The Scarlet Star Trilogy Read online

  ‘Heard Yule got bit last week?’

  ‘Bit? Man got ripped in half!’

  ‘Down the middle.’

  ‘Wife only knew him ‘cause of a mole he had on his right cheek.’

  And so their hushed conversations went. Some of them must have noticed him, after a spell, but it did not make them speak any quieter.

  ‘No good pretendin’ it ain’t happened,’ as one of the workers so eloquently put it.

  Truth hurts, and the frontier was full of it. Welcome to the wild west, he thought. Last stop before Hell.

  *

  The locomotive that came to fetch them was considerably less impressive than the one he had first seen in Boston, and the other two that had come after it.

  If those three had been princes, here was the pauper.

  Merion scowled as it pulled into the station, belching oily steam. This locomotive was smaller, for one thing, and covered by at least an inch of dust. There were six carriages, but only two were for passengers. These carriages had large portholes instead of windows, no doubt pilfered from some downed air balloon. In fact, the whole train looked stolen, borrowed, or otherwise improvised.

  The men on the platform didn’t seem to mind. They stepped right up to the lip of the platform and waited for the doors to stop in front of them. Some even made quick bets as to where the doors were going to stop, and who would be closer. Gold and copper glinted in the sunlight.

  Merion was the last to board. He shuffled on in the wake of the workers, guards, and other riffraff, his legs like molten lead. His luggage was thankfully being loaded for him, alongside barrels and boxes of tools and supplies, headed for Fell Falls.

  ‘Maybe we should get you a gun after all,’ whispered Rhin.

  Merion did not dignify that with a response. The men would have heard him, in any case.

  He found a seat near the door and put the rucksack on his lap. He could feel Rhin moving around so that he could peer out at the carriage interior. The men sprawled about, as though they had already done their day’s worth of hard work.

  As soon as all the luggage and supplies had been transferred from the other train by the station workers, the locomotive released its breaks, and the whole carriage shuddered.

  The men chatted idly, this time of women, gambling, and stories of the war. Rumour had it some were still fighting in the misty swamps of the deep south. Renegades, Merion heard them called. One man said they were all doomed, once the steam warships of Washington got there, with Red King Lincoln standing on the bow of the Black Rosa.

  ‘With his trusty axe,’ another added, and the men thumped the seats patriotically until dust filled the carriage.

  Soon the talk turned to the wild Shohari, and Merion couldn’t help but lend an ear. He closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep, and let his body rock with the rickety train.

  ‘Shohari are gettin’ braver.’

  ‘Coming further south every summer.’

  ‘I heard they already overrun some of the northern towns. Landsing was razed to the ground not this winter gone. Heard they took some of the women too. Men’ve gone looking now the snows have thawed. Damn shame, ain’t that right.’

  More thumping of seats.

  ‘I heard they own the nor-western mountains to rights. Ain’t nobody that’ll venture into them woods.’

  ‘Nor the canyons neither.’

  ‘Lord Serped will ‘ave somethin’ to say if they come near Fell Falls. With his lordsguards and gatlings.’

  Merion’s ears pricked up at the sound of the word ‘lord’. What was a lord doing all the way out here?

  ‘What’re you talking about ’bout, Hummage? You know they been seen already. On the ridges.’

  ‘Darn that. Scouts is all.’

  ‘Ain’t just scouts from what I hear. Got war parties roaming as far south as Shamrok Hills.’

  ‘Can’t the patrols from Kaspar pick ’em off?’

  ‘They are, sure as hell. But they’re too many.’

  A deep voice echoed in the far corner of the carriage, one Merion hadn’t heard yet. ‘I heard they brought their shamans too,’ it said, and there was a silence. ‘You ever seen a shaman in real life? Any of you?’ More silence. ‘Those Shohari are somethin’ else. They got proper magic running through their veins, mark my words. I heard men say they can peel the flesh right off your bones at a hundred paces. Turn the steel of your rifle hot as hell, ’til it burns your hands or explodes. Take your soul, too, if they lay hands on you. A little chanting, a little blood, and you’re theirs.

  Merion’s own voice surprised him, so much so he could not help but squeak halfway through his last sentence, so that it came out as more of a question than a fact. ‘My father said that magic is only what science can’t yet explain. That it’s all a trick.’ He heard Rhin muttering something derogatory in the pack, and immediately wished he had kept his mouth shut. Perhaps it was his nerves, or the need to be noticed that had made him squawk. He did not even agree with his father. He had a faerie for a best friend, after all.

  The laughter started slowly at first. A few chuckles here and there to get the ball rolling. One man started wheezing, and slowly but surely the carriage erupted into uproar. Merion looked at the floor and wished he would melt. He wished he had Rhin’s powers.

  As the laughter finally died away, one of the nearest men slapped his hand on his thigh. ‘Darn, son, your father’s got some balls. All a trick, hah!’

  Merion was not sure what the ownership of a pair of testicles had to do with the matter, but he nodded anyway.

  ‘Just wait until he meets his first railwraith!’ somebody else cackled.

  ‘Or sandstrike!’

  And the laughter began afresh.

  In the pack, Rhin winced as the men yelled out each individual peril of the wilds. He swore he could feel Merion trembling with fear through the cloth walls of his little sanctuary. The faerie racked his brains for something useful to say, but he couldn’t think of a single word. He only had words for himself.

  ‘Poor lad,’ he mumbled.

  *

  One by one, the green shrubs that had brightened Merion’s morning died away until there was barely anything but rock, sand, and brown scrub. Merion sighed. Even the terrain wanted him to feel unwelcome.

  As the train reverberated around him and made his teeth jiggle, Merion’s mind once again turned to its dark corners. He wondered what he had done to his father to deserve this. He wondered whether he should start cursing his name, whether it would make any difference.

  Merion had left London in a muggy cloud of confusion and disbelief, almost as if he were still dreaming. But with every mile west he’d crawled, that disbelief had melted away and left something very solid in its place. His father had been murdered, and he had been banished to live with his aunt, the undertaker. His whole life hung in suspended animation, ripe for greedy claws to pick at. That disbelief had become a very chilling reality.

  The young Hark may have been trembling, but he had no tears to shed. Along with the fear there came a burning, indignant anger. And as we all know, anger must have an escape route, otherwise it boils up into something a little more dangerous. So it was that Merion’s anger gave him an idea, a purpose to shield him from this awful new reality of his. He swirled it around inside his head, and let it keep him warm.

  As they steered a course north and west, the scenery swapped between the unbearably flat and the worryingly steep and craggy. Merion had one thing to say for the cobbled-together locomotive: it was as strong as the sea. During the ten hours between Cheyenne and Fell Falls, it never broke pace once, not even on the hills. It was an unstoppable force that dragged him ever-onwards.

  The sun was just setting when they crested a hill only a handful of miles from Fell Falls. For a moment, Merion couldn’t bring himself to look, before he remembered some more of his father’s cold words: We must always stare our opponents square in the face, whether in the street, the ring, or amongst the Bench
es.

  ‘So be it,’ Merion spat, and turned, daring Fell Falls to inch closer. And so it did.

  Close up, the town looked like a monster, sprawling and leaking charcoal smoke from its pores. Its veins were dusty streets scarred with the pockmarks of hooves and wheel-ruts. Its tentacles were wandering, misshapen buildings and ambling paths. Its skin was made of wooden slats, jagged and tortured like every true monster’s skin, and like every true monster, it was being harried and attacked.

  The freshly beaten railroad from the east pierced the monster’s side like a silver spear and ran it clean through. Roads snaked in from the north and south, looking for all the world like ropes lassoing the creature’s wooden limbs. As the light faded and the shadows grew long, Merion could almost imagine the town thrashing and flailing as sunset made the sky ripple. With every twist of the track they came closer. The locomotive aimed its nose right for the heart of the town and chugged towards it. The men in his carriage had grown silent. Merion just pressed his face harder against the glass.

  The black skeleton of a church lay on Fell Falls’ eastern outskirts, as though it had somehow escaped the tentacled clutches of the sprawling monster yet had paid the price with fire and flame. In the scorched soil of its graveyard, stood a congregation of sun-bleached crosses, creaking in the desert breeze. Some were dressed in dusty hats with holes, others adorned with pickaxes and tools, still others with garlands of wild flowers, either fresh or dried and crumbling. Some crosses bore no gifts at all. Merion tried to count them as they rumbled past.

  On the locomotive’s other side, to what Merion assumed was the north, a great barn stood alone in the desert. Flags flapped from several poles on its roof, each bearing colours and shapes, but at that distance Merion couldn’t make out their specifics. To his squinting eyes, it almost looked like a coat of arms of some sort.

  No matter where Merion looked, how far he craned his neck, or how much he squinted, he could not spot a single drop of water. Unless they were to be found in the surrounding low hills, it seemed that Fell Falls actually had no falls at all; the name was a lame joke at the town’s expense.

  As the locomotive pulled into the station (if a jumble of wooden decking, a glorified shed, and a small outhouse can be considered a station), the sun was just about to set. The vast sky had turned a deep, furnace-orange, and it made Fell Falls glow.

  There was barely a brick building in sight. The whole of the town seemed to be constructed of a grim grey wood. Thankfully, its citizens had gone to some effort with their paintbrushes, and there were plenty of colours on the insides of the monster. There were plenty of citizens too. The dusty streets were abuzz with men and women. Workers, guards, farmers, shop girls, stableboys, the lot. Merion watched them as they wandered to and fro, some drinking, others laughing. Some even sang. He wondered how there could be so much merriment in a place as dangerous as this. Why weren’t these people in their homes, behind locked doors? He wondered.

  What Merion did not know, and would soon find out, is that it took a special type of person to exist out here, on the edge of the world: the sort of person that knows, as we all do, that copious amounts of alcohol and laughter are brilliant methods of keeping the heavy weight of mortality and an occasional disembowelling off your back.

  Once the train had come lurching to a halt, the men filed off one by one, rubbing their hands at the thought of whiskey and women. So eager were they, in fact, that Merion was soon left alone. He had a grim look on his face.

  Rhin’s head poked out from beneath the flap of the rucksack. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked slowly, as if it were a dangerous question to be asking.

  ‘I am. But trust me, Rhin, we won’t be here long,’ growled the boy.

  Rhin narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you on about?’

  Merion shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘Right you are, but don’t do anything stupid in the meantime, like running into the desert. I don’t feel too good about deserts.’

  ‘Stop worrying,’ Merion replied, and with that he got to his feet, and forced himself out onto the platform.

  Merion was carrying Rhin and the rucksack in his arms now, rather than on his shoulders. After checking that his luggage was being unloaded, he wandered down a short set of steps and onto the dusty earth of the town.

  Both boy and faerie peered around. The light was fading fast and not all the street-lamps had been lit. Aside from the station workers, the platform was empty. All the passengers had disappeared, already barging their way into the first tavern they could find.

  ‘Your aunt should be meeting us, am I right?’ Rhin asked.

  ‘Yes. Aunt Lilain.’

  ‘Aunt Lilain. Sounds so plain next to “Karrigan”.’

  Merion had to admit the faerie was right. ‘Well, she’s a Hark nonetheless.’

  Rhin sighed. ‘Hark or not, it looks like she didn’t get the wiregram about picking you up.’

  Merion stared back at the sign hanging above the platform. ‘Fell Falls’, it said, in bright blue lettering. Merion found a nearby barrel and perched on top of it. ‘Nice place,’ he muttered.

  Rhin shuffled out of the pack so he could see Merion’s face. The boy’s face was expressionless now, deadpan. ‘Could be worse, from what the men were saying.’

  All Merion had to do was look left, to the west, where a few rugged hills stood stark against the red of the dying sun. ‘This is the frontier, Rhin. All of those things that the men talked about, they’re just out there. Barely a stone’s throw away.’

  Rhin unsheathed his knife and waved it around, slicing at the air. ‘Well, they can come try their luck. They’re not the only ones that are magic,’ he hissed to the darkness. Nothing replied. Nothing moved and, secretly, they were both very glad.

  ‘See?’ Rhin sheathed his knife.

  A moment passed, and Merion huffed sharply. ‘Where on earth is that aunt of mine?’

  Rhin looked about. He pointed towards the milling crowds of the town. ‘I don’t suppose it could be that crazy woman sprinting towards us, could it?’

  ‘I think I’ve had my fill of crazy,’ Merion sighed as he turned.

  There was indeed a woman coming towards them, and she was indeed sprinting. If you have ever had a stranger run as fast as they can towards you, with little or no explanation, then you will know how nervous Merion suddenly felt. Rhin even went as far as to unsheathe his knife again, poised inside the rucksack.

  ‘Thank the Maker!’ cried the woman, as she skidded to a halt barely a foot from Merion. He coughed as her dust cloud enveloped his face.

  The woman patted him on the shoulder and smiled broadly. His aunt was all wire and tanned skin, quite obviously as strong as a mule, and not nearly so old as Merion had expected. In fact, there was barely a wrinkle on her face, just a smattering of well-used laughter and frown lines. Her hair, the trademark Hark blonde, was scraped and tied back into a long ponytail that ended somewhere above her hips. She had a brown mole beneath her left eye, almost like a lost teardrop.

  It was her clothing that gave Merion the most cause for concern. Instead of the graceful frocks and dresses in which he was used to seeing women, his aunt dressed somewhat like a man. She wore dark jeans held up by a thick buckled belt, and a checked shirt rolled up to the elbows—very informal indeed.

  ‘Sorry about that. I thought I’d missed you! Don’t want you wandering off on your first day here. Somebody could have shot you!’ she looked about furtively, as if checking for snipers.

  The look on Merion’s face told her that he did not get the joke, if it could even be called one. She patted him on the shoulder again and smiled even wider. Merion was just grateful she still had all her teeth.

  ‘I’m joking, Nephew. One good thing about Fell Falls is that we’re too busy shooting other things to be shooting ourselves. In a way, it’s the friendliest place on earth,’ Lilain said.

  Merion looked around and decided that his aunt was a liar. In the street a
head, tucked into an alleyway, he could see a man urinating on his own boots. ‘Doesn’t look too friendly to me,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Lilain winked. The gesture reminded him of the old woman on the barge, and he wondered if his aunt was just as crazy as she had been. ‘Now, where are my manners?’ she asked herself, and all of a sudden she was transformed into a different person. She stood straighter, taller, and her hands came to rest gently in front of her. She clasped her fingers and curtseyed, looking for all the world as though she had just entered the dining hall of Humming Tower. ‘My nephew,’ she said. ‘It is a pleasure to see you again.’

  Merion was desperately thankful for the touch of refinement. Perhaps his aunt had been joking all along. ‘Tonmerion Harlequin Hark of Harker Sheer, at your service,’ Merion replied, bowing low. Always lower for family, no matter how distant.

  His aunt curtseyed again, and introduced herself. ‘Lady Lilain Hark of Fell Falls, formerly Lilain Rennevie, socialite, citizen, crack-shot, and town undertak– Oh, hah! I can’t do it! Can’t stand all that pomp and ceremony, dearie me. Left all that behind long ago. Still got it though, eh?’ she snorted, her veneer crumbling to ash in front of Merion’s eyes. As she chuckled away, he began to boil.

  ‘Anyway, Tonmerion, that reminds me. Before we get you settled in and talk about anything else, I need your help. I’ve got a body that came in just this afternoon. The workers have already gone to the saloons, so it’s just me. And dear me if he isn’t a big fella. You look like a strong young lad—fancy giving your aunt a hand?’ Lilain asked, cheerful as could be, as though she had just asked him to help pick strawberries.

  Merion’s voice was flat, but nowhere near calm. ‘You want me to help you move a dead body.’ It wasn’t even a question, the way he said it. ‘A dead body.’

  ‘Yes, just over to the Runnels, back to the north.’ Lilain jabbed a thumb in the air and smiled again. ‘Fancy it?’

  Before he could answer she had already turned and begun to walk away. ‘It’s this way,’ she chimed, in that eroded Brit accent of hers.