Conspiracy of Ravens

by Lila Bowen

  “Well, what do you think of that, Rhett?” Sam asked.

  Rhett leaned back on his elbow and ran the ball of his thumb over his gun’s wood grip. “I reckon I haven’t gone into a fight yet knowing what I was up against, and I managed to live through it.”

  “You’ve been lucky, so far.” Dan’s voice was dry and obnoxiously matter-of-fact. “A monster that commands other monsters with magic will be harder to fight than a child-stealer, hiding alone in the mountains. This Trevisan could be anything. A rogue Lobo, a shifter, a powerful witch. He’s smart. And he’ll be on the lookout for trouble. And he has a scout. Adolphus.”

  “We got a scout, too. Me.” Rhett pointed at his badge.

  Dan’s eyes did that thing where they kinda pitied Rhett while also being amused with him—that thing that made Rhett want to scuffle with the feller even more than usual. “One of the only things we know about Trevisan,” Dan said slowly, “is that he only takes on monsters to work in his camp. Even though you’re a shifter, because you’re the Shadow, you’re undetectable. Therefore, Trevisan isn’t likely to take you on.”

  “What’s this Shadow thing you all blabber about?” Earl asked, sloshing his wine. “Is our birdie friend special, then?”

  Rhett rolled his eyes, knowing Dan would answer for him. Not even worth trying to get a word in first.

  “Rhett is the Shadow,” Dan said in his preacher voice. “He has great powers. He is a shifter, but even the sharpest scout won’t recognize that he has magic. His eyes don’t shine, he has no scent, he doesn’t set stomachs wobbling. I once told him myself that he was…how did I say it? As human as human can get. Normally, this helps him hunt his prey. But this time, he has no way into Trevisan’s graces.”

  “Oh, well then. That explains why he doesn’t make me as ill as he should.”

  Rhett tipped his hat. “Many thanks for the compliment.”

  “What we need,” Sam said, getting back to the topic at hand, “is a plan.”

  “I got a plan,” Rhett muttered.

  “Let me guess.” Dan leaned back on his elbows. “Rhett, you want to ride up, guns blazing, and start shooting anybody who’s white and not in chains.”

  Rhett nodded. “That sounds about right.”

  “If you want to get us all killed, sure. But we don’t know how the other groups feel, who’s loyal, if he has hidden sympathizers. We don’t know who is acting under duress and who is part of the problem. And, most of all, we don’t know if their sawbones can help Winifred.”

  “What’s your point, coyote-boy?”

  “It’s got to be me. I’m the only one here who’s an obvious monster, who’s unknown to the camp, and who’s sound of body. I’ll go in as a scout, find out what I can, and escape.”

  “Fool! You can’t just be escapin’ whenever you wish, you grand ninny,” Earl slurred, the bottle clutched in his hands like a life rope. “’S’not that bloody easy.”

  Dan grinned. “It will be for me.”

  “You’re not going in without me,” Rhett growled. “This is my goddamn destiny, and I’ll goddamn live up to it.”

  “Did you ever think that sometimes your destiny is to wait two damn days and then save everybody with a little bit of well-timed help?”

  Rhett looked up at the moon, remembering how it had hounded him on the road to the Cannibal Owl. “I reckon my destiny’s as restless as I am.”

  “Then you’ll both have to trust me and learn patience.”

  Rhett rolled over, his back to the fire. “I reckon we just need a better plan than yours.”

  Chapter

  10

  Every nerve in his body sparking, Rhett waited until the familiar snores of his friends joined the low crackle of the fire. He sat up slowly, feigning sleepiness and scratching the fuzz of his shorn hair. Checking that they truly were asleep, he buckled on his holster, shook out his boots, stuck his feet into the worn leather, and wandered away to piss and change his rags. When he came back, certain that no one was close to wakefulness, he picked up his blanket, saddle, and bags and walked to the horses. Ragdoll sleepily snapped at his hand as he tightened her cinch, but no mere grouchy horse was going to stop him. He had business to do, and Coyote Dan didn’t get to jump in line and get himself hurt.

  A long nose bumped into his back, and he cussed under his breath. If he didn’t take Blue, the damn mule would bray his fool head off as he left. He unhobbled the rangy critter and ponied him off Ragdoll as he rode away from the fire and into the darkness.

  He didn’t need the sun and moon to know which direction was the right one; the flop and wobble in his belly told him. The moon, at least, was cooperative, giving enough scant white-blue light to keep the horse shuffling along. Rhett couldn’t help thinking about the many dark creatures that might be hiding out here—Lobos, sirens, and worse. Maybe even some of the Captain’s dreaded sand wyrms. It was right funny, to think that he’d once considered rattlers and scorpions the most danger the world had to offer, outside of Pap’s whip. When an armadillo popped up in terror and trundled away, Rhett didn’t even blink. If the critter had meant any harm, Rhett knew he would’ve felt it in advance.

  It wasn’t long before time lost all meaning. Everything was heavy with blackness, and if Rhett looked for too long at the glittering stars overhead, he started to feel like maybe he was upside down, the world shifting and sliding sideways. Ragdoll knew her job, surly as she might’ve been about it. She stopped, once, to rub her face on her leg, but Rhett knew that trick and kicked her on before she could drop to the ground and roll him off. A man’s destiny didn’t offer leeway for laziness, and Rhett didn’t have time for anything that would allow Coyote Dan to get the drop on him.

  That Trevisan feller belonged to Rhett. To the Shadow.

  Letting someone else kill him was bound to feel like never quite scratching an itch.

  And letting Trevisan kill Dan and leave Winifred alone in the world and neck-deep in sorrow? He couldn’t let that happen, either.

  As the night wore on, Rhett had to correct Ragdoll’s path using the wobble in his belly like a compass. Trevisan was building a railroad, after all. Who knew which-a-way he was taking it? Without Rhett to guide them, the others didn’t have much of a chance of finding one little camp in all of Durango, even with Earl’s shoddy map. So long as those coyotes didn’t catch his scent before the sun was up, they’d be hard-pressed to catch him in the days before he’d found his quarry. Blue, at least, was no trouble. The stupid animal was happy just to be along for the ride. If things went real bad, Rhett could always trade him. Or eat him. At least that’s what he told himself.

  The edge of the horizon was just starting to consider lightening up when Rhett saw some right peculiar shapes drawn in stark black against the moonlight. He expected buttes and rock piles, hills and valleys and arroyos and tablelands, all the general natural furniture that made Durango right hard to traverse. But these shapes were unnatural, disconnected and peculiar. It wasn’t a town, and it sure as hell wasn’t a railroad, but it was something man-made for sure. He squinted, trying to puzzle it out from over a mile away, but his one good eye couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

  Wait. Except…there were some heads and tails, weren’t there?

  Cows, maybe. Some horses. A unicorn?

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, angry at not knowing what the Sam Hill was going on.

  He knew well enough he had to stop before Blue gave an earsplitting welcome to whatever creatures were sleeping up ahead. Rhett slipped off Ragdoll, undressed, tucked his clothes in her saddlebag, and tied her to a raggedy tree. As annoyed by this turn of events as the mare was by everything that happened when Rhett went off alone, she nudged him with her nose and turned her bottlebrush tail on him.

  “Right back at you,” Rhett muttered, shivering in the night’s cold as he gave her rump a conciliatory scratch.

  He walked off a few paces, took a deep breath, and…changed.

  Blue was already asleep, bu
t Ragdoll looked over and snorted as Rhett hopped away and into the air. Worry and anger fell off him as he swooped upward, his brain making easy sense of what he saw but not quite able to grasp the why of things. It was so much easier, being a bird. What was, was. It didn’t need a why, so the bird didn’t need a why.

  But he did need breakfast of the unrotten sort, and so did someone else. With leisurely flicks of his feathers, he returned to the now-impatient horse and mule and landed as gracefully as he could.

  As soon as he’d transformed, he was muttering, “I know. I know! I’ll get your damn grain.”

  His human brain had to pick apart what his bird brain had seen. There were animals aplenty, mostly cows and horses and, sure enough, a unicorn. The blocky things that looked like buildings were wagons, some with bars on them instead of wooden sides. His nose, or beak, or whatever the hell he had that helped him find dead things to eat—it had smelled live things, and lots of ’em. To the bird, all that breathing flesh smelled better than Conchita’s breakfast, far as he could figure. But the damnedest thing about the whole scene was that there wasn’t just one monster. There were dozens. Maybe hundreds. The animals were all monsters. And it wasn’t the railroad camp, so what the Sam Hill was it?

  Only thing Rhett could reckon was that if he just acted like a traveler, he might find out. Being the Shadow was an encumbrance most of the time, but at least it meant that he could pretend to be a dumb human, easy enough. He dressed right quick, burrowed into his new buffalo coat, saddled up, and did his best to look like a born fool.

  The camp was a mile off or so, but Blue acted like it was across the country and required a good bit of hollering. The mule’s bray was enough to chase the sun up, and by the time the sky was purple fringed in red, all sorts of creatures were answering his call.

  The first thing they came across was a herd of cows, but these cows were like nothing Rhett had seen before in Gloomy Bluebird. They were black and heavy-built, but their faces were just horned skulls of long white bone. They could moo well enough, but they had no eyes in their stark black sockets, and as Ragdoll rode into the herd to the tune of Blue’s braying, the cows’ heads clicked curiously. They didn’t seem mean, at least, and the ones with horns didn’t try to use ’em. But cows, in Rhett’s opinion, definitely required faces.

  Up close now, Rhett could hear horses whinnying, dogs barking, birds cawing, and one very annoyed human. From somewhere among the wagons, an old woman’s voice called, “Be gone. The show aims for Zodiac. See us there.”

  Rhett swallowed hard and pitched his voice low. “It’s a show?”

  A tall, hunched-over figure appeared from behind a wagon painted bright violet. She scurried nimbly up the steps to sit on the driver’s seat, her slitted eyes peering out from a shawl that had seen better days, possibly as a saddle blanket onto which a cow had given birth. The woman reached out and tugged a rope, and a piece of canvas unfurled, showing swoopy letters that didn’t make a lick of sense.

  “I ain’t got my letters,” Rhett grumbled.

  “’Course you don’t.” The old woman chuckled in a mean sort of way. “What it says is, Prospera’s Menagerie: Magical Beasts Revealed!”

  “Well, that ain’t catchy. It don’t even rhyme.”

  “Folks don’t come here for the wordplay, boy. They come for the monsters.”

  Rhett laughed, startling Ragdoll to a sidestep. “Monsters? Lady, did you fall and hit your head? They’re just cows.”

  The old woman, Prospera, supposedly, hopped down from the wagon, unexpectedly quick and spry in her heavy boots and ragged skirts. “Didn’t look close, did you? Nobody ever does, not till I tell ’em to. Folks don’t like to see the truth. Come on, then. You give me a quarter, and I’ll give you a special show.”

  “You want me to pay you two bits to look at your cows?”

  The lines of the old woman’s face showed her long familiarity with this particular brand of rage. “If you aren’t surprised, and if you still think they’re cows at the end, you can have your two bits back, plus another two. What you’ll see here is real. Realer than anything else.” Her hand crept out, palm up to show wrinkles and calluses and burn scars.

  Amused for a variety of reasons, Rhett fished a quarter out of his pocket. “Figure I’ll do it for the wager if not the show, ma’am.”

  The quarter disappeared, and Prospera unfolded and drew herself up tall, like some fancy statue. Her face went over solemn, and Rhett could see that she might’ve been beautiful and queenlike, once. With his belly wobbling all over the place, he looked her up and down for any signs of what sort of monster she might be, but all he knew was that she wasn’t a vampire, as her eyes were gray instead of red and she was standing proudly in the morning sun.

  “Step close, my friend,” Prospera said in a cultured, practiced voice that echoed back off the buttes. “For you will see, today, the monsters of antiquity that draw fear into a man’s heart.” She walked, all swoopy-like with arms outstretched, toward the nearest wagon and whipped back a canvas curtain in dramatic fashion, flinging dust into the morning sunlight and making Rhett sneeze. Behind the bars were several weird-looking rabbits. Rhett saw the usual fanged kind, which he found quite tasty, plus some with antlers, and even some particularly large ones with antlers and wings, both. Considering Prospera was looking at him expectantly, he gave a gasp of surprise.

  “What the Sam Hill are those things?” he asked.

  “Jackrabbits, jackalopes, and the more esoteric Wolpertinger, brought all the way from Germania.” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a scrap of dried meat and tossed it behind the metal bars. The rabbit-things fell upon it in a ball of fur and flying teeth. “Unseen by most innocent souls, these beasts surround us every day, waiting for the opportune moment to feed on the unwary.”

  “So how come I ain’t never seen ’em before?”

  Prospera smiled coyly. “Only my great magic can reveal their horror to human eyes.”

  “I reckon they’re still just rabbits, ma’am.”

  Prospera’s smile twisted into a cruel sneer. “Then let me show you something that isn’t a rabbit at all. My newest addition. The Elmendorf Beast.”

  The next wagon was considerably smaller, and the curtain opened to reveal a snarling dog-thing that made Rhett’s hand itch for his gun.

  “What is that—some hairless coyote?”

  He knew it wasn’t, though. He could feel the wobble in his stomach, the strangeness calling for release. The beast’s skin was the color and texture of stone, wiry hairs standing up here and there. It had a ferocious overbite and glowing red eyes, and it lunged at the bars, teeth scraping on metal. A thick leather collar and heavy chain held it at bay, the monster’s throat red and raw where it rubbed.

  “The Elmendorf Beast killed hundreds of cattle in Bexar County, ripping the helpless calves to ribbons and littering the ground with bones and blood. Most women pass out, looking upon its hideous face. But you, fine sir, I can tell are made of sterner stuff.” She threw a piece of meat to the beast, and it snarled and sneered at the tidbit. “Likes its food alive and screaming, that one,” Prospera added, whipping the curtain back down.

  Rhett stuck his thumbs through his holster and said, “So you got some messed-up animals. That ain’t worth a quarter.”

  Prospera snorted. “A disbeliever. Yes. How original. What do you think about…this?”

  When she whipped the canvas off the next wagon, Rhett didn’t have to feign amazement. He stumbled back and drew his pistol, his heart yammering in his chest. He knew this creature well. Bright blue eyes in a buzzard’s face, dark gray wings with blades for feathers, dangling dugs with long, brown nipples, talons coated with gore gone black.

  It was a goddamn harpy.

  “What the hell?” he snapped.

  “Finally. Something impresses you. Behold: the harpy!”

  “Gonna kill you, bitch,” the buzzard-woman spat, lunging to peck at the bars with her razor-sharp beak.

/>   Prospera ignored that. “This creature of antiquity was seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod, captured by the great storytellers in their mythology, as I have captured her here.”

  “Bitch. Cur. Gonna eat your liver. Gonna rip the old woman apart like a rag doll.”

  Whether Prospera was troubled by the harpy’s words, Rhett couldn’t tell. The lady’s smile remained smug and arrogant.

  “Please lower your gun, sir. She’s entirely harmless so long as she’s caged. Just squawks and pecks. You’re as safe as safe can be.”

  “I don’t think she likes you very much,” Rhett muttered, ramming his gun back in its holster as he noted the fresh silver claw marks on the otherwise dull and tarnished bars.

  Prospera waved her hand at the cage. “I don’t think she likes anyone.”

  Rhett backed away from the harpy, remembering all too well what one of the creatures could do when let loose on the world. Could this very one have helped carry him to the Cannibal Owl’s lair or hunted him through the desert? They all looked alike, really. And they all died alike. Rhett was mighty tempted to shoot this one and be done with it. But he needed to act dumb so he could learn more about Prospera’s magic. If whatever she did revealed monsters, maybe it could lift the Shadow’s disguise, show that he was a monster, and get him into Trevisan’s labor camp, neatly trouncing Dan and his attempt to take the reins and get his fool self hurt.

  One more step back, and Rhett fetched against something huge and hairy. He spun, gun out again, ready to fight.

  “Excuse me, good sir,” the creature said, its voice cultured and soft around huge teeth.

  “William, you’re supposed to be cleaning cages,” Prospera said, the sweetness of the words caught between angrily gritted teeth. “Not getting in the way of paying customers.”