Sword of Honor

-I-

The man sprawled across the crumbling cement courtyard in front of me was dead. 

That he was dead was obvious not so much from the way he stared up at the sky, but because no one would lie out in the open like that in Old Denver. It showed a lack of interest in who or what might come upon them. And with the nation being what it was now, folks didn’t just not care about what might see them vulnerable.

So yup. Definitely dead.

It was also damned inconvenient.

I’d been inside, combing the forgotten shelves of the library for the last hour, and when I re-emerged into the sunshine, a hefty sack of books on one shoulder, and my sword tucked neatly into its scabbard on my back, there he was. 

Deader than a Dickensian plot twist.

I didn’t need to touch him or listen for his heartbeat to know it. I’ve been intimate enough with Death over the years to know the color of His underwear. Grey, if you must know. Grey and cracked and stiff like tanned leather left in the sun too long. He wore them long beneath that velvet cloak of His and it’s always a surprise when the softness of it brushes coyly aside to let you cop a feel. You’re always surprised by the harshness of those drawers when your fingers touch them. Doesn’t matter how many times He runs His palms down along your ribcage. You’re never ready.

Never submissive.

But then, I’ve never been submissive. It was part of my charm, if you could call it that. Just like the chestnut colored hair that kept sticking in my eyes, my filthy mouth, my undying penchant for the written word.

That charm kept me alive and kicking in a world that was less than kind to soft, yielding women. So soft and yielding I was not. I hadn’t been soft and yielding by my recollection since my mother died. It had kept me alive each day since. I’d come to rely on each of those charms because they had their uses, and if a gal knew when to put each into play, she could eke out a decent life without too much molestation.

Note I said too much molestation.

New Denver, like the rest of the nation was nearly lawless. The new world wasn’t kind to folks who were trusting. I felt for them, actually. Not everyone was born with grit in their bones. 

When I returned to New Denver after years of self-imposed exile, it was my grit and charm that caught the eye of the mayor, who needed that in a personal mercenary. I was fine with that. I did his bidding to eke out that living, and I crafted a routine that would enable me to network with those amenable to keeping their own soft, loved ones safe. 

That network became part of my insurance. Help them, help me, so to speak.

I favor the two-pronged approach of hiring yourself out to a bigwig and being nice to the locals because you can never be too careful when you’re a woman alone, no matter how adept you are at swordsmanship or fighting or lying or stealing. There’s always someone who wants to try you on like a pair of monogrammed socks.

Because the library visits were part of my weekly routine, I’d come to know each upturned brick and broken window in the old city. I knew exactly how abandoned it was. It had been abandoned a generation earlier. The wilds had encroached into the streets and buildings like squatters party crashing a place too posh for them to resist.

It was a mess, quite honestly. And it wasn’t safe.

No one bothered with Old Denver when New Denver was so nicely hunkered down into the shelter of the hogbacks. One road in. One road out. Easy Peasy.

Witness my standing in the doorway of the old library, chewing my lip over the problem of a freshly deceased guy right straight in line with my exit.

Perhaps Dickensian plot twists weren’t so dead after all.

There had to be a reason he was lying there in my way, and it couldn’t be because he was a fan of fiction. Few people in this god-forsaken excuse for a world cared about art or culture. It fell decades earlier when the government went underground. Most folks didn’t like to read anymore. They had enough fantasy, gore, and horror in their lives to call it a day on the musty pages thing.

I had a knapsack full of books to prove how little folks cared about reading nowadays. I carted them off one by one to my own little library and read late at night when memories and guilt kept me awake. Which was a lot. Enough that the twice weekly sweeps strained to be increased so I could return to the library.

I always checked in with my contacts along the way. 

I’d heard nothing about a stranger. 

I’d scoped out the area as usual when I had arrived. No one behind me. No one hiding off in crumpled building corners.

Deserted. The way it had been for as long as I could remember.

Population: the occasional me.

So yes. This man posed a problem. Several of them, in fact.

I couldn’t just walk over him and keep going. The fact that he was there at all was out of the ordinary, and out of the ordinary called for caution.

And he was fat. No one was fat in New Denver. No one had enough food or enough leisure time to add bulk.

Where had he been that he could put on that sort of girth? 

Unless he wasn’t human. Some fae were fat. Trolls, surely.

I lifted on my toes to peer over the girth of his chest to his face in the hopes of finding some giveaway characteristic or marking. He wore a black slouchy fabric cap pulled down over his ears far enough that it met his jawline and all but covered the greasy hair cascading to his shoulders. His beard was heavy and covered in dust.

I heaved my backpack down onto the steps. 

Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe I was wrong this time. I hoped so.

I leaned down, pulling off my sword and scabbard so I could crouch next to him unhindered. I dropped them to the broken cement and leaned over him, tilting my ear to his mouth to be sure. 

No breath.

I sniffed. The faint aroma of feces stung my nostrils, overpowering that of sweat.

Most definitely dead. But where had he come from?

I scanned the deserted street, taking in the broken windows and crumbling sidewalk. Several rusted vehicles from the early days hunkered along the street in lacy, curling bits of twisted brown metal. Whatever color they had been–whatever make–was impossible to tell now. 

“Great,” I said to the man at my feet. “You had to go and die right here, huh?”

I toed his shoulder with my boot. A greyish, sticky substance mired the tip when I pulled it away. Not blood, that was for sure.

I squatted down beside him, the back of my neck prickling the way it would if someone were watching me.

My hand reached for my sword grip, a reaction that was as automatic as breathing.

“You alone, fella?” I cocked my head just a bit sideways to look up one end of the street and then down the other.

A tatter of moldy curtain blew out into the street from a broken window two buildings down. I relaxed, propping my elbows against my knees as I studied him. It wasn’t just the lack of lootable goods that kept folks clear of the old city. 

“Golems,” I said to the man’s clouded gaze. “Most folk think it’s a rumor, but I know Hunter had some magician summon them. Ransacked the underground looking for God knows what.”

Golems loved to dig. And they were antisocial. They tunneled into parts of the mountains when humans got too close. That Hunter had forced a magician to force them to dig beneath the old city was a legend that meant the Chief Justice gained almost mythical status in the nation and the golems a certain, odd respect.

It also meant you never knew when the street would collapse.

I muttered a few choice words about Hunter Wolfe and thought it was too bad the dead man couldn’t appreciate the creativity of the commentary.

I blew out a breath of sigh. If I was alone, I might as well work his clothes, try to find something useful while I decided what to do with him. A sigil, a rune, a stone. Maybe some food. Food would be good.

I played a palm over the surface of his clothes. My index finger dug into the man’s jeans pocket and finding a stub of pencil, I pulled it out and pocketed it for barter later, then continued on, moving deftly over his shirt and then down beneath his neck. 

Something caught in a tangle around my knuckles.

My first thought upon snagging a bit of wire was that Hunter had planted the cadaver there to bait me. He’d found me somehow and thought to fix his little problem of a renegade Ruby Skull. 

I had flashes of visions that involved things blowing up from old and sweaty dynamite or the equally aged C4 and I pulled my hands back instinctively.

Or worse: was the sticky substance beneath the man’s shoulder some sort of physical spell meant to alert him and the cord a tracking device of some sort?

But that was ridiculous. Hunter didn’t have that sort of magic. No sorcerer would deign to help the man who, along with his band of Ruby Skull judges, had started terrorizing the nation with the notion of justice.

I paused and looked up the street again, scanning for movement. 

Nothing.

Except, now that I was really paying attention, I could make out a faint sound I’d missed before. And it was coming from tiny white cords that wound up from behind the man’s neck beneath his cap. 

“What’s this you have, stranger?” I said, yanking on one string. 

Something like a rosebud plopped free and fell against the stone step. I traced the line to his shirt pocket and found a small rectangular box. 

My heart skipped.

Technology.

Working technology.

My fingers trembled as I lifted the box level to my vision. A grayish window took up most of the face. A small lightning bolt separated another picture of a box.

One entire half of that picture was solid.

I swallowed down a flood of water. I’d seen one of these things in my grandmother’s house. My granny kept one next to her bed on the nightstand as a reminder of the old days. 

I knew exactly what it was even if I’d never heard a sound coming from it.

The screen told me a group called The Tragically Hip was going to play me something called Dire Wolf. Pretty fitting, actually, since the woods were filled with them.

I couldn’t help myself. I pressed the freed ear bud into my ear. The archaic palm-sized music maker in my grip clipped over to another track. The screen shifted. Music rang out in my ears.

Technology and music. Partnered in a moment of impossibility.

I knew without a shadow of doubt that the man on the steps had juiced up this box with his own electricity and enjoyed the music until his energy ran dry.

So now at least I knew what kind of creature the dead man had been. He was a muster. A man of power, made when the world fell and magic began to creep back out of its dark and dusty warren. 

The time-befores had eschewed the possibility of magic. When they buried themselves in the earth, magic reclaimed its land.

And it found some of us in varying quantities and qualities.

And those that magic abducted, kept it secret if they could.

So if this man had access to magic or technology or both, he’d make a perfect target for Hunter Wolfe.

Or he was Hunter’s weapon.

And that meant he was more dangerous than a bit of sweaty dynamite.

I backed away at the thought, yanking the sound pieces from my ears and throwing the box aside. It skipped once on its corner and bounced onto the man’s chest, where it settled, unbroken and leaking out a voice that lilted in strange but intoxicating ways. The dire wolf of the song partnered with something called a Newfoundland.

The air felt dense with tension. 

“What are you doing here, buddy?” I said. “Who sent you?”

I sucked in a breath. I wasn’t scared, but only a fool wouldn’t pay attention to the way her nerves lit up like lightening across her skin. Something was wrong.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but things were not the same as when I’d entered the library just an hour before. And change in this world never led to anything good.

I felt eyes on me from every corner of every building. For the first time in all my weeks coming here, I felt as though I wasn’t alone. Worse, I felt as though I was being watched.

The dead body had been planted all right; but not by Hunter. There were far too many other creatures coming out of the woods now that magic had reclaimed the world to dally when you felt like that.

I had to get the hell out of there. And now.

I left the man where he was, music player and all, and I fled down the street faster than my entry into the city, aiming for the quickest route that would take me to where I’d left Gentry hobbled.

There were half a dozen streets to zig zag through before I reached my horse. Six long and agonizing streets.

Each pounding, breath-stealing step, I felt something on my heels and that made my legs grab for distance. The energy stuck to me like that goo beneath the dead man’s shoulder, that had smeared over my boot. It toyed with me, playing with my hair as I ran. I could hear ragged breathing just behind my hair. Something touched my shoulder.

I screamed and pumped my arms harder, hunkered down into the sprint, not daring to turn around for one second and lose the ground I’d gained.

And that seemed to do it. I lost the sound of someone breathing in my ear. I convinced myself it had been my own hair whipping about that had struck my shoulder. I slowed my pace. I was nearly out of the city anyway.

I stopped, chest heaving as I struggled to catch my breath.

I was alone, after all. I spun 360 in the middle of the street, the crumbling buildings kaleidoscoping around me.

Definitely alone.

“Ridiculous,” I said out loud. My voice echoed across the streets three times before it died.

I was pissed at myself. I wasn’t a coward. I’d seen plenty of dead men in my day. I’d killed one or two when I was left with no choice. I knew the smell of blood and I knew the sound of the death rattle. 

Those things haunted a gal at night until she had to stuff her mind with words to smother the noise of memory.

I was just spooked. That was all. A ridiculous flood of fear because I’d spent too long inside a dusty library and found an unexpected surprise on exit.

I was losing my touch, I guessed. I chuckled to myself and headed for Gentry at a much slower pace. But even with the evidence of abandonment, I couldn’t stop the prickling at the back of my neck.

I was two blocks away from the city’s entrance, and the hidden wood where I’d hobbled Gentry when the air went frigid. 

Instantly.

I swung around, scanning the facades and the street. Frost crept along the bricks and asphalt as though someone were brushing it on. 

“What the fuck?” I said without planning to say anything at all.

Laughter erupted from just behind me. Throaty, guttural laughter that didn’t sound the least bit human. Something caught in a tangle of my hair and my head snapped back as it yanked and let go.