Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 45

Muire, you really ought to know well enough to stay the Hel out of other people's marriages by now.

I knocked anyway.

The knees of Liz Brady's calico dress were dirty and she held a scrub brush in her right hand: she had been waxing the kitchen floor. The dress was too hot for the weather, though, and though she'd splashed her face at the kitchen pump when she heard my knock, she could not hide the redness of her eyes. She moved stiffly, as if her bones ached.

"Hi, Missus Brady. May I come in for a minute?" My voice and face were as open and honest as I could make them. She hesitated, glanced over her shoulder. I stepped forward.

"I don't know, Miss MacAydan. I'm awful busy..."

I lowered my voice. "Liz, let me in. Your husband's gone to town. It will be safe for a moment."

My candor shocked her, and she stepped back the quarter-inch necessary for me to bustle past. She trailed me into her own kitchen forlorn as a shadow, and I looked from her to the half-waxed floor and found myself thinking about the oddity in the way she moved. Then I sat myself firmly down at the kitchen table while she hovered over me, wringing her hands on the handle of her brush. "Miss MacAydan..."

"Liz, call me Maura," I interrupted. "And listen. You have to get out of this house, and do it now, before he kills you."

"He'd never hurt me," she began, and then she dropped the brush in terror as I surged across the floor toward her and caught her wrists in both hands. She screamed-in agony, not in fear-tears starring her eyes. She glanced down then, the pain in her face replaced by awe and then terror as I stripped the long sleeves back from her arms with casual, inhuman strength and a horrid rending of cloth.

Black, cracked scabs encircled her wrists almost completely, thicker and worse by the k.n.o.bs of the slender, birdlike bones. The marks were laid over other, older scars, and I had seen enough prisoners in my long life to recognize the like.

She was not much bigger than I, and infinitely less strong. I thought of Brady's bulldog shoulders, and felt the blinding white current of my rage rise up in me.

"Not Stagolee," I told her. "I'm not worried about Stagolee hurting you. Brady, Liz. And Browning too."

A short ride and a pot of tea later, I got her settled at the Ivory Dog. Then I got back on my red mare, rode home, and got the crowbar from the tool room in the little barn. I paced up and down the length of my house, swinging that short length of iron in my hand. The sun was moving faster than I wanted it to, and I had no way to control too many of the players in this little game.

I kicked the wall, cursed hard when an oil lamp tumbled and broke against the raw pine wallboards. Then I hefted the wrecking bar in my hands and started ripping up the parlor floor.

The sun ached on my head, despite the welcome shade of my hat. Liz lay hiding in the cool back room where Duncan kept his bed, three floors below, bandages seemingly all over her body. Duncan was with her, and the Dog was shuttered and closed, just like the rest of Main Street.

I lay on my belly on the roof, a carbine and my revolver by my side, and waited for the short shadows to appear on the street below. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled out across my neck; lank strands of hair clung to my forehead. A familiar-unfamiliar weight rested between my shoulderblades-the sheath of a sword I had not touched in years. I stole a pull from my water bottle without raising my head, tasted leather and warm spit.

A horse stamped in the corral down the street, followed by the jingle of chains. The reek of my own sweat, oil and powder, horse manure, the midden out back of the Dog clogged my nose. A hawk called, far off, answered by another. Lovers or enemies: no way to tell from the sound of their cries. The tar on the roof under my hands was melting. I thought of the texture of things with no place on this world, in this time. Sealing wax, ski resin, rosin for a fiddle's bow.

No, rosin belongs here.

Stagolee stepped into the street first, and my thumb moved with practiced strength on the safety of the carbine. He glanced around, but from where he stood he never could have seen something that was not a breeze ruffle the white eyelet curtains in the half-open window of the upstairs bedroom of Miss Pamela's boarding house, across the street. I did, however, and I saw as well the gleam of steel and a flash of ash-colored hair.

My carbine roared and choked simultaneously with the tigerlike cough of the rifle. The gun slammed into my shoulder, and a pane of gla.s.s starred and shattered. In the street, I heard Stagolee grunt and then curse.

Another gunshot rang out of the first floor of the Ivory Dog. I was already moving when the shotgun roared its answer.

I abandoned the carbine on the roof: it would only have impeded me. Perhaps the leap was superhuman: had I not been what I am, I would not have cared to try it. As it was, the three-story drop to the ground was jarring, but my knees took most of the shock of landing. Crouched, I rolled with the landing, letting gravity take me to one side with a wind-breaking thud. I needed to keep moving, suspecting that I hadn't done more than wing Browning. The sword across my back bruised my spine.

Blood lay like a banner in the street, but no body. I gasped painfully as I dragged myself to my feet, pulling my sword over my shoulder and into my right hand.

She flared suddenly at my touch, singing with a lost and abandoned Light that might have brought tears to my eyes another day. I had more immediate concerns. Raising the sword-bearing arm to protect my face from the shards of broken gla.s.s, I threw myself in through the tavern window.

The big window at the front of the Dog had been broken before, but usually as a result of the forceful expulsion of a brawler. It exploded inward quite satisfactorily, and I caught Marlowe Brady with most of my meager weight across the back of his neck. The eight-shooter skated out of his hand and across Duncan's polished pine floor, fetching up against the base of the upright piano with a musical thump, which was echoed by the sound of the pommel of my blazing sword striking the back of Brady's head and Brady's forehead striking the floor. He fell quiet, and I rolled off him and around behind the bar.

The bullet had gone through Miles Duncan and broken the looking gla.s.s. The blood had already slowed to a trickle, still pulsing weakly from the ragged wound in his side. I knelt in the puddles and spatters of it, remembering other pools of red, another time. As I reached for him he shook his head and might have coughed, but he had no air in his lungs to do it with. His maimed right hand lay inches from where the shotgun had fallen after discharging its useless burden into the bar-room ceiling. It made an interesting tattoo, and would make a better story, one day.

"Miles..."

"Doesn't hurt," he mouthed, and then paused as if to gather breath and strength. He braved a painful smile. "Miss Maura..."

"My fault, Miles..."

"No blame... Miss..."

I shook my head. "My name is Muire, Miles. Long story."

His hand clutched mine weakly. "Always knew... on the lam..." His face contorted as he struggled to breathe. "Last request, Muire?"

"Name it." My words had the force of a vow.

"Bar goes to Liz..." I nodded, and he shook his head to say he wasn't finished. "And Susie. You take my fiddle."

"A treasure." I squeezed his hand, not caring now if he knew my strength, and let the Light come into my eyes-perhaps to comfort him. His eyes widened, though whether he saw me or Death I will never know. "Scared." A long pause. "See you in Hel..."

"You're going to Halla, Miles." I felt myself smile. "I know it for a fact."

"Never was a... churchgoing man..."

"Churchgoing's got nothing to do with it. They'll take you in or they'll have me to answer to."

Surely I was not lying. Surely, though the Light has failed, souls like his are not lost forever? Surely, somewhere, I have some authority still.

He drew it in, what I knew would be his final breath, and expelled it with a silent tumble of words. I heard them anyway. " ...angel? On the lam?"

There was blood on my hands as I closed his eyes, blood on my hands as I picked up his shotgun and stood, just in time to hear the click behind me of a hammer being pulled back. I tensed, and heard that soft, sharp voice cut through the smoke of death and gunpowder. "Don't worry, Miss MacAydan. I know whose side you're on now."

I turned around slowly. Stagolee stood over Marlowe Brady, on booted foot on the unconscious man's back, a revolver in his right hand. He looked directly at me and smiled a crooked smile, showing three missing teeth on the ruined side of his face. Then he glanced back down at Brady and shot him once, fastidiously, in the back of the head.

My shock must have shown, because he grinned at me again and stepped around the sudden runnel of blood and brains that dribbled across the floor to mingle with Duncan's. Stagolee's left arm hung stupidly useless, and his own blood dripped from the fingers of that hand. "Browning," I said to him, and he nodded.

"Missed him," he answered. "Son of a wh.o.r.e."

"Browning killed her. Liz's mom, I mean."

Stagolee pulled Duncan's ap.r.o.n from a hook behind the bar, laid his gun on the counter, and began to improvise a sling. After half a useless, one-handed minute, he looked at me with something that might have been pleading in another man. "What do you say, Doc?"

I bound his arm up while he remained silent, pouring himself a shot into an unbloodied wooden bowl and downing it with his other hand. Then he turned his head and spat, while I stared at him expectantly.

"Yeah, I guess he did." He looked at me straight, then, as I tested my knots. I felt his brutality in that sea-blue gaze, and I remembered how he had smiled as he killed the helpless sheriff. "And another thing."

I nodded. I already knew. "She's your little girl, isn't she? Liz." I felt desolation in the look he shot me like ice in my heart.

"She is not to know," he answered, pouring himself another drink. "Her momma deserved better men, and so does she."

I took the little bowl out of his hand and downed the whiskey myself. "She knows. She figured it all out herself."

He looked at me, and his lip twitched. "Knew I was going to like you."

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place then, with a satisfying click. "Kale knew too. He called you in, didn't he? For Liz's sake."

Stagolee just stared at me, eyes like chips of gla.s.s as he picked up the bottle and took three hard swallows. I watched the air bubble up in the bottle. He set it down with a click, wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

I set down the bowl. "Browning's still out there. I think I tagged him."

Stagolee looked at his gun, lying on the bar. He fumbled it open, replaced the empty, clicked it shut. It made a satisfying sound, like a closing door. He nodded his s.h.a.ggy, gaunt grey head. "Believe you did. Hard man to kill, though."

The back of his hand rubbed across his cheekbone as he said it, and as it concealed the ruined half of his face I looked into the face of my brother: weary, fallen, lost and broken, but once far more worthy than I. I wondered if it would not have been better, to lose immortality and memory both, rather than to continue on as I have, as I will. I smiled at him, and laid a hand on his arm. "Come on, Strifbjorn. We've got a man to kill."

He reacted as if I'd poured whiskey down his throat when he was expecting iced tea. "Where did you hear that name?"

I picked up the eight shooter and held it out to him, b.u.t.t first. He gawked at it for a moment as if it had grown eyes and were staring back, but he took it. "I have the second sight," I told him. "Come on. Time's wasting."

But Browning was gone. There was some blood upstairs at Pamela's and his best horse was gone from the ranch house, and his track led out into the desert. It made me d.a.m.ned uncomfortable to know he was still out there, but it wasn't my vengeance to follow.

Stagolee never came back into town. The last I saw of him, he was slumped in the saddle of his good-looking dappled dun horse, riding into the West with his shadow stretched out before him, looking for vengeance still.

I kept that fiddle.

Sleeping Dogs Lie Liam dreams of flying. Overlong nails scrabbling cement, coa.r.s.e black fur matted and filthy against skin that would show flaking and raw in the light. But the bas.e.m.e.nt is cool in the summer, and Liam, hungry, sleeps. And whines.

But the whines are laughter. Until he wakes.

Strong hand lifting him from mother's too-warm belly, Liam cries as he soars through the air. Eyes blind, ears deaf. The rush of wind, and then the sweetness of milk: goat's milk, warmed on the stove, doled from an eyedropper: fevered, his mother cannot feed him. Belly full, he flies again, into the wrestling embrace of his nine brothers and sisters, mother's soft kisses as another puppy flies through the big, invisible sky to be fed.

Liam knows not to go to the stairs when the bas.e.m.e.nt door opens. He sits up, whining again at the shaft of light. He can't fly in the light. Can't fly with his eyes open. And he won't let him know. It's Liam's secret.

Liam's secret. Secret like Liam's name. Good dogs don't keep secrets.

But Liam's learned to lie.

"Dinner, Luke," he says-not the big, warm hands but the boots and the pail. "Outside." He comes down the stairs and opens the bas.e.m.e.nt hatchway and Liam follows him into the yard, to the chain. He lies down under the tree and noses fallen apples while he half-fills a bowl with kibble from the mouse-nibbled bag in the shed. A grey squirrel eyes him without compa.s.sion from the branches, and Liam braces his front feet and lurches up. Squirrels are not tolerated. The whole litter learned that, a snarl of dark fur and giant paws in pursuit of mother and the big, light-colored dog that she wouldn't let close to her puppies, even when he whined. Even when he laughed.

"Luke. Down."

But squirrels.

Liam lies down, although the pressure hurts his bony elbows. The bare ground under the apple tree is softer than the bas.e.m.e.nt concrete. He leaves the food and goes inside. It's almost enough to fill Liam's belly. Once the door is shut, Liam drinks yesterday's water and paces, although his head hurts and the ache between his ribs makes him dizzy. Squirrels are not tolerated, and he watches the grey villain race up and down the trunk, chattering.

Liam knows if he could bark and throw himself into the air, eyes closed, he could fly. If he could fly, he could make the squirrel pay for its temerity. Somewhere in the sky is where the food is. Round the tree he paces, chain grinding the bare ring deeper, and the squirrel finds his hole for the night. Liam stands up on his chain and dances, but he knows better than to speak, and you can't fly if you're silent, and he doesn't dare close his eyes. He couldn't get far on the chain anyway, and Liam's dreams are a secret.

The house lights dim and silence follows, but the summer night is warm, and Liam, hungry, sleeps.

And dreams of flying.

thizwunwilbeeahpeht, the big, warm hands say, and then they make other noises as they cuddle Liam close to a neck that smells like coffee and sugar. He, the one who'll be the pails and the boots someday, makes noises too-friendly noises-and then hands are soft on his ears and different hands are holding him. Liam squirms, because the hands don't know how, but they're gentle enough and he calms down slightly. amgunnacalimLuke.

Brothers and sisters have left before him, so Liam knows what will happen next. "Hey Luke!" the new voice says, wannac.u.mhoamanmeetmykids? Liam knows about car rides from vaccinations and having his ears cropped and trips to dog shows and puppy cla.s.ses. He knows about gra.s.s and backyards and the big blue sky and he knows that squirrels aren't tolerated, and the one who will be boots and pails laughs and laughs and laughs when puppy-Liam barrels out the back door after them, forgetting to close his eyes so he can fly.

Liam sleeps on the boy's bed that night, and the girl's bed the night after that. They tease and make him jump to snap cookies out of their hands and laugh when he laughs back at them-kiy yi yi kiy yi yi.

But Liam gets big, and barking and jumping aren't cute anymore. And big people have work, and children have school, and long-coated dogs need grooming if they're going to be clean enough to come in the house. Nevermind that they chew when they're lonely.

Liam dreams of flying, and warm hands hold him up.

Car doors slam, and Liam shivers and whines in his sleep. He dreams about car rides sometimes too, but those dreams and those whines aren't like the ones where he's flying. There's not so much laughing. His paws scrabble in the dirt, dew-claws grown long and curled back into the flesh of his leg. He squeezes his eyes tight so he won't see the sunlight. He's flying.

yushuldhavecaldmesuuner says the voice in his dreams, and canyookeephim-foraweekuntilayefindahome. The big, warm hands' voice, but Liam knows better than to believe it. He hears the voice often, but he never feels the hands. He buries his face in his paws. He wants to laugh. He wants to keep flying. It's the way to catch squirrels. He knows, because he hasn't caught one yet.

He's confident he will someday.

"Come here, Luke." No help for it. Liam opens his eyes and stands up, rattle of chain and he's moving.

Good boy, nice boy. Remember me?

The hands aren't as big as they used to be, but they're just as warm. Liam flinches from the trembling fury he feels in them as they touch his ribs, his matted fur. Oh poor Liam.

Liam.

His hands. His name. And the rage in those fingers isn't for him, he realizes, leaning against her legs when she stands up and unhooks his chain, never-mindahlltaykimnow. sunnuvab.i.t.c.h.

Nevermind.

Liam.

Liam hits the screen door running, sails through the air from the top step, hits the oak at the peak of his arc, eyes closed and fur a black banner of war flying long around him, singing out his secret in a series of joyous yelps. Ki yi yi yi yi yi. He scrabbles after the squirrel by sound, chatter of challenge and then nails on the bark as it dives into its hole. Acorns rain down around him and twigs catch in his coat. Squirrels are not tolerated. Over the ringing of his barks he hears voices: ahnevasawadogflybefore.

Yoonevvasawwadogthathaddalearn The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe She cuts him from the belly of a shark.

If this were another kind of story, I should now tell you, fashionably, that the shark is not a shark. That she is not a she and he is not a he. That your language and symbology do not suffice for my purposes, and so I am driven to speak in metaphor, to construct three-dimensional approximations of ten-dimensional realities. That you are inadequate to the task of comprehension.

Poppyc.o.c.k.

You are a G.o.d.

The shark is a shark. A Great White, Carcharodon carcharias, the sublime killer. It is a blind evolutionary shot-in-the-dark, a primitive ent.i.ty unchanged except in detail for-by the time of our narrative-billions of years.

It is a monster wonderful in its adequacy: the ultimate consumer. So simple in construction: over eighteen feet long, pallid on the belly and shades of gray above, in general form comprised of two blunt-ended, streamlined, flexible, muscular and cartilaginous cones. One is squat and one is tapered. They are joined together base to base.

It is a sort of meat ramjet. Water runs through, carrying oxygen, which is transferred to the blood by a primitive gill arrangement. At the tapered end are genitalia and propulsion. At the thick end are lousy eyesight, phenomenal olfactory and electrical senses, and teeth.

In the middle is six meters of muscle and an appet.i.te.

Beginner's luck; a perfect ten.