Jesse is awoken at dawn by a warm and furry shape nuzzling against his arm, pawing at him and waking him without much gentleness to a cawing of cocks and a thin light the color of steel rising in the distance. Jesse rubs at his tired lids, looking around disorientedly until he settles his gaze on the cat as he stands there, pumpkin colored and with proud green eyes. He gives a soft mrow and Jesse smiles as he strokes the scraggly head of the beast, looking about and seeing his brother already awake and preparing coffee over the relit dregs of the fire.

“New company.” Morgan says dryly. There around them the rest of The Band stirring awake, Sunny already with a grin across his face to match the cats as if waking from some wonderful dream possibly of lustful tint. There Jesse sees Arthur is also awake, speaking to a tall and wiry shape in the shadow of the abattoir that Jesse presumes to be his father. Looking closer he realizes the pair do have striking resemblance, the father almost a grown clone of the son sharing the same blonde hair, pale eyes, and round face, the only distinction the traces of color like quicksilver across said hair. The Elder Slaughterer looks across and meets Jesse’s eye with something approaching coldness, and Jesse tosses him a wave which he responds to tersely.

“I don't think he likes us here.” Jesse says.

“We aint on his property, so what does it matter?” Duncan says with a scoff.

“Don't matter a lick. He wants to come evict us he can come do it and I might shoot him dead on the spot for the attempt.” Sunny jests, pouring himself a cup of the thick and rich coffee into tin cup and drinking at it with grimaced lip. The Slaughterer Elder and Younger go about conversing for another long moment painted there like chattering puppets in the gray-gold dawnlight until finally The Elder comes and walks up to The Knights with one hand in the pocket of his coveralls and the other on a long cigarillo plucking out of his dry mouth. He comes to a stand on the other side of the fence stretching his lanky arms over it and giving The Knights a nod.

“Howdy.” Says he.

“Howdy.” Say The Knights. The Elder looks to their pot of coffee and nods at it.

“You brewing coffee there?” He says rhetorically.

“That we are. Want a cup?”

“I could do with a cup. Say, what business you lads off on?”

“Business of The King. Headed to the outer territories on a peacekeeping dispatch.”

“So you are knights.” The Elder says as he kneels by the fire and relights his cigarillo there amidst the embers before a moment later chucking the stub into the ashes where it burns and grays like a thick and flaming ashen serpent.

“That we are.”

“All five of ye?”

“All five of us.”

“Why, ain't that something. Must be quite a mission yer on sending five knights.”

“Nothing we can't handle. Territorial dispute, is all.”

“Those are a hell of a thing. Had one with our neighbor over Easterly and a man got killed over it. Raising pigs takes more space than one’d think.”

“You raise em as well as slaughter em?”

“That I do. Better business that way I've figured.”

“Aye. I’d pay good money to see inside one of them slaughterhouses.” The Elder chuckles.

“Well, ain't too much to see in there, at least not for the weary eye. Death and dying, and that ain't nothing special.”

“Especially when it's pigs.”

“I guess so. Say, this coffee is fine.” Morgan smiles thinly and proudly.

“Say, mister, could we see inside before we go on?” Sunny says with a glint of excitement in his eyes.

“Well, I suppose so. You bunch seem finer than ye did at first glance.” Jesse furrows his brow.

“Good shootists too, evidently.” The Elder says, pointing off at the bush where Morgan has dumped the mangled bodies of the rabid hounds, already swarming with flies black and numerous.

“We pride ourselves on it.”

“I reckon that's a fair thing. My name's Tommy, if it’d please ya to make my acquaintance.”

“That it would. I here am Jesse and my fellows here are Duncan, Sunny, Giles, and Morgan.” The Knights nod peaceably.

“Right fine to meet ye.”

After the coffee is finished and the pot cleaned out with canteen water and restowed on the mule Tweed, the contingent of seven and one pumpkin colored cat walk through the weed strewn field to the rusted side door of the abattoir which Tommy opens with a brass key, leading them in out of the sunlight into a land where only blood shines.

There laid before them as they enter the dusty light streaming through the abattoir windows a grim tableau of life and death rendered in pig flesh, a pink and bloodsoaked procession of killing in this workshed of slaughter. All asquealing and shining like jelly beans of perfect pink the shoats and swines and bull hogs lined up on the far wall stomping about in the mud and feeding from their slop trays, looking out of dark beasts eyes to the scene of their brethren slaughtered or being slaughtered in front of them. Conveyor belts manned already by workmen in the early dawn, pigs shepherded from the outside into the pens and then into the shining knives of their killers where their throats are cut and blood spilled forth onto the mud in death gurgles of crimson, their bodies then hung and the last dredges of sanguine life mopped away and dumped into a great drain where it is emptied out to one river or another somewhere far off and unseen. Once they are exsanguinated and skinned and butchered at the Eastern end of the building their spare parts are fed into meat grinders and then promptly refed into the slop trays of the hogs, providing a grim cannibalism uncontemplated by those beasts with their greedy snouts and teeth chomping there. The usable meat is carved into its cuts and put into two great and whirring refrigerators where it awaits shipment out on an ice wagon, presumably headed therefore to Dullwater or Greenrun or other smaller settlements far away from the place of its death and butcher.

“Ain't nothing special but it keeps us fed and happy.” Slaughterman Tommy says, nodding out at the work with great pride as before them a bull pigs throat is cut by great butchers blade and its blood spills forth onto their boots. The Cat licks at the spilled blood with great greed in its green eyes, a by nature carnivorous beast suddenly presented with a feast to quell its thirsty tongue.

“You got much in the way of family asides your son?” Sunny asks.

“That I do. Prettiest wife you done ever seen and four sons excluding him and one daughter too.”

“Sounds a wonderful life out here.”

“I reckon it is, better than most men that is. A stable living is all one can ask for these days, even if it gets a bit trite some days.”

“Amen.”

They are off and onto The Road within the strike of the hour of seven, the sun rising in not quite orb shape off in the West, climbing in the sky dreary clouds of pale and looming rain puncturing through them pinholes of light like many count and watchful eyes. They travel in double file with Morgan bringing up the rear and leading along the mules on the progressively narrowing road, turning into nothing but a weedy median strip in this backcountry between high city and low town. They travel in that way for three nights and nigh four days, along the way seeing many a strange sight in this framed and pastoral land.

At noon of the first day they come to The Old Woman and The Donkey. They hear her cries before they see her, great and ringing wails through the thicket of pines The Road has careened into, echoing along those trees like the howls of some unfortunate and forgotten banshee and the only sound in the deadly hot day. The Knights reach for their guns but Giles wards them off from such, raising a pale hand and furrowing a black brow as he peers around the bend to try and find the source of such a horrible noise.

“Just some old crone, I think.” Giles says.

“You certain?” Sunny asks.

“Nearly.”

“I've heard of bandits using old women as bait so travelers’ll stop and they can rob em.”

“Have them guns ready then, just in case.” With a chorus of nods Giles leads them around the bend in single file, hands itching for guns and relaxing when amongst the treeline and down the road there is no sign of movement. Standing there the victim of some phantom misfortune The Old Woman, white and wrinkle skinned and dressed in shawl and head wrapping with one hand on the lead of her donkey, a tiny and frilly dressed thing all donned in a costume of white and lace like some bestial wedding ornament. It stares up to The Knights with frightened eyes and bucks, nearly taking the old womans head off in the process as its hooves come inches from her face.

“Woah now.” Duncan says, approaching the creature while shushing with nervous eye. Meanwhile Sunny walks to The Woman and wrestles the lead from her hand, pulling her away from the beast bucking like a bronco and kicking up a dervish of red dirt.

“Woah!” Duncan says, throwing his great and thick arms around the creature and finally managing to wrestle it to stillness by grabbing its rear legs while sweat beads across his hairline. The Old Woman is bawling with renewed intensity, howling and crying with no seeming cause.

“Whats the matter, miss?” Sunny says, wrapping one arm awkwardly around the woman as she raises her hands to her face. Jesse looks to Morgan and Giles and in their eyes all similar looks of confusion at the scene. The woman goes on crying for a long minute perhaps longer before she manages to croak her cause.

“That man.” She says.

“What man?” A new fit of wailing.

“The Patchwork Man.” She says. The Knights look among each other.

“What’d he do?”

“Did he rob you?” Jesse chimes in. The Woman shakes her head vigorously.

“No.”

“What then?”

“Much worse.”

“What?”

“He showed me his cards. And then, with sweet Grace over there.” She points at The Donkey and moans helplessly.

“What’d he do?”

“He raped her. Sodomized her right in front of me.”

“Christ.” Jesse rubs at his red hair and looks off to the treeline.

“Why’d he do that?” Duncan asks.

“Why would I know?” The Woman wails.

“Did he hurt ye?” The Woman shakes her head. The Knights look among each other and only shrug.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Do you need any aid?”

“All the aid in the world.”

“Any we can give ye?”

“I don't reckon so.” The Knights mount up and continue down the road uneasily, leaving the woman there to sob at the back of her apparently violated beast.

That night they camp on the top of a high ridgeline, out on which spilling to one side a forest of pine and scrub and the other a great expanse of overgrown fields of watermelons, beets, and corn. From an abandoned farmhouse of fading cherry red paint on the horizon perhaps a mile off comes a great swarming of bats, rising from their roost with flapping paper wings of noir color and casting long and flittering shadows across the rotted and bloated crops like specters of death over some great and dismaintained graveyard. Joining their swelling comes a flock of doves spread in a V and dissolving into the mass, filing amongst them and forming there in a tornado like dervish of wing and beady black eye a portmanteau of white and black, in their an analogy of one kind or another for life and death as they intertwine and dance with each other like forbidden and strange lovers in swirling and hooping dives and dips. It is to this cacophony The Knights fall asleep, flittering as shadows across their sleeping eyes and cast in bronze dusklight the beasts as they fly overhead and head westwards, westwards, forever westwards on the breeze ablowing and arolling across those pastoral lands.

It is only the next day that they come to meet The Drifter. The morning and early afternoon spent riding in thin line across weedy gravel and dirt track as it rolls low and long over short nosed foothill and past tin can houses ramshackle in build and populated by dirty and ill clothed forms watching them with a dim emotion vaguely approaching curiosity. One of said forms offers Sunny Miller a half quart of whiskey to which he gladly accepts and tucks away in his pouch.

“Hey, you ought to pay me for that.” The Dark Eyed form calls after him.

“I ought to.” Sunny says, sparing no glance back.

Past rising scarecrows with outstretched arms spaced apart and doing little to guard off the black and numerous crows in their black eyes a corvid intelligence as they preen at the mules and caw at the passing men. A great flock of them rustles up from the carrion remains of a yote and spreads off to the cloudy sky grown more ominous and grayer by the hour, promising almost certain summer storm in its faint electric cracklings of lightning. Signatures of detritus and littered life on the roadside, tin cans and castaway clothing and lying there as the hour passes noon even a white bleached and grinning human skull long since picked clean by maggot and scavenger.

Up over a rise wherein they can see distantly the rising steepled roofs poking amongst pine like cavities in teeth the shapes of Greenrun, and before that below in the valley a wide forest of green top and trees both deciduous and coniferous in nature, all blowing equally in the wind and swaying carrying within them a hint of something ominous. Down and into that valley they ride in file five horses, five young men and two mules to bring up the rear accompanying them a scattered and stray dog of hairless and black shape. All of this scene seeming a faint omen of death, unsettling and frightful to the heart.

Through a corridor of tall and crooked trees standing as spindly fingers of some strangling giant, all around a chill as the wind begins to billow and blow its currents and ebbs growing stronger and stronger until it is almost certain the sky will break. Already The Knights fastening about themselves their heavy and black rain coats, tying the straps and pulling them across their athletic bodies with great and spindly motions like a line of black and mounted spiders readying to be washed away down the earth's gutter. Their shadows long and marching behind them in the faint and white sunlight as they come to the clearing.

The clearing stands almost perfectly round and fenced in by pine like a coliseum, all on it’s floor of brown and red clay dirt the litterings of ancient killings and passings of beast and man alike, scattered bones of mice and greater beasts such as elk and bears and amongst them the long ashed fires of man and pilgrim and scattering of debris from said passerthroughs. No verticality save in the center a single stump of an apple tree, upon which sits The Drifter.

He seems to The Knights as they fan out uneasily with hands on guns one of the strangest sights they have seen in their young lives, a man of upmost peculiarity and much more than minimal charm. He stands tall and pretty dressed in clothes at first sight rags and at second sight almost strange sorts of abstract artworks rendered in patch and stitch, long and billowing in the breeze a long coat of said make and a broad brimmed hat of dusty edge and brown leather, below it all a pair of great brown boots on which are emblazoned in the cow hides visages of hissing serpents and rolling meadows of apple groves. His face almost unnervingly beautiful, of dark hair falling about the ears, emerald green eyes, and milky pale skin covered with farmboyish freckles seeming like his coat a fixup of assorted features piecing together to create something undoubtedly appeasing to the eye. From his mouth dangling a long cigarette clasped in white teeth and blush lip, and on that face a wide grin like a wry coyotes.

“Howdy.” The Drifter says.

“Howdy.” Jesse says, fixing at his hat with a thin ream of sweat forming across his brow. The Drifter produces from some unseen pocket of his coat a pipe of pale ivory not looking like that of an elephants tusk, begins to put tobacco into its chamber. From his sleeve he drops a match into his hand which he lights upon his teeth, and he begins to smoke.

“You’ve heard of me, I take it?” The Drifter says. His voice of a strange accent, not placeable on any of the rims of The Kingdom or foreign country, but rather the tongue of a well traveled man, a rolling and fine creole tint between all these environs, mongrel in nature.

“That we have.”

“And what did you hear? Come closer now, so I can hear you well.” The Knights look among each other and stay where they are.

“We’re just fine right here.”

“Are you?” A long silence and then The Drifter grins a white toothed grin.

“Have your way.” He says.

“We met an ole lady back down the road a day, and she spoke of you.” Duncan says.

“And what did she say?” Duncan spits.

“She said you had raped her donkey.” The Drifter laughs, a rising and warm sort of sound across the clearing, sounding something near trustworthy.

“Many tell tall tales. I did no such thing.”

“And who are we to believe you?”

“And who are you to believe her? I have finer tastes than beasts of burden, I can assure you. I did sleep with a bride soon to be wedded only yesterday, but she was no donkey. Though she looked like one.” A small and involuntary smile creeps across Jesse’s face.

“And all that is to say, young knights, don't believe everything you hear. Now, if you really would come closer, we could make acquaintance.” Jesse looks out to his fellow knights and eases his horse closer to The Drifter until they are perhaps six or seven yards apart. The others follow close behind until they form something of a cinquet council around the patchwork fellow.

“And my name, if it bothers you to know it, is not as some would say. It is not The Drifter, it is not The Scarecrow Man, it is not Patchwork Jim, it is, despite all the tales say, simply Cain. Elijah Cain, if the preliminaries bother you.” The Drifter pauses to take a long drag from his pipe, points up to the clouds as they lay there billowing in their gray forms like devilish and ephemeral sheep.

“Nimbostrati, if it would care you to know, and brewing with lightning. Sometimes in the Western lands where you are headed lightning moves along the ground with no cloud at all. Great big balls of the stuff, the devil eyes the locals call them.”

“And how do you know we’re headed to the western rim?”

“As that’s where this road heads, doesn’t it?”

“And your names, as I've heard on the wind, are Duncan Briar, Giles LeClerc, Sunny Miller. And, of course, the twins there, Morgan and Jesse. distinguishable by that long scar across Morgan’s cheek.” Sunny reaches a hand down to his gun and is stayed by Morgan.

“Now how would you know that?”

“I know a great many things.” A great silence between the strange woodlands congregation as the five knights sit there on horseback around this odd sage.

“You're no good, mister.” Sunny says in his eyes something grave.

“Some say. I reckon you’ll find you need me sooner rather than later, however.”

“And what business do you have with us?”

“None at all. Not yet.”

“Then how are you so certain you’ll have business with us?”

“As I said, I know a great many things.” Sunny shakes his head and rears his horse out of the group, begins to ride down the road. Duncan follows first with the mules, then Giles, then Morgan, and finally Jesse.

“Remember me, young knight.” The Drifter calls out to him. Jesse does not look back.

That night four of the knights sit around their campfire in jet silence, solemn and each with the mechanisms of their mind high and whirring. A strange feeling of paranoia permeates in this neck of the woods, seeming to climb amongst the trees and shine there in the eyes of the crows and raccoons and fowl, as if there is some taunting and wicked force casting a veil over the whole domain. The lightning now lighting off purple and vivid amongst the blanket of clouds, a dry cannonade of thunder ringing through the alleys and corridors of pine and the dry shiver of new weather traveling down the spines of the knights. Sunny lays away from the group, supine across the bed of an ancient and long since defuncted wagon perhaps belonging once upon a time to some band of traders or another. He looks up to the streaks of lightning like electric arteries with his dark eyes, in his hand there and clutched against his chest a heart shaped locket on the back of which is engraved “Love, Isabella”.

He undoes the brass hold and looks upon the photograph inside, tiny and rendered in faded black and white, of a girl one day he hopes to make his wife. She sits there in the photograph at his side, blonde haired and blue eyed with wide smile and Sunny’s arm around her with a similar expression. He sighs, closes the locket, then closes his eyes.

The next day more riding, the wind so strong that they begin to smell and hear the scene of town life in Greenhorn on it, a thin drizzle beginning to fall all while the storm threatens and taunts to break. Jesse looks up to the rearing cloudfronts clashing against each other like some ancient and pagan gods of storm at war, whistles.

“Must be one hell of a storm if it's waiting this long to break.” He says.

“Must be.” Sunny says.

“Reckon we’ll get to Greenhorn before it bursts?” Giles says, turning amongst his fellows for an answer. They only shrug.

“If God wills it.” Morgan says.

“God ain't gonna will it.” Sunny says. Just then a splatter of a raindrop on Sunny's brown-blonde brow. He raises a hand to it and holds up a wet finger with a smile across his face.

“Spoke of The Devil you did.” Duncan says. More raindrops falling now, quickly escalating to a downpour and then a torrent as The Knights dismount and scramble for cover amongst the pines.

“Goddamn.” Jesse says as his hair falls wet onto his face, holding his hat as it clatters and jumps with rain. Looking around desperately for some sort of cover as a cannon shot of thunder and a lightning flash jumps not even a mile away from them, startling in intensity. Duncan points then to a far off outcropping of rock which at first appears to be unremarkable but upon a further glance seems to harbor a cave, demarcated by a thin and cragged mossgrown entrance.

“Over there.” Duncan says calmly, shaking his hat loose of rain as his clothes begin to stick to his semi-giants form.

“Duncan you sharp eyed son of a bitch.” Sunny says with a grin, patting his fellow on the back as Morgan rushes forth with the horses and donkeys. There they make their way in a congo line of soggying and dripping forms like a band of unfortunate stormswept mice to the entrance of the cave, filing inside through the thin entrance shifting and ducking so they can fit. Inside there is a hollow clunking of thick raindrops casting their echoes through the caves roof and entrance, a steady dripping of water through the cracks there. Morgan struggles to light a match sending sparks and brief shivers of light across the walls until he succeeds, there leaping their small and lifegiving glow in Morgan's hands as he brings it about to one of their lanterns. They can hear behind the rain the sounds of each other's breath both horse and man, vague shadows of fog rising from their sources and wisping and disapparating in the small light. The lantern is lit and the cave illuminated, the faint stench of burning whale oil rising as the knights look about the place with great intrigue.

The cave consists of one large and domed chamber large enough to harbor perhaps threefold their party, its limestone walls covered with mosses and lichens and running with dampness and small rivulets of water, and from there towards its back stretching thinly down and away an A shaped passageway of natural construction. All across the floor traces of past camps, cans of food and ash of long forgotten fires, bones of small animals and even the skeleton of a great bear.

“Let's kick us up a fire. Damn cold in here.” Sunny says. Giles and Morgan set about constructing a fire from their limited store of carried kindling and with walls made of ribs Giles breaks off from the bear skeleton, while Sunny and Jesse head back into the cave and Duncan looks up from the caves entrance to the ominous cloud ceiling trying in vain to figure out when the torrent will stop.

Sunny lifts before them their lamp and Jesse leers over his shoulder as they crouch to move through the passageway, running his hands along the walls and feeling there slimy growths of lichen weirdly appealing in their sensation. They find the passageway stretches down quickly as well as veering slightly leftwards, seeming soon to almost spiral downwards like the staircase of some great castle.

“What made this thing, do you wonder?” Sunny asks.

“God, probably.” Jesse says. They see coming up the passage a faint hint of light, and Morgan stops at the forefront. They stand there in silence and Sunny turns to Jesse with wide eyes, turning back when they hear a kicking of rock and a snorting of man from the end of the cave.

“Howdy.” Jesse calls, the echoes rendering the sound near incomprehensible as it bounces up and back over the walls. A faint and sickly sounding breathing comes up the passageway and Sunny pulls his gun, clicking down the hammer.

“Travelers?” The Voice calls, cracked and old.

“Yer. We travelers.” Sunny calls. A joyed hooting from down the passageway. Up and into their lantern light comes one of the strangest men Jesse has seen in his short life, a ragged rumplestiltskin of a hermit all dressed in rags with dark and gray struck hair perched beneath a ridiculous tophat of ash color. He stands hunched and grinning a wide and yellow grin, staring at the knights with crazy blue eyes and twiddling his spindly and crack nailed hands in front of him.

“Travelers? After all these years?” He says, sticking a hand to Sunny’s face as Sunny pulls away and quietly holsters his gun.

“Yer, travelers.” Sunny says uncomfortably. The Hermit claps and looks to Jesse, attempting also to touch his face to which Jesse shifts away with a grimace.

“Don't do that now.” Jesse says. The Hermit smiles and brings away his hand.

“It's just I aint seen a new face in nearly three years, I haven't.”

“You live here?”

“Right down there.” The Hermit says pointing down the spiral passageway. Sunny shifts on his feet.

“Alright then. We’ll be back to our camp now.”

“Wait. Don't leave me yet.”

“It's getting late now.”

“Can I supper with ye?” Sunny grimaces slightly.

“I suppose so. We’re right up there waiting out the storm.”

“The bear moved out?”

“The bear died a long while ago.” The Hermit scratches at his head.

“I figured. Ain't heard her growl in a while.”

The six sit around the fire passing around Sunny’s half quart of whiskey, amber bottle and murky fluid glimmering in the light and smoke rising up and out of the chamber through a small hole in the ceiling. The taste acrid and feeling like slick fire as it drops down Jesse’s throat, his head quickly dulling and the voices quieting. The Hermit takes a long swig of the stuff gulping it down greedily, grinning a gap toothed grin as he wipes at his lips.

“Wooo boy. Been a long goddamn time since I’ve had me some whiskey.”

“Use the Lord's name well.” Duncan says. Morgan smiles slightly.

“Lord this Lord that. Good whiskey is better than God.”

“This whiskey ain't even all that good.” Sunny says.

“To me it is. Had nothing to drink but rain water for three years.”

“You left this here cave?”

“Nah sir. Wouldn't dare it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there was this here bear.” The Hermit motions to the grinning and white bleached bear skull with its ursid frame and canines still flared out and snarled.

“But he's a couple years dead ain’t he?”

“Well. It seems so.” The Hermit takes another long drag of whiskey in his eyes sparkling something wild.

“But I didn't realize that.”

“Oh.” A shifting of haunches around the fire, Duncan coughs.

“And, anyways, there's all sorts of no good folk out here in this country.”

“Bandits?”

“Yer, harriers. But all other types too. Traffickers, slavers, cannibals and such. Even blacks.” Duncan rubs at his mouth.

“Where at?”

“All around I reckon. I've met some of them myself. Dined with em even.” Jesse meets eyes with Giles.

“You seen a man dressed in patchwork?” The Hermit frowns, furrows his brow.

“Dressed in patchwork? Was he real tall, kind of fine about the face?”

“Yer, that's him.”

“Yeah, I've seen him. Met him right before I came down into this cave. Seemed a peaceable enough fellow, read me some tarot cards for free.”

“What did those tarot cards say?”

“Oh, I don't remember. One of em showed a bear on it that much I can say.” The Bear's skull seeming to grin wider.

“Funny coincidence. I don't believe in fortune telling myself but the folk who do it are always good company.”

“You say?”

“I say.”

“Why don't you believe in it?”

“Just don't see the point myself. Why would you want to know the future?” The Hermit takes another drink.

“Nothing good lives in the future.” He says.