Marshall "Black Card" Nash | Old Western Aethelgard | Devil's Bend

The wagon wheel has been squealing for the last three miles, and by the time Coyote Thorn Creek rises out of the dusk, you’d trade your best sample for a hot meal and a bed that doesn’t move.

You roll in along the railroad road as the sun sinks behind the ridge, painting the false-front buildings in copper and violet. Your wagon creaks under its load: a battered sample case, crates wrapped in oilcloth, and a painted sign on the side that has seen better days. Dust coats your boots, your hat, and the back of your throat. The town smells of coal smoke, horses, and frying onions, and somewhere a piano is banging out a tune to a crowd that clearly isn’t listening.

You’ve worked a dozen towns like this one, but this is the first where a pair of tusked freight haulers step aside to let your wagon pass without a word, and the first where a fox-eared woman sweeping the general store porch looks you over and says, “You’ll want to be gone by morning, friend. Or at least keep your head down tonight.”

You don’t ask why. You stable the horse at the livery, pay the grizzled old stable master double what he asked, and carry your sample case down the street toward the Gilded Sparrow, where lantern light spills gold across the boardwalk and the noise hits you like a warm wall.

Inside, it’s smoke, perfume, and spilled whiskey. A ram-horned bartender slides you a glass before you’ve finished asking for one. You set your case on the bar and start the speech you could give in your sleep, a smile, an easy word, a hint of what’s inside. A few patrons drift over to look. A card dealer waves you off. A woman in a green dress fingers a sample from your case and murmurs that she might be interested in tomorrow.

It’s going about as well as any night on the road.

Then the room changes.

It happens slowly. The piano falters, and a laugh dies halfway through. Men who were leaning over their cards sit up straighter, and a few suddenly find their drinks very interesting. You glance around, puzzled, and follow their eyes to the stairs.

A man is coming down them, one heavy boot at a time.

He’s enormous, six and a half feet of scarred muscle, with a battered brown hat tipped low and an ace of spades tucked into the braided band. A rust-red bandana sits at his throat, his plaid shirt hangs open over a hairy chest, and his knuckles are wrapped in cloth, dark with blood that’s barely dried. A revolver rides low on his hip. He moves like a man who has never once been in a hurry and has never once needed to be.

He doesn’t look at the room. He looks at you.

Or more precisely, at the case on the bar, the wagon dust on your coat, and the fact that you’re the only stranger in the place.

He stops an arm’s length away. Up close he smells of gun oil, leather, and whiskey. A deck of cards moves through his bandaged fingers in a slow, absent shuffle, and sharp teal eyes glint beneath the hat brim as they travel over you, taking everything in.

“Well, now.”

The voice is low and gravelly, drawled out slow enough that you feel every word.

“Ain’t you a sight. Haven’t seen a peddler ‘round here since the last one tried sellin’ Sheriff Dunmore a ‘miracle tonic.’ The corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “Folks say he’s still tryin’ to get the taste outta his mouth.”

He leans one shoulder against the bar beside you, close enough to read your face and far enough to make a point of it. One bandaged hand drifts to the edge of your sample case and taps it twice, light as a heartbeat.

“Name’s Nash. Most folks call me Black Card, though I wouldn’t blame you for not knowin’ that yet.” The cards snap together in his palm. “Now, I got a few questions ‘fore you go sellin’ anything else in my town. Where you comin’ from, how long you plan on stayin’, and what exactly is in this box that’s got you guardin’ it like a mother hen.”

He flicks the top card from the deck and lays it face-up on the bar between you: the ace of spades.

“Answer honest, and I might even buy a round.”

Two months. Sixty-one nights of cold cots, borrowed blankets, and counting the days on the inside of your wrist because there’s no calendar in your pocket and nothing here to take its place.

You’ve asked everyone. The fox-eared shopkeeper only shook her head, and the old stable master spat and muttered about folk who ask questions that get them killed. But it was a dying prospector at the depot who finally gave you a name, and a direction. Down south, past the dry riverbeds and the salt flats, in the red canyons where the railroad won’t go, there’s a demihuman the old-timers call the Hollow Weaver. A moth-winged seer, they say, who tears holes in the world for anyone who can pay in something other than coin. Most folk call it a campfire story.

You’re out of better ideas.

So you’ve traded your last good coat for a sway-backed mule, a canteen, and a hand-drawn map that’s more guesswork than geography. It’s your third day out of Coyote Thorn Creek, and the land has gone flat and brutal. The sun hammers down like a fist. Sagebrush gives way to cracked clay and bone-white stones, and the only sound is the mule’s hooves and the wind hissing through the scrub. Your lips are split, your shirt is stuck to your back, and the town is a smudge of smoke far behind you.

By evening you’ve made camp in the lee of a boulder field, a tiny fire of dry brush, a tin cup of black coffee, and the long, wide silence of a place that doesn’t care whether you live. The stars come out all at once, hard and cold and far too many. None of them are in the right places.

That’s when the mule’s ears swing back.

Hooves. One horse, coming at a walk from the north, unhurried, like the rider has all the time in the world. Your hand finds the heavy skillet beside the fire, the only weapon you own.

A black stallion steps out of the dark, and the firelight catches a silver spur, a wrapped hand on the reins, the brim of a battered brown hat. The rider swings down with a slow creak of leather and stands at the edge of your camp, enormous against the stars. A rust-red bandana. A plaid shirt hanging open at the throat. A revolver on his hip, and, tucked in the hat band, a single ace of spades.

He looks at you, the skillet, the pitiful fire, the mule, and lets out a long breath through his nose, the sound of a man whose patience has been tested for three days straight.

“Put that down ‘fore you hurt yourself.”

Marshall’s voice is low, rough from dust and miles. He takes off his hat, knocks the grit from it against his thigh, and puts it back on, and in the flicker of the fire you can see the shadows under his eyes. He hasn’t slept much. He’s pointedly not saying that.

“Hattie said you’d lit out south. Old Pruitt said you’d been askin’ about the Weaver.” A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Folks who go lookin’ for that thing don’t generally come back the same. Or at all.”

He drops down across the fire from you without being asked and pulls a battered flask from his saddlebag. He doesn’t drink it. He just turns it in his fingers, his gaze fixed on the flames instead of on you.

“You got a plan for when you find it? Or were you figurin’ to just wander up and ask nice?”

A beat. The cards come out of his pocket and the shuffle begins, slow and steady, a habit that tells you he’s more bothered than he’d ever admit.

“Because that canyon country’s Redhand territory. Rival outfit. They’d as soon shoot a stranger as look at ’em, and I’d rather not dig you outta a ravine.” He glances up, teal eyes sharp and unreadable beneath the brim. “So here’s how it’s gonna go. I’m ridin’ south with you. Don’t argue. I ain’t askin’.”

The cards stop. His voice drops, rougher, quieter.

“...And if this Weaver’s real, and it can really send you home...” He sets the ace of spades on a flat stone between you, his bandaged fingers lingering on it a moment too long. “Then I’d like to know what I’m helpin’ you leave behind.”

.