TALES OF THE FAR WEST

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction by Gareth-Michael Skarka

  He Built The Wall To Knock It Down by Scott Lynch

  In Stillness, Music by Aaron Rosenberg

  Riding The Thunderbird by Chuck Wendig

  Purity of Purpose by Gareth-Michael Skarka

  Paper Lotus by Tessa Gratton

  In The Name of The Empire by Eddy Webb

  Errant Eagles by Will Hindmarch

  Railroad Spikes by Ari Marmell

  The Fury Pact by Matt Forbeck

  Seven Holes by T.S. Luikart

  Local Legend by Jason L. Blair

  Crippled Avengers by Dave Gross

  Promo

  Tales of the Far West

  (Digital edition)

  Copyright © 2011 by Adamant Entertainment

  Cover by: Rick Hershey and Gareth-Michael Skarka

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from Adamant Entertainment.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-937936-02-0

  www.intothefarwest.com

  www.adamantentertainment.com

  INTRODUCTION

  by Gareth-Michael Skarka

  It was a long war, and hard-fought. The August Throne was in no hurry, however. The Secession Wars ended with the inevitability of a coming winter.

  The new world was created. Peace and prosperity for all. For those who had lost everything in the war, there was no place for them. They headed West, to start new lives. For warriors, even those who had fought on the winning side, there was no place for them, either. Steeped in too much blood, and possessed of a skill and trade that was no longer desired, they also headed West.

  Beyond the Periphery lies the Frontier. Settlements began to blossom. Yet even here the flower of civilization asked too much tending, and so men and women pushed further West.

  Beyond the Frontier. Into the Far West.

  The road to the Far West began five years ago, in May of 2007. That’s when the idea settled in my head, and development began. The inspirations for Far West were, like many things, seemingly separate events which suddenly coalesced.

  In the introduction added to the more recent printings of his Dark Tower series, Stephen King wrote something which really resonated for me:

  “….I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic, but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”

  That planted the seed. Fantasy, but instead of elves and dwarves in a mythic amalgam of Western European culture and history, one which was based upon the American myth — the West.

  The seed grew. I’ve been an afficianado of the wuxia genre for quite some time, and I’ve always been struck by the similarities between it and the American Western. Both are heroic genres, set in an mythologized idealization of a culture’s past. At the core of both genres, in fact, lies a similar theme – a theme once spelled out for me in a delightful drunken evening at a convention hotel bar by friend and author. Kenneth Hite, who said that all of the best westerns can be summed up as follows:

  Civilization must be protected from the Barbarians, and to do that, somebody has to pick up The Gun. However, if you pick up The Gun, you become a Barbarian.

  The same theme is echoed in the tales of the wuxia. The wandering heroes were outsiders, who do not follow the rules of conventional Chinese society because of their focus on individuality and the use of force to resolve conflict. Their wandering lifestyle, and rootless existence was seen as a rejection of family and traditional values, and yet the virtues that the wandering heroes espoused (traditionally these eight: altruism, justice, individuality, loyalty, courage, truth, disregard for wealth and desire for glory) contained most of the values considered by the Chinese to be the signs of a superior person. So the heroes in wuxia are heroic, protecting civilization, but outside of it.

  From there it was a short leap to combining the two. Not only were the themes similar, but the trappings were also often repeated in both genres: the wandering hero, the frontier location, the evil landowner, the downtrodden peasants, etc. I had my genre: The Wuxia Western Fantasy.

  I decided to add elements of steampunk for one reason only: It’s cool.

  OK, OK, there’s more to it than that. I wanted some element of the fantastic — the wuxia tales feature high-flying kung fu, but only a minority of the tales involve “magic”, as fantasy fans would define it. The majority of ‘magical’ elements in wuxia stories are secret knowledge — alchemy, hidden techniques, etc. Far-fetched, to be sure, but within the realm of “science”, as it was understood. Given the 19th-century vibe of the western, the best analog to that would be steampunk. Far-fetched, but within the realm of “science”, rather than the truly magical, and in keeping with my personal belief that steampunk works best as a seasoning, rather than a main dish.

  So I had my basic elements — the ingredients for my genre mash-up.

  Over the next five years, the concept went through a number of iterations. It started as a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) — the pen-paper-and-dice variety, like Dungeons & Dragons — but I wanted more. Short stories were written… novels begun. But there was more that I wanted to include. A webseries was outlined; online video that could eventually be compiled and sold as a DVD. All the while, there was a dissatisfaction in having to nail down the epic setting and concept into just one thing.

  Then I discovered the concept of transmedia storytelling. Simply put, transmedia is storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have a wide array of entry points by which consumers can interact with a particular property, each of which add additional layers to the overall narrative, yet also stand alone.

  …and that’s when everything clicked. I would create the world of Far West and then provide a wide array of methods to explore that world. I assembled a development team and we set to work, and launched the Far West website (http://www.intothefarwest.com) in June of 2011, featuring fiction vignettes, development articles, art and discussion forums. After a record-setting crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter, we prepared to release our first commercial efforts: The Far West Adventure Game (a tabletop RPG), and the fiction line -- which kicks off with this collection of short stories. Other expressions are currently in development, including mobile applications, music and more.

  The authors featured herein are stalwarts of the science fiction, fantasy, horror and adventure genres; best-sellers and award winners. More importantly, they are friends and colleagues, and I thank them for jumping into our sandbox to play.

  Welcome to our place. Keep your boots off the table and your weapons holstered, if ya please. We run a respectable joint.

  Gareth-Michael Skarka

  Lawrence, Kansas

  Lunar New Year 2012

  Year of the Water Dragon

  HE BUILT THE WALL TO KNOCK IT DOWN

  by Scott Lynch

  1

  He called himself False Note. It wasn’t his real name. Hell, it wasn’t even his real fake name.

  He was old but unbent and his sins hung on him like bark on a tree. That was my impression the first time I ever saw him, keeping his own company in the darkest corner of Tychus Sload’s Lucky S
ky Diamond Diversion Parlor. He looked like a man waiting for a funeral to break out, or a man who’d make one if it didn’t get there in good time.

  I knew the dust on his boots wasn’t working-day dust or wasting-time dust like mine. That dust he trailed was old bad news stretching back across leagues, years, and lives.

  At a glance, my eyes saw clear. Trouble was, I was twenty-two, and those eyes weren’t fastened to anything worth writing home about. If I’d had brains enough to fill a rattlesnakes’s ball-sack I’d have spun on my heel and gone anywhere else that night, anywhere a man like that wasn’t waiting for something.

  But I was twenty-two, invincible in my own stupidity, and I was at the frayed end of a bad employment situation in a nowhere-town that had never seen any good ones. Ain’t That Something, they called it, because the gods need places to point at and laugh.

  Ain’t That Something had been hitched to a silver mine but the vein was thinner than a whore’s rouge, and when it ran dry the crowds and money waiting past the eastern horizon elected to stay over the horizon. Ten days’ ride north of the Bloodiron, up into the shadow of the Eagles’ Claws, Ain’t That Something was a dry misfire of a town and I got a hell of big surprise when I showed up aiming to make my fortune.

  Sload’s Lucky Sky Diamond had the same problem. Lavishly built in expectation of great things, what it got instead was us, night after night, the dregs too damned stubborn to give it up or too short-sighted to save our gambling money for the long haul back to anywhere.

  We crept from sober to drunk under the yellow light of oil lamps hanging from brass sculptures of tigers and dragons. Their haunches were spread to receive copper wire that would never be laid; their mouths gaped for glass bulbs that would never be shipped within a hundred leagues of that place. We drank Sload’s worst until the images on the cards swam like hot desert air, then we went to our beds on all fours. You could have gathered up the sum total of our wit and good fellowship in a thimble.

  There were six of us worth mentioning that night. Tychus Sload was a given, a snuffed candle of a man, a Seccesh war veteran who’d saved thirty years to build his dream then sunk it by building where he did. At the table with me was Jozan Shung, swollen like a toad, who carried a sawed-down coach gun and called himself Scattergun. When he got tight he acted like the rest of us did, too.

  Hot Molly had what you might call a rugged natural geography and a limited acquaintance with bathing. Her temper named her. There was no place in the civilized east for a blacksmith, even a skilled one, who’d put a client’s head between hammer and anvil for late payment. Now she hunted work town by town on the frontier, where murder was less disqualifying in most trades.

  Next to Molly was Timepiece, formerly the discount sort of bad man who’d thumped indentured workers for one Chartered House or another until he’d been aged and beaten out of the game. His left arm was ten years gone. He had a colorful story about some admirably-endowed bandit queen with a hatchet, but when Timepiece moved just right I could spot the scars of grep fangs on his shoulder and collarbone. His replacement arm was rusty steam-cobbler piecework, hacked up from old farm tools and busted Drudges. He loved the name Timepiece, and thought it was because he set the pace for the sad circle of bummers around him. Actually it was because his godsdamned arm made more noise than a box full of wind-up clocks.

  So there was Jozan, Hot Molly, Timepiece, and your dutiful scrivener, all sitting at a table just past midnight, while Tychus Sload listlessly polished glasses that had never been used and that stranger, that waiting stranger, drank his tea in an island of shadow between the jaundice-colored lights.

  “Heavens,” said Timepiece, his voice as grit-clogged as the gears of his arm. “Why heavens, just look at this hand. I swear if these cards had tits I’d marry ‘em.”

  He set his cards down paint up, and the rest of us were done in. As he’d promised, it was a marriageable spread. His fourth or fifth in an hour. Still, he laughed like he’d done something clever and his arm went whirr-click, whirr-screee, whirr-click as it swept the little pile of clipped silvers toward him.

  So went the game, most nights. Timepiece had two nested machines bolted into that godsdamned arm, and one was a pointlessly complex channel-fed card-sorting mechanism that was noisier than the rest of the affair put together. He was hellfire proud of it, even spent hours fussing over it with oil and jeweler’s tongs. If he’d loved the rest of his arm half as much it would have been a museum piece. Anyhow, it was no secret that when he used that thing to deal a hand it tended to miraculously come out in his favor. We pretended not to notice. He’d cheat us, we’d cheat back in turn, and when stumbling-off time came we’d all be back to equilibrium, losers together, less the price of our drinks.

  That was most nights. The night I met False Note, I got wound up and sent the game right off a cliff.

  I’d love to blame it on that quiet stranger, waiting for whatever wind he thought was going to blow, but that’s not even a near-truth. I was drunk in the deadliest way, deep enough to be prickly but not deep enough to be numb and slow. I was in a bad humor, too, dwelling on the idiocy of my situation, grudging Timepiece those precious silver bits he scraped up even though I knew I’d probably chisel them back just as soon as he quit dealing.

  “Hell, Timepiece, you’re already married to the secret of your success.” I took a long slow swallow of whatever Sload was passing off on us that night (lead sugar, vinegar, grep piss— gods knew) and it didn’t make me any smarter. “After all, ain’t like that arm of yours can get up and walk away whenever it wants to.”

  That opened a hole in the conversation. Timepiece had gathered the cards and now he slotted them into his arm mechanism in groups of five or six, slowly and deliberately like a man feeding shells to a carbine. The ominous silence stretched and his bloodshot eyes were on me all the while.

  “You got any inclination to clarify that remark?” he said at last, too softly.

  “If you’re gonna keep that thing rigged up to four-flush us, don’t you think you ought to have the courtesy to vary the miracle every now and then? Maiden’s Tits, it’s more regular than the sun and the moons!”

  With that, I broke the magic for good. When you’re sitting at a table like that, you can call one another scoundrels, murderers, grep thieves, ingrates, and fancy dancers of the cheapest persuasion. You can joke about being crooked as a general and constant state of affairs. But what you can’t do, what you can’t ever do, is accuse someone of cheating right then and there. Not unless you’re ready to play for blood.

  Click. Timepiece shoved the last bunch of cards into his dealing mechanism. Sha-chock. The arm primed itself for the next deal. Timepiece still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Hot Molly and Jozan Shung were giving me the stink-eye, too. They weren’t real tight with Timepiece, but they were sure tighter with him than with me. Somewhere behind the booze and bitterness my better judgment was waking up. Too late.

  “Why, I do believe that touches on my honor, you skinny little serpent-tongued son of a bitch,” said Timepiece. Now he sounded downright jovial, but there was no mistaking what burned behind his eyes.

  He reached out with his metal arm and took my just-emptied glass in its misshapen hand. Gears ground, pistons popped, and tinkling fragments rained on the table.

  “How’s that for a new trick?” He got up slowly, like some range beast rearing up to make a show in front of its den, which I suppose is exactly what he was. His smile was wide and full of piss-yellow teeth. “You wanna see some fresh miracles out of this arm, you just step right outside and I’ll accommodate your godsdamned curiosity.”

  “Well, uh, maybe I was a little hasty, Timepiece.” A little! Maybe water was a little wet and the sun was a little in the sky. My bad weeks in Ain’t That Something had made me careless. I’d fancied myself hard and ready for the world, but I had no arts for hurting folks, not even to stack up against cast-offs like Timepiece, Molly, and Jozan, and that realization was coming on awfull
y fast.

  “Yeah, take it easy, Timepiece,” said Sload. I don’t know if it was the threat to my tender young self or the busted glass that got his attention. Probably the glass.

  “He called me a cheat!” said Timepiece.

  “He did not,” said the stranger.

  It was like the shadows had decided to talk, or one of the sculptures. I mean, I’d guessed the stranger must have a voice of some sort. Hard to explain the tea otherwise. But he’d been wordless for so long, watching us, that he’d faded into the background for me. Timepiece seemed equally surprised at the man’s decision to quit making like wallpaper.

  “Now that’s a novel interpretation of recent events.” Timepiece turned his back on me to address the mystery man. I should’ve been insulted, but it was a pretty fair assessment of the threat I posed.

  “Cheating’s a marginal sin,” said the stranger, rising casually to his feet. All my first impressions of him came rushing back as he stepped into the light. That brown face had seen some weather, all right. That long hair was the color of a raven that had flown through falling ash. “He accused you of being artless. And that’s. . . much worse.”

  “Mister, this ain’t your game, but you just dealt yourself in.” Timepiece lost his feigned joviality. Now his voice and his body matched what I’d seen in his eyes.

  I mentioned that Timepiece had a second device nested in his arm, beside the card-game-ruining mechanism. This was a spring-loaded compartment clutch for a short-barreled revolver with cracked ivory grips. A whore’s gun, basically, but nothing bigger could hide in his forearm. Automata squealed and spat that gun into Timepiece’s flesh-and-blood hand. He held it up to catch the sickly yellow light.