His Ragged Company

  His Ragged Company

  A Testimony of Elias Faust - Book 1

  Rance D. Denton

  Copyright © 2021 by Rance D. Denton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  COVER ART by Sean Martin

  (https://www.fiverr.com/gravylaughbeebl)

  BACK ART by Sandy Butchers

  (http://www.patreon.com/sandybutchers)

  COLOR STUDY by Marlena Murtagh

  (http://www.marlenamurtaghphotography.com)

  AUTHOR HEADSHOT by Mary Elizabeth Williams

  Contents

  Content & Trigger Warnings

  Acknowledgments

  A Beginning-Of

  I. The Gun

  II. The One-Armed Man

  III. The Eye

  IV. The Girl Made of Gold

  V. The Mark

  VI. The Well

  Ashes

  About the Author

  Content & Trigger Warnings

  Ableism, alcohol use, animals harmed in combat, blood & gore, death, dismemberment, drowning, drug use, forced restraint, gun violence, hanging, harsh language, knife violence, racism, self-harm, sex & sexual acts, sexism, sexual assault (verbally threatened, not performed), suicide.

  Acknowledgments

  My many thanks—

  To Katie, who spends hours listening, suggesting, and pulling my head out of my ass;

  To Bob, who holds me to higher standards than anyone else, because a book shouldn’t suck;

  To Lithia, who creates so tirelessly, she reminds me I should too;

  To Mom, who always knows that the value of a story lies in its heart;

  To Laura across the sea and Matt down the road.

  To you, reading now.

  For Dad

  who knew enough to teach me how not to be.

  A Beginning-Of

  There I was, the guy with his head halfway up a horse's ass.

  Maybe halfway is stretching the truth, but I was close to it. I hung across the rear of the horse. The ground flashed by a few feet below my head. Sand and dirt stung my cheeks. My brain felt like it was close to giving up. Body wasn't far behind.

  I heard gunfire. Not close by, but getting closer. The popping gunblasts had a heartbeat rhythm. Woodsmoke was in the air, but I knew it didn't come from a hearth-fire. It was death-smoke. Town's-on-fire,-get-your-ass-in-your-hand-and-run kind of smoke.

  Welcome home, Elias Faust.

  “You mind slowing down a bit?” I said to the rider. “Mind giving me a second—”

  Something splashed across my cheek. I thought it was blood. I went to wipe it away. Grains of wet sand clumped in my eyes.

  A body went spinning past, rolling along the ground with a slice across its chest that left it resembling more a piece of ham than a living thing. Its black cloaks flapped, snap-snap, like a flag. I looked up, thinking it was the rider. It wasn't. The rider still had the killing knife in her hand, poised for another strike. Her face, painted up like a skull, was a mask of stark white shadowed by slashes of coal-black. She hunched over the neck of the horse, melting into it.

  In the distance ahead, smoke spiraled into the air like a dirty bandage against the sun. A town was there too, little pockmark of a thing that probably didn't even deserve being called a town. More like a blemish made up of squat buildings, a town hall, and a livery. It all looked like it was burning, but you'd be hard-pressed to see fire with all the sunlight, so I had to imagine it. The smoke made it that much easier.

  All around the town, an army of dark figures scurried, some engaged in close combat with townspeople who used everything they had to fight against them: rusty tools, cast-iron, even their fists. Other marauders dashed about on horseback, guns belching out little puffs of smoke, others slicing with keen blades or clubbing heads with cudgels. There was a lot of howling and hollering. It was a big ol’ people-killing party. Some of Blackpeak's people had guns, but that didn’t help them much – the shadows were faster, more vicious.

  Some shadows didn’t have guns at all. Just opened their palms and blinding sprays of wildfire spewed like burning fabric from their hands. ​The figure running the horse turned her head just enough to look at me. She held the reins with her knife-hand and pulled something metal out of her belt.

  She spun it in her strange, metal-gold palm, then handed it back to me.

  It was my revolver. I grabbed it.

  We careened into a group of cloaks just outside the town. They were chasing down a screaming woman and her kid. Skullface, without pausing her horse, leaned down off the saddle and stabbed one of the cloaks in the throat. Our sheer speed tore out the neck in a bloodless spray of dust. The knife wove up like it had a life of its own and came down, cracking into another black-cloak’s collarbone. His mouth opened in a soundless yawn, he folded over like paper, and hot sand flew off into the wind.

  We swept through the edge of the town and went barreling into it at full speed. The cloaks had themselves a grand time with their wild handfuls of fire, lighting flame to any building within reach. Black-powder smoke burped out of broken windows as the townspeople fired at whatever didn't look like them. Some of the black-clad figures seemed to leap and float, suspended from invisible strings, defying natural rules.

  Once we got into the town, Skullface had to let up on the horse a bit to weave through the little fights going on along the main road. “You got any plan here, Painted Wonder,“ I shouted, “or you just taking a joyride?”

  No response. Guess that meant no plan. Ain’t a real fan of plans anyway. Most of them go awful wrong.

  Then again, I guess not having a plan went wrong, too, because just as she spurred around the corner, the horse bucked. Lots of tattered figures came pouring out of alleys and side streets. Skullface tried to keep control. In the wild moment, she didn’t see one of the beings drawing back a hunting bow.

  The arrow whisked through the air like a brown insect. Her shoulder jerked. I saw the point come out of her skin, punching through her tattered vest. She collapsed off the saddle just as two other arrows landed between the horse's ribs. It staggered. Its legs collapsed. The world skewed sideways. Skullface reached up, grabbed me by the collar, and wrenched me down to the ground.

  Her blood, gray as melted lead, dribbled spirals into the dirt.

  I tried to will myself to move, but nothing happened. My legs weren’t talking to my brain. The cloaked beasts didn’t lend us a second. They started running, firing rifles, hoisting deadly tools above their heads.

  “Shit,“ I said. “This ain’t good.“

  Skullface got a handful of my collar. With her good arm she started dragging me as fast as she could. My limp legs left long traces of blood in the sand. Above the buckle of my belt my shirt was shredded and wet, sticky like syrup. When I breathed, a boiling agony burned inside my guts.

  Within seconds, the mob would be on us. We’d be stew.

  I raised the Colt. I found the bead of the sight between the trenches machined into the cylinder. Then I looked for one of the creature’s chests and drew back the hammer with my thumb.

  Had to use my middle finger to pull the trigger. I didn’t have the best grip on account of all the blood. My blood. The Colt kicked. One of the intruders jerked back, stumbled, then flopped over.

  With Skullface dragging me, all I could do to hold off the group was shoot. They just kept coming. An arrow splashed in the sand next to me. I fired again, but the shot jumped high. I worked the hammer, and this time – even though the ground and hot rocks
felt like they were burning a hole through my trousers – I was patient enough to aim. I caught one of the bastards right in the thigh. It stumbled away, leaving three more coming at us.

  As Skullface kept pulling me, I held the Colt with both hands. One of them leveled an old rifle. I could see my fate in its barrel, but I was quicker. Pop. He collapsed.

  The last two bolted for us. I had two shots left. Only enough time to get one off before they were all over us. I bit down on my tongue, raised the pistol, and fired. A reddish cloud of sand blew out the first one’s misshapen head. The other one leaped for me.

  It raised a woodcutter’s axe. I might have had the chance to get off a gut-shot, but that wouldn’t change momentum or the fact that my brains didn’t get along well with sharp objects.

  Skullface moved in a flash. She leaped over me like a cat and caught the downward-slicing weapon. The cloaked presence hissed.

  Without missing a motion, like she was doing some kind of dance, my savior stole the axe from the figure. She spun it in her palm, barked out a cry, and swung. After several thumping chops, the shadow’s neck went missing. The body and severed head plopped into the sand at about the same time.

  Skullface stood firm, waiting for the next round of raiders. They were coming. I could feel the footsteps like a rumbling train.

  We could fight over the burning husk of a town all we wanted, but in the end, no matter who won, there’d be nothing left. Nothing to salvage. “They’re on the way,“ I said, every word sending a new shock of pain down into the bleeding ruin of my stomach.

  She nodded.

  “And that means we're likely on our way out,“ I said.

  Nod number two.

  “Kill as many as we want, we won’t come out of this alive.“

  “You will not,“ she said.

  “Well, I got one more bullet.“ Skullface turned. Oily paint ran with her mercury blood, with my blood, glistening along the front of her throat. She still had an arrow through her but didn’t seem to realize it.

  Behind her, another wave of dark raiders swept through the town on foot and horseback, firing and burning and swinging, breaking everything they came across and killing every townsperson who tried to counter them. There was no time wasted on trophies of flesh or bone. The mass of them was a machine, powered solely for the destruction of anything and everything that flickered in front of their eyes.

  We’d be next.

  I saw a little shift in Skullface’s lips – a twitch, like she was about to say something. Instead, she just squatted down over me and threw the axe away. The thunderous crowd came closer. I didn’t hear so many people screaming anymore.

  Skullface sifted through the dirt. When she found what she wanted, she lifted it up and showed it to me.

  “Did it speak to you,“ she snarled, her words all sharp edges and crude angles. “Tell me. Tell me now.“ It was a rock, about the size of a fist. Round. Just the right size to—

  “The Shattered Well,“ she said. “Did you hear its voice?“

  I tried to remember. I told her. I showed her.

  Skullface raised her arm, gritted her crystalline teeth, and swung the stone down at my face.

  I fired, mostly on instinct, right from the hip. I felt the Colt jerk, but I never saw what happened. I got clobbered in the forehead with the stone anyway. I was thrown into a black sea and floated further and further away. The cold sensation of wood and metal in my hand started to vanish.

  I don’t remember my head hitting the ground.

  I don’t know if my shot landed.

  The hot stink of woodsmoke followed me down. Even in death, I doubt I’d shake the smell.

  Yeah. Welcome home my ass.

  Now

  “I believe I asked you to start at the beginning.”

  “I did,” I tell him. “At least, as far back as necessary.”

  “Never took you as a man who would cut so many corners.”

  “Quickest way's usually the easiest.”

  He smiles. If a vulture could smile, I’d imagine it looking something like this. Just like the last time I saw him, he had way too many ivories in too many narrow rows. Give him a side of beef and he could have slivered it into ribbons for you with his eyeteeth. The faster you think a man can mash his steak into paste, the less you can trust him. Meat is meat, after all, whether it's a cow’s or whether it's yours.

  He flicks his lapel and straightens a wrinkle between his thumb and forefinger. There, set in a gold broach, an eyeball blinks, rolls in its socket, and locks on me. It trembles, disembodied but alive. “Quick or not, Marshal, I'm interested in the details, in the morsels and minutiae. In the truth. Can you give me that?”

  “Never had much of an imagination. Takes too much work to keep all those fantasies lined up in your head.” I see only him. Nothing else. The gaslights behind him burn my eyes, blaring like droplets of sunlight. His face is a distorted shadow. “Most people would think them tall tales if I told them straight, just lies and fabrications meant to impress myself into the company of free drinks and warm thighs.”

  “You don't have to impress me. You just have to tell me everything you know.”

  I turn my head away from his breath. It stinks like leather-oil and boiled eggs. With all that darkness around me, I drive my heels into the floor to be sure I’m not being swallowed. I can feel my heartbeat pounding a steady pulse inside my ears. That was a start. I knew I was, just not exactly where. “So where would you prefer I begin?”

  “Think of the first time you drew his attention.”

  “Whose?”

  There’s that smile again, wide and slippery. Too jovial, too inviting. He knows what he wants out of me.

  I tighten my fists. The thirsty thorns bound around my wrists bite deeper into my flesh. Their points cry caustic acid. It takes their juices only a second to find the avenues of my veins and rush through them. Tides of pain explode inside me.

  Then the worms come. I see them beneath my flesh, crawling, curling, hatched out of a thousand unseen eggs, lumps of my skin moving like a quilt covering restless legs.

  One burrows out from the roof of my mouth, falls right onto my tongue.

  “Tell me about him. Tell me about the Magnate.”

  I suppose it couldn't hurt to be thorough.

  Part I

  The Gun

  1

  Being a marshal ain't really a big task in a town small enough to spit over. It's not very exciting. Not very dangerous. Not very reputable, either. Either way, it's still marshaling. It pays for the whiskey. If I'm frugal, it also makes sure I have a warm body in my bed at the end of a week.

  Not much law to speak of in Blackpeak. Every citizen of Blackpeak falls under my watch, no matter who it is. If Paul Fulton thinks someone’s snooping around his homestead, then I'll look into it. If Mr. Sloman at the trade shop has a problem with a customer, even if he’s nudged up the prices on me once or twice, I'll look into it.

  Case in point: Even town drunks like Rufus Oarsdale are my responsibility. My town, my people, my jurisdiction. Most people have probably heard similar talk before, but it's easy to lack creativity when your head's chock full of law and swagger and your hips are heavy with guns.

  Rufus came bursting into the marshal's office on a Saturday afternoon. The way his boots scraped the floorboards, I knew he had been drinking before I even smelled his breath. He smashed his meaty fists down on my desk. “Those connivin' sons of bitches,” he snarled. “Those pig-stinking, trough-licking—“

  “Mr. Oarsdale,” I said. “There something I can help you with?”

  “Goddamn right there's something,” he said, heaving out whiskey-breaths. “Help me dig some graves for the thieving rats I'm about to kill.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Talk to the undertaker about the graves. Who you about to kill?”

  “Some boys,” he said.

  “Any boys?”

  He said, “’Pacific ones.”

  “Sailors?”
<
br />   “No. Pacific ones,” Rufus said. “Certain set of boys done me wrong, so it's time for them to get killed.”

  “These pacific boys anybody I'm familiar with?”

  "Gregdon Twins," he told me.

  Oh, I thought. Them.

  “Weren't you running with them as of recent, Rufus?”

  He jabbed at the desk with his finger. “As of this morning.”

  “Disagreement?”

  “They stole something.”

  I like to run things in an off-the-spur kind of manner. Situation comes up needs a rule, that means I get to write one. Long as they don’t shake up the town too much, of course. That’s the agreement Mayor Kallum and I came to. I decide on a rule, and then I talk about it to whoever it applies to. If they don't like it, they get to leave Blackpeak in whatever way suits them the best: in a saddle or in a pine box. Like everything else, I had a rule about thieving: Don't do it. Sounds a lot like my other rules. No reason to complicate things.

  The Gregdon Twins – capital T, as they'd corrected me in the past – were a pair of kids barely out of their teens that had somehow managed to claim Blackpeak as their stomping ground. They were arrogant, crude, and because they could talk a lot of trash and wore firearms at their sides, fancied themselves kings. Rufus, too damned drunk half the time to think straight, had taken right to them. They kept him drunk so they could laugh at him and watch him make a fool out of himself. If you were a scientific sort, you might even call them symbiotic. “You seem pretty heated, Rufus. Must have been something special they took from you.”