Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  How drunk was he? She could have killed him, he knew it, and he was asking her out on a date?

  “Just go,” Lisa said.

  James pulled at Fish’s duster, and this time Fish didn’t seem upset at all. He smiled his missing-tooth smile, kept trying to bow, almost fell over every time he did.

  “Until we meet again, ma’am!”

  The two men left the alley, and like dry logs thrown into a river they were washed away by the passing crowd.

  Lisa stood still for a moment, hands still in her sleeves, fingertips touching the wood handles of her slivers. She waited, expecting Fish to come back, wondering if she would put a sliver in his throat if he did.

  And then, it all caught up with her.

  Her body shuddered, a shiver worse than any she’d suffered in a mountain winter. It wracked her so hard she had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. All the fear she’d felt facing those two men, it had bottled up inside of her, been held down by pressure—the pressure of her training, she had to admit—and now it was bubbling up like a shaken beer.

  More people out in the street now. More animals, more noise. Music, too—she heard a marching band. Shredding fiddles, strumming guitars, big bass drums, snappy snares, ceramic horns and bone flutes. The crowd, marching along with the wrestlers’ wagons. In those wagons stood fighters, flexing their muscles, screaming obscenities at each other while the people roared in delight. Many of the people sang along with the band. Lisa recognized the song.

  Stand, stand and face your foe.

  Forward, forward, the only way to go.

  Never turn your back.

  Always on the attack.

  Fight fight fight to the final blow.

  The wagon train was rolling toward the arena.

  Everyone is going to the matches.

  Would the Laughing Man be there?

  Lisa walked past the two bums and stood at the mouth of the alley, watching the crowd flow past.

  She realized, suddenly, that the sun had set. Lamps everywhere, flames flicking inside colored glass, making the streets jump with reds and greens and yellows and blues. Were any of those lamps witchglass? Did they hold spellfire? Maybe. Frisco was rich enough for something like that. She wasn’t about to touch any of the lamps to find out.

  She moved across the street, careful to avoid a blue-skirted buffalo with a monkey on its back wearing a suit of blue that matched the buffalo’s skirt. No person leading the pair. The monkey did flips, held out its little paw. Some of the drunken revelers would hand it coins, which the monkey put inside its little coat.

  A dancing bear, toothless and old. Some asshole with a whip, cracking it at the bear’s face, making the beast stand up on two wobbly rear legs. Sacrilege. She could only imagine what people from the Grizzly Coast would do to that man. But in Redwood, no one seemed to give a shit about religion.

  What a twister of emotions. She’d come into the city on the back of a wrestler’s wagon, feet dangling above the brick road, eyes wide at the wonder of the Redwood Empire’s wealth—the buildings, the statues of granite and witchglass, the bright clothing of the rich people. Witchglass weapons of so many colors. Then that instant in the bar, when she’d been dragged back to the worst moment of her life. She’d wet herself, rushed out of the bar like a coward carrying the awful weight that she’d wasted her life with worthless training. And finally the alley, facing down Fish, three slivers to his hat—the kind of shooting that even her counselors couldn’t do. She had stood up to two full-grown men—two men that rode with a living legend—and kept them from putting their hands on her.

  If Fish hadn’t been drunk, maybe it would have gone differently. No way to know. And it doesn’t matter, because it went the way it went. Lisa couldn’t explain the feeling inside of her. She wasn’t a bad-ass, she knew that. Not a highwayman, not a ranger, not a puma-warrior, not a slinger or an outrider or anything like that. She was just a small woman, yes, but she had defended herself. And with that knowledge, she knew she had the gravel to step up to the Laughing Man.

  Was it her job to kill him? No. That was the work for some sheriff, some judge. But what was she going to do, report a ten-year-old crime? No one would believe her, especially not in a city this busy. His word against hers. Was it her job to kill him? No.

  Was it her duty?

  Yes.

  Because if she didn’t, what the Laughing Man had done to her he would do to some other family, some other little girl.

  That was part of the Victim creed: Never again. It didn’t just apply to her . . . it applied to anyone else the Laughing Man might hurt.

  If she let him live, she was complicit in anything he did from here on out.

  Would he be at the matches? Might be a thousand people there. Maybe more. Would she even recognize him in that crowd?

  The matches would go on for hours. She could always check there after.

  After she went to the one place she knew he had been.

  Lisa stepped out of the alley and walked upstream against the crowd.

  As she walked, she pulled slivers from hidden padded pockets and slid them into the three empty holsters inside her sleeves.

  This was the opposite of avoidance.

  Yes. Because it was time for killing.

  Could she do it? She’d never killed before.

  She reached the door to Ziggy’s Place. Lisa waited a few seconds. She let the mantras flash through her thoughts. A decade of training whipped by like wind scraping across the wastes.

  Could she do this?

  Never again.

  Time to find out.

  She slid the wooden bolt, pulled the door open and stepped inside.

  The smell of stale beer, roasted meat, puke.

  The bar was almost empty. The bread lady, eating pork chops, one arm curled protectively in front of her wooden plate. An old man face-down on a table wet with his own vomit. The woman in the skimpy yellow dress, still sitting at the bar reading her book. Ziggy wasn’t there. Maybe he was in whatever room lay past a black curtain behind the bar.

  Lisa felt a wash of relief.

  The Laughing Man was gone.

  Relief, follow by guilt—this was her duty, she shouldn’t feel happiness at not being able to do her duty.

  Wait . . . a small orange glow from table in the back, almost fully in shadow, half-obscured by the flickering light of the hanging oil lamps.

  Two men.

  One holding a cigar.

  Lisa shuffled forward, then jumped when the bread lady shouted at her.

  “The fucking door! Born in a barn, were ya?”

  Lisa realized everyone in the bar was looking at her—including the two men at the back table. She pulled the door closed and slid shut the slide bolt.

  If it was the Laughing Man at that table, he’d surely recognized her. No, of course not, her face was hidden in the hood. And she’d been a little girl then.

  “Fucking tourists,” the bread lady said, then went back to hacking at her pork chops with a knife and fork.

  Ziggy pushed through the curtained doorway behind the bar, apron a little bloodier, beard a little dirtier, oak club in his hand.

  “You,” he said to Lisa. “You clean up?”

  She nodded. She hadn’t, and Ziggy would smell that soon enough, maybe, if the stench of spilled beer and vomit and unwashed bodies didn’t cover it up.

  It didn’t matter—she wouldn’t be here that long.

  Step after step, she walked toward the back table. With each hanging lamp she passed, the men were a little less obscured. The one on the right, twenty-something, with the thick frame of a lifelong farm hand, body as big as the cows he probably tended, wide as the hay bales be probably threw. She had no idea who that man was and she didn’t care.

  She didn’t care, because she did recognize the man on the left.

  It was him.

  The Laughing Man.

  She could never forget that face, that face that had pressed against hers
, the smell of him then.

  —clean, like fresh soap, which was wrong somehow because he should have stank but he smelled clean and that made it even worse—

  He’d gained weight. He’d seemed so muscular before, the barrel chest of a man, arms of solid iron, hands like dull claws. Now his gut pushed the sides of his leather vest apart like a pig pushing through swinging doors, strained the buttons of his white shirt. The face she would never forget had sagged, cheeks drooping to jowls, sharp eyes underlined with wrinkles and folds. His black hair had once been so thick you could have whitewashed a fence with it—now it was thinned out, bits of graying grass pushing up through a mottled pink desert.

  This couldn’t be him.

  This was him.

  He took a drag from his cigar, then blew it sideways, so as not to blow it right in her face.

  “Help you?” he said.

  Lisa jolted back to reality. She was standing at the edge of their table. She’d walked right up to it, like a wasteland deader in a trance.

  The Laughing Man and the big cowhand looked at her, expectantly. Not with hate. Not with lust. With . . . Jesus, was that helpfulness on their faces? Like two country gentlemen ready to lend a hand to anyone who passed by.

  “Um,” Lisa said.

  The two men looked at her, half-smiling, half-waiting.

  —say something you ignorant idiot, tell him you’re here to kill him for what he’s done, so he can’t do it anymore, so—

  “Miss, you’re trying my patience,” Ziggy called out. He shook the club at her. “If I gotta kick you outta here a second time you’re going out the hard way.”

  The Laughing Man held up a hand toward Ziggy.

  “She ain’t bothering us none, Zig. Looks like she wants to say something but can’t quite get it out.”

  The cowhand, elbows on the table, leaned a little closer.

  “Miss, you all right?”

  —Jesus save me they are trying to help me what the fuck am I doing I’m no killer it was ten years ago get the hell out of here just go and—

  “Miss,” the Laughing Man said. “This is getting a little odd.”

  “Sorry,” Lisa said. “Sorry. I . . . sorry.”

  She turned and walked quickly away from the table, heading for the door.

  “Fucking tourists,” said the lady in the yellow dress, peering over the top of her book. She shook her head, then went back to reading.

  Before Lisa reached the door, the latch slid sideways and the door opened.

  There stood Fish and James.

  Lisa froze in place. Trapped between the one who had hurt her and the one who wanted to hurt her.

  Fish touched the brim of his hat.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Sure is nice to see you again.”

  “You . . . followed me?”

  James dipped his head, more to hide his eyes than anything else.

  “Sorry about this, ma’am—once Fishy gets an idea in his head, ain’t no getting it out of there. He’s quite keen on you all the sudden.”

  “The fuck,” the bread lady shouted, knife in one hand, fork in the other. “Close the godfuckingdamn door you piece of shit hillbillies!”

  Fish stepped toward her, glared down, towered over her.

  “How about you shut your old nasty bitch mouth when there is a proper belle standing right there?”

  The bread lady shrank down over her plate, which had nothing but bone and grease, yet still she protected it like it was her last meal.

  “A proper belle,” said the woman in yellow. “That’s hellish sweet of you, sir.”

  Fish glared at her.

  “Wasn’t talking about you, whore.”

  The lady in yellow made a hmph noise, returned to her reading.

  Lisa wanted to scream at Fish, wanted to go back to the alley and plant all three slivers in his throat, watch him bleed out onto the piss-mud.

  Ziggy came around the bar, one hand on the warped surface, the other waggling his well-used club.

  “You cocksuckers don’t come into my place and start flinging cow shit, you hear me?”

  Fish’s hands dropped to his belt. His fingers twitched. He seemed more steady now, more sober, and Lisa knew he was about to throw a sliver at Ziggy.

  “Stop,” she screamed. “All of you, just stop!”

  Ziggy did. Fish did. James did. The bread lady gnawed on her bone. The lady in yellow turned a page.

  Lisa almost breathed a sigh of relief that she had stopped this before it got started . . .

  . . . and then she heard that laugh.

  Her body clenched.

  Her mind shut down.

  Lisa Tryon turned.

  Turned to face him.

  Him.

  The man who had hurt her.

  The man who had changed everything.

  Smiling at her. Laughing at her.

  The sliver left her hand before she even knew she’d touched it. Sharp glass flew into the open mouth, the laughing mouth. The man coughed, just once. His eyes went wide. His left hand came up, slowly, cigar still wedged between pointer and middle finger. Came up, hovered, the hand as slow and confused as Lisa’s thoughts.

  Then the blood came.

  Pouring out, a red geyser, splashing on the table, making the cowhand push back in his chair, shocked and surprised, as if the blood was poison that might kill him at the touch of a single droplet, pushed back so hard the chair collapsed under him, dropping his wide ass to the floor with the sound of snapping wood.

  “Agah,” the Laughing Man said, then he coughed again. More blood shot out, a red wave splashing off the table and down to the dirty floor.

  Movement.

  Ziggy, coming fully around the bar toward her, eyes narrow, club raised. Turned out he did have teeth, and lips—she could see both where the snarl parted his matted, dirty beard.

  Lisa heard the hiss of a weapon sliding out of leather. She turned, saw Fish with a blue sword in his hand, point inches from Ziggy’s throat. A translucent sword, the perfect crystal of magically fused sand melded into one smooth bit of hardness. Witchglass. How did some drunken outrider have a weapon like that? Blue? East Coast magic?

  Ziggy, his hands up, club dangling by a leather loop from his right wrist, eyes staring down at a blue point of death that caught each flicker of lamplight.

  “Thaaaaaat’s it, mister,” Fish said. “Stay right where you are. This ain’t your business.”

  Fish, smiling. Missing teeth. A smile of delight, a smile of hope, that this shit might go further south than it already had and he’d get to use that blue blade against tan flesh, red blood, white bone.

  The Laughing Man coughed for the last time. He pitched forward. His head hit the table, kicking up splatters of blood that splashed against the cowhand still ass-down on the floor.

  The Laughing Man twitched.

  The cowhand stared at him.

  “I didn’t see nothing,” the lady in yellow said. Her book was closed, held tight to her chest. “Didn’t see a goddamn thing. I swear I didn’t. I was reading.”

  She seemed to remember her book. She quickly opened it, hid her face behind it, oblivious to the fact that it was now upside down.

  The cowhand stood. He reached out a shaking hand, touched the Laughing Man’s head.

  “Pa?”

  At that word, that single syllable, the strength and courage gushed out of Lisa like a waterskin sliced clean through.

  The cowhand slowly reached his hands to his hips, to holsters there Lisa hadn’t noticed. Each came up with a bone-handled, foot-long flint blade, edges chipped jagged and sharp enough to slice horsehair. His head slowly turned. He stared at Lisa, so much hate in those eyes she thought why is he mad at me before she remembered she’d just thrown a sliver twenty-five feet into a human being’s open mouth and he’d coughed blood all to hell and highwater over the place.

  “Jimmy,” Fish said, “you want to take care of that big-ass redneck for me?”

  James re
ached into his gray duster, came out with a sliver in each hand.

  “Dammit,” he said. “Dammit I just wanted to do the New Year. Buddha’s sake, lady, why’d you have to kill that man?”

  Nervous. James’s hand shook, and Lisa knew he couldn’t hit a buffalo in the ass if he was close enough to have his hair blown back by its farts.

  Why’d you have to kill that man, he’d said.

  Dead.

  The Laughing Man was dead.

  She had killed him.

  And she hadn’t even gotten the satisfaction of telling him why, telling him who she was, who her family had been.

  Fish took a half-step forward, gingerly forcing Ziggy backward until the big bartender bumped into the redhead who was busy reading an upside-down book.

  “The whore got it right,” Fish said. “She didn’t see nothing. You seen anything, bartender?”

  Ziggy’s eyes were still fixed on the blue sword’s point, so focused his eyes were almost crossed beneath his bushy eyebrows.

  “Not a thing,” Ziggy said. “I was in the back room, cutting up pork chops. They’re on special.”

  Fish took a step back, nodding. He kept the sword pointed at Ziggy, but looked at Lisa.

  “Girlie, you never told me your name. Feels like someone can handle their business like you shouldn’t just be called darkie.”

  The respect in his voice. He was on her side? What the hell was happening?

  “Lisa,” she said, the name coming out almost as fast as the sliver that killed the Laughing Man.

  “Lisa,” Fish said, nodding. “You know we should kill all these fuckers, right?”

  The words stunned her, even though somewhere inside she knew they were coming, maybe even had wanted them said. If these people lived, what came next? A posse on her tail? Trackers hunting her?

  “Coming for you,” the cowhand said, his voice cold as mountain ice. “Coming for you, and bringing hell with me.”

  “Bark-bark-bark,” Fish said. “Everyone’s a yapping dog.”

  The bread woman stood.

  “Had enough of this fuckery. Goddamn tourists.”

  She stepped to the door. James stood there, frozen. Without a pause, the old woman slid the bolt aside, stepped out and shut the door behind her.