5-1
Amidst the red and black, the cowboy fought a battle without beginning nor end. The bloodfiends came in a tide, wave after wave never giving him more than a minute or two to catch his breath in between bouts of combat. A strange and impossible energy filled him, rendering him immune to exhaustion, immune to hunger and thirst, his heart racing and his brain on fire with a lust for violence beyond even the baseline for a man who murdered with nothing but a shot and a smile.
Paper targets, all they were was paper targets, an endless parade of paper targets. Few indeed were the bloodfiends that did not disintegrate back into their constituent matter when a .45 passed through their weakest point. Man-sized insects on two and four and six limbs, vast horned giants, blood-clot imitations of machines with fractal intricacy in their pipes and struts, human beings deformed by cybernetics or gross mutation, reptiles matching no species known, all of these and a billion more unnameable things fell before the final answer to all questions: the bullet.
Memory was available only in flickers. Like a mountain range seen through a dust storm, the cowboy remembered only briefly the ones who had sentenced him to this purgatory. There had been a woman and a girl. The girl was the ultimate prize, crown jewel atop a whole life of conquest. But the woman, weak though she was, had been possessed of a cunning so great that it was almost impossible not to underestimate.
That was as far as he would ever get in his remembrance. Before memory could turn to rage, and rage to motivation, the bloodfiends would come back and the cowboy would be thrown into the moment of combat. The only moment. A moment that could last until the end of time, if it was allowed to.
It was chance that saved him, though the inevitable sort of chance, the chance that a coin flipped over and over forever will eventually land on its edge. The cowboy cared not about where he went: in the same way that he had no will to escape, so too did he have no will to return to the same position at the end of every fight. Bit by bit he crept along the length and breadth of the suture, until at long last he found himself close enough to the edge that he could be overheard.
“Is somebody in there?” A young woman’s voice tore through the red. “Follow the sound of my voice, I’m outside the suture!”
The cowboy was suddenly jostled back into full awareness. How long had he been trapped in the ceaseless combat? That moment of horror nearly cost him his life as he hesitated for a fraction of a second: a quadrupedal bloodfiend with a blunt whale-shark head leapt to tear his head from his shoulders. The cowboy ducked back, the bloodfiend’s teeth scraping down his leg even as he fired off a pair of shots into its skull.
“Whoever that was, don’t stop shouting! I’m in here!”
The young woman’s voice shouted wordlessly, a sonic lighthouse beacon that was soon joined by several other voices calling for him. The cowboy finished off the remaining threats with ruthless efficiency, one bullet apiece, then ran. Already he was putting together plans, mapping out his course. He would find them, the woman and the girl, and finish what he had started.
The cowboy was not a man prone to emotions. But even still, the first glimpse of blue skies after so long trapped in the hellish territory of the suture brought an incredible feeling of lightness. He’d wish such a fate on the worst man he’d ever met; nobody less loathsome would deserve it.
Immediately before him were the ones who had rescued him, a group of four individuals of such strange and totally misaligned appearances that they could only be four Pretenders. The one who had first heard him was a young woman, probably from Qinglong judging by her tight shirt, ripped jeans, and shaved head. Next to her was a giant of a man, about the same six-foot-four as the cowboy, but with a quarterback’s muscle stuffed into his prim and proper vest. A short distance away, leaning against a dead tree, was a man in brightly-colored clothes, his tunic and trousers marking him as being from the Kingdom Forest. A pair of narrow blades swung at his hips.
“Well that’s what I call good luck,” said the group’s fourth and final member. “We come across someone stuck in a suture, and he just happens to be as much of a freak as the rest of us! I’m Maria.” She stuck out her hand at the cowboy. “You?”
He scanned her up and down and decided he wasn’t a big fan of Maria. She reminded him too much of the woman, with her dark hair and the many pouches secured both onto her clothes and onto the sides of her wheelchair.
“I’m the man with no name,” he said, popping a half-smirk.
“Hah! I always gotta admire someone who can commit to the bit! Jingjing, did you get that? He even kinda looks like a spaghetti western!”
“I was always a fan of the genre,” the cowboy said, walking past Maria. “The edgeblood proved to be very accommodating.”
“A cowboy…” said the giant. He frowned, his brows knitting together.
Dammit. The cowboy with no name had been hoping that he might be able to surf along with this group, at least for a little while as he caught his bearings. But it was looking like his reputation had preceded him once again. He became very aware of his movements, lines of sight, the position of his hands.
“This is Leedsrealm, isn’t it? Where are you headed?”
“Leeds is only a few hours that way,” said Jingjing, gesturing with a thumb. “We were patrolling for bloodfiends.”
“Good to hear,” the cowboy replied. The giant was looking right at him, concentrating hard. Had they met? Maybe. “I could use a bath, a meal, and some company after what just happened. I think I was trapped in there for days. Maybe even weeks.”
“I’ve heard of you,” said the giant. “A Pretender who dresses like a bloody American movie star. You k—”
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
With a twitch of his fingers, the cowboy’s left-hand revolver appeared. He fanned the hammer, first shot aimed into the giant’s pelvis and riding the recoil upwards until the cylinder was nearly empty, the final bullet punching into his forehead and exploding the back of his skull.
“Terrance!” screamed Maria.
The other two, Jingjing and the swordsman, did the smarter thing.
“First Pretense: I Am Justly Proud!”
“First Pretense: Flying Foot of Blinding Steel!”
The cowboy was enough of a fighter to recognize his weaknesses as well as his strengths, and his weakness was durability. He needed to take them all out as quickly as he could. The giant, Terrance, hadn’t even hit the floor when the cowboy turned, letting the spent gun vanish while summoning his right-hand piece.
There was a part of him that was mildly disappointed his Pretension Statement hadn’t been “kill anything that moves” or the like, considering what he could do with a revolver. But oh well.
He fired six shots and hit six times, twice against each of them, the bullets slithering through the air in order to strike center of mass. Which was why it was strange as all getup that six pings rang out, all ricocheting off of the flank of the levitating iron maiden that had replaced the Chinese teenager. Maria, who hadn’t even activated her First, was unharmed, as was the swordsman. The clockwork of the cowboy’s brain seized for a moment.
But only for a moment. Jingjing could take injuries from others and put them on herself. Alright then.
He slapped his hand against the cylinder of the right-hand revolver, spinning more bullets into being, but before he could raise the gun to aim, the swordsman was on top of him and slashing away with impossible speed. The cowboy had grit, of course, and his ability to dodge was just as quick as his draw, but neither of those allowed him to survive that initial onslaught: it was the coat that did it. Nothing, not dust, not dirt, not snow nor sun, not bullets nor blades could cut through the Texas leather of his duster.
When the swordsman finally stopped, the cowboy’s shirt was sliced to tatters, and blood trickled all down his front. So the swordsman was fast, faster than anything, almost as fast as the cowboy’s bullets.
Maria, meanwhile, wheeled backwards away from the scene as fast as she possibly could, stopping almost a hundred feet away from the scene of the battle. The reason why became soon apparent.
“First Pretense: Whale, Set Sail!”
Maria promptly exploded outward, her First burgeoning to impossible size even as it was hurled up into the air, sending a windstorm in miniature rolling over the duelists as a heavy prop-bomber screamed into the air. A heavy prop-bomber as painted into being by the brush of Pablo Picasso having a high-energy day, at least. Every surface contrasted with every other, no two plates were flush, and the entire thing was cast in a riot of contrasting colors. But even the number of colors was put to shame by the number of turrets studded across the bombers surface, all taking aim at the cowboy.
The iron maiden spoke up. “He hasn’t moved: one meter in front of you, the floor is even!”
The moment Jingjing was finished speaking, the swordsman moved, launching into a nearly identical flurry of attacks. This time, though, the cowboy was prepared. With revolver in hand, he carved furrows into the earth, and was proven correct in his guess when even that slight disruption caused the swordsman to be knocked off-kilter. The thing about wind-up dolls is that they do the same motion every time: the swordsman was blind once he started moving, stuck with a pre-set series of actions.
When the swordsman stopped, the cowboy had no new injuries, not a single one: every single sword blow had deflected off of his coat, or else been parried by expert use of his .45. In the distance, the tone of the prop-engine buzz shifted: Maria was turning around for a strafing run.
And the cowboy felt as fresh as the drips out of a whiskey still. “You’re good at this, I’ll give you that much. But let me show y’all what a real expert can do.”
…
Two and a half minutes later, the cowboy reached into the pocket of his coat and was quite relieved to find that, even after so many days trapped in the suture, he hadn’t lost his matches. The cigar in his mouth was the good stuff, imported from Cuba, the last such box in all of Scrapyard, stolen off of a murdered clerk in Topeka years back. Someday he’d run out of them: but at a rate of one smoked per truly exceptional victory, they’d be able to stretch for quite some time.
From his perch, leaned casually against a small boulder, the cowboy let the bitter taste of tobacco carry him away from all of this carnage. The burning wreckage of Maria’s First Pretense turned the cool spring air into a high-plains heat. Buried somewhere underneath it was Jingjing, crushed by overwhelming force. The unnamed swordsman was dead at the cowboy’s feet, his eyeless face stomped into the dirt. Him and the stub of the cigar would make for familiar grave-mates.
It was a Bible name. Too damned old-fashioned for a woman warrior.
Oh, of course: Sara. The woman’s name had been Sara. And the girl was Zahra, because her parents hadn’t had an ounce of originality in their bodies. Sara was the one who had put him in the suture, and Zahra was the ultimate prize, the thing that would finally put him on the Old Man’s level. And if his intuition had any truth in it—which it did, it was part of his Pretension—then the trail led somewhere into Leedsrealm.
By the time the cigar burnt down to the nub, the sun was already painting a pretty picture across the canvas of the seaward horizon. There was work to be done: the cowboy had already taken the edgeblood from Terrance the giant and the nameless swordsman, but the edgeblood of the other two was still somewhere in the wreck. He hadn’t gained anything from what he’d taken, and if four Pretenders in one go didn’t make him any stronger than the cowboy would start firing his revolvers at heaven.
Then to Leeds. Sara wasn’t going to be able to escape from him that easily.
…
“You’re sure that you don’t want to change course?” Juniper asked. “There’s a place for you in Kansas; there sure as hell isn’t any extradition across that border, that’s for sure.”
It was a heartfelt goodbye on the Blackpool dockside, at least for Gilead and Sara. Gilead had spent more time in the upstairs of Juniper’s shop than he had any other place in Scrapyard. But…
“And burden you with four excess bodies? I think not. There is a bottom to your coffers, though you’ve been passing generous with them.”
“Five bodies,” Qi Zhen reminded.
“Just think about how much trouble we’ll already be having getting Shati back into position for repairs,” Wesley said. He took a step further onto the gangplank, then turned to say, “God bless you on your journeys, and here’s to our paths crossing once again.”
“Lord be with you as well, Wesley.”
That was the end of the conversation. Juniper gave her goodbye half-hugs to everyone except Gilead—who would not have appreciated anything so close to his chest, let alone a person—and followed Wesley up the plank, backpack over her shoulder. The truth was that the matter had already been settled, and this was merely Juniper’s last act of politeness. They’d debated it for hours while walking the trails from the wreck of Shati to Leedsrealm’s main port city, and settled on the necessity of their separation. Gilead wanted to go to the Kingdom, and Vilena couldn’t stand the heat.
As soon as Juniper vanished over the railing of the rust-ivied coal steamer, Qi Zhen let out a digitized approximation of a sigh of relief, immediately bounding down the gangplank.
“Where are you going?” Sara shouted after them.
“This is my first time in this city,” they said. “Our ship isn’t until tomorrow morning and I want to explore.”
“Idiot, stop!” Vilena yelled.
Qi Zhen stopped. “What do you want?”
“If we’re going to be traveling, then the first order of business isn’t running around the place like an escaped circus acrobat. We need to go to the shops!”
“Shopping?” asked Zahra, stirring momentarily from her half-dazed state.
“Havest thou any coin?” Gilead asked.
“Of course I do,” Vilena said. “Three days ago I was functionally a princess. Now come along, I can feel the sunlight burning through me.”