The gal wasn’t from Venus. Ezbon Berwick had met some of those Venusian women in Boston, before the war, and this gal resembled them as much as an ocotillo cactus resembled a rain-fat oak back East. She was bony, dried up, shorter than the dust-blown mule that carried her into town. Where it peeped out from her serape, her skin showed a coppery green sheen he had never seen on any living thing, Earthly or otherwise.
Ezbon’s own horse carried him out of town just as she rode in, so he didn’t see or hear what commotion she caused, yet he mused on her all through the following days of riding errands for the old sorcerer down by Larrenby’s Canyon.
One night, cleaning his guns by the fire, he ventured to speak with the sorcerer about her. “Saw a new gal come in to Hopsapaw just as I was leavin’.”
“Mm,” she said, poring over a gem Ezbon had helped her dig out of the canyon wall earlier that day. It caught the light like a cat’s eye, holding onto it from more angles than it should, a trait that Ezbon’s eyes didn’t rightly like. The sorcerer couldn’t seem to shift her own eyes off the gem for anything.
“She weren’t from any place I know about,” Ezbon persevered, digging into that old vein of stubbornness his Ma could never clear from him. The sorcerer’s quill flickered with what Ezbon recognized as annoyance. “She was a bony thing. Didn’t rightly look half alive, if you follow me. Skin like an old penny—”
“Berwick, I— A what? Skin like a penny, you say?” Down went the quill, though the sorcerer didn’t yet turn around.
Now that he had her attention, Ezbon felt he didn’t quite know what to do with it. “An old penny,” he said. His mouth clamped shut of its own accord. He turned back to his guns. When he dared to look back up, the sorcerer was gazing at him, a distant, thoughtful look in her eyes.
“So they’ve come already,” she murmured, caressing the gem with her thumb.
As he prepared to bunk down in the barn that night, the sorcerer hobbled out after him, peering at him under the lamp she held. She placed a pocket watch in his hand, its casing scaled gold, coiling its chain around and around in his palm. “Take me to Hopsapaw tomorrow,” she said. “We must find out about this new girl.” Then she vanished, lamp and all.
* * *
The pocket watch was a weight in his fob, pulling him forward, as if his horse trotted downhill the entire way into town. It seemed to drink in the heat of the early morning sun until his chest glowed with it. He thought of the rotgut brewed in army camps, the way it burned and numbed and drowned you. He thought of rattlesnake venom and the way it scalded up your leg.
Right now he almost wished he were back in that army camp or tumbled amid a nest of serpents. This kind of errand didn’t please him.
He slid off his horse and tied him off in front of the Trog’s Den, then hesitated. From outside he could hear laughter and loud voices. He ran his fingers through his horse’s graying mane and along his bony withers. His horse flicked his tail and drooped his head. Ezbon set his jaw and gave him one last scratch. “Not much longer, old friend. We’ll get free soon.”
He took a deep breath, clenched his fist, and strode into the saloon.
At first, as Ezbon’s eyes adjusted to the smoky dimness, none of the regulars noticed him. His gaze latched onto good old Daisy Dollar behind the bar, holding up a new lithograph print to the hoots and guffaws of the boys lined up behind their drinks. It showed a buxom heroine in a rocketeer’s suit, helmet under one arm and a revolver in the other, one boot settled in conquest on the back of a slick-haired city fellow. Great reptilian beasts loomed behind the pair of them. A star-spangled font proclaimed:
DAISY DOLLAR
-in another-
REAL ROCKETING ADVENTURE!
BEYOND the VEIL OF TIME!
an all new novel:
MYSTERIES AT THE MOON’S HEART!
by CORDRY NATHERS
“Is that how you served ol’ Archy Clarendon?” Petey Hobbs hollered, and everyone else howled, Daisy Dollar herself loudest among them.
“That gasbag of a senator? Oh, he wishes,” Daisy said, and turned her back to pin the new print alongside a dozen others yellowing on the wall. Men slapped the bar and banged their drinks together.
Petey still had a satisfied grin beneath his scruffy yellow mustache when he turned around and saw Ezbon lingering by the door. “Oh ho, what’s this? Ol’ Low Eb himself! Come to trade your sobriety coin for a free one at last?”
Ezbon’s tongue felt gummed up against the roof of his mouth. His fist was still clenched.
“Clear off him, Pete,” Daisy snapped. Her brown eyes were kind when they met Ezbon’s. She nodded him toward the darker reaches of the room. Ezbon nodded back and walked stiffly to a table flush against the farthest corner.
“I tell ya, a man that can’t drink ain’t hardly a man,” Petey was saying to those gathered around him.
“Keep it up and you can’t drink here.” Daisy snatched his glass away and glared. Even though he had a full foot of height on her, Petey shrank down at the shoulders, muttered, and turned his back to Ezbon. Daisy snorted before giving back his glass. “That goes for all of you. Clear off Berwick. He’s a friend of Daisy Dollar. Now.” She dusted her hands and swept around the bar and followed Ezbon to his corner table. She looked nothing like the buxom lass on the poster. She was Comanche, for one thing. Her face was weathered, her hair graying and cropped close, still following rocketeer regulations after all these years on the ground. Her shoulders were pinched thin beneath the faded man’s shirt she wore.
“Errand?” she murmured as they sat across from one another.
Ezbon brushed his thumb across his fob and nodded. Daisy caught sight of the watch there and frowned.
“Wish you’d skip on that magic-maker.” He placed his hand on the table and she touched it lightly. “My offer’s still open, you know. Can’t pay the same as her, but it’s honest work.”
“I know.” Ezbon didn’t know how to cut through the thicket of half-formed feelings and ideas that crowded his head whenever Daisy repeated her offer. It wasn’t as if he enjoyed drudging for the old sorcerer. He liked the work in the canyons well enough, and he liked the solitude she permitted him whenever she had no need of him. But—the way she watched him, the foul voices he heard at night, the way the watch warmed against his chest... it didn’t sit well.
Daisy was right, though — there was no way Daisy Dollar could match the money the sorcerer had promised him at the end of his hitch with her. And he needed that payout.
As if following the same train of thought down the same tracks, Daisy scuffed her nail against the smooth wood of the table and said, “Wish I’d been smart and known what a bum deal selling my likeness would be. That Cordry Nathers — you know it ain’t even a person? It’s a committee in New York. Churning out novels on command until our fine public cools on me and my supposed adventures. I was desperate, Eb, in a real pinch. You know how well the service takes care of us when it’s done with us.” She snorted. “That contract saved my hide. Saved me from creditors and worse. Yet it’s been haunting me ever since.”
Ezbon had heard it all before. It was a complaint Daisy loved to make, her favorite tale of woe. He nodded.
“I don’t want that sorcerer haunting you the same way, Eb.” She frowned again at the watch. “Or worse. She’s here, right?”
Ezbon opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say.
Daisy nodded. “Thought so. I’m not scared of her, not like these Hopsapaw rubes. They hate you because of her, you know that? She’s been a plague in these parts since before anyone clapped some logs together and called it a town. But you know it takes more than a dusty old arcanist to rattle Daisy Dollar of the Planetary Patrol.” She made the rocketeer salute, flying her left hand to the stars, and Ezbon cracked a smile.
“There he is!” Daisy grinned at him. “What’s the old bat got you in for today?”
“New gal showed up the other day,” Ezbon rasped, his tongue dry from holding it in.
“Hm.”
“In town. I saw her ride up. Like no one I ever saw.”
Daisy flashed into anger, her lips setting in a thin line. Her eyes flicked from Ezbon’s to the watch. “The Martian. You saw her.”
Ezbon’s eyes widened.
“Listen up, Zorumel.” Daisy leaned forward and jammed a finger against the watch. It thunked into Ezbon’s chest and left him oddly short of breath. “You clear away from that Martian girl. You hear? I’m not telling Berwick a damn thing about her whether you’re here or not, and that’s Daisy’s bottom dollar. My revolvers still work, and they’re proof against sorcerers.” Daisy’s eyes were hard when she looked back up at him. “And you, old friend, won’t dare bring her back in here like that again.” She slapped a hand to the table and shoved away from him, leaving his thoughts more nettled than before.
* * *
Man and horse alike slumped on the long ride back to Larrenby’s Canyon. When the watch cooled, Ezbon wasn’t surprised to find the sorcerer stalking alongside his horse, the now-useless lamp swinging from her hand.
“That was your plan?” she snarled, then took a deep breath and straightened her spine. “You were not the right tool for the job, Berwick. I apologize.” She stopped, and the horse stopped alongside her without Ezbon’s command. “A scholar has many tools. I should have selected better.” She smiled up at him and he ground his teeth together. He felt like lightning would come calling down from the sky when she smiled like that. He could almost swear the sorcerer’s perfect teeth carried an electrical charge, so white they looked blue. “Run along home, Berwick. Take the rest of the day off.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Ezbon said. His heart pounded in surprise at himself, that he had dared to speak.
The sorcerer had already been looking back toward town. She glanced at him impatiently. “Mm? The rocket pilot, you mean?” She waved the idea away. It was as if she were so deep in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed his temerity. “I’m concerned with matters more urgent than a make-believe heroine. Don’t you fret about her.”
As she turned and stumped back along the road toward town, Ezbon wasn’t sure if it was Daisy he’d had in mind when he spoke up.
* * *
Ezbon didn’t take well to sitting still. Ignoring the sorcerer’s command, he busied himself with tasks that needed doing around her homestead.
The big windmill that drew water from the ground had a pump arm that had been sticking for some time; he took it apart and got it moving again.
The goats’ corral had a broken fence where it butted up against the canyon wall; he removed the tangled cottonwood branches that had been his temporary fix and brought fresh boards down from the barn to hammer into place.
All the while, though his hands were occupied, his thoughts raced away from him. He cursed himself for bringing the Martian gal to the sorcerer’s attention. He cursed himself for bringing the watch into the Trog’s Den and for the look on Daisy’s face when she turned away from him.
He thought of the posters with his own face lithographed onto them, the ones he saw at that train station back East. DESERTER, they proclaimed. $1000 BOUNTY FOR CAPTURE.
He thought of the face of Bill Harrison beneath him, urgent lips, clumsy hands. Quiet need shared in the darkness of the army camp. The secret sweetness of sweat. Extra moments stolen afterwards, head on chest, gentle fingers suddenly shy.
The cannons. The rifles. Those same hands, those same lips, stilled forever in the mud at Camdentown. The ringing in his ears.
He thought of the money the sorcerer had promised him. One thousand, exactly. Enough to pay off his bounty, to buy back his freedom. Enough for a new life. She had smiled that same dangerous smile when he shook her hand on it.
He wanted to slow his thoughts, to numb them, to drown them. His head pounded as he worked late into the evening, tearing down old wire, stringing up new. His ears rang.
He wanted a drink.
Ezbon threw down his hammer and his wire cutters and stomped off, away from the sorcerer’s homestead. The moon was setting close behind the sun; Venus gleamed between them, planet of pleasure and storms. The canyon had long fallen dark. Gray jays and crows yelled at him from the rock walls above. His feet picked their way from memory along the sandy wash at the bottom of the canyon, taking him through thickets of dwarf willow and joe-pye weed and yucca, up shelves of loose stone. Coyotes yapped in the deep blue twilight.
There had been coyotes the night before Camdentown, too. Harrison, from way back East, thought they were some farmer’s dogs. Ezbon had laughed at him, ribbed him, offered to tame him one of those yipping dogs to take home to Albany. Laughter came easy to Ezbon back in those days. Coyotes bayed the last time they ever kissed.
Climbing in the dark. Boots slipping on crumbled sandstone. Tears clouding his eyes, refusing to fall.
Piñons crowded the upper reaches of Larrenby’s Canyon. Ezbon realized just where his feet had taken him: the fresh dirt marked where he had dug the canyon wall for the sorcerer the other day, where she had found the cat’s-eye gem. Cold flushed through him as he pondered whether she had worked this on him through her magic.
“Old bat,” he whispered, smiling at Daisy’s words.
His fingertips brushed the scars his pickaxe had chewed into the rock. He was numb to whatever magical strands had drawn the sorcerer to this spot, and yet—
He stooped and plucked a dusty bit of gravel from the tailings he’d left behind. It was a dark lump in the starlight, indistinguishable from any old chunk of sandstone. Until he sucked enough water from his parched cheeks to spit on it and polish it clean.
A gem winked at him, reflecting the wavering red star at the zenith.
Mars. Ancient planet of war and magic.
* * *
The sorcerer didn’t return that night, or the next. Ezbon scarcely noticed the passing time, hardly stirred himself to open a can of beans for a cold supper. He stared into the red gem as long as the light lasted, turning it this way and that, slipping into the subtleties between its shades — the red of warmth, the red of living, the red of closed eyes. At night the fire showed him the red of war, the red of wine. It drew him much the way the cat’s-eye had repelled him. It swallowed him and its color filled him. It made him feel good. Alive. It was magic of a kind he’d never seen in the sorcerer’s hands.
The sorcerer.
It was on the third day he thought of her, and the Martian gal, and Daisy Dollar. He wrapped the gem in a bit of cloth and slipped the bundle into his boot. He made sure his guns were clean and loaded in his belt. He remembered to feed and water his old horse, chores he’d neglected while taken by the gem. He brushed the gelding’s graying hide and murmured, “Sorry, old friend, I’ve done just rotten by you.” Only then did Ezbon saddle him and lope him easy toward Hopsapaw.
* * *
Some kind of fuss was going on at the Trog’s Den. Petey Hobbs stood fast in the door with a shotgun cradled over his arm, jawing away at Tansy Chavez, the town constable.
“She ain’t here, boss, ain’t been since Saturday,” Petey said.
“She weren’t seen leaving town, Hobbs,” Tansy said, hand resting on the butt of a silver revolver.
“She’s Daisy Goddamn Dollar, boss. She coulda got out of town any way she pleased.”
“It don’t sit right with folks that you set yourself up in her establishment, see, with her not seen these last few days. Just let me through.” Tansy pushed forward. Someone in the crowd hollered.
“She gave me orders,” Petey said, sweating, raising the shotgun enough that Tansy stopped. “‘Run the bar for me, Pete,’ she says. ‘And don’t let no one snoop.’ I can’t let you in here, boss.”
Tansy gripped the butt of her revolver. Ezbon grimaced, wishing he could ride anywhere else this day, but spurred his old horse toward them all the same. “Hold on,” he called. Somehow his voice carried fine and clear over the dustup of the crowd.
Petey and Tansy alike froze up and looked at him as if they’d sooner expected a Venusian rainbow-dancer troupe to come trotting into town.
“The wizard’s jobber,” someone jeered.
“That’s right,” Ezbon said, “and there’s magic mixed up in this.”
No one said a word or moved a hair while he slung himself off the horse and stepped toward the fray, hands raised as if to reassure a skittish colt. For once—for the first time since Camdentown—Ezbon Berwick knew what he had to say. “I been helpin’ the sorcerer, and I tell ya, I feel mighty rotten about it. She’s got her spells on this town, onto all of y’all. Howsoever I helped her on that trick, I apologize. I’m sorry.”
“What’s he talkin’ about?” Tansy said to no one in particular. She hadn’t taken her hand off the revolver.
“I mean old Zorumel’s got you spittin’ mad at each other.” The name was like blue poison in his mouth, but he went on, striding ever so carefully between the constable and Petey Hobbs. “She’s got a big score she’s workin’ on, that Zorumel.” The scene unspooled in his mind, almost as clear as if he’d been there to see it. “She didn’t want no distractions. Daisy Dollar up and called her out the other mornin’, so of course Daisy had to be cleared off.”
“You had a hand in takin’ Daisy?” The constable pulled her iron then, training it at Ezbon’s boots.
He was making a mess of this. He wished he’d read those novels Daisy was always in. Daisy would know how to talk her way out of any jam. Daisy could get out of anything.
“No—no, ma’am.” He closed his eyes, felt the red warmth through his lids, and remembered Harrison kissing him there. He went on. “Zorumel didn’t put much stock in my brains, and maybe she was right about that. She sent me to the homestead and had me occupy my own self while she worked her magic. I’m tellin’ ya, she’s up to no good. Daisy’s likely out there right now, trackin’ her and puttin’ a stop to things. The sorcerer’s got us pinned down, yappin’ away, when she’s up chasin’ that Martian gal who knows where—”
“Martian,” Tansy and several others said at once, and there was a general murmur from the mob. Petey had lowered his shotgun and was backing away, as if fixing to lock himself inside the Trog’s Den and wait for it all to blow over.
“Pete Hobbs,” Ezbon hollered. “What’d Daisy tell ya about the Martian gal?”
Tansy flicked her gaze over at Petey and sussed out the same idea. “Let’s go in and talk about this at a nice table.” She shoved past Petey before he could react, occupying the doorway with her silver revolver in hand, looking a challenge at anyone who would gainsay her. “Berwick, Hobbs. You too, Carter.”
Ezbon was surprised to see Babatunji Carter, the big merchant who ran the general store and always wore the newest and nicest suits in town, come elbowing his way through the now restive crowd. Several folks made to follow him toward the saloon, but Tansy glared at them one by one until only Ezbon, Petey, and Babatunji were left. She motioned them inside, and she and Petey barred the door behind them. Empty bottles and glasses on the bar demonstrated that Petey’d been hard at work in Daisy’s absence.
“I doubt the wisdom of this,” Babatunji murmured to the constable.
All three of them looked at Ezbon.
“Berwick.” Tansy stepped up to him, holstering her revolver and planting her hands on her hips. “D’you swear by God and the Constitution that the sorcerer ain’t with you? That you brought no trace of her, no devices, no magic contraptions of any kind in here?”
Ezbon hesitated only a moment, thinking of the gem in his boot. Surely something so warm and pure hadn’t felt the sorcerer’s touch. “I swear.”
Tansy and Babatunji exchanged glances, and the constable nodded reluctantly.
“Daisy Dollar had us swear not to tell you any of this, Mr. Berwick,” Babatunji began.
* * *
When the Martian witch rode into town, no one noticed at first. A few greeted her politely and went on about their errands but, for the most part, she glided along Hopsapaw’s only real street as invisible as a ghost or an idea. Earthly English signage stumped her for a bit — the letters were too squared off, too discrete, refusing to flow together and make their sounds for her. But she found the Trog’s Den quickly enough and slipped inside.
Daisy Dollar saw through the Martian’s glamour straightaway but didn’t say a word about it until closing time, taking only a moment here and there to leave a glass of water where the Martian could take a discreet sip. The Martian occupied her time by drinking in the sight of those posters on the wall behind the bar, the lithographic heroism and derring-do of the Planetary Patrol’s most famous and decorated pilot. There was the time she had vanquished the robber-barons of Ascraeus Mons, the time she had brought peace to the warring families of the Occator. Other adventures—against certain “beast-men” of Ganymede or a conquest of the sapient plants of Mercury—were not among the tales the Martian had heard in her homeland.
Daisy closed early, shooing out Petey and the rest of the recalcitrant stragglers. She came and bowed Martian-style to the witch, who seized her hands and said, “Hero of Earth, I am Thrull t’ar Sur. I need your aid.”
“Daisy Dollar, at your service,” Daisy replied. “What d’you need, doll?”
Neither Babatunji nor Tansy were sure of the specifics of the wizards’ war the rocketeer discussed with the Martian mage, save that its origins were ancient and Daisy herself didn’t stint on helping the Martian’s cause. Neither was surprised, when Daisy came to them the next day, to hear that their own local sorcerer was mixed in with some nefarious business at the root of it. Daisy told them the Martian was here to make sure Zorumel didn’t get her claws on something important—some bygone relic of the wizarding war—but wouldn’t tell them more than that.
Petey Hobbs poured himself a tumbler of whiskey. Tansy frowned and made sure she could fix her eye on him at all times while the jawing went on.
“Daisy laid out that our first job was to keep even a whisper of Thrull away from Zorumel,” Tansy went on. “Thrull was to face down Zorumel herself, but only when she was ready. I was to help with scoutin’ and keepin’ it quiet. Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Berwick, but as of Saturday I had instructions to keep you clear of the Den at all costs. Mr. Carter was in charge of makin’ sure the Martian had certain things for her spells. On top of all that, Thrull needed time and a place to hide.”
Petey knocked back a second slug of whiskey. He rubbed the back of his hand across his damp mouth. “And she needed errand boys.”
Ezbon and the others looked at Petey. The bottle rattled against the glass as he poured himself another shot.
“You,” Babatunji said. “And who else?”
When Petey looked up at them, his eyes were red and running. He smiled joylessly and knocked back another drink. “Daisy plays ’em close to the vest. I think Maria Perez was one. Saw her diggin’ roots down at the river. Maybe findin’ something the witch could eat. Didn’t know who else Daisy talked to. She didn’t want us able to tattle on one another.”
Tansy’s voice was cold. “What did you tell Zorumel?”
Petey hung his head and let out a strangled sob. “I swear to God I didn’t mean no harm, boss. She came in that same day ol’ Low Eb came in and rattled Daisy so.” He sniffled, and put an angry eye on Ezbon. “Only I didn’t know it were her, you follow me? I—I thought it were Daisy. Askin’ for—more help.”
Babatunji shook his head. “I don’t follow you, Mr. Hobbs.”
“He’s hankered after Daisy Dollar since day one,” Tansy said. “Hobbs means he thought Daisy’d come to help him with his—hankerin’.”
“You shut your mouth about Daisy,” Petey exploded, smacking his glass down on the bar. Somehow, it didn’t shatter. “I’d go to the ends of the Earth for her. I’d go to Mars if I had to.”
“What did you do, Mr. Hobbs?” Babatunji asked quietly.
“Daisy—Zorumel—she sidled up to me after the real Daisy musta left to arrange some other things. I was cleanin’ the bar, see, swabbin’ the floor and tables.” He made to pour himself more whiskey, but Babatunji rose and scooped the bottle and tumbler from him before guiding Petey—now rightly soused—to a chair next to his.
“You thought she was Daisy,” Babatunji prompted.
Petey gripped the table as if to keep himself from spinning away. Moved by a new sense of comradeship, Ezbon placed his rough hand atop Petey’s. “Magic makes a man a stranger in his own mind,” he said, and the words seemed to come from some other star.
Babatunji and Tansy exchanged a glance.
“She—she had me lie in wait for Mr. Carter’s men to bring in the salt casks and things.” Petey stared at Ezbon’s hand atop his while tears flowed freely down his cheeks. “She gave me a—powerful charm to run over the salt and things.”
“A gem,” Ezbon said, fetching his hand back, scuffing his boot under the table. “A gem like a cat’s eye.”
Petey looked up at him as if he’d forgotten Ezbon were there. Anger rushed into his eyes. “Daisy said to clear you outta the Trog—”
“And maybe we just got hoodwinked,” Tansy said. She rose and had a revolver pointed at Ezbon’s chest in one motion. “Magic’s on us all, lads, and I went and invited Berwick into the Den.”
Babatunji rose too, still hefting the whiskey bottle in his hand. He looked between it and Ezbon as if unsure whether to bust it over his head now, or to wait to see how things went before wasting the whiskey. Petey just sat and stared, his lips moving without a sound.
Warm confidence flowed through Ezbon. Of course the sorcerer had fixed their minds against him. That wouldn’t stop him, not Ezbon Berwick. He’d come through for Daisy Dollar in the end. She was the best and only friend he had left, on Earth or any other globe.
“I need you to unbuckle your gun belt now, Berwick,” the constable said.
Ezbon raised a hand affably, and all three of them quieted, tractable as horses. “I need Pete Hobbs to finish tellin’ his tale.”
Petey’s mouth worked two or three times, like a wagon wheel finding purchase in mud. “Gem. Over the salt. Daisy, the real Daisy Dollar, poured it herself later—barrier to magic.”
“How’d ya puzzle out Daisy weren’t Daisy?”
Petey gulped and all of a sudden looked mighty sober, his red cheeks paling. “When she came back.”
“Zorumel,” Tansy murmured.
“Daisy had her gun out quick as anythin’. ‘Petey, what’d you do?’ she said.” Petey ran his fingers through his hair, clenching and unclenching them, as if he could tug himself out of a nightmare. “Zorumel, she stood right there—” He pointed to the far corner of the saloon. “She just laughed. ‘More fools than you have thought to try lead against me,’ is what the ol’ hag said. She raised her hand, see, and there was the cat’s-eye.” Petey buried his face in his hands and shook, unresponsive when Babatunji patted him on the back.
Eyes and iron still pointed at Ezbon, Tansy said, “What happened next, Mr. Hobbs?”
“Tell us,” Ezbon murmured.
Petey raised his head to meet Ezbon’s gaze and stilled. Cold anger lurked in his eyes, but he did as he was told. “I hid, Eb. Like a coward. I hid right behind that bar and saw not one thing while Daisy Dollar fought the wizard. There were a crack like lightnin’, and another crack—like gunfire, but softer. It were like I couldn’t rightly hear. All muffled. Then—Daisy Dollar jumped the bar. She crouched down and shook me and said, ‘Pete, I got her on the run. Things are movin’ quick. Watch the Den for me, Pete,’ she said. ‘Don’t let no one snoop. And don’t let in Ezbon Berwick or no one else that’s been actin’ funny, on my life and yours.’”
Tansy’s thumb was working at the hammer of her revolver. Ezbon raised his hand more sharply this time. Tansy grimaced, her arm shook like the palsy — but then she lowered the bore. Ezbon nodded at her. “All of y’all have been actin’ funny,” he said. “Hopsapaw’s been cursed. Pete Hobbs bewitched, the constable pointin’ irons, every blessed soul like a match on a powder keg. You bet Daisy Dollar can get to the bottom of this. And her old friend Ezbon Berwick is out to help her, make no mistake.” The warmth inside him swelled when he looked at Daisy’s lithographs behind the bar. Soon enough she could pin a new adventure up there, a real one this time, and Ezbon’s features would be up there with hers instead of on some wanted poster.
Soon everything would be back the way it should be. Bill Harrison — oh, Harrison would be so proud of him.
Ezbon pushed himself off from the chair, stretched his back until it popped, and smiled at the three townsfolk held fast in front of him. Three sets of eyes glaring at him. No one in Hopsapaw had given Ezbon Berwick a proper chance. He’d brought it down on his own head by working for that wicked old sorcerer, sure, but he’d make amends now, and they’d see.
He just had to find Daisy Dollar, and this Martian witch at the root of it all.
The heat inside made him thirsty. He snatched the whiskey bottle from Babatunji, gave him a polite nod, and lifted it to his lips. A drink—his first drink in who knew how long. Oh, such precious fire washed into him, fuel eager to burn, mingling with the red of the star aflame in his heart. The wine red star guiding him.
He turned to Tansy, smiling wide. Everything fitting together at last. “So where’d ya hide the Martian?”
* * *
Mounting and staying atop his old horse took more effort than it rightly ought to. Ezbon clung tight to the bottle with one hand and the reins with the other, shaking his head to clear it. He smiled wide at the mob of folks eyeballing him uneasily in the street. “I’m off to help Daisy Dollar set it right,” he said, or so he thought he said. In truth, it’d gotten hard to reckon which way was up, let alone be sure what came out of his mouth.
Guiding the reins with one hand had a marked influence on the horse, who felt disposed to follow the reins leftward. That was all right—he felt sure that Daisy’d allowed for that, somehow. No matter what happened, they’d fetch up just fine.
Past town, the road led out onto broad grassy hills fenced up by the bigger ranchers before dipping down to the broad shallow ford of the river, which spilled over its rocky bed even in the dry summer. Ezbon guided his horse left instead of fording, following an old hunting trace downriver. The lowering sun fell in his eyes. It mixed its flame with the whiskey and the magic within him, and set his pores to squeezing out every drop of sweat his carcass had left in it. His hand brought the bottle up to his lips but it was empty, somehow. He tossed it like a rocket at the sun. He heard it smash somewhere far off but the sound was muffled, his head wrapped in miles of gauze, his sweat bleeding him dry.
Daisy Dollar stepped into the trail in front of him, taking the horse’s bit. She telescoped before his eyes, receding to the stars, swimming back like a rocket falling down to its mother planet. He smiled down at her with all the warmth and benevolence of the wide solar system.
“Oh, Eb,” she said. She reached out toward his boot, the one with the gem tucked inside.
His sweat cooled mighty fast. He jerked back away from her, making his horse dance an awkward two-step.
Daisy grabbed hold of his shirt and hauled herself up behind him on the horse’s rump. “I never meant it to happen this way, Eb,” she said in his ear, and clocked with her sharp fist right in the back of the head.
* * *
Ezbon woke in his socks with a thousand artillery pieces clanging in his head. His lips were like shredded paper. Never in his life had he felt farther from warmth and light and the sun. He shivered and groaned.
“You’re all right, Eb,” a voice whispered above him. Water touched his lips and, for a spell, it was the only thing in the world for him.
He could tell it was Daisy by the way she moved in the dark, hands small and strong and precise, cupping his cheek reassuringly as she put the canteen away. His thirst checked, a cold, ravenous need seized him. All at once, he knew himself Daisy’s prisoner, his warm jewel snatched away through treachery. He made to scramble away from her, socks catching in gravel, but she placed a knee in his chest and caught his wrist in her grip.
“I’m mighty sorry,” she said, grunting with the effort of holding him down. “We had to act fast and it was our only plan. Ezbon, hush. Please. I ain’t your enemy.”
Only a wordless howl came from his lips, cousin of the call wolves throw to the cold moon, a yowl for starlight, the cry of an empty soul wanting surfeit. She clamped a hand down on his lips.
“Hush, you lunk. You had hold of a powerful magic charm for three days. That was my doing, Eb, but you’re comin’ off it now, and you went and soused yourself half-dead.” She raised her hand cautiously, testing him, ready to clamp down again. He snarled up at her and thrashed a bit, but stilled when the pain in his head grew too heavy. He thunked his head back down and he cried, shuddering silent sobs that shook him and made his head throb worse.
“Eb, Eb, Eb,” Daisy murmured. She cupped his cheek again.
“Hurts,” he hitched out between sobs.
“A man what’s been sober ten years can’t hold what he used to.”
“Hurts,” he grunted. She didn’t understand. All of it—all the pain he’d kept in check, all the ache, Harrison’s face, his touch, the shy and daring smiles they shared, the long rambling talks about sweet horses and mean sergeants and folks back home and the farm they were going to build on Harrison’s Ma’s piece of land in the Berkshires and the gentle brook there that became a roaring cascade as it flung itself down a chasm of boulders between the hemlocks and the shady spot where Harrison loved to sit and read his poetry books among the trilliums on the first warm day of May and you’ll just love to see it Ezbon, as soon as this blasted war is done I’m taking you to see it and I’ll read you poetry and we’ll be brothers and lovers forever, Ebby dear.
All of it poured through him, cold and bilious, thundering like cannons into the gulf between stars. He rolled away from her and retched onto the woven blanket beneath him. After that, still he sobbed, helpless as any baby when the nurse shuts the door—and as alone.
“It was the magic,” Daisy said, as if to someone else.
“No,” said a new voice, dry like wind through the cottonwoods once their leaves were gone. “This dam has been inside him for some time. Taking the stone away loosened it, and now it must flow.”
Ezbon’s sobs stilled. He spat out bile and rolled back, placing his hand over Daisy’s where she made to hold him down again. He blinked the tears away. A familiar shape in the dark.
“Ma’am,” he said to the Martian through chattering teeth.
Thrull t’ar Sur nodded in return, her spidery arms folded beneath her serape. “Earthman. An unlikely helper, but Commander Dollar swore her faith in you.”
He gave Daisy’s hand a squeeze and she let him sit up. His head spun and the tears rose up in him again—the tears he’d rarely been able to shed after finding Harrison dead in the Camdentown mud. “Faith in a blubbering fool,” he croaked, and turned away from the ladies to spit more of the filth from his mouth.
“Faith in a man of character,” Daisy said. “I’m mighty sorry I put that stone on you, Eb. You deserve to hear why.”
“We move against the Earth sorcerer tonight,” Thrull said, the patience in her tone as sharp as a rebuke. “Tales may wait for the end of battle.”
“No ma’am,” Daisy said. “Ezbon Berwick is a friend of Daisy Dollar, and I owe him an apology and a chance to have his say in all this.” She patted his hand. “It don’t sit right on my conscience, Eb, me using you like that. And damn me if I don’t try to set it right.”
* * *
So she spun him the yarn while he huddled under a clean blanket and drank the water Thrull t’ar Sur had silently fetched him from the river.
“Long ago the mages of Earth sought to stretch their grasp to the other worlds.” In Daisy’s voice, Ezbon heard the rhythm of ancient songs—memories passed down under the light of the stars. “Venus was the first to fall, choosing to survive rather than to fight. The Venusian day is long; it taught them patience. Mars would be harder to crack. Though the mages threw down the Martian moons and scoured the globe with storms, the Martians fought them back. The seas boiled, their cities crumbled, yet still they endured.
“Through some means an Earthly mage descried the Martian secret. It was a gem like no other in all the wide Solar System. It linked their minds and guided their hearts to a common cause. The mages of Earth feared this unity, and quickly moved to suborn it to their own wishes. Thus they fashioned their own jewel, a tool of greed to magnify the self above all else.”
“A jewel you helped the sorcerer recover,” Thrull rasped.
Ezbon spat a mouthful of water but couldn’t shake the taste of bile. He couldn’t meet their eyes.
Daisy touched his shoulder. “Maybe you see why we had to do it this way, Eb. Zorumel had her fangs in you. The cat’s-eye made her poison sink deeper. She was doing her best to make you her creature—and the whole town along with you. Someday, maybe, she’ll want the whole world under her, like in the ancient days. The red gem was your only way clear of her.”
He could feel it still, that red warmth. A sun hidden close-by as he shivered and cringed under the blanket. Was it there, in Daisy’s saddlebag? Did the Martian clutch it beneath her serape? Ezbon stole peeks around the camp, avoiding Thrull’s gaze. The night stank of his vomit.
“The two stones are linked from how they were formed in the ancient days. Zorumel touched your mind with the Earthly stone. We had to drive her out again with the Martian stone.” Daisy sighed, gave his shoulder a squeeze before releasing it. “It’s up to you to forgive me, old friend.”
Ezbon took a breath, forced his hands steady, took a long pull from the canteen. Nothing was enough to fill him up, to lodge him back down into his own hide. His thoughts were clouded, distant, a vast blizzard taking shape as it swept down from the northern plains. He managed to look Daisy in the eye long enough to nod. Her answering smile brought the famous dimples to her face. She clapped him on the back.
“Let’s hope his aid is worth this risk, Hero of Earth,” the witch said, turning from them and scuttling toward her mule. “Your world won’t satisfy her. We need to stop her now.”
“You’ll see,” Daisy Dollar said, though her smile faltered just a little as Ezbon’s eyes strayed past her once more.
* * *
“They used you,” the sorcerer said calmly, somewhere behind Ezbon’s right ear.
He flinched and risked a glimpse back, saw nothing but dark cottonwoods and the empty trail behind them. His old gelding shook his ears with unease. Neither Daisy nor the Martian, ranging up ahead on their own mounts, seemed to hear.
“You want that stone back, Berwick. You hunger for it. Once you’ve known its heat, you won’t ever be complete without it.” The sorcerer’s voice was companionable, filling Ezbon’s mind with the warmth of a hearth and a house wrapped snug around it. Under his blanket, he shivered. “All the years of your life will be spent in that hunger, gnawing you out from the inside. Daisy Dollar knew that. She and the Martian tipped you that red gem regardless of what it would do to you — heedless of how much you would need it after they were done with you. And as you can see, I’m still here. Linked the stones may be, but Earth, after all, devised the green to defeat the red.”
Ezbon tightened his grip on the reins. His horse whickered and slowed his pace.
“I have no quarrel with you, Berwick. I shall give you your thousand dollars tonight and consider you ably acquitted of your duties to me. Fair and square. I ask only one small task of you in return: get that jewel. No, no—not for me, Berwick. I want you to keep it. I would never deprive a worthy being of that gem’s power, to leave him thirsting forever after it. No, I will give you that jewel tonight, in addition to what I promised you. It will be yours, and you’ll be free. Go East and make a new life for yourself. Charm your way into a fortune. Stay in Hopsapaw and become its king. I won’t hold anything over you.” He felt the electric danger of the sorcerer’s smile, a tingle like an approaching thunderhead that stirred the hair on his neck. “She won’t let you touch it again, you know. So get that jewel.”
Ezbon’s teeth chattered in the sudden silence. His horse had stopped of his own accord, shifting his withers nervously. The night grew vast and empty above the cottonwoods, a chill seeping from the abyss between the stars into his ribs. He could almost see the gem now, a red star illuminating the Martian, limning her shape between the trees where no light from the upper stars reached.
“Eb?” came Daisy’s soft call, up ahead on her palomino.
Ezbon’s hands stole to the butts of his guns. His heart tripped like a colt’s first steps.
The pain of Harrison’s absence, which he tried to drown in drink for so long, which he fled the East to escape. The pain that had made him a deserter, a wanted man with only loss behind him, and nothing but a gaol or exile ahead of him. The pain took physical shape inside him, a weight on him as familiar as a cruel rider on an old broken horse. The red gem had burned that pain away. In the absence of the gem, it seemed as if no time at all had passed since Camdentown, that the weight was as heavy as it ever had been, a hole in the shape of Harrison that let the wind of the desolate stars howl through and buffet him where he sat—a gap only the gem could fill.
He thumbed the cold hammers of his irons, then paused.
He touched his face. It was wet with tears he hadn’t known were left in him. What had that Martian witch said? Taking the stone away loosened the others, and now it must flow.
He scrubbed his face with the rough heels of his hands, gave Daisy an answering whistle, and nudged his horse up along the trail.
* * *
Zorumel awaited them as Ezbon knew she would, enthroned atop a hoodoo where the river cut into the badlands. Daisy Dollar stole one last look at Ezbon before urging her palomino ahead of the Martian, drawing her irons and standing in her stirrups.
“Surrender the jewel, Zorumel,” Daisy hollered, her voice skittering like so many bats across the walls and pyramids of the badlands. In the light of the stars she looked every inch the hero the lithographs made her out to be. “Toss it to Thrull now, and all of us are back in our beds before sunrise.”
The sorcerer smiled that awful electric smile. Ezbon flinched, expecting lightning from the clear sky. What smote them down instead was cold, an avalanche of it, a freight train of winter wind screaming from everywhere and nowhere. His horse buckled at the knees. Daisy and the Martian were flung aside, their mounts crying aloud. Ezbon felt himself slammed to the ground, too numbed to do much more than watch Zorumel, who seemed to recede impossibly high into the sky.
“The lies they’ve printed about you have gone to your head, pilot.” Zorumel’s voice sounded as companionable as before, undaunted by the howling cold. “I’ve warned you before about chancing lead against me. What is a service revolver against one who wields the powers of old?” Then, behind his ear, spoken for him alone, Ezbon heard, “The gem, if you please, Berwick.”
The wind relented above him and, after a moment, Ezbon limped to his feet, head swimming, knee shooting a volley of warning before he could commit his weight to it. His horse thrashed, eyes shining white with panic. Daisy struggled to rise ahead of him but was shoved back into the dirt by an unseen hand. From the corner of his eye Ezbon saw green and blue shapes in the wind, outlines of dragons and ancient monsters, greedy jaws that vanished as soon as he turned his head, teeth that flashed like lightning. He worked his fingers but they remained numb, as if deadened by frostbite.
He staggered forward, finding the Martian crumpled among the rocks at the base of a spire. Her eyes arrested him, locking onto his, and he stumbled.
The Martian didn’t speak, didn’t do more but look him in the eye. Ezbon wanted to drop his gaze, hide his soul from her scrutiny, but something—a trace of disappointment—was enough to stop him.
“Take the gem,” commanded the sorcerer in his ear. Ezbon saw that the Martian heard as well—and then she extended her hand from beneath her serape, the gem warm as wine in her palm, warm as summer sunshine, offering it to him.
Shivering, his arm shaking, Ezbon fumbled a gun out of its holster. He crouched before the Martian, nodded to her, and extended his hand to take the gem.
“Now,” the Martian whispered, her cracked lips making no sound in the screaming wind.
He snatched the gem from her, dropped it onto a flat rock and—quick as anything—he slammed the butt of his gun against it. For a moment two suns flashed there in the badlands, one red and one green, and the sorcerer’s howl drowned out the sound of the wind. A split second later came the report of Daisy’s guns, one-two, and Ezbon blinked his eyes clear. His world narrowed to the broken fragments of the gem, dark and lifeless on the slab of stone in front of him. The echoes of Daisy’s guns flew down the badlands and swam back up to them. After that was silence, broken only by a choked sob from Ezbon.
The Martian placed one shriveled hand on his chest. He clutched at it, bowing his head, and the tears fell in the vastness of night.
* * *
They rode in silence as the bowl of sky paled above them, climbing out of the valley of the badlands and onto the mesa. Ezbon led, unsure where he was going, the two behind seeming as lost in thought as he was. Atop the mesa, Ezbon nudged his horse around and halted him, gazing for a spell at the eastern horizon. A coyote yapped once. Far away a band of its fellows answered.
Daisy turned her palomino beside him, and the Martian’s mule pulled up behind. They watched the sky, listened to the first stirrings of birdsong. A vireo warbled somewhere below.
Daisy sighed, rubbing her neck, nursing the spot where she’d landed after the sorcerer’s first blast. “The books never tell it like it is,” she murmured. “The fear of it. The way it makes you feel sick to your stomach. The headache you get when the shootout’s over. The way gunpowder stains your insides.”
Thrull t’ar Sur grunted.
Daisy turned her eyes on Ezbon, placed her hand on his shoulder. “They never talk about the friends we hurt on the way.”
Ezbon knuckled an eye, unsure what to say, unsure what he felt in that moment.
“Give credit to your friend, Hero of Earth,” the Martian rasped behind them. “He may or may not forgive us, as is his right. But he saw what needed to be done when the moment came, and proved your faith in him.”
It was a while before Daisy spoke again. “The offer’s still open, Eb. You’ll be a hero to Hopsapaw. But I understand if there’s anywhere on Earth you’d rather be.”
His old horse scuffed a hoof in the loose gravel, impatient for feed and rest in the sorcerer’s barn. A place he’d never go again. Ezbon turned in the saddle, looking at the Martian and beyond her, where a red planet was setting over the distant peaks. He wondered what Harrison would say and, for the first time in a long while, he was pretty sure what it would be.
He looked at Thrull, who nodded once. “I’d like to try someplace new,” he said.
Rick Hollon (he/him) is an intersex and bisexual SF writer whose work has appeared in several small-press zines, including Corvus, Deimos eZine, Into the Willows, and The Book of Imaginary Beasts. He is one of the editors of From the Farther Trees, a fantasy print zine.