by Andrew Post
“Certainly isn’t looks.”
Lodi snorted. “Exteriors. That’s all you see. Fucking sad.” She cut her gaze to Anoushka. “Also, you dears might wanna come and check on me—wouldn’t want Lyle getting the jump on us while you’re sitting down to a bowl of this one’s gruel, would we?”
“Lodi . . .” Anoushka tried.
Stepping up in the caravan, Lodi slammed the door behind her. The sound carried down the hill, drawing Peter and Ruprecht’s attention. Anoushka waved, letting them know all was fine.
Kylie-Nae stared into the cold water and floating bits of vegetables in the cook pot. “Here I thought dinner duty was gonna be the peaceful chore.”
* * *
After Zuther and Russell finally returned with some firewood and the stew had been cooked, Kylie-Nae found the metal triangle where she’d stashed it six years ago, in Joan’s floorboard compartments. Rapping it with a spoon to call Peter and Ruprecht up, she circled the campsite, banging extra hard when passing the caravan where Lodi was sleeping.
Anoushka ladled the stew for Peter and Teetee into two separate bowls and handed them to the berserker. With a nod of thanks, he took them back down the grassy slope to the waiting wolfhound, who’d remained at his post. Peter, in full armor and seated on the ground beside his four-legged companion, had his dinner. Teetee buried his head, to the ears, in his own.
Later on, passing a box of matches around for pipes and cigarettes and filling mugs with coffee or ale, they clicked on the radio. Joan’s metal worked to focus the music onto those seated outside, backs against her treads. “Living After Midnight.” Kylie-Nae and Zuther sang along, breaking into laughter. While she went to refill her mug, Zuther watched her, his smile never fading. Until he noticed Anoushka watching him.
“Evening, night owls,” DJ Cliffy Cohen came over the tinny speaker, fuzzily, “I’m signing off for the night, but I leave those out there with broken hearts with this favorite of mine . . .”
Smiles came as each, around the fire, recognized the opening strums. When Zuther requested to borrow a lute, Ruprecht parsimoniously took his time picking one from his collection. Cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, Zuther played along, beautifully, to “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”
“Talking’s not permitted at the monastery,” he explained, “but music’s encouraged. Words mess things up. Songs are from the heart.” He chuckled at himself. “Or something like that.”
Kylie-Nae watched him play—and Anoushka watched Kylie-Nae watch him. She was really looking at Zuther. Not like something he could turn to a puddle with a mere wink, but something else, something more. He could play an instrument now, Anoushka considered. That certainly might have something to do with it. Zuther, premonastery, couldn’t play to save his life. And he wasn’t half bad. It was nice to hear music, live, before them. Anoushka found herself humming. Russell drummed on his knees, his beard mostly hiding the smirk emerging. Just when the song was going to reach its rousing melancholy peak where Zuther’s skills would truly be tested, Lodi sprang out of the back of the caravan.
“What in the thirteen blazes are you doing with this thing on?” she shouted, twisting the radio’s knob, dropping them into silence.
“It’s only music,” Kylie-Nae said. “Turn it back on.”
“Use your fucking heads. The repeater? Same shit inside as a radio. We could be helping him.”
“Could be,” Kylie-Nae said. “But probably not.”
“Were you born this much of a pain in the ass? Makes me wonder if, when the Civility Initiate people came trawling you mud-slicked little brats out of the swamp, your folks didn’t throw your annoying ass to them voluntarily.”
Kylie-Nae stood. “Wanna say that again?”
“I said it makes me wonder if, when the Civility Initiative—still with me?—came trawling you mud-slicked little brats out of the swamp . . .”
“I will punch the ugly off you.”
“Ladies, please,” Ruprecht tried.
“Let’s turn the radio back on,” Zuther said, standing to take Kylie-Nae gently by the arm, “maybe one more drink, call it a night?”
“You two need to accept the fact you don’t like each other. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just how it is. But we still need to work together,” Anoushka said. She was the only one who’d remained sitting besides Russell, who simply stared into the fire, tugging on his beard, shaking his head. “Because this shit is getting really old.”
Kylie-Nae shouted, “But she killed someone, Annie!”
“How sure are you that each contract one of you assholes took on was really for the same incorrigible shit detailed in the list of their crimes?” Lodi said. “Huh? Tell me. Are you sure every one of them deserved to die? Or, blazes, were even the right person? But maybe you’re willing to trust your gut and convince yourself they were. Anything to sleep well at night, I suppose, right? It was duty, yeah? Orders are orders? Or maybe you should be like me and face the fact that you don’t really care either way; a hunch’s good enough, even if you’re wrong. And even if you were wrong, you still don’t actually care. Hard to swallow, sure, but it sure makes the job—any job—easier from that point forward, I can personally attest. I don’t care about any of you. Or myself. Doesn’t make me a real chummy individual, no, but it’s honest. It’s real. Unlike you fucks pretending to be fun-loving outlaws with your big talk about how you’re the good guys.” Lodi was directing most of this at Anoushka. “But go ahead. Have your music. Let him grab a dead bear or something out there in the middle of the night. Let him bring it running over here, gutting you one by one in your sleep. Go ahead, heroes. Have at it.”
Teetee, down the hill, barked. The wolfhound sent one pounding woof chasing the next over the landscape, out into the cornfield.
Zuther set the lute aside and drew his borrowed six-gun. Anoushka and the others did the same, jumping to their feet. Kylie-Nae dumped the leftover stew over the fire, killing the unwanted light.
Lodi choked down an elixir. “I hate being right all the time.”
Together, in the cold dark and drifting smoke stinking of burnt vegetables, they held their breath and listened.
On the narrow dirt road below, Peter and Teetee no longer faced opposite directions but the same—out into the moonlit cornfield.
A whistle from the berserker silenced his dog.
Cricketsong.
Wind.
Those at the top of the hill began descending. More than once Anoushka had to pull Ruprecht back so he was behind them, out of the potential crossfire should a shoot-out start.
“What was it?” Anoushka whispered to Peter.
“Footsteps. Thirty yards out. They know we’ve heard them.”
Somewhere far off, coyotes howled and laughed, simultaneously gloomy and menacing.
Anoushka watched the shadows inside those of the cornstalks, looking for any that weren’t being made to shift by the wind like the others. She saw nothing but believed Peter anyway.
Zuther said, “You think there was somebody dead out there? Some hobo who fell out of his boxcar or something?”
“The tracks aren’t far off,” Kylie-Nae added.
“Be quiet,” Lodi hissed. “Unless you two fancy volunteering to go see?”
“Peter,” Ruprecht whispered, “now would be a great chance for some heroism, as we discussed earlier.” He whisked his hands, shooing the berserker into action.
Peter, behind his helm, estimated the bard a moment. Then swinging his leg up and around, he boomed to the ground. After thrusting his horse’s reins at Ruprecht to take, Peter drew his battle-ax and snapped free the scattergun from its saddle-horn mount. Another soft whistle cued Teetee to go ahead. The wolfhound slunk low, his dark ropey fur helping him to disappear in the dark of the cornfield.
His master’s progress was detailed by the steady clunks and clanks of his armor. Peter’s heavy trudging grew faint as he marched farther out. Soon wind-stirred cornstalks and cricketsong were the o
nly sounds.
Anoushka couldn’t be sure, but it felt like an hour before Teetee suddenly howled, followed immediately by a shot. A flash of blue-white. Over there, fifty yards out.
First up, Anoushka lost the others behind her immediately. The corn lashed at her face and arms, but she pushed on. She stumbled into a clearing, a dirt aisle between the fields. Looking left, right—trying to follow the smell of spent gunpowder—there, a towering shape was hefting a second, smaller figure off his feet. Peter thrust a middle-aged man in stained overalls onto his back. With the man supine, the berserker raised his ax.
“Wait!” Anoushka shouted, running up.
The man, unarmed, screamed for his life, hands out. Before he could stand, Teetee chomped his shin, shaking it violently, making him wail again. Peter made some small flick of his wrist, and the dog released at once.
Anoushka holstered, knelt. The man’s leg was bleeding, tough to do when you’re dead.
“Who are you?”
“Nobody. I ain’t nobody.”
“Why didn’t you leave with the others?”
“Whut? Leave? With who?”
“There was an evacuation call,” Anoushka told him. “Don’t you have a radio?”
“Naw, naw, I dinnit hear. If Ida heard, I woulda gone. I dinnit mean to frighten y’all, but I saw a campfire out on the yonder hill thar and I—I thought y’all was greenies. I ’erd ’bout Kambleburg fallin’, but nuthin’ of no evacuation. I figgered it was too late to run, and I thought I best stay put, thinkin’ it’d be no time ’fore they’d come through along here. And if y’all was greenies, I was gunna run up to the train station thar an’ send a deet the Committee’s way.”
The others called for Anoushka and Peter. “Over here!” A moment later, they came pushing into the aisle between the fields.
Now faced by the complete group—as if Peter alone wasn’t scary enough—the man tried pushing his way up, digging in his uninjured leg’s heel, only managing to shuffle the grit. “I got nothin’. Nothin’ but the church an’ the people I’m lookin’ after and thassit.”
“We’re not gonna rob you,” Anoushka said.
“Please—y’all want, we got plenny harvested, fresh. Ain’t gotta steal it.”
“Let’s get you back home. Where’re these people you’re looking after?” Anoushka said. “Close by?”
“Half mile yon—lissen, y’all fightin for the Ma’am, one of them con-tractor outfits? I take my hat off to y’all if y’all is.” He snatched the straw hat off his head, a grin revealing what remained of his teeth. “I love Rammelstaad, and I love those who fight for ’er all the same, second only to Aurorin on high.”
“Could be another agent of Lyle’s,” Lodi said, curling her hand into her bag.
Barring the wizardess with an outstretched arm, Anoushka said, “We’re not doing that again. He came unarmed.”
Zuther said, “But what if they’re running a bait and switch, huh? Send the simpleton out and once we’re all good and chatty with him, spring up on us?” He scanned the walls of corn, six-gun in hand. “Oldest trick in the damn book. And we’re right in the honey hole. I say let her.”
Zuther hadn’t seen what Lodi did to land them in jail, so Anoushka forgave the pedaler for not getting what Lodi splitting someone would specifically involve.
“Gag the lad and fire once,” Russell suggested. “If it is a bait, they’ll come runnin’, thinkin’ we offed their pal.”
Obliging, Kylie-Nae untied the bandanna from around her hair. Approaching the hayseed, she kept her eyes on Anoushka. Her movements read insincerity: stop me; show them you’re in charge.
Anoushka stepped in front of her. “He’s nobody. We take him back to his home. He said it’s close by.” Anoushka noticed Ruprecht at the back, rolling his eyes. “Does anyone take issue with that?”
“So who’s to do what, Captain?” Ruprecht said. “I’ll be more than happy to take my orders at your earliest convenience.”
“Go back to camp. Russ, Zee, Kylie-Nae, and Lodi, please join Mr. LeFevre so he doesn’t get lost in the corn. Peter, could you carry our new friend here? Oh, and Ruprecht? I’ll be sure to try to remember everything so I can get you some notes.”
Without ever having to put down his ax, Peter squatted and hoisted the man onto his shoulder.
As Kylie-Nae left with the others, she gave Anoushka a thumbs-up. You’re the captain, she mouthed.
After a thank-you nod, Anoushka started into the corn after Peter. She asked the man dangling over the berserker’s shoulder, “Got a name?”
“Otis Kelly. Pleased to make yer acquaintance.”
“Point the way, Otis.”
Navigating by the stars, Otis got them turned the right way.
Teetee moved ahead, becoming a specter among the stalks again. She couldn’t hear him, but Anoushka was willing to bet he was never far. Without any landmark to lend scale to the trip through the cornstalks, it felt as if the rows had begun to repeat. In the dark, the clatter of Peter’s armor helped Anoushka keep a peg on him. Every once in a while, Otis would grumble about his leg. Possibly to distract himself, he asked what kind of dog Teetee was. Peter didn’t answer.
They walked in silence for a while before someone said, “It wasn’t me.” It took a moment before Anoushka realized it’d been Peter. He kept thudding on, clunk-clank-clunk.
“Wasn’t you who . . . what?” Anoushka said.
“Who killed them.”
She didn’t know any other way to phrase it. “Your wife and—?”
“No.” Peter crunched through another line of corn. “Ellis Buckley, Alice Buckley, Stan, Corey, and Ellis Junior.”
“Ruprecht didn’t say why you were sent to Breakshale, but it’s good to know you didn’t do it,” Anoushka said, though she remained dubious. Berserkers could often find themselves good candidates for crime pinning. Need the Committee boys off your back? What’s that, there’s a guy around town who’s easily pissed off and just as quick to forget what he’s done?
“Does Ruprecht know you’re innocent?” Anoushka said.
“He didn’t ask.”
“All are welcome at our church, brother,” Otis put in. “Aurorin burns away sin. His light’s mighty.”
Anoushka said, “Peter, who were the Buckleys?”
“Don’t know. Ellis, the father, worked for a magazine. They mentioned it a lot at the trial, as if that made him somebody.”
“Do you think you were framed?”
“Can’t think what else to call it.” Humor? From Peter? Weird.
“After we disbanded,” he went on, “I went to find work. Gallingrad, I’d heard, was where solo contractors can find under-the-table wages pretty easily. The watch stopped me at Darvin. Said they had a warrant. I matched the description they said they’d gotten in that morning. Being on parole, I was considered a runner. And forfeit a trial.”
Twisting his head to peek up at the stars, Otis snuck in: “A little left, brother.”
Anoushka followed in Peter’s broad trail of flattened corn, her mind racing. What if Lyle Eichelberger was actively plotting even back then? While cooking up his plot over cheese sandwiches in the break room and playing footsie with Sharona—if Lodi was right about them—had Lyle heard about Peter running loose and decided to remove him as a possible future annoyance? Lyle was visiting Peter in Breakshale, in a manner of speaking; toying with him, trying to drive him mad by making the gobs’ pigs pace back and forth before his cell. But it still didn’t fit together. The timeline: the squad fell apart and Peter, on the lam, makes the long journey back and gets apprehended only when at Darvin? Odd, when he could’ve—should’ve—been stopped at any of the towns and villages and crossroads before.
Anoushka reeled. She thought of the only person she knew who lived in Darvin just as Peter spoke.
“Mister LeFevre was at the courthouse. I didn’t know who he was at the time. But when you brought me to the camp and he shook my hand . . . he looked different,
but I know it was him.”
“Do you think Ruprecht saw something in you and thought he’d make you as undesirable a protagonist as could be so he could try to redeem you when the time was right—and profitable?”
“Don’t know. Thought I was going crazy,” Peter murmured. “The gobs cut the prisoners, hanged them upside down. ‘The four minutes,’ they call it. Almost dying. Left me longer once. Said before they could bring me back, I had—”
“Kylie-Nae told me.”
“Mister LeFevre said what this man can do. What he does to dead things.” When Anoushka looked over at Peter, white steam, lit to glowing by the moon, was rolling out from under his helm.
“You’ve talked with Ruprecht more than I have. Has he said anything to make you think he and Lyle are working together?” Her leg throbbed in time with her quickened pulse. What if it’d all been a ploy? What if Ruprecht and Lyle Eichelberger were channeling them right toward the necromancer?
But to what end?
Maybe together, Ruprecht and Lyle, cotreasonists, had some sort of deal with Skivvit. Undermine Rammelstaad from within, lead its most vital champions to dishonorable deaths; some overwrought plan to hit at the realm’s morale. Fuck, too murky. Maybe there was no plan, no aim or goal—unbroken horses that jump fences don’t typically have a destination in mind. Regardless, Anoushka certainly wasn’t about to discard this theory, even if it was a flimsy one. If any part of her had suspected Ruprecht LeFevre was a two-timing shit, it’d just doubled in size, solid supporting evidence or no.
Peter interrupted her thoughts. “You care about the story.”
“I care about stopping Lyle.” And the story, okay.
After a moment, Peter drew from between panels of black steel a neatly folded piece of parchment. He held it out to her by its corner.
Anoushka’s hand accidentally grazed his. The fingers of his gauntlet were warm—like hard, dented flesh.
She read, cornstalk shadows sliding over the pale page like knife blades:
With Peter’s name and redemption sharing the same line, the title made a promise to the reader. Now it was up to Peter to fill in everything between the covers. Anoushka wondered if Peter was aware of how much of an underhanded thing this was, what Ruprecht was pulling, the bard drawing a dotted line for the berserker to follow. Though it’d be tough for someone in Peter’s position to not find Ruprecht’s promise a little enticing. Judge as she might, Anoushka considered how everyone, on occasion, enjoyed their reflection. Even more when it wasn’t perfect; one where the imagination was permitted to paint over otherwise glaringly irreparable portions. A thrill-rag could do that. Half lies and pseudofictions. Adjusted history, ironed of wrinkles.
