Blood of Mystery (14 page)

“What do we do?” she said. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t think.

Falken gave Beltan a grim look. “Hold on to her, Beltan. Whatever happens, you have to keep her safe.”

“On my life,” the blond knight said. “I swear it.”

No, this was madness. They needed a plan of action, not words of doom. Grace opened her mouth to speak, but a horrible grinding noise filled the air, and once again the deck lurched beneath her. She fell to her knees.

“Prepare yourselves!” Vani called out.

The grinding stopped, but the deck kept moving. It tilted wildly to port. Grace couldn’t hold on; she began to slide. Then she felt a strong grip on her arm.

“Swim, my lady,” Beltan growled in her ear. “No matter how hard the currents pull at you, swim with all your might.”

All at once sky and sea switched places. Screams came from every direction, along with the horrible sounds of snapping ropes and splintering wood. There was one final, rending shriek as the ship broke apart.

Then Grace plunged into cold water, and invisible hands dragged her downward.

PART TWO

THE RAVEN REBORN

15.

It was strange how quickly time could pass when all you were doing was trying to survive.

Travis knew their only purpose in Castle City was to bide their time until Jack Graystone arrived and helped them find a way back to Eldh, and back to their own time. Grace and the others probably thought they were dead, killed in the collapse of the Etherion. Travis couldn’t let them believe that, not when there was still hope. Sometimes he wondered if Beltan had given up on him, or Vani. The thought made his soul ache, but just who the pain was for—fair-haired knight or gold-eyed assassin—he could never say.

Besides, Travis, maybe it’s better if you never get back. If the
dragon and the Witches are right, you’re going to destroy Eldh
no matter what you try to do.

Then again, if Vani’s grandmother spoke truth, and he was
A’narai
—one of the Fateless—how could it be his destiny to do anything, let alone shatter a world?

It didn’t matter. As things stood now, neither Beltan nor Vani had even been born yet. And it seemed anything but likely the four of them would ever get back to Eldh, let alone to their own time. Besides, in the day-to-day work of keeping a roof over their heads, sometimes it was hard to remember he was anything but a bartender in a Colorado saloon in the year 1883.

“Tell me how to concoct a Velvet, Mr. Wilder,” Manypenny quizzed him that first evening he reported for work at the Mine Shaft in his new white shirt and black trousers.

Travis rubbed his freshly shaved pate. It had always been a point of pride that he knew the recipe for nearly every cocktail in existence, no matter how odd or obscure. However, his brain was a bit rusty. It had been over a year since he had left the Mine Shaft—in his time line, at least. All the same, he managed to dredge up the knowledge.

“Combine equal parts champagne and porter.”

Manypenny gave a satisfied nod. “Now describe the manner for formulating a Flip.”

That one was locked in an even dustier corner of Travis’s brain, but at last he recalled the Halloween when they had done a Sleepy Hollow theme at the saloon. He had dressed up as Ichabod Crane and had learned to mix drinks that were popular in Colonial times.

“Rum, beer, and sugar,” he said, ticking off the ingredients on his hand. “Mix them together in a mug, then plunge in the tip of a hot poker until it foams.”

Manypenny stroked his curled mustache, beady eyes glinting. “I see you’re not so easily confounded. Inform me, then, of the items that go into a Blue Blazer.”

Travis racked his memory, but in the end he was baffled. No doubt it would cost him his new job, but there was nothing to do but admit the truth. He would just have to find work at one of the mines, no matter what Maudie said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said, prepared for Manypenny’s displeasure.

Instead, the saloonkeeper let out a bellow of laughter. “Well, it appears the Sphinx has won this contest of riddles after all.”

Travis could only gape. It seemed Manypenny had been playing with him, determined to best him at the game.

His employer clapped him on the back. “Never fear if you’ve never heard of a certain beverage, Mr. Wilder. The miner who asks you for a fancy cocktail likely won’t know what goes into it any more than you do. No doubt he simply overheard some well-heeled gentleman order such a drink and wishes to try it for himself. However, your typical miner wouldn’t know amontillado from mare’s piss. So formulate any preposterous concoction, and he’ll drink it gladly.”

Travis forced a weak smile. He had the feeling working for Manypenny was going to be something of an adventure.

As it turned out, few of the men who walked up to the bar requested cocktails. A good number asked for beer, but the vast majority were there for one thing only: whiskey. Usually it was a shot of Taos Lightning—or Old Towse, as the crustierlooking men termed it. This was a hot and potent liquor distilled in the city in New Mexico from which it took its name. When Travis tried his first sip, he decided it had all the kick and character of a can of Sterno—after it had been set on fire.

Right away, Travis was struck by the similarity between the men who came into the saloon and many of the men he had seen on Eldh. Trade their muslin shirts and denim jeans for tunics and hose, and any of them could have passed for a peasant in Calavan. Most were short, their faces lined beyond their years, their teeth yellow and rotting, and their hands permanently blackened from labor in the mines.

Many of the men had hard and empty eyes, as if all the life had been leached out of them, just like the silver was leached from carbonate of lead. They drank standing at the bar, downing their whiskey quickly and without relish, then stepping aside to make room for the next man.

Not all of the customers were so cheerless. Just as when Travis owned (would own?) the saloon, many of the men who stopped by each day were regulars and friends of the proprietor. These were townsmen, not miners, and many owned businesses along Elk Street.

Unlike the miners, these men wore suits, with silver watch fobs dangling from their vest pockets. They talked much, laughed more, smoked cigars, and drank bourbon and champagne as often as whiskey and beer. They were men of wealth and success— bankers, merchants, doctors, and lawyers. Travis didn’t have the heart to tell them that, in a few more years, once the silver market crashed and the mines closed, they would all be broke.

Whenever Manypenny, in his booming voice, introduced his new bartender to one of these regulars, the customer always bought Travis a drink. In fact, as far as Travis could tell, making the bartender drink seemed to be a popular pastime in the Old West, and almost any occasion called for it.

When a man wandered into the saloon, fresh from the East, full of dreams of striking it rich and still flush with cash, he always insisted on buying Travis a drink. Travis hated to accept the gesture, knowing that a few weeks later, when his claim went bust, the same man would come in again, clothes dirty and torn, and pockets empty. At that point it would be Travis’s turn to buy the other a drink while the fellow tried to figure out a way to earn enough for a train ticket home.

Then there was the occasional prospector who managed to find a small pocket of high-grade ore, and who—after paying a visit to the assay office—would swagger in and buy whiskey for the entire saloon. Of course, after a few days of drinking and gambling, his newfound fortune would be gone. Head aching, the miner would return to his claim to start all over.

Even a fair number of the miners—laborers who made three dollars a day—would buy Travis a shot of whiskey along with one for themselves. One look at their haunted and lonely faces, and Travis couldn’t turn them down. For all this town’s bustle and crowded streets, he had a feeling sharing a drink with a bartender whose name they didn’t even know was the closest some of these men came to having a friend. Sometimes Travis would ask the man his name—but only his first, not his last.

“Never ask for anything more than a man’s front name,” Manypenny admonished him. “As far as I’m concerned, a man who enters here leaves his past at the door.”

Travis clenched his right hand into a fist. If only that were true. However, while he could never forget the past, he also knew that it lay behind him—a shadow that followed in his wake, and nothing more. That was what he had learned in the Etherion, when he faced the demon; that was what the ghost of Alice, his little sister, had shown him. So he would raise his glass to the fellow who had bought him the drink, and they’d down their whiskey in silence.

Of course, if Travis were actually to consume all of the drinks that were bought for him, he’d have been lying under the bar by sundown most days. Instead, after filling the customer’s glass with the good stuff, he’d pour a shot into his own glass from a bottle he kept behind the bar, which was more water than whiskey— a survival trick practiced by bartenders in any century.

Once the sun slipped behind the mountains, the character of the saloon changed. The somber drinkers who inhabited the bar by day were replaced by a noisier, harder-drinking, and decidedly rowdier crowd. Cigar smoke and laughter filled the air, along with tinny music once the piano player arrived to plink out “My Darling Clementine” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike” on an upright piano so battered it looked like it had been dragged across the Great Plains behind a covered wagon.

It was also after dark that the gambling tables came alive. Each of the tables was rented to a gambler who ran his own game, and who paid Manypenny a share of the table’s take. There were plenty of choices for losing one’s money, including poker, paigow, and three-card monte. However, by far the most popular game was one called faro.

As far as Travis could tell, there wasn’t much to faro. The thirteen card ranks—from ace to king—were painted on the surface of the table. Players placed bets on the various ranks to win or to lose. Then the dealer turned up two cards. The first card was the loser, and the second card was the winner. So if a player bet sevens to lose, and a seven was the first card drawn, the bet paid off. Or, if he bet jacks to win, and a jack was the first card, the dealer took his bet.

After watching a few games, even Travis was smart enough to realize that the odds of winning in faro were pretty much dead even. That was clearly why it was a popular game. The only thing that gave the house a slight edge was the fact that the dealer discarded the first and last cards in the deck—they were neither winners nor losers. That meant, over time, the dealer kept just a thin fraction of all the bets placed. Then again, given the vast amount of money that moved across the faro table, even a few percentage points wasn’t a shabby sum, and no doubt accounted for the dealer’s silk vest and diamond stud cuff links.

While the atmosphere in the Mine Shaft at night was a bit on the wild side, it was usually good-natured. Men drank, laughed, gambled, and made conversation with the rare woman who entered the saloon—ladies who, while not hurdy-gurdy girls, were certainly not a big step above on Castle City’s social ladder. And while many of the town’s prominent men could be found at the saloon, their wives were nowhere in sight.

Most men could hold their liquor, and they took their losses at the gambling tables with no more than a sheepish grin. But there were the exceptions. One of the first things Manypenny made a point of showing Travis was the shotgun that hung from a pair of hooks beneath the bar. And, almost every night, at some point the big saloonkeeper brought out the shotgun and cocked it, aiming it square at whatever rowdy had had too much to drink, or had lost too much at poker, or had been jilted by his best girl, and who was determined to fight someone— anyone—over it.

Usually the other was not so drunk or angry he didn’t think twice at having a shotgun barrel pointed at his chest, and upon quickly sobering up he hurried out the door. However, one night a young man in grimy clothes shouted that Manypenny was watering down the liquor—an accusation clearly disproved by the man’s evident inebriation. The other seemed not to feel the barrel of the shotgun jammed into his stomach as he swung his arms wildly, reaching for Manypenny, who clenched his jaw and slowly squeezed the trigger. Then a pair of men who seemed to be the angry one’s friends pulled him off and dragged him out into the street.

Laughter and the sound of music quickly rose on the air again, and Travis suspected he was the only one who saw Manypenny slump against the bar, still holding the shotgun in pudgy hands. The big man’s face was red, and sweat stained his shirt in dark patches.

“You wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, would you, Mr. Manypenny?” Travis said quietly. “No matter what he did, you wouldn’t have shot him.”

The saloonkeeper drew in a rasping breath. “Put this away for me, Mr. Wilder.” He handed Travis the shotgun. “In the name of God, please put it away.”

Travis took the shotgun and placed it on its hooks under the bar, and all the while he wondered—if this was one of the more respectable establishments in town, as Maudie had said—what were the other saloons in Castle City like?

Fortunately, incidents of violence in the Mine Shaft were rarer than Travis might have feared. In fact, for all their drinking, for all their gambling and boisterousness, there was something oddly subdued about the men and women in the saloon. Travis couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Sometimes he’d see a man stop short in his laughter and look suddenly over his shoulder, or perhaps he’d quickly hush another man who was talking in a loud, slurred voice about something Travis couldn’t quite understand.

They lead hard lives, Travis. They’re probably tired all the
time, that’s all.

Except he didn’t quite believe that was it.

All the same, in the constant hurry of his work at the saloon, it was easy to forget those peculiar moments. Just like it was easy to forget about Jack Graystone, and how they had to find a way back to Eldh and their own time. In fact, he might have forgotten about everything in his daily labors at the Mine Shaft.

Only then, as he hauled in a fresh cask of whiskey from the back, or swept up the sawdust from the floor, he’d look up and see the yellowed Wanted poster plastered to the wall, staring back at him with his own eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. TYLER CAINE, THE MAN-KILLER.

And Travis knew he would never forget who he was.