Beneath the Canyons Read online

  The dark, bushy beard broke into a leering smile. “Miss Lainie, you tell your Pa for me that this land ain’t owned by no one an’ I’ll drill wherever, whenever, an’ –” he leered more broadly “– whoever I want.”

  Miss Lainie responded with a rude gesture. Gobby went red above his beard, and the men from the Bootjack laughed. One corner of Silas’s mouth quirked up. She had spirit; he liked that. He offered an arm to the young woman. “I’d be happy to escort you while you do your business, in case there’s any more trouble.”

  She eyed him head to toe, her gaze lingering on the large revolver holstered at his left hip. Though firearms were considered anti-magical and therefore forbidden in Granadaia, no mage hunter would last a nineday in the Wildings without one. Silas had specially modified this piece himself; mundane bullets alone couldn’t be depended on to take down a highly skilled mage. “My Pa don’t like me going around with strange men,” she said.

  “Well, then. I’m Silas Vendine.” He added the usual name-slip charm as he spoke his name, to make it harder to remember, though it didn’t always work very well with other mages. Then he grinned at her. “I may be strange, but at least now you know my name.”

  That got a smile from her, a shy half-smile as she glanced away. “All right, then, Mr. Vendine. I’m Lainie Banfrey. If you’ll keep Gobby away from me while I do my business at Minton’s, I’d be grateful. My Pa’s foreman should be over at the cattlemen’s co-op; he’ll see me home.”

  She took his arm, and he accompanied her next door into Minton’s General Mercantile. He stood just inside the door, keeping an eye open for trouble, while she made her purchases and talked with the storekeeper about the weather and that year’s drive herd, which was currently on its way to the Gap.

  Two other young women walked up to the counter from the back of the store and greeted Miss Banfrey. One wore a dress, the other also wore men’s clothes, altered, as was common, to fit her figure, and decorated with embroidery on the cuffs and pockets. Miss Banfrey’s clothes had no such trimmings or alterations; Silas wondered if she lacked the skill to make such adjustments, or the interest. Still, even in ill-fitting clothes without the feminine touches, she was undeniably all girl.

  “We heard shooting,” the young woman in the dress said. “Was anyone killed?”

  “Maybe just a couple of miners,” Miss Banfrey replied.

  “I’m just so afraid now, every time it happens,” the girl in pants said. “Ever since –” Her voice broke.

  Miss Banfrey hugged her. “I know, Mari. I miss him, too,” she said, tears in her voice.

  “Maybe those no-good miners will all kill each other, or the mining business’ll bust and they’ll all go away again,” the girl in the dress said.

  A young man came in the door, holding what looked like a brand-new bridle, and went to the girl in the dress. They both wore wedding rings. “You’re okay?” the girl demanded, grabbing his shoulders.

  The young man kissed his wife. “I’m fine, honey. I stayed inside next door the whole time. You ready to go?”

  “Almost,” the young woman said. “I just need a few more things.”

  Miss Banfrey finished her own business, paying for the sack of nails and other items she had bought. With a squeeze of her friends’ hands, she said goodbye to the others and came over to Silas. “I’m done. Let’s go.”

  The young couple, the other girl, and Mr. Minton all stared at him. Silas imagined he had just made Miss Banfrey the subject of the Bitterbush Valley’s latest gossip.

  They left the store. “Mari was walking out with Blake, my brother, when he died,” Miss Banfrey said. “They were going to be married this fall.”

  “I’m sorry,” Silas said again, and again it seemed completely inadequate. If there was a rogue mage behind the trouble that was tearing this town apart, catching him would be a job well done. Silas hadn’t gotten his license as a mage hunter and come out here to the Wildings just for the money and the excitement or because he cared about the Mage Council’s authority. The Plain settlers of the Wildings had fled from Granadaia in search of freedom from oppression by the mages there. But they also needed protection from ruthless, ambitious renegade mages who came out here looking to establish their own lawless domains. And though Silas himself was a mage, and though mages were hated and feared by the Plain folk of the Wildings, protecting Plain folk was his primary aim, whether he got paid for it or not.

  Untrained as she was and clearly Wildings-born, Miss Banfrey definitely wasn’t a renegade mage, Silas thought as they walked down the street to the crossroads. But there was still no question that she had a significant amount of power. Under the Mage Council’s law, he was required to either send her back to Granadaia to be trained, or, if she refused to go, Strip her of her power. Silas didn’t think Miss Banfrey would appreciate being told she had to leave her home and family to travel to Granadaia and become something she had probably been taught all her life to hate. On the other hand, Stripping destroyed the mind and personality of the person being Stripped and left them a mindless, helpless shell.

  Not a pretty choice to offer to a pretty young woman. But he couldn’t just do nothing. She could hurt or kill herself or someone else with her untamed power, or sooner or later another mage would find her, and then she and Silas would both be in serious trouble for not following the law in the first place. And there was the very real danger that the Plain folk of the town would discover that she had power and she would end up on the wrong end of a hanging rope, the settlers’ preferred way of dealing with mages.

  Well, he was planning to stay in town until he unraveled the mystery of the other powers he had sensed, the Granadaian power and that darker magic, and caught his renegade, if there was one to catch. That would give him time to think of a way to approach the subject that wouldn’t upset her too much or earn him an unpleasant introduction to the business end of her revolver.

  They arrived at the office of the Bitterbush Valley Cattlemen’s Cooperative Association, at the southwest corner of the intersection. A medium-size brown mare and a larger buckskin stood hitched outside. “I’m ready to go, Mr. Dobay!” Miss Banfrey called through the open door of the office.

  A tall, weathered cowhand with salt-and-pepper hair showing from beneath his stiff, curve-brimmed straw hat came out of the co-op office. “You okay, Miss Lainie?” he asked. “We heard shooting out in front of the saloons. When I came out to look for you, I saw you outside Minton’s with this fellow.” He nodded towards Silas.

  “This is Mr. Vendine,” Miss Banfrey said. “He offered to escort me in case there was any more trouble. Mr. Vendine, this is Mr. Dobay, my Pa’s foreman.”

  Silas shook Dobay’s hand as the foreman said, “Much obliged to you for keeping an eye on Miss Lainie, Vendine.”

  Dobay would remember his name, since Miss Banfrey had spoken it with no name-slip charm attached. Oh, well, no harm done; at least Silas hoped not. Dobay seemed to have Miss Banfrey’s best interests at heart, and Silas had helped her; at least if his name was remembered, it would be remembered by someone who had no cause to think ill of him. “My pleasure,” Silas said.

  And it had been a pleasure, he thought as he watched Miss Banfrey swing up into the brown mare’s saddle in a practiced, graceful movement. A fine young woman; he looked forward to talking to her again. Even if the subject of the conversation was likely to be unpleasant. He tipped his hat to her and Dobay, and they rode away, heading west out of town.

  Chapter 2

  WITH MISS BANFREY safely on the way home in the company of her father’s foreman, Silas walked back up the street to the stable. To his relief, Abenar had come through all the excitement unhurt. Silas paid the stable boy for a handful of dried apple slices and fed them to his horse to make up for all the trouble.

  Assured that Abenar was all right, Silas went into the boarding house. The landlady offered him a choice of bunking with a few other men or having a room to himself. Apparently the miners board
ing there preferred to split the high rent among two or three or four of them, which allowed the landlady to keep prices even higher still. Silas wanted privacy, so despite the rather depleted state of his finances, he paid in advance for a private room for a nineday. Board, grooming, and feed for the horse was available at the stable next door for an extra forty drinas per nineday, she informed him, and meals were served in the downstairs parlor, though most of the boarders took their supper next door at the Rusty Widow. “I don’t charge none if you take a house lady from the Widow up to your room,” Mrs. Mundy said, “but it’s ten drinas a night for any other birdie.”

  Silas left his belongings in the small but clean room he was given and returned to the stable, where he paid the hostler for a nineday’s stabling and saw Abenar comfortably settled. That done, he sauntered back down the street to the Rusty Widow Saloon. Two men were sitting on the edge of the wooden walkway in front of the saloon, one with a leg wrapped with white bandages, the other with his arm similarly wrapped.

  Two bodies still lay in the street. The face of one was covered with a white kerchief. A white-haired man in shirtsleeves, with a large black physician’s bag on the ground next to him, squatted beside the other body, feeling the neck for a pulse. Carden stood nearby, watching, his hands in his trouser pockets. The doctor shook his head, then took a second square of white cloth from his bag and draped it over the face of the man he had been examining. Carden spat off to the side, shrugged, and walked away. Like most towns in the Wildings, Bitterbush Springs probably didn’t have a proper shrine to the Gatherer or even a priest. Most likely, the dead men’s friends would cobble together a pair of coffins or just wrap them in grave-windings and give them a quick burial outside of town.

  Silas walked past the wounded men and pushed through the swinging doors of the Rusty Widow. The plinking, jangling noise of a hammerbox being inexpertly played carried over the sounds of conversation and laughter, and a miasma of tobacco smoke drifted over from a couple of the card tables. He wondered if the fact that he had assisted a rancher’s daughter would put him firmly on the ranchers’ side of the feud and make Mundy’s and the Rusty Widow hostile territory. A few men looked up at him with varying degrees of curiosity, but most of the two dozen or so customers at the Rusty Widow were too occupied with playing cards, drinking, discussing the shootout, and flirting with the brightly-clad house ladies to pay him any mind. If there was trouble, as a newcomer he could always plead ignorance of local politics.

  Silas lowered his shield a bit and reached out with his mage senses, checking for the presence of power or signs of power-blocking shields. Aside from an occasional dim flicker, the legacy of a long-ago mage ancestor in an otherwise Plain heritage, too small to be of any use or even noticed by the person who carried it, he found nothing. He let his own shield go; maintaining it all the time was draining, and he didn’t want to be distracted by magical hunger or find himself short on power should the need to use it arise.

  He walked up to the bar and perched on one of the tall stools there. Minding his manners, he took off his hat and put it on the stool next to him. The bartender, only slightly less grimy and gritty-looking than his customers, raised his eyebrows at Silas in question.

  “Beer,” Silas said.

  The barkeep filled a metal tankard from a keg and handed it across the stained, smudged bar. “Two drinas and six.”

  Expensive for a place like this, but Silas refrained from commenting. He laid two silver drina pieces and six copper pennies on the bar, and drank, trying not to examine the cleanliness of the tankard too closely. The beer was strong stuff, and rough, but still felt good going down after the long, hot ride he’d had to get here and the shootout.

  “Some excitement here today,” he said. The barkeep shrugged and turned away, wiping down a row of tankards behind the bar with a none-too-clean towel.

  So the bartender was not inclined to be talkative. But the man next to Silas, a sun-shriveled, balding man with five empty shotglasses in front of him, said, “Damn ranchers bring it on themselves. They want a payout, they can get out there an’ bust their asses digging like the rest of us.”

  “What’re you digging for?” Silas asked.

  “Ore.” The man shrugged. “Dunno what it’s called. Carden buys it from us, pays a handsome gilding for it too. Says there’s si – sine – scientists –” It required a noticeable amount of effort for him to slur the word out correctly. “Scientists, that’s it, in a country over the sea who’ve discovered things to do with it. Things that would put the gods-damned wizards to shame.” With no visible sign from the man, the barkeep set two more full shotglasses on the bar, and he downed them both in one breath.

  Interesting. Science was forbidden in Granadaia because it was considered the antithesis of magic, but it was practiced in other lands, across the sea from the vast continent where Granadaia and the Wildings were located. And now miners in the Wildings were being used to obtain materials for some sort of scientific work. The products of foreign science that Silas was familiar with – eyeglasses, canned food, clocks with numbered hours, and, most notably, guns – were undeniably useful things. He could see why a renegade mage might have an interest in gaining scientific secrets for himself, once he got over the natural distaste for and distrust of science that most mages had. If a rogue mage could add such secrets to his magical skills, that would make him a force to be reckoned with. The bounty on a mage involved with science was sure to be high, but even if there was no rogue mage involved, the Mage Council might be interested in hearing about this foreign involvement in the Wildings – maybe even a couple hundred gildings’ worth of interested.

  A house lady in black-and-silver striped satin came to the bar, gave Silas a lingering, appreciative look, then took a tray of filled tankards from the bar back to the table she was hostessing. From that table, a man shouted, “That’s the stranger what was with Miss Lainie!” Silas recognized that voice. He turned around to see Gobby standing up, leaning drunkenly against the table and pointing one thick finger towards Silas. “I know it was you, mister, and don’t say it weren’t!”

  “The young lady was frightened by the gunfire. I helped her,” Silas said. “Is there a problem with that?”

  “You stay away from Lainie. I set my eye on her, an’ I’ll have her for myself!”

  “You an’ half the fellas in this town, Gobby,” someone else at the table said. A round of chuckles followed his words. “Anyway, Banfrey won’t let no miner knock his little girl. He’ll kill any who tries.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Gobby grumbled beneath his thick beard. “When I’m rich enough, ain’t no birdie an’ her Pa who’ll say no to me.” He sat down heavily and picked up his hand of cards.

  Silas checked Gobby for power or signs of a shield, probing more deeply than he had in his initial scan of the saloon. Though Gobby seemed troublesome enough to be a renegade, Silas wasn’t surprised to come up empty in his search. If the miner was a rogue Granadaian mage, he was doing an awfully good job of pretending to be a Wildings ne’er-do-well.

  “Supper?” the barkeep said to Silas, startling him out of his thoughts.

  “Sounds good,” Silas said. A moment later, the barkeep put a large bowl of ham and bean soup and a fresh, warm bread roll in front of him. “Six drinas and two,” he said.

  Like the beer and the room, it was expensive, but it looked and smelled surprisingly good and Silas was hungry, so he paid.

  “So, Carden pays good money for this ore that the scientists want,” he said between spoonfuls of soup and bites of roll to the wizened man next to him. “What’s that to the ranchers?”

  “They claim ownership of damn near all the land around here, right up to the blueskin markers. Ain’t hardly nowhere to dig that ain’t on land some rancher says is his. They’s threatening to shoot anyone they find digging on their land, an’ saying they want to get paid for the ore that’s dug up.”

  Silas thought that sounded fair, but this d
idn’t seem like the place to say so. “Hmm,” he said non-committally.

  “It’s hard work, an’ dangerous. Carden pays us good, an’ we earn it. Don’t need no ranchers what can’t even prove they own the land taking what we earned with our hard work an’ sweat.”

  “Well, I can certainly see your point,” Silas said. “But is it worth killing people over?”

  “It’s worth it,” the man said. “It’s that much money. Right now, with what’s in my pocket, I could buy all seven of the Widow’s house ladies for a nineday, just for me. Only reason I don’t is because the other fellas would beat me good for keeping ’em all to myself. That’s how much money we’re talking about. And that’s just from what I dug out nineday before last.”

  “I see.” Silas worked up a quick estimate in his head. Exclusive rights to just one house lady for even a single night didn’t come cheap. The total he arrived at was impressive. What were the scientists doing with this ore that made it so valuable? Whatever it was, the result was a tense, sometimes deadly, situation here in Bitterbush Springs. He found he didn’t like the thought of Miss Banfrey being caught in the middle of something like this – or of someone like Gobby setting his eye on her. With or without a bounty at stake, putting an end to the trouble seemed more and more like a worthwhile endeavor.

  He finished his supper, pushed the bowl back across the bar, and drained the last of his beer. “Thanks for filling me in,” he said to his partner in conversation. “Man walks into town right in the middle of a gunfight, he kind of wonders what’s going on.”

  “Glad to help,” the man said. “But if you want my advice, mister, if you ain’t here to sign on with Carden, I’d just stay out of it, that’s what I’d do.”

  “Thanks,” Silas said. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He took up his hat from where he had set it on the seat next to him, and left the saloon.