Passages

by Olan Thorensen

  After pouring a small portion of oil into his hand, he worked it into his ash-coated hair and beard, then shaved carefully with the knife. In the dark, he assumed he’d missed places, and he knew he’d nicked himself in multiple spots by the time he finished. No matter. A little blood would make less of an impression than a man with a shaved head and face. The unconscious guard would report a man with gray hair and beard, while any other witness would claim to have seen a clean-shaven man.

  His final preparation lay within one of the boxes he’d pointed the guard to. Mark strapped on a harness he’d paid a leathergoods worker handsomely to make for him on a rush basis. Four pistols went into the holsters. He hadn’t brought along the materials for reloading—it would be fire and drop. A second knife went into a tight sheath at his left shoulder, the knife handle facing down, so he could jerk the knife out with his right hand.

  An ax handle completed his armament. He’d briefly considered a large bladed weapon, but he had no experience with swords, spears were too unwieldy for close-in fighting, and he decided swinging something similar to a baseball bat would likely be as effective as the other options.

  Ready, he relieved the guard of the door key, then picked up the guard’s musket and pistol. He hoped he wouldn’t have to depend on them because he hadn’t done the loading, but he’d leave them inside as an emergency backup.

  He went to the front door and paused, key inches from the lock.

  Is this the stupidest clown act in history or not? he wondered. I must look like something out of a fantasy video action game.

  It flashed through his mind that he still had time to back out and leave. Then . . . no. He’d already killed Rynlow, leader of the raid on Tregallon and responsible for Holt’s death, but Klinster had given the original orders and set the tone for the entire guild hierarchy. The dumon waited on the top floor. Mark pushed the key into the lock and turned it.

  Against his expectations, the large foyer seemed well lit. Two whale oil lanterns on opposite sides of the space appeared almost glaring to Mark’s dark-adjusted eyes. However, they revealed no guards—an observation he immediately had to amend.

  “Mamyl. That you? You know you’re supposed to pull the bell cord once if it’s just you and twice if it’s a guild member.”

  Well . . . no, I don’t know that, thought Mark, as he quietly put the first guard’s weapons next to the door and then raced to the wide staircase. The voice had come from somewhere higher in the building.

  “Mamyl?”

  “Yeah,” uttered Mark in an abysmal imitation.

  “Well, do what you’re supposed to be doing, or I’ll have to report you next time.”

  Mark assumed the faint light from above came from more of the small lanterns. He was two-thirds of the way to the second floor. He could tell the second guard was closer because he heard boots on marble coming in his direction.

  Mark pulled a pistol with his left hand. He was ambidextrous enough to be confident the off-hand could handle the pistol while the right hand was free to wield the ax handle. If possible, he didn’t want to alert the third guard, Klinster, or anyone else Mark didn’t expect to be in the building.

  He reached the second floor just as a man with a musket came into view ten feet away. Mark rushed as the guard pulled the musket off his shoulder. Mark’s swing with the ax handle parried the musket barrel.

  The man brought the musket stock up to catch Mark under the chin. Mark moved his head just enough that the handle only grazed him, instead of breaking his jaw, but it clipped the pistol and sent it flying across the floor.

  Both men cursed, loud, one in Frangelese, one in English.

  They were too close to each other for Mark to swing the club again. He dropped the ax handle and grappled to prevent the guard from firing or swinging the musket. Cheek to cheek, chest to chest, the two men were of the same height, though Mark had a weight advantage. His strength began to assert itself.

  Legs alternately intertwined and braced apart, torsos twisted as the two men strained against each other. The guard was forced back until he hit a wall. Mark rotated his lower body perpendicular to the guard and pulled him into a hip throw. The guard grunted once at the unexpected move and a louder, second time as he hit the floor.

  Mark pulled the knife out of his chest sheath and stabbed the guard just below the rib cage. The man’s body spasmed, his eyes popped wide, and his mouth opened to scream. Mark prevented this by jamming his left hand over the man’s mouth.

  He stabbed the guard a second time, this thrust near the first wound but angled upward at the diaphragm and the heart. The blade pierced something vital because the man jerked once and went slack. Mark lay on top of him for several seconds. The man’s chest rose once, then fell slowly and didn’t move again.

  Panting, Mark wiped the blade on the guard’s clothing, then retrieved the dropped pistol. He raised his head to listen, wondering whether the fight had been heard. Only the faint ticking of a clock came from somewhere in the building.

  He climbed off the body and checked himself. He’d come through with only a few future bruises and a shallow gouge along his cheek where the musket’s edge had furrowed. It bled, but not enough to deal with.

  He took several deep breaths, dragged the body into a nearby room, and started up the next flight of stairs. They were narrower than those leading to the second floor.

  Third floor. Nobody and no sound. Another small lantern glowed in an alcove opposite the stairs, the same position as on the second floor.

  Just before he reached the top of the fourth floor, Mark decided the time for stealth was about over. He left the ax handle leaning against the stairwell wall and continued, pistols in both hands.

  Fourth floor, nothing, but he froze. A new sound came from the top floor. Boots shuffling on the marble flooring? Clothes rustling? He didn’t know.

  When he was six steps from the top, the same sounds recurred, from the same approximate location, and probably closer only because of his movement.

  According to Rynlow, the top floor had a single door twelve to fifteen feet away in line with the stairs—the door to the dumon’s residence.

  The third guard was supposed to be standing beside the door. When Mark came into view, the guard would have seconds to respond before Mark would be on him—seconds that were enough to bring a musket into play.

  CHAPTER 18

  A DEBT PAID

  Mark leaped onto the fifth-floor landing. He fired both pistols at the startled guard who was leveling his musket to aim. Both balls hit the guard’s chest with eruptions of blood. He staggered against the door and slid to the floor. One of the balls had passed through the guard’s body and left a hole surrounded by blood splatter on the dumon’s door.

  Mark ignored the guard’s blood, still pumping, and eyes following his assailant.

  Mark dropped the two expended pistols, plucked a pistol out of the guard’s belt and stuck it in his own waist, and pulled out his other two pistols. He tried the door latch. It was locked. He stepped back and kicked just behind the latch as hard as he could. He heard something break, but the door didn’t open. He kicked again. This time the door gave so suddenly, he stumbled and almost fell on the guard’s body.

  Recovering, Mark ran into a large room lavishly decorated with paintings, crystal ornaments and vases, and bookcases lined with leather-bound books. An opening led to another opulent room, this one with windows on two sides. In the middle of the room was a bed whose occupant, until moments earlier, had been sleeping. Now Dumon Klinster stood by the bed, a raised pistol in one hand and a second hanging by his side.

  Mark and Klinster fired at the same time, both missing their targets. Both dropped their first pistol, raised their second, and again fired together. Both men hit their targets.

  Mark spun halfway around and felt a searing pain on the outside of his left thigh. When he whirled back, Klinster lay on the bed clutching his side, where Mark’s ball had struck him.

  “D
on’t you know who I am? I’m Dumon Klinster! Robbing the guild hall is bad enough. Killing me will have all the guilds after you for the rest of your short life, no matter where you run to.”

  Mark snarled as he pulled the guard’s pistol from his waist. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing but a pile of shit. In fact, I do shit a disservice by saying that. I guess I don’t have the words, at least not in your language. As varied and colorful as English can be, even then I can’t recall a vile enough word for a man who would order the torture and murder of innocent people. You’ve probably done the same before and worse.”

  Klinster blinked, confusion mixing with pain from his wound. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t recognize me, do you? Look again. Imagine me with a full brown beard and head of hair. Imagine you’d met with me months ago and never expected to see me again.”

  The dumon’s expression morphed from confusion to recognition to fear. “Kaldwel!”

  “Bingo! Pay the man by the bed the boobie prize. Unfortunately, you won’t live long enough to enjoy the win.”

  Mark raised the guard’s pistol.

  “NO! WAIT! I’m a dumon! I can pay you anything you—”

  CRACK!

  The ball hit just below the man’s windpipe and forestalled further words.

  Mark wanted to turn away. There was no logical reason to stay and watch the last light leave Klinster’s eyes and his last struggle for breath from lungs and a windpipe filling with blood. Mark should be leaving. He shouldn’t watch almost with pleasure the FINAL moments of another human’s life. Unfortunately, what he should do was irrelevant. Preeminent was his need to see Klinster die.

  The wait was short. Less than two minutes after the two men fired, Yyslin Klinster, the Seventeenth Dumon of the Cloth Guild of Brawsea, the third-richest man in Frangel, a man feared and listened to by even the Frangel royal court, died at the hand of Mark Caldwell, a stranger from a farther distance than any human on Anyar could imagine.

  Mark was disappointed. The anticipated satisfaction failed to materialize. Killing Klinster and Rynlow didn’t bring back Holt and Ulwyn. Dayna and Gwanel would continue mourning their husbands. Gone, too, were Mark’s visions of transforming Anyar.

  He needed to go. Reflection could come later. Maybe the guard in the alley was already awake. Someone might have heard the pistol shots. Maybe something else unexpected could happen.

  He pulled down his pants to check his wound, just now starting to hurt like hell as the adrenaline washed out of his blood. It was a clean shot, hitting about an inch from the edge of the outer thigh and going straight through. Klinster’s pistols were small-bore, easily concealable weapons—fortunately for Mark. The hole was smaller than the one in Klinster’s throat.

  Mark, in a moment of swirling thoughts, cursed the aliens. He wished the modifications of his biology had included tougher skin to go along with faster healing.

  His bleeding had already slowed to only a trickle. He cut off a piece of Klinster’s nightshirt, a section devoid of blood, and tied a wad of the cloth on the entrance and exit wounds, then secured them with a strip of the same cloth. If his past experience on Anyar was any predictor, the wound would slow him down only for the first few days, though residual pain and stiffness would linger. Complete healing would be faster than on Earth, though not as swift as before the stirkin’s sting.

  He dropped the guard’s pistol by Klinster’s body and holstered his own two pistols. Outside the apartment, he retrieved his other two pistols and picked up the third guard’s musket. To his surprise, he’d survived. Now, getting away was the priority. From the fifth floor he descended, limping, and stopped only to listen at each floor before continuing.

  “Hello?”

  Mark froze, as his foot touched the bottom of the stairs from the third to second floor.

  “Hello? Why is the door open? Where’s the guard? Is something wrong?”

  The man’s voice was tentative.

  Damn, just what I need. Some early working staff showing up. Probably he’s never found the door open and unattended, Mark thought. He didn’t want to kill anyone else—that urge was satiated. But he had to GO.

  “Nothing wrong,” he called out. “Another guard had an accident. I’ll be right down to relock and man the door. Where do you work?”

  “Third floor. Accounting.”

  “Hurry on up and stay where you work until I come tell you otherwise.”

  Mark ducked into the second-floor room with the second guard’s body. When he peered out the cracked door, he witnessed a fortyish man scurry up the stairs.

  After he heard a door close, he took the remaining stairs down three at a time, momentarily oblivious to his wound. At the first floor, he left the musket, exited the front door, locked it, and turned to walk away. Two men outside stood staring at him. Three more watched, stationary, from a farther distance. All five men looked confused.

  Mark could imagine the situation from their standpoint—a strange man, not the regular guard or doorman, bald head and clean shaven with multiple nicks and abrasions, pistols everywhere on his body, locking the hall’s main door

  “Nothing to worry about,” Mark called out. “Just a disturbance inside. Dumon Klinster told me to tell you to wait here until the guard comes to open the door.”

  With that, Mark walked off, ignoring their questions. A block later, he threw the key onto a pile of trash in an alley.

  CHAPTER 19

  WANDER SOUTH

  Mark reached the inn as the sun edged above the eastern horizon. The owner asked no questions when Mark returned the cart. Nevertheless, Mark commented that he’d used it to make a series of nighttime deliveries from farms near Brawsea to local markets. He explained his lack of head hair as the result of a job where tar became tangled in one side of his beard and hair. The easiest solution was to shave it all off. He also informed the innkeeper that a job offer in a town east of the capital meant he was leaving as soon as he packed his belongings.

  An hour later, Mark rode east two miles, then turned south across open grass country. He had bought two quality horses and gear in anticipation of fleeing Brawsea. The purchases were both rational and an effort to convince himself he wasn’t on a suicide crusade. The riding horse was a large, well-muscled chestnut. The roan packhorse carried enough food for three sixdays and gear for camping.

  Mark hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours. Though he couldn’t predict the immediate or longer-term response to the night’s events, he accepted that the results might be seismic. He wanted to get well away from Brawsea.

  The grassland changed into farm country with dirt roads, one of which he followed south toward a forest. In the late afternoon, he crested a hill and could see the sun a hand’s breadth above the western horizon. Worried that he’d fall off the horse from sleep deprivation, he rode off the road two hundred yards and staked his two horses amid grass and adjacent to a pond. Under an oak-like tree, he spread a blanket and fell asleep seconds after lying down.

  In the next sixday, he drifted south-southeast fifty miles by his estimate, avoiding villages or other human habitations. His wound, though not infected, ached enough from riding that the discomfort wore on him. He found a small glade among tall rock outcroppings that provided isolation from the nearest road and eyes that could report a strange man with a shaved head and beard. For two sixdays, he waited for the wound to heal and enough hair to grow so he wouldn’t be as noticeable among the rural population, where hairstyle varieties were limited.

  He spent much of the time sleeping, in addition to walking near the camp, sitting in the shade of an Anyar tree, and staring at a small fire after sunset. There were hours of contemplation and recollection. He recalled his life on Earth—from his earliest memories to the last day. Had Hal told the truth about the aliens’ intentions? If yes, that meant a second group of aliens had transplanted organisms from Earth to Anyar thousands of years ago. Why? If there were other survivors of the United fli
ght, could there be other humans from Earth on Anyar? These and others weren’t new questions, and he never expected to get answers.

  Then there were the hours he spent thinking about his second life, from waking up on the beach at Derwun Bay to the current moment. The initial adjustment. Learning a new language. Planning for all the innovations he could introduce if he just had the resources. Tregallon. Safety pins, leaf springs, and weaving. Kaledon. Brawsea. Always ending with Holt’s death and the results of the Tregallon raid. The hours he spent going over the technological inventions he’d introduced kept coming back to an acknowledgment that he had ignored possible consequences, particularly for weaving. The warning signs were there, but his arrogance—thinking he could handle any problems—was unforgivable. Even after Holt’s death and during his rush to return to Tregallon, it was only in the last hours before he arrived that most of his worry shifted from the weaving factory to the people. He would carry the guilt the rest of this life.

  When he resumed moving south, he covered another hundred miles before stopping in a village to buy food—bread, cheese, dried meat, and a sack of a fruit he didn’t recognize but that had a taste and texture similar to persimmons. The woman at the market assured him the fruit would last several sixdays without spoiling if he kept it out of direct sunlight.

  He continued south for another four sixdays after leaving Brawsea. When his pack animal lost a shoe, he looked for a blacksmith several miles ahead in a larger-than-average village—not quite big enough to be called a town. While re-shoeing the horse, the burly smith asked whether Mark had done blacksmith work.