The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (22 page)

“How else will my minions recognize
you when next your paths cross?”

*     *     *

Clutching his injured hand, Leland
Quince fled back to the saloon, the smell of blood and fear thick as iron in
the air. Rebreather watched him go before approaching Gusman Kreiger. “Why?”

Unmoved, Kreiger replied simply,
“Great rewards require great sacrifice.”

“Never before has a Cast Out lived so
long, or kept his constructs alive as you have.” Rebreather’s words hissed out
sharply through the mask, spoken with deliberate care, each syllable carefully
chosen before utterance. “That was how I knew to follow you; knew you to be the
one who would lead the Cast Outs from Hell, and deliver us home. But you
forfeit our advantage to a
construct
.” The word was blasphemy to him.

“You think me mad, perhaps?” Kreiger
asked, indifferent to Rebreather’s impertinence.

“A construct can approach the Saloon;
a Cast Out cannot. A construct can kill a Guardian; the dregs cannot.”

“But such a weapon is worthless so
long as it remains here with us. All traps comprise two basic elements.”
Kreiger glanced at Rebreather, eyes possessed of a maniac’s deliberate
certainty. “Bait to draw in the prey …
and jaws to hold it fast
.”

OVERSIGHT

The following morning, two things
happened that set events in motion, the repercussions of which could not be
foreseen.

The first was the disappearance of
the hanging basket chair from the bedroom where Ellen and Lindsay slept. It was
not removed or stolen; it simply disappeared. The hook from which it hung and
even the drill-hole in the ceiling both likewise gone; gone as if they had
never been. No one saw it happen or could remember exactly when they realized
the chair was missing. It was simply gone.

The second was the arrival of a sixth
to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

Alex woke up to stillness, the soft
buzz and crackle of the vending machine gone with the night, the new silence
unnatural. He walked to the doorway of the waiting room still half-asleep.

And there, face down upon the floor,
limbs splayed out like a fallen angel, was a young woman in black leather so
saturated by Wasteland dust as to be the color of days-old ashes. Long, dark
hair spread across the varnished planks, sun-browned skin blazing like molten
copper in the early light of orange dawn. Alex stared at her hands, the
delicate fingers, the sharpened nails, the network of veins, faint blue lines
against bronze. Her fingertips caressed the floorboards lightly, sensuously,
the skin of a lover, the throne of God.

He stepped forward, offering a
simple, “Hey.”

In his time—which was not extensive,
but, he believed, proudly squandered—Alex had seen more than his share of
martial arts movies. And in all that time, all those wasted hours of celluloid
special-effects, never had he witnessed anything like what she did next.
Propelling herself into the air with a simple push of her hand, her body rolled
sideways through space like a dust devil before landing in a low crouch, boots
hitting the floor as quietly as cats. In her left hand, a slim dagger, blade
and pommel carved from ivory or bone, the polished edge shining warmly in the
morning light.

“Whoa! Take it easy!” Alex said,
pulling back to the wall, hands up in surrender. “I thought maybe you were hurt
or something.”

She remained perfectly still, the
blade pointing somewhere between his throat and heart, undecided about which
should be slit open first. Half-covered by a veil of hair, her smooth features
and narrow brows looked exotic, a delicate quality belied by the extended knife
blade. Her eyes, exquisite motes of captured night, carried a mix of wisdom and
sadness juxtaposed over her young face. She looked to be the same age as he,
but her eyes hinted she might be older by centuries.

“It’s okay, really,” he said. “I just
didn’t think anyone else was coming, you know? I thought we were all here
already. I’m Alex.”

She appeared to consider all of this
for a moment, her gaze unflinching, the knife’s point steady. Then she
straightened. She did not offer her name, or anything else for that matter.

“You look like you got stuck outside
all night. You didn’t come on a train like the rest of us, did you?”

No answer, only the stare:
suspicious, assessing, cold.

“No, I guess not.”
You would have
heard a train, stupid?
he thought. If she was dropped off elsewhere and
forced to cross the Wasteland with its dregs and Cast Outs and whatever else,
then he supposed she had a right to be suspicious. “Look, whatever. You’re here
now, right? Did you want something to drink? It’s no problem. There’s probably
something behind the bar.”

She nodded in acknowledgment, her
stare offering neither appreciation nor gratitude. But it was a response all
the same. Alex walked to the bar, deliberately ignoring the way she followed
him with her eyes, with the knife. He opened the small refrigerator, the
contents different from the day before: half a carton of milk, a pitcher of
orange juice, a small bottle of apple juice. “Uh, there’s juice and milk down
here, or soda from the machine out on the porch. Water, of course. And there’s
coffee—”

He nearly jumped, startled by the
slender arm clad in dusty, biker leather reaching past him to take the apple
juice from the refrigerator shelf and walk silently back around to the front of
the bar.

She moves like a ghost!
he thought, straightening back up to
find her sitting across from him on a barstool, the faintest hint of a smile
edging at her lips, amused at his naked amazement. On a positive note, the pale
blade had disappeared somewhere.

“Split this with me,” she said,
adding, “Alex.”

“Uh, sure.” She knew his name. And
they were splitting an apple juice. Both good signs. He reached below the bar
for a couple glasses.

One less naive would have realized
her offer assured her the contents of the bottle was not deliberately tainted
or poisoned; mistrust was a lesson learned early in the Wasteland, the
consequences of failure excruciating.

But the idea never occurred to him.
He watched her pour equal portions into both glasses then push one over to him.
“You never told me your name,” he said.

“No, I didn’t.”

He took a drink to hide his
disappointment. Perhaps she had reasons for her secrets just as the others
asleep upstairs had reasons for theirs. Perhaps there were things about her
life outside of this world that she would rather not share just yet … or ever.
He could respect that. His own was a simple story, embarrassingly trite: the
classic underachiever going nowhere, doing nothing, and going about it poorly.

She stared fascinated at the juice,
rolling the glass to see the liquid cling to the sides. Her delicate caress of
the tumbler reminding him of the way she touched the floor, timid and
expectant, as if seeing it all for the first time … or perhaps seeing it again
after a long absence.

“Were you out in the Wasteland long?”
Alex asked.

“Forever,” she answered
matter-of-factly.

Another vague answer to protect her
secrets. “Well, it’s not so bad here. A little strange, but you have everything
you need. I mean, you have a place to sleep, and there seems to be enough to
eat for now. The bathroom’s a little rustic, but it works well enough. It could
be worse, I suppose. You’ll probably meet the others shortly; they’re mostly
okay. Not morning people, I guess.”

She turned away abruptly, staring
across the room. Nail stood just inside the saloon doors, a shadow-shape of
pure darkness in the morning twilight. The Guardian stared directly at them,
and, now that he wasn’t talking, Alex could hear the faint growl coming from
Nail’s throat.

“Don’t move,” he warned softly, not
realizing she was already sitting stock-still, the bone knife soundlessly drawn
and held out before her like a ward, a vampire hunter’s reliquary.

 “Nail?” Alex said, coming out from
behind the bar to stand between them. “Nail, she’s okay. She’s one of us.”

The small monster’s growl rose as if
in contradiction.

“Stop it. Go … go watch the barrier
or something. Keep an eye on the dregs. We’re okay in here.”

The gargoyle’s lip curled revealing
more sharp teeth supporting his six-inch fangs, but Alex held his ground
between them, the gargoyle and the nameless woman from the Wasteland. “I said
go!” he tried again, hoping the tone was more stern than desperate.

Nail refused, trying to see past Alex
to the woman from the Wasteland.

“Go!” Alex shouted.

Then Nail sniffed the air, turning
his head deliberately to catch the various scents and consider each in turn,
less intimidated than distracted. He bolted suddenly from the room, claws
scarring the hardwood planks, already on the trail of something more
interesting …
or more threatening
.

Alex let out a long breath, turned …
and flinched
. She was
standing only a pace behind him, moving to within inches without a sound. Her
eyes caught and threw back the dawn, blackness transformed into amber and fire,
ablaze with newfound interest.

“My name is Oversight.”

*     *     *

Leland Quince woke up at dawn to his own internal alarm clock, unaffected
by this strange world or his nighttime foray into the Wasteland.

It didn’t hurt that someone was shouting.

He quickly assimilated his new
surroundings; he had awoken to numerous hotel suites and was not easily thrown
by unfamiliar settings.

His palm itched, the new scab glaring
back at him like a single, red eye. It felt infected.

In the new silence, he heard only a
flap like startled birds taking to the air. He thought that was unusual, not
remembering any birds in the wasteland, or much indigenous life at all. This
world was a corpse; best it were buried and left behind.

He dismissed it as another
inexplicable event in an unimportant world he intended to leave behind very
soon; sooner than anyone imagined. He went to the bathroom thinking that with
any luck, he would be back in the real world enjoying four-star service for
dinner.

In one corner, motionless and unseen,
the Dust Eater crouched, skin the color of wood planks. Its leering grin
widened, clawed hands digging contentedly into the thick varnish of the floor,
carving up furrows of gray-white polish like gouges of dead flesh. Baleful eyes
watched the window carefully, but the guardian did not return.

Pity. A fight would have been …
amusing.

*     *     *

Jack walked quietly so as not to
waken anyone. The bathroom door was closed; he could hear Leland inside. He
also heard Alex talking quietly downstairs. Ellen and Lindsay were still asleep
in bed.

So who was Alex talking to?

He stopped four steps from the
bottom, surprised to see the young man at the bar with a beautiful woman in
black leather, her skin dusky, hair dark, eyes darker. She sat on the stool
with a kind of artificial calm, hands planted on the edge of the barstool,
fingers tight, shoulders taut, anything but relaxed.

“I don’t know what got into him,” the
young man said. “He’s like a watchdog or something, I guess. I don’t mind
tellin’ ya, I was glad he was there yesterday when those creatures out there in
the sand started coming towards us. But I don’t know what set him off this
morning. It was weird.”

“The Guardian protects the Caretaker,”
the young woman said as if it was clear to anyone what purpose a gargoyle in a
saloon on the edge of insanity would serve. “Protecting the Nexus or anyone
else here is incidental.”

Jack was simply amazed that this
woman, whoever she was, could speak so plainly of things he was only just
coming to
believe
in, much less understand.

“That doesn’t explain why he got so
riled up over you.” Alex persisted. “You belong here just as much as any of
us.”

“No, I don’t,” she replied.

“Hmm?”

Instead of answering, her eyes
shifted to the turn in the stairs where Jack stood quietly, watching, a
voyeuristic intruder. She found his gaze and held it. “Caretaker.”

Alex turned around and offered a
smile, a trace of disappointment that Jack remembered well from when the train arrived
yesterday, interrupting his own private moment with Ellen. “Morning,” Alex
said. “I didn’t think anyone else was up yet.”

Jack smiled back, but his attention
was with the woman, her remark sparking his curiosity. How could she know so
much? How could she know him? Had Alex told her he was the Caretaker? She said
the word as if she had an understanding of it, an appreciation that escaped the
others in the Saloon, him included.

“Leland’s in the bathroom,” Jack
offered. “The others are asleep. Who’s this?”

“Her name’s Oversight,” Alex said,
sliding off the stool. “She arrived this morning.”

“Not on the train,” Jack stated.

“Well, no. She walked in. She’s been
in the Wasteland for a while.”

“I’ll bet.”

Alex frowned. “What do you mean?”

Jack ignored his question, stepping
closer, Oversight’s nonchalant smile masking a predatory stare. “Where do you
come from, Oversight? You can’t be a Cast Out because if you were, the barrier
would keep you out.”

“She’s one of us,” Alex protested.

“And if you were one of the dregs,
Nail would have killed you already,” he continued, still ignoring Alex. “So if
you’re not a dreg, and you’re not a Cast Out, what are you?”

Her eyes darkened, smile
disappearing; he had struck a nerve, distant and indiscernible. “An oversight,”
she declared. “And your guardian didn’t protect you from me because it has no
reason to.”

“She’s okay, Jack,” Alex said, “I’ve
been talking to her. She’s okay.”

Alex’s argument was hardly
dissuasive, but Oversight’s point was well made. His own judgment over the last
few days was circumspect, but he trusted Nail’s instincts implicitly. If the
gargoyle had not ousted her, then the least he could do was give her a chance.
“I guess I just need my morning coffee.”