by Garth Nix
There was no one outside, but a notice had been pushed half under the door. Alice May picked it up, saw the black and red and the flaming torch, and stormed back inside, slamming the door behind her.
“The Master’s coming here! This afternoon!” she exclaimed, waving the paper in front of her. “On a special train. He’s going to speak from it.”
She put her finger against the bottom line.
“It says, ‘Everyone must attend,’ she said grimly. “As if we don’t have a choice who we listen to.”
“We’d better go,” muttered Stella. Jake nodded.
“What!” screamed Alice May. “He’s only a politician! Stay at home.”
Jake shook his head. “No. No. I’ve heard about what happens if you don’t go. There’s the store to think about.”
“And my grandsire was a Cheveril—an accommodator,” Stella said quietly. She looked down at the splintered glass and the smashed painting. “We mustn’t give them a reason to look into the family. We must be there.”
“I’m not going,” announced Alice May.
“You are while you live in this house,” snapped Jake, in a rare display of temper. “I’ll not have all our lives and livelihood risked for some silly girl’s fancies.”
“I am not going,” repeated Alice May. She felt strangely calm, obviously much calmer than Jake, whose face was flushed with sudden heat, or Stella, who had gone deathly pale.
“Then you’d better get out altogether,” said Jake fiercely. “Go and find your real parents.”
Stella cried out as he spoke, and clutched at his arm, but she didn’t speak.
Alice May looked at the only parents she had ever known. She felt as if she was in a kinetoplay, with all of them trapped by the script. There was an inevitability in Jake’s words, but he seemed as surprised to say them as she was to hear them. She saw a terror deep in his eyes, and shame. He was already afraid of what he was becoming, afraid of the place his fears were driving him toward.
“I’ll go and pack,” she said, her voice dull to her own ears. It was not the real Jake who had spoken, she knew. He was a timid man. He did not know how to be brave, and anger was his only escape from acknowledging his cowardice.
Alice May didn’t pack. She stopped by her room to pick up a pair of riding boots and then went up to the attic. She opened the trunk, breathing a sigh of relief as the straps and lock gave no resistance. She took out the box marked AMMUNITION and set it on the floor, and placed the holstered revolvers and the belt next to the box.
Then she stripped down to her underclothes and put on the white dress. It fitted her perfectly, as she had known it would. She had grown in the year since her first sight of the dress, enough that two undone shirt buttons could derail the trains of thought and conversation of most of the boys she knew—and some of the men.
This dress was not low cut, but it hugged her breasts and waist before flaring out, and it was daringly short at an inch below her knees. The waistcoat that went over it was also tailored to show off her figure. Strangely, it appeared to be lined with woven strands of hair. Blond hair that was a shade identical to her own.
The dress, even with the waistcoat, was cold to the touch, as if it had come out of an ice chest. The temperature outside had forced the mercury out the top of the old thermometer by the kitchen door, and it was stifling in the attic. Alice May wasn’t even warm.
She strapped on the revolvers next. The gun belt rested on her hips, with the holsters lower, against her thighs. She found that the silk was double-lined there, to guard against wear, and there were small ties to fix the snout of each holster to her dress.
The ammunition box opened easily. It held a dozen smaller boxes of blue tin. Alice May was somehow not surprised by the descriptions, which were handwritten on pasted labels. Six of the boxes were labeled “Colt .45 Fourway Silver Cross” and six “Winchester .44-40 Silvercutter.”
She opened a tin of the .45 Fourway Silver Cross. The squat brass cartridges were topped with lead bullets, but each had four fat lines of silver across the top. Alice May knew it was real silver. The .44-40 cartridges looked similar, but the bullets were either solid silver or silver over a core of lead.
Alice May quickly loaded both revolvers and then the rifle and filled the loops on her belt with a mixture of both cartridges. Instinctively she knew which ammunition to use in each weapon, and she put the .45 Silver Cross cartridges only on the left of the eagle buckle and the .44-40 only on the right.
Even with the rifle temporarily laid on the floor, the revolvers and the laden bullet belt came to quite a load, heavy on her hips and thighs.
There was still one thing left in the trunk. Alice May picked up the jewelry case and opened it. The star was dull till she touched it, but it began to shine as she pinned it on. It was heavy, too, heavier than it should have been, and her knees buckled a little as the pin snapped in.
Alice May stood absolutely still for a moment, breathing slowly, taking the weight that was as much imagined as real. The light of her star slowly faded with each breath, till it was no more than a bright piece of metal reflecting the sun. Everything felt lighter then. Revolvers, belt, star—and her own spirits.
She closed the trunk, sat on it, and pulled on her boots. Then she picked up the rifle and climbed down the ladder.
No one was downstairs. The broken glass and picture frame were still on the floor, in total contradiction of Stella’s nature and habit. The painting itself was gone.
Alice May let herself out the back way and quickly crossed the street to her Uncle Bill’s house. The other Uncle Bill, Bill Hoogener. The milk carter. She wanted to talk to him before she did…whatever she was going to do.
It was unusually quiet on the street. A hot breeze blew, throwing up dust devils that whirled on the fringes of the graveled road. No one was outside. There were no children playing. No one was out walking, driving, or riding. There was only the hot wind and Alice May’s boots crunching gravel as she walked the hundred yards diagonally down the street to the Hoogener house.
She stopped at the picket fence. There was a red firebrand splashed across the partly open door, the paint still wet and dripping. Alice May’s hands worked the lever of her rifle without conscious thought, and she pushed the door open with the toe of her boot.
The coolness of her dress was spreading across her skin, only it was colder now, a definite chill. Bill, as his surname gave away, was a descendent of Oncers, even if he wasn’t practicing himself. The Servants reserved a special hatred for the monotheistic Oncers.
Everything in the hall had been broken. All of Bill’s paintings of the town and its people, a lifetime of work, were smashed upon the floor. The wire umbrella stand had been wrenched apart, and the canes and umbrellas it had contained used as clubs to pummel the plasterboard. It was full of gaping holes, the wallpaper flapping around them like torn skin.
There was blood on the floor. Lots of blood, a great dark ocean of it close by the door, and then smaller pools leading back into the house. A bloody handprint by the kitchen door showed where someone—no, not someone, Alice May thought, but Bill, her uncle Bill—had leaned for support.
She stepped through the wreckage, colder still, colder than she had ever been. Her eyes moved slowly from side to side, the rifle barrel with its silver flowers following her gaze. Her finger was flat and straight against the trigger guard, an instant away from the trigger, a shot, a death.
Uncle Bill was in the kitchen. He was sitting with his back against the stove, his skin pale, almost translucent against the yellow enamel of the oven door. His eyes were open and impossibly clear, the white whiter than any milk he had ever carted, but his once-bright blue pupils were dulling into black, black as the undersize bow tie that hung on his chest, the elastic broken.
His mouth was open, a gaping, formless hole. It took Alice May a moment to realize that his tongue had been cut out.
From his waist down, Bill’s usually immaculate whites were bl
ack, sodden, totally saturated with blood. It still dripped from him slowly, into the patch under his legs. Someone had used that same blood to paint a clumsy fire-brand symbol on the floor, and two words. But the blood had spread and joined in the letters, so it was impossible to read whatever Bill’s murderers had intended. The firebrand was enough, in any case, for the death to be claimed by the Servants.
Alice May stared at her dead uncle, thinking terrible thoughts. There were no strangers in town. She would know the murderers. She could see it so easily. The men dressed up in their black and red, drinking whiskey to make themselves brave. They would have passed the house a dozen times before they finally knocked on Bill’s door. Perhaps they’d spoken normally for a minute to him, before they pushed him back inside. Then they’d cut and cut at him as he reeled back down his own hallway, unable to believe what was happening and unable to resist.
Bill Hoogener had died at the hands of neighbors, without having any idea of what was going on.
Alice May knew what was going on. She knew it deep inside. The Master was a messenger of evil, a corrupter of souls. The Servants were not Servants of the State, but slaves to some awful and insidious poison that changed their very natures and made them capable of committing such dreadful crimes as the murder of her uncle Bill.
She stepped toward him, toward the pool of blood. An echo answered her, another footfall, in the yard beyond the kitchen door.
Alice May stopped where she was, silent, waiting. The footsteps continued, then the screen door swung open. A man came in, not really looking where he was going. He wore a Servant’s black coat over his blue bib-and-brace overalls. There was blood splashed above his knees. There was blood on his hands. His name was Everett Kale, assistant butcher. He had once walked out with Jane Hopkins and had given a much younger Alice May a single marigold from the bunch he’d brought for Jane.
Alice May’s star flashed bright, and Everett looked up. He saw Alice May, the star, the leveled rifle. His hand flashed to the bone-handled skinning knife that rattled in the broad butcher’s scabbard at his side.
The shot was very loud in the confined space, but Alice May didn’t flinch. She worked the lever, the action so fast the sound seemed to fall behind it, and then she put another round into the man who had fallen back through the door. He was already dead, but she wanted to be sure.
Noise greeted her as she stepped outside. Shouts and surprised cries. There were three men in the yard, looking at the dead butcher on the ground. They had got into Bill’s home brew, and they were all holding bottles of thick, dark beer. They dropped the bottles as Alice May came out shooting.
They were armed with slim, new automatic pistols that fit snugly into clipped holsters at the nipped-in waists of their black tunics. None of them managed to get a pistol out. They were all dead on the ground within seconds, their blood mixing with black, foaming beer, their death throes acted out upon a bed of broken glass.
Alice May looked at them from a weird and forbidding place inside her own head. She knew them but felt no remorse. Butcher, baker, ne’er-do-well, and ore washer. All men of the town.
Her hands had done the killing. Her hands and the rifle. Even now those same hands were reloading, taking bullets from her belt and slipping them with a satisfying click into the tubular magazine.
Alice May realized she had had no conscious control over her hands at all. Somewhere between opening the front door of Bill’s house and entering the kitchen, she had become an observer within her own body. But she didn’t feel terrified by this. It felt right, and she realized she was still in charge of her actions. She wasn’t a zombie or anything. She would decide where to go next, but her body—and the weapons—would help her do whatever had to be done when she got there.
She walked around the still-twitching bodies and out the back gate. Onto another empty street with the unforgiving, hot wind and the dust and the complete absence of people.
There should have been a crowd, come to see what the shooting was about. The town’s two lawmen should be riding up on their matching grays. But there was only Alice May.
She turned down the street, toward the railway station. Her bootheels crunched on the gravel. She felt she had never really heard that particular sound before, not so clear, so loud.
The wind changed direction and blew against her, stronger and hotter than ever. Dust blew up, heavy dust that carried chunks of grit. But none hit Alice May, none got in her eyes. Her white dress repelled it, the wind seeming to divide as it hit her, great currents of dust and grit flying around on either side.
A door opened to her left, and she was facing it, her finger on the trigger. A man half stepped out. Old Mr. Lacker, in his best suit, a Servants of the State flag in his trembling hand. His left hand.
“Stay home!” ordered Alice May. Her voice was louder than she expected. It boomed in her ears, easily cutting through the wind.
Lacker took another step and raised his flag.
“Stay home!”
Another step. Another wave of the flag. Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a tiny pocket pistol, a single-shot Derringer, all ancient, tarnished brass.
Alice May pulled the trigger and walked on, as Old Man Lacker’s best suit suddenly fountained blood from the lapel, a vivid buttonhole of arterial scarlet.
She reloaded as she walked. Inside she was screaming, but nothing came out. She hadn’t wanted to kill Mr. Lacker. He was old, harmless, no danger. He couldn’t have hit her even if she was standing next to him.
But her hands and the rifle had disagreed.
Alice May knew where she had to go. The railway station. Where the Master was to arrive in under an hour. She had to go there and kill him.
It didn’t seem sensible to walk down the main street, so Alice May cut through the field behind the schoolhouse. From the top of the cutting beyond the field, she looked both ways, toward the station and out along the line.
The special train was already at the platform. One engine, a tender, and a single private car, all painted in black and red. The engine had a shield placed on the front of the boiler above the cowcatcher. A shield with the blazing torch of the Servants. The train must have backed up all the way from Jarawak City, Alice May thought, just so the balcony at the rear of the private car faced the turning circle at the end of the main street.
There were a lot of people gathered in that turning circle. All the people whom Alice May had expected to see in the streets. They’d come down early, to make sure they weren’t marked as tardies or reluctant supporters. The whole populaion of the town had to be there, many of them in Servants’ uniforms, and all of them waving red-and-black flags.
Alice May slid down the cutting and walked between the rails. This was the way she’d come as a baby, all those years ago. But somehow she didn’t think she’d come from Jarawak City.
All the attention was at the rear of the train, though it was clear the Master hadn’t yet appeared. It was too noisy for that, with the crowd cheering and the town band playing something unrecognizable. The newspapers all made a big thing about the total silence that fell in any audience as the Master spoke.
Alice May crossed the line and crept down the far side of the engine. Just as she came to the tender, an engineer stepped down. He wore denim overalls, topped with a black Servants’ cap, complete with the badge of the flaming brand.
Alice May’s hands moved. The butt of the rifle snapped out and the engineer went down to the rails. He crawled around there for a moment, trying to get up, as Alice May calmly waited for the crowd to cheer again and the band to crescendo with drums and brass. As they did, she fired a single shot into the engineer’s head and stepped over him.
I’m a murderer, she thought. Many times over.
I wish they’d stay out of my way.
Alice May stepped up to the private car’s forward balcony. She tried to look inside, but the window was smoked glass.
Alice May tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
She opened it left-handed, the rifle ready.
She had expected a small sitting room of some kind, perhaps opulently furnished. What she saw was an impossibly long corridor, stretching off into the distance, the end out of sight.
The crowd suddenly went silent at the other end of the train.
Alice May stepped into the corridor and shut the door behind her.
It was dark with the door closed, but her star shone more brightly, lighting the way. Apart from its length, and the fact that the far end was shrouded in mist or smoke, the corridor seemed pretty much like any other train corridor Alice May had ever seen. Polished wood and metal fittings, and every few steps a compartment door. The only strange thing was that the compartment doors all had smoked glass windows so you couldn’t see in.
Alice May was tempted to open a door, but she held out against the temptation. Her business was with the Master, and he was speaking down at the far end of the train. Who knew what she would get herself into by opening a door?
She continued to walk as quietly as she could down the corridor. Every few steps she would hear a sound and would freeze for a moment, her finger on the trigger. But the sounds were not of people, or weapons, or danger. They came from behind the compartment doors and were of the sea, or wind, or falling rain.
Still the corridor continued, and Alice May seemed no closer to the end. She started to walk faster, and then began to run. She had to get there before the Master finished talking, before his poison took her foster parents and everyone she knew.
Faster and faster, bootheels drumming, breath rasping, but still cold, cold as ice. She felt like she was pushing against a barrier, that at any moment it would break and she would be free of the endless corridor.
It did break. Alice May burst out into a smoking room, one full of Servants, a long room packed with black-and-red uniforms.
Alice May’s hands and eyes started shooting before she even knew where she was. The rifle was empty in what seemed like only seconds, but each bullet had struck home. Servants slumped in their chairs, writhed on the ground, dived for cover, clutched at weapons.
