by Scott Lynch
A peek around the bar revealed Hollowaigh on his belly, with one leg up through the door in the floor, squinting against the smoke billowing up around him. No way Hollowaigh could make a decent shot like that. Redhand kept climbing. Above him was a window that led to the port-side walkway of the airship—but Redhand would have to come out from behind the bar to get through it. Behind the bar was a door leading back to some modest storeroom and office, a corkboard dangling wild on a loose hook in the wall.
Another shot from Hollowaigh, another wound to the bar. Then Hollowaigh was groaning and dashing toward the bar, glasses rolling about around his feet.
Redhand drew his hand-cannon with his left hand, his broken ring finger jutting out, put his arm around the bar and fired one barrel blind, aiming down. The shot went wide. Hollowaigh ducked instinctively, tripped on a brass sconce curling from the hot floor, and tumbled into the bar.
Something gave way in the rear of the airship. The back of the room sagged and Redhand found the bar angling above him. Hanging from his good hand, he wrapped one leg around the edge of the bar and pushed off with the other to slide down the stretch of polished wood and brass like a pole.
Hollowaigh fired a panic shot. Redhand slammed into him feet first.
Hollowaigh stumbled back against what was now the wall and immediately pushed off of it.
Redhand moved to fire his last barrel from the hip. Hollowaigh straightened his arm, gun pointed at Redhand’s chest.
The room tumbled upward as the hull banged against the prairie below. Fingers of fire flashed through the walls and floor, spitting cinders into the room. Broken pint glasses and teacups arced through the air.
Redhand grabbed the bar with his good hand as the room flopped. Hollowaigh went backward, squeezed a shot into the mirror behind the bar, and was buried as the barroom tables and chairs came tumbling down the sloping room in the flailing hull.
The walls shivered and split as the sinking airship gouged the prairie, the hull snagging on the earth in a plume of smoke and dirt.
The house that Redhand built for his wife, Abigail Marsdan, stood on the side of a modest hill crowned by a great oak tree. It was two stories of yellow boards capped with three gabled roofs. Wildflowers swayed when the wind came across the hillside. They were bright white even in the night, seemingly shining in the glow of the Rushing Rabbit’s quick course across the starry sky.
Half the house was burned out, leaving it blackened and hollowed like a rotten tooth. A dozen townsfolk stood around the place with lanterns and torches and wet buckets drawn up from the crick at the base of the hill. Each one with a lantern was a bright collar and a fire-lit face hovering in the night; each one without was a dark shape against the backdrop of wildflowers and stars. Somewhere in the dark and the long grass, Redhand’s dog was running, barking.
The folk made way for a new pair of shapes coming up the hillside. A horse complained below. One of the new shapes lit the lantern it held and the pale light revealed a ginger-bearded face and high, arched brows beneath a simple hat—Hollowaigh.
The other new shape stood backlit by the lantern. It had the crisp collar and tailored shoulders of wealth and smelled like citrus and cigars. It drew a wad of bright silk from its breast pocket, unfolded a handkerchief, and held it to over its mouth. The other hand held out a brassy badge so it caught the lantern light. The badge was a palm-sized shield emblazoned with twin eagles.
The townspeople looked to each other, nodding. One of them, an older man, pointed up at the house. A younger man gestured for the newcomers to follow him.
“I know the way,” said the voice behind the handkerchief. He strode through the crowd, up the hill, the firelight revealing the shiny paisley pattern on his cuffs and lapels.
As he passed, someone whispered to someone else, “That’s her brother. That’s Jang Marsdan.”
The dog came to the edge of the lantern light and ran sideways, barking at the crowd.
“Somebody shut that thing up before I shoot it,” Hollowaigh said. Someone separated from the crowd, snagged the dog by the collar, tried to calm it down.
The rest followed the newcomers to the foot of the front-porch steps.
Hollowaigh kept going, stopped where the front door hung open, the top of the jamb streaked with smoke. He looked back at his partner.
There, with Hollowaigh’s lantern in front of him, Marsdan’s fine red coat and silver buttons were plain to see. One hand held the handkerchief over his mouth. The other held the coat back, away from a bright silver revolver, as though he contemplated shooting the house itself.
“Should I?” Hollowaigh asked.
Marsdan shook his head and came forward. He tucked his handkerchief in a pocket and took the lantern from Hollowaigh. He stepped carefully across the threshold into the house.
A woman lay on her stomach in the front hall amid a dusting of broken glass and a smear of blood, as though she’d been dragged away from the front door. Her hair splayed out on the floorboards and in her blood.
Hollowaigh edged around his partner and stepped closer to the body. Marsdan gestured. Hollowaigh crouched down and moved the woman’s hair aside, revealing a pale face with slender, open eyes and a delicate mouth. Her bottom lip was gashed and bloody. Hollowaigh looked back and up at Marsdan.
Marsdan set the lantern on the floor. His hand was shaking.
Hollowaigh opened his mouth to speak, shut it again. Almost touched a spot where a bullet had torn through the woman’s dress, then withdrew his hand.
The wind sighed through the back of the house, wide open to night where the fire had eaten half of it away. The dog barked outside.
“Where is he?” asked Marsdan.
Hollowaigh shook his head.
“Where is he?” Marsdan asked again, over his shoulder.
“Redhand?” asked one townsperson.
“He rode,” said another. “He rode off.”
Hollowaigh stood, drew his six-gun, and stomped back out the front door. The crowd made way. Hollowaigh dropped off the porch, took two steps, pulled back the hammer and aimed his gun at Redhand’s dog.
The fellow holding its collar jumped back. The dog stood its ground, growling between barks.
One townsperson took off his hat. “It’s not what you think,” he said.
Hollowaigh turned his head to look at him.
The townsperson looked from Hollowaigh to Marsdan, who emerged from the house and stepped slowly over to stand between Hollowaigh and the townsperson. “What do we think?” Marsdan asked the townsperson.
“It wasn’t Redhand. Redhand rode off to find the bastard,” the townsperson said. “To get him.”
Marsdan raised his eyebrows. A silent question. His eyes were wet.
“Broadhorn was in town today,” another townsperson said. “Asked about Redhand.”
“Did one of you speak to Broadhorn?” Marsdan asked. In the dark, for most men, the tell would’ve been all but impossible to read—the townspeople shifting and glancing at each other. Then they all looked away from the man who mentioned Broadhorn. “You?”
The man gave a reluctant nod.
Marsdan drew his bright revolver. Its grip was silver. Rushing Rabbit’s light made it shine. “You told Broadhorn about this place?”
The man made a noise, a few babbled, defensive vowels.
Marsdan shot him. Barely moved his arm to do it.
Hollowaigh shot the dog.
The Maiden’s Breath left a long gash in the green prairie, her hull dashed to pieces here, laid out in odd segments of burned floorboards and shivered timbers there. Half of a wagon-wheel chandelier jutted from the topsoil. The corner of a stateroom lay in the grass like a rough canoe with wallpapered innards. Broken bottles and tin cups lay scattered like coins in a dry fountain.
The ship’s gasbag dragged the fore section of the wreck onward across the grass before the hull snagged on some patch of rugged ground. The bent timbers of the ship’s open belly looked like a rib
cage of splintered bone with a balloon tied to its spine.
The majority of the vessel’s passengers and crew took refuge in that forward-most part of the ship, and good thing, for the rear of the ship had torn free when the massive propeller ground into the dirt and the fire burned the frame out beneath the boilers. The back of the ship fell out, crewmen and engines with it, leaving a trail of dry flotsam in the fields.
Redhand stood on the remains of the polished wood-and-brass bar where it angled out of the grass and dirt and shielded his eyes with his good hand. The bulk of the Maiden’s Breath seemed to be tethered to its gasbag, now, by a single tenacious chain. It would be easy to spot, should anyone come looking. And they would come looking. Hollowaigh had made it clear, before the guns came out, that his cohorts were close behind him. “I only came aboard to make sure you didn’t try to vanish through some trickery,” he smiled through his orange beard, before the parlor had caught fire, “in case you still thought of yourself as some kind of Ranger.”
Now Hollowaigh’s body lay broken amid snapped barroom furniture and the barbed wire of a simple fence the ship had torn as it crossed the fields.
Redhand stepped off the bar and walked through the grass toward Hollowaigh’s body. Along the way, he pretended not to notice the other figure limping out of a patch of wreckage across the way, thin hair and thin jacket blowing about it in the wind. Redhand crouched down next to the body and went through the its coat pockets with his injured left hand. His right hand went to the pommel of the shotgun in his belt and waited there.
The limping figure took its time. Its wavering path took it out of Redhand’s peripheral vision, then brought it back in. As it came forward, it raised and waved a tentative hand. Redhand looked over at the figure but gave it no other signal.
It was some passenger out of the Periphery, by the looks of it.
His tweed jacket was torn at one shoulder, frayed like a rope, and his oiled hair now roamed about his head in the wind. A red tie was still knotted around his neck, its loose end flapping around like a pinned snake. He was at least a head shorter than Redhand. As he came closer, Redhand could see the abrasions on the man’s white skin.
The man waved again. “Hello?” he asked.
Redhand raised and lowered his head in acknowledgement.
“Is he alive?”
Redhand shook his head.
The man stopped. “Oh,” he said.
Redhand waved him over. The man approached, got close. Redhand was on him in a flash, had the man by a wrist and spun him around into a pressure hold. The man winced and gasped. “Iron?” Redhand asked him.
“What?”
“Iron!”
The man grimaced and pointed inside his jacket. “It—it’s just—”
Redhand reached inside the man’s jacket with his bloody hand and pulled out a shiny little single-shot squeeze pistol with a fat barrel and no grip. He frowned at it, let go of the man. “Sorry for the trouble,” Redhand said. “Can’t be too careful.”
The man rubbed his wrist. “That’s what I thought.”
Redhand clicked open the pistol with his thumb, like a smoker with a favorite match case, for his thumbnail under the edge of the sole round inside and flicked it out into his right hand. Then he tossed the gun back to its owner, who caught it with both hands.
“Thank you, I guess,” he said, waggling the empty pistol.
Redhand grunted and crouched down next to Hollowaigh’s body again.
“Did you… know him?” asked the other passenger.
Redhand pried out Hollowaigh’s brass shield in its wallet and tossed it into the grass. “I did, once.” Redhand checked Hollowaigh’s boot, found an empty holster for a drop pistol that must’ve fallen out in the crash. He grunted again.
“I’m Walner,” the man in tweed said.
“Walner,” Redhand said in an introductory manner. “Did you know this man?”
Walner shook his head. Redhand believed him. He walked over to a heap of smashed luggage and dug out a box of cigars and a wide coolie hat with one modest break in it. He donned it and tied its chinstrap with casual grace.
Walner went over toward Hollowaigh’s badge, bent down, picked it up. It bore the raised emblem of the Twin Eagle Security Agency, scuffed and worn. Walner turned back toward Redhand and found him standing and aiming the short shotgun in an outstretched arm.
Walner made a questioning sound.
Redhand looked at the sun, back at Walner. “We’re not far outside of Kalsi now. Less than a league, I reckon. There’s a creek west or southwest of us a bit.” Redhand paused. He didn’t mention the rail line to the east that ran south out of Kalsi.
Walner looked around. “All… all right.”
Redhand tilted his head, looked down the length of shotgun at Walner, then straightened his head again. “I ran ahead. I ran to the river.”
Walner looked confused. “I—”
“When they ask, you tell ‘em. I ran southwest, toward the river. You saw me.”
“Of course. Yes. Of course. Should I—”
“You head toward the balloon, meet up with any others. Wait for rescue.”
“For rescue.”
Redhand nodded once, lowered the shotgun. “Might need this, all the same,” he said and tossed Walner the round for his single-shot pistol.Walner looked at it in his palm. When he looked back up, Redhand was headed east across the green prairie on foot, into the deepening dusk.
At his trial a year before, Redhand testified that he found Broadhorn in a town on the outer edge of the Periphery, waiting casually on a platform for a train headed west. Broadhorn smiled when he saw Redhand, said something. Redhand couldn’t remember what.
The trial was held in an unfinished new courthouse made of unvarnished boards. The place smelled like paste and pine and a box of nails. The roof leaked over the gallery, so people wore their hats and bonnets inside. Folk from all over came to the trial, in part to see if Redhand would be punished, in part to see if his rumored past would come out—was he really once trained by a Ranger to be one of their outlawed order?
For the Imperial prosecutors, the question of Redhand’s training was as important as determining the truth about his revenge killing of Broadhorn. Redhand was evasive on one count and frank, if laconic, on the other.
In his capacity as a shootist in his small frontier town, Redhand confronted the bandit and murderer Broadhorn one chilly day at the beginning of spring. Broadhorn was huge, sunburned pink, and bald as a stone except for a beard as long as his forearm, often split by a wide and lopsided smile. Redhand came at him with a six-gun and a wanted poster with Broadhorn’s name and likeness on it.
No one disputed this part of the tale.
Redhand told Broadhorn, “I’m here to bring you in ‘fore you do anything wicked in my town.”
Broadhorn smiled and, real slow, drew his long-barreled rust-colored revolver from its holster. “I won’t ever go back to no jails,” Broadhorn said, smiling.
Redhand, jollier in those days, grinned back. “Want to wager it?”
Before the next hour chimed in the saloon’s grandfather clock, Broadhorn’s gun was in pieces, Redhand had put a bullet through the hulk’s fat leg, and Broadhorn was chained to a well.
“You’re gonna wish you’d killed me,” Broadhorn said.
No one disputed this part of the tale.
“Why didn’t you kill him then?” the Imperial prosecutor asked at Redhand’s trial. “You knew it was wrong?”
Redhand was steady. “I wasn’t a lawman or an executioner. I figured he’d hang for what he’d done before if the Magistrates deemed it so. More killing wouldn’t untie the knots he’d made before.”
By summer, Broadhorn had busted out of Imperial custody and left a pair of broken necks in his wake. He beat autumn to town, found Redhand’s home, found Abigail Marsdan, and shot her dead. The house he burned out of spite.
No one disputes this part of the tale.
Red
hand rode after Broadhorn, found him on that train platform. The prosecution had a witness: a postman from the nearby mail shack. That postman said Redhand and Broadhorn had fought on the platform as the train approached, that Redhand dodged Broadhorn’s practiced gunfire using the techniques of the infamous Ranger gun style, that Redhand dove and rolled and fired only one shot—the shot that killed Broadhorn.
When Redhand himself was asked what happened, he said, “I shot him down.”
“Have you been trained in the so-called Eight Compass Way of the outlawed Knights of the Far West?” Most folk just called them Rangers.
Redhand looked far away. “I took the shot I should have taken before.”
“You killed him?”
“Yessir, I did.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Then I waited for the law to show up.”
The judge didn’t contemplate long. Redhand nodded when his sentence came down. “One year,” said the judge, “and one day.” He put Redhand in a barred wagon bound for labor outside Drywater. Redhand left town in chains before dawn.
Abigail’s brother stood on the boardwalk outside the saloon with his partner, Hollowaigh, and watched the wagon and its orange lanterns recede into the night. He wore his fine red coat with the black paisley cuffs. He smoked a slender cigar and, once, dabbed his handkerchief to each eye. “One year,” he said.
Hollowaigh looked at his partner’s profile, shadows moving on his face from a sputtering kerosene lamp in the saloon window. “Not long enough.”
Marsdan barely shook his head, turned to face Hollowaigh, leaned in, mouth to ear. “He didn’t do what needed doing until too late. Abigail died because of him.” Hollowaigh and Marsdan looked at each other. “Can’t forgive that,”
Marsdan said. “I won’t.”
In that dark, the prairie ended where the stars began.
The earth was a band of utter black against the deep heavens. Rushing Rabbit had already completed its first run across the sky, chased by the shadowed gap in the stars that marked the position of Night Wolf, and without Rabbit’s light the fields Redhand trod were all but impossible to make out.
