Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  12

  Bloodsilver

  A.E. Decker

  The Bay’s sides rippled with only a slight sigh of protest as Rider Bell flung her tooled leather saddle over his back. “Good boy.” She gave him a pat before leading him out of Myer’s Livery Stable and into the dusty yellow expanse of Sutton Street. A notion struck her as she was hitching him to the post beside the watering trough in front of her house.

  “S’pose I’d better wake up Dead Guy, huh?” she said, stroking The Bay’s nose. “He’ll want to know where we’re headin’.”

  The livemetal disk flashed in the sunlight as she hauled it out of her shirt by its leather cord. Her fingers tingled; the disk was always cool to the touch, even on days her spit evaporated before it hit the ground. Rider nicked her thumb on her knife, squeezed out a bead of blood, and swirled it over the disk. The shiny surface absorbed the red wetness like dry sand sucking up the drippings from a canteen. She never had to wipe it clean.

  Dead Guy didn’t always show himself the same way. Sometimes he rose up out of her shadow or spun himself into existence from a passing gust of wind. None of that today: a mad hot day with a glaringly blue sky, not a breeze stirring. Today he just appeared: blink, and there he was, resting his long forearms against The Bay’s saddle.

  “What’s up, Rider?” he asked, his black hair ever-whipping in a gale that blew solely for him. One eye glowed like a thundercloud before the lightning forked down; a crescent scar sealed the other. Black hat and black boots and black trousers. Black shirt, a laced-up red vest only a couple shades off black, and a long black duster. Brown gloves, though. Rider often wondered if that was an oversight or Dead Guy’s strange brand of humor.

  He’d had a name when he was alive, but Rider never used it.

  “Rumors of Skeleton Dancers at Bondee Camp,” she told him.

  Molly Bindle sashayed down the wooden sidewalk wearing a new hat. Whoops of laughter erupted inside the Hellbell Saloon as Abe Jabbot and Darly Firth burst through the swinging door. They staggered across Sutton, kicking up dust, smug as a pair of tomcats. Probably just spent the night wasting all the earnings from their arcsilver mine on faro, whiskey, and ladies of negotiable virtue.

  Dead Guy rubbed his chin. “Where’d you hear this?”

  “Miles Bronson.”

  Snorting, he rolled away from her, lounging against The Bay’s side. “Miles Bronson is a son of a bitch,” he said to the sky.

  “I ain’t arguing with you,” said Rider. Everyone in Camlock had seen Mrs. Bronson with an eye all swollen up like a plum behind its mask of powder.

  “Miles Bronson would steal the last tooth from his granny’s gums to turn a profit.”

  “I still ain’t arguing with you.” Rider worked the pump. The first trickle of rusty brown coughed out. She pumped it clear then held her canteen under the spigot’s mouth.

  “Miles Bronson—”

  “Bronson got no reason to come crying to me without cause,” said Rider. He’d wept right there in her parlor, tears cutting slug-tracks through the layers of dust caked into his pores. “He knows I don’t look kindly on him.”

  “There is that,” admitted Dead Guy.

  “And why make up something unlikely as the Dancers leaving Rattling Sky Mountain?” Canteen filled, she hefted her saddlebag, already loaded with biscuits and jerky. “It’s a Shadowmarshal’s duty to investigate supernatural doings.” He wouldn’t miss the emphasis on “duty.” Nor would he forget that every self-important male in Camlock ached to see her slip up and neglect it.

  No reply. She glanced over at him. Dead Guy was still observing the sky, arms folded over his chest. “Ain’t you gonna call up Dead Horse?” she asked.

  That wrung a wince out of him. “His name,” said Dead Guy, “is Huntsman. Why can’t you ever remember?”

  She snorted. “Why bother? It’s not like it’s gonna answer when I call.”

  “I’d find your logic unassailable if you’d ever tried calling him.”

  “Pah.” She clomped up her porch steps, stepped into her house, and took her Arbiter down from its rack over the door. Her seven-chambered Lucky Cat already rested in its hip holster, loaded with dewdrops—arcsilver bullets. Neither dewdrops nor regular bullets would bring down a Skeleton Dancer. If they got nasty, she’d have to rely on the flaked obsidian knife in her boot, and even more on Dead Guy, to bring her out alive. But skreekers haunted the plains: spiteful wisps of things long dead, clinging to existence through sheer hatred of the living. Those arcsilver could banish.

  She emerged blinking into the sunlight, giving her door a little push to be sure the latch caught. At the base of the porch steps, Dead Guy sat atop Dead Horse. Thin tendrils of mist rose from Dead Horse’s hooves as it stood, patient as a chunk of steel-gray rock. The Bay kept a body’s breadth of distance between them, but at least didn’t seem inclined to kick up a fuss beyond what was fitting for a gelding of sixteen years. Nodding approval, Rider slung the Arbiter over her back and mounted.

  “Let’s ride,” she said.

  Rider recalled the desert full of life. As a girl, she’d spent hours catching skittery purple lizards with yellow streaks painted down their backbones, but she saw fewer of them these days. The cactus owls, round handfuls of chalk-and-tobacco-colored feathers, came less and less often to the area around Camlock and she hadn’t heard a whooping kite give its ooweeoo cry overhead since she’d grown to be a woman. She wasn’t so old, not even three double-handfuls of years, that things should’ve changed so bad in her lifetime.

  “There was a whole carpet of redbird brush down in that gulch last year,” she noted. “Now look at it. Just raggedy shreds.”

  “Yep,” said Dead Guy.

  “You could at least turn your head, being how it’s on your blind side.”

  “I saw it as we rode up.”

  “Well, here I was thinking it would interest you a little more.” She folded a leg to rest on the saddle afore her. “What could kill off a whole patch of redbird brush in a year? Stuff grows like bristles on a hog’s back.”

  “There’s death in the desert,” Dead Guy replied.

  “Hm.” Rider drummed her fingers on her saddle, watching as he rode past, hair whipping in his private gale. “If it comes to choosin’, the world belongs to the living.”

  “You think?”

  “Sorry, partner. That’s just how it is.”

  Midday came. The sky rained down heat, and the cracked ochre earth radiated it all back upward, hot as a baked stone. White foam mottled The Bay’s flanks. Rider took off her hat to mop her brow, her eyes squinting up tight as babies’ fists under the sun’s remorseless glare. Ahead, a tangle of mesquite cast a patchwork shadow over the dusty ground. “Let’s stop,” she called to Dead Guy.

  Leisurely, he turned Dead Horse around, circling to her side. “Need a breather?”

  Rider scowled, particularly at Dead Horse, still sleek and unwearied. “Maybe you and that spook-horse can go on without a break, but us flesh-folk ain’t so lucky.”

  He held up a hand. “Just teasing.”

  “Pah.” She’d have wagered her boots he didn’t enjoy the heat any more than she did. He didn’t show it in sweat the way she did, but the sun’s rays seemed to pass right through him, thinning him down like watered soup. She turned The Bay toward the patch of shade, and he pricked up his ears and picked up his pace. But, fifty paces from the stand of trees, his hooves inexplicably slowed. His nostrils flared.

  “What’s up, buddy?” Rider leaned forward to rub his shoulder, all the while keeping a wary eye out. It wasn’t like The Bay to dally when he knew a rest was in store.

  No animals. No tracks. Only a hawk hanging black and seemingly motionless in the blue expanse of the sky. The Bay wouldn’t spook at a hawk—a desert guinea, yes, but she’d hear their throaty chirps gurgling out of the mesquite branches if any were perched up there.

  The mesquites. Rider stood in her stirrups, craning her neck for a better look. “
Their leaves look awful brown.”

  Dead Guy’s mouth tightened. Hooking the reins over his saddle horn, he dismounted. After a moment, Rider followed suit. Grit crunched under their boots, crunched under The Bay’s hooves as he tossed his head and stamped, a sad contrast to the stoic Dead Horse.

  “Easy,” Rider soothed. She cast another glance around the clearing, shook her head. “Don’t see nothing, but I’ll check the scry-crystal, just in—”

  An icy jolt shot through the vein pulsing at the back of her knee, right above the top of her boot. Her thigh muscles knotted into one giant cramp as a dead-woodchuck stink filled her nostrils.

  “Son of a bitch!” She staggered as a clammy hand with many thin, flexible fingers wrapped up her leg and began levering itself out of the sand.

  “My baby,” grated a voice. “They smashed his head against the wall. Help! My baby!” A distorted woman-shape pulled itself out of the ground, its face horribly elongated, jaw rattling against its breastbone, eyes pulsing out of their sockets.

  Skinning her Lucky Cat, Rider sighted along the barrel. But beside her, The Bay reared. Forgetting his sixteen years, his lack of stones, and that stiff hind leg he played up when he felt lazy, he knocked her flat and bolted off across the path they’d already cut through the desert.

  “Shi—” cried Rider, getting a mouthful of sand for her trouble.

  Dead Guy flexed his hand. A trickle of liquid metal flowed out of his sleeve, coated his wrist, engulfed his fingers, poured itself into the shape of a gleaming blade. One swift downward jab skewered the skreeker. It gargled once, like a handful of pebbles swilling around inside a tin can filled with spit, then flashed in on itself and vanished.

  Rider shoved off against the ground, swatting sand from her trousers. “I musta taken shelter by these mesquite near a hundred times. Never seen a skreeker here before.” She dug in her pocket, brought out a quartz crystal, two inches long. Its tip glowed yellow. She jabbed it into the sand where the skreeker had appeared, and something like a rotted tater with a huge wailing mouth and two bulbous eyes maggot-wriggled up out of the ground. She shot it.

  “That was the baby,” said Dead Guy as it imploded. His livemetal blade flowed back up his sleeve.

  “Was.” Rider chambered a new shot, holstered the Cat, and slammed her fists onto her hips. The distant silhouette of The Bay skimmed across the desert, still going a fair clip. “Goddamn horse.”

  “What now?”

  Rider thumbed back her hat. She had the Cat and the Arbiter and the ammo on her belt. She picked up the canteen The Bay had slung loose when he bolted, and it glugged, still half-full.

  She corked it. “We ride double.”

  Three hours later, Dead Horse still hadn’t tired of snaking its head back to snap at her leg. She kicked its nose as it came ‘round again.

  “Quit that,” said Dead Guy.

  “You talking to it or me?” Rider shifted, picturing the bruises blossoming on her rump come tomorrow.

  “Either.” He yanked the reins as Dead Horse tried to bite again and lifted a finger to trace a spot along the horizon where the land sloped downwards, forming a natural, shallow basin. Three sand-colored lumps and one roughly square stone structure sat in a semi-circle against the wall of the steepest slope. “Bondee.”

  “What’s left of it, anyways.” Rider reached for her binoculars, remembered The Bay’d run off with them, cursed, and settled for cupping her hands to her eyes and squinting. “Don’t see any Dancers.”

  “Don’t hear them either.”

  True, the Dancers kicked up a heap of noise. Rattling Sky Mountain earned its name from their antics on its peak. The air all around Bondee hung still as a held breath.

  “I assume we intend to take a look around regardless,” said Dead Guy.

  “Come this far.”

  Another hour’s ride into the afternoon’s stretching shadows brought them to Bondee. Dead Guy guided Dead Horse to the middle of the abandoned camp, next to the old stone supply house where the stub of an ancient live oak jutted up out of the ground. A whole troop of soldiers must’ve used it as their hitching post; pale lines encircled the trunk where the bark had been rubbed off, like the marks of the hangman’s noose.

  Dead Guy dismounted. Rider went to follow, and Dead Horse’s muscles bunched in that split instant where she hung suspended between hide and earth. She guessed its plans right before it corkscrewed its rear off the ground in an almighty heave. Sixteen years since last she’d been bucked. Felt the same. The sky passed at an odd tilt above her head before she whomped onto her back. The Arbiter, caught between her and the hard-packed ground, grunted and popped.

  “Goddamn!” Rider rolled over quickly, even in her anger grateful it hadn’t gone off. Dewdrops generally caused little harm to living flesh, but she didn’t fancy taking chances at such close range.

  “Bad Huntsman.” Dead Guy swatted Dead Horse’s flank, and it returned to standing like a carving of a horse. “You okay? What’s the damage?” he asked over his shoulder as he tied up the damned beast.

  Rider shook her head. The Arbiter breech-loaded; she tried to break it and peer down the barrel, but it jammed. Swearing, she slung it over her back. “Good thing I prob’ly won’t need it.” She tried to convince herself the smug expression on Dead Horse’s face was her imagination, without much success. “I’ll take it to Mr. Claggan tomorrow. Bronson can pay the bill for sending us on this wild jackass chase.”

  Dead Guy’s lips quirked. “Let’s have a look around, fellow jackass,” he said, tugging his hat to shadow his face.

  Nothing in the stone supply house but dust, rotted sacking, and a hairy brown tarantula. The first of the old clay quarter houses had so collapsed in on itself that Rider could barely squeeze her thin body past the fallen debris blocking the entrance. Only rubble inside. The second—the one that smacked right up against the basin wall—

  The instant Rider stepped through the doorway, she knew something was off.

  “Someone’s been in here recently,” said Dead Guy, bent near in half to avoid banging his head. He ran a hand along a thick pine branch, still smelling of sap, braced against the angle of a wall to reinforce the ceiling.

  “And not Dancers neither,” said Rider, finding a boot print pressed into the dirt floor. A fresh print, its outline unblurred by settled dust, pointing deeper into the room. A faint breeze tugged her hair. Tracking it to its source, she pulled down a tattered sheet of canvas tacked to the back wall. Behind it, a ragged black hole gaped, exhaling a breath of stone and darkness into her face.

  “Well,” she said.

  Dead Guy’s livemetal flowed over his hand, coating it like a second glove. Rider lit a candle. Mutely, they stepped into the tunnel.

  Her sweat iced on her skin. Too big a drop too quick, just for getting out of the sun. Darkness settled in, thick as liquefied velvet. Sound came to her all hollow and echoing, like she’d stuck her head underwater. Tap, tap, tap, tap went her footsteps. The noise reminded her of the undertaker at work. She set her jaw as the tunnel narrowed. Her coat snagged against its rough-hewn sides. Someone’s chopped this out recently, she thought, and no sooner thought it than the candlelight caught the glimpse of metal half-buried in a furrow of the wall. The head of a pickax, four broken inches of shaft still attached. Rider gave it an experimental tug, but it was wedged too deep to shift.

  “Someone’s gone to a heap of trouble to dig this tunnel,” she said to Dead Guy, cramped up behind her. The walls caught her words and echoed them, sent them slithering up and down the tunnel, adding a sibilant hiss they hadn’t possessed when they left her mouth.

  “The only thing anyone would mine for around Camlock is arcsilver,” he replied, and the echo returned his voice in the rumbling growl of an angered cat.

  Rider ran her fingers along the embedded pick, trying to fit the two contrary pieces together. Arcsilver. Many experienced prospectors claimed the Camlock mines were almost tapped out. Then—after a few drink
s and in lowered tones—they’d speak of rich veins just waiting to be claimed beneath Rattling Sky Mountain. No one cared to brave the Dancers, however. But Bondee? No one’d ever discovered arcsilver around Bondee.

  As she puzzled, a new smell mingled with the sluggish air. A vivid recollection rose to her mind of the day she’d lifted a floorboard to find a sand rat decomposing beneath, its guts half melted into sludge, maggots squirming in its eye sockets. The stench flowed into her nostrils and ran down the back of her throat until it took all her grit not to spew it back out. She lifted the candle. The passage widened ahead. There, a sour, yellow-gray mist was flooding the tunnel floor.

  “Skreekers.” She drew the Cat.

  “Rider,” said Dead Guy, quietly in her ear. “I can’t use my blade here. The tunnel’s too narrow.”

  She tapped a finger against the Cat’s barrel, tempted to stand her ground. She was Shadowmarshal, and how many skreekers could there be? The smell intensified, coating her tongue with its vile essence. The mist thickened into a fog swimming with vaguely human shapes. Sallow tendrils licked her boot’s toes. Discretion won. “Back up,” she commanded.

  The fog exploded into a hundred starving faces, two hundred groping hands. Each lipless mouth opened to form an unending screech of hatred. Rider staggered back as the skreekers engulfed her, tearing her skin and clothes with stinking, clawed hands. The candle dropped from her hand. Its flame flickered twice and died on the wick. No matter; the skreekers cast their own, nauseous light. The wizened, yellow face of an ancient woman thrust into hers, nosetip to nosetip. A mad, half-second’s eternity of staring into rolling, piss-colored eyes, then the skreeker’s lips yawed open, the thin skin around them stretching like a snake’s. Its eyeteeth lengthened into fangs.