He didn’t say that. It would only give Elim ammunition to claim that Sil’s secret was already out, and there was no point in hiding himself. And maybe that was true – but while there was any chance that a rumor hadn’t spread, Sil had to err on the side of caution. “I know,” he said, with more patience than he usually managed. “But think of what will happen if the Azahi’s gone again, or if he keeps you there for any length of time. You know what I’ll be like after sunset, and that’s attention neither of us wants.”
Elim considered that for a maddening long silence, the town looming closer all the while. Finally, just before Sil would have stopped, Calvert’s mule found his next worry. “Yeah,” he said at last. “But I can’t – what’m I supposed to say?”
That was easy enough. “Well, what did you expect ME to say?”
Elim worried Molly’s reins, comforting himself with the feel of supple, sweaty leather. “That, uh – that I did what I was supposed to do, and the a’Krah people let me go. And the Azahi promised me that if they did that, he’d do likewise, and that –”
Elim apparently reached the obvious conclusion then: if he could say it to Sil, he could just as easily say it to the Azahi. He stopped again, and this time refused to move. “Sil, I can’t. I know what you’re getting at, but I just – I don’t have the grit for it. We don’t need nothing from them anyway. Let’s just go home.”
Sil watched the worry furrowing his partner’s long face, conflicted in spite of everything he’d already decided. Yes, he knew he could manipulate Elim into going in there – but no, he couldn’t absolutely guarantee that he’d come back out again. Was it really worth the risk, however slight, when they were so close to being home free? The river was right there – the border was right there – and all they had to do was skirt around and swim over it.
But no, damn it, this was important. Not to satisfy some two-bit native mayor and his little proclamations, but for Elim himself. That monstrous huge thing he’d been before was still somewhere inside him, would be with him the rest of his life, and Boss Calvert and Lady Jane wouldn’t always be around to keep him safe. If he were going to survive on either side of the border – if he were going to have any hope of making it on his own – he absolutely had to learn to answer for himself. Sil had no right to push him out of the nest like this, but at the end of the day, he couldn’t count on anyone else to do it... and Elim might never get another chance.
So he swallowed, looked his partner in the eye, and laid down his trump card. “We can go home,” Sil said. “Of course we can. It’s just that... you know, she did ask us to tell Fours where she was.”
It worked perfectly. Of course it did: Elim did for other people what he would never dare for himself. Sil could see it all in his expression: a bloom of shock, a terrible realization, and then an instant, switch-flipping shift from ‘whether’ to ‘how’.
Elim looked back at the town, as if seeing it in a totally different light. “If I go in there, and they don’t let me go...”
“I’ll come for you,” Sil pledged. “If you’re not back by supper, I promise I’ll come get you.”
Elim gave him an interrogating look, an unspoken You sure you won’t leave me?
Sil returned it with a steady, unblinking When have I ever?
And apparently that was good enough. Elim handed the sweaty reins over, as if he might lose his nerve by waiting. “You’re gonna wait right here, right?”
Sil pointed over to the northeast. “There’s liable to be traffic here – too many gossipy turnip farmers wandering about. I’ll take Molly and skirt around to the river, about a mile north of town. We’ll wait for you there.”
Elim’s jaw worked, as if he would extract one more promise, just to be on the safe side. Then he turned on his heel and went. No ceremony, no goodbyes: just a barefoot pilgrim in a borrowed poncho, armed with a pair of empty pockets and a half-baked plan.
Sil and Molly stood in the road and watched him until he was nothing more than a speck. When it was clear that Elim wouldn’t lose his nerve and turn back, Sil clicked at the horse to turn her off the path –
– and would just about swear that the big mare was giving him the eye.
Maybe he was going sleep-mad after all. “Don’t look at me like that,” Sil said as they started off into the dry autumn grass. “He’ll be fine.”
After all, Fours was there, and – according to Día, at least – the Azahi was as honest a fellow as anyone could ask for. Elim had nothing but himself to worry about... and Sil intended to keep repeating that until he believed it.
THEY HAD LEFT Día.
They had left her.
Elim knew that. He’d been there when they’d done that. He had no excuse, no room for surprise.
But it was only just there, with Sil’s almost casual mention of it, that the realization jolted through him like ice on a rotten tooth. As tired as he was, as numb as he’d been after all of that, it hadn’t seemed real. It was only now, walking up to those warped wooden gates like a schoolboy on a dare, that the reality set in: he was going back to Sixes – to the place that had hung him up, burnt him, and flat-out tried to kill him – and if it got its claws into him again, there wasn’t going to be any boot-blessing science-minded grave bride there to work them back out. Elim and Sil had... why, they’d let Atali’Krah do just the same thing to her – let it cut off her hair, hold her back in that blood-stained lair of theirs and do God-knew-what by now. Elim didn’t really believe the a’Krah would kill her, but he had a horrible feeling they’d found other ways to even with her for Dulei.
And that was a boon, in a way – because otherwise Elim would never have had the guts to keep going. He would have withered under the stares of the field-workers he passed on his way up the wide, dry road. He would have frozen there on the creaky old bridge, staring helplessly up at those staked wooden walls, that moribund tilting church-steeple, that four-story adobe hive of humanity spreading out like a plaque over the southern end of town. He would have fled at his first sight of the stately black-iron manor at the opposite end of the road.
But someone somewhere in Sixes was missing Día, and on the other side of the border, two someones in Hell’s Acre were missing him too, and now there was no way out but through. Elim held that thought just long enough to pass under the shadow of the gray wooden gates, crossing over the murky green river and beyond the point of no return, surrendering himself and his expectations as the infamous patchwork town loomed larger and nearer and then finally, silently swallowed him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SPECTACLES
AT LEAST IT didn’t take long. Elim wandered into town on the main road, probably looking like a gunslinger spoiling for a fight. People stared at him. One ran away. It occurred to him, too late, that he didn’t actually know where the Azahi lived, and by the time he allotted on looking for the jail, there was no point: the speckled mule – the lady-sheriff – was already coming for him.
Elim’s gut clenched at the sight. She was as intimidating as she had been the first moment he caught sight of her boot-heels rapping down Fours’ front steps: hard-faced and freckle-spattered, with coarse men’s clothing and a wide-brimmed hat, and everything from her knife-cut hair to her skinned rabbit-fur vest to the pistol slung at her hip spoke of ruthless, unflinching resolve. She had dressed herself in violence, and her posture challenged anyone to question it.
Elim knew that wasn’t all there was. He knew she could be soft, as she had been in the moments before Bootjack came to collect him – when it was just the two of them there in her dark, quiet jail-house, her hand clasping his through the bars. But the look in her eyes as she approached him now warned Elim to expect no such thing here in daylight, in public. As long as the rest of the world was watching, they were strangers, if not enemies.
He tried to assure her that he understood that. “Luho,” Elim said, stopping a neighborly distance apart, tipping a hat he didn’t have.
The sheriff stopped l
ikewise, as if she might be contaminated by coming any closer, and looked to the gates behind him. When she failed to find anyone else in his company, she glanced back to where someone – a deputy? – was watching from the jail. “Huitsak tráe,” she ordered.
The fellow ran off up the road.
The sheriff beckoned Elim to lift his hands, which he did, and then she walked all around him. When she found no weapons, she pointed to the right like a short, freckled weathervane. “Marcha.” She didn’t need to imply the or-else at the end of that– that first flash of her wolfish white fangs said it all.
Elim went, letting himself be escorted in front of her: not north to the manor-house, thank God, but down south, towards the giant pueblo and... what, exactly?
“I want to see the Azahi,” he said, which probably he ought to have mentioned up front. He couldn’t tell how much of that was clear to her – he’d never heard her speak a word of Ardish – but if she understood the name, it made no difference to her calculations: she kept herding him on past houses and shops, in front of mistrustful mothers and wide-eyed children and men stooped with the weight of their labors, pushing Elim deeper into a world where he was nothing more than an irritating foreign speck in the collective eye – where he just absolutely did not matter at all.
And he was so unnerved by those stares, so fixed on walking the sheriff’s invisible tightrope – eyes on feet, feet on line, no stray looks or extra steps anywhere – that when she finally grunted for him to stop, it took Elim a minute to recognize the place.
There were no animals in Fours’ corral now, no yearlings for Elim to mind while Sil went in to do the talking. Now Sil was a million miles away outside, and it was the sheriff going up those porch-steps, and Elim following after her, uninvited and yet loathe to be left anywhere outside the circle of her authority. He wished he’d thought to ask Sil who had put that noose around his neck, or how to spot them.
The sheriff picked up the stick in the doorway and tapped at the front door. “Quatros, akí estás?”
And then, receiving no answer, again. “Pendejo cabrón, abre!”
So the pair of them waited there together, two mules from opposite sides of the border, apparently calling on a closeted fishman to translate between them. It was more than a little absurd.
The sheriff seemed to think so too. She threw the stick down, forced the door – Elim couldn’t tell whether it had been shoddily locked or just stuck – and tromped inside. “Quatros, dondeystás?”
Elim had long since lost track of the days. He thought he couldn’t have left more than two weeks ago. But as he stepped inside Fours’ little shop, he might as well have been gone fifty years.
It had been eccentric enough before: a sunlit room full of too many treasures, every shelf and wall piled with warm, dusty clutter. Now it was a looted mausoleum. Half the old fellow’s goods littered the floor, broken or stepped-on or simply left where they fell, and strewn among them were filthy clothes, festering food-fragments, and – as Elim took his first reluctant barefooted steps inside – peculiar damp spots in the warped wood floor. The whole place stank of mold and vinegar.
Something moved out of the corner of Elim’s eye – like a giant rat scuttling behind the back shelves. The sheriff went wading into the mess after it, her scolding voice equal parts anger and anxiety as Elim edged back towards the door –
– and was accosted with a poncho-grabbing lunge.
“WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?”
Elim jolted back, crashing up against a wall of old bottles as he stared in horror at the leprous gremlin clinging to his front.
That might have been Fours, once upon a time. Now it was a gaunt, hissing demon, sloughing great gray flakes and patches of dead skin as it bared its sharp teeth in a demented snarl. “I said WHERE IS SHE?”
“I don’t know!” Elim cried as the sheriff made it over and hauled the horrible thing off him. It didn’t put up a fight – it was far too thin to have any strength left, and couldn’t weigh more than sixty pounds – but just the sight of it was a horror to rival Sil at his worst. Its clothes absolutely reeked of mildew.
“I don’t – I didn’t see anyone like that,” he said, hurrying to forestall another outburst, hoping like the dickens that the daughter wasn’t one of the dead fishmen he’d seen at the foot of the mountain. “I just, I just came to tell you – Día asked me to tell you that she’s with the a’Krah.”
The creature’s expression melted, realization thawing the fury in its sunken black eyes, and then Elim saw Fours again – albeit a parched, palsied, ruined Fours, with peeling parchment-skin and the gill-plumes dried out to cracked and bleeding tatters.
The old mereau all but collapsed back into the sheriff’s arms, clutching her vest as he looked up at her with pleading desperation. “Huitsak tráe! Akí lo tráe!”
And as she began to reply, the penny finally dropped for Elim. Día WAS his daughter. Not by blood, of course, but if Fours was to her what the Calverts were to him... Elim glanced around the remains of the store, dreading to think what he would find at home.
“How?” Fours said at last, when he had found the strength to stand on his own. “Who took her? What happened?”
This was going to be so much harder than he imagined. Elim straightened likewise, suddenly aware of how little room he had to move. “Well, uh, we... we went to the crow city, like I was supposed to, and they did their deciding about me, and they let me go, but then they said – they wanted her to stay, and I tried not to let her, but then she said I was to go and leave her to do her job, so... so I did.”
Well, it wasn’t poetry, but that was about as plain as he could make it – at least, not without spilling the beans about Sil.
His efforts were not appreciated. “You LEFT her there?” Fours said with festering incredulity. “She wasn’t even supposed to be there! She didn’t – she had no business...”
His outraged sputtering died away with the rhythmic, sequential squeaking of the stairs outside. A huge shadow blotted out the light from the still-open doorway as its immense owner eased himself inside.
That was an a’Krah. No, not an a’Krah – the a’Krah. Their big boss, the one who had come with the sheriff and the Azahi and Día to decide about Elim after the night he’d spent in jail. Unlike Fours, he hadn’t diminished a bit since the last time Elim saw him: still tall and fat and powerful, with his black hair hanging in plaited pigtails on either side of his fleshy face, he pulled off his blindfold and stood surveying the disgraceful interior, his eyes keen and his clothes just slightly rumpled from sleep.
Fours gave him no time to remark on it. “Huitsak, what is this?” he demanded. “Why is he telling me that Día is in Atali’Krah?”
The big man’s brows lifted, their gaze lingering on Fours’ shriveled figure. He tipped his head left and right in an unsettled shrug. “Let’s find out. You,” he said to Elim, with an inquisitive upward jerk of his chin. “Where are Vuchak and Weisei?”
Oh, this was not going to go well. Not at all. The a’Krah boss was standing there to Elim’s right, still blocking the doorway, and Elim couldn’t get to the side door up ahead without going through Fours and the sheriff and a whole pile of junk. He was trapped.
“I want to talk to the Azahi,” he said, striving to keep his voice decent and level, like Sil would. “I’m only supposed to talk to the Azahi.”
Fours and the a’Krah – Huitsak, if that was it – exchanged a glance. “He’s not here,” Huitsak said, a mistrustful gleam in his eye. “Stop wasting time and answer the question. Where are my men?”
This was bad. This was so bad. Why the hell had he listened to Sil? The churning in Elim’s gut began to take on a life of its own, urging him to be anywhere but here. “I, uh...” How to tell the truth without making it worse for himself? “They’re still in Atali’Krah.”
“Now there’s a ripe lie,” Huitsak snorted, folding his arms, somehow taking up even more space. “Even if Vuchak and Weisei were asked to s
tay, the Eldest would have still sent you back with Hakai. Where are they really?”
Fours was translating for the sheriff. Huitsak was standing there waiting for an answer. And Elim’s spots were itching, his muscles aching to run. “They’re still there,” he promised, “all of them, all three of them are there –”
“Bullshit!” Huitsak thundered – both provoking and obscuring the conspicuous pop of Elim’s knee. “What are you hiding?”
Elim could feel himself growing as the wild thing inside him came alive with mortal fear. He took a shuffling step, burying his left foot under a spilled heap of blankets, folding his arms to keep his right hand hidden under his poncho. “I’m – I’m telling you the truth; I don’t –”
“Oh, spit it out!” Fours snapped – a sudden sidelong assault that split Elim’s attention and his vision both. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because Bootjack’s dead and Hawkeye’s addled and Way-Say’s probably killed himself by now!”
Elim heard it come out of his own mouth, but it was as foreign to him as the itch and shiver curling around his limbs. Still, it left enough of a silence for him to start trying to rein in the deathly panic lashing and pushing out from his insides. Not now, he told it. He couldn’t afford to let it happen now.
Huitsak stared. The arrogance in his expression was gone. “... dead? How?”
And now that the cat was out of the bag, Elim felt no compunctions about siccing it on his keepers. “Because some crow woman with a knife came up behind him and cut his throat open like a stunned beef, and all the rest of them stood back and let her, and if you ever find out how come that was, you can write and tell me, cuz I said what I came to say and now I’m going.”
Huitsak’s expression didn’t change – and yet he looked like he’d sprung a slow leak. He raised no objections, no anything at all.
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