by D L Frizzell
He approached me from behind and unlaced the falcata’s sheath. “Yup!” he guffawed as he pulled it free. The T’Neth gave him my pistol and he tossed both weapons through the waterfall into the metal sphere.
I turned around and glared at Redland. “How did you do it?” I asked.
“How did I get out of Ovalsheer Prison?” Redland asked, motioning toward my bedroll. “Have a seat.”
“For starters,” I said.
“Not the same way everybody else did. You figure out how they all escaped yet?”
“I bet you had something to do with it,” I snarled.
He made another, more insistent gesture toward my bedroll. “Well,” he said, “That’s not important right now. What’s important is that I’m a free man, legally speakin’.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Did your thumb grow back, too?”
Redland’s smile vanished. He held up his left hand and stared at it. It did appear to have five fingers, even though I vividly remembered Kate Runaway slicing his thumb off with a straight razor six years ago. On closer inspection, I could see that his left thumb was actually a prosthetic, a crude wooden peg he’d strapped over his glove.
“You carve that yourself in prison?” I asked acidly.
Redland stared at me for a second, and then rubbed his cheek with the fake thumb. “I did,” he admitted. “Well, this is my third attempt. You should know I’m gettin’ pretty good at carvin’ things right-handed.”
Sure enough, he had a machete strapped to his right leg below his holster. “What exactly can you do with your left hand, then?” I asked
He pointed the wooden thumb straight at me. “I can gouge out a smartass’s eyeballs for one thing,” he growled, “so sit your smart ass down.”
I held my hands up in surrender and knelt down onto both knees.
Redland took a moment to compose himself and pull the rumpled sleeve over his exposed shackle. An instant later, his anger disappeared like a candle being snuffed out. In a frighteningly cordial voice, he said, “I’m here to make you my deputy again, Alex. If you’d like the job back, of course.”
I glanced back at the T’Neth, who had not budged a centimeter. “Is he serious?” I asked.
No answer.
“Yes, he’s serious,” Redland mocked. “That guy’s name is Shiv, by the way. It’s a great name. He just spells it wrong.”
“Xiv,” the T’Neth said. He pronounced the first letter more like a ‘Zh’.
“Oh!” Redland teased. “You didn’t call him Fourteen, did you? He hates that!”
Putting my hands on my knees, I stared up at Xiv, and then Redland. “You weren’t one for small talk, last time I checked. Let’s get on with it.” I hoped I was able to sound calm and compliant. I was actually gauging the distance to the metal sphere and whether I could launch myself into it before either one of these guys could grab me. As if reading my mind, Redland maneuvered between me and the sphere. That would have foiled my plan, except that it placed him just a meter in front of me. That gave me a new plan.
“You think you can get in this hole without slicing yourself up on the metal parts in there?” Redland said, gesturing into the metal sphere. He chuckled when I didn’t answer. “Now, to business. Alex, you may have noticed that prison has not been kind to me. I’m not the same man I was six years ago. No, don’t candy-coat it. I’ve lost a step or two. But then again, I’m a better man than I was six years ago. I have changed.”
“Clearly,” I said.
“It’s true that our relationship went sour,” he said. “I’m even willing to accept some responsibility for that. Hell, I wanted to kill you more than any person alive has ever wanted to kill another. Except for maybe that girl of yours. How is Kate, by the way?”
“No idea,” I replied icily.
“She still in Celestial City?”
“Go find out,” I said. “Seriously, can we move this along?”
“Alright, forget about her, then,” Redland said, and shared a look with Xiv. He then paused as if unsure how to continue. “Look, I don’t know any other way to say it. Our personal squabble is irrelevant. Hell, even the Jovians don’t mean a damn thing, and all they want to do is conquer the world.”
“That’s small potatoes, sure,” I agreed.
“Yeah,” Redland said, ignoring my sarcastic tone. “We have bigger…much bigger…problems to worry about. I know how to fix them, Alex, but I can’t do it on my own. I need your help.”
“You’ve got a funny way of asking,” I said.
“You’re alive, ain’t you?” Redland pointed out. “This was a necessary precaution. I knew that you might very likely shoot me on sight, especially because I’m still wearin’ this,” he raised his right arm and let the sleeve fall back to expose his shackle. “That’s why I convinced Xiv to distract you. I needed to discuss this important matter.”
“You convinced a T’Neth to work for you?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two men.
Redland nodded. “Xiv and I have had a working relationship for a long time now. We understand each other.”
I couldn’t let that pass without a comment. “What you’re really saying is that you’re working for him.”
“Working with him,” Redland emphasized. “We have mutual interests, him and me.”
“Which are?” I asked.
“I’ll get to that part later,” Redland said. “First, I want to show you this.” He pulled a document out of his breast pocket and tossed it to me.
I stared at him distrustfully, but finally picked up the paper and unfolded it. At the top was the official letterhead of the Alliance Council, dated a month prior. “To whom it may concern,” I read aloud, “This rightful notice, authorized by the Alliance Council, and accepted by the Sheers Territory Corrections Authority, states that Hugh Redland, former marshal of the Sheers Territory, is granted a temporary reprieve for his crimes, and is further granted the provisional title of Marshal. Agreed upon here by all council members and representatives of the above jurisdiction.” I read the letter again, quietly this time, and examined the signatures closely. They were legit. I’d seen these signatures many times, although never on anything approaching a pardon. I held the paper up to the sunlight and checked for the official watermark. It was there, alright.
“So,” Redland said, holstering his pistol, “I am askin’ you to put aside any grievances you have with me, as valid as they may be. I want you to join my team.” He lowered himself onto his haunches. “The stakes are…”
I sucker punched Redland in the face and grabbed his right arm. Spinning him around, I snatched the pistol from his holster and shoved him to the ground. He fell on his face.
Xiv moved toward me, but Redland waved him off. “Wait!” he yelled at the T’Neth. “Leave him alone.”
“Alone?” Xiv growled.
“What I mean is,” Redland said, “don’t hurt him.” Looking back to me, he took a more conciliatory tone. “Fine, I deserved that. Look, Alex, you ain’t the only person I’ve wronged, but I’m tryin’ to bury the proverbial hatchet here. Hell, even Xiv has a good reason to want me dead. Don’t think I don’t lie awake thinkin’ about that.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You double-crossed him?”
“Worse,” he said. “I killed one of his people.”
“One on one?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Putting aside the ludicrous claim that anybody could kill a T’Neth single-handed, I stared into Redland’s eyes. “You’re telling me that this is some kind of reform tour for you?”
“It’s not the main purpose,” he said, acknowledging that point at least. “What I’m doin’ is a necessity. You’d join me if you knew how bad things have gotten.”
“That letter says you’re only a provisional marshal,” I said. “You just want a pardon.”
“Did that fancy University teach you to always state the obvious?” Redland sneered, his eyes flashing hot. “Of course I want a pardon,
because I can’t save the world while I’m shackled to a mining cart. It’s a means to an end.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “Saint Redland, hero of the Alliance Territories.”
“I didn’t figure you’d believe me,” he said.
“Convince me,” I said, doubting he could. If anything, he’d put some kind of scheme into motion that somehow included a T’Neth lawman and the Alliance Council. Not that I trusted the Council any more than I trusted Redland. In my mind, they’d made a number of self-serving policy decisions that greatly enhanced their political power at the expense of their credibility. I didn’t trust the T’Neth, either, despite the fact that he’d saved my life. Once again, I was put into a situation where I could only trust one person - me. I could learn a few things by letting Redland play his cards, though. Maybe even find out what his scheme was and foil it. If I thought he was setting me up as a fall guy, I could always shoot him. “Why should I trust you?” I said.
“First off, I want to assure you that gun you’re holdin’ is loaded,” he replied. When I returned a blank look, he scoffed at me. “Didn’t you get suspicious when I threw your gun in the drink and got close enough for you to grab mine? I may have lost a step, but I ain’t stupid.”
I hesitated. No, I hadn’t thought of that. I glanced at the metal sphere for a moment, and back at Redland. He had gone down awful easy when I grabbed him. I’d assumed he was just weak from being in prison too long. “You let me take it away from you,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. “I could’ve shot you without a second thought.”
“I took a chance you wouldn’t,” Redland said, “but it was a good chance because I knew that letter would make you hesitate.” He looked at the letter lying on the ground next to him. “Speaking of…I’ll probably need it again,” he said, picking it up gingerly and wiping some mud off the corner. Once satisfied it was presentable, he folded it up and put it back in his pocket.
“I still might shoot you.”
“I need you to understand that I’m not playin’ you, kid,” he said. “I thought about it for a while, tryin’ to decide if I should give you the chance to actually kill me. Well,” he rose to his knees and raised his hands, “here’s your chance to see if I’m lyin’. I let you take a loaded gun away from me.”
I looked at the revolver. I couldn’t tell at a glance whether it was loaded or not. It hadn’t occurred to me that Redland coaxed me into grabbing it, but now it seemed like this had been his plan all along. That was so like him. “Step aside,” I told Xiv, who’d been standing behind Redland.
Xiv looked doubtful, but Redland nodded approvingly at him. “Go ahead, big guy.”
Xiv did as instructed, leaving his sword out of reach and lacing his hands together. It still made me nervous that he could get to his blade and cut me to ribbons before I could fire more than a single round. Maybe Redland was up to his old tricks again. Manipulate others into cowering to his ego, and then keep them under his thumb. So, I considered my options. If Redland was bluffing, the gun would be empty. Then, if I pulled the trigger, he’d see I couldn’t be trusted. On the other hand, if the gun was loaded and I didn’t shoot him, I would be essentially admitting that he had the stronger argument and giving him the psychological advantage. No way was that going to happen. I considered the odds that the gun was empty, based on Redland’s aversion to risking his own safety. I also considered the stakes he was playing. He wanted me to believe that the situation was too grave to harm him. Plus, he’d given me the letter to insulate him from summary execution. I once heard that Redland was a master poker player. I could see why. That’s just another difference between him and me – I don’t bluff.
“I believe you,” I said, and fired the pistol.
Chapter Six
Redland howled as the bullet pierced the right side of his abdomen. Blood oozed forth from the wound. He immediately brought his hands down to stem the flow while I rested the pistol in the crook of my arm.
“You little shit!” he spat. “You said you believed me!”
“I did,” I replied, and tossed the pistol on the ground near him.
Redland let loose a chain of pain-fueled expletives. “Couldn’t you just fire into the goddamned dirt?” Anger flashed in his eyes as he picked up the pistol. He thumbed the hammer menacingly and pointed it at my face.
“No,” Xiv stated emphatically, and moved to block Redland’s shot. “He is mine.”
Redland locked eyes with Xiv. Seeing that the T’Neth apparently considered me his property for saving my life, he considered whether he could get away with shooting me. After a long moment, he relented and holstered the pistol. “You want to find me a bandage, asshole?” he asked me coldly.
“I would,” I said, “but I don’t have any.” That was a lie, of course. I always carried a medkit. He probably did, too, but this was his way of jerking me around. Personally, I would have waited for Redland to pass out from blood loss before helping him. And maybe not even then.
Xiv glared at both of us like we were children and stomped off into the trees.
When he was out of sight, I turned to Redland. “Something tells me he’ll expect me alive when he returns,” I said.
“Naturally. You’re his pet now,” Redland mocked. “Don’t start thinkin’ your life will be easy, though. You’re beholden to him, and T’Neth treat their debtors with even less regard than their enemies.” He got a faraway look on his face and smiled. “Oh yeah. I can’t wait to see the moment you disappoint him. I’m sure that won’t take long.” He focused on me again, and then pointed past the spot where I first saw him in the trees. “In the meantime, would you please get my pack? It’s over there.”
I found his travel pack behind a large stump with a Longarm rifle leaned against a tree next to it. The rifle hadn’t been cleaned for a while, which seemed out of character for the Redland I used to know, but I chalked that up to hard traveling. I brought the pack to him without opening it. He sifted through the contents until he found a field surgeon’s kit. “You came prepared for my answer,” I noted.
“Of course, I did,” he said, gritting his teeth. He opened the kit, but had trouble with the items inside. “You gonna make me beg? Stitch me up,” he demanded.
I examined his wound, not trying to be overly gentle. As Redland sat there, grunting every time I prodded him, Xiv returned with an assortment of fresh roots cradled in one arm.
“You are a strange people,” Xiv remarked.
“You’d have to know our history,” I told the T’Neth, and turned my attention back to Redland. “I can’t stitch a hole this deep,” I said, “even with your kit.”
“I thought you were supposed to be smart,” Redland said.
“Being smart doesn’t make me a doctor,” I shot back. “I don’t normally have to fix the people I shoot.”
“Next time I’ll know better,” Redland growled, his anger exacerbated by pain.
“Shooting one another is a ritual?” Xiv interrupted, his voice grim and uncertain. He seemed unaware that the conversation was confrontational, but still had a deliberateness in his gaze, an intensity that told me he was fascinated with us even if he didn’t understand what we meant.
“Shooting Redland was a test of his honesty,” I said. It was much more than that, I thought, but didn’t feel like explaining myself.
Xiv scowled.
Redland, in a rare moment of forbearance, said, “Xiv, sometimes folks need to prove that you aren’t pullin’ their leg.”
“You did not pull his leg,” Xiv replied in all seriousness. “I watched.”
“That’s a figure of speech,” Redland told Xiv. “You shouldn’t take everything so literally.”
“And you shouldn’t take me for a fool,” I warned Redland. “Whatever scheme you’re running here, it’s not going to get you back in my good graces.”
“I don’t care,” Redland said, hissing as I pressed against the wound again. He eyed me suspiciously. “By the way, I noticed you un
loaded my pistol before you threw it back to me.”
I raised an eyebrow. I thought I’d concealed the gun pretty well behind my arm. There wasn’t even a click when I released the cylinder.
“I use extended rounds,” he explained. “They pack a bigger punch. There wasn’t any brass at the end of the chambers when you tossed it back.”
“This newfound honesty of yours doesn’t make me trust you more,” I countered. “If anything, I trust you less. If that’s even possible.”
“Fair enough.”
Xiv turned his back to us and knelt down by the sphere. He reached through the pouring water and felt around. Redland and I stared at him to see what he was doing. Xiv began pulling and twisting at something inside the sphere. Water splashed up his arm as water deflected at different angles. There was a muffled snap. In his grip there was a metal disc about half a meter in diameter. Xiv examined it, appeared satisfied, and warped the edges with vice-like fingers until it formed a crude bowl.
“How’d you do that?” I asked. It was one thing to throw big rocks around. It was quite something else to tear steel braces from their mounts and bend them like aluminum foil.
Xiv sat the bowl aside and washed his collection of vegetables in the running water before looking at me. His brows folded together in a scowl as he thought about the question. “With my hands.” Taking my lack of further questions as an end to the matter, he put the vegetables into the bowl and mashed them into a lumpy paste with his thumbs. “Lay Redland down,” he directed me. “Put this into his wound.”
It took a couple of minutes to get Redland settled comfortably enough on his bedroll to stop complaining. I hadn’t recognized the roots that Xiv used in his poultice, but he seemed to know what he was doing. It was then that I realized he had no pack of any kind. Other than his sword, all he had were the clothes on his back. “I guess you know how to live off the land,” I commented.
“No,” Xiv replied, “I live on the land. Also in.”
