The big greenskin’s body finished toppling, dragging his knife with it.
For half a heartbeat the boy just stood there, breath sawing in and out, back to the chapel wall, the world still ringing from the echo of the Tyrant’s bite that hadn’t quite taken him.
Then everything the System had just laid on him came crashing back.
Beastmaster
Bestiary
Summoning
The yard was still a mess of screaming and smoke and steel. The breach at the gate gaped wide, a raw wound choked with bodies. Greenskins poured through what was left of it, climbing over their dead. Men fell back step by step, boots slipping in mud gone slick with blood. The howitzer boomed at near point?blank; the blast flattened men and monsters both. Lily and Mary were pressed against the chapel wall a little ways to his right, faces white, mouths open on words that had no space in the noise.
[Bestiary]
Dire Wolf – Rank I – Level 1
Reaper Lizard – Rank II – Level 1
Bison latifrons – Rank II – Level 1
He grabbed the first line without understanding how.
Come.
Something like a door opened in the air just in front of him, no frame, no light. One heartbeat there was nothing but smoke. The next there was a wolf.
It stepped out of nothing as if it had been standing there the whole time and had just remembered to be seen. Black fur, thick as winter, dusted with frost. Eyes yellow and sharp. It shook once, snow falling in ghostly flecks that melted before they hit the ground.
The Dire Wolf’s gaze snapped to him, then past him, to the breach.
“Go,” the boy said, though he didn’t need to.
The wolf bared its teeth and launched itself toward the gap, galloping like a wild mustang.
Behind it, another doorway tore open and spat something feathered.
The Reaper Lizard landed in the dirt with a screech, sickle claws carving furrows. Feathers along its spine fluffed and settled. Its head jerked from side to side, nostrils flaring at the stink of blood and powder.
He didn’t even have to tell it to move. It saw meat and threats and went surging.
The boy reached one more time.
The Bison latifrons did not so much step through as crash into being, half?formed for a blink then solid all at once. One moment there was only smoke and the shimmer of heat near the breach. The next, a bull bigger than anything humans had ever seen shook its horned head and bellowed, steamy breath exploding from its nostrils in two white jets.
The bull’s hooves hit the yard and the ground jumped. Its hump nearly brushed the top of the broken gate.
He felt its confusion for a heartbeat—this was not grassland, not the open sea of his trial—and then its anger cleared that away.
There were things in front of it. Things that smelled wrong.
The boy let his own fury run down the tether.
Break them.
The bull snorted, lowered its head, and charged.
The wave of greenskins at the breach met three monsters instead of a crumbling line of men.
The Dire Wolf hit first, a black streak that slammed into the flank of a greenskin already climbing over a dead comrade. Its jaws closed on the back of the thing’s neck. Bone cracked. It shook once, hard, and let the body drop underfoot. Its paws found another target even as the first fell, teeth flashing, shoulders rolling under that dark fur.
The Reaper Lizard darted along the edge of the gap, weaving through legs that didn’t belong here—greenskin and human both—its tail out behind like a balancing pole. It sprang, sickle claw raking across the hamstring of a greenskin twice its height. The leg went out. The Reaper was already past, spinning, coming back in to drive its hooked talon deep into the fallen warrior’s back. It climbed them like trees, claws finding purchase in armor seams, jaws tearing at throats.
The bull slammed into the breach like a living avalanche.
Its horns took three greenskins at once, lifting them bodily off the ground, armor shrieking and bending. Its chest hit the carcass of the earlier behemoth, shoved it further into the ditch, then climbed its own balance of dead to crash down into the open mouth of the gate. Greenskins went flying. Some disappeared entirely under its hooves, crushed into the sucking mud.
The boy felt every impact like a distant echo in his bones.
At the same time he felt something else.
Souls.
They rose like they always did, gray?green and oily, steaming off newly dead greenskins in the yard and at the gate. But they didn’t all come straight toward him the way they had before.
Some went sideways first.
A soul?echo tore free of a greenskin whose throat had just been ripped out by the Dire Wolf. It drifted, confused, for a heartbeat.
Then it latched onto the wolf’s fur. Into it.
He felt the line between him and the beast thicken. [The Hollow] was there too, a third weight, deep and empty and wanting. It reached out through the same tether, like a root following a crack in rock.
The wolf shook itself, as if shrugging off water.
The soul came free of its fur again. This time it slid along the cord toward him.
He didn’t have to move. Didn’t have to turn his head. [The Hollow] opened and drank.
Stat increase gained!
+2 Strength
+2 Dexterity
+2 Vitality
+2 Magic
The words cut through the noise, cold and clear. Another followed, from another greenskin under the Reaper’s claws. Another from one impaled on the bull’s horn.
The boy swayed where he stood, pressed to the chapel wall, knife dripping black blood. Power rolled through him in waves, the same as before—muscles thickening, veins pushing cold then hot, breath coming easier even when there was smoke in it. His coat felt looser on his shoulders and too tight at once.
He tore his knife free of the dead elite greenskin’s jaw, wiped it once on its breastplate, and shoved it home in his belt.
A greenskin rushed him from the side, howling, sword upraised. It came out of the churn near the chapel, not from the gate—one that had made it in earlier and gotten turned around in the press.
He moved without thinking.
His hand snapped out, fingers closing around the haft of the fallen greenskin’s axe instead of going for his Colt, which he’d thrown and lost somewhere in the yard.
The axe was a monster of a weapon. Two?handed, haft wrapped in leather, head broad and ugly, nicked along the edge from hard use. Earlier that day it would have been something he could barely lift off the ground.
Now it came up like it belonged there.
The weight of it pulled at his shoulders, sure, but not more than the musket had. His arms took it. His back set. The long handle fit across his palms, rough and solid.
He stepped into the charge.
The greenskin’s sword came down in an overhand chop. The boy met it with the axe in a sideways swing. Steel hit steel with a scream that hurt his teeth. The greenskin’s blade went spinning out of its hand, sheared half through.
Momentum carried the axe on.
It bit into the greenskin’s chest, just above the leather bandolier that crossed it. Armor split. Meat parted. The head lodged in bone a moment, then tore free in a wet arc.
The greenskin staggered back, hands fumbling at the hole in its chest. The boy stepped in and finished it with a chop that took half its face off.
Soul. [The Hollow]. Another rush.
He barely felt it over the rest, especially not with all the corpses left behind in the wake of his Beasts.
To his right, a musketeer in blue fired point?blank into a greenskin that had gotten too close, then slammed the butt of his musket into another’s jaw. The chaplain swung his empty gun like a club, black coat flapping, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. Lily’s pistol cracked again near the chapel wall; Mary’s smaller pistol coughed smoke. The line inside the yard had stabilized for the first time since the gate went.
Because of the beasts.
Because of him.
The boy didn’t have time to feel anything about that either.
He moved.
He pushed off the chapel wall and went toward the worst of it.
The axe felt right in his hands. He learned its weight as he went, the way he’d learned the Colt’s, the way his fingers had learned the musket’s fouling. Swing, recover, step. Don’t let it pull you too far open. Use the haft like a staff when you had to.
He killed another greenskin, then another.
One tried to slip past him toward Lily and Mary. He stepped into it, shoulder first, and sent it stumbling. The axe came down in a diagonal cut that started at clavicle and ended at hip. The System didn’t bother writing a message for every soul now. That would’ve been like counting raindrops in a flood.
Still, sometimes the numbers managed to shove through the noise.
Stat increase gained!
+2 Strength
+2 Dexterity
+2 Vitality
+2 Magic
Much of the numbers in his mind came from [The Hollow], from all the souls around him, friend and foe alike, drawn into his body before he could even think.
Level up!
Level 11 achieved.
All attributes +1
4 free points awarded.
He dumped them all into Vitality.
The Dire Wolf hit another knot of greenskins trying to clamber up onto a wagon for better position. It went for hamstrings, for tendons behind knees. Monsters that big fell hard when their legs went. For every one it took down, [The Hollow] took its taste through the wolf’s teeth.
The Reaper Lizard bounced off the bull’s flank, using it as a springboard to launch itself onto a greenskin’s shoulders. Its sickle claw hooked into the joint between gorget and breastplate. It pulled, hard, and the plate tore free with a screech of metal. Teeth went in after, right at the soft place of the throat.
The bull charged, stopped, backed and charged again, turning the breach into a meat grinder. Greenskins tried to swarm up its sides, jabbing with spears, hacking at its neck. Their blades skated off its hide more often than not. When they did bite, the wounds bled thick and slow. It bellowed and shook them off, stepping sideways to crush a half?dozen under one hoof.
The yard stank now. Greenskin blood wasn’t the same as human. It had a sour tang to it, like iron and piss. Mixed with powder smoke and manure and sweat, it made a smell the boy knew he’d never forget.
“Keep shooting!” Captain Hargrove’s voice cut through it all from somewhere near the inner line. “They’re breaking! Give them no room to breathe!”
They were breaking. For the moment.
The boy could feel the tide of it even under the chaos. The greenskin wave that had poured into the breach had thinned. Their shouts had gone from eager rage to something harsher and more strained. For every one that made it over the bodies into the yard, three stayed where they’d fallen.
He killed another and another.
It added up.
He didn’t know how many he took down personally. Ten, maybe. A dozen. The axe helped. So did the hollow, cold calm that came over him when he fought—the same stillness that settled when he sighted down a barrel, now spread over his whole body. He saw openings before they were there. Felt weight shifts. There was a rhythm to it.
You step. You swing. They fall.
He stopped counting after eight.
If it had just been the ones inside the fort, maybe they would’ve held.
It wasn’t.
More greenskins slammed into the breach from outside, still screaming, still coming. Somewhere out beyond the gate there had to be a churning mass of them they hadn’t even seen yet.
The bull started to slow.
He knew it like he knew his own breath. The line between them thickened with strain. Wounds that had been nothing started to bite. A spear found the soft of its shoulder. Another stabbed up under its jaw. Arrows thick as lances jutted from its flank.
The bison bellowed, a sound that tore at his ears, and stomped again, crushing two more greenskins flat. It tried to swing its head, to catch three more on its horns.
Five or six were clinging to its back now, hacking at its hump, stabbing down. Armor didn’t matter much if you murdered meat an inch at a time.
The Reaper Lizard leapt up to help, sickle claw ripping one greenskin free to topple under the bull’s hooves. Another grabbed it mid?air and slammed it against the broken gatepost. He felt something crack along its ribs, pain flaring down the tether.
It twisted and tore free, but more hands caught its tail, dragged it down into the mass.
The Dire Wolf went in snarling, fur bristling. It ripped one off the Reaper, then another. Teeth found a third’s wrist, bone crunching.
A war hammer came down on its skull.
Pain. Bright and white. It staggered, legs splaying. The hammer fell again, and again, until something broke that didn’t knit.
All three lines snapped at once.
Not completely. Not away. It was more like somebody cutting the ends of ropes that had been drawn taut around his chest, then tying them off somewhere he couldn’t see.
The boy gasped.
The bull went down first, knees buckling. It toppled sideways into the gate gap, crushing friend and enemy both. For a moment it lay there, sides heaving, eyes rolling white. Then its form… blurred. The way it had come out of nothing, it went back.
It just… wasn’t there anymore.
The wolf and the Reaper went the same way. One blink they were under a pile of greenskins, teeth and claws still flashing in the gaps. The next they were gone.
The weight in his head shifted.
Bestiary (3)
Dire Wolf – Rank I – Level 1 – Status: Fallen. Recovering (24:00)
Reaper Lizard – Rank II – Level 1 – Status: Fallen. Recovering (24:00)
Bison latifrons – Rank II – Level 1 – Status: Fallen. Recovering (24:00)
A raw feeling opened in his chest, quick and sharp. The yard felt… emptier. Quieter. Even with all the screaming.
He tightened his grip on the axe.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “Just us again.”
He looked for Lily and Mary.
They were still by the chapel wall. Mrs. Brant and one of the laundresses had joined them at some point, all four crouched behind the low stone, pistols empty or nearly. Lily’s hair had come half loose from whatever hurried braids had been pushed into it that morning; sweat had plastered curls to her forehead. Mary’s hands shook as she tried to pour powder from a cartridge into her small pistol’s cylinder without spilling half of it.
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
The boy saw all that in a flicker, the way his eye counted men on a wall at a glance. Then he turned back to the breach.
The line inside the yard had thinned. Men were down—blue coats, teamsters, even one of the enslaved stone haulers, who’d somehow ended up with a bayonet in his hands and a terrible determination in his eyes. The chaplain bled from a cut along his temple. The howitzer had been pushed back as far as it could go and was now firing almost point?blank into the gap every time they could risk a shot, but every blast took a little more out of its crew.
The boy swung the axe again. Another greenskin fell.
[The Hollow] drank. Numbers ticked. He pushed them away.
They didn’t matter much next to the sheer weight of bodies on the other side of the wall.
He realized, in a cold, clear way, that they were going to be overrun.
Not because they weren’t fighting hard enough. Not because the System hadn’t given them enough tricks.
Just because there were more of the things out there than there were bullets inside.
He killed another greenskin anyway.
Somewhere in the churn he stumbled across his Colt.
It lay half?buried in mud and blood near a fallen crate, just beyond a dead greenskin he’d hacked apart earlier. Its blued steel was smeared dark. The grip stuck out like a familiar face in a crowd.
He kicked a corpse aside and bent to grab it, never letting his eyes leave the nearest threat.
His fingers closed around the grip and something in his chest eased.
He tucked the axe haft under one arm just long enough to thumb the cylinder, checking. All six chambers were empty. He’d expected that. He still felt better having it.
He slid it into its holster. The weight at his hip felt like a promise.
“Back to the inner line!” Hargrove’s voice cracked, hoarse, but it still carried. “Fall back by twos! Keep dressing that line! We give ground slow or we don’t give it at all!”
They fell back.
Men stepped back in pairs, covering each other, firing when they could and clubbing when they couldn’t. The boy moved with them, anchoring a piece of the shrinking front. The axe rose and fell, rose and fell.
A greenskin tried to push through the gap he left when he stepped back. He met it with a boot to the knee and the butt of the axe, then finished it with a chop.
He didn’t know how long it went on. Minutes. Hours. The night felt endless.
At some point the howitzer’s barrel glowed faintly red in the dark from overuse. The crew stopped firing; they were more likely to crack it and kill themselves than kill any more greenskins with it. They dragged it back as a last?resort battering ram.
The boy’s arms ached now. Even with the System’s help, even with all the Strength and Vitality poured into his bones, there were limits. Muscles burned. Cuts he hadn’t noticed earlier sent jagged flashes of pain when he moved a certain way.
His breath stayed steady, but his thoughts started to feel… far away.
It was Lily that pulled them back in.
Her scream cut across the yard, high and raw.
He snapped his head around.
Two greenskins had broken through near the chapel.
They’d come up over the low wall, boots crushing the little patch of bare earth where men sometimes knelt. One had a sword, serrated along one edge. The other had a short spear and a shield made from some beast’s hide stretched over a wooden frame.
Mrs. Brant lay on the stone steps, blood spreading from her side. The laundress was down too, hand groping weakly for the pistol that had fallen just out of reach.
Mary stood in front of Lily and Ember, both hands locked on the grip of her pistol. She fired as the first greenskin came at her.
The ball hit its shoulder instead of its face. Armor dented. The thing snarled and came on.
Lily had the fallen musket up, butt on the stone, barrel pointed too high. Her eyes were huge.
The boy started toward them.
He was too far.
He knew it with the same cold certainty he’d had with the Tyrant. He could run as fast as his legs would go. He’d still be watching something bad happen before he got there.
The world answered somewhere else.
Lightning cracked.
It didn’t come from the sky. It came from eye level, from just beyond the chapel corner, where a figure on horseback had just slammed to a stop.
For a heartbeat all he saw was the flash—blue?white, jagged, leaping from outstretched fingers to metal.
The greenskin with the sword jerked like a puppet. The lightning took the blade first, then traveled up the arm, clothes and skin going white for an instant. The smell of burned hair and meat hit the boy’s nose even from where he was.
The greenskin toppled sideways, smoking.
The second stepped back, spear coming up.
The rider was already moving.
She swung down from the saddle like the horse was just another part of her—one smooth motion, bare feet hitting the stone. Her hair was pale, almost the color of dried grass, braided in two long plaits that swung down her back. Her skin was sun?browned, freckled. Her clothes were Comanche—leggings, breechcloth, a short dress of soft leather painted with red and black lines. A row of brass trade bells tinkled at her ankles when she landed.
She looked like no white woman the boy had ever seen, but she wasn’t Indian either.
A long lance was in her other hand. The shaft was ash or something like it, worn smooth. The steel head on it was narrow and wicked sharp, with bits of cloth and hair tied behind it that fluttered as she moved.
She took one long step, lunged, and drove the lance through the spear?bearing greenskin’s throat.
It barely had time to blink.
The point punched out the back of its neck, carrying a spray of dark blood with it. She planted a foot on its chest and shoved, ripping the weapon free in one smooth pull. The greenskin collapsed in a heap.
Lily stared. Mary stared. Ember stared with her one charred eye.
The rider turned her head, looking the boy’s way just long enough for him to see her eyes.
They were a pale, washed?out blue, almost gray, and bright as if someone had lit a candle behind them.
“Stay behind the stone,” she said to the girls, English smooth and accented only with the plains. “Shoot anything that comes over.”
Then she swung back into the saddle with a fluid hop, heels digging into her pony’s ribs, and was gone again, lance leveled toward the breach.
“Who the hell is that?” someone gasped near the boy.
“White Comanche,” another man muttered without taking his eyes off the fight. “They said there was one riding with the Nokoni. That’ll be her.”
The boy filed the name away somewhere behind the press of the moment.
The press shifted.
He felt it before he heard it.
The greenskin shouts had been one kind of noise—raw, harsh, like crows and war drums. This was something older. Wilder.
A roar rose from outside the fort, beyond the wall, beyond the ruined gate.
It was not one voice. It was hundreds. Thousands. A high, ululating cry that went up in waves, braided with lower shouts, with words he didn’t catch.
The ground started to tremble with the thunderous pounding of many hooves.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, toward the wall.
Men were running for the parapet even as they fought. A few reached it, grabbed the stone, and peered over into the night.
The nearest one—a private with soot?streaked cheeks—stared, then barked out a laugh that sounded half mad.
“Jesus Christ and all his saints,” he said. “They’re fightin’ each other now.”
Captain Hargrove shouldered his way to the wall, blood soaking his sleeve where a blade had caught him earlier. He looked over, jaw set.
For a long moment his face was unreadable in the torchlight.
Then something like awe cracked through it.
He turned back to the men, to the boy, to anyone in earshot.
“Kiowa,” he said, voice rough. “Apache and even the Comanche.”
He shook his head once, as if even saying it out loud still sounded like nonsense.
“They’ve come as allies.”
The boy didn’t fully understand what that meant. He understood what he saw.
Out beyond the broken gate, the moonless plain had been a dark emptiness—the vague shapes of trees and scrub, the moving mass of the greenskin rear ranks. Now it was a churning, living thing.
Horsemen poured across it in lines that were no lines at all, not like Army drill. Loose, broken, flexible, but all moving with the same intent. They came in from the south and the east both, sweeping around the greenskin host like the jaws of a trap closing.
Some rode bareback, some with worn saddles. Some had lances tipped with metal or fire?hardened wood, others bows, quivers rattling at their hips. More than a few had rifles. Feathers streamed from some young men’s hair; buffalo horns rose from others’ headdresses. Paint striped faces and horses alike—white handprints on chests, black circles around eyes.
The Kiowa. The Apache. The Comanche.
He couldn’t tell which was which. He believed the Captain. Different war cries wound together, different colors, different ways of sitting a horse.
All of them aimed at the same enemy.
They slammed into the greenskin flanks like knives.
The first impact was lances—long, flexible shafts leveled at a dead run. The points took greenskins in the side, in the back, under arms the things hadn’t thought to guard because they’d only had a wall in front of them for so long. Horses shouldered into bodies, knocking them off balance.
Shots snapped from the Indian lines, muzzle flashes bright. Some rifles had clearly been blessed by the System—shots curved just a hair, found gaps in armor. Others were simply well?aimed.
Arrows darkened the air. They weren’t as heavy as musket balls, but a strong bow and a good arm put them through seams in armor all the same. A feathered shaft stuck out of a greenskin’s eye; another stood quivering from the gap under a gorget.
The greenskin host tried to turn.
They’d come on in a kind of brute formation, all weight and yelling, the way they’d hit the fort. They weren’t ready for something to hit them that way. Orders—if that was what you called the barks their leaders gave—got lost in the noise.
The horn that had called them forward now blew shrill and desperate, trying to call them back, to turn a line that had become a knot.
They were still pushing at the fort. Now they were being pushed from behind and both sides.
They had nowhere to go.
“Open that inner line!” Hargrove yelled. “Let ’em come in a little, then hit ’em from both sides! Don’t shoot the men on horses unless they’re green!”
Jim Booth laughed, short and wild.
“You heard the man!” he shouted. “Try not to shoot the cavalry!”
The boy found a grim, sour smile on his own mouth he hadn’t known he had room for.
He fought.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t orderly. Men and greenskins and horses all tangled together once the first wave of lances was spent. The boy saw a warrior, bare?chested under a bandolier, vault from his horse onto a greenskin’s back and bash its head open with a club made from some animal’s jaw. He saw another with a hatchet in each hand carve a path for his pony through three greenskins in as many breaths. He saw boys no older than him wheel in circles around isolated knots, firing from horseback with a casual grace.
He saw white men and Indians back?to?back at one point—one in a blue coat, the other with a hawk’s feather in his hair—fighting off a ring of greenskins with bayonet and lance both.
Somewhere in that mess, the white Comanche woman rode like a needle in thread, stitching her way through gaps, her lance finding throats and armpits, lightning jumping from her fingers whenever she had a clear moment to fling it.
Each bolt stunned, dropped one or two for the men behind her to finish. She had to be a [Witch], like Lily, but stronger.
The boy didn’t stop.
He swung the axe until it felt like an extension of his bones. When he had a breath, he reloaded the colt as quickly as he could, fingers moving by habit, and fired when a clear shot presented itself. The pistol barked six times, each ball punching through a skull or a gap in armor. Then he holstered it and went back to the axe.
At some hazy point in the chaos, Captain Hargrove left the wall.
The boy saw him in flashes. Blue coat torn, blood down one side, sword in his hand. He moved along the shrinking line, shoving men into gaps, dragging the wounded back with his free arm when he could. A greenskin swung at him and he parried, riposted, took it in the throat. Another jabbed with a spear; he knocked it aside and drove his sword up under its ribs.
“For the fort!” he shouted, voice raw. “For the frontier! For every man, woman and child behind these walls!”
Someone took it up as a ragged cheer. Then another. It wasn’t pretty, but it was something, though it hardly made sense to the boy.
The tide finally turned.
The boy felt it like a shift in the wind. The greenskin push wavered. Then… broke.
Some tried to turn and flee out the shattered gate, only to find more horsemen in their way. Others kept fighting because that was all they knew how to do. The shape of the battle changed from a crush to a series of smaller, uglier knots as the big mass dissolved.
He kept killing until nobody in reach was green anymore.
The last greenskin he personally put down took two chops. The first one half?severed its arm. The second took its head off.
Soul?haze rose.
He barely tasted it.
Silence came in pieces.
First the cannon stopped. Then the closer shouts. The war cries outside the fort carried on for a bit longer, echoing across the plain as the horsemen ran down stragglers. One by one, those died too.
What was left was groaning. The crackle of a few small fires in fallen thatch and spilled grain. The sob of somebody who’d held it in too long.
The boy let the axe head drop until it rested on the ground. He leaned on the haft.
His chest heaved. His legs shook. His arms had gone past burning into a kind of numbness. Blood—some his, most not—had dried in stiff plates on his coat.
He looked for Lily.
He saw her sitting on the chapel steps, pistol in her lap, Ember cradled tight against her chest. Mary sat beside her, braid half?come undone, eyes too wide. Mrs. Brant was propped against the wall with bandages around her middle, face pale but alive. The white Comanche woman stood over them like a guard, lance butt resting on the ground, watching the yard with those bright pale eyes.
The boy let himself breathe out once, slow.
Then he saw Captain Hargrove fall.
It wasn’t dramatic.
He was standing near the center of the yard, near the howitzer, one hand on the barrel as if he’d just spoken to the crew. A surviving greenskin—one the boy hadn’t seen, half?hidden under two of its own dead—lunged up from the pile with a broken sword in its hand and drove it into the captain’s side.
The blade went in under his ribs.
Hargrove grunted but did not scream.
He turned as he fell. His sword came around in a short, vicious arc and took the greenskin’s head off even as his knees hit the dirt.
“Captain!” someone shouted.
The boy moved before he knew he’d decided to.
He ran the last few steps on legs that didn’t want to, boots slipping in mud. He skidded to his knees beside the man as two soldiers dropped to help, hands already reaching for the hilt of the blade in his side.
“Leave it,” Hargrove rasped. “Leave it… where it is. Pull it and I’ll shoot you.”
They froze.
His coat was already soaking through under the sword, dark stain spreading. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth when he coughed. His face had gone gray, but his eyes were still clear.
He saw the boy.
“Son,” he said.
The boy swallowed.
“Yes, sir.”
“Looks like…” Hargrove took a shallow breath, grimaced. “Looks like the fort lives to be a stone box another day.”
He flicked his gaze toward the gate, where Indians still moved, dark shapes on darker ground, finishing what greenskins remained outside the walls.
“And the world’s turned on its head.”
He coughed again, softer this time.
“Listen to me,” he said.
The boy leaned closer. The two soldiers did too, hats crushed in their hands.
“You keep your sister and that girl alive,” Hargrove said. “You get ‘em somewhere that isn’t the edge of the world if you can. Dallas. Beyond. Wherever….”
He lifted a hand, fingers brushing at the boy’s coat front until they found the edge of the fabric. He grabbed it and tugged weakly, pulling the boy down until their faces were close.
“And when this starts up again—and it will—you put that gun of yours wherever it hurts ‘em most,” he whispered. “You hear me? Don’t you waste what the System’s seen fit to pour into you.”
The boy nodded.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I hear you.”
Hargrove’s grip loosened.
“Good.” His mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile if it had had more room. “You were a damn good shot for a mule boy. You’ll be… hell by the time you’re a man.”
His eyes went past the boy again, toward the chapel, toward the laundry, toward the line of fresh mounds out beyond the ditch where they’d buried Rangers earlier that day.
“Tell the chaplain… no more sermons about the lilies of the field,” he muttered. “They don’t know half of it.”
His hand slipped from the boy’s coat.
The breath went out of him on a soft sigh and didn’t come back.
The yard seemed to lean in around that spot for a moment. Then the world widened again.
Men stood. Men took off hats. The chaplain came, clutching his Bible so tight his knuckles were white, and knelt at Hargrove’s head, lips moving around words that sounded small in all that space.
The boy stood up slowly.
He felt older than he had that morning.
Someone shouted near the gate. A horse screamed. The battle might have been mostly done, but there were still corners of it going on.
He started toward the opening in the wall without quite deciding to. The axe came with him. So did the Colt at his hip, heavy and ready. He reloaded all six cylinders as quickly as his bloody hands could manage.
Outside the fort, the plain looked like a butcher’s yard.
Bodies lay everywhere. Greenskins mostly, twisted and hacked and flattened. Here and there a man in blue or butternut lay among them, face turned to the sky. A few horses were down too, legs at wrong angles, eyes rolled back.
The Indian host moved among the dead like crows come to pick. Some stripped armor and weapons from greenskins, testing the weight, the fit. Others went from body to body humming low songs, touching fingers to brows in some ritual the boy didn’t know.
Closer to the gate, the fighting hadn’t quite ended.
A knot of six or seven greenskins had formed up around a fallen shape—a man in Comanche dress, from the look of him, his horse lying dead at his leg. He’d been thrown clear, but not far. His lance lay in the dirt a couple yards off. Blood soaked the dirt under his thigh where it bent wrong.
He still had a pistol in his hand.
He fired it as the boy watched, the flash bright in the night. One greenskin in the knot jerked and fell back, chest blown open. The others snarled and closed in anyway.
The fallen man tried to roll to his knee, to get his knife out. His wounded leg buckled. It was the kind of break a man didn’t stand on again.
One of the greenskins raised a heavy cleaver, aiming to split him from shoulder to hip.
The boy moved.
He ran across the ragged ground, boots slipping on blood and mud, leaping over a dead horse’s haunch. The Colt was in his hand before he realized he’d drawn it. His thumb cocked the hammer back by habit.
He brought the pistol up as he ran, sights cutting a straight line through the chaos.
The greenskin with the cleaver loomed larger in front of him, back mostly turned.
The boy breathed in, breathed out halfway, and squeezed.
The Colt boomed.
The ball took the greenskin just under the ear. Bone exploded. The thing pitched forward, its swing cut off before it landed. The cleaver tumbled from nerveless fingers.
The others turned, tusks bared.
The boy didn’t slow.
He fired again, and again, each time picking a face, a throat, an exposed joint in armor. Three greenskins went down in as many shots. The last two rushed him.
He let the empty Colt drop back into its holster and brought the axe up in both hands.
The first one swung a club at his head. He ducked under and stepped in so close he could smell its odorous breath. The axe came up in a short, vicious arc, the butt catching it under the jaw. Teeth snapped shut on its own tongue. It reeled.
He pivoted, letting his body turn with the motion, and used the full weight of the swing on the last one.
The axe bit into its collar and out its far armpit, splitting ribs on the way. The greenskin made a sound like a broken bell and dropped.
Soul?haze rose.
He barely tasted it through the Hollow before it sank.
He stood there a moment, panting, bodies at his feet.
Behind him, the Comanche man groaned.
The boy turned.
Lying down was a man in fringed leather, hair in two thick braids, silver disks braided in, a shell necklace at his throat, lying in the mud.
The man’s eyes were dark and sharp. They took the boy in at a glance—small frame, too?big hat, axe dripping, Colt smoke still curling.
For a heartbeat neither of them said anything.
Then the Comanche huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been half pain.
He said something in his own tongue first—short, sharp, full of sounds the boy couldn’t follow.
Then, in rough English, he added, “You move fast… for little Ranger.”
The boy shrugged, because he didn’t know what else to do with his shoulders.
“Didn’t want to watch you get chopped in half,” he said.
The man’s mouth pulled into a thin, tight line that might have been a smile.
“Good reason,” he said.
He dropped his head back into the dirt, eyes closing for a moment as if that small effort had cost more than it should have.
Men were running from the fort now—blue coats, teamsters, even a couple of the enslaved stone haulers, shackles clinking as they moved. Some Indian warriors rode closer too, lances raised but eyes no longer wild. The white Comanche woman was among them, pony picking its way through bodies, her pale hair dark with sweat.
The boy stepped back so they could reach the wounded man.
He looked down at his hands.
They were shaking now, just a little. Blood had dried in the creases of his fingers, flaking when he flexed them.
He tightened his grip on the axe, then loosened it again.
