the dead abandoned where they lay, the survivors retreating.

  Reinforcements will come, he thought. They will come, and they will die. Then more will come, all eager to see, to know: Come on boys, this is it. The one we’ve been waiting for. The red devil’s inside the city. Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!

  “Let’s go,” he murmured.

  Oversight looked at him, the knife in her hand frozen amid sawing at the rope on her ankles.

  “They think I’m the Red Knight,” he said, reaching into the leather satchel and drawing out a handful of bullets. Without even looking, he drew one of the pistols and opened the cylinder with his other hand. Spent shells spilled out, plunking to the tile like pennies hitting the glass insides of an empty pickle jar. It was a familiar sound, both distant and clear, begging him to remember something, remember…

  “Are you?” she asked, her eyes on his weapons.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.” From the handful of bullets, his fingers worked out the correct rounds and started reloading. He never looked to see what they were doing; he didn’t need to. His fingers knew the gauge of the shells by feel, distinguished one round from another, right bullets loaded into the next empty cylinder, wrong bullets dropping back into the bag with soft clicks; use ‘em later; use ‘em all. “Does that make sense?”

  Oversight quickly wiped her shoulder against her face, clearing away forgotten tears as she again started sawing at the rope. “I don’t think it’s supposed to. I’m not sur
e we belong here, you and I.”

  Loading the gun by feel, the weapon so right in his hand that it almost felt like an extension of his own flesh, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe Oversight was merely hopeful. Jack had recast their roles, and before this moment, he’d thought it all a mistake. But the feel of steel in his hands, the explosive force of his will, the ability to exact vengeance upon those who would stop him made him think otherwise.

  Alex spilled out the still smoking cases from the second pistol. Again the plinking sound of brass on tile like coins plunking upon glass, pennies unspent, things unremembered. Something distant and close, so near; so nearly forgotten.

  He took another handful of bullets, loading the cylinder without looking, without considering. He was the Red Knight. This was what he did, what he was, what he was meant to do.

  —Remember—

  He slapped in the cylinder and jammed the weapon back in the holster.

  —Remember—

  You never know when you might need to kill again. Kill a lot. Kill ‘em all!

  —Remember—

  But there was still something, something about coins hitting a glass jar, a large pickle jar like you’d find in an old time saloon, filled with huge dill pickles or pig’s feet or pickled eggs or …

  —Remember, remember, the lady of dark November!—

  Coins. Lindsay.

  (the center!)

  Alex looked up suddenly. “I know where we have to go.”

  SECRET DOORWAYS - REQUIEM