6-1
There was no such thing as a new locale, for a Pretender. That was the problem with Scrapyard, the whole reason for walking the Path: it was too damn small. There were only a handful of cities, only so many pieces of dirt to stand on. Sure, every so often you got a new one, but that sort of excitement only happened every five, six years, and the novelty never lasted for long.
Admittedly, the cowboy had a bad opinion of the last new arrival. The Topeka shard had been achingly close to what he’d been looking for all along, the home that he’d almost forgotten about. But it just wasn’t the same. Topeka was too tamed, too orderly; even the Indians were too much a political group, not real enough. He’d stopped there for a few months, enjoyed the wide open prairie, even fought against the circuit freaks for a hot minute when they’d first invaded. Then he moved on.
And now, having completed yet another lap around the full circumference of Scrapyard in what promised to be a lifelong rat race, he was back in Leeds. Now there was Shitville, Population All of the Damn Folks: the place smelled like coal and opium and sweat and sluts. Not even the presence of horses could soothe the hate the cowboy felt towards that cage of metal and money. If he was one of the poor fuckers trapped there? He’d have offed himself before the second Sunday.
But he wasn’t not trapped there. Under normal circumstances he’d not spend longer than a day: enough to get a nice bath and look for jobs before moving on. But on that day, he was looking for Sara Ajami, and for the prize she dragged around wherever she went.
Leeds was probably the second-biggest Pretender city in all of Scrapyard, after war-torn Kiver in the Kingdom Forest. It was big enough to have places to stay, so better than Carlisle, and unlike the cities in Furat on the opposite side of the Deluge, you weren’t gonna get shot by either side of a civil war for looking at them funny. Everything a Pretender could need.
The first Pretender bar that the cowboy knew about kicked him out the second he walked in the front door. Apparently he was “a fucking monster” who the owner wasn’t going to “just let you have a drink as though I don’t know what you’ve done!” He was pissed, obviously; it was a man’s right to be pissed after being ejected from a bar before his first drop. But he constrained his anger for the time being, on the grounds that being angry doesn’t do jumping jack squat for finding information about a woman and a little girl.
The second Pretender bar was where he lost his cool. Word travelled fast, apparently faster than he could. The second bar didn’t bother to kick him out. No, they skipped straight to the part where they laid an ambush for him. Apparently one of the patrons there, his Pretension had something to do with medicine or being a doctor or something, or maybe vampires. Either way, The cowboy had made it two steps past the door when a significant fraction of the blood in his body went outside of his body in a great crimson burst.
He killed everyone in that bar, Pretender or not. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t exactly hard neither; there were maybe eight, nine Pretenders, but the space was so enclosed that they couldn’t help but run into each other and into his bullets, so they went down fast. He still had a lot of lost blood, and some crazy son of a bitch with a hammer had taken a damn good shot at breaking his knee, so he was on a limp. But they all died anyways. The regular folks, too, not just the Pretenders. Plenty of them had guns, which made them fair play.
Only two people inside that bar left alive. The cowboy, of course, and one other.
“Now then, miss, tell me your name if you would.”
The cowboy strode through a thick sheen of blood and gore, his boots making a soft splash with every footstep. This battle wasn’t good enough for a cigar, but tobacco helped to mitigate the metallic scent of gore, so he lit up a stolen clay pipe instead.
“M-m-minnie,” said the girl. She was wearing something plain and brown, with a frilly apron on over it. Her accent said she was from around here; sounded like a chimneysweep. She worked at the bar, maybe; not quite clear why she hadn’t evacuated before the killing started, but she hadn’t fought back. The entire fight she’d been curled up on the ground with her back to the wall.
“Like the mouse,” the cowboy replied. “Very sorry about that dress. Bloodstains are hell to get out of lace.”
There was more bloodstain on her than clean cloth. He tossed her a pound coin, which bounced off of her shoulder and into the blood. She still scrabbled to pick it up once she realized what it was.
“Do you know why I’m keeping you alive?”
Minnie closed her eyes and nodded. “Just get it over with quickly.”
The cowboy smirked. “Well, you are as pretty as a picture—girls always are when they’re scared—-but I’m not much in the mood for that sort of thing. No, I spared you on account of I needed your help. Can you help me, Minnie?”
Minnie pressed her cheek against the wall, nodding as though nodding fast enough might wake her up from the nightmare she wasn’t in.
“Good. Now what I want you to do is, I want you to take that pretty coin I gave you and buy yourself a new dress. And while you’re going, if you see any Pretenders, I need you to tell ‘em that the cowboy isn’t here to cause trouble with folks who don’t cause trouble with him. You hear? These folks attacked me, so I defended myself. I’m looking for the Furati girls, not a fight. Repeat it back to me.”
“You’re not looking for a f-f-fight, you’re looking for the Furati girls!”
The cowboy grabbed Minnie by the hand—she screamed—and hauled her back onto her feet. “Good girl. Now get outta here!”
The cowboy washed himself off in the pub sink as best as he could. His coat, thankfully, wasn’t ordinary leather, otherwise the water’d ruin it altogether. But Pretender-stuff was more durable than that.
Briefly, as he left that carnage-riddled scene, the cowboy questioned whether it might be worth his while to revert to his Zeroth, snoop around that way. People’d be less likely to be all afraid of him if they didn’t know who he was, more likely to open up. But no. The shiver of disgust that raced down his spine like a sidewinder through the dust said everything that needed be said about that option.
He took off the hat instead. Went to a barber, got his beard shaved, which he thought caused him to lose some of his rugged, masculine charm, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t still handsome, and beards grow back anyways. The brown leather coat still made him stand out in Leeds, but he wasn’t going to remove it. There was always the chance that someone was putting him in the crosshairs of their rifle, and the cowboy didn’t fancy the idea of dying to a fucking coward.
Who, besides the Pretenders who wouldn’t speak to him, was most likely to have seen the Furati girls? He started with the police, of course. The cowboy had a love-hate relationship with cops; which was to say, they loved him and he thought they weren’t shit. What kind of a man needs an entire precinct at his back to exercise the law of the gun?
Still, he walked into the police station with a whole story in his back pocket, a tale of woe about how those dirty foreigners had stolen the private property of this upstanding white gentleman what never killed anybody who didn’t deserve it. He made it three steps in before seeing her face on the wanted poster. Only the older one, of course; not even the cops would dare put a little girl on one of those. Name unknown, wanted for questioning in association with the cold-blooded murder of Viscount Bruce Rutter. Reward to the order of twenty-five pounds for information which leads to her arrest.
He laughed. Couldn’t help it. Of course she’d gotten up to trouble while he was trapped in the suture; it was always the most cunning ones who screw up the most spectacularly. The cowboy included himself in that, of course. He tore the wanted poster off the wall; it was a good enough likeness to be worth showing around.
“Her name’s Sara, now can I have my twenty-five pounds?”
The cop-house was bustling, and he had to repeat himself before anybody took notice. He had big mutton-chops and he was a couple of inches under six-foot, with a missing middle finger on his right hand. But he was a cop.
“Excuse me, sir, what might be the problem?”
“No problem, no problem at all,” said the cowboy. He pushed the wanted poster into the cop’s face, an inch too far to be polite. “It’s about this woman here. Her name is Sara, no aitch, just ess-ay-ar-ay. I was wondering if I could have my twenty-five pounds, now that you know that.”
The cop’s expression immediately soured. “This precinct is highly busy at the moment. We won’t be handing out prizes to any fellow who comes by, not with matters the way they are!”
He went to leave; the cowboy stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Whoa there, whoa there, I was just making some humor. To tell you the truth? This lady has been a thorn in my side since long before she murdered this Rutter personality. She has wronged me, and I would like to know about her. As a man of certain talents, I thought perhaps I could cooperate with the… legitimate authorities.”
The cop twitched in the way that cops always do when they face any kind of grittiness. There was a revolver at his hip, after all. But as the cowboy bared his teeth, something changed in the little man with the nine fingers. He saw past the obvious, past the mundane, and for just a second realized the truth of the situation. That insight lasted only a second before he repressed it, forgetting all he’d seen like a momentary hallucination. But he couldn’t make it so he hadn’t seen what he’d seen.
“S-sir, as much as we at the department appreciate the offer of help, now is… now is a very bad time. What with last night’s unpleasantness. I can make a space in the schedule”—he pronounced it shed-jewel—“to see you about this matter, erm, tomorrow.”
The cowboy’s brows furrowed. “Unpleasantness? I’m just arrived in town today, haven’t heard of such a thing.”
“There was an… attack. Malignant anarchists, a bombing at Lord Ruthven’s palace last night. Nasty business, lots of good men gave their lives to secure our Lord’s safety.”
“A bombing?” The cowboy’s grip tightened. “You’re sure it was a bomb?”
“Sure as Sunday, sir. You know anarchists, always with their bombs.”
Not a coincidence, not a coincidence at all. Just remembering the Furati woman’s bombs made the cowboy’s ears ache. If there was a bombing against Ruthven, she must have been involved.
“These anarchists, where are they now?”
The cop chuckled, though there was no glee in his eyes. It was a laugh for the cowboy’s benefit. “Not a clue! But wherever they are, I assure you they’re not in Leeds. Sent ‘em packing, our boys did!”
Hell and damnation. It would have been too much good luck in one sitting for his prey to be locked up in jail somewhere, waiting for his arrival. Not like any jail could contain Sara for long. But either she was still in the city, or else it had not been long at all since she had fled it. That trick with the suture hadn’t put him too far behind after all.
He spent the full rest of the day canvassing the city in search of her. No place was too dirty, too low-down for his suspicions. He knew that the Furati girls were used to survival’s filthy embrace, and criminals in particular couldn’t be choosy. He interrogated the indigent at the end of his revolvers, searched the squats where the real anarchists hid out. The cowboy ended up with nothing. Every place he’d searched had been fully crossed off the list, but Leeds was a big city, with a hell of a lot of places to cross off.
When morning came, or when he’d had enough sleep for it to be close enough, it would be back to the hunt.
The cowboy had barely slept for an hour when he was awoken by a shifting in the air. The bedroom was tiny, being as it was on the third floor of a whorehouse, and not one of the expensive ones. Too small to fit a donkey inside. So he could feel it in the air when the number of occupants went from three to four, and levered himself up carefully, so as not to disturb the women in front of and behind him.
“You know, I really don’t have much tolerance for disorder in my city,” Ruthven said quietly. “And you’ve been causing quite a lot of it. So we’re going to have a chat, and you’re going to think extremely carefully about what you say next.”