I
Upon a rooftop, Khàmantsi studied the rent in the faded canopy above him through bleary eyes. A dangling length of canvas billowed across the azure void. Shadowless, it rippled and stilled. As his thoughts cohered, he wondered if he had fallen through it somehow, but the quiet agonies that waited for him to move were not born of a fall, but of an empty bottle.
How long ya’ been out for?
He held his hand before his eyes and calculated the days by his growing tremor. The shakes usually started after two days without any drink. He’d had only enough coin for three days of hard drinking, the three days he’d been granted leave. That was all the leech-men had given him. A salutary reprieve, they’d called it, to center his mind, not his soul. Never his soul.
Searching his memory for more clues, he found nothing but a drunkard’s chaos of images. Stumbling and shouting, stars falling, a knife flashing in moonlight. Whether the memories were new or old, he could not tell.
He focused on only what could be known or deduced. Five days then, at most. He’d have died if it had been any longer. In time, he would know. The true reckoning of his absence would be born out in the severity of the punishment the Locutor would ordain for him.
The gallows or a few days in the oubliette?
They’d throw him under. He was still useful.
Alright, ‘Mantsi. Let’s go.
He sat up slowly to quell his roiling stomach and the agonies that threatened to burst through his eyes. Lights, green and red and gold, swarmed his vision, and he rubbed them away with a grimy palm, grimacing.
Pushing himself to his feet, he wobbled in a splay-legged shamble. Arms out, he sought his balance, groping at the air. He found none, fell to his knees, and vomited.
There was no food in the puddle below him, only islands of bile and a froth of mucus unmixed in the pellucid liquid.
Maybe just a day then.
He waited for the heaving to pass before he rose to his full height and walked to the low parapet wall that girded the roof. The city came into view between its teeth: half-cloaked in the slow turning of the Holy Mesa’s shadow, white-washed adobe buildings, some two, some three stories high, sprang out of the red desert as if it were teething. He eyed the sun cresting above the city.
Almost noon.
He walked to the wall, back straight, affecting dignity he knew he’d never possess, then slouched upon it. To his left, the iron road stretched toward the eastern horizon like a profanity sutured into the sanctity of the red desert. He grunted.
He was in the outskirts of the city, atop one of the abandoned homes where the actinic fire of Garganá had scorched through alleyways and thoroughfares and an emissary had proselytized with its sweet song. He recalled the men and women and children among pillars of black smoke, gathered for a theophany.
He'd won the day, and they’d spit on him.
He drew his sica from the small of his back and checked it for blood. Finding none, he then checked himself.
The images of violence rectified into understanding. He’d been fighting the ghosts of memory that lingered in the ruins of the city.
A small mercy, that.
II
He avoided the direct route through the butchers’ quarter with its blood-reek and tempest of flies and skirted the Holy Mesa, stumbling through the winding streets of the poor quarter under the distrustful gaze of wandering urchins and bruised-eyed prostitutes who reclined on wooden stoops escaping the heat of the day. He hugged the retreating shadows, bracing himself at times against warm adobe walls, but never lingering after he had regained his balance.
Emerging from the poor quarter, he entered the high street and its milling throngs. They moved from his path, some jeering, others mumbling stone-faced prayers. It was not for his scars, though they were many, nor for his height, though it was menacing. No, they veered from him for the anathema that he was and the spiral-sun of dull iron upon his chest, his sole warrant to exist within Lozené’s realm. He would be forever untouched by miracles hallowed or heretical, but that in itself made him inhuman and uncanny. Nihilities in the Gods’ eyes, Khàmantsi and his brother anathemata were below contempt and found safety only as weapons in the Good Lord’s armies.
He had asked his mother after his failed baptism what had changed about him, what was different. The light of Lord Lozené, she had said, his soul, she couldn’t see it. There was only the flesh, the worldly, the boy. And they sent him to the sulfur mines.
His tremor grew as he walked, and he slipped his hands beneath his serape, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat. Against his ribs, they drummed a violent rhythm that he sought to pacify by tensing the muscles of his forearms. He failed.
“’Mantsi!” a voice called to him from among the passing strangers, drawing out his name in a singsong voice. His shades, the manifestations born of his sober mind, had returned, and he struggled not to argue with them.
The people that passed him, seeing him jittering and whispering to himself, were now visibly afraid as if what he had was catching. But the madness that quickened within him, that conjured shades out of the dust and shadow, did not emerge from some miasma, but from his sobriety. He ignored them and fell into a jog.
III
"You've been missing for over a day now."
They sat across from each other, Khàmantsi in a low wooden chair, and the Locutor in his high swing-back. The door to the office lay ajar and creaking on its hinges as the hot wind came in furtive gusts. Functionaries passed quietly in the hall, their boots clacking against the hardwood, whispering of theology and bureaucracy.
He was a thin man, tall and broad of shoulder. Upon his face, the higher mysteries of the faith had been etched in faded woad geometries that warped and contorted among the contours of his visage. A puckered crater marked where his left cheekbone had been, marring the scripture and a brighter woad wound over the ruin, raveling old and new together.
“Drunk again, was it?”
The bullet had torn through his mouth, and he spoke with a thick-tongued precision that never quite reached the consonants and vowels that he had lost with the tip of his tongue.
“Aye, you gonna throw me under?"
"Sir."
"You gonna throw me under… sir?"
"Yes, of course, you know the law.”
The Locutor rubbed the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes, furrowing his brow. Sweat tumbled down into the hollow of the Locutor’s wounded cheek, dribbled out, tracing an arc towards his chin. A shade crossed behind him, susurrations of invective trailing it. Khàmantsi tracked it with his eyes.
“Where did you find yourself this time?"
"Somewhere."
"Where's somewhere?"
"Don't know, some 'bandoned house, sir. Where's the others?"
"Fire-fa’, did you see it?”
In his mind’s eye, he saw meteors flashing blue, and then pale godlings squalling in shattered stone cocoons broken upon the desert floor.
Khàmantsi shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe? I’ve never met a man with such a ‘onging to return to the mines. They ‘eft yesterday."
“How many of them rode out?”
“A’ five.”
“They won’t need me then.”
“I don’t know if they’ve ever needed you when you are ‘ike this.”
He could think of a few times. He wasn’t unskilled; he just didn’t care. His was an allegiance of necessity, the other anathemata’s, one of salvation. He’d rather die than return to the mines where rot of the earth spilled out in white smoke and sickly yellow stone.
The Locutor drew a cigarette from a nacred case and placed it between his lips. He mumbled a prayer, the cigarette jouncing with the words, and it ignited. The Locutor took a drag.
“Have you ever desired more, Khàmantsi?”
“More what?”
“More than this. Sa’vation.”
“Like the others, sir?”
Blue wisps of smoke tumbled from his mouth as he spoke.
“Yes, ‘ike the others. They have found so’ace in praying, though they cannot commune with ‘ord ‘ozené as I or the rest of his f’ock do, but I be’ieve that through prayer and meditation, they would no longer be ‘acunae in our ‘ord’s eye.”
“Is that so, sir?”
“Yes, they on’y need sing ‘oud-.”
“How, sir?”
"How-"
“There was a blind man at the mine. They yusta tease him a bit, saying it didn’t matter much for him ‘cause he was always in the dark, but it wasn’t true though. He told me once that it wasn’t darkness for him. It was nothin’. Darkness is somethin’. For him, it was like sight didn’t have meaning. You understand, sir?”
“Are you comparing the infinite power of our ‘ord, to a b’ind anathema?”
Khàmantsi ran a hand over his shorn scalp and shook his head. “No, what I’m sayin’ is, you can’t learn to see… it just is.”
“By ascribing ‘imits to our ‘ord, you strip him of his divinity. I’m certain that that you understand this.”
Khàmantsi nodded.
“Five days in the oubliette wi’ be good for you to ref’ect upon the infinite.”
Khàmantsi nodded and scratched at his greasy beard.
“Yes, sir.”
“How ‘ong has it been since you’ve had a drink?”
“A day, I reckon… sir.”
The Locutor sighed, took a drag and considered the cigarette clamped between his fingers.
“I wi’ get a drink.”
“Thank you.”
He rose from his desk and crossed the room to the bookshelf. Removing a pannikin and crystal decanter half-full of cactus spirit, he faced Khàmantsi and poured.
“The Doctor has said that a comp’ete cessati-“
As the goldenrod liquid streamed into the tin cup, the Locutor’s shoulders slackened, and his face drooped in a palsy.
Hierophany. Lozené was speaking.
Khàmantsi stood, wobbling, and crossed the three paces to the Locutor. The alcohol spilt onto the floor, passing over the lip of the pannikin and splashing at their feet. He took the decanter first, then the tin cup. His chest ached for the sweet liquor and excitement tingled up his spine as he looked into the cup’s shallow depths. He brought it to his lips and grunted.
His shades satiated, he let the pannikin dangle from his finger and cradled the decanter to his chest. He turned from the man, but on a whim, filched the cigarette from between the Locutor’s fingers and placed it in his own mouth.
He went to the Locutor’s desk and deposited the spirit and cup. Brushing aside some papers, he lifted the decanter and, with the dexterity of an arthritic, he poured three sloshing fingers. Upon the desk, the spilt liquor pooled thinly and followed the course dictated by gravity, over the edge, dripping onto the floor.
Holding the pannikin before him, he toasted the Locutor and quaffed the liquor. As its fire burned and its pall of apathy descended, his tremor subsided, and the shades departed with quiet vitriol. He poured another three fingers.
He took a seat facing the window, sipping at the liquor. The red desert slouched in a gentle curve toward the horizon, unbroken but for the chine of the Painted Mountains rising in the north and the anthropoid shadows of the yucca that bled upon it. He considered grabbing a book from the shelf but doubted whether he’d have the time to read it.
They had been surprised when they’d discovered that he could read, as if a man of his condition would have no need of knowledge, but they had allowed him to indulge his curiosity.
“Did you do this?”
Khàmantsi glanced over his shoulder. The man was pointing to the fumous puddle at his feet.
“No, that, I believe, was Lord Lozené doin’, sir, when you two were talkin’.”
“And the desk, and the cigarette, too?”
“Aye, that was me, shakin’. And the cigarette, I didn’t want you burnin’ your fingers.”
“You didn’t just want a cigarette?”
“Two things can be true, sir.”
The man grunted.
“You’re welcome. Lord Lozené have good news or bad news?”
Khàmantsi took a drag on the cigarette, blowing a thin scud of blue smoke into the space between them. He tipped the ash into the pannikin and took another sip.
“Good news, we wi’ press the attack in the north. Our thaumaturges have been ca’ed to the front. Shindáre’s forces are retreating and he wished to press the attack. It is an honor for our—"
“Sir, is that wise, sendin’ all them out that way?”
The Locutor sighed and shook his head.
“You’re drunk Khàmantsi.”
“Aye, I am.”
But not stupid.
Khàmantsi dropped the butt into the pannikin and hissed in the dregs of liquor.
“You better throw me under.”
IV
A spiral of actinic blue torqued out of the grey smoke and flashed across the mouth of the alleyway almost close enough for him to touch. Over the din of battle and crackling inferno, the enemy’s war hymn droned through the street and thrummed in his chest. Khàmantsi peered around the corner and fired both barrels of his cut-down shotgun into the billowing smoke.
The song did not cease.
Ducking back around the corner, he cracked the breach and clawed the spent shells from the barrel. As they tumbled to the ground, he shunted his two remaining rounds into the empty chambers with his palm.
“Khàmantsi! H-help me!”
Khàmantsi glanced back. Pulsing blue, Locutor Pralésa was scuttling backward, rocking like a broken pendulum. His legs had been obliterated at the hip and the charred mangle of bone and muscle left a trail of gore through the ash and dust.
He might live yet, Khàmantsi thought, should he survive long enough for one of the leech-men to reach him. But that wasn’t the truth of it.
“Lozené curse you! Carry me back.”
“Sing a ward! We got one more comin’. I’ll be back,” he said, voice muffled beneath his kerchief.
Another coiling shaft of blue fulgurated among the smoke, and Khàmantsi snapped the shotgun closed and cocked it with the flat of his palm. Ignoring the pleas, Khàmantsi darted across the street into an adjacent alleyway. Rolling and righting himself, he pressed his back against the broiling adobe.
The Locutor would die there, and he would become but one more voice in the chorus of shades that followed him. Khàmantsi could accept that because he had no choice. The gate would open soon.
Khàmantsi pulled the cut-down into his shoulder and knelt. A yard away, the scrim of smoke churned, folding in on itself and tearing, and from it, the thaumaturge appeared. His robes flowed behind him, whipping through the air and alighting upon the ground in a dusty tangle.
Khàmantsi leveled the shotgun and fired both barrels. Squealing as if scouring glass, the prayer-graven shot bored into the shield.
The thaumaturge’s head whipped around to face him and they locked eyes as the shot sparked and burst in tiny pockmarks of holy fire. Shuddering then dimming, the shield shattered into glowing mist.
The thaumaturge raised his hands and his singing swelled, summoning eldritch energy with his war hymn. Khàmantsi dropped the gun and ripped his sica from its sheath. With the sickle-dagger held aloft, he leapt upon the man, pulling him to the ground. They tumbled through the rubble and dust, vying for dominance.
Shifting his weight as they rolled, Khàmantsi mounted the man and swept the crook of the blade across his throat. Blood fanned from the grinning wound to the rhythm of the man’s death, flowing over Khàmantsi in the only baptism the world would permit.
The thaumaturge mouthed his ultimate hymn at Khàmantsi, but from out the silence where words ought to have been, there was nothing. No magic. No miracles. Only the chaos of battle in which Khàmantsi waited for the man’s remaining moments to spill onto the street.
After the thaumaturge had died and his own heart stilled, Khàmantsi stood, sucking in the smoke and dust in deep, ragged breaths. Death lay before, but death also lay here in the street. He drew his gun and charged, and the world disappeared into nothingness. Void.
Out of that void there was screaming accusation, a deluge of images and sensations and then, his sundered self coalescing from nightmare, he recognized where he was.
They had dropped him into the dark and its myriad monsters to dry out. How long ago, he could not reckon, days that felt like years. He lay, covered in the filth of his body, a convulsing mass of limbs that were both his and not. Howling the sins of his existence untallied by any hand save his own, his voice cracked and broke in the dark.
The shades were upon him, squamous things limned from the darkness, boring into his flesh with trilling teeth. Rising from the murk, a tall tatterdemalion paced through the room in a febrile riot of color, accusing: you, you, you, in a hundred voices, men and women and children, you, you, you.
Weeping into his filthy hands, he apologized to them for his failings, for his actions though they were sanctified by the very God that they themselves had worshipped. The shades, conjured from his base wretchedness, found no solace in his anguish and attacked him.
He sobbed and wept and screamed and begged.
After a time unknowable, he heard voices and a rusted iron door shrieking upon its hinges. A shaft of light plunged into the center of the room, and he did not know if it were yet another false miracle.
“Khàmantsi! Lo there!”
He would not speak.
“Have you died?”
A rope ladder unfurled and swung among the light. A silhouette descended, slowly, and a sloshing heard, he curled into a ball.
They’re not real. They’re not real.
Water splashed upon him, frigid against the burning of his body. He shuddered in the dark.
“Khamantsi?”
He recognized the voice, but not the name of the acolyte who spoke.
“N-n-not dead,” he croaked.
“Good, we hadn’t heard your crying for a bit. Doc was worried that you might have succumbed.”
“H-how many days?”
“Three.”
“W-why?”
“Why what?”
“W-why now?”
“You’ll be informed soon enough.”
He was in no state to climb, so the acolyte called for rope. The acolyte pulled him to the light and looped the rough hemp beneath his armpits and cinched it tightly. Curses rained down upon his as more acolytes, unseen, dragged him upward into the light. He watched his shadow, twisting and spinning like a corpse dangling from the gallows.
V
Bearing him between them in a broken cruciform, they had taken him down brazier-lit hallways, past iron-barred cells and into a room dimly lit and near empty, save for a claw-footed washtub.
They had sneered at his manic questions as they’d prepared his bath. And when they had finished, they laid fresh clothes in a neat pile upon the stone floor next to a platter of dried fruit, meat and cheese. Finally, they shoved a green bottle of rotgut into his hands and left. He stripped from his soiled garments and left them in a fetid pile. Cradling the bottle to his chest with one arm, he clambered into the tub, water sluicing over the rim. He pulled the cork free from the bottle-mouth and drank.
For a time, he sat among the unraveling skeins of steam, watching the filth of his body slough into the soapy water and drinking from the bottle when the urge struck him. As the water cooled and his body and mind quieted, he regained himself, the alcohol filling the gap where his soul should have been. Eventually, he rose from the cool brown water, smelling of jasmine and musk.
He toweled off and dressed, and when he had finished, he hollered into the hallway. The acolytes came to him, bringing his weapons. A top-break revolver, a belt of cartridges, a cut-down, his spiral-sun badge, and surprisingly, a book of ecstatic poetry.
A small kindness that, though misguided.
He pulled the revolver from its holster, testing the action, listening to the turn of the drum. Antiquated now, given the war’s technological spur, but still functional. It would suffice for his butcher-work.
The grip, fashioned from the bone of some dead emissary. One of their own, or of the enemy, he didn’t know which. But whether grim trophy or holy relic, the yellowing scrimshaw caught the roughness of his palm, and it felt secure within his hand.
He checked the shotgun and, finding it to his liking, he sat upon the rough stone floor tailor-wise and began picking at food as he read. He left the spiral-sun where it lay. An hour later, the Locutor arrived.
He pushed through the door, dressed in his ceremonial robes of red and white, he appeared ready for a battle.
“Lord Lozené’s providence shines upon you.”
The Locutor took two cigarettes from their case and put both in his mouth. After a mumbled prayer, they both ignited. The Locutor handed one to Khàmantsi.
“How’s that?”
Khàmantsi took the proffered cigarette.
“The Lord has given you a task. The horses of the other anathemata are all dead.”
Though their deaths were unseen by the Gods in their realm, Khàmantsi knew his comrades were gone. Not friends, an anathema had none, but fellow outcasts excluded from Heaven’s light, ignorant of even the Temple’s barest mysteries.
“‘Tweren’t providence, then. Just luck.”
The Locutor sighed but said nothing.
“An emissary, sir?”
“Yes.”
“It’s eclosed, then,” he took another drag on the cigarette, “who from?”
“A lesser God, Hrodínja.”
Khàmantsi didn’t recognize the name.
“We ridin’ out together?”
“No, I shall remain here.
“I’ll be accompanyin’ another thaumaturge, then?”
“No, every one of them has already been sent North. It was a feint. An incursion.”
Khàmantsi nodded knowingly, taking a slug from his green-glass bottle. It was still half-full.
"Alright."
"Alright?"
"Just alright. Where were they last seen?”
“Two days’ ride north-east. Skirting the Painteds. I do not know the waypoints, but another brother will give them to you before you embark.”
“Why only two days, when they been out five?”
“They seem to have taken a circuitous route through the desert, tracking the emissary.”
Khàmantsi nodded. He’d find four dead men, not five.
But who’s the fifth one, grovelin’ to a new God?
“I’ll need more to drink, to get through it.”
“That will be arranged.”
VI
A night and two full days followed, first pursuing the tilt of the myriad blind stars over the rim of the world where none would bear witness to his mad procession save he and the ravening thing, implacable, that dragged him beneath the heavens and then, when the sun rose, and the blistering wastes wavered, tracing windblown hoof-sign to the charred remains of dung-fires. He pulled at times from a bottle of spirits, and at other times, he howled into the desert the secrets of his heart, known to neither man nor God.
At his own fires, awash in guttering ember light, he read from the book of poetry, seeking revelation in the rhythm and rhyme of the prophet’s words. But within the book’s pages he found nothing until he cast it upon the cinders.
On the morning of the third day, half-drunk, revelation in his heart, and his hand steadying the cut-down shotgun broken open across the saddle, he came upon the final camp of his comrades.
His horse had begun to shy and snort before Khàmantsi noticed the vultures wheeling above a point some hundred paces away, their quarry hidden by a slow rise of hills. He edged his horse upwind, coming at the massacre in a slow half-circle.
Cresting a hill, he found more birds hopping and waddling among bodies littering the hardpan gully. They lay in all manner of defilement: voids where eyes should have been, intestines unspooled onto cracked earth like mounds of snakes. Only one recognizable: Grotsitsé, his face not yet torn away, forgotten in the bounty of flesh.
The horses had fallen where they had been hobbled together, lying in a broken pile, as if they were once one variegated creature.
He counted them. Four dead men and five dead horses.
But the fifth man, where’d he gone?
He dismounted wearily and pulled from his bottle but found it dry and vaporous. He let it fall from his hand, and it bounced with a thud, kicking up a small plume of dust. He drew his flask from beneath his serape and took a sip.
The horse shook her head, eyes rolling. He gripped the reins and pulled her from the chaos, whispering into her twitching ear what few sweet words he could remember. He carried on that way, speaking and stroking her neck until she settled. He went to his saddle and removed her feedbag, filled it with oats, and slipped it over her muzzle. As she ate, he hobbled her loosely with a leather thong.
“Alright, sweet thing, just wait a moment.”
He entered the massacre, waving the birds away with his hat. They vomited and lurched into flight to join those whirling above the desert floor, waiting for Khàmantsi to finish his communion with the dead so that they might resume theirs.
In the viscera and arcing foot trace, he compiled an atlas of the carnage. The emissary had taken them in the night, the remnants of their fire kicked in a flare of ash southward, a headless body slumped over sprawled legs in the wake.
“Took ya’ from behind, didn’t it?”
Khàmantsi studied the soot-black tracks the size of his hand. Doglike, they looped among the strewn corpses and back the way it came. Only one man had drawn a gun, probably Lùrda; he had always been the on the draw. The others, no time.
He sipped from his flask and set to work rifling among the other bodies until he found a half-drained flask and slipped it into his pocket. With that, he might have enough to see him through to the end. From among the horses, he pulled a stinking blanket blackened with flies and walked to Grotsitsé.
Searching the body, he found the cause of death. A bullet wound to the chest, hidden in the dusty black of his waistcoat. A near-perfect shot in the havoc.
“You think they see ya’ now, Hohútsa. Always too eager to please. I see ya’ though. I see ya’.”
Khàmantsi searched among the tracks again, looking for Hohútsa’s footprints, but found none. He’d been carried out on the back of whatever Hrodínja had sent. He’d be following that trail, but first he had to prepare.
Stripping Grotsitsé of his gun-belt, Khàmantsi tossed it to the hardpan with a thump and spread out the blanket. He bent and dragged the man to its edge and rolled him up. He took the gun-belt from where it lay and threw it over his shoulder.
Hunkering over the body, Khàmantsi looked into the man’s deliquescing eyes. With two fingers, he raked them closed and wiped the foul jelly onto the man’s shirt.
“Sorry Grot, you got one more use in ya’.”
VII
The fire burned ahead of him some ten yards away, reaching high into the night. Sand fell in hissing sheets as he adjusted his elbow to scratch at his cheek. He’d had no choice but to let the barrel of the shotgun extend beyond the blanket. Though he had blackened it with charcoal, there was a faint scintillation limning the left barrel.
He had spent a good hour gathering dry brush and dead yucca. A fool’s fire. A drunk’s fire. Then he erected a simple frame so the fire could feed itself for the hours to come.
He’d dragged the corpse from the horse and propped it against his saddle. He eyed it.
Not quite natural. Too stiff.
He twisted the rigor from the man’s arms and legs, forcing it into a manner of easy repose. When he had finished, he placed his hat upon its head.
Well, Grot, sorry to say, ya’ look like a drunk.
He’d gone from the dead man to a recess in some high ground, and covered his horse blanket in sand before shimmying beneath it. And then he waited as the alcohol dripped from his pores and filled his enclosure in an inebriate musk. A day out from the shakes, he reckoned. He could live with the sobriety, for the few hours it would take whatever came out to kill him to arrive.
The shot came first, hitting Grot in the back of the head, pitching him forward. For a time, there was nothing but the roar of the fire and its bright light, until, out of the dark periphery, Hohútsa strode, revolver held before him.
He bent to examine the corpse and recoiled from the stench. Realization rushed upon him, and he spun, leveling his gun at the night.
Khàmantsi fired. The buckshot tore through Hohútsa’s ankles, severing him from gravity. In his ugly fall, the gun flew from Hohútsa’s grasp, its chromed barrel flashing as it spun past the licking flames.
Glowing in the moonlight, Khàmantsi rose from the sand as if he were some dustborn wraith, a suzerain of the night. His boots crunched against the sand, but the sound was drowned out by Hohútsa’s cursing and screaming. He crossed the ten yards of dark, rounding behind Hohútsa, and entered the threshold of firelight with the shotgun held before him.
Hohútsa, rolling, stretched for his revolver, but Khàmantsi kicked it beyond the light and squatted on his heels just out of reach of the man. He rotated the shotgun to rest upon his thighs and waited for the man to cease writhing.
He pulled on his flask, the liquor burning out the rot of guilt, and screwed the cap back on.
“Where?”
“You knew you couldn’t take me, ya’ had to cheat.”
“That’s right.”
"I always hated you ‘Mantsi, you cursed drunk."
“Aye, I know. I do, too. Drink?"
"Yeah."
He tossed the flask to the downed man, and it struck him in the chest. Catching it in the crook of his elbow as it slid down his ribs, Hohútsa grabbed it with his free hand. He fumbled with the cap, growling and swearing until finally twisted free and took a long swig.
“Where?”
“Don’t matter no more.”
Khàmantsi drew his revolver across his stomach, thumbed back the hammer, and shot the man in the knee. A black delta of blood gouted and then disappeared as the gunsmoke eddied about Hohútsa.
“Next one’s in the gut. Slow or fast, what’d you prefer?”
He thumbed the hammer.
“Fast,” he hissed.
“Take another drink. It’ll ease the hurt, for a time.”
The man lifted the flask and drained it.
“Where? Voriska?”
“No, ‘bandoned silver mine- in a wadi. T-ten miles east. Ya’ know it?” he slurred.
“Aye, I know it.”
“How many?”
“Three… a priest… and… a couple of thaumaturges. Didn’t need more. The priest, he offered-“
“Don’t care. The emissary?”
“All grown up, out there cullin’.”
“Manlike or animallike?”
“Both.”
He pondered that. Someone had reached it as it had been pupating.
“You gonna ask me why, ‘Mantsi?”
“I suspect I know why. No sense in asking.”
Khàmantsi’s eyes left the man, and he stared off into the darkness, mind playing images, testing tactic against geography. A mine lit up by flames, and the circle ringed with bodies. No, that wasn't right. It'd be in the wadi.
That’d be someways better, someways worse. Mostly worse.
“Just do it already.”
Hohútsa glared up at him, all his bluster leaked into the dust. A hyena laughed somewhere in the black.
"I got one more for ya’. Where'd ya' think we go when we die?"
"Cursed if I know, 'Mantsi. I'll let you know when I get-."
Khàmantsi shot him. His head snapped back into a mist of brain and blood. The expected pink lost in the red-orange glow. He stood and broke the gun, slowly and with trembling hands, filled the empty chambers.
VIII
He rode into the night, first at a trot, then at a gallop, following the stars. Two hours later, the wadi and the escarpment from which it was cut rising blackly out of the night came into view, looming above the desert like some wind-shorn barbican.
Nope, not there, too easily pinned.
Within the escarpment’s shadow, there was a copse of ventifacts, hollowed and smoothed by eons of wind. It was the only place for any kind of trap that he could set.
A quarter mile out, he reined the horse to a stop and dismounted to water her.
“Why?” a shade screamed in his ear.
He didn’t look at it. He pulled Grotsitsé’s gun-belt from the horse’s back and buckled it around his hips.
“Don’t know myself. Willful, I guess.”
“No, you’re just a cursed coward.”
“Aye, that too.”
The moon had begun to sink, and when she had finished drinking, he removed the tack and saddle and let them drop to the sand. She eyed him inscrutably and stamped.
“No sense both of us dying here,” he whispered.
He smacked her on her haunch and she fled. He did not track her course.
Pulling his looted flask from his pocket, he debated with himself. He held it to his ear and sloshed it.
Still half. Now or later?
He chose the latter of the two, saving it for the time it might matter.
He scuttled to the copse of ventifacts, ignoring the spiders and snakes and shadowmen that loitered at the edges of his vision, and squeezed among the stones.
He chose his spot, open to the mouth of the wadi, but protected. There was a small boulder nestled among the pillars, and he rested his shotgun upon it. He lay prone. Taking a deep breath full of his own reek, he drew Grot’s pistol from his hip. He didn’t know if man or beast would come, but he hoped for beast and fired into the sky.
“How you gonna play this, you dumb drunk?” Hohútsa’s shade asked him.
“Just like I did you, I suppose.”
It arrived a moment later, trotting out of the wadi with the dawn, its shadow prefiguring its course. The pink light played upon its black-dappled coat, strangely beautiful. It appeared headless, just a high bristled spine that tapered to its hindquarters propped up by long, powerful legs. Its whole body turned in his direction.
Recessed within the muscles of its neck, there was a man’s face, hairless and pallid, lower jaw awash in blackening gore.
Khàmantsi shuddered.
Half-blind as if waking, it scanned the shadows that enclosed him. It rose up on its hind legs and its neck tumesced into the sky. Mouth agape, its long pink tongue flopped over a braid of barbed teeth and tasted the air.
Khàmantsi sighted the beast, the barrel bobbing and swinging in erratic arcs.
Better get this over with.
He took a deep breath, held it, and tried to time his tremors.
He fired. A flurry of sparks danced like fireflies within the gunsmoke and died. Deafening roars echoed around him, setting his ears to ringing, but the voices remained clear from the recesses of his mind, cursing him for all his failures.
Its neck retreated to its shoulders, and the emissary dropped to all fours and charged. He holstered the revolver.
Four seconds.
“Not enough, ‘Mantsi.”
Clouds like dirty cotton burst from beneath the emissary’s pounding feet, roiling around it in great nebulous burls. Tongue lolling, eyes wide in ecstasy.
He stabbed the shotgun forward and brought his shoulder to it. Jittering and skipping, it scraped at the stone. He couldn’t hear it over the chorus of shades, but he felt it grinding through the gun.
Two seconds.
A black face dipped into his view like an eclipse.
“You killed her! You killed my daughter!”
Somewhere to the left, it slammed unseen into the ventifacts. The stone forest shuddered and creaked, dust and scree and stone falling upon him. He pivoted on his elbows, bringing the gun towards the rumble, and fired the slug-loaded barrel.
A cachinnating screech vibrated through his skull and chest, out of the gunsmoke veil its face emerged, snapping. Khàmantsi fired the buckshot.
It scythed through the emissary’s jaw, splaying it apart like a lily in bloom. Wild and wounded, its neck twisted and swung, knocking the shotgun from Khàmantsi’s hands. He rolled left, beneath the emissary’s whipping neck and the drizzle of blood. His back collided sharply with a pillar of stone, and he scrambled for the revolver holstered at his abdomen. His palm rattled and slipped from the pistol grip.
His hand, his cursed shaking hand.
He tensed his muscles and slammed his palm onto the grip of the gun. Thumbing back the hammer as he ripped the gun from its holster, it cleared his stomach, but his finger twitched, and he fired too soon. The bullet caromed into the murk, wasted. He thumbed back the hammer again and thrust the barrel into the crying beast’s neck and fired.
It began to judder, spinal cord severed, and it collapsed in a quivering heap. He dropped the gun and sat up. From behind his back, he drew his sica.
Breathing in cotton-mouthed gasps and blinking away the burning dust, he mumbled the prayer the Hierophants had taught him, but it didn’t matter. Only he would hear it.
“Lord Lozené, take of this offering that I consecrate in your name.”
He swept a wobbling red cataract across its throat.
Three more to go.
“You gonna murder them too?”
He tore a strip of fabric from his shirt and wrapped it around his right hand and the grip of his pistol, cinching it until it throbbed and then easing the tightness.
“Maybe, maybe not. But I’d bet on it.”
He fumbled the flask from his pocket and gnawed open the cap.
“Just die already. Why keep fightin’? It don’t mean nothin’ to ya.”
“Curse ‘em. That’s why.”
He drained the flask and waited and waited, watching his hand. It stilled, but only just.
IX
Spindrifts of sand curled and frayed across the desert floor. The sun had risen fully, and the shadows of the wadi mouth pierced the red of the desert like horns. Too easily defended, that way meant death, the end of things. Khàmantsi decided to climb. He broke cover from the stone copse, eyeing the river-sawn gap in the escarpment. No movement.
He understood. The theophany was imminent.
One hand free, and the other bound to his revolver, he picked his way up the red and white banded stone, crawling catlike up a wind-smoothed hummock. Stones tumbled and clacked beneath his boots and the grit screeched. A quarter of the way up, he lost his footing, and slid down, clinging to the wall like a hunchback, boots juddering, palm and knuckles abrading in his slow, sad descent.
No more traps. They knew he was coming. Following the folds of the escarpment into the wadi mouth, he moved at a trot, revolver held before him.
If they had any sense, they’d flank him there, but he heard no song in the calm of the morning save for a low sound, a thrumming coming up through the desert floor.
He came to the fringes of the wadi mouth, where the dead river had devoured the stone and disgorged and died upon the desert.
He craned his neck beyond his rocky cover. Dry saw grass sprang up among the white sands in brittle tufts in a stone run that wound through the ravine. Half-reclaimed by the encroaching desert, tors broke from the riverbed like cairns erected in the aftermath of a battle long forgotten.
Head down and body hunched, he ran to the nearest outcrop, his feet echoing in the stillness. He picked a winding course through the stone field, finding and breaking cover, hugging the small shadows that the morning provided him, until he saw them.
Fifty yards distant, they sat, legs folded beneath them in the soft sand. Their heads were bowed in prayer, and they communed with their God, trusting him or her or it to alert them to any thaumaturge who might wander their way. But he was not a thaumaturge, and he could not be followed.
Hubris.
He steadied his barrel on the jagged stone and sighted one, watching his barrel drift and scutter. He spat. To his left, twenty-five yards out, there was another jutting of rock, but between it and him lay nothing but open ground and conflagrating magic. He spat again. If he could get to it, he might be able to creep around them, take them from behind.
If.
He ran, boots slapping on stone and hissing through sand, his legs propelling him in his suicidal charge. He kept them in his sights, gun held before him as he canted towards his hope for victory.
Halfway, they both roused, his lumbering run alerting them to his presence. Their communion broken, they saw him, and hopped to their feet, already singing their eldritch hymns. Tendrils of blue grew from the sand, whipping and twirling. The thaumaturge on Khàmantsi’s right loosed his light. In a heartbeat, it sizzled into the earth behind him, vitrifying the sand erupting in a burning hail that scourged his back.
Running, Khàmantsi snapped off a shot and it echoed through the shallow canyon disrupting the hallow chorus, taunting his drunkard's aim as he dove behind the tor.
He tracked the men in his mind’s eye as another blast rocked the massive stone.
Five rounds remaining.
They’d flank him. Pin and pincer. He knew it, he’d used it.
He drew the gun from his hip, cross-body, and poked it above the low edge. Another blast. He fired back blindly, then fired again. Keeping his left hand above the rim, he twisted his body until his back was flat against the boulder and the revolver inverted. He fired.
Four right, three left.
A shadow encroached to his right, slow bleed of black against the white alluvial sand. Khàmantsi fired with the left and lunged into dead space.
The thaumaturge jumped backward and a shroud of blue rose from the sand like a geyser, enveloping him. Khàmantsi leveled the gun and fired, missed. He rolled to his feet, thumbed the hammer and fired again.
Two right, two left.
Catching him in the hip, the impact spun the thaumaturge, the light twisting with him as if bound to his body and the earth. It flashed, wild and violent, scourging through the sand in a glassy fissure that spiraled towards Khàmantsi. He rolled again, the air snapping with steam, but it only scalded him in its course.
He drew a bead on the second thaumaturge, his own light engorged about him, spiraling. They both let loose at the same time. The blaze burst through the gunsmoke as he hurled himself to the right.
It glanced his left shoulder, lifting him further into the air and pitching him into a savage perning arc. He skidded and tumbled and collapsed into the sand. He’d lost Grot’s gun in the fall and fire.
Half-deaf, he could hear the one he had maimed, shrieking in the dirt, somewhere to his right. Had he hit the other one? His mind raced, unable to fix on any one image. He just saw the shades crawling over the ground towards him. He stood, body trembling from fear and pain and withdrawal.
One right.
Ten paces away, the second thaumaturge splayed on the ground. The bullet had taken him in the neck, bursting through in a ragged hole, his blood staining the white sand the color of the desert. He would sing no more for his God.
He limped past the living thaumaturge. He pulsed blue on the ground, unable to find the words to his song in the pain. Khàmantsi thought to shoot him, but he had only one bullet. Khàmantsi continued forward.
Flesh black and pink and smoking, his left arm swung in a loose pendulum, but his right, still bound to the gun, pointed the way.
He was a phalanx of one.
How deep into the wadi he ran, he did not know. He followed its ancient course, the thrumming of the theophany shuddering up through the ground and into his legs, growing stronger and stronger, until he saw them twenty paces away, nestled into a broad sweeping alcove.
Facing Khàmantsi, the priest stood at the edge of a circle of the culled five paces in diameter. Gripping him by his shining black hair, the priest exposed the man’s throat and whispered into his ear. Ecstasy played upon the man’s face, caring not for the theophany to come.
They did not see him.
No time, no time, no time.
In a hitching jog, he tried to clear the gap between, but he was too slow, too tired, too broken. The world shook and Khàmantsi stumbled and pitched into the soft ground with a thock. Eyes burning, he pushed himself to his knees with his gun hand, and a part of him screamed to keep the barrel free of grit. He shook the gun. A flash of blue exploded before him and the space in the ring of bodies became an infinite black.
Theophany.
Rushing to fill the void, a great wind howled into the wadi and with it, the desert dust. An arm, fleshless and taloned, slashed through the white and raked a body into the infinite depths.
Khàmantsi aimed, the barrel swinging between the two men, and a shade passed before him. One shot. The arm rose again, now clad in the skin of its sacrifices; it sought another body to pass from the empyrean and tread the earth.
Eyelids drooping, vision all but gone, Khàmantsi fired, and a head burst at the crown, but of which man he did not know. It didn’t matter. They both fell in. As he collapsed, and the apathy of exhaustion and agony took him, the wound in the world snapped shut.
Another hollow victory.
X
He awoke in the night on the flat of his back, the stars flooding the sky. Light, leached from the moon above, suffused the land around him and there was a silence that he knew would not last. He would take the respite for what it was.
He shifted in the coarse sand, flattening a hummock at the small of his back. His arm burned and throbbed as it was scoured in his movement, and for this, he was grateful.
You may yet keep it.
He sensed the shades prowling around him. Ignoring them, he brought his gun-bound hand to his teeth and gnawed the knot loose and shook the torn fabric free of the grip. It slid down his forearm and onto his chest. Heavy in his hand, but his grip sure, he studied the gun beneath the cold moonlight. Empty, it had no more use, and he tossed it into the night. He still had his sica.
His gaze returned to the untold stars in their slow wheeling against the black serene, and he wondered what they were. He’d never know in truth, but he felt that they were just as he was, relentless in their bearing.
A shade sauntered into view. Khàmantsi knew it by its gait.
“This the end of it, ‘Mantsi?”
Khàmantsi sat up and shook some of the sand from himself. He gripped the wrist of his wounded arm and placed it in his lap.
“Maybe.”
“Shouldn’t’ve given me that flask if ya’ was just gonna shoot me. Now I’m gonna be doggin’ ya’ till ya’ die.”
“True, but I was tryin’ to be peaceable,” he said, probing his arm.
“That so?”
Taking the length of fabric from his lap, he shook it free of sand and tied it into a wide loop with his good hand and teeth.
“Aye.”
“Ready to give up now?”
“No,” he said to the shade, “truth of it is, I don’t think I can.”
He passed his wounded arm through the loop and, inclining his head, hung it around his neck. His arm sagged, and he pulled it further through the loop, letting the fabric rest three fingers below his wrist.
“How do ya’ figure?”
“I think there's something else in us, next to the soul maybe. Something always burning, ‘cept no one sees it. Not me, not the Gods, not anyone. But we know it by the trace it leaves in the world. And that thing won’t let me die.”
Pushing off the sand with his good arm, Khàmantsi stood and turned his back to the shade and its questions. He’d look for water first, then a horse. Testing the sling, he scanned the stars and plotted a limping course through the desert, and after that, he did not know.
-- AJ Hannigan lives in Yalova, Türkiye. He is currently unpublished.
