by Frank Tuttle
“Not to worry,” replied Jiggles as he threw her a sloppy salute. “I only shoot husbands on Tuesdays.”
“It is Tuesday,” muttered Gertriss, but then Dame Corniss stumbled and Gertriss rushed to her side.
We herded them through the door and onto the platform. One by one, Rowdy and his crew of terrified stewards hauled the last of the Western Star’s passengers onto the narrow railed platform that led around the bulk of the coal tender.
The Dames made it without incident. Miss Hasty maintained a death-grip on the sooty rail, but her feet never faltered. Drum Killins was right behind her, his eyes scanning the skies and his right hand on his revolver.
The Doctor and Colliers went next.
Darla stayed behind, of course. Her hat was long gone and the wind whipped her short black hair and the smile she turned on me would have been right at home in the Army. “Don’t waste your breath, husband,” she said, putting her back to the car’s steel spine. “I’m not missing this, and you know it.”
I just shrugged. Jiggles bent his stout frame over the navis pin. Evis leaped onto the frame of the car, grasping his side of the coupling mechanism. I did the same.
Jiggles spat into his hands, rubbed them together, and took hold of the leather-wrapped handle. “This one won’t be as easy as the other one,” he said. “Whole weight of the train is on it. Get ready to duck if it gets caught sideways and then gets thrown. Saw a man lose his entire head that way, once.”
A giant roared. The Star rocked on her wheels from a blow that must have been from a monstrous club striking the ground.
We bent. We took hold. We pulled.
Nothing happened. The central pin didn’t budge. Make-up ran streaming from Jiggles’s fat face and I heard his back pop over the rumble and groan of the speeding train.
From behind us, a cry rose. It grew louder and louder still, standing my hair straight up, filling me with a nearly irresistible urge to find a hole and crawl right in it.
Darla joined Jiggles, wrapping her hands around his and hauling away with him.
The cry took on a shape, a distinctness, the beginnings of a meaning.
I didn’t need the ghost of the huldra to tell me that hearing and understanding that word would snuff out our lives as surely as any bullet or blade.
The Western Star’s whistle sounded. Sounded, and didn’t stop. The word, whatever it might have been, whoever was shouting it, was lost in the relentless mechanical shriek of escaping steam.
“I think I’m going to like being married,” yelled Evis. “Pull out that damned pin, Mr. Clown. I own a bar in Rannit. How does free drinks for life sound?”
The pin shot out of the coupling as though greased. Evis and I heaved, and after a moment, the mechanism separated and the car behind us began to lose speed, inching slowly away.
The whistle fell silent. But so had the dread word.
“I’ll want that in writing, Captain,” said Jiggles as he and Darla climbed back up on the platform proper. Jiggles tossed the pin away, hurling it at the boiling mass of darkness behind us. “That’s if we live long enough.”
I clambered up onto the platform. Jiggles swung the gate into place.
“Is there any point in running, Markhat?” asked Evis. “We’re just about out of train.”
The locomotive’s engine took on a sudden new cadence. The chug-chug-chug of her pistons quickened. The smoke billowing from her funnel increased suddenly in volume, the black cloud shot through with hundreds of darting sparks.
I shrugged. “Looks like they’re pushing her as hard as she can be pushed,” I said. I leaned on the rail, took Darla’s hand. “Here is as good a place as any, I suppose. Might as well watch. It’s not every day you see Death, a pair of storybook giants, a mad sorceress, and a magic box all collide.”
Darla snuggled close to me. Jiggles pulled a nearly-spent bottle from somewhere in his striped clown britches. Evis tried and failed to light a cigar against the whipping wind until Gertriss came slipping back around the narrow walkway.
The battle began in earnest before anyone could speak.
I’ll always believe the radiant child threw the first blow. A harsh blast of pure white light lit up the world, originating from a spot on the eastward tracks behind us. Before I had to close my eyes against the light, I saw them all, frozen in a tableau that would make a fine stained glass Church window one day.
Radiant child, arms upraised, hurling vengeful sorceries at the distant silhouette of the Star’s stalled luggage car. The widow, larger than the car or the child or the High House, defending herself with a tangle of dark magic that reminded me of a spider’s web. The giants at her side, clubs raised, muscles bulging in preparation for a pair of gargantuan killing blows.
But above them all, quiet and unhurried and already beginning to settle like a peaceful spring fog, Death.
Not the clouds or the storm. That was merely a distortion of the natural world, brought on by Death’s rare emergence as a single entity.
You notice the strangest things, in those moments when your life hangs by a thread. The scent of bloodied soil. The single forlorn caw of a distant crow.
Or the fact that Death casts no shadow, even when doused with the brightest of light.
Darla squeezed my hand.
The glow faded.
There was a sound, and a sudden rush of west-bearing wind. Another blast of light. A brief darkness that seemed to swallow the sky.
“What the hell did you do?” asked Evis, as he pulled out his dark spectacles and put them on his nose.
A giant fell, roaring. It got to its knees, and another brighter flash struck it down.
“Remember the keys I sent up the kite?” I said.
“The two remaining keys. The ones her imp snatched,” replied Evis.
I nodded. The injured giant roared and swatted at something we couldn’t see with his club.
Lightning fell from the sky. Bolt after bolt, crack after crack.
Bolts continued to fall long after the giant stopped moving.
“Mr. Colliers, the jeweler does good work,” I replied. “The key he made was a damned good match. Guess it fooled even the widow. But then she was in a hurry. Didn’t take the time for any arcane tests.”
Evis pulled his sunglasses down. “So you’ve got the third key? You’ve had it all this time?”
“Nope. Death wouldn’t have appreciated that. Too, we needed a key on the kite. If I’d kept it, the loci would still be centered on us, and not the widow’s luggage car. I’m hoping we can move our part of the train far enough away from the dust-up to break free.”
Gertriss catches on fast. “So you hid it on the kite?”
“Sewed into the festive red tail,” said Darla, grinning.
Jiggles hoisted his bottle. “I didn’t understand hardly a word of that,” he said. “But it sounded like we won. Did we win?”
The lightning shifted, pelting the remaining giant with fire. It twisted and turned, roaring, flailing away with its club, not going down.
“Not sure who won yet,” I said. “If the widow figures it all out. If she gets that infernal case open before the loci collapses. If the radiant child is stronger than Death. If any of those things prove true, well, you might not get those free drinks, Mr. Jiggles. That would be a shame.”
He finished his bottle, tossed it out into the prairie.
“How will we know when this here loci-thing is collapsing?” he asked.
Before I could reply, the whole of the east lit up, suddenly illuminated from horizon to horizon with a silent dazzling radiance that raced toward us and passed over us and enveloped us.
The Star lurched forward, as though pushed ahead by the glow.
I could barely see. A great roar followed on the heels of the light, drowning out all lesser noises.
Jiggles bellowed with drunken laughter. I could just make out his upraised arms, his capering mad dance, there at the edge of the platform.
Evis and Gertriss were slim shad
ows that quickly merged.
Darla and I held hands while the Star hurtled west, picking up speed with every heartbeat, while the light filled the world and we fools watched and waited.
Chapter Sixteen
The Western Star, what was left of her, limped into a two-horse town named Snort Creek just after midnight.
“Where’n hell is the rest of ye?” shouted the station master, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Ask him,” Stoddard bellowed back, hooking his thumb at me.
The station master sat to pull on his boots, still squinting in the glow of the Star’s flickering headlamp. “Damn,” he muttered. “Gonna be trouble. Why’d you have to stop here?”
Stoddard didn’t reply. He did take off his engineer’s flat cap and fling it at the station master’s feet. “Name’s Stoddard,” he said. He even spelled it out. “Tell the C&E I quit. There a bar around here?”
The old man spat. “Only other building in town with glass in the windows,” he said.
Stoddard pushed past him, his jaw set, his footfalls hard and fast.
“But Bill’s in bed by now,” called out the station master.
“Not anymore he isn’t.”
That was the last time I ever saw railroad engineer Eugene Stoddard, formerly of the C&E.
Rowdy got the C&E’s first emergency field promotion. We spent the night and the day and the next night in Snort Creek, while Rowdy’s mechanics hammered on things with long complicated names and everyone else hauled bucket after bucket of water from the town’s namesake creek to the Star’s thirsty boiler.
A couple of wild-eyed young idlers heard our tales of monsters and devils. That, coupled with the lights and thunderous noises that lit up the prairie the night before, led them to head east on horseback. “We’ll bring back a giant’s britches,” boasted one, winking at Miss Hasty. “Maybe his pockets were full of coin.”
There was no more boasting from the youths, who were considerably less wild-eyed, when they returned. They left their bravado out there on the prairie. I didn’t need to ask what they’d seen. I knew all too well it was something they’d spend their lives trying to forget.
They were gathered in a solemn ring with the station master when our tiny funeral procession passed.
We buried poor Mr. Sands on a hill behind the Snort Creek railroad station. He didn’t even get to enjoy the dubious comforts of his own funereal wares. Sands hadn’t laid long, after he fell. The widow’s magic sent his body to the roof and then all the way to the coal tender, where his unfortunate corpse had its feet nailed to the floor by Rowdy and his lads. He’d dropped down, properly dead, only after the widow’s magic lost its grasp.
“Ain’t nobody laughing at us now,” said Jiggles, who’d donned a fresh red nose and polished his shoes for the funeral. “You know they say having a clown at your funeral is lucky,” he added.
“Never met a lucky corpse,” I said, maybe a little too loud because Darla dispatched a wifely look my way. “But I’m sure Mr. Sands appreciates the gesture.”
The elderly horse pulling the funeral wagon stopped to break wind and enrich the hungry prairie soil.
“Now that’s a proper sermon,” said Jiggles.
“Hush, both of you,” said Darla. She looked at me. “Do you have it?”
I patted my side. “I do,” I said.
The horse resumed its grudging trudge up the grassy hill. We traipsed after. After a moment, half a dozen rough-hewn wooden gravewards peeped over the restless grass.
The grave was already dug, courtesy of my coin and the labor of two burly Snort Creek worthies. There was an awful moment when it became apparent the coffin was a few inches longer than the hole, head-to-toe, but we got Mr. Sands in his grave, albeit at a slight angle.
Snort Creek doesn’t have any church mission. But it does have a hermit who sidelines as a holy man. He showed up, clad in proper hermit rags, as the first shovel of dirt hit the lid of the coffin.
We gathered in a circle as the grave was filled. The hermit spoke softly, most of his mumbled words lost in his filthy matted beard, but I suppose he made as much sense as any priest ever did.
The grave filled. The dirt was shaped into a mound. A new pine graveward was stood up over Mr. Sands, so that it too could peek down whenever someone climbs that lonely hill. The hermit fell silent. Dame Fabbers dabbed at her eyes, stifling sobs.
I opened my coat, drew the silver sword Sands had used to slay an Angel.
“By all accounts, our friend here lived a quiet, peaceful life,” I said.
The hermit bowed his head and began to hum an old Church song.
“But when the time came to fight, he fought,” I added. “He fought for people he barely knew. He fought monsters when he could have run. He died with a sword in his hand. This sword.” I raised the thing, let it shine in the early sun. “Be it known that here lies a brave soul. I leave him his sword. Let anyone or anything who would disturb his rest beware. Mr. Milo Sands sleeps, but he does not sleep empty-handed.”
I drove the silver sword down into the base of the graveward. It bit, and bit deep, and the Dames hugged and the hermit promised to keep a watch over the grave.
In the shadow of the hill, Engineer Rowdy blew his whistle.
“Time to go,” I said.
As I’ve done so many times before, I put my back to the fresh grave and walked away.
We’d picked up a battered old sleeper car from the station. It was slated to go back to Rannit and be broken up for parts, so the accommodations were rude, but it beat sleeping on a heap of coal in the tender car.
We’d lost three whole days inside the loci. Three days and damned near all of a nineteen-car train.
Our tiny band of passengers dwindled as we traveled. The doctor disembarked at Spirit Hills, left with nothing but his medical bag and his least favorite hat, but he was all smiles nonetheless. Drum Killins stayed all the way to Witch Dance, and left only after promising to pay Miss Hasty a visit as soon as his three weeks in the outback was done.
We stopped for water in Aches, and again to repair a blown pressure valve in Goodfoot. By then, everyone had noticed the massive flights of vultures sailing past overhead—not circling, but following the railroad tracks heading straight back east, toward Rannit.
Like the others, I saw, but offered no comment.
The Western Star, much diminished, chugged bravely on. We passed Stockard and Lago. Jiggles preceded us across the bridges at Bad River and Carson’s Cut, cussing the whole time.
Elf Sward, said to be the biggest of the new frontier towns, had been burned to the ground. Wisps of smoke still rose from the remains of the train station. The only thing left of the water tank were stumps of three legs. Not a soul stirred in that place. Rowdy ordered us onward after hanging a red flag on a tall pole by the tracks. According to Jiggles, that told the next train to pass by at speed.
We ate hardtack and jerky and talked about coffee until everyone, even Jiggles, lapsed into a weary silence filled only with the keen of the wind and the slice of steel wheels on iron tracks.
Just after midnight on the fifth day out of Snort Creek, Rowdy sent word we’d make Railsend by dawn.
I woke Darla to tell her, and she yawned, brushed her hair, frowned at her only hat, and sat up with me while the lazy sun rose.
Railsend was full of surprises.
First of all, it bustled. Even at sunup, the streets were full of ponies and wagons and tall square-jawed fellows striding this way and that, unimpaired by the horror of the early hour or any lingering effects of libations from the night before.
Hammers rose and fell. Saws worked. Lumber and honest labor was turning into stores or hotels or banks along every street and on every corner. I saw my first street lamp since leaving Rannit, grinned like a fool when I saw a kid in knee-britches and buckle shoes hawking an honest-to-Angels newspaper in the street.
Darla’s ears pricked up at that too. “If they have newspapers, they might have a dece
nt hotel,” she said.
“A fancy one, with hot running water,” I added.
“Coffee. New clothes.” She leaned and pretended to sniff my waistcoat. “And soap. Something perfumed.”
The Star’s brakes bit. Sparks flew as we slowed, and the tidy, freshly-painted railway station’s pitched red roof hove into view.
We jerked and rattled to a stop. Rowdy gave our whistle three shorts blasts, and then great plumes of steam hissed from beneath the locomotive, briefly enveloping us in a warm fog.
“Last stop, Railsend,” shouted Rowdy from ahead. “Welcome to the West.”
We waited for the fog to disperse. As the early morning breeze pushed it away, strange sounds came from the station platform.
Darla frowned.
“Is that a horn?” she asked. “Or is there some quaint local tradition involving the choking of goats?”
I put my face to the window and squinted through the fog. Furtive shapes darted to and fro. The tootling became louder, took on a clumsy semblance of music.
“That’s a brass band,” said Evis, peering out over the tops of his sunglasses. “Well, they might be a brass band after years of intense practice.”
I counted five figures in the swirling fog. A sixth joined them, waving his hands, and after a moment, the various instruments managed to more or less come together and start tooting out ‘Hail to the King.’
“That’s for us,” I said, rising. “Sooner we get out there, the sooner they’ll stop playing.”
Darla rose, a questioning look on her face. “Why would we be met with a band?” she asked.
“Mama,” groaned Evis. “It’s always Mama.” He offered Gertriss his arm, and I did the same to Darla, and we led our merry band of survivors out onto the platform.
By then, the steam was gone, leaving us to confront a short fat man in a century-old army uniform held together with patches and hope.
“Welcome to Hogstown,” he said, his eyes not on us but the Star’s abbreviated length. “Might I ask which of you is Mr. Markhat?”
I stepped forward, reached up to doff the hat I’d lost in the fight. “That would be me,” I said. “We misplaced a few cars along the way. If they show up later, send a letter to the railroad. Who might you be, sir?”
