Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
She faded in from the night like a phantasm, clothed in all black save for the flowing cinnabar wrap layered around her neck, riding a pale horse that matched her porcelain-hued high cheeks. She moved at the unhurried pace of someone who had nowhere better to be and knew it. A large black bird rode the figure’s shoulder, its eyes reflecting in cerulean what little light the night sky had left to offer.
She might have beautiful at one time, Harlan thought to himself, but something had changed that — though he knew not if it was the tattoo he could only barely make out from the window that marred her face, or the dour expression she wore as she looked up and down the town’s streets.
The man the townsfolk used to call “The Baron” while snickering behind hands covering their mouths, watched the stranger and her horse drift through the dusty streets from the second floor of what had been the assay office. He still used the office on the grounds that someone had to maintain a professional presence in Nod until the situation resolved itself. There was a ledger open on the desk behind him that not been written in for some time. How long, he could not have said precisely. Time moved differently in Nod. It always had, he supposed, because he could not remember if there had been a before when that was not so.
A minor setback, he told himself.
The baron straightened. Smoothed his jacket, which had once been a fine thing perhaps a decade or more ago. Ran a hand across his hair.
An investor.
He had been expecting one to finally find their way to Nod. Not this investor in particular, but logic of the situation had always suggested such an arrival was an eventuality, only a matter of time. Once word got out about the town’s position in the mesa country, the spring, the proximity to the Old Canaan Road — serious parties would begin to take an interest in the untapped potential. He had said as much to Caldwell, who had disagreed in the particular way Caldwell disagreed with everything Harlan said, which was the primary reason he had stopped discussing business with Caldwell some time ago. Caldwell did not understand capital. Caldwell had never understood capital.
He glided down the stairs, his feet barely touch the pine worn smooth from Harlan’s daily shuffle to the office in the morning and back down when the evening came. When they came. It was not always a given that either would arrive just because the other one had earlier.
Harlan had already prepared opening remarks before his feet came to rest on the ground floor. He dusted himself off, and straightened his jacket a final time before stepping through the door and onto the fine plank sidewalk he had been responsible for getting installed within his first year upon discovering Nod.
Her crow turned to Harlan and stared into his eyes with its own. He decided right away that he did not care for the beast. Most crows stuck to a sensible eye color, like black. The crow’s faceted lazuli pierced his own hazel-stained eyes and bored into the back of Harlan’s head. No, he decided, he did not care for the bird in the least.
Leaning against one of wind-polished posts holding up the awning covering the boardwalk, Harlan tried to quash his eagerness and to appear more casual. He stroked his beard with a cupped hand to ensure not a hair was out of place, his beard being perhaps the best maintained of anything in Nod.
“Welcome,” he said, with the particular warmth of a man greeting the first serious investor to show interest in some time. “Name’s Harlan Creed… Though some around here like to call me The Baron. Neighborly little jest. Heh. Hum.” He hoped his chuckle sounded more unforced than it had felt.
“I’m the founder of Nod — original claim, assay rights, the whole of the mesa corridor north to the wash.” He gestured at the street as though it were self-evidently valuable. “You’ve chosen an excellent time to arrive. We’re at something of an inflection point.”
Both the stranger and her crow regarded Harlan without blinking, something he found damnably unsettling.
Her eyes, matching the crow’s in hue, drank him in. Damnably unsettling.
She looked up and down the unpaved and uncobbled street, at the dark windows, a door hanging off its hinges at what had once been a dry goods store, the dusty display window of a haberdashery — a fine layer of silt covering everything that suggested the wind worked here undisturbed.
Her impossibly blue eyes turned back to Harlan.
“Is there a livery? Someplace to feed and groom my horse?” she asked. “We understood there were services in town.”
She pointed down the long path to the deep desert along the Old Canaan Road. “There were signs.”
Harlan issued a nervous chuckle as he stood up from the post. “Well, yes. As I said, we are at an inflection point in Nod and it is only a matter of time and…” He looked at her with a hungry eagerness as he finished. “…investors.” The last was a question posing as statement.
She ignored the implied question and her crow uttered a harsh caw, making Harlan jump.
“A livery,” he said louder than he intended. “Yes, there is one just down at the end of the street on the West end of town where the Road continues on to Absalom.” He held out his hand to take the pale horse’s reins. “I’d be happy to lead you there, however, it is currently underemployed at this time. I’m afraid we’ve not been able to find a suitable replacement for the stable worker who left without giving notice some time back.”
Again, Harlan had difficulty recalling just how long ago it had been since the stable was attended to.
The crow took flight and perched above them from the peak at the top of the assay office. The longer the bird was around, the more nervous it made Harlan. He could not shake the feeling it knew something unsettling about his past.
The stranger dismounted and handed him the reins to her horse her eyes seeking something in the near darkness of what passed for night the next few hours in Nod.
“Name?” asked Harlan as he start to lead the mare to the livery at the other end of the short street bisecting the town, mesa looming overhead on one side, alkali desert and wasteland on the other.
For the first time since she had arrived in Nod, the stranger looked startled. “Name?”
“Your mare’s name? What can I call her?”
The tension left her body. “Oh. Name. The mare’s name is Fallow.”
“Odd name for a horse,” he noted. “Why choose that over something with a little more glamor?”
Her eyes were scanning the spaces between the buildings, as if expecting something to leap out from the shadows. “She came with the name. I didn’t choose it.”
He noticed her hand resting on the butt of a black revolver, perhaps in wait for trouble to emerge from the dark. Fortunately, Nod had almost no reported crime since… Harlan could not recall the last time there had been any crime in the town, he had to admit.
The livery at the street’s end still had a roof on three sides and enough dry feed that the horse would not suffer for one night. The Baron walked Fallow and her owner to it, talking investments the entire way. The stranger said nothing that could be mistaken for encouragement, which Harlan appeared not to notice. Meanwhile, the crow perched along various empty storefronts along the way, seeming to favor the old jail, more useful for drying out the drunks than housing the nonexistent criminal elements it had been designed to contain.
What passed for night in Nod had arrived by the time she had seen to grooming Fallow and brushing the desert’s dust from her coat. The darkness felt provisional, like a storm that had yet to decide to break. The temperature dropped sharply and then less sharply and the stars, where they showed, showed the wrong constellations, none of which could the stranger recognize.
She had noticed narrow track leading to the spring on her way in. The standing stone still visible within the tangle and vine beside it. She had not gone to it yet. She felt that it would be best to have some light to examine the menhir at the water’s edge.
As she groomed the horse, Harlan kept talking. She only heard about a third of what he said, easily filtering out most of it as the babble of a businessman looking for profit wherever they could shake a few coins free.
“The issue,” he was saying, “has been largely one of perception. The road traffic reads Nod as a way station when in fact the mesa corridor represents a significant — are you listening?”
“Yes,” she said. She was watching the crow, which at some point silently assumed a perch on the livery’s remaining roof beam, looking toward the saloon across the dirt street.
“The significant opportunity,” the baron continued, “is in the water rights. The spring’s yield is—”
“Consistent,” she said.
He paused. “You know about the spring?”
“I saw it coming in.”
He looked at her with the particular expression of a man reassessing whether a visitor is more serious than they first appeared. “Then you understand the position. Water rights in mesa country, reliable yield, road access — that’s the foundation of something substantial. With a modest investment, it might even bring rail back to these lands to carry pilgrims to and from Absalom. What I need is a partner who understands—”
From the saloon came the sound of the piano. Then raised voices. Shouting. Then the piano’s jaunty ragtime tune abrupt stopped.
Followed by a crash.
Harlan’s expression did not change. “That’ll be Caldwell,” he said, in the tone of a man footnoting a minor inconvenience in an otherwise sound prospectus. “He does that at times. Fantastic piano player most of the time. But I’m afraid that he’s a bit of a souse, truth be told.”
He was about to bring the conversation back to the matter of the rail but she was already walking away from him towards the saloon with the gait of a predator.
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