Life and Limb (The Ebon Chronicles) (2 page)

The frail and diseased creatures were known to tumble to the sand and die at a moment's notice, to contract illness and blight through the long running sores in their rumpled skin.

But not this one.

His coat was smooth, free of tumor.  Of course that would also make me a target if ever I ended up running into bandits.  Then again, I would be a target anyway once I reached the ground.

"Should be a two or three day journey," I said, "Will my feet touch the ground?"

"This isn't a disposable creature," Atus said, "Not for the price I'm asking.  He's worth a year of a man's life at the least."

"Sold," I said pulling the silver from my jacket and tossing it over, "Have him waiting for me at the drop room in one hour with waterbags and provisions.  Basic provisions."

As he caught the bag I saw him weigh it in his hand with satisfaction.  He grinned, the cigar hanging loosely in his teeth as he lit it with his pocket lighter.  As I opened the door to leave, he spoke around the cigar, puffing it against the lighter's blinking flame,

"It's the shooting star isn't it?  You're the one they picked to take a look at it."  I didn't respond, and he knew I wouldn't.  I had an overwhelming feeling - as long ghosts snaked from his nostrils - that I would regret speaking about this job if ever the magistrate found out.

I did, however, pause.  It was ambiguous enough to provide me pardon if it came down to trial.  I turned, looking over at him as he finished his thought with a casual spit on the hay below, "You know I've heard stories of those things before.  I have poisons.  Painless.  Strong enough to kill a horse if you come across one of those interrogation drones."

"You think they'd interrogate a horse?" I said wryly with a grin I couldn't feel, "What do you think they know?"  His laughter followed me as I stepped onto the street,

"That's a good one, Mr. Still.  What
do
the horses know?"

My next stop was my home, a small house on the now oriented south side of town near the meat market.  The simply furnished old house was by no means opulent, but it was comfortable.  And it was home.

Inside I reached my old oak journeyman's cabinet and opened it up.  My suit jacket and dress pants were replaced with the rugged coarse material I always wore on expeditions.  In addition to looking quite low class, the outfit had the added benefit of being mobile and light in the harsh sun.  And though it was hot on the trail, I would need my coat, as the nights in this land were as cold as days were hot.  And there was the hat, a simple affair designed simply to keep the sun off my face on an often unchangingly flat landscape.

I would be armed with a simple pistol, a tried and true design as ancient as the city itself, designed to keep working even with a barrel full of dust.  Bullets were in short supply, as they often were for a man of my means.  But that didn't matter.  My preferred method for survival was avoidance, enlightened cowardice. 

The same seven bullets I now loaded into my revolving pistol were the survivors of the same family of twenty I had purchased at the beginning of my career.  A single pistol.  Add to that a compass, my mapping case, and my old hunting knife, and you can get an idea for how woefully ill equipped I was to take on the waste.

"Two days.  Maybe three.  Stay alone, stay alive."

The mantra still hung in dead air as I turned and looked at the simple elegance of my home, perhaps for the last time.  Next to the old ticking wind-up clock, a real luxury in those times for me, I caught sight of a brass framed mirror cached in soot from the extinguished camphor lamp beneath it.

And I saw the dirty man therein adjust his collar and avoid his own gaze.  My thoughts returned to earlier.  Would I really murder the magistrate when I returned?  I was captive to my nature in that moment, willing myself to deny it and knowing full well that I would feel the man's throat in my hands if I lived.  And that would be it.  That would be all.

I would live the rest of my life with many titles.  Husband, father, redeemed free man, ex-vagrant, ex-workman, ex-murderer.  I would spend my nights idly, playing music to my lady on one knee, a song to last forty or so years.  Or else however many I could expect to follow.  And after that, forever.

All I had to do was catch a falling star.  And then I would have life.  I looked back to the mirror, smiling and casually flipping my pistol in my hand, holstering it without a care in the world like a dirtwalking mercenary.

I'd kill for that life.  Without a tick, I'd kill a lot of people.  For Tyche.

For my blossom.

At the turn of that hour I met Atus in the drop room of the city's lowest level.  The door opened into something part room, part machine, bathed only in a thick, smoky red light.  With the factory pistons leading up onto the upper levels still chugging away loudly, Atus walked nimbly with his horse by the same name behind him.  He was still smoking his cigar, grinning in the gleaming red that covered everything.  Over the sound of the machines I could hear his cackling and the beat of shod hooves on the steel floor.

"A deal's a deal, Mr. Still!" he called out, "I'd get moving, though.  I doped him up pretty fair, free of charge.  He's not going to sleep tonight, but he'll be a little more paranoid than usual."

I wasn't dressed as a gentleman anymore, so thanking him didn't seem appropriate now.  I took the reigns and hoisted myself onto the back of the creature, guiding both Atuses to the side to reach the drop room.

Atus the man, and two attendants attached a tube to the hydration spout in the horse's neck and checked the pressure of the water bags, giving me a thumbs up.

Atus the horse was twitching its head from side to side, chewing the air and his own lip in anticipation, hot breath streaming from his nose in twin gusts. 

Deep within the creature something rattled, and I noticed as it looked back at me that I could see a lot of white in its eyes - more than was normal.  Chains were attached to the saddle hooks, and with a hydraulic whir we were lifted from the steel plate we had been standing on.

"How much dope did you give this creature?" I called out as the floor dilated beneath me, filling the room with light reflected from the shadow-ground beneath the city.

"What does it matter?" Atus the man said, "free of charge!"

The cables and chains lowered us down through the opening beneath the city.  The last thing I saw as I looked up from the sudden silence of our descent was the horse dealer staring out at us with the cherry on his cigar shining as red as the rest of him.  With wind blowing, flapping the rim of my hat, I looked down at the ground closing in on us.  I swear that horse, silently anticipating the touch of ground beneath its hooves, started running before we even touched the ground.

With one swift movement I slapped the saddle catch and the hooks released the chains above us, dropping us the last few inches to the ground, which the horse Atus started tearing across with the might of a locomotive.

As I rode, my eyes cast out across the great gulf between us and our destination.  Whatever was out there beyond the horizon, nothing would stand in our way.  The two of us were moving as one inevitable force, closing in, even in these first few moments, on our destiny.  And if the thing we were after proved too far to reach, I would welcome the sun bleaching my bones.

With the city's legs pulverizing the ground all around us we ran, easily outpacing the behemoth.  I chanced a look backward, as was my custom on those lonesome cartography missions, back toward home.  Over several minutes, the city diminished in size before we reached the first hill.

Atus had already proven himself an incredible racer in this first stretch, and he would have been an excellent adversary for any of the great racing horses I had read about in my younger days in the twice annual ground derby. 

He ran straight as a bullet down the barrel of a gun until we reached the hills, and then he strode up them with ease, as if he had shifted the whole of the Earth around his own personal gravity.  We reached the peak and I saw the rest of the landscape we still had yet to travel.

We hadn't slowed, even when the sun started touching the mountains in the west.  Up ahead there was a small hamlet.  I could see patchwork houses and the patchwork families within, staring out windows as tiny blips in the distance.  If they suspected I was from the city, I wouldn't be surprised. 

Generally I had experienced very little of the civilizations outside, merely noting where they were for my maps.  And this would be no exception in that regard.  Pulling the reigns and pushing on Atus' left flank with my heel, we did a wide arc to the right, avoiding even the longest range rifles they were likely to have.

The wasteland hamlets are not a matter of mystery.  Those who have visited one often tell the same tragic stories as those who have visited a hundred.  Starvation, disease, warring gangs, and of course the constant subjugation by cities such as mine.

Ripper dogs were still a problem in this region as well, having rebounded from a group that had once worked to wipe them out nearly four decades prior.  I hadn't seen any, wouldn't likely see any at the speed I was traveling.  They were cunning hunters, unable to feel natural emotions like fear, intent only on devouring everything that crossed their paths.  But they were also clever predators, like foxes.  They wouldn't chase us now.  They would wait until we stopped.

With the landscape whipping beneath me at this incredible rate I found it difficult to feel a part of it all.  It changed so quickly that I felt an odd lack of attachment to any single object that we passed.  A broken tree here, a burned house there, a family of skeletons arranged on a broken sofa, these became more images in a book as I flipped its pages without care.  Each one soon forgotten as we passed by.  Except for one.

As we soared across the sands I came across a man, possibly in his early twenties.  He had a tool in his hand, a crook's spade.  It was a common enough tool for farmers, and it had a reputation as a weapon among bandits during the frequent times of drought.  It was a look he had in his eye that moved my hand to my pistol - a hunger unknown where I came from.

He stared, and as I watched him pass beside me, carried by the moving land Atus was tearing through, time seemed to slow.  He leaned heavily on the spade, mouth chewing a blade of grass he must have been saving all morning. 

It wasn't just a hunger for the food I had packed, but for all of it.  He had dreamed of adventure, I realized, dreamed of the rich rewards afforded to those of us who were offered them.  In that instant I saw his history, having laid awake with ripper dog howls, staring at the stars and imagining what it would be like to live anywhere.  To live.

As I passed, I raised a hand and his face softened into an idle smile.

The sun was setting deep into the horizon now, turning the Earth a shade of deep brick red.  Atus wasn't showing any signs of slowing down, so I kept him moving.  I thought about the fallen star, the feel of the paperslave's throat in my hands, and my blossom Tyche.  We rode the whole night without stopping.

And then there was dawn.  With the lids hanging low in my eyes I scanned the landscape that came with the first light.  It was the same, the same it had been all night and the day prior.

Featureless, unchanging.

My attention was divided, distracted as I reached down to take a drink from the waterbags hanging in front of me.  As I tasted hot plastic flavored water trickling from the rubber tube clenched between my teeth - that's when it happened.

It was a zipping sensation, a thump and a crack I noticed only after the hot lead passed through my leg.  I looked down to see the ground no longer moving. 

The way I remember it, Atus didn't fall right away.  He stopped, letting one final snort pass from his twin barreled nostrils as if he was sharing the punch-line of some great and unspoken joke.  In that snorting second I looked down and saw the waterbag in front of my left knee spattered with the all too familiar red explosive stain.  My leg had a hole in it, but I didn't feel pain right away.  Not until the horse fell to its left and pinned my shattered shin beneath it.

And then I screamed.

As we fell I must have heard the crackle of the rifle shot catch up to us, but I don't actually remember hearing it.  I was breathing hard in a thin cloud of dust that had risen all around our fallen bodies.  All I remember is wiping muddy perspiration from my eyes as my hand tried to rip the pistol from between me and the wrinkled dirt beneath.  The gun was slippery, bathed in a pool slowly emerging from the gap where my leg and the horse were bound by gravity.  My vision was leaving, my breath was quickening, and my thoughts became a singular scream.

Escape.

I ripped back across the cracked clay-like dirt, clawing my wet hands back, leaving thick red handprints in wide spiraling arcs around me.  I couldn't get leverage, couldn't move my leg back.  Pain was shooting in irregular patterns up into the rest of me, eclipsing abrasions and cuts all along my left side.  I even kicked with my good leg, trying to spur the creature to action.  But Atus wasn't moving.

Time passed, and I realized I could do nothing to stop the bleeding in my leg.  I don't remember prying the pistol from my hip, but I do remember being surprised to see it in my hand some time later.

"That was a shot for the campfire!" an excited young girl's voice said as she bounded up to where I lay, "Must've been clear through the heart!"