by Scott Lynch
“Oh, come on now, Timepiece,” said Sload. “There’s no need for that!”
“Shut it.” Timepiece twirled his sad little shooter languorously and didn’t take his eyes off the stranger. “See, someone makes noise about my honor, I’ll make noise of my own. But I’ll go all the way. All the way, get it?”
“If you had any notion of honor,” said the stranger, his voice cold, “you’d carry a good piece, and you wouldn’t keep it in a metal purse, and you wouldn’t pull it just to make yourself forget how small you are.”
Almighty gods. I thought I’d had everyone’s attention when I mouthed off to Timepiece. Jozan and Molly were clutching the table, they were so excited. Tychus Sload had a look on his face like he was about to shit twenty pounds of hot bricks.
“Show us your iron, you clown!” shouted Timepiece.
The stranger flicked the lapels of his wind-worn duster open just enough to show what he was carrying— a plain leather belt above his slim-hipped jeans. Not a holster in sight.
“I think you’re gonna be awfully surprised if you figure you can hide behind that fact that you ain’t running heeled,” said Timepiece.
“I think your opinions are as worthless as your honor,” said the stranger.
Timepiece’s gun came up. It was dead center on the stranger’s chest from six feet away.
“Mister, you ain’t drunk and you’re provoking me awful fierce. So I tell you now, I swear to the gods, you find a gun or you borrow one, or I’ll put you down like a dog right here on Sload’s floor!”
“You are provoked,” said the stranger. “I invite you to do something about it.”
“Mister, arm your damn self right now.” Timepiece was steady, I’ll give him that. He moved his thumb, and two pregnant sounds echoed across the diversion parlor. Half cock. Full cock. “I AIN’T KIDDING!”
“I don’t need any other weapon.” The stranger hooked his thumbs in his duster pockets and rolled his shoulders, making a soft crackling noise. “The one you’re holding will be entirely sufficient.”
Three seconds went by like three years. Timepiece’s gun hand was still steady, but I could see the rest of him, and he was heaving. Disbelieving. One angry breath. Two angry breaths.
Three. There was a sound like rope snapping taut, then the room shook to the thunder-crash of that little gun.
If nobody’s ever let off a shot nearby while you’re under a roof, let me assure you, your ears will ring like they’ve been boxed. My jaw went wide open with the pain of it, and it took me a moment or two to piece together what I’d seen.
The encounter had not concluded to Timepiece’s advantage.
That snapping sound had been his right wrist. When his brain had told his finger to pull the trigger, he’d been looking down the barrel at the stranger’s chest. By the time his finger got the message, the stranger had somehow moved and forcibly reversed Timepiece’s gun hand. One hundred and eighty degrees, honorable reader, then thunderclap. Right in the heart.
Timepiece spun as he fell backward. His metal arm slammed down hard, scattering clipped silver pieces, and anchored him there grotesquely as though he’d been frozen in the act of crawling up onto the table. As the smell of gunsmoke wafted past me, Timepiece’s arm went into death-jitters and started spitting up cards.
Snick, snick, snick, snick, snick went the dead man’s last deal, into the stunned silence. The stranger stood there holding Timepiece’s ivory-handled gun, almost disdainfully, while snick snick, snick, the cards shot out into a meaningless pile in front of me.
Molly made the first move after that. Her temper, I guess. She had a belt-buckle gun that weighed half a pound and was chambered to heave real metal, a pair of coin-sized shells. She’d shown it off once or twice, and it had scared me then. It scared me even worse now that she tore it out and banged off a shot at the stranger.
Again, double-thunderclaps, double flashes like lightning. I heard the sharp bangs and then a strange underwater sort of echo. My ears weren’t pleased at all.
Molly and the stranger had fired at one another across a space of seven feet. There was hardly any way to miss, and yet Molly hadn’t quite hit.
There in front of me, rolling around and smoking atop the pile of cards, was a little gray object like two metal mushrooms slammed together. Two bullets tip to tip.
Molly hadn’t quite hit. The stranger definitely hadn’t missed.
That right there would have been enough for most folks. Enough to know they were up against some hard old kung fu straight off the Dust Road. Mysteries that ordinary folk ought to step aside for, if not take to their heels outright. Yet by the same token, this stranger was an opportunity. For deadbeats like Timepiece and Molly and Jozan, when they hunker down in a place like Ain’t That Something it means they’re as far from glory as the living can get. But if you could throw down with someone who had the real art, if you could win a wild fight, well, maybe you could crawl back on the path to making your name a Name.
That’s why Molly saw the evidence and unloaded her second shot anyway.
Flash-and-thunder, flash-and-thunder. Something hot stung the top of my hand and at last the petrification of my wits came to an end. I flinched away from the table, staring down at the red welt where the second lump of fused bullets had landed just behind my right knuckles.
The stranger must have figured he’d made his point. His next shot knocked Molly out of her chair with a dark red hole above her left breast.
That brought Jozan to his feet, as fast as Jozan had ever moved in the time I’d known him. While I scrambled for the nearest wall, he drunkenly swung up that hand-me-down carriage gun of his.
“I’d love to see you try and knock down a cloud of buckshot, old man!” Jozan hollered. I could make out the words, but everything sounded flat and wrong, with a steady ringing behind it.
“That’s exactly why I won’t,” said the stranger.
“They call me Scattergun Shung!”
“Nobody calls you that,” said the stranger, gently, “except when you’re alone in front of a mirror.”
Jozan opened his mouth to say something else and the stranger fired from the hip. Jozan’s would-be retort was transmuted to a scream, and when he held up his right hand I saw that the stranger had taken off his trigger finger, right down to the bottom knuckle. Neat as any sawbones and a fair sight faster.
The stranger folded his arms and waited.
Jozan shuddered, sobbed, and then awkwardly shifted his carriage gun, cradling it with his blood-streaming right hand while he reached for the triggers with his left.
“You can lead a horse to water,” sighed the stranger. His final shot gave Jozan the dubious honor of a third eye, directly between the other two. A heavy heap of surprised dead man hit Tychus Sload’s formerly clean floor.
The air smelled like whiskey, blood, and brimstone. Clouds of gray smoke drifted up over the card table and got lost in the dark corners of the room. The stranger tossed Timepiece’s empty pistol down beside its owner, then turned toward the door.
“Hells and ancestors,” I whispered. I was still drunk, and I was struck pretty dumb by what had just happened. Again, I’d like to blame what came next on all that, and on the stranger. But I did what I did for the same reason Molly and Jozan had thrown their lives away. That stranger and his mysteries were the only ticket out of Ain’t That Something the gods seemed likely to punch.
“Take me with you,” I hissed.
The stranger stopped, and without turning around he said: “The hell would I do that for?”
“Teach me.”
“Walk east long enough and I’m sure you’ll find an Imperial grammar academy.”
“Sir, I’ve got nothing holding me here,” I said. “I’ve got nothing holding me anywhere. I don’t know how to fight and I don’t know how to shoot, but you saved my life and I’ll follow you anywhere you want me to.”
Now he turned. His eyes were like the holes in the night sky where there ar
en’t any stars. I felt about ten years old and three feet high.
“What arts do you have?” he said.
“Well, I’m, uh. . . a scrivener, of sorts. When there was supposed to be a silver mine here, that meant business offices and contracts and mail—“
His soft laughter shut me up.
“There’s no contracts and no mail on the Dust Road, boy.”
“Then I guess I’ll quit being a scrivener. Teach me.”
He stared at me. I felt steel-plated fear gathering in my guts. The last three people who’d annoyed him hadn’t even been dead for three minutes.
“Timepiece,” he said, pointing at the previous owner of that name. His finger tracked across the bodies. “Hot Molly. One-Finger Shung. You got a toy name I ought to know about?”
“Uh, no sir. I’m. . . Andus Cadwallader. I never did anything to, uh, get a more colorful one. And I didn’t use my real name much. . . I mean, who’s gonna respect an Andus Cadwallader in a place like this?”
“If no one respects Andus Cadwallader,” he said, “it’s because you don’t respect Andus Cadwallader.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I bowed my head like a damned little kid.
“If you’re coming with me,” he said after a long silence, “I’ll call you Stray. You’ll be Stray until you grow into something else. . . maybe even Andus Cadwallader.”
“What do I. . . what do I call you, master?”
I let that word out without thinking about it, and he didn’t correct me.
“If you have to call me anything, you might as well call me False Note.”
A fresh metallic sound echoed across the main room of the Lucky Sky Diamond. Tychus Sload was still behind the bar, but he was fixing to rejoin the conversation, this time over the barrels of his own shotgun. Both hammers were cocked.
“Now you just hold it there,” he said. All the blood had gone right out of his face. “Maybe that was self-defense, mister. Maybe you ain’t done nothing wrong. But there’s. . . there’s gonna be questions. We gotta get the sheriff in here. And you gotta stay.”
The sheriff! Sure, Ain’t That Something had a fellow with a badge and a gun. The gun was hung on a wall, the badge was pinned to three hundred pounds of pickled lard. If the sheriff kept his usual habits, he’d be awake to ask questions around the middle of the next afternoon.
“Conversation with your sheriff is no enticement,” said False Note. “And neither is your tea, I’m afraid.”
“Then you’ll just have to be enticed by my shotgun.”
False Note didn’t have to say anything. The look on his face conveyed the profoundest sort of disappointment.
“Don’t get cute,” said Sload. “That was fancy work with them drunks at kissing distance. I’m thirty feet away and you ain’t armed.”
“That’s true,” said False Note. “I’m not armed. At the moment.”
I saw the workings of Sload’s throat bulge and bob as he tried to dry-swallow his fear. The gun wavered.
“Last call, barkeep.” False Note again hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his duster, again rolled his shoulders. “Someone’s getting paid to dig three graves tomorrow. Work’s so thin around here, you think they’d miss you if I made it four?”
The gun went down, and then it went back beneath the counter, and that’s why Tychus Sload lived long enough to leave this story on his own terms.
False Note nodded, then turned back to me. “I’ve got someone on my backtrail, Stray. Maybe coming faster now if they get wind of this. You still want to come with?”
“I said I’d follow you anywhere, Master False Note.”
“You don’t know a godsdamned thing,” he said. It was next to a whisper. But he didn’t tell me to go away.
“Should I maybe gather up these guns, master?” I said. “You might want to be armed if you’ve got. . . well, trouble following.”
“Oh, I’ve got a gun. Packed away. I’m not quite ready to wear it yet.” He smiled. “As for these unworthy things, leave them. If the need arises, I’ll find someone else to take one from.”
Master False Note turned and went out into the night. Those were his last words for some time. I followed, unsteady on my feet. It took three days for that ringing in my ears to go away.
2
The gods sent rain to chase us out of Ain’t That Something, gray tumbling lines of it that might have been cold when they left the high country but came down warm as horse lather.
False Note, as indifferent to weather as he was to shots fired in anger, rode out on a fine horse accustomed to his voice and habits. I had Hot Molly’s four-legged disaster. I named her Hand-Me-Down, but she answered just as well to long strings of random blasphemies. We headed south, keeping our distance from the hacked-out wagon road but moving parallel to it.
Now, I was no stranger to riding moderately hard and sleeping rough. I’d been away from the comforts of actual civilization long enough to grow some calluses on my delicacy. Still, my elation at escaping from my exile was soon as damp and saddle-sore as the rest of me, and False Note, while cordial in his cool fashion, was in no hurry to unravel the mysteries of his history, plans, or destination.
“Were you a Ranger?” I asked one night as we made our camp during a pause in the rain. After a long silence, I added: “It’s just that… the things I hear they do with guns, well, one might assume—“
“Stray,” he said, “are you ready to take some instruction?”
“Oh, I. . . well, of course!”
“Make a fire.”
We’d been out for four or five nights, and it was the first time he’d permitted light after sunset. After much prayer and furious fussing, I eventually conjured a weak, flickering smoker. From his gear, False Note brought forth a lacquered wooden box, secured on three sides with brass clasps.
When he opened it, I saw that half the padded interior was lined with cylinders and the other half with an assortment of paper envelopes. “Cartridges,” he said, one finger hovering over the cylinders. He moved it to the other side of the box and said, “Tea.”
I nodded.
“On the trail you might be wet. Your clothes might be wet. Horses might be wet. Water might be falling so heavy it’s leaking through your eyeballs and filling your skull. But these you keep dry.” He shut the box again and snapped all of its clasps tight. “If you can’t keep the cartridges dry, you won’t live. And if you can’t keep the tea dry, why would you want to?”
He stowed the box, and when he returned he said: “Now, we’ll discuss how to boil water properly.”
My tutelage had begun. In the preparation of tea.
Four more days we headed south. The rains passed and each night we camped beneath the silver light of Wolf and Rabbit. Each night I discovered just how much consideration one man could give to the subject of leaves steeped in boiling water.
“This is Jononzal Resplendent Thorn,” said Master False Note, waving one of his paper packets at me. “Smell that faintest hint of dragon cactus? When you smell that, Stray, you’ll know you must dash it in cool water and let it sit for at least a quarter of an hour before you place it in the—“
“Master False Note,” I snapped at last, “begging your pardon, I like tea as much as the next man, and you do make a fine cup, but this is all it’s been for night after night now. Tea. Sifting, boiling, serving. Smelling, tasting. Over and over again! How can I be of use to you like this?”
“I’m a scant fraction of a man when tea and I don’t keep our usual appointments.”
“That wasn’t tea you were serving in the Lucky Sky Diamond!”
“Ah.” False Note returned the Jononzal Resplendent Thorn to his box and I swear I felt his disappointment like a physical weight. “You look at kung fu and you only see results.”
“Results? What else am I meant to see?”
He said nothing, and by the way he said it I deduced that I was expected to fill the silence.
“I see results like me
not being dead at Timepiece’s hand!”
“That bravo with the ridiculous arm wasn’t defeated a week ago,” said False Note. “He was beaten before you were born, Stray. Nor was he defeated by the way I handle a weapon. He was beaten by the way I select tea. By the way I brew it. The way I wake up and go to sleep. The way I choose a horse and sit its back. The way I look at the sky.”
“But—“
“I’m speaking of the pursuit of excellence in all things. All things! Presence of mind and devotion to craft. A great artist has these. A great chef. A great master of tea. There’s powerful kung fu in a well-built house or an eloquent letter, but the limit of your imagination is bones breaking and bullets flying. Why do you believe I interfered with that business in Sload’s parlor?”
I hemmed and hawed and made nervous circles in the dirt with my bootheels. At last shame, which I possessed in more abundance than sense, drove me to swallow my modesty and reply. How could I follow this man into the middle of nowhere, relying on him for all things, if I wasn’t willing to be honest with him?
“I assumed,” I said, “that I’d done something brave.”
“I thought as much.” False Note smiled thinly. “Bravery is cheap. Bravery is common. Bravery is what’s put just about every man or woman I’ve ever killed in the way of my guns.
“Timepiece offended you, Stray. But it wasn’t merely because he was cheating you. That would have been an animal reaction, howling senselessly because something had taken your food. For that I would have sat quietly and let you die. Instead, you were offended because your opponent was boring. Now, that was a human reaction. A perceptive reaction. Only the perceptive student can be taught anything meaningful.”
He handed me his box of tea and cartridges. “Count six shells and pass them over,” he said. By the time I’d done so, he’d rummaged in his gear and produced a clean, sturdy-looking revolver. He flipped the loading gate, and the motions of his fingers were almost hypnotically smooth as he rotated the cylinder and slid the cartridges home. When finished he thumbed the hammer back and held the weapon out to me, barrel downward.
