Jesse looks into the pile of waxwork where just a moment ago The Fool has stood and sees there a strange black object within the smoldering flesh popping and bubbling. He leans down and uses his boot to clean the remains and clothes of The Fool off of it, sees there a long and hollowed out goat horn, spiraled and curved and engraved across its black ivory with scenes of The Tower, knights with swords raised and roses and The Tower itself there at the end of its length. He picks it up and turns it over in his hands, seeing along its length four rings of red gold gunmetal along which are written inscriptions in an ancient language he cannot decipher. He crouches there a moment longer cast in moonlight and the glinting refractions of the frescos gemstones, and then he hides the horn within his coat and stands.

Up and through the back hallways of the fortress, winding through the red rock. When he looks behind him at the main hall he sees that where the passageway he just traveled through stood there is only a wall of red adobe, flushed perfectly with the walls surrounding. He shakes his head and walks out into the courtyard where the rain has ceased falling, a stillness in the storm where they lie in its eye and the tapestry of the stars visible overhead poking through the clouds. In the center of the courtyard a sole and shadowy figure standing with two pistols ready in his hands, facing out towards the broken down gate and into the night. Jesse walks through the sloshing red mud and comes to his side, halting there and following his gaze.

“What are ye looking at?” Jesse asks, turning to Sunny and seeing smeared on his face a handmade warpaint of red mud and what seems to be blood, crimson and startling along the gaunt lines of his face. In his nose a faint powdering of cocaine, slung from his waist a bottle of whiskey tied with bootstring. Sunny does not respond, his dark eyes only darting out amidst the night and his guns ready.

“Sunny?” Jesse says. He puts a hand on his knife as it’s tucked into his trousers, thumbing the handle of foreign wood.

“They’re out there.” Sunny says.

“Who, Sunny? The riders?”

“Who else. They’re waiting out there. Look real close, Jesse.” Jesse peers, adjusting his eyes, and sees faintly out there eight rifles and pistols aimed with barrels glinting silvery in the moonlight, behind them cruel eyes watching.

“Sunny.” Jesse says.

“I knew they’d come. I just didn’t think this soon.” Sunny says.

“When it lights off it’ll light off quick.”

“It always does.”

“So light it off.” Sunny casts Jesse a grin and Jesse steps away to the side, ducking for cover as Sunny raises his guns and fires off two pistol shots towards the Rumrun riders. The sounds shocking in the calm air and the flashes of their discharge illuminating the courtyard. Sunny screams gutturally, stepping back and running farther into the courtyard as the riders shoot back. Jesse sequesters himself behind the shadow of the open door of the gate, lurking there in a lunatic crouch with knife raised as the riders funnel into the courtyard. The rest of the knights pop out of the adobe frantic faced and wild, Giles and Morgan from the infirmary with pistols raised and firing and Duncan standing on the western wall with a rifle raised.

“Give it up! Give it up and surrender!” A voice calls, one Jesse recognizes as Sheriff Franklin Coleman. He stands at the back of the contingent of riders as they take up volleying formation and shoot the knights into cover, as they do two of the riders falling dead. Creeping low Jesse emerges from behind the shade of the gate and raises his knife, coming around to Sheriff Coleman's back and standing with arms raised, taking him with his knife to his throat and pulling him back into the darkness with a hand over his mouth.

“You bastard.” Coleman says as they crouch behind the door, and Jesse presses the knife down producing a drop of blood. The riders notice not the absence of their leader and stay shooting, numbers whittling down as bullets fly through the courtyard and chunks of adobe are disintegrated in their leaden wakes. A friends bullet flies just over Jesse’s head and burns off a strand of his hair, smashing into the wall behind him and sending fragments of the adobe into his shoulder. He grimaces and wrestles with Coleman to keep him pinned, furious eyes meeting as the riders fall in turn and soon they are whittled down to only one spare man. The survivor turns and begins to run, halting as he sees Jesse with his knife to Colemans throat.

“Frank.” He says, right as a bullet carves a hole through his throat and sends him bubbling blood to the floor. Coleman tries to scream but Jesse muffles him.

“Calm down now and lets be cordial.” Jesse says. Jesse drags Sheriff Coleman to the center of the courtyard, throwing him down there in the mud and standing over him with knife raised as the rest of The Knights come in to form a circle around Coleman with guns readied. The Sheriff looks up to him and spits at his boots.

“Kill me then. Do it right.” Sheriff Coleman says, sticking his hands up and grinning across his grizzled face.

“We ought to.” Sunny says. Morgan there locking eyes with Jesse, both sorrowful in gaze. Therein comes The Drifter, walking to the circle and clearing a spot between Duncan and Morgan with his ringed hands thrumming against his hips.

“You should've done a better job the first time.” Coleman says.

“I never intended to kill ye.” Elijah says. Coleman laughs bitterly.

“Then what did you intend to do?”

“You’ll soon find out. Sunny.” Elijah turns to Sunny and Sunny nods. Sheriff Coleman looks between the two and sneers.

“Your monsters, the whole lot of you. Torturing me won’t make no difference.”

“And what are you? A rebel? A traitor?” Sunny says.

“Does it matter? I serve the innocent and you only serve yourselves.”

“You think yerself a martyr? I know a fate for you, sheriff.” Sunny says, grabbing Coleman by the shoulder and wrestling him up with Duncans help. Giles, Morgan, and Jesse look between each other as they drag him to the other side of the courtyard, Duncan restraining him as Sunny sets about pillaging carpenter’s tools to seal The Sheriffs fate.

There soon produced while Jesse watches in horror two long boards of ironwood, a carpenter’s hammer, and a handful of wicked looking nails. Sheriff Coleman sees the materials coming out and his face goes aghast, his struggle renewed but powerless against Duncan’s strength.

“Sunny.” Jesse says as Sunny puts the boards down and aligns them.

“Sunny be reasonable now. This ain’t right.” Jesse says. Sunny only grinning madly as he goes about his wicked carpentry, nailing the boards together with the adept fingers of the truly hateful. The sun now beginning to rise a bloody red on the horizon, roseate rays illuminating the courtyard in gorey light. The Sheriff screaming desperately as Sunny finishes his crucifix.

“This ain’t Godly.” Jesse says, mouth open in horror. Morgan and Giles only standing back, Elijah smiling slyly alongside them.

“Now, Sheriff Coleman.” Sunny says as he walks over to The Sheriff.

“Drag him out into the yard now. Sheriff Coleman, as I was saying, my father was a farmer. My mother too. Born and raised, and about five generations before them. What was yer father, sheriff?”

“A better one than yers, I reckon.” The Sheriff hisses, thrashing around like a wild dog caught in a trap.

“Maybe so. But my father, Sheriff Coleman, my father was also a preacher. And in his line of work, he preached much about martyrdom. About dying for a cause. So, I ask you.” Sunny now positioning the crucifix against the exterior wall of the fortress, dark wood against blood colored adobe, this desertborne mockery of Christ looking devilish in the dawn.

“What do you die for, Franklin Coleman?” The Sheriff looks Sunny up and down and seems to resign to his fate as he is positioned on the cross, laying there with eyes distant yet heroic as Sunny readies the nails and hammer at his wrists.

“Well shit. You goddamned maniac.” Sunny hammers down the left nail and The Sheriff grits his teeth, moaning with agony and spittle flying. At his wrists as Sunny hammers down blooms of fresh blood against the tanned skin.

“I die for God. I die for the town of Rumrun.”

“For The Kingdom?”

“I don’t die for no goddamn king off in his castle. I die for my people.” Sunny brings down the second nail, driving it into Coleman’s convulsing right wrist. Coleman’s face fails to flinch.

“I die for my wife. For my children. I die so one day perhaps you’ll be smited from this earth, along with the rest of The Devil’s envoys you ride with.” Coleman looks among The Knights and smiles as Duncan raises the crucifix, tipping it against the wall and leaving it there angled towards the rising sun, Coleman hung by his dripping wrists like a leather coated backwater saint.

“And what do you die for, Samuel Miller?”

“I won’t die for nothing.” Sunny says. The Sheriff coughs and then moans in agony, bearing his teeth towards the roseate sun and flashing a replacement of perfect gold amongst the ivory rows.

“Then you won’t stand for nothing neither.” The Sheriff says. It is there that The Knights leave him, crucified and looking Easterly, towards a town that was once called Rumrun.

The Knights there gathered in a grim assembly around the circular table of the main hall of the fortress, all stinking of gunpowder and the stinks of filthy and dying men. Their eyes dark ringed and their faces hollow, darkened by desert sun and worn by wind and looking much, much older than when they departed. Aged from boys to men. Elijah there at the head of the table watching them, green eyes flittering impartially.

A long silence wherein dust is illuminated in swarming speckles through the room’s narrow windows, angelic in the golden light of morning. Elijah leans over the table and wraps his gold ringed fingers on the table. The Knights turn to him and he looks each of them up and down in turn.

“I see a traitor amongst our midsts.” He says. A long pause and then Sunny breaks out laughing.

“And what would make ye say that?” Sunny says, spitting onto the dusty floor of red adobe.

“I, as a thinking man, have been ruminating on the matters of our misfortunes.”

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“Our misfortunes. Not yours.” Morgan says. At his side a makeshifted crutch of fire timber and gauze.

“But I travel alongside you, do I not? So, our misfortunes are one.”

“You don't fight alongside us. Hell, I don’t even know how ye fell into our company in the first place.” Morgan says bitterly. Duncan puts a hand on his shoulder to calm him.

“But you haven’t kicked me away, have you?” A heavy silence and The Drifter again clinks his rings to the table, the sound there emphatic and fate dealing, a sound like a judge’s gavel coming down.

“And what do you provide, for us?”

“The truth. And the truth I say today is that, indubitably, there is a traitor amongst us.”

“And why would that be?” Jesse says.

“Back in Greenhorn, you killed two young rebels, did you not?”

“And how would you know that?” Sunny exclaims, bristling.

“I know a great many things. Birds on the wire tell me many tales, and I have listening ears.” Sunny shifts and motions for Elijah to go on.

“And I believe a contingent followed you there to the outskirts of Rumrun, where you were ambushed.”

“Maybe so.”

“And I ask you then, how would these rebels know you were to travel by river, especially with the riverfolk of whom so many of the aristocracy cast down their eyes?” A silence.

“And then, at Rumrun, how was the sheriff to know we headed West? How was he to know when we were to attack the caravan of pilgrims, down to the minute?” The Knights look among each other now, faces cast with a new emotion-suspicion.

“And therefore I deduce one of us must be an informant, a mole, a spy.”

“And why would any of us do that? Why motivation would any of us have to defect?” Morgan says. At this The Drifter laughs.

“Because you’re on the losing side of a bad war, that’s why.”

The Band departs from The Wayfort at noon, riding atop six stolen horses of piebald and skewbald coat pillaged from the rider’s militia of Rumrun, behind them a train of three smoky haired burros on which they carry as much food, powder, and liquor as they can store within their saddle bags. Jesse’s pistols restored at his side, their rosewood handles and black gunmetal a comfort against his hips as he rides. They travel across the desert for ten days and ten nights, through the flooded valleys, canyons, craters as they dip subterranean and reemerge through the blood colored stone as if traveling through the arteries of some enormous unbeating heart. Around them strange remnants of ancient civilizations alien in their advancement, great and impossible cities of mirror like glass and steel rearing up in the distance like foreign mirages, aeroplanes of aluminum long since crashed and left here to rust amongst this desolate land, the bones of travelers of every country and creed both beast and man cast amongst the rocks and the detritus of man’s hubris manifest. Along the way and underneath the waxing moon of gold like a merchants coin bone chilling and impossible sights, strange dioramas of the bizarre and eclectic.

One morning The Band crests a huge and oblong plateau through its scrabble cliffside paths and come to view stretched out before them Southwesterly a plane of glittering green glass almost impossible in its viridescence, seeming to reflect the sky upwards on its mirror like expanse, perhaps several miles in circumference each way. At its center an enormous crater like that of a fallen star, so deep that its bottom is shadowed by it’s ridge even from this raised viewing point. Jesse pulls his hat over his eyes and squints, pointing out towards the plane.

“Dear God. What is that?” He asks, to noone in particular. Elijah comes to his right side atop his black and white piebalded horse, The Knights fanning out to his left.

“Wreckage of an ancient weapon.”

“What weapon could create that?” Sunny asks.

“A bomb that could harness the power of the sun. A bomb of which the process of creation has been long forgotten, forgotten for thousands of years.” Elijah strokes at his horses mane.

“For now.” He says.

Another night the five sit around their campfire, makeshift thing of kindling and tin cans to hold the charcoal, with the stars above bright and seeming like a tapestry of watchful, judgemental eyes there. They sit apart each with their own bottles of drink and plates of food, among them distrust apparent. Sunny looking the maddest of them all, watching The Knights with their backs turned and thumbing his necklace he has makeshifted of human teeth and the locket of his lover. All these guns seem so tantalizing, the words of The Drifter undeniably truthful.

Sunny takes a swig from his half-quart of whiskey and spits into the fire, the spit so alcoholic as to send up a flare of fresh blue flame.

“Who do ye reckon it is?” He asks. His fellows shift uncomfortably and Duncan coughs into his hand.

“I asked who do ye reckon it is?” Sunny asks, a hint of verbal venom on his pink tongue as the others stay silent.

“Well, shit, I don’t know.” Duncan says. He hesitates.

“I don’t think it’s anybody, is what I think. I think it’s just a.” Duncan turns to look at The Drifter as he sits away from the knights, under the shade of an old and sweeping palo verde. The shadows of the canyon walls play on the faces of the knights, casting them in flickering shades hellish and strange.

“Well, I think he just made it up, is what I think. I think he might be the spy.”

“Then why would he tell us?” Giles says. A silence.

“I got my own suspicions.” Sunny says simply. Jesse scoffs.

“And what would those be?” He says, drinking from a teacup filled with absinthe and grimacing as he locks eyes with Sunny.

“Well. I ain’t too keen on sharing them.”

“Well I don’t care if you aint too keen tell us. We can’t hide nothing from each other so say it plain.” Sunny laughs bitterly.

“It ain’t me, and that’s for certain. I think I’m cleared, given all I’ve done.” Sunny motions to his necklace of teeth.

“And I don’t think it’s neither of the twins. If one of them was a traitor the other would’ve found out, and so I don’t think it could be neither of them.” Sunny grows silent as he looks to Giles and Duncan.

“Well hold on now.” Duncan says.

“I never said anything.”

“Hold on now if yer gonna accuse me of being a traitor.” Duncan says, standing, his huge mass menacing as he bears his shoulders at their full height. Sunny pulls his pistol and clicks down the hammer, aiming dead at Duncan's chest.

“Sit the fuck down.” He says. Duncan stands there a moment longer and shakes his head, sitting back down. Sunny keeps the pistol trained on him.

“I never did say it was you. It could also be Giles there.”

“And why would that be?” Giles says, his voice tired and his eyes moreso.

“Well. Merchant’s son probably ain’t too loyal to The King. Were you even born in the kingdom?”

“Sunny, I was born in Dullwater just like you.” Sunny moves his gun to Giles and Jesse puts his hand on his own pistol.

“We’ve been through everything together, us five. You know that? So don’t go pointing that gun at me and accusing me of being a turncoat.” Jesse draws his pistol in one lightning motion and sticks it to Sunnys head.

“Put it down.” Jesse says. Sunny looks to Jesse and smiles, flashing his white teeth in a wicked cheshire grin.

“Alright then.” Sunny drops his gun slowly, disarming the hammer and laying it there on the red and sootblown sands.

“I did figure you two had something going on.” Sunny says, spitting off into the fire.

“Now what does that mean?” Jesse says, dropping his pistol down to his side but keeping it tight in his palm.

“Well.” Sunny says, and laughs. Duncan and Morgan look between the two with flitting eyes.

“Well what? What are ye accusing us of?”

“Well, I’m insinuating.”

“What are you insinuating.”

“I’m insinuating that the both of you are faggots, is what I’m insinuating.” Sunny says, still grinning and raising his hands in the air. An uproar from around the campfire, both amused and angered.

“And what would lead ye to believe that?”

“I’ve seen the way you two look at eachother, is all. And it ain’t in a Godly way.”

“We do no such thing.” Jesse hisses. Giles clears his throat and everyone around the fire turns to look at him. From beneath the black shade of the palo verde The Drifter watches with emerald owl like eyes. The moon illuminating the party in it’s rays of clearest gold, the embers of their fire flaring on the wind like a malfunctioning factory smokestack.

“And what of it?” Giles says.

“Well, now we got an admission. That seems damning as anything.” Sunny says. Jesse looks at Giles disbelievingly.

“And what does it matter, out here? There ain’t no laws out here besides the ones we make. We’re the ordinators here, and we can make our own rules.”

“The Book governs all.” Morgan says gently.

“And why? Ain’t you seen enough out here to question?”

“To question God?”

“To question everything. The King, the kingdom, maybe God I reckon.”

“That’s reason enough to hang both of ye if we follow the code.” Sunny says. Giles stands and Jesse follows, Sunny then Morgan and Duncan all standing and bristling around the fire.

“Two faggots and a black, ain’t we lucky.” Sunny mumbles. Jesse comes at him quick, crossing with a punch from his right side and hitting Sunny across the jaw. A faint flicker of white as one of Sunny’s own teeth flies out into the fire, sending up a jet of flame there. Sunny staggers into Morgan’s arms and Morgan raises his pistol as the knights step towards him.

“Calm the fuck down or I’ll kill the lot of ye.” Morgan says. A dead silence dropping over the campfire as Sunny looks up at Jesse with a grimace on his face, spitting at his boots.

“Scarred face son of a bitch.” Sunny mumbles. Jesse takes a step forwards and Giles holds him back with an arm, prompting a grin from Sunny.

“I swear to God I will. We’re brothers, you know.” Morgan says.

“We grew up together. How many of us were there, plucked off the streets to become knights?” The Knights shuffling on their feet, breathing hard.

“Fifty-three, I believe.” Duncan says.

“And how many of us are there now? Who made it?”

“Just us five.”

“And what are you saying?” Jesse says.

“I’m saying we can’t afford to be at each other throats. We gotta think this through calmly, or we’ll all be doomed.”

“When we hang the traitor, there’ll only be four.” Sunny says. A long silence and then Morgan lets Sunny go, leaving him standing there and rubbing at his jaw. Morgan drops his pistol steadily and then sits back down by the fire, shaking his head and drinking from his silver flask of whiskey.

“Goddamned idiots. The whole lot of ye. What the fuck are we even fighting for?” Morgan says. A long silence.

“What the hell are we killing folk over? We’re wicked, all of us.”

“Wicked and we’re all goddamned doomed.” he says. Sunny eyes his fellows suspiciously and then walks off to The Drifter while Giles goes the opposite direction, disappearing off into the night. Duncan and Jesse look at eachother and sit down by Morgan’s side, leaving only the three of them there around the fire.

“I think we’re fighting for ourselves, Morgan.” Duncan says. The shapes of Elijah and Sunny talking there under the tree shade like flickering stage actors in the showman’s spotlight of the three quarter dollar moon.

“Just fighting to survive.”

The next morning Giles nowhere to be seen. His guns and clothes gone, horse tracks leading off into the red sand Easterly. Faintly there far on the horizon, heat miraged in aspect, the shape of a rider atop a piebald horse of brown and white, atop his head a broad brimmed hat of black, headed with his back to The Knights. They stand there in a line and watch him go.

“He’s deserting.” Jesse says, puffing from a cigarette and painted by the orange dawn the shade of a harvest moon.

“I told ye he was no good.” Sunny murmurs, turning back and shaking his head.

The Drifter leading them across strange dunes and ancient long dried creek beds, traces of life signifying once upon a time here perhaps some great oasis or delta. Pie eyed and pygmy desert owls watch them by nighttime, the strange faces of suntanned outskirts hermits by day out of the doors of ancient shacks of wood salvaged from wagons and doomed ghost towns, those towns themselves standing up like paper mache mirages along the horizon in pastels of blue, pinks, green stark against the blood colored desert like flares of springtime flowers in this hellscape. As they near the sea in the last days of their journey they come unto volcanic scrabble and calderas still brimming with the heat of magma as if they lead to the pits of hell themself, black glass and scrag soaking the indian heat of the beginning days of October. By night Jesse looks to the stars and the sky where eagles soar and sees within the watchful full eye of the moon traces of his own damnation, reflections of the desert within those craters and frozen seas of Apollo’s berth. The planets beginning to come into alignment starkly visible here, cosmic fate itself ordaining to match the end of The Bands journey eye to eye, Jupiter’s orange and Neptune’s cerulean glow, Mars’s deathly red of a color to match the desert and Saturn’s gold-ringed form like astral jewelry of some forgotten God of those limitless cosmos, all jangling fixed there on the cosmic chain of gravity’s pull and the will of the stars.

They come under a grimoire’s sun like a beating heart to The Valley of Slaves, a cragged fissure like a lightning scar through walls of jet black and glassy obsidian, reflecting their faces like a devil’s mirror as they ride into its berth atop their spooking horses. The path so narrow as to make them go into single file on the scragged path, climbing steadily downwards until only a faint shade of light falls through the crack which opens this valley of the damned to the world. Along the walls of midnight ancient pale graffitos etched with knives, stark and ominous in their archaic messages. The visages of the rebel’s sin seeing eye looking at them in dozens and then hundreds, devilish and damning in their gazes.

“Praise The Piper” One message reads. Besides a broken down wagon and the traces of shattered shackles of steel another reads.

“God freed us, free yerselves next.” Next to those shackles several bleached white skeletons of slave traders. The black glass beneath their horses hooves crunching as they travel through this valley of bone and death, remnants of slaves and traders both turned to ivory dust beneath their clopping forms.

“The slave trade must be good here.” Sunny says from the front of their line, already in his hand a bottle of liquor and in his nose a line of cocaine.

“The aristocrats here have peculiar romantic tastes. Bought tastes, and hardly legal.” Elijah says.

“All of them?”

“Mostly the Whitmores. They’re known for it all the way back to Dullwater among certain circles.”

“Are you a member of those circles?” Elijah only laughs. That night they camp at the mouth of a cavernous and jagged tunnel in which no light shines like a maw into hell itself and which is the only path Westerly. Along it’s pumice floor ancient train tracks stretch off into the gloom, faint chitterlings and clickings of sheathtails and strange howlings of the darkness, unidentifiable creatures like sorrowful damned souls of an oubliette cast to lay in shadow for eternity or a mariner cast to a sorrowful mute drowning at the bottom of a foreign sea.

There visible around the bend of sheer obsidian wall and cast in flickering light of campfire like a grimoire devil a slim shadow watches them, unseen by all but Jesse. His form there holding a burning cigarette and ephemeral in the coastal moonlight of purest blue.