A couple days passed,
and Silk and Digger spent them resting.
With a half-eaten
apple in one hand, Silk stood in front of a board covered in relics from the
War: wanted posters. The War went everywhere, changed everything. It’d been one
of those confusing wars—no one knew for sure what side they fought for day to
day. It got confusing after only a few years. The War had lasted for forty
years. When Silk had been growing up, an urchin on the far southern docks, the
War was already old. Just the War. It didn’t need a name. Probably the history
books would call it something, but no history books had been written about it
yet.
No one ever knew what
side they fought for, no one except the choice few like Engelkind and the gods.
Failing in that certainty, there was a certainty about what sides fought the
War. On the one side stood the gods themselves: Ythig and his pantheon, ruling
from castles and leading vast armies who believed the old stories and stood by
how the way things had been for all recalling. The gods defended themselves
against an insurrection: a coalition of atheistic men rallying to cry that
mankind had outgrown the gods. Ironically, when that coalition of rebels lost
their leader, the person who replaced him was a god. A new god—a god who never
appeared in any old story. People took it as a sign that they would win.
And they had won. The
coalition of men, led by the new god Kunig and his warlords—Engelkind being
first among them—defeated the gods and threw them from their keeps. The gods
lost the War.
Silk inhaled cigar
smoke around a bite of apple. The War’s outcome was so monumentally impossible.
The whole of Eardbána—the only known continent in the world—took on a greyish
cast. No parades or celebration marked the end of the War. Quietly, the new
regime established, and the population went along with it. The new god, Kunig,
assumed rule in the south, and Engelkind and his armies moved into the greatest
fortress in the middle belt of Eardbána. The most pivotal warchiefs who had
supported the gods took up abode in the northland of Wildhagen. Kunig declared
them exiled. Ythig and the old gods disappeared. Folk presumed them also
exiled, but rarely inquired because they feared Engelkind’s secret police.
The gods had lost the War. The concept could
hardly be understood. Perhaps the impossibility of it affected men—perhaps the
feeling that the gods no longer watched them made more of them turn bad—perhaps
fewer people chose to police each other any longer. Silk thought it was because
Wildhagen had become a no-man’s land. The only real authority there was the
exiled King of Wildhagen, who stayed in hiding because his power was now illegal.
Whatever the reason, boards for wanted posters had more posters than ever.
Engelkind offered most of the rewards. Many stated that the reward would be
paid forward regardless of the criminal arriving dead or alive.
Silk blew a smoke ring
at the poster-covered board. A handful of the posters were slashed through.
They had the highest rewards and names Silk recognized. Brillig Oxley—Strags
Curran—Gerick Cham—all of them vicious murderers, highwaymen destined for the
gallows. They had been war heroes, for what side didn’t matter. Now they were
wrong-minded psychos. This was the effect of the War. These men could not
recover.
Digger walked up next
to Silk and looked at the board with him. They stood for a moment with some
town folk walking past behind them. Silk blew out a lung of smoke.
“How did you become
sheriff here?” he asked.
“I go where the wind
takes me,” Digger said.
“That’s sort of
ridiculous.”
Digger shrugged.
“How long are you
going to stay here?” Silk asked.
“Well,” Digger said,
drawing out the word. “That rather depends on you, as it happens.”
“Does it?”
“Aye. As per preparing
to become the Wiga, I’m obliged to learn from anyone who can beat me in a
fight.”
“Is that a fact?” Silk
said, scratching his cheek and raising an eyebrow.
“Aye. A tradition
passed down through the ages.”
“I hate tradition,”
Silk said. It was true, though he respected magic. It sounded like one of those
magical contracts, like the legend about how the gods had declared that
Engelkind could not be killed. A legend, most said, though the now eighty year
old warlord gave the tale some credence. The gods made magical promises like
that sometimes and men lived with the consequences. Some things could not be
negotiated. The gods had a tricky way of declaring things that would happen no
matter what.
Digger shrugged again.
“Tradition means little to me one way or the other.”
“You’ve never gotten
around it, though,” Silk said. Digger shook his head. Silk looked close at
Digger’s calm expression. Digger’s eyes had a touch of resignation in them, as
if he had tried to outwit the tradition and had failed. The look on Digger’s
face made Silk think the consequences had been grave. It must be strange to
live a life with a destined place in the world. Silk took joy in little, but he
did find a great deal of comfort knowing that he made his own tomorrows.
Digger smiled and
looked at Silk sideways. Such a child. Silk puffed on his cigar. He turned back
to the board of wanted posters.
“These posters that
have been slashed—the outlaw was caught?” he asked.
“For these here, I
caught them,” Digger gestured at a handful in the corner. “Some of those were
caught by locals or by travelers or mercenaries,” he pointed with an open hand
to several others. None of them that he had pointed to so far had very high
reward. “These,” he pointed at the three with the highest rewards—Oxley,
Strags, and Cham. “These men turned up dead on the highway into the north.”
Silk smiled. “No one
has tried collecting a reward for them?” He thought he knew the answer but he
asked it anyway.
“Some have tried,” Digger said.
“You didn’t give them
the money,” Silk said, more a statement than a question. He smiled around his
cigar.
“They weren’t up for
hunting these brigands,” Digger said. “Anyway, whoever it was that killed them
is still roaming the hills.”
“Do you know anything
about him?” Silk thought he knew a little more himself about this vigilante.
Van Vleidt said that Silk would find the vigilante useful. He wanted to know
what Digger knew anyway.
“He’s stuffing these
in the mouths of the outlaws’ corpses,” Digger took a little piece of paper out
of his pocket and handed it to Silk, “wrapped around a rock.”
Silk took the piece of paper. Come and get me, it read in simple, straight letters.
Continued December 13...
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