Dead Man’s Hand (52 page)

He thought, safe on rock, of his mother and his sister. His teachers, back East. His
first riding companion, near twenty years back, who had taken the green youth under
his arm and taught him how to survive.

Old Matthew, who’d died north of Smithtown when the savages overran their camp. Died
by his own hand, rather than be taken captive. “Never let them take you,” Matty had
said. “Never do anything other than by your own free will. Promise yourself now, to
never give up that will.”

He had been, in the end, no better a student to Matty than he had been at reading
the law.

Those memories were only safe on rock, and they never did him any good. Jack forced
his mind to consider each step, the colors and striations of the rock, the crunch
of his boot heel on timeworn rubble, and the sough of the wind against his ears, until
his brain went numb once more.

Finally, the day came to a close, and while the ridge ran on a while more, there was
the blur of blue shadow in the distance that told Jack there was a town off to the
south.

People—settlers and traders, common folk—were wary of him, knowing without being told
there was something gone wrong with him, but he missed hearing them speak, even when
they did not speak to him. To sit, briefly, at a table, and pretend he could stay…
it broke him, every time, and yet still he could not resist.

If he was fortunate, his master would have no summons for him.

* * *

Briar, the signs at the boundary line named the town, and it seemed well-called: sparse
and spare, the color of deadwood and sand. But the buildings were sturdy, and the
children clean and strong-limbed, and the sound of their play was the first thing
he heard when he rode into town.

“Trust in God but Watch the Border” was inscribed at the archway of the church, a
lookout on its spire, and Jack stared at the arch a while before riding on.

The saloon looked clean and orderly, and Jack barely hesitated before swinging down
off the piebald’s back, wincing as his soles touched dirt.

Silence. Silence in his head, silence in his bones.

Looping the piebald’s reins around the post, he gave it a pat and a cube of close-hoarded
sugar, and went through the sand-brown doors of the Briar’s Last Hope.

* * *

As usual, the folk gave him a wary circle: other strangers might be pestered for news
or begged for a story, but they left him to his table and his whiskey, the girl serving
him a plate of something that looked well-marbled but tasted of gristle and bone.
He ate it, and the dry potatoes, and drank his whiskey, and let the noise wash over
him, better than any bath he’d ever had.

And then it came.

No words: there were never words, only the command. The game was over, for the nonce:
he had all-unwitting come where his master wanted him, where men waited, dreading,
unknowing, for his hand on their necks.

Ten men of Briar, sold of their own free will to the devil, waiting only to be claimed.

“All right,” he said, as though he had a choice. His meal done, he would rise up—no
more avoiding the dirt that clung to him, now that the deed was done—and walk through
the town, and find who had taken his master’s coin.

Whatever border they sought to guard, whatever god they trusted, it had not been enough.

* * *

They were waiting for him when he came: nine of them, on the church steps.

“Avram ran,” the oldest of them said, when Jack put one foot on the faded wooden steps
and looked up at them, his hat angled back so they could see most of his face in the
light coming from the open door behind them. “He broke and ran when we knew you were
coming.”

Word had spread: like the demons, the townsfolk of Briar had heard of the devil’s
Jack.

“But you waited.”

“We did what we had to do. Our children are safe. That is all that matters.”

Their calm was almost disturbing. The damned bargained. The damned wept. The damned
offered you everything they no longer possessed. They did not stand like god-fearing
men.

“The border. What is it?” You could ask humans questions you did not ask of demons.
They would lie just as easily—but they did not always, and there was no risk in listening.

They looked at each other, the nine men of Briar, and if they wondered at his question,
they did not show it. Finally one, neither oldest nor youngest, spoke. “A magician
lived here, back before there was a town. Bitter and sour, and not able to stop fiddling
with things that would not be under his control. And in his fiddling, in his disregard
for what was natural, he called up the briar-rock from the breast of the Earth and
let loose abominations on the land. The founders of this town, they contained it,
somehow. But they left no instructions, no grimoire we could follow, and when the
ground rumbled underfoot last year, the first abomination returned.”

It had the sound of a story long-told, worn with the repetition. “You’ve no magicians,
none to hire or lure, to strengthen the barrier?” Better to bargain with a magician
and risk his whim than sell your soul outright.

Another man, a freeman from his skin, as upright as the others, spoke then: “There
was no time. The devil was there.”

“Yes. He often is.” Jack’s words were dry, but the townsmen took them as solemn gospel.

“And now you will take us.” The freeman again, resigned.

He was the devil’s dog. “Yes.”

“Does it hurt?”

He could not tell who had asked that question, a voice within the group. “Yes.” Now,
and forever. That was what it meant, to give over to the devil. Not a great pain,
not always, but a never-ending one. The sour bile of regrets; the loss of hope; the
abandonment of fleeting, innocent joy for the more grim knowledge of sorrow. He felt
them all, scraping at his insides.

They would exist within that pain, their souls’ protection forfeit, for the rest of
eternity.

Sixteen years of taking the devil’s price had hardened Jack to regret. But these were
good men. Honest men, who had waited for their fate. Looking at them, something inside
Jack rebelled.

“Go make your peace with your families,” he said. “No memories will save you now,
but there is no reason to leave them with pain.”

Lie to them
, he meant.
Give them a pretty story to believe. They won’t, but they will remember that you tried.

“I’ll be back come dawn. Don’t make me have to find you.”

He had some hard riding to do, before then.

* * *

The moon rose low and cold in the sky, and the devil pinpricked him the whole ride
back to the rock ridge, but Jack gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw and did not
relent, even when the pricks became jabs, and the jabs drew blood from his skin.

The devil was
always
there; but he could not be everywhere at once. So long as he did not turn his full
attention here, Jack had a chance.

No.
Jack had no chance. He let the thought go, became empty and bare as the grasslands
around him, all life hiding away the closer he came to the demons’ rock.

They met him on the lowest ridge, five sleek shadows glowing and shifting under the
moonlight. This was their time, their place, and he was no longer a stranger to them,
that they would hide their true form.

He had never thought to gamble again. Never thought to bargain, or hide a card in
his sleeve.

He stopped, the horse’s hooves barely settled on the rocky spine, and called to them.
“What would you risk, to be entertained?”

“What would we not, to no longer be bored,” came back the answer. “Have you come to
be our fool, human?”

“I am already my own fool,” he said. “But if you can manage it, you will have entertainment—and
strike a blow against the memory of the magician who bound you here.”

That had their attention, he could tell by the way they paused in their restless,
graceful swirl.

“Tell us more.” A swirling demand, five voices as one.

“Those who stood against the magician, those years ago. The humans. Their descendants
sought to continue their work—and sold themselves to my master, to do it.”

The swirl picked up again, disdainful. “That is your business, not ours.”

The fabric of his shirt stuck to his skin, pasted by sweat even in the cool night
air. “Ten men, my master claims.” Nine who waited, and one who ran. “What would you
do for an entire town? Yours to observe, to entertain you, without any cost to yourself.”

“Ours? No cost?”

“My master cannot touch you, not here, not bound as you are.”

That was not the same as no cost, but he was playing on their boredom, and their greed,
to blind them. “An entire town, brought here, for the length of the lives of those
who swore their oath,” Jack said. “The natural life, and no more. When that last man
dies, the town goes free.”

Dying, bound to the rock… Jack did not know what would happen to their souls. But
they would be unclaimed, and therefore not belong to the devil. Perhaps their god
would intervene.

The swirling slowed, paused. He had their interest, now.

“Can you do this? Can you hold them to you, secure within the stone?”

He had his cards; he did not know what they held.

“If willing, we can.”

That was enough. They haggled over terms for the rest of the night, Jack making them
each one agree to every term. And when the moon set but before the sun returned, they
had a bargain.

“They will agree? They will be bound?”

Jack shifted in his saddle, feeling his bones ache, exhaustion gnawing a hole in his
skull. “They will have no choice.”

* * *

The men were waiting, as he knew they would be, on the steps of the church. No children
played on the planed sidewalks this time, no women gossiped in the stores, no youths
recited lessons, or brought in the cows.

Briar waited.

“Is it time?” a voice asked.

Time, and past. He stared at them from the back of the piebald. “What would you give,
to stay with your family?”

“You make a joke of our fate?” The youngest spoke, his face pale and tight with grief,
while the others stirred uneasily around him.

“I’m asking you a question.” Jack’s temper, unused to dealing with people this long,
frayed thin. “Answer it, or be damned. Would you break oath, give yourself—and your
families—over to a lesser evil, to keep your souls and save them from heartbreak?”

It was too late to save them, too late the moment they made their deal. But there
were different levels of damnation.

“Yes.” Not the oldest nor the youngest, nor the speaker from the day before, but a
slight, slender man with the look of a storekeeper about him, narrow-faced with sideburns
too large for his chin, and spectacles perched on his nose. “Whatever price, it cannot
be worse than what we have already pledged.”

“Nathan, be quiet,” another man said. “There is always something worse.”

A town of foolish men, but not fools, it seemed.

Jack, bluntly, told them what they faced.

“Decide now,” he said, cutting off any discussion. “You who made the bargain must
seal this the same way, else it cannot work. Ten souls bound, either way you go.”

“We are only nine,” Nathan said.

The oldest man, their leader, looked to Jack. “The devil’s dog will deliver the last.
Will you not?”

Jack did not answer the obvious, but merely waited for them to decide.

As he had told the demons, they had no choice.

* * *

Nine men and their families, and the family of the tenth man, and the ties they had
made—it was nearly two hundred souls and their households Jack led to their fate.
Briar was left near-empty behind them, but it was a sturdy town; it would survive.
And this time, Jack thought, they would know to lure a magician and heed their town’s
warning.

Nearly two hundred souls, all of them willing, he led to the rock’s spine, and delivered
them from the devil.

The hollow of the stone was barely a dozen feet long and half that across. But it
was large enough to contain them, and give them the illusion of land stretching beyond.
A man’s lifetime was only so long, even the youngest of them, and once the nine died,
their children and children’s children would be released, unstained by their fathers’
folly. The demon gathered above the hollow, stretched on their flat stomachs, watching
the town rebuild itself the way humans watched a game of dice.

Jack, forgotten, gathered the reins and swung up into the saddle. Digging his heels
gently into the piebald’s sides, the pair moved down off the rock and onto the endless
plains. The devil did not hold a grudge. This one time, Jack had outplayed his hand
and taken the pot. But one game changed nothing: he had a missing man to chase down
and deliver unto the devil.

Obedience kept him alive. If he lived long enough, he could outride his own damnation.

In the Devil’s West, only a fool asked for more.

So here we are, sitting in ambush on the Sacramento River down below Sutter’s Mill,
and I still don’t know what it’s about. Of course I’m not a complete raving imbecile,
I know the
ambush
is about the
gold
that’s coming down the river. What I don’t understand is why I’m dressed like Admiral
bloody Nelson, and talking like a toffee-nose imbecile, and waiting for a man dressed
like a carrion-eating bird to swoop down on us.

I want the gold, but more than that, I want answers.

When I first arrived in Alta California, I found myself a lucky man. I served as a
topman on one of the first merchant ships to sail through the Golden Gate after Commodore
Stockton secured the place, and therefore I was one of the first to hear of the strike
on the American River, where gold nuggets were said to be just lying on the ground.
I promptly deserted my ship—along with the other sailors, and all the officers, too.