Issue #123 • Jun. 13, 2013

“Cold, Cold War,” by Ian McHugh

“A Sixpenny Crossing,” by Don Allmon

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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COLD, COLD WAR

by Ian McHugh

Russia, 1921

        There was a tower at Petrovsk. A monstrous, broken-topped spike like the one the Allied forces had found at Astrakhan. Having to look up, even flying at two thousand feet, past the upper wing of his Avro biplane to see its top made Masaru dizzy. He groped for the small lump of the embroidered omamori amulet hanging from a cord around his neck. The other Avro, painted blue like his, followed as he banked into a wide downward loop, the Australian woman for once holding her proper station off his right wingtip.

        Masaru peered past the struts and wires between his biplane’s wings, trying to take the sight in. The tower’s proportions were such that it upset the perceptions and seemed to distort the flat landscape around it. Its base was a madman’s helter-skelter ziggurat, made of impossible stone blocks the size of townhouses, that cut a swathe across the city’s snow-covered grid of tenement blocks and terraces between the Caspian shore and the abrupt incline of the escarpment to the west. From the ziggurat’s peak, the ragged-toothed tower reached up to a dark stain of cloud fixed in the sky directly above.

        Just like at Astrakhan.

        Impossibly huge though it was, this tower was barely half the height of the one there. The realization brought Masaru back to his proper senses. Why the difference?

        He turned his attention to the city below. There was smoke coming from the ruined medieval fortress on the escarpment. There were more fires in the town itself. As at Astrakhan, stones from the tower lay scattered among the buildings, with ruin all about them as if they had fallen from its peak. The dome of the mosque, miniscule in the shadow of the impossible edifice, was cracked open like an egg.

        Red Bolshevik flags flew above the fortress. As Masaru and Edie swung low overhead, smoke puffed from the mouths of artillery pieces along the wall. Dirt and snow burst amidst a swarm of figures laboring up the slope. A pair of tanks crawled alongside the troops. White banners bearing the two-headed Imperial Russian eagle identified the attacking force.

        Masaru shook his head. Even with that tower in their midst, which made the rival Russian forces looked like ants warring in a man’s shadow, and even with shape-changing monsters running loose in their country—hordes of them, like those the Allied forces had driven at such cost from Astrakhan—still the Reds and Whites would rather fight each other.

        There were red Bolshevik and white Imperialist flags scattered too, among the roofs of the city’s buildings. There were many more in different shades of blue, with the common populace aping the color chosen by the Allies to declare their newfound neutrality in the war of Red and White. As the biplanes circled, bright blue banners unfurled from the twin minarets of the shattered mosque.

        Masaru’s loop took him away from the tower and the battle at the fortress towards the port and the Allied airfield. There was no sign of conflict on that side of the town. Indeed, both the port and the airfield seemed deserted. Masaru was disturbed to see that there were no vessels at the wharf, no planes parked at the airfield. He saw no movement near either. The queasiness returned to his stomach. Petrovsk airfield was base for two R.A.F. fighter squadrons and a large Allied garrison. Where were they?

        For the umpteenth time since they had flown out of Astrakhan, he scanned the sea to the east, hoping to see the ships of the Allied fleet already on their way north from Baku, bringing reinforcements for the next big push, inland along the Volga. The water was clear of anything but patches of floating ice, all the way to the horizon. He could feel the bulge of the dispatch wallet inside his jacket, with the urgent demands from the field commanders at Astrakhan for those extra divisions. Edie carried an identical set of papers—the normal contingency. One plane, at least, usually got through.

        He checked his rear left quarter, where her Avro was wobbling from side to side, out and back again, rather than holding a steady line at his wing. Masaru felt a surge of irritation. The woman flew like an undisciplined child kicking its heels. He still couldn’t believe they had given him a woman for a wingman. And an uncouth, irreverent, barely-civilized Australian adventurer woman at that!

        Abruptly, it occurred to him that she wasn’t waggling her wings idly. He realized his fist was bunched, about to punch the cockpit wall. Masaru took a slow breath, then throttled back to let her come alongside.

        She flew in close enough that he could see her shivering. Her scarf only covered her neck, and her cheeks were chapped raw, her lips a pale purple-blue.

        She pointed down at the airfield, then raised both palms. Should they land? Masaru chewed his lip in indecision. His eyes were drawn back to the tower, as by a magnet. He did not want to land anywhere near that monstrosity.

        They had no choice in the matter, regardless of his fears. Even with its added fuel tank where the trainee’s forward cockpit normally was, the Avro’s range was barely three hundred miles. Astrakhan to Petrovsk was over two-thirty, and it was another two hundred or so from Petrovsk to Baku. The dispatches had to get through to Baku.

        Finally, Masaru nodded. It seemed a forlorn hope that the Allied garrison wouldn’t have taken all the fuel stores with them when they abandoned their base. If they hadn’t, it meant they must have left in haste, perhaps even under attack, and then who knew what might be lurking down there. Swearing softly to himself, he pushed the Avro’s stick forward to begin his descent.

* * *

        No-one emerged to meet them as Masaru taxied across to the airfield’s fuel shed. Leaving the engine running, he lifted himself up to perch on the back lip of the cockpit and looked around. The maintenance hangar stood open, the shadows within cavernously empty. Beyond the hangar, the door of the dispatch office was propped open against the wall. Nothing moved inside.

        There were footprints and tire marks all over. The snow was thin enough that the matted, frozen grass underneath showed through in the tracks. A refueling car was parked nearby.

        His eyes were drawn once again, unwillingly, to the tower, and up higher to the dark stain of cloud above it. Never had he imagined that such things could exist in the world. It reached up higher than any structure built by man. Impossibly high. The ragged tops of both towers and the scattered stones at their feet made it appear that they had been broken off, somehow. But by what means had either of them been built at all? Where had the stones come from, and how?

        And what was the link between these towers and the monsters—Changelings, as the Russian peasants called them—that had been emerging from Bolshevik territory for the past year?

        Once again, his hand was drawn to the omamori at his chest. His sister had given him one for protection against injury the first time he went away to war as a young man. She had sent him a new one every year since. He had always kept his promise to wear them, but mainly as a reminder of her. The tower’s baleful presence prompted him to wonder if he should write to ask her for an amulet to protect against supernatural harm, instead.

        Edie’s biplane taxied up beside his, the throttle cut and the propeller winding down. She was already out of the cockpit, hopping nimbly down onto the wing and hanging one-handed from a convenient strut, one foot swinging carelessly. Before the plane had stopped rolling, she jumped lightly down, her boots crunching on the snow.

        Masaru ground his teeth in exasperation. Circus pilot, he thought. He had heard she had been a wing walker in an American flying show before she’d come to Russia. He reached down to close his Avro’s throttle. His ears rang as the roar of the engine wound down.

        “It’s quiet,” Edie said, sauntering over. “Where is everyone?” She took off her flying cap. Blonde curls spilled around her face, caught by the wind.

        Arrogant. Like most Allied personnel, Masaru kept his own head shaved to avoid lice and the threat of typhus they carried. He said, “What use are you if you break your leg performing childish stunts? We have a mission.”

        Her face registered surprise, then she put her fists on her hips, ready to argue.

        “We will not dally here,” Masaru continued. He jumped down on the opposite side of his plane. “You stand guard.”

        He paused before walking over to the refueling car and stooped to examine the tracks in the snow more closely. The uppermost prints were still crisp around the edges. Perhaps as recent as the day before. He stamped across to the refueling car, trying to work some feeling back into his legs. The stillness of the buildings—that should have been bustling with pilots and ground crew—was oppressive, the quiet broken only by the distant thud of artillery fire from the fort. Masaru undid the button of the holster at his hip, trying to ignore the nervous crawling sensation at the back of his neck.

        The drum on the tray of the refueling car sounded full when he knocked it and, for a miracle, the car’s engine turned over on the third attempt. Masaru gave it a bare handful of seconds to warm, then drove over to park between the biplanes.

        Edie had wandered off a short distance. She was at least treating the situation seriously enough to have her revolver in hand. But when Masaru turned around again after filling her Avro’s tanks, she had her jacket off and overalls down around her calves, squatting bare-arsed in the snow to piss.

        He averted his eyes quickly, his face heating. He cocked his fist at the fuel car door, stopped himself. Then, ever so carefully, he pressed his knuckles into the cold metal.

        Small arms crackled somewhere in the city, not far away. Masaru drummed his fingers impatiently as the fuel poured into his auxiliary tank. Two fighter squadrons and a garrison of British and American infantry had been based here. Where had they gone?

        Done at last, he drove the refueling car clear of the planes and tramped back across the snow.

        “Edie!” he called.

        She looked his way, shrugging herself back into her jacket, and raised an arm to point. “There’s someone over there, outside the fence.”

        “More reason for us to leave now,” Masaru said, not bothering to hide his impatience.

        “He’s wearing flying clothes.”

        “What?” Masaru looked.

        Sure enough, there was a lone figure outside the wire mesh of the airfield’s perimeter fence, facing them. Even at a distance, it was clear he was dressed as a flyer—leather cap, high boots, wool-collared leather jacket over padded flying overalls.

        There was something odd about the way the stranger stood, though—his shoulders hunched unnaturally, as if pulling too-long arms up into his jacket sleeves. His legs seemed strangely bent above his boots. Masaru squinted at the stranger’s grinning face.

        “Changeling!”

        The monster sprang forward. Inhumanly long forelimbs thrust from its sleeves. It bounded, ape-fashion, towards the fence, cackling like a hyena.

        Masaru scrabbled for his sidearm.

        The Changeling leapt at the fence, bouncing off the top of the wire and landing with an explosion of powdered snow. It charged, mouth split open from ear-to-ear to show needle teeth and a lolling black tongue.

        Edie raised her pistol two-handed and fired. The monster yelped, rolling. Masaru was amazed. A hit! Then it was up again, whooping and giggling, skittering side to side as it continued its charge. Edie fired again and missed. She held her ground, tracking its approach with her revolver.

        Masaru dashed forward, raising his own weapon as the monster sprang. He shoved in front of Edie and fired into its chest. The impact of the bullet sounded like a hammer striking wood. The Changeling was flung squealing backwards. Masaru was aware of Edie swearing. The Changeling thrashed its limbs to right itself and leapt at him again. Masaru aimed his pistol, too slow. A cloven-hoofed forelimb knocked it aside. He threw up his arms to protect himself, and the monster sank its teeth into his hand.

        For a moment they braced, arms and forelimbs locked. Masaru stared into its eyes, pinprick black pupils ringed by red and orange bands. Its breath on his face smelled of hot metal. There was nothing left of the man it might once have been. Edie stepped around him, put her pistol to the monster’s temple and pulled the trigger.

        The blast was deafening. The Changeling’s head snapped to the side, and stayed there. Its eyes glazed, and it slithered limply to the ground.

        Masaru’s ears felt stuffed with cotton wool. He stared in horror at his lacerated hand. The Russian peasants had named them Changlings after the hideous fairy children of their folk tales. The Reds’ Plague, the Whites called the affliction, the result of some germ or chemical cooked up in the Bolsheviks’ vile scientific experiments. Contagious, virulent as rabies, they said.

        Edie called something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He cast about for his pistol, spied it in the snow a few yards away, and staggered over to scoop it up.

        “Stop!” Edie cried as he began to lift the gun to his head. She smacked his wrist with the barrel of her pistol, sending shooting pain up his arm. His gun tumbled from his grasp once more.

        He stared at her in shock. How could she think of stopping him?

        “You won’t become one of them,” she said. “It’s not contagious.”

        He raised his injured hand for her to see, then waved it at the dead Changeling. “That was a man once!” He saw himself turning into another leering monstrosity, shook his head violently. “I will not—”

        “It was never a man!”

        “Then where do they come from?” he demanded.

        Her mouth opened, shut; answers started and discarded.

        The tower, Masaru thought. From that mad tower. But how? And where had the towers come from? His gaze was drawn up to the immobile patch of darker cloud above it.

        “I don’t know,” Edie said, at last. “But I’ve seen men bitten and they have not changed.”

        Masaru had, too—men injured in the bloodbath outside Astrakhan. Days later, still strapped to their hospital beds, they remained men, begging to be released from their bonds. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t change. Who knew how long it took? Most soldiers who were bitten killed themselves or were shot by their comrades. He imagined his body corrupting, his mind falling into madness.

        He lunged for his pistol. Edie kicked his knee, knocking his leg out from under him. Masaru went down with a yell. Edie scooped up the gun and backpedaled clear of him.

        “Enough,” she said.

        “Then you do it,” he spat, getting to his feet.

        “Who’s waiting for you?” she asked, abruptly.

        He scowled at her, confused by the question.

        “Who have you got at home?” she said. “A wife? Children?”

        Affronted by her presumption, he drew himself up. “I have a sister. She has children.”

        “You provide for them?”

        “Their father was a soldier,” he said, stiffly. “He died in Manchuria.”

        “And what will happen to them if you shoot yourself?”

        Masaru remained silent.

        There was a rolling boom from the escarpment—another salvo of artillery fire.

        Edie held up his gun. “Can I give this back to you, now?”

        Sullenly, he nodded. She tossed it onto the snow in front of him.

        “Stay out of my way next time. I don’t need you to save me,” she said. “Come on. There’ll be more of them, and we’re stuffed if they turn up in numbers before we get airborne.”

* * *

        The wind at five thousand feet was burning cold. Masaru pulled his scarf up closer to his goggles. His legs were going stiff, his backside already numb from the cold and sitting in the cramped cockpit.

        With a grimace, he forced the fingers of his injured hand to flex. Edie had doused the wound with gin from the bottle she kept in the cockpit of her plane, before binding it with a strip of cloth torn from Masaru’s shirttail. It throbbed abominably, the fingers stiff with cold and swelling.

        The injury to his pride from being saved by a woman—a gaijin woman—felt almost as painful as the injury to his hand.

        The fingers of his good hand twitched towards his neck. He hesitated, then grabbed at his scarf and pulled it loose. He opened the collars of his jacket and flight suit to get at the cord around his neck. Holding the flying stick between his knees, he wrapped the cord around his injured hand and gripped the omamori in his palm, clenching his fingers painfully around the little embroidered parcel. Through the swelling and his fleece-lined glove he could not even feel the wooden tokens inside, written with the prayers his sister had bought for his well-being.

        Was Edie right? Or was it just his own cowardice that had allowed her to convince him? The thought of becoming one of those... demons was just too much to bear. Why would the Changelings’ affliction be known as the Reds’ Plague, if it was not a contagion?

        He pushed down his doubts.

        Even if Edie was wrong, he told himself, he had time to complete the mission before the Plague took him.

        Their flight ceiling had lowered even further, the clouds darkening overhead. Lightning flashed from time to time deep within, although the thunder was lost in the engine’s roar. Just an ordinary storm. He hoped it wouldn’t break before they reached Baku.

        The peninsula should soon be in view, where stood the ancient Azeri capital, surrounded by its sprawling acres of oil wells, their pumpjacks nodding like a thousand iron birds dipping their beaks for water. Masaru squinted into the distance The clouds seemed to deepen and darken even further, funneling closer to the ground. Lightning stabbed earthward. One hell of a storm, Masaru corrected himself.

        There seemed to be a steep-sided silhouette, like a child’s drawing of a mountain, rising up to meet the descending storm. Masaru felt a deeper chill than the frigid air. He tried vainly to peer harder, uncertain if it was a trick of the gloom. Was their heading too far west, flying into the foothills of the Caucasus rather than skirting their eastern fringe?

        He started to turn in his seat, to signal to Edie, hanging too far back behind his left wing. Some fighter pilot’s sense made him glance up. Gargoyle shapes plummeted towards them from the clouds like stooping hawks. Masaru saw red eyes and shark-toothed grins.

        Instinct took over. He kicked at the rudder pedals and shoved the flying stick forward, banking and diving at once.

        A Changeling flyer shot past, folded bat-wings rippling behind its back. Another whisked by, missing the Avro’s fragile wood-and-canvas wingtip by barely a yard as Masaru kicked the other way. He held the turn, risking a flat spin and putting the biplane into a roll instead.

        Then he was clear and looping around to find Edie. The Changelings were opening their wings like parachutes, some still above, some below, arresting their dives then flapping heavily as they began to maneuver. He spied Edie roaring towards them. The muzzles of her twin Lewis guns flashed. Changelings shuddered under the impact of the bullets. Masaru watched, expecting her to pull up, then cried out in dismay as she flew straight through the middle of the flock.

        “Stupid gaijin....” He turned harder, bringing his own guns around to bear.

        A Changeling dipped its wings and smashed into the side of Edie’s Avro. The impact knocked her into a spin and sent the Changeling tumbling earthward. The rest of the flock charged after her as she fought to regain control of her plane.

        Masaru opened fire, strafing the Changelings. He saw bits of them come apart like splintering wood where the bullets struck. A couple fell with shredded wings. One glanced off the center of Edie’s top wing as she righted herself.

        Edie ducked and put her Avro’s nose down, diving to gain speed and escape. So she had listened to someone, at least, Masaru thought. It was always the first lesson the veteran pilots tried to drum into the new recruits: “If you get into trouble, put your nose down and dive towards friendly lines.” He stood his own plane on its tail and soared over the top of the flock, then came around and aimed himself after her.

        They left the Changelings quickly behind, the creatures’ straight-line wing speed no match for even an old Avro.

        Daylight peeked under the clouds near the western horizon, lighting one side of the biplanes a pale gold. Masaru’s heart was still thumping furiously in uncomfortable discord with the plane’s vibration. Ahead, against the dark clouds of the storm, he could see clearly the mist of fine droplets that trailed from Edie’s top wing, catching the light. The impact of the second Changeling had cracked her main fuel tank.

        He shot her a glare, willing her to turn and see his anger, but she was staring fixedly ahead.

        The protests of his injured hand demanded his attention. He had flown two-handed during the dogfight, not thinking. He pulled back his flying glove to find fresh blood seeping through the bandage. Somehow, he had dropped the omamori.

        He twisted sideways, trying to spot it in the foot-well of the cockpit. Swearing, he held the stick between his calves and groped around blindly on the floor. The plane lurched sideways as he bumped the rudder pedals. Flying like that bloody woman. He couldn’t feel a thing through his gloves. He swore again and thumped the inside of the fuselage.

        Lightning flashed across the storm ahead, illuminating the tall silhouette within. Masaru had no doubt, now, what it was.

* * *

        “Shinjirarenai,” he heard himself repeat, as they swooped in over the city of Baku. Shinjirarenai, over and over. Unbelievable. He understood, all of a sudden, these Westerners who exclaimed “My God!” when all other words failed them.

        Gigantic stones swirled down out of the clouds, riding on a tornado wind at the center of the city. Each came to rest with mad precision on the tower’s ziggurat base, building the tower ever higher. Tinier objects tumbled among the gently falling stones. Changelings, in their thousands, falling slowly from the clouds.

        Below, in the city, gunfire crackled in a vast, ragged circle around the base of the tower. Buildings and streets exploded from bombs or artillery fire.

        A few stray raindrops pattered against Masaru’s flying goggles. He wiped them clear. His course had brought him close enough to the tornado to see the faces of the Changelings riding the whirlwind down, and see that they were attired as peasants and laborers, soldiers and businessmen. He saw policemen and nurses and even a robed Orthodox priest.

        Close up, strange ripples of light encased the spinning storm, like a film of oil on water—a skin, almost. A barrier.

        Masaru looked up, through the center of the storm. His mouth fell open in simple, stupid awe.

        At the top of the tornado, there was a hole in the clouds and, through it, another tower—a mirror image of the one below. Its peak pointed downward, ever diminishing as its stones detached themselves to join the cyclonic dance. Changelings swarmed across the inverted ziggurat base and flung themselves into the whirlwind. Around it he glimpsed a land of cracked desolation, upside-down in the sky.

        Something peppered the side of the tornado, leaving spots of brightness in its sheen. Lightning crazed outward from the spots. The tornado lost its shape where the lightning ran. Building stones crashed into each other. Changelings plummeted until they passed the unstable section and the whirlwind caught them again and slowed their fall once more.

        Out towards the edge of the city, Masaru spotted the muzzle flashes of heavy artillery. Seconds later, more bright spots flared on the side of the tornado. It wobbled again.

        He swooped down for a closer look, not checking to see whether Edie followed. A howitzer battery was arrayed at the edge of the city’s large airfield. Masaru saw only Red banners as he passed low overheard, saw nothing but red flying anywhere. No sign of Allied blue, nor the Star-and-Stripes or Tricolore of the Americans and French who had dominated the city.

        Where had they gone?

        He caught the flash of a searchlight from the airfield, throwing sparks of light through scattered sheets of rain, and banked instinctively. The expected anti-aircraft fire didn’t come, though. Masaru peered downward once more.

        The searchlight crew were using the light to signal. Land. Fuel. Help. Land....

        He looked up. Edie was circling directly above. His Avro was almost out of fuel. Her situation with one tank holed would be even more desperate.

        Where else would they go, besides? And what might they find if they did?

        Masaru put the nose of his plane down, coming around to land.

* * *

        The front lines were very close to the airfield. A continuous rattle of small arms fire was punctuated by the crump of explosives. A squad of riflemen jogged towards the biplanes, slipping in the half-frozen mud as they fanned out to surround them.

        Masaru pulled down his scarf and stood up slowly in his cockpit, his hands raised. His vantage gave him an excellent view of the howitzer battery. In front of them was a row of machinegun nests. The barrels of the machineguns were unusually elevated, even more steeply than those of the artillery pieces behind them.

        Masaru saw why a moment later.

        From the rubble of the nearby streets, Changelings launched themselves high into the air on grasshopper legs, over the machinegun nests. The machineguns opened up, shooting all but one of the creatures out of the air. The survivor landed in the middle of a howitzer crew. Masaru saw blood spurt even from a distance. An infantry reserve rushed to intervene. The rest of the gun crews kept to their tasks. Masaru was struck by the discipline of the Bolsheviks, far superior to anything he had seen from their White Russian rivals.

        A rifleman called out, beckoning him down from the plane.

        Masaru’s feet squelched into the mud when he hopped down.. Freezing liquid seeped through the loose stitching at the toe of his right boot.

        “You speak Russian?” the squad leader said with a thickly Turkic accent, while another soldier relieved Masaru of his sidearm.

        “I do,” Masaru confirmed. Carefully, he lowered his hands. “Where is the Allied fleet?”

        “Gone.” The man indicated with a crooked finger that Masaru should walk with him. Others closed in behind, making refusal an undignified alternative.

        About half the soldiers wore some item of military clothing, either scavenged from the Whites and Allies or because the men themselves were deserters. The rest of their garb was civilian. They were all bedraggled, as from a downpour that had ended only minutes before. Their only other commonality was the red Bolshevik star that each man wore, and even this appeared without uniformity on caps, shoulders, and breasts.

        “How long ago?” Masaru asked.

        “Two days.” The man tapped a cigarette out of a crumpled packet and rummaged for matches to light it. Finding none, he left the cigarette in his mouth anyway. It sagged damply. “The French and American garrisons evacuated overland when the Curse fell on the city, yesterday. Fortunately, the Baku Commune was already poised to launch the Revolution and we have stepped forward for the defense of the People.”

        Masaru barely heard the rest of the man’s answer. Two days since the fleet sailed. But that would have had them arrive in Astrakhan before Masaru and Edie had left.

        So where were they?

        Edie’s escorts converged with his and herded her in beside him. Her face was smeared with the spray from her holed fuel tank, with outlines of cleaner skin left by her flying goggles and cap.

        “What you did was reckless,” Masaru said. “The mission always comes first. The dispatches must get through.”

        Her eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “You came back for me, too.”

        With a snort, he looked away.

        After a moment, she asked, “Where’s the fleet?”

        “The fleet sailed two days ago,” he said.

        “Then they should have reached Astrakhan before we left.”

        Masaru nodded. “Where else would they have gone?”

        “Ask him,” Edie said, gesturing at the squad leader.

        Masaru felt his face heat.

        “Turkmenistan,” was the reply. The soldier gestured with his unlit cigarette. “They sailed east, for Krasnovodsk.”

        “Why would they go to Krasnovodsk?”

        “There is a tower there, too.”

        Masaru slowed. Of course there was. The soldier behind him gave him a bump with his rifle butt.

        “Where are you taking us?” Masaru asked.

        “The Comrade General wishes to speak with you.”

* * *

        The Bolshevik general was a remarkably young Russian wearing round-framed spectacles, with the furrowed brow and pale complexion of an academic. He was hatless, his dark hair plastered across his skull. He stood with a mixed group of equally young Russians and Azeri a distance back from the howitzers, observing the effects of their bombardment. Mist rose from the group’s sodden shoulders in the chill air.

        “If I had twice as many guns, I could bring that tornado down,” the general said, in English and without preamble. “As it is, this,” he gestured at the battery, “is hopeful at best. Planting a sufficient quantity of explosives where the tornado touches down would also work, but our line is under too much pressure to consider such an attempt.”

        He turned to examine first Masaru and then Edie through partly fogged lenses. If he was surprised to see a woman flyer, he did not show it. “Your dispatches, please.”

        Masaru and Edie reluctantly drew the oilskin envelopes from inside their jackets and handed them over. The general flipped open one and briefly scanned the pages inside. With a grunt, he handed both envelopes to one of his aides.

        “So, you have come from Astrakhan.” He took off his spectacles and produced a handkerchief from his pocket. He squinted and waved the kerchief vaguely in the direction of the tower in its spinning storm. “The Astrakhan tower was stopped by the Red Army before it was fully complete. As was the tower at Petrovsk, which you have no doubt seen.” He wiped his glasses and put them back on before smiling primly. “At Astrakhan and Petrovsk we had more artillery.”

        Masaru thought he had seen some of the guns that brought down the tower at Petrovsk, bombarding the White Russian forces on the escarpment above the town.

        The general went on, “However, since then, much of our strength has been drawn away from the Caspian sector by the Imperialist offensives in the Ukraine.” He paused and peered intently, first into Masaru’s eyes, then Edie’s. “I need you to bring the Allied fleet back from Krasnovodsk. We lack the necessary strength here to prevent this tower’s completion, and once it is made, we will not contain the Curse here for long. We have sent messages by fishing vessels, but we do not know if they have succeeded.”

        “The Curse?” Edie asked.

        He flashed another neat little smile. “Rasputin’s Curse,” he said. “That.” He pointed as another wave of leaping Changelings were shot to pieces by the crews in the machinegun nests.

        Masaru said, “Our mission is to bring urgent reinforcements to Astrakhan. The Allied command there suspects that Volgograd has also fallen to the... Curse.”

        “‘The Reds’ Plague’, you meant to say.” The general chuckled. “Interesting, is it not, that each side blames the other?” He pushed his spectacles firmly onto the bridge of his nose, sobering. “Volgograd did fall, yes, but that outbreak was contained. The situation here has become most urgent. This is our war now—Bolshevik or Imperialist, Russian, Turk, American, British, French, Japanese. The Whites have not yet accepted this new reality, but I believe your Allied commanders have begun to do so. I have no aeroplanes. I have no pilots to fly yours. You must bring the Allied fleet back here.”

        Masaru chewed the inside of his lip, almost hypnotized by the rising tower. Invaders from a land in the sky?

        “Masaru?” said Edie.

        “Please understand,” said the general, “I do not have the luxury of patience while you wrestle with your decision.” He turned to his aides and barked an order in Russian. It was relayed and a soldier hustled up, towing a boy of nine or ten by the collar of his jacket. The general pulled out his sidearm and touched the muzzle to the child’s temple.

        Masaru blinked, unable to grasp for a moment what the man intended to do.

        “Agree, or I will shoot this child, and I will continue to shoot children until you do agree.”

        “You can’t!” Edie cried.

        Masaru met the general’s wide-eyed stare. He saw unhappiness behind the man’s fogged spectacles, and desperation. He looked down at the child’s terrified, helpless face. The general must have sent his men to prepare for this when they first spotted the biplanes. Masaru drew himself up to rebuff the threat.

        “Stop!” Edie said. “There’s no need.”

        Masaru’s teeth clicked shut.

        She caught hold of his sleeve. “The Allies can’t afford for Baku to fall, either.”

        He shook his arm free of her. But she was absolutely right. Azerbaijan was the Allies’ lifeline to Persia and the Black Sea. Most Allied reinforcements and materials funneled through here, and Baku’s oil was critical.

        Masaru let his anger go in a long breath. Stiffly, he inclined his head to the general. “We will do it.”

        “Very good,” said the general, holstering his gun with – Masaru saw—evident relief. “One of you will remain here, the other will fly to Krasnovodsk.” He signaled to an aide, instructing the man to have one of the Avros refueled.

        “Her plane has a damaged fuel tank,” said Masaru, in Russian. “It will not reach Krasnovodsk.”

        The general and his aide both nodded, and the aide rushed away.

        Masaru said to Edie, “You will take my plane.”

        She flushed. “I told you, I don’t need you to—” She swore at him as he turned away from her.

        He set his shoulders as a squall of rain and sleet blew across the airfield. The freezing touch of the drops stung his bare cheeks. Another volley from the howitzer battery struck the spinning storm. Masaru watched the purple cracks run across the tornado’s surface. Not enough, he thought. The Changelings would surely break through the Bolsheviks’ perimeter soon.

        They need a bigger explosion....

        The world seemed to slow around him, the noise of the battle dimming in his ears.

        He turned to the Bolshevik general. “Would an aeroplane loaded with explosives be sufficient to collapse the storm?”

        “What?” Edie exclaimed.

        Masaru ignored her.

        The general’s eyes roved over his face. The man nodded slowly. “It could work.” He nodded again, more firmly, and gave a little bark of laughter. “It would work.”

        Masaru’s injured hand throbbed. “Then load the damaged plane with as much explosive as it will carry.”

        Edie gaped at him in frank amazement, her hair hanging in damp ringlets around her face. The general gestured to another aide and repeated the instruction in Russian.

        “You can’t do this.” Edie gripped Masaru by the arm.

        He shook her off again. “One of us has to do it,” he said. “Can you think of another way?” He let her lack of an answer hang between them, before continuing, “It is the only way. If Baku falls to the Changelings, then what?” He pointed skyward. “If that hole stays open, then what?”

        He was surprised to see moisture on her eyelashes. Not rain, he thought. Then she blinked and looked past him, towards the tower, and he wondered if it had been imagination.

        “What will happen to your sister?” she asked.

        The question struck hard. Masaru sought refuge in dignity. “She will understand. It will be an honorable sacrifice. She will be proud.”

        “Like she was of her husband?”

        A vision of his sister, grieving, swam before his mind’s eye. Proud, certainly. And broken-hearted.

        Edie’s eyes were on him again, watching his expression intently. “Can she feed her children with pride?”

        He shouldered roughly past her, meaning to stride away. Unthinking, he lifted his hand to his chest. His steps faltered. For a horrible, panicked instant, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t feel the omamori through his flight overalls. Then he remembered. Still in his cockpit, he hoped.

        “There is another way,” she said.

        He rounded on her, barely maintaining his self-control.

        “I could do it.” She held up a hand to forestall him. “No, listen. I can line my plane up with the tornado. If you bring your plane up underneath mine, I can climb down onto your wing and get clear. My plane will hold a straight enough course without me at the stick.”

        Masaru was shaking his head before she had finished speaking. “Not possible.”

        “I’ve done it before,” she said.

        “It is not—”

        “Not for me to do? It’s my plane with the holed tank, me who went through the middle of those flyers. Remember?”

        Masaru could feel the pressure of his answer in the back of his throat, unable to get out. He stared at her helplessly, this gaijin woman who had faced a charging monster with a steady aim, who had dived unflinching through a flock of the things, guns blazing. If she were a man, would he still reject her idea in favor of his own suicide? Could he really be rendered a coward by it just because she was a woman—a gaijin woman?

        He teetered, caught between two answers, both of them true.

        She grabbed his good hand, squeezed hard on his fingers. “We can do this.”

        He stared. Then, slowly, amazed at himself, he nodded.

        A breathless rifleman ran up.       “Comrade General, it is done.”

        Masaru started in surprise. His head felt light. So soon?

        The general had been observing their conversation. He looked from Edie to Masaru. “I wish you good luck,” he said, offering his hand to each of them. “If you succeed, you will save many lives. If you fail....” He shrugged. “Well, one of you should still be alive to fly to Krasnovodsk.” He paused a moment, then added, “Do not fail. We cannot hold them if you do.”

        Masaru accepted the general’s grip. Edie had already set out after the soldier, back towards the Avros. Masaru started to call after her, then paused. To say what? He hurried to catch up, his thoughts still unsteadily awhirl.

        Lines of infantry trudged across the airfield through the mud and slush, herded by crack-voiced NCOs. These men were already exhausted, filthy and bloody, siphoned from other parts of the frontline to shore up the defense here.

        A company shuffled wearily past in front of Masaru and Edie. A trio of tattered stragglers caught Masaru’s attention. Their gaits were even more lurching and uneven than those of the men they followed, peaked caps pulled low over their faces.

        Wounded, was his first thought. But....

        “Changelings!” he cried. “The Curse!”

        The monsters’ heads snapped up.

        “Changelings!” The warning was echoed across the field.

        The Changelings’ torsos popped suddenly inwards, broken blades of ribs piercing their clothes. The creatures snapped off a blade in each hand. Two of them charged at the soldiers now converging on them.

        The third came straight for Edie and Masaru. Did they know, somehow? How could it be possible?

        Masaru’s hand went to his holster. He saw Edie do the same, both of them remembering in the same instant that their pistols had been taken. Their escort stood between them and the Changeling. It closed too fast, knocking his rifle aside as he fired. The soldier fell, clawing at the bone blade jutting from his neck. The Changeling snapped off another rib.

        Masaru threw himself at the monster’s midriff. The impact was like diving into the trunk of a tree. The Changeling stumbled, feet slipping. A blade scored Masaru’s flank, ripping his flight suit. He tangled his legs between the monster’s knees, toppling it forwards. He scrambled on top of it, holding it down as the Changeling thrashed, crushing its face into the mud with his hands.

        “Go!” he cried to Edie. “Go!”

        She sprinted for the planes.

        The Changeling bucked, throwing Masaru off. It sprang to its feet with a snarl. A volley of bullets staggered it. Masaru lunged into the mud after the fallen escort’s rifle. He scooped it up, rolling onto his back and firing just as the Changeling pounced. The bullet carved a path up the middle of its face. With a shriek, it flipped its bone blades point-down to impale him.

        Soldiers barreled into it, hacking with bayonets, axes, and cavalry swords. Masaru curled into a ball, trampled and kicked as they charged over the top of him. The Changeling was dragged under by the frenzied attack.

        An engine roared into life.

        With a yell, spitting mud, Masaru pushed himself to his feet and raced towards the parked Avros. Edie’s plane was already rolling, with a hasty collection of sacks, cases, and rolled tarpaulins lashed to its fuselage. She hadn’t bothered with her flying cap. Her blonde curls whipped around in the draft of the biplane’s prop.

        Masaru glimpsed her pale features as she looked his way. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her goggles.

        The Avro accelerated. It bunny-hopped once and wobbled clumsily into the air.

        Masaru sprinted for his own plane and scrambled up into the cockpit, yelling for the soldiers standing guard around it to spin the prop.

        The biplane roared into the air. Edie was looping around, lining up for the long run in towards the tornado. Masaru flew to intercept her. His heart hammered. Could they really do this? Or would Edie end up making the honorable sacrifice in his place?

        Winged figures dropped from the clouds towards Edie’s plane. Masaru cried a useless warning. At the last instant, the other Avro jerked aside, barely avoiding the first wave of attackers. Masaru watched Edie dodge and weave, the Changeling flyers swarming around her, as he raced to help.

        He started firing as soon as he was in range and kept the trigger down as he tore through the middle of the flock. He banked hard and went back through for another pass. His Avro jolted violently, a Changeling colliding with the fuselage somewhere behind him. He glanced back, expecting to find half the tail missing and was amazed when he couldn’t see any damage. Facing forward again, he was just in time to dodge another plummeting flyer, slamming his plane onto its side. The Changeling’s claws tore strips of canvas from his top wing as it tumbled past.

        Then he was clear of them and chasing after Edie.

        Her plane was badly battered, trailing black smoke. A wing flap bobbed about uselessly behind her bottom right wing, dangling from one hinge that was still attached. Masaru wondered if the Avro would still hold its course without Edie at the stick. The whirlwind loomed in front of them, frighteningly close.

        Masaru brought his biplane up underneath and to the left of Edie’s, easing his top wing as close to her bottom wing as he dared. Edie leaned over the side of her cockpit, gauging his position, then started to hitch herself up out of the plane. The Avro dipped when she let go of the stick. Masaru had to drop down to avoid having his wing clipped by her undercarriage.

        Edie climbed out onto her plane’s wing and crouched. Heart in his mouth, Masaru brought his Avro back up under her. For a breathless moment, Edie held her place, clinging to the wet cables. The whirlwind filled the sky ahead of them. Masaru could pick out the individual Changelings twirling down among the slowly falling stones.

        Edie stretched down with one leg. Her muddy boot found the top of his wing. The other foot came down. And then she was crouched between the two biplanes, fingers gripping the trailing edge of her plane’s bottom wing, booted toes at the very back of his top wing. She eased a leg past the edge of his wing, foot hunting for a strut to hook onto. Her arms stretched as the Avros drifted apart. Masaru didn’t dare adjust for fear of jolting her off.

        Her foot found a strut. She slid her other foot off the wing and hooked it around the strut with the first, now dangling from the other plane by her fingertips. Then she let go.

        She dropped. Her forearms bumped against his top wing as she slipped past, and for a moment Masaru was sure she would fall. Then she caught the strut, found a cable with her other hand and got herself in between the wings.

        Masaru started to swing around. Edie worked her way quickly forward until she could lock her arms around the leading strut and lie flat across the bottom wing.

        Masaru dove steeply, his immediate thought just to get clear. He spotted the airfield and adjusted his course, opening up the throttle and keeping the nose down, waiting for the blast. The city buildings rushed up towards them. Edie looked back from her place on the wing, hair whipping around her face, eyes slitted, her teeth bared.

        There was a flash. Masaru twisted to see. A fireball split the whirlwind, blinding, expanding, like someone had smashed the sun into a disc.

        Tenement rooftops whipped past underneath, frighteningly close, soldiers and Changelings in the streets below frozen like animals in a locomotive’s headlamp. The biplane cleared the howitzers at the end of the airfield. He was coming in far too fast. Masaru closed the throttle and pulled back the stick. The plane seemed to hover in the air, on the brink of stalling.

        Then the shockwave hit them.

        The Avro jolted, tipped nose-down. Masaru saw Edie bounce clear of the wing, legs flailing, her hands still clamped around the front strut. The airfield rushed up, Bolshevik fighters scrambling to get clear. Masaru’s arms protested as he hauled back on the stick. Just barely, he got the biplane level again. It smacked into the ground, bounced, hopped twice more before the undercarriage collapsed. The Avro slewed around on its belly, propeller splintering as it gouged up mud and slushy snow.

        Eventually, it slid to a halt. Masaru coughed, winded, and looked down at himself, amazed to find that he was unhurt.

        The omamori lay wedged in the corner of the footwell. With a huff of disbelief, he picked it up, then sat back in wonder. Shaking his head, he looked towards the wing.

        Edie was no longer there.

        When had she fallen?

        He was up, half-leaping, half-falling from the cockpit, ignoring the cries of the Bolshevik soldiers converging on the wrecked biplane. Others were hurrying towards a prone figure back along his trail of wreckage and furrowed turf.

        He ran, stumbling and slipping over the churned earth. He dropped to his knees when he reached her. A soldier was already cradling her head on his thigh. Edie’s face was deathly white behind a half-mask of mud. Splintered bone jutted through one leg of her flying suit.

        Her eyes rolled towards him. She showed him a rictus grin. “We did it.”

        “You’re hurt,” he panted.

        She chuckled, then gasped in pain, her teeth still bared. “Broke both my legs. And some ribs.”

        “Both your legs,” Masaru repeated. His jaw worked while he fought for breath. He laughed, suddenly. “I told you.”

        He sat back on the cold wet ground, his fist clenched tightly around the omamori. High above, the whirlwind was coming apart, stones and Changelings tumbling down to crash onto the half-finished tower, or falling back up towards the collapsing hole in the sky.

        He would be writing to his sister, he decided. He imagined the joy and anguish, amazement and horror warring across her face when she read his request for an amulet to ward against supernatural powers as well.

Copyright © 2013 Ian McHugh

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Ian McHugh is the author of “Songdogs” in BCS #27 and “Red Dirt” in BCS #58. His stories have also appeared in publications including Asimov’s, Analog, Daily SF, and Clockwork Phoenix 2 & 4. His first short story collection, Angel Dust, will be published in 2014. His full bibliography, along with links to read and hear stories online, can be found at http://ianmchugh.wordpress.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

A SIXPENNY CROSSING

by Don Allmon

Chapter 1

In which our hero learns the downside of fame.

        Easric rarely received anything from Pearl Snow that wasn’t disgusting. It was the nature of witches to find the sublime in viscera.

        He eyed the grocer. He eyed the unmarked postal slot in the wall behind the counter. He weighed the package doubtfully. It was small, thin, and light. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. Pearl’s loopy script said only, “Easric Dane.” There was no address. He had no address. How her packages found him, he didn’t know.

        He sniffed at it, smelled nothing dead; nothing but the leather, grains, and dust of the general mercantile.

        He thanked the grocer without conviction.

        “Here now!” the grocer shouted past Easric. “You keep away from that man!”

        Easric spun, package dropped, revolver out.

        A kid stood outside, framed in the open doorway, pocketknife in hand. Sight of the revolver froze him solid. He paled and blinked. His pocketknife clattered to the wooden boardwalk.

        Beside the kid, a man. He flung the rope bonds the kid had cut from his hands to the ground and he ran. He ran for his life.

        Easric bolted after, bowling the kid over, out onto the through-road of Deer Cross Post.

        The man made for Easric’s horse hitched nearby. He whipped the shotgun from the saddle scabbard, had no time to aim, and fired. Easric, beneath the shot; the store’s window blew, canning jars burst, jam everywhere.

        He swung the shotgun, defiant. Easric caught it with a smack of wood on skin; stronger, twisted it free and slammed the man to the ground. He fell on him; threw all his mass behind a slap so hard the man’s eyes rolled back, struck silly.

        Easric dragged him back to the porch by his collar, bound him with new cords.

        He looked around for the kid, wanting to give him a whipping he’d never forget.

        The grocer had the kid by the scruff of his neck. “What you want to do with him, Warden?”

        The kid was, what, six? Ten? Easric had no sense for children’s ages. The kid didn’t struggle against the grocer. He stood, shirt twisted in the grocer’s hand. No fear. Only awe at what he’d seen.

        Easric sighed. “Let him go.”

        “You don’t want to give him a whipping, I will.”

        “He won’t remember it come morning,” Easric said. “Let him go. Damage is done.”

        The grocer let the kid go. The shirt stayed twisted. The kid knelt, retrieved his knife, his eyes never leaving Easric and his prisoner. Easric knew the kid would keep the knife somewhere safe. Maybe he’d never use it again. And when he had a boy of his own, he’d pass the thing on and tell him his story: how he helped the outlaw Freedom Cordrey escape Easric Dane, was almost shot, then watched as Easric caught him again.

        The grocer said to the kid, “What he give you to help him?”

        “He didn’t have to give him anything,” Easric said. “He promised him he’d be famous.”

* * *

Chapter 2

In which our hero crosses into enemy lands.

        Riding north of the trading post on a dirt-packed road, prisoner in tow, Easric opened Pearl’s package.

        An enclosed note read only: “Sign and return.”

        There were always cryptic notes. Once, he’d taken her to task on this. “It’s the cards,” she had said in her charlatan voice. “The cards show me forms, not meanings. Meanings, you must provide.”

        Easric thought that was bullshit. He told her so. He thought she was only covering her ass.

        With the note was a book. The book was entitled The Rosemond Gold: Being the Sixth Romance of Easric Dane, by Hugo Lovelace.

        Lovelace had toured the Marches once, ten years previous, an Imperial newspaperman. He covered the horse races. Of horses, he knew plenty. Of everything else, he’d taken only the sketchiest notes. And when he returned to the capitol, he introduced a war-tired Empire to his favorite savage, Corporal Easric Dane, March Warden of the Crossings, Second Company, having not the foggiest notion what that title meant. It was just something he’d heard.

        Easric Dane had never met the man.

        It was a sixpenny bit of sensationalist crap.

        He cursed Pearl Snow, hoping her witchy ears could hear. She expected him to read.

* * *

        “Now, sweet daughter,” the General boasted, “I will show you how your father will regain the Emperor’s favor, so unjustly lost.”

        He slid aside the glowering portrait of his venerable grandfather and revealed the wall safe whose existence none would ever guess. Therein he had locked away the ancient manuscript that held the secret to opening the Rosemond Crossing. Thus would the mountain of gold that had lain hidden within the pagan mound for untold ages come into his possession; thus his salvation; thus his glory. His palms grew excitedly moist as he tumbled the lock.

        He swung open the heavy steel door.

        “Papa!” the lovely and devoted Beatrice cried. “Whatever is the matter? Why have you gone so pale?”

        “Stolen,” the General hissed. “Stolen!” he shouted, enraged. “It was Easric Dane, I know it! Upon my soul, it must have been he!”

        Not only was it awful, but Pearl couldn’t possibly be suggesting there was any truth to it. There was no gold under Rose Mound. Imperial prospectors had proven that when they tore the thing down, looking. No Crossing, neither; no spiritland. The land there was dead as any to the east.

        He thought of drowning the book in the river. He thought of taking her note literally, autographing its title page and mailing it back, postage due. But Pearl Snow had a wicked pack of cards. They brooked none of Easric’s sass and weren’t lightly ignored.

        He put his horse east toward the Lentenlyf river.

        “Think of it as a reprieve,” Easric told Cordrey. “But don’t get too used to breathing. It won’t be a long one.”

* * *

        A spirit-stone stood on the bank of the ford, a limestone obelisk six feet tall and cut with offering holes long weathered to pits.

        Spirit-stones marked Crossings just as mounds often did, so Easric stopped and closed his eyes and cocked his head and felt for one.

        “It’s dead,” Cordrey said. “Anyone can tell that.”

        Easric wasn’t sure. Like children, Easric wasn’t so solidly rooted in the real world. He had a knack for falling through Crossings and getting lost on the other side. The shamans had offered to train him, but studying chafed him raw, and he’d turned them down. Still, thirty-seven years of falling through had taught him something.

        He nudged the horse forward one step at a time.

        But Cordrey was right. The stone and its Crossing were dead. It seemed nearly all were these days, and there were so few shamans to tend those that were left.

        Easric dropped down from his horse beside the stone. One eye on Cordrey, he pulled leaves of sweetgrass and wove them into a braid and tied it into a loop. He tossed it over the top of the stone and it hung there, skewed. He asked the stone for its blessing.

        Cordrey laughed at him.

        Easric thought of killing him. Crossing into Imperial lands was trouble enough. Hauling a captive along while he did it was madness. He laid his hand on his revolver.

        “So no hanging after all,” Cordrey said. “No vengeance for the people or object-lesson to ornery boys. And no swinging trophy for the great Warden Dane.”

        Easric glared, but his hand fell away from his revolver.

* * *

Chapter 3

In which our man of action reads a book.

        Easric lay naked but for his hat. His trousers lay nearby, legs tied together, stuffed with the things that had needed to stay dry: his revolver, powder horn, matches, notebook and lead stylus, and the rest of his clothes. As his horse had plowed the river, he’d worn it around his neck.

        Sun dried him, tightened his skin. Breeze rattled the grass and reeds. It made his hairs stand on end and his balls pull up. It felt very nice.

        Freedom Cordrey was not naked. He’d been dragged through the River Lentenlyf, still bound, with a horse lead wrapped beneath his arms. He’d nearly drowned. His clothes were soaked and wouldn’t dry for hours. He lay in the sand, miserable, like a netted fish.

        Easric read, book shielding his eyes from the sun.

        “Your father lied to you, Beatrice,” Easric said solemnly. “Now put down the pistol and let’s talk.”

        Cordrey said, “All that trouble you’ve given them over the years, if they catch you this side of the river, they’ll hang you.”

        “Yep,” Easric said.

        “Papa would never deceive me so!” Beatrice exclaimed defiantly.

        “There’s proof!” Easric declared, and he threw down the papers he’d retrieved. “It was the General, your father, who betrayed your dear brother to the Sorcerer’s men. Your brother’s life was the price your father paid for the secret of Rosemond. Anything to restore his lost honor. Even you, Beatrice, would he sacrifice for his vanity.”

        “I’m not a wanted man over here,” Cordrey said. “They’ll hang you, and then they’ll set me free. Funny how things switch around just by crossing a river.”

        Easric turned a page.

        Beatrice’s eyes raced along the pages, widening in horror at each line. “No, no! I won’t believe it! My brother, my brother, to what terrible doom has our father condemned you?” Her pistol fell to the floor. She poured forth her heartbreak into a soprano shriek of despair, and swooned.

        “You don’t care they hang you, do you? But they set me free, that would burn you up,” Cordrey said.

        “Yep,” Easric said.

        Easric caught her in his firm but gentle embrace. He patted her cold and deathly cheek until her long lashes fluttered open in response.

        “I guess you can’t let them catch you, then,” Cordrey said.

        “Oh, Easric, can you forgive me? They poisoned my heart with tales of your savage appetites. How could I have known they were lies? Only forgive me and swear you’ll see justice done. Avenge my brother; avenge me! Only such generous manhood as yours can stand firm before the likes of my father.”

        “‘Generous manhood,’“ Easric said. “Got that right.”

* * *

        Easric dressed. He made a hobble of rawhide so Cordrey could walk but not run. He tied Cordrey’s hands in front of him and dallied the extra rope.

        Cordrey walked while Easric rode. The going was slow. It would take them a week or more to get to Rose Mound.

* * *

        “That supposed to be you on the cover there?” Cordrey asked.

        The illustration was a woodblock print. It showed a man from the waist up, hairless chest broad, shirt somehow both tight and undone, as if shirts weren’t made what could cover a chest like that. He held a revolver in one hand, a rose in the other. The revolver was smoking, and the lines of the smoke formed a languid woman of unlikely curves reclining on a pile of gold. Her eyes were come-hither. The man’s face was bold. Its one scar was perfectly placed to accent his jaw.

        “They ain’t never seen you have they?” Cordrey said.

        Easric was blond and blue-eyed and broad as a bull. There it ended. He was not tall. He was hairy as a wolf except where scars marked him. His small ears stuck out through shaggy hair and got in the way of his hat sitting right. His nose was broken three ways, and his upper lip cleft by a knife wound so awful he had to talk with care so as not to mix his sounds. It wasn’t the most terrible wound on his body, just the one that everyone saw.

        “And that woman, we both know she’s wasting her time,” Cordrey said.

* * *

        There was nothing of this land to tell it was Imperial. These grasses were the same as those of the March, west of the Lentenlyf. These rocks here were the same quartz and chert and limestone. These antique hills, the same alluvial wash. It was the same sky.

        They waded through grasses grown four feet tall.

        There wasn’t a spirit to be felt anywhere, neither a Crossing for it to call home. The sweetgrass didn’t smell the same.

        Still, Easric picked flowers as they went and tucked them into the band of his hat.

        Evenings, Easric hog-tied Cordrey, feet bound to hands. Eyes cool, Cordrey’s hate lay just beneath. Easric could’ve warmed his hands by it.

        He knew what Cordrey was thinking. He was thinking how Easric would die. He was playing out stories in his pretty head, picking the best parts of each. And when he’d made a story he liked well enough, Freedom Cordrey would make it happen.

        It’s what Easric would have done were he in his place.

        He didn’t make a fire. He read as long as daylight allowed, as much as he could stand.

* * *

        Easric knelt near the dying outlaw and shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry to have done it, Billy, but you gave me no choice. Here you are; drink up. It will help ease your passing.”

        Billy took the flask Easric offered and tried to bring it to his lips, but he shook too badly and the liquid only spilled. Easric held the young bandit’s hands in his own as gently as he might those of an infant, and he helped him to drink. It was whiskey, and the dying man sighed with contentment as that heart-strong draught of those sons of the plains dulled his pain.

        “How can you be so good to me, knowing all the evil I’ve done?” the young brigand whispered. He coughed, and a ruby droplet of his failing lifeblood quivered on his tender lip.

        “The world dealt you a bad hand, Billy,” Easric said somberly. “Had things been different, I know you’d never have served the Sorcerer’s cause. Were life not so cruel, we might have fought side by side. Think on that, Billy. Think on that.” Then the light faded from that misguided youth’s eyes, and Easric brushed them gently closed. “God take and keep you, Billy.”

        Easric threw the book down. Had he been a witch, he’d have set it afire with nothing but his eyes.

        “That what you think?” he spat at Cordrey, “The world’s dealt you a bad hand?”

        Cordrey frowned, confused.

        “Know what I think?” Easric said. “I think you’re a goddamn parasite, you and everyone like you. And you weren’t born that way, and the world didn’t make you that way. It was your choice. And the only whiskey you’re getting is what I piss on your grave.”

        Cordrey smiled. Then he burst into a fit of laughter that left him wheezing. “Billy,” he said. “You’re a slow reader, Dane. For days I’ve been watching you build up a good steam. If anything was going to make you blow, I knew it’d be Billy.”

        “You’ve read this?”

        “I’ve read them all. ‘Know your enemy,’ just like the Saint says.”

        “You think I’m anything like the man in this book, you don’t know me from shit.”

        “You ain’t nothing like the man in that book. But you’d like to be, and that’s all I need to know.”

        It was true, he would have liked that—if a gentle-hearted lawman stood any chance at all.

* * *

Chapter 4

In which what the reader has long suspected would happen, happens.

        Four days, and they’d not seen a soul. It was too much to hope that luck would continue. Around noon he saw the Imperial patrol some two miles out. Two men on horseback. And they saw him. They turned and headed straight towards him.

        He thought to make a run, but there was Cordrey on foot, and he’d be damned if he let the bastard go.

        “You’d best shoot them now,” Cordrey said.

        Easric ran options, rejected them all. He kept his revolver holstered. He didn’t draw the shotgun. He put the horse to a small clearing in the tallgrass then dropped down and stood calmly, hands clasped at his belt.

        “They’ll arrest you,” Cordrey said.

        The soldiers came in at a canter.

        “You know what I’ll do,” Cordrey said.

        They slowed to a trot. They wore unsubtle overcoats of Imperial red. One was older, the other just out of boyhood. Both had carbines out but not up.

        “You’ll regret this,” Cordrey said. And when Easric still paid him no mind, he shouted, “It’s Easric Dane! It’s Easric Dane. Shoot him. Shoot him, goddamn you, before he kills us all!”

        The two men did not shoot. They reined in their horses just inside the clearing, ten yards away.

        “He doesn’t look anything like Easric Dane,” the older said.

        “Look at his damn coat,” Cordrey said. “Who else would he be?”

        The insignia sewn to the shoulder of Easric’s brown greatcoat was a ragged patch of linen cut into a 2. It was plain as day who he was.

        The younger snapped his carbine up, aimed it at Easric.

        The older soldier looked pleased. “And who are you?” he said to Cordrey.

        “Rasmus Tripp,” Cordrey said. “From Hallow Hill, south of here—”

        “I know Hallow Hill,” the soldier said.

        Easric let Cordrey spin his lie. It bought him time while he took the soldiers’ measure.

        “I got a farm there. Dane, he rode in, he took me, said he’d kill my family I didn’t come. Said I was security. Look what he done to me!” and Cordrey held up his bound hands. Four days of tight rawhide had ruined the flesh of his wrists.

        “Warden Dane,” the older soldier said. “You’re a long way from home, in violation of treaty. Why are you here?”

        “He’s going to Rose Mound,” Cordrey said.

        The soldier’s eyes narrowed. “You going to say anything, Dane?”

        Easric ignored him, eyes on the younger soldier. Easric knew his type. He was smarter than his superior; stuck with a duty he abhorred, like holding a gun on a lawman he respected, but too disciplined to protest. Easric liked that. He hoped the young man lived.

        To the young soldier he said, “I’m Easric Dane. And this here is Freedom Cordrey. He’s a murderer. I’ve caught him. And I’m taking him to hang.”

        The young soldier’s eyes went wide and he blinked away sweat, but his carbine didn’t waver.

        “You’re lying,” the older soldier said. “Cordrey’s got no reason to come this far across the river. And even if he did and you’re taking him for hanging, you’re going the wrong way.” Behind Easric stretching west was a trail of bent grass that any trained scout could see. “Throw down that revolver.”

        So Easric did.

        The soldier dismounted, told the younger to keep his carbine on Easric, and went to Cordrey. He drew a knife.

        Easric said to the young soldier, “You let him free that man, he’ll kill us all.”

        The older scoffed. He knelt to cut Cordrey’s hobble.

        “Does he look like a farmer to you?” Easric said.

        The younger shifted his carbine to Cordrey.

        The older sliced through the cord.

        Easric cracked Cordrey hard in the ribs with an elbow, twisted the soldier’s arm and wrenched it up across his back. The knife flew. He held the arm there, threw his other across the soldier’s throat, used him as a shield. The younger was now on the ground, carbine up and aimed. “Let him go!” he said, no clear shot.

        Easric had lost sight of Cordrey.

        Easric tried to fish the soldier’s revolver from its holster, but it was already gone.

        A shot cracked from close behind. The soldier’s temple burst in an ugly spray and he went rag-doll in Easric’s arms. Easric kept him up, kept him facing the younger soldier. Had Cordrey wanted him dead, he’d have done it already.

        Easric stood between two armed men. He couldn’t face one without turning his back to the other.

        He made hand signs to the young soldier, hoped he understood.

        The soldier nodded, and Easric dropped the corpse and threw himself flat.

        The soldier fired over Easric. Then his eyes widened in panic. He dropped the spent carbine, went for his revolver, then lost his nerve. Instead of drawing, he turned and took two steps for his horse. Crack, and the soldier fell, shot in the small of his back.

        Easric rolled standing and looked behind him. Cordrey crouched half-hidden between dense tufts of waist-high grass on the clearing’s edge. He was grinning wide, revolver on Easric.

        Easric scrambled for his own revolver lying in the grass ten feet away, and Cordrey fired. The revolver bounced and Easric jerked back. He dove again and Cordrey shot it again.

        Easric gave up and spread his arms. “Come on, you son of a bitch. This is what you been dreaming of, ain’t it?”

        “I got bigger dreams,” Cordrey said.

        Easric frowned, then he closed his arms together in front, ready to be tied.

        Cordrey said, “I ain’t coming within ten feet of you, gun or no gun.”

        “Well, what then?”

        Cordrey took the reins of Easric’s horse in his bound-up hands, held them and the revolver together, and led the horse away. When he had a safe distance, he mounted the horse more smoothly than Easric would have believed possible with his hands bound. That’s what practice would get you.

        Cordrey shot one of the Imperial horses in the head. Then he shot the other.

        Six shots. Easric lunged for his revolver, came up and fired. It wouldn’t fire.

        “You know where to find me, Dane,” Cordrey said, and he waved Easric’s copy of The Rosemond Gold, and he rode off.

        “There ain’t no gold!” Easric shouted.

        “Then why are we here?” Cordrey called back.

        Easric threw the lead-mangled revolver after him, howling curses. Then he stood alone in breeze-stricken grass and let his eyes drift over the dead.

* * *

        The young soldier wasn’t dead. Easric knelt beside him. The soldier’s head thrashed and his hands clawed the earth. He fought back screams through clenched teeth. His legs didn’t move at all.

        Easric held him, grabbed his chin in a vice to focus him and bent close. “Listen to me. Are you listening?” And though the soldier’s eyes were wild, he nodded. “You’re dying,” Easric said. “Do you understand?”

        “No.”

        “Listen to me. You’re going to die.”

        “I can’t.” He gasped fast short breaths to manage his pain.

        The soldier was Imperial. He had no spirits. The grass would not sing him to sleep. He’d die alone. “I’ll stay with you,” Easric said. “I won’t leave.”

        “I can’t die,” the soldier said, “Not now. God won’t take me. I sinned.”

        “You didn’t sin. You were going for cover.”

        “I tried to run. I’m going to die a coward and he won’t take me.”

        Easric had abandoned the Imperial faith long ago. Their bloody god was good for curses and little else. He fought to keep his thoughts silent.

        Then the soldier’s eyes cleared. “You’re Easric Dane,” he said. “They say you’re a saint.”

        That wasn’t part of Lovelace’s romances. Some Imperial soldiers had heard rumors and told their own stories, ones Easric liked even less. Easric was plagued by stories. “I’m not a saint.”

        “They say it’s a blessing to be killed by a saint.” The young soldier touched a finger between his eyes. “I promise I won’t look away.”

* * *

Chapter 5

In which the witch’s intention becomes clear.

        Rose Mound was the largest mound known. It lay alone. From balloon, the scalloped cut of its tiers made it resemble its namesake. Or once it had. Fifty years ago, prospectors and treasure hunters had torn the thing down.

        It had always been extinct, so no one had cared.

        It was now an unsightly hill, bearing only traces of the pre-historic labor that had shaped it. It was sheathed in scaffolding. There was an enormous wooden construction. Teams of oxen turned a great wooden wheel, which turned a cog, which turned another and so on, until the entire assembly turned a great auger, boring out the mound at an angle. Dirt spilled into waiting rail-carts. They hadn’t used steam. There was not enough water. The auger flickered with witchlight runes.

        Hard by was a mining camp. Its tents and shacks and sheds were set in neat rows. These were not the raggedy gold-diggers of the high plains. These were Imperial engineers.

        Easric had a telescopic spyglass to his eye that he’d taken from one of the dead soldiers’ packs, days before. He saw a group of soldiers, an officer leading them. With them was a man. His hair was worked into braids, river-polished stones threaded through them; agates and opals and turquoise, green and yellow and blue like captured stars. Those beads said he was a shaman. Spirit-dead as Imperial land was, no shaman would come willingly this side of the river. He was bound in chains.

        The officer argued. The shaman stood resolute. A soldier cracked his rifle butt into the back of the shaman’s head, and he dropped like a stone.

        Easric’s mind went white, no thought but fear for the shaman’s life. He drew the young soldier’s revolver and rushed low through the grass.

        He slid to a stop. There was only one reason to bring a shaman here.

        He closed his eyes and cocked his head, listening. He groped the air with both hands like a panicking blind man, feeling.

        There it was. Easric felt it; what no one had ever felt at Rose Mound, he felt it. A Crossing. It was thin and fragile. It slipped through his hands. He hadn’t training enough to part it.

        Easric blessed Pearl Snow and her pack of cards. This was why she had sent him. Somehow a Crossing had been born.

        The Empire had no use for such places. To them they weren’t sacred. They would tear it down for a rumor of gold unless he did something to stop them.

        Rose Mound exploded as mining charges blew. From one side of the mound, dust plumed. Dirt and rock rattled down for a hundred yards.

        The Crossing rippled in response. The air quivered; glimpses of a land beyond. And like a chasm had opened below his feet, Easric fell through.

* * *

        A riot of color that made no sense, hurt his eyes, made him retch. Then:

        Blasted land that had never known water. Deep purple sky. The fairy dust of unborn planets wove maypoles there. Close-by, stars. Not knowing their place, they fell and they fell and they fell. A morning star caught on the horn of the Moon and stuck there. Rose Mound was a desert rose, pink gypsum petals unfurling, tall as wizards’ towers; scent thick as love.

        Easric was used to strange things. He knew a hundred Crossings, all in their lives’ winter, different than the physical world by nothing more than the angle of a shadow, or the scent of a flower that wasn’t there, or the North Star found in the West.

        He knew of none like this one, not even a rumor. He’d believed the days of newborn Crossings long gone.

        He spun, arms wide. He howled and he bayed at the confused stars and Moon, and he wept childlike with joy.

        All was silent. Then from beneath the petals of living rock flowed bats in a black shrieking fog. They made up the spaces between the stars. They nudged the Moon and it rocked like a cradle. They swelled overhead.

        Another explosion. A cataclysm. Falling home.

* * *

Chapter 6

In which our villain finds fertile ground for the seeds of his revenge.

        Lieutenant Colonel Nasica didn’t believe Freedom Cordrey, not one word he said. “For all I know, you’re in with Dane thick as thieves.”

        Cordrey blew smoke from a machine-rolled cigarette. They sat in Nasica’s headquarters. The table between them was covered by surveys and maps.

        “If you think we’re friends, you don’t know Easric Dane,” Cordrey said. He set down his coffee. He lifted his hands and let his shirtsleeves fall and showed Nasica his wrists. “I can show you the rest of my bruises, if you like. I guarantee you, we ain’t anywhere close to friends.”

        “All those do is remind me you’re an outlaw.”

        “I ain’t an outlaw. Least not over here. To look at it one way, I’m your best friend. I never done nothing to Imperial folk. Never even crossed that river until Dane brought me here. Now Dane, he’s your outlaw. How many times has he busted up your men and hid behind that treaty?”

        Cordrey nodded to the Lieutenant Colonel’s dog-eared copy of The Rosemond Gold and produced his own. “These books say the only thing keeping your military honest is Dane. These books make you all out to be fools. He’s more a hero than your own saints. That must smart. Especially what with the way he runs off with the General’s daughter in the end. You all let your wives read these books?” Cordrey smiled and smoke bled between his teeth. “You got a daughter?”

        “It would be a sign of goodwill to hang you, Cordrey. Send you back in a box. Unless you have a point?”

        “I’m thinking there’s a bounty on Easric Dane’s head. Under the table, quiet, so it don’t upset his admirers. That treasure you’re hunting, how much of it you give me, I deliver him up?”

        “What makes you think you can deliver me Dane?”

        “I got away from him. That’s tearing him up. You make a show of me, let him see where I am, there ain’t nothing that’ll keep him from coming for me.” He ground his cigarette under his boot. “It’s the kind of man he is.”

        Nasica thought of his daughter. He thought of his wife, whose damn book it had been to begin with before he took it away and read it himself. He thought of the way the two had conferred over it, giggled over it, shot him glances, found him wanting.

        Nasica stood. He took Cordrey’s coffee. He dumped it. He refilled the cup with a good brandy, then filled his own.

* * *

Chapter 7

In which Easric shows his compassion.

        It rained dead bats.

        The first pelted the ground not three feet before Easric.

        He dropped to his knees and doubled over, hands clasped over his neck, knowing what was coming, having seen this before. The rain of gore came down. Bats smacked around him. They flopped. Entrails spattered. One struck him in the back. Another in the shoulder, and still they came down.

        Five seconds they fell.

        And when the horrible dull thunder of them stopped, he unclasped his hands and rose up and looked around.

        There were hundreds of them, spirits all caught in the quake of the Crossing and too weak to live in the physical world. They were all of them dead but one. It was tiny, a pup. Its fur was silver-brown. Its wings were black. It was ugly and wicked looking. Who could figure spirits? It could have been anything. It chose to be a bat. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

        Easric reached for it. He thought of disease. He said to it, “You son of a bitch, you bite me, I’ll tear your head off.”

        He picked it up. It bit him. Blood welled. He cussed it but held it no less gently. If he went rabid and died, it was his own damn fault for touching it. And he was pretty sure—almost sure—that a spirit could carry no earthly disease.

        He opened his coat. The bat climbed inside it and hung by small claws from the lining. “I’m Easric Dane,” he told it. “I’ll get you home. I promise.”

* * *

Chapter 8

In which Easric gets his man.

        Two unconscious guards later, Easric had himself two rifles. Along a patrol route on the border of the camp, he set up his distraction.

        With his spyglass he’d seen Cordrey wandering the camp, free as you please. Cordrey had gone to a tin shack, looked around to see who was watching, then slipped in.

        Easric told himself he was there to find the shaman and take the newborn spirit back to its home. He’d watched the enchanted auger bore its way down and thought about blowing it slivers. But now he was here, his head was filled with nothing but Cordrey and blood.

        Five minutes later and far away from where he’d set his trap, Easric heard his rifles go off. A patrol had tripped the wire he’d strung. Shouts went up. Klaxons rang and soldiers ran, leaving unguarded space behind them. It was almost too easy.

* * *

        “Sir, Cordrey’s gone,” the soldier reported.

        Lieutenant Colonel Nasica shot standing and cursed.

        “We were walking him through the camp like you said, and I don’t know how he did it, but—”

        Two pops in the distance, klaxons and shouting. Nasica ran to the door. “It’s Dane. He’s here.” Men were swarming toward the gunfire. They were going the wrong way. God dammit, he’d been right and Cordrey and Dane were in this together. “They’ll go for that shaman,” he said.

* * *

        Easric cracked open the door to the shack.

        A lantern burned on a shelf. Its glass was soot-streaked, its wick needed trimming, and the light it spat had no substance.

        The shaman stood facing the door. The agates in his hair flickered like fireflies, green and enchanted. He’d been freed of his chains. They lay at his feet. Still, he didn’t move. Cordrey stood behind him, revolver pressed to the shaman’s temple.

        Easric’s revolver was up.

        “Close the door, Dane,” Cordrey said. “I’ve been trying to get this shaman to cross me over, but he don’t seem inclined. Maybe you can talk sense to him.”

        Easric closed the door with his foot. Behind it lay an Imperial guard, throat cut.

        “We got about two minutes, I figure, before the whole damn army shows up,” Cordrey said. “You got two choices. Tell this old man to cross us over, all of us, or take your chances with the army.”

        The bat writhed under Easric’s coat, a claw dug into his chest. “You won’t kill him. You need him to get your damn treasure.”

        “Thought you didn’t believe in it?”

        “Doesn’t matter what I believe.”

        From outside someone shouted, “Corporal Dane, surrender!”

        “Quicker than I thought,” Cordrey said. “Time’s up, Dane. Make your choice.”

        Easric said nothing, stood there stock still, both hands on his revolver, waiting, breath slow and even.

        From outside, “Five seconds, Dane, then we open fire!”

        Cordrey cursed.

        Easric smiled. “Your new friends don’t like you any more than I do.”

        “Cross us over,” Cordrey said. “Cross us over now!”

        Then the bat went crazy. It bit Easric on the chest. It gnawed. Its claws raked at him. Easric danced and threw open his coat to free the damn beast. It shot to the ceiling.

        The shaman’s eyes went wide with delight.

        Cordrey swung his revolver up toward it.

        “No!” Easric shouted, and fired.

* * *

        Lieutenant Colonel Nasica shouldn’t have given Dane any warning at all. With the shaman freed, Dane and Cordrey could cross over any time they liked.

        But there was good money in a living Easric Dane. In the Empire, the remains of saints were kept in reliquaries on trains. They made a circuit of the Empire, blessing the towns they passed through; inspiring young dreams of glory. To mock those damnable stories that made Dane out to be some kind of saint, some imaginative brass had commissioned a reliquary especially for him. It would make no circuit. Dane’s slow dismembering would be private, and a ticket to watch wouldn’t be cheap.

        It would be a shame to blow the man to ribbons and let all that money go.

        A shot came from within the shed. So much for the dream.

        “Fire,” he said.

* * *

        Cordrey lay, a neat hole in the center of his throat and spine shattered to hell. It would have been a perfect shot.

        Easric was down on all fours by the shaman. From a furrow his bullet had made in the old man’s neck, blood spilled in time with his heart. Easric tried to cover the wound but a spray wet his hand, and it was warm and struck him like a voltaic shock and he couldn’t bear to touch what he had done. Worst of it all was the shaman’s look of bliss as the bat lapped his blood.

        “Cross us over,” Easric asked him.

        The soldiers opened fire and Easric fell to his stomach, and a Gatling gun rattled, rifles cracked, and bullets tore through the tin walls. Red rays from lanterns outside painted dust and debris. Bits of spinning metal nicked at him. The two men’s blood soaked into his clothes.

        “Cross us over. Please. I can’t save it on my own.” He took the shaman’s hand, not believing the old man could hear him anymore.

        The bullets didn’t stop, and the rays turned to sheets as the holes widened and merged. Timber cracked into flinders. Then the whole thing fell.

* * *

Chapter 9

In which our hero saves the world.

        Easric lay for a year. Or a day. He lay as if he were dead.

        Above him the spirit-sky shuffled its stars, never happy in whatever place they found; no different than men. The rose bloomed by degrees and released its perfume.

        The shaman lay next to him. Easric couldn’t let go of his hand. He told him he was sorry. He didn’t ask forgiveness. There was none to be had.

        Finally he rose. Clothes blood-heavy, they dragged at him. He looked a terror.

        Cordrey lay there as well. He’d been a wickedly handsome man. It was a shame he’d also been a son of a bitch. Easric rifled the outlaw’s clothes, found the goddamn book that had started this all, and pocketed it.

        The plain was puzzle-cracked, dirt dry as bones. His boots scuffed up dust as he walked. Someday there’d be grass. But just now there was nothing nowhere but the pink gypsum rose, the only place to go. It was a long walk.

        His bat followed. It seemed he should fill the time by teaching it something of the world it had been born into. But he wasn’t a shaman. He didn’t know what to teach it, so he sang it songs. The only songs he knew were saloon bawdies. He couldn’t carry a tune, so he sang loudly instead.

        He passed beneath the petal-eaves, undersides crusted dark by a million bats. He entered a grotto at the rose’s base. It was fathomless and dark. His eyes adjusted. Bright moonlight filtered in from somewhere, or perhaps it didn’t filter at all, but just was. He lay upon a dais, the cavern’s only feature as far as he could tell.

        He thought what to do. He thought of all the men he would kill once he fell back through and how he would kill them, and how hopeless it was to think he could kill them all. And what would it prove, all those soldiers’ deaths, but that there was something here to die for?

        And all because of a goddamn book.

        He took the book from his pocket. He looked at the cover. He hadn’t looked like that since he’d been eighteen. He flipped past pages and looked at the engravings inside, text quoted beneath them, each portraying some bit of action or a dramatic and rugged landscape that was nothing like home.

        He flipped to the end where Easric won. Where Easric got the treasure and got the girl. He read.

        Easric and Beatrice stood within the entrance to a chamber fathomless to man.

        “Oh, Easric!” Beatrice gasped. The sight before her stole away her breath and her knees weakened and she clove tight to her man. “It’s so beautiful!” And she wept.

        The chamber was heaped with mounds of gold, precious gems, jewelry and gilt objects of art. There were overflowing chests and urns of all sizes, bolts of silk, jars of rare spices, rolled tapestries and carpets strewn on the floor. It was a horde worthy of a dragon, or the accumulated wealth of untold generations of banditti rapine. It glowed with a light all its own, and in that light Easric shone like the sun-bronzed statues of the Saint’s Way and Beatrice like a soft diamond by his side.

        “But Easric,” Beatrice lamented, “However will we carry it all?”

        “Never you mind,” consoled Easric, and he patted her delicate hand. “I’ve brought help.”

        Easric spoke those magical words taught to him as a boy by those inscrutable March witch-doctors, and the spirits heeded his call.

        THE END.

        Unbelievable. And yet they had believed. And how could he blame them? Wasn’t it a similar hope Easric had every time he made a prayer to a dead spirit-stone; hope he’d find a miracle the next time he passed by?

        He read the page again. Then he smiled and knew what to do.

        They’d believed part of it, and that part had been true. He’d bet even money they’d believe the rest.

* * *

Chapter 10

In which Easric’s rivals are foiled again.

        A week later the bewitched auger pierced the Crossing. No one had really expected it to work. The geologists and engineers were happily confounded. This was the hand of god at work.

        Nasica lead them in, his second close behind, followed by the rest.

        Their lanterns swayed at the end of poles, their light eaten up by too great a darkness. They were in a grotto with an exit to a blasted land with a sky full of madness. Nasica’s men were terrified of it and wouldn’t go out. So they went deeper in.

        They found a stone dais on which lay an open book. Its spine had been broken and six pennies had been laid on the pages’ edges, three to a side, to keep them from turning.

        Their lanterns swung over it. They huddled to read.

        Then they looked around them at the immense empty space. No one dared say a word. Was this even possible? Well, of course it goddamn was.

        Nasica drew his revolver. He clicked the cylinder around. All his men stepped back. Nasica thought of his commission. He thought of the money he’d invested—his personal fortune, others’ too. He thought of his wife’s smug look once she heard of his disgrace.

        His second barked orders to start a thorough search.

        “Don’t bother,” Nasica said. “We’re done here. It’s over. He’s taken it all.” There’d be nothing left, he knew. Not a coin, not a pearl, not a single thread of silk.

        Easric Dane, he thought. Lawman, soldier, shaman, and saint all rolled into one, and god how he hated him. He aimed the revolver at the damnable book, thumbed back the hammer.

        Then he lowered it slowly.

        He snatched up the book. Coins flew.

        “How much is this worth?” He thrust the open book into the face of his second, so he could see.

        On the last page, just under “THE END,” scratched in lead in a blocky hand, was written: “Better luck next time. With love, Easric Dane.”

        It was the only autographed copy ever of The Rosemond Gold, and it was worth a fortune.

Copyright © 2013 Don Allmon

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Don Allmon is a computer technician who spends his spare time working toward a master’s degree in nineteenth-century American literature. He lives in Kansas with many animals. His story “Bandit and the Seventy Raccoon War” appeared in BCS #103.

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COVER ART

“News from the Horizon,” by Tuomas Korpi

Tuomas Korpi is an illustrator, production designer, and matte painter from Finland. He has worked in the entertainment and advertising industry since 2005, including the last three years as an illustrator, designer, and visual director at Studio Piñata, a Helsinki-based animation and illustration studio. In his work he aims to combine the vivid impressionistic style and lighting with digital media and environment design. He likes to think of his personal works as frames from yet-to-be-made movies that leave the viewer space for their own imagination. See more of his work at tuomaskorpi.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press

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