by Jeffrey Ford
From the captain’s window, Cley could see the snow driving down. Curaswani threw another log into the fireplace behind his chair and returned to his seat.
The hunter puffed at his pipe, and said, “I remember you telling me that there were five citizens left alive when you arrived, and that two have been killed since. Now I have met Morgana and Willa, but who is the third?”
“You don’t miss a trick, Cley,” said the captain. He took a drink of his whiskey and began to relight his pipe. “A fellow named Brisden.”
Cley sat forward. “Brisden is here?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Curaswani. “He is in a jail cell in the cellar of the barracks across the way. A comfy little place for him next to the furnace. Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him,” said the hunter.
“Then you know he is a monumental pain in the ass. It seems that he is one of the main reasons that the Beshanti attacked our people. He was famous for roaming through the wilderness, getting to know the different tribes. Well, he incited them to overthrow their oppressors, namely the citizens of the western realm. The laggard lives to talk. Talk is his reality. At first, I thought of having him shot for sedition, but believe it or not, I didn’t want it on my conscience, though heaven knows I’d have been doing the entire world a favor. He is fed and kept, and that is the best I can do for him. We will return him to the realm in the spring, and he can stand trial.”
“Do you know where he hails from?” asked Cley.
“Well I prefer not to be indelicate, but he is not what I would call your best ambassador from the eastern realm. He wandered west years ago and ended in the capital city of Belius. I believe he was at one time a compatriot of Drachton Below, the Master of the Well-Built City.”
“In a very roundabout, convoluted way, he saved my life once,” said Cley.
“Well, that’s all the better, but as for me, I’d just as soon put a bullet in his head. He spins a dark reality with that tongue of his. His conversation is chaos and somehow those words of his insinuate themselves into the actuality of life and shatter lives. I predicted he would cause mayhem here in the Beyond when he first shipped out with the settlers. Truth is, the realm was happy to be rid of him.”
“May I see him?” asked Cley.
“No one sees him unless I accompany them. He is too wily. I’ll take you down there someday,” said Curaswani, and finished the rest of his drink.
“The Wraiths have been quiet,” said the hunter, and made sure to rap on the wood of the tabletop.
The captain knocked on the wood also. “They don’t come when it snows,” he said. “By the way, the Olsen woman has named her child. She has named it Wraith.” The captain raised his eyebrows.
“Odd,” said the hunter.
“Not so very” said Curaswani. “She is a little touched from her travails. Perhaps she believes that if she names it after the thing she fears, it will not harm the poor little fellow.”
Cley nodded. “What about my medal of honor?” he asked.
“Honorary,” said the captain. “Get ready, here it comes,” he said, and lifted the bottle to top off the hunter’s drink.
Two nights later, Cley woke in his room to the sound of Wood growling, and a moment later, he heard a terrible scream from out in the compound.
By the time he got his boots on and was out in the dark, frigid cold, he found Weems kneeling next to a body lying on the ground. In the lamplight, he saw the red stain blossoming in the hard-packed snow. Another soldier stood over the scene, shivering, but obviously not from the cold. The captain stood a few feet off dressed in long johns and boots, brandishing his sword and pistol, his head bowed. Steam issued from each of the soldiers’ mouths and literally poured out of the corpse, which, from its huge size, the hunter only then could tell was Knuckle.
Cley knocked on the door down the hall from his room. Under his arm, he carried the cradle he had crudely constructed from the planks of a crate that had once held canisters of cooking oil. It was a baby-sized box with hand-carved rockers attached to the bottom.
The door opened, and there was Willa Olsen, holding the squirming Wraith. “Yes?” she whispered, appearing both nervous and shy.
“I’ve made something for the child,” said Cley, and held up the cradle for her to see.
“A coffin?” she asked.
“A cradle,” he said, undeterred, “so that you can rock him to sleep at night.”
She did not smile, but she nodded and opened the door for him to enter. Stepping back, almost against the wall, she motioned with her free hand for Cley to set the thing down on the floor next to the bed. He did, then rose to face her. She was wearing a kerchief around her head and a dark blue dress.
He put his arms out, and asked, “May I hold him?”
She hesitated, visibly shaken by his presence.
“I do charge for my services,” he said. “I require one chance to hold the child.” He tried to make his most sympathetic face but feared it was not going to convince.
Reluctantly, she took a step forward and handed him the baby. Cley took the bundled infant in his arms and looked into the small face. He was a handsome imp, with dark eyes and a shock of black hair. A waving hand came up and got tangled for a moment in the hunter’s beard. Cley thought of Knuckle being lowered into the earth two days earlier and hugged the child to his chest. The mother reached out and took Wraith away from him.
“Thank you,” said Cley, and turned to leave.
“Wait, Mr. Cley,” she said. “I want to buy your dog.”
“Wood?” he asked, surprised that she had spoken.
“Yes, I have money,” she said.
“I cannot sell him, madam,” he told her. “But why?”
“Because he will smell the ghosts coming for my boy,” she said.
Cley had a memory flash of Wood growling just before the death cry of Knuckle. Without speaking, he left the room and ran down the hallway to the stairs.
From sundown until the break of dawn, Cley and Wood patrolled the compound, waiting for the next invisible assassin to scale the wall. Instead of the rifle, the hunter carried two loaded pistols. Mrs. Olsen’s theory that the dog might be able to sense the Wraiths even though they were camouflaged had caused the captain to order a second plate of food at mealtimes for him. Wood had become the hope of the fort, and had a disposition that was well suited for it. He gladly accepted all of the attention and extra tidbits of food, but never felt the stress of the others’ expectations.
On this night, Cley crouched in the darkness, Wood beside him, staring out across the compound. He was thinking of Morgana at dinnertime, telling the men’s fortunes with the use of a deck of playing cards. Her facade of intense seriousness had all of the youths convinced of the prophecies she made. Each of the young soldiers had wonderful adventures and lives of passionate love predicted for them. When they had insisted that Cley have his fortune read, he reluctantly agreed so as not to break the spell the old woman had woven. Morgana dealt the cards, and upon seeing them, had quickly whisked them off the table, claiming she had grown too tired to retain her concentration on the future.
Cley laughed to himself quietly at the absurdity of the show the old woman had put on.
“What was it she saw for us?” he asked Wood, and looked down to see that the dog was gone.
He immediately looked up and, in that second, heard barking. Drawing the two pistols from his belt, he moved cautiously out of the shadows and spotted Wood across the way, near the outhouse in the southeastern corner. He began to run.
“Weems, light,” he yelled, and the young man lifted the lantern he held and dashed away from his post outside the captain’s quarters.
Wood was lunging and barking at nothing, growling as if fighting a demon. Weems got to the dog before Cley, holding the lantern high as he went for his gun. The light spread across the front of the outhouse and, like some illusion in a magic show, Cley saw a knife blade suspended in midair.
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“Down,” said Cley to both the dog and the soldier. Wood backed off, Weems crouched, and, on a dead run, the hunter fired both pistols at once. One bullet chipped the outhouse door and one exploded into a spurt of blood. The very air appeared to be bleeding and the wound moved along the wall dripping red in its wake. Cley dropped the guns and reached for his knife, but as his own blade flashed in the light, Weems fired his pistol and there was a ghostly cry. Something weighty fell and made an impression in the crusted snow. The bleeding wound blossomed in the frozen white, spreading out from one static point.
In minutes, the compound was full of soldiers. The captain burst from his quarters in his usual nightly attire followed by Morgana, who was wearing only Curaswani’s field coat.
“One Wraith less,” said Weems, wiping his brow with his coat sleeve.
“The dog?” asked Curaswani.
Cley nodded.
The captain got down on his knees and put his arms around Wood. A shout went up from the men. Morgana had gone to the kitchen and returned with two handfuls of flour. She sifted the fine powder over the growing bloodstain and slowly, beneath this handmade snowfall, the shape of a body began to materialize.
In the next week, two more Wraiths were sniffed out by the dog and disposed of—one by Cley’s pistols and another by a remarkable rifle shot from Dat, across the entire compound, from his perch on the eastern catwalk. All men on guard duty were now issued a pocketful of flour for each night’s watch.
“In light of recent events, I was hard put to ignore your request,” said the captain, as he led Cley down the stairs to the cellar beneath the barracks.
Underground, the ceiling was low and the expanse, stone walls and floor of packed dirt, ran the exact length and breadth of the structure above. Short torches burned in holders on each of the walls, and the area at the bottom of the steps was crowded with barrels of supplies. The dark, earthy smell reminded Cley of his cave in the demon forest. Curaswani led him through a winding path that ran amidst the supply crates and barrels to a far corner, in which sat a furnace. Crackling sounds of burning wood issued from behind its metal doors. Through the grate on the door to the contraption the hunter saw the red-hot sections of log that heated the barracks above.
“This furnace is a wonder,” said the captain. “I stoke it myself once a morning, and through its special design it need not be filled until the next morning. An example of the technology of the western realm.”
Cley remembered having one like it in his childhood home. He did not tell Curaswani that his wonder was a primitive heat waster compared to the spire furnaces of the Well-Built City.
“And here,” said the captain, turning to the left and sweeping out his arm to reveal a jail cell previously blocked from sight by his girth, “is the supreme hemorrhoid, the taskmaster of language itself, the insipid Mr. Brisden.”
The shadows were thick inside the cage, which had three sides made of bars and one the stone of the foundation. Cley could see someone sitting there, like a massive lump of laundry in a plain, high-backed chair. A sound emanated from inside the cell, a steady mumbling, like a child saying prayers quickly in order to be done with them. The captain reached back behind himself and pulled one of the torches out of its holder on the wall.
“Here you go, Cley. You’ve got to get the full show,” he said, and held the light up to the bars.
Now Brisden became clear. The hunter could tell it was the same man he had encountered in Drachton Below’s memory. He was not so heavy as he was before, and there was a stubbled growth on his chin and cheeks, but the small, deep-set eyes and the voice, the ceaseless voice, were remarkably the same. His thinning hair was wild and the once white suit he wore, ripped and torn at the elbows, the knees, the collar, looked like it had not been washed in years.
Cley listened as a steady stream of words poured forth, some obtuse invective concerning time and consciousness, fact and fable. It was a mighty cyclone of inexplicable terminology celebrating language as reality.
“He’s leaking words like a stuck dictionary,” said the captain.
The hunter nodded, struck speechless at the sight of this second memory come to life. “First Anotine, now Brisden,” he thought. “I am haunted.”
Just as Cley was pondering the living Brisden, the heavy speaker looked up suddenly, his jowls bouncing, and stared directly at the hunter. His voice rose a decibel, and he said, at a speed that sounded like a drawl in comparison to the normal rapid flow of his monologue, “Cley, did you really think you had escaped the evil?”
The hunter stepped back as if pushed. While Brisden again achieved his old speed and incomprehensibility, Cley looked to the captain, and said, “He knows me.”
“He doesn’t know the difference between his ass and his mouth,” said Curaswani.
“But he knew my name,” said Cley.
“I spoke your name first,” said the captain. “He’s playing with you.”
The hunter shook his head and turned away from the cell. “I cannot contemplate what his statement suggested,” he said in a whisper. Without turning back to look again, he told the captain he had seen enough.
“That certainly makes two of us,” said Curaswani, replacing the torch in its holder. “Let’s get out of here. The smell of his breath is all over the place. Good-bye, Brisden.”
“You’ll be seeing me soon,” said the voice from the shadows.
Once out of the cellar, Cley asked Curaswani for a glass of whiskey. No demon or Wraith had ever upset him the way the sight of Brisden had.
During a very cold night watch, Cley and Dat crouched in the shadows beneath the southern catwalk, with Wood sitting between them. The stars and moon were brilliant, and there was a fierce wind whipping down from the north. The young man broke the silence and confessed to Cley that even though he had told all of the other soldiers that he had lost his eye in a knife fight over a girl, it had really been a beating from his drunken father that had blinded him.
The hunter’s first thought was to ask why the youth was telling him this, but instead he held his tongue. When the wind finally died down for a short spell, he said, “I’ve heard you tell that story about the girl, and you tell it well.”
Dat nodded.
“I’d stick with it,” said Cley.
Willa Olsen walked through the compound now on those afternoons when it didn’t snow. She carried Wraith bundled in three blankets. The soldiers nodded to her and smiled, but she said nothing in response. Like a sleepwalker, she trod the perimeter of the wall once, and then returned to her room.
Cley and Dat took a large buck in the marsh to the north of the fort one day. When the hunter cut into it, he found it had no heart.
At the same moment that Wood lunged across the compound, barking and growling after an invisible enemy near the eastern wall, a knife blade suddenly appeared out of nothing and, in one fluid movement, sliced the throat of Private Soames where he stood on the southern catwalk. Weems and Cley, through their practiced routine of lantern and pistol shots, dispatched the Wraith on the ground as the body of Soames fell from on high into the snow of the compound.
In the bright moonlight, Dat, on the northern catwalk, spotted the floating knife blade that had killed Soames. Praying for a right-handed Wraith, he quickly calculated the distance from the hand to the heart of a normal-sized man and shot. There was a scream and a dark spot of blood in the air, but he did not wait to see what would happen. In seconds, he loaded the rifle again, brought it to his shoulder, and without bothering to use the sight, fired. Only when the bleeding wounds appeared to fall upon Soames’s body did he leap off his perch and run to join Cley and Weems.
“There may be more,” said Weems, pointing to the still-barking dog. As he spoke, the door of the captain’s quarters opened with a creak, as if of its own volition.
Before any of them could run to Curaswani’s rescue, a pistol shot sounded from inside the low structure, followed by a scream from Morgana.
; Cley, Weems, Dat, and the other men on sentry duty made for the open doorway, with Wood in the lead. As the hunter entered the one large room, he reloaded his pistol. There, in the far corner, next to the fireplace, Curaswani and Morgana were lying together on the large cot where the captain slept. He was in an indelicate position atop the old woman, whose legs encircled the military man. In her hand, she held a smoking pistol.
Cley looked down at the floor and saw, next to the table at which he and the captain took their afternoon whiskey, a fist-sized wound, leaking onto the planks.
Morgana was smiling broadly. “I saw it moving through the lingering pipe smoke,” she said.
“That scream, though,” said Cley. “I thought you were done for.”
“That was her victory cry, so to speak,” said the captain.
“I grabbed the pistol right out of his belt and just pulled the trigger,” said the old woman.
“Nice shot, madam,” said Cley, who tried to block the doorway so that the soldiers behind him could not see in.
“Cley,” said Curaswani.
“Yes?” asked the hunter.
“Close the door.”
Cley did as he was requested and a few minutes later the captain appeared, fully clothed in the compound. The other men were standing around the body of Soames, and Weems was telling the others how the dead private had left behind, in the realm, a wife and two children.
Obviously not wanting to give grief a chance to set in, Curaswani ordered the men to materialize the bodies of the dead Wraiths and burn them outside the fort. He told Weems to put together a detail to hack a hole in the earth off the western wall for Soames’s burial. “Quickly,” he said.
The soldiers moved slowly, and one young man was overcome with tears. The captain put his hand on the private’s shoulder. “We’ve got to move, Private Hast,” he said, “or we’ll all wind up like Soames. Stay with me, boy. I need everyone.” Hast nodded, and he and the others moved off.
