Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  “He doesn’t look so much.” Mikeos heard the whine in his voice and hated it.

  Grum snorted out beer foam and grunted an aside to the girl with him. He had to lean over so far that Mikeos nearly lost his seat.

  “Who’s that with him?” A child of six, maybe seven, had the seat to the gunslinger’s left, and a robed figure sat opposite, back facing Mikeos.

  “Some hex-witch from Ansos.”

  Grum shrugged Mikeos to the floor and ran a hand over his girl, a blonde from Kitty’s collection. Grum liked blondes. Mikeos hoped he wouldn’t break this one.

  “What about the little girl?” Mikeos asked.

  No reply. From knee height it’s hard to command a taur’s attention, especially when the competition is alcohol and women.

  Mikeos fought a path toward the fireplace, squeezing through a tight knot of prospectors, burly men in hemp and cheap hats. They smelled worse than the dogmen by the bar. Something wet spilled down Mikeos’ neck. He hoped it was just beer.

  He won free of the crush as the hex-witch rose from the gunslinger’s table. She had the bloodless beauty of her kind, and the crimson hex sliced across her forehead. Mikeos didn’t want to look at that. The symbol made him cold inside his bones, but it hooked his eyes.

  “You should deal with us, gunman.” She watched Mikeos while speaking. “You can’t win this time. Not alone.”

  And she was gone. The crowd opened for her, and shut behind.

  The gunslinger sat with the child, his eyes flicking over Mikeos, just the once. His companion looked to be a girl, but with hair cut short like a street-boy. She studied Mikeos with open interest. At ten he was by far the closest to her age of any in the tavern.

  Mikeos ignored the girl. He had come to see the gunslinger, Remos Jax. Legends didn’t blow into the Five-Oh-Seven every day, or even every decade, and Mikeos was damned if he’d let this one slip through the outpost without a look-see.

  Close in, Remos Jax looked a more like a fast hand should. Mikeos had thought he might be a bit younger, but leather-skinned and flint-eyed would do. His gear was still a disappointment, but at least all that black-skin and mole-hide drew attention to the revolvers at his hips. Colt 45s. Silver-handled seven shooters. Mikeos knew it all from the ’Oh-Seven Herald. He had the newsprint folded into a neat square in his back pocket.

  “How come you’re in here?” The little girl had gotten beside him somehow. “You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m ten,” Mikeos said. “Besides, my mother—” He bit the words off and shot a quick glance up the stairs. “How old are you anyhow?”

  The girl smiled. “Old enough.” She had strange eyes, pale, with a draw to them. “Why’re you here?”

  Mikeos looked back at Remos. “Is it true he’s going to fight? They say the sect are sending a champion.”

  “He always fights.” The girl smiled again. She turned back to the gunslinger. “Here, Remos! You’ve got an admirer. Aren’t you the hero of men!”

  She didn’t sound like a kid. Mikeos looked down, feeling the blood rising in his cheeks. Before he could turn away, something cold seized him from behind, lifting him by the neck.

  “Hello Mikey.” A dry voice hissed into his ear.

  Shit. He’d forgotten about the corpser. He hadn’t thought it would follow him into the tavern. He stopped kicking and tried to think. The grip on his neck hurt like hell.

  “Hi.” His flesh crawled under the corpser’s fingers. He wondered how quick the rot set in.

  “I chased you halfway across the Oh-Seven, little boy. Did you think I was just going to stop?”

  Around them the conversation had muted but the tavern still bubbled with chatter. It would take more than a corpser to put a damper on the evening.

  “I’ve got the dust.” Mikeos tried to reach for the pouch under his shirt. His arms wouldn’t work. “You can have it back.”

  “I’m going to need a little . . . interest on the loan, boy.” The corpser stank worse than the dogmen and prospectors both. Mikeos felt his stomach heave.

  “Look, she just needs a bit more.”

  “She can pay a bit more then,” the corpser said. “She can whore a bit more. Can’t she? Boy?”

  Mikeos couldn’t answer. His lips felt numb. His mother would be upstairs. Working, or sleeping off the last of the dust. During the day she lay with whoever or whatever had the money and the inclination. By night the dust took her off to the deadlands and she’d lie with his father. At least that’s what she said. She saw his father in the dryland and they’d do the things they did back when Mikeos was just a babe. And every day she’d wake a little more grey, a little more thin.

  “Put him down.” Grum’s deep rumble reached into his daze. Grum had been sweet on his mother once upon a time.

  The corpser let him drop. He drew a long white knife from within his trench coat, the blade as narrow as a finger. Hush spread across the tavern fast as a gunshot.

  “Go play with your human, Bull-boy.”

  Grum frowned, his face rucking up into ridges and folds. The corpser might not be able to reach from one of his horn tips to the other, but it doesn’t pay to mess with dead-kind.

  Mikeos managed to sit, sensation making a slow return to his limbs.

  “Leave him be.” Grum opened his cape to reveal the axe at his side.

  The corpser flung out his empty hand, quicker than any dead thing should move. A scatter of dust hit the taur’s snout.

  “Eich.” The corpser spoke the death-rune as Grum reached for his axe. The taur fell, like a mountain falling, and the iron plates on his robe clashed when he hit the ground.

  He didn’t move. No one moved. Death-runes aren’t spoken lightly and the corpser had the room’s attention.

  Grum’s girl screamed once into the silence, then shut her mouth.

  “Now, Mikey, we can settle our account. A tongue or an eye will suffice. Both make good voodoo. Child blood is always sweet. You can keep the dust, your mother’s slate will be clear, and we’ll be even for the chase.”

  Mikeos tried to scramble away but his legs were still uncoordinated and he got tangled in a chair. He’d never had a day go so spectacularly wrong so fast. The corpser bent toward him, the skin around its mouth cracking into a grin over yellow teeth. An animal horror filled him and he felt his bladder go as he howled.

  “Don’t do that.” The little girl stepped between them.

  “What?” The corpser straightened. “What are you?”

  “I’m older than you, thing that was Elver Samms,” the girl said. “And I’m meaner than you. Better run now.”

  And to Mikeos’s amazement, it did.

  Mikeos scrambled up the stairs to his mother’s room. He crashed in, forgetting to listen first for a client. She lay under a heap of covers on the bed, alone and sprawled out in the death-sleep. A bar of dusty light from the gap in the drapes crossed her arms and face.

  He went to the clothes chest and rummaged for his other pair of leggings. The wet pair he threw into a corner. The room stunk of sweat and old sex; a bit of piss wouldn’t make much difference.

  “Mikey? That you?”

  He jerked upright at her voice, still jumpy from the business downstairs.

  “Yes, Ma.” Mikeos tied off the laces at the front and turned to the bed.

  She watched him in a half daze, blinking, not lifting her head from the bed. “Is it nighttime?”

  “Three past noon.”

  “I . . . I dreamed about your father,” she said. “He told me you were in trouble.”

  “No trouble, Ma.” He put his fingers to the back of his neck. The skin there felt dry and blistered.

  Her eyes found sudden focus. “Did you get it?”

  Mikeos sighed. “I got it.” He tossed her the little pouch. He wouldn’t tell her about Grum. She probably didn’t even remember him.

  She sat up, cross-legged, and took the pouch from the bed. White fingers fumbled at the tie. “You’re a good boy, Mikey.�
� She didn’t look up from her work.

  “I gotta go, Ma.” She looked so old, grey in the blonde, hair thin on her scalp. “The gunslinger’s in the bar.” He remembered her strong and laughing, a time when she could throw him in the air. And catch him. But that was . . . how long? Two years? Before Jim Bright put a bullet through his father. Before his Ma found her comfort in dead dreams and the dust that gave them.

  “I gotta go.”

  She didn’t hear him.

  Mikeos came down the stairs one slow step at a time. Grum had been removed. The crowd was as packed as ever.

  Take someone away and they don’t leave a hole, not in the Bullet and Rye. Not anywhere maybe.

  The gunslinger sat where he had been before, the child with him. Mikeos looked away when she turned toward him. She left her table and met him at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to walk past.

  “The clan took your friend away.”

  “He wasn’t my friend.”

  “He died for you,” she said. “They’ll put his skull up by the pillar. A warrior’s right.”

  “He died because he was a bull-head. A stupid cow-brain that never backed down, ever.” He pressed his hands into his eyes, hard, and looked away from her.

  “Maybe he knew when to back down. Maybe he just knew that this wasn’t the time to do it.”

  Mikeos sniffed and watched the crowd for a moment. He turned to answer, but the girl had gone back to the table. All of a sudden he wanted to be out of the heat and the noise, out of it all. He dived into the crowd and fought a path toward the street doors.

  The street lay empty save for a lone cart heaped with barrels, and a few prospectors straggling in, dust grey and trailing picks.

  “Move it!” The carter lashed at his straining mule. It looked too small for the cart, and the cart looked too small for the load.

  “Pesh!” Hemar sat with his back to the saloon wall and his legs stretched out across the boards of the raised sidewalk. “Man doesn’t know mules from mutton.”

  The dogman had an empty whiskey bottle clutched protectively to his chest. A long line of slobber ran from his jowls down into the matted fur of his stomach.

  “Hey, Hemar.” Mikeos had time for Hemar, when he wasn’t too drunk. Most of the dogmen were vicious and best avoided, but Hemar was OK.

  “Heyah. I saw them pulling Grum out. Bad business, that.”

  “Yeah.” Mikeos looked toward the pillar, towering over the roof of the Grand Hotel at the end of the street. It looked close, like you could hit it with a stone.

  “Bad business. He was alright, Grum was.” Hemar gave out a little howl of misery that showed several dozen big yellow teeth in jagged array along pink gums. “A good taur. Free with a drink for an old friend. Always free with a drink.” He gave Mikeos a sideways look. “You’re not packing a bottle there are you, Mikey boy?”

  Mikeos shook his head. “No.”

  “Never mind.” Hemar slumped back against the wall. “Never mind.”

  Mikeos stepped down into the street. “I’ll see you later, Hemar.”

  The dogman leaned forward, resting on his knuckles. “Hey, wait up. Where you off to, little man?”

  Mikeos nodded toward the pillar. “Guess I’ll see where they put him.”

  “Hey, hey, that’s quite a walk. Couple of miles outta town. Be dark before you get back, Mikey.”

  Mikeos shrugged. “I feel like a walk.”

  Hemar sniffed the air. “Me too.” He growled to himself and rolled up to his feet. He looked to be just bone and gristle under all that lank and greasy hair. “Guess I could do with a stroll too.”

  Mikeos shrugged, and they walked on together. He kept two steps ahead; Hemar smelled rank.

  They walked in silence, past the Grand Hotel, past Gore’s Smithy, past the stockades and the lowing steers.

  Hemar paused at Jonan’s Lodgings on the corner of West Way. “That’s where the trouble came from.” A yellowed claw picked out the window of the room where Parker Hale, the Oh-Seven’s much loved gunslinger, bled out three weeks earlier. “Heard she slit him from gut to gills with a letter-opener.”

  Mikeos nodded. Sharra Leo did the cutting they said. A lover’s tiff taking on too sharp an edge. Rumour put Sharra on a southbound train, outpacing the law. That was rumour—“fact” left the Oh-Seven without a gunslinger, an open town where anyone with the price of a ticket, or legs enough to arrive under their own steam, could show up to challenge for the slinger title.

  Homesteads gave way to dusty scrub and grey shale. The dogman paused, sniffed the air with suspicion, and moved on.

  “I never go to the pillar,” Hemar said.

  Mikeos shrugged. “I’ve been. It’s big.”

  “The pack talk about it,” Hemar said. “Out on the plains. We meet under the full moon, you know?”

  Mikeos knew. How could you not know, with the howling rolling in off the plains every month?

  The dogman looked over his shoulder, sniffing and sniffing again, harder. “There’s a hundred of them pillars, a thousand. You know that?”

  “Sure.”

  Mikeos’s mother used to say the pillars were there before man, before the taur and hunska, before dogmen or corpsers. Even before the woodkin. She said they met in the middle of the world, made by whoever shaped the lands and set the gun-law above all magics.

  “You know what else?”

  “What?” Mikeos asked.

  “Remos Jax is going to meet the sect’s champion there, tomorrow noon.”

  “They’re going to have their showdown by the pillar?” Mikeos remember the gunslinger’s eyes. Flint. He almost felt sorry for the sect man.

  Hemar woofed in agreement. Adding, “He’s going to lose.”

  “Jax? No way.” Mikeos shook his head.

  “Oh yes.”

  “No one’s ever beaten Jax,” Mikeos said.

  “Duh!” Hemar snorted. “That’s why he’s not dead.”

  The dogman ran his tongue over his teeth. “This sect champion is something new. Locust-born. He’s not flesh and blood. It’s all chitin and acid-reflex. It draws its gun and you hear the crack, like a whip breaking the air. A man can’t measure against that. You didn’t wonder why only Jax showed up to the challenge?”

  “So why would he go, if he can’t win?” Mikeos asked.

  “Why did I fight the pack leader ten moons back? Why does a taur make a stand? Sometimes, right or wrong, you know it’s time.”

  The sun hovered above the horizon as they drew up to the first of the boneyards. The last light reached them across the wild plains, rippled by the dust-laden wind. It shimmered crimson across acres of clean-picked bones. The black finger of the Oh-Seven pillar loomed ahead, huge though still a quarter mile off, its shadow reaching to the east.

  Mikeos stopped by the picket fence and looked out over the confusion of bleached skulls, ribs reaching like claws, leg bones half covered by windblown sand.

  “Hunskas. They just leave them for the vultures.” Hemar panted and lolled his tongue. “They don’t care. A dogman can crack a bone or two, suck the marrow, the hunska don’t care.”

  “If they don’t care, why do they bring them out here?” Mikeos asked. “It’s a long way to haul a body.”

  Hemar licked his teeth. “Maybe they think the corpsers won’t come this near the pillar. Who knows with them? The hunska look like men, but they smell different.”

  Mikeos looked up. The pillar stood black against a paling sky. “It’s just so damn big.”

  Hemar nodded.

  “But it is,” Mikeos said. “It makes me feel . . . like nothing.”

  “The world is big.” Hemar filched an arm bone from the hunska yard. “But you don’t see it all at once. The pillars, well they’re just there in front of you. A billion tons of stone piled up to make you feel small. To show you that the Old Ones could do anything.”

  “And what they chose to do was leave?”

  “I guess.”

  �
��My father left.”

  “Everyone leaves in the end.” Hemar put the bone between his teeth and strained to crack it. “One way or the other.”

  Mikeos looked away. Old corruption hung on the air, a sick sweet smell that turned his stomach. Back among the long shadows on the path to town he glimpsed something, something moving. Tumbleweed, probably.

  The wind felt cold now. “Let’s keep going,” he said.

  They found Grum’s skull as the very last of the sun’s rays skimmed the plains. The clan had worked fast. It sat on a flat rock less than two hundred yards from the base of the pillar. Dust clung to the damp white bone, but the polished horns were unsullied.

  “They honoured him,” Hemar said.

  The minotaurs framed their cemetery as a wedge, narrowing to a point that almost reached the pillar. Mikeos had thought to hunt for Grum in the wide expanse of the far end, but they had placed him close in, where the yard narrowed so that ten skull stones could span the wedge. Grum had been more important to his kind than Mikeos ever guessed.

  “A corpser’s out there.” Hemar nodded back along their path. “Reckon I know which one, too. Been shadowing us a while.”

  They turned and watched the path together. For a few minutes the Frostral wind made the only sound, whispering through the forest of horns. At last the corpser stepped into view, emerging from the shadow of a crypt.

  The dogman made a soft growl in his throat. “Elver.”

  She’d called it Elver Samms. The thing that had been Elver Samms. How long ago had that been, Mikeos wondered.

  The corpser moved toward them as if wading through a deepening mire. Some said the pillars held a magic that kept corpsers from ever reaching them, and it seemed to be true. But Elver looked ready to try anyway.

  “They knew he’d come for the skull,” Hemar said. “That’s why they put it so far in.”

  Mikeos glanced over at Grum’s skull. He imagined Elver crouched over it, scraping and cutting. The corpsers took from the dead, particular parts to match their needs. What would he have taken from Grum?

  “That dust your mother snorts—ever wonder what the corpsers make it from?” Hemar asked.

  Mikeos shook his head. He didn’t want to know.

  “At least whiskey is clean,” Hemar said.