Flitterings of feverish semi conscious like silver strands there through the mind of Jesse Black, nightmare drawls of morphine and the torture of the burns waking him and dragging him back to sleep, time passing in no sense at all. He awakes and sees he is in what seems to be an abandoned barn, visible faintly through his unbandaged but smokebit eyes, rains of September dripping through its eves. Watching him there the eyes of a crow of perfect snow white, pale as its body and with the same avian elegance. Perhaps it pities him. Asleep again.

Dreams, perhaps fever memories, of Dullwater. A dozen pigeons all lined up there on the telegram wire of the training courtyard, there the knights lined up five in a row, fresh faced now at only twelve years of age. Behind them The Mentor, Ishmael Cortland standing in pale and yellow toothed bulk. The pigeons there big and of pearlescent feather watching from innocent bird eyes as the knights load their rifles.

“There’s no more noble art than killing. No more Godly act.” Ish says, in his hands as he watches the young knights a cup of swirling black tea of finest import.

“Death is the equalizer, and you are the equalizing. Death is the return to the natural state, the return to the ashes we all come from. God makes life, but man makes death.” A ream of sweat across Jesse’s brow there even in the pissing cold of December. The clicking of training rifles being armed.

“So, equalize.” Five shots there, five pigeons disintegrated. No blood, just a poof of feathers and they are vanished. Returned to their maker.

Awake again. Looking up to the face of Giles LeClerc there, bit lip and worried eye, bandaging him. Jesse tries to say something what he is not sure and he falls unconscious again.

Visions of the mother and father incarnate, the poverty bound patriarch and matriarch of the Black family. The faces of a man named Abel and a woman named Isabella, so pristine and happy here. Springtime in some backwater park or another, watching the ducks there. All three of the Black children sitting there on the grass, looking out onto the water. His mother running a hand through his hair. It was all so good. Until. Well, until.

He awakes again. Seeing there Morgan cross legged in front of him, looking up to the eves of the barn. The Merce family there on the far end, stretched around their own patriarch as he is spread eagled there on the floor, convulsing in jitters and spasms violent and skeletal. Jesse raises one finger and finds the cost of doing so great, dropping quickly his hand to the floor.

“Got hit by a bullet. Filled with rat poison.” Morgan shakes his head. Jesse can see in his pale eyes tears.

“Ye’ll be alright, you know.” Jesse tries to shake his head but the movement causes him to fall unconscious, blackness of false sleep rising up and pulling him down, down, down.

Feverish nightmare there of The Dark Tower, rising up from its tarot card to reality, presented there in the shadows of the mountains and on a field of ash and lightning. From that field blooming out roses of impossible scarlet. Even through the veil of dreams a terror striking the heart of Jesse Black. In its grasp a pull, a desire, a premonition of journey to that Tower. What lies there at the top, he wonders? What lies there at the top, oh he must know.

Awake again. The morphine run out, almost blacking out from the agony, eyes wide. He reaches a hand to the bandages there and it comes back gauzy. He wonders very succinctly if he will die, decides he wouldn't mind. He looks up and sees Giles there, preparing another vile of morphine.

“I’ll die, won’t I.” Jesse croaks, his voice charred by smoke, every word more painful than the last.

“You won’t die just yet.” Giles says. He scoots up to Jesse’s side, puts a hand into his red hair and thumbs a lock of it, stroking it smoothly. The sensation vaguely distracting from the pain.

“And how do you know that?” Jesse says. He sees over in the far end of the room Monty Merce dead, wrapped in bedsheets and at his side his children wailing, all their bodies covered in bandages as well but none quite as bad as Jesse.

“It ain't yer time yet, that's why.” Jesse reaches a hand up to Giles shoulder and leaves it there. Giles leans in and kisses him on the unburnt side of his forehead, the feeling of his lips smooth against the skin, and then Jesse is back under the veil of unconsciousness.

Awakening again, this time being carried out across the plains on a makeshift stretcher of spare shirts and two repurposed planks. Duncan on one end and Morgan on the other, the whole thing making a strange and lopsided rickshaw as they walk through fields of golden grass. Jesse looks to Duncan and Duncan gives him a weak smile.

“He’s still alive.” Duncan says simply.

“You ain't gonna die. You just ain't gonna die.” Morgan says. Sunny there at the front with hands on guns, far off in the distance a line of buffalo watching him like curious eyed and massive owls. At the middle of their line a bull of perfect snow white fur, snorting at the air. Jesse locks eyes with it and sees its eyes are gray just like his. Down again.

Sometime later to a wagon of pilgrims there on the road, The Knights forming a blockade there as they approach. The covered wagon with tarp of white is laden with goods and remnants of some past life fled, foodstocks and fruits, squashed and green apples and dried jerky and wild potatoes, hanging off of its length and in its bed memorabilia, old family portraits and heirloom chairs and tables, even there a grand piano of onyx wood with its cover jumping and clanging as the wagon makes progress on its rough oxen-pulled suspension. Sunny Miller clicks the hammer down on his pistol, raising it to the air as the wagon comes to a dead halt just in front of them. On its drivers seat a portly man of greasy black mustache and fine pioneers clothing, at his side a spindly woman perhaps a half foot taller than him and of gaunt face. Peering there from the bed a half dozen children all of round face and chestnut hair, looking upon The Knights with awe.

“G’day.” The Black Mustached Man says.

“Gooday then.” Sunny says. He nods to Jesse who lies sprawled across the stretcher there.

“This man needs transport to a doctor. Up in Rumrun.” The Man shifts on his fat haunches, adjusts his gold rimmed spectacles as his pale eyes lock on Sunny’s gun.

“Well, that is where we’re headed. But that man needs a hearse, not a doctor.” The Man laughs and Sunny raises his gun. His wife screams and the children duck for cover.

“Now I said this man needs transport to a doctor. Maybe ye’ll need a hearse if you don't give it to him.” Sunny says. The Man scratches at his oily mustache, fixes his hat.

“Well, I really don’t.” Sunny shoots off the mans hat, sending it flying up and blowing down onto the grass with a bullet hole in its brim.

“Good God. Who the hell are you, harriers?” The Man yells. Sunny grins.

“Something like that.” He says. Jesse is loaded onto the wagon and sees there the half dozen chestnut haired children's faces looking down at him. He gives them a weak smile and then passes out.

He awakens on an operating table, being pried and inspected by a pale skinned and gray haired doctor with enormous and magnified spectacles which render his eyes massive. His brow is furrowed. Jesse looks about the room and sees all four of his fellow knights there, all with worried looks on their faces. He gives them a grin.

“How long since he was burnt?” The Doctor asks, pulling a notepad from his white medical coat.

“What day is it now?” Sunny asks. The Doctor checks a calendar there hanging from the wall, tracing its ink with his finger.

“September the twenty first.”

“Around three weeks then.” The Doctor jumps in surprise.

“Christ! Why didn't you bring him in sooner?”

“We couldn't move him without killing him.” The Doctor shakes his head.

“Well. He must have one hell of a heart pumping in him if he's managed to survive this long.”

“Will he survive a bit longer?” Morgan asks, biting at his lip nervously.

“He’ll live long as any. Trouble is he’ll live looking like this.” The Doctor sighs.

“But, yes, he’ll live. Might have to wear a mask the rest of his life, but he’ll live.” Jesse touches his face there on the bandages.

“I want to see.” He says. Morgan walks to his side.

“Not yet, Jesse. It's bad.”

“I said I want to see.” Morgan looks at The Doctor, who motions at the dusty mirror on the far end of the room.

“It’s time to change his bandages anyway. He’s a free man.” Morgan reaches out a hand to Jesse and helps him up there, Duncan standing by in case he is to fall. He stumbles across the checker tiled floor of mint and white and stand there in front of the mirror, looking at his face on half unburnt and one half bandaged up like a mummy. He begins to unwrap the bandages, revealing more and more of the gruesome mask of his new visage under there.

When it is all said and done he realizes the extent of the damage, the left half of his face there run a vicious raw red, burnt down to sinew and covered with blooming pustules and scar tissues. When he flexes his jaw he winces at the pain and can see his bone moving down there. His eye there, however, untouched.

“Well. Never was too much of a looker anyway.” He says, then stumbles back to the operation table where he closes his eyes and slips quickly into exhausted sleep.

When he awakens again he is in the room of some unknown and grand hotel, laying on sheets of cotton and noir silk patterned with roses of ruby, dressed in fresh clothing of fine white and black cotton. He reaches up to touch his face and feels there the bandages, looks off around the room and sees no one there. Faintly from the adjoining room the running of a bathtub. He closes his eyes and feels through an open window the fresh air of late September, wet and cold petrichor and duff filtering through and rejuvenating him. The pain there on his burns is still terrible, but not unbearable, and his throat feels recovered from the smoke. He sits up and puts one foot gingerly to the hardwood floor, standing up with one hand on the wall to steady him. When he tries to walk he feels as if he is at sea, on legs wooden and atrophied from nearly four long weeks spent in semi-comatic state. He walks to the window there long and covered with thin stretching of silky cobwebs, brushes his hand against it. Looking out he sees the scenes of town life in Rumrun, great ore carts trundling down the streets with foremen at the helm, serpentine mule trains of merchants with brown skinned conductors, whores advertising in the streets dressed in gaudy dresses, the shopfronts abuzz with business in the muddy streets and rained out day. There spread across the streets leaves of red and brown and gold, the signs of new Autumn.

From the bathroom the running of water stops and Jesse turns to the door, startled. Out of instinct he looks for his guns and finds nothing there, shakes his head and the urge is gone. Out of the dark painted door flushed against the green vine patterned wallpaper comes Morgan, wet haired and dressed in white linens.

“Hey, yer up!” Morgan says, his face rendered luminous with a rare smile.

“That I am.” Jesse says, coughs.

“Sit down before you pass out now.”

“Nah, I'm just fine. Just fine.” Jesse says, limping over to the bed and collapsing there.

“Oh Lord, I thought I was gonna die there.” Jesse says.

“Well, you got pretty close.” Morgan says.

“I know.” Jesse sighs.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“What about Florence and the rest? Monty?”

“Monty died.”

“Strychnine bullet. Those bastards.”

“Nasty trick. Poor feller.”

“And Florence and the rest of the Merces?”

“Burnt, but alive. Not as badly as you, but still.”

“Better than dead.”

“Yer one brave son of a bitch, Jesse. I thought.” Morgan grimaces.

“Thought I was a dead man.”

“More or less. You scared me bad, Jesse. I’ve never thought you to be.”

“Brave?”

“No, I've always know ye were brave. The bravest of any of us, and the quickest too. But I’ve never thought you to be anything near heroic.”

“Heroics aint our job.”

“But you just did that very thing.”

“She was too pretty not to save. Say, where is she at?” Morgan shrugs.

“We’ve got no clue. She was watching over you while you recovered for a while, but she left after her pa died. Somewhere in town probably.”

“Her ships gone, half her face gone probably. What the hell is she supposed to do?”

“Aye. It's a fair question. Ye were smitten with her, weren't you?” Jesse laughs hoarsely.

“I suppose I was. I don’t s’pose that’s going nowhere now though.” Jesse says, pointing at the bandages on his face.

“Well.”

“What about the rest?”

“Off hunting the rebels. Across the plains.”

“They got any leads?”

“Just their trails.”

“And when they find them?”

“Shit. I don't know. Kill 'em probably.”

“We ought to bring em in alive. Bring them to justice.”

“I don't know if that's feasible.”

“Maybe not. But I wanna see them when they hang.”

“Hopefully so. This whole town is on the brink, I get the sense.”

“What was that word Monty used?”

“Contentious.”

“Contentious. Yer.”

“Yeah, ye could call it contentious. I see that goddamned eye everywhere, and folks give us funny looks.”

“Like they want to kill us?”

“Some of that. More that they just want us to leave em alone.”

“Shit. It's fair enough, ain't it? We’re not even at Fortune yet, and look how many corpses we’ve left.”

“All for The Kingdom.”

“For good cause?”

“Maybe. Sometimes I wonder myself.” Morgan turns to the nightstand and takes from there a half quart of whiskey, pours out a shot into a ridged shot glass, liquid pouring there like an amber waterfall. He hands it to Jesse. Jesse shakes the glass in his hand and watches the amber whirlpool churn, downs it.

“Good as always.” He says.

“Sometimes I worry we’re getting like Pa.” Morgan says. The two grow silent, looking off out the window, watching buffalo move far off across the plains.

Later that night the pair walk through the streets of Rumrun side by side, cast in orange sunset glowing strongly off over the prairie, casting rays of its light long sunbeams of marigold onto the facaded buildings which line those muddy streets, painted in bright pastels of pink, blue, mint, red, each gaudier than the last and lit up with electric lights flaring bright in the dusk. Buffalo hunters dressed in long cloaks and toting unscoped rifles of high grain and massive barrel, on their varied faces the myriad scars of the ex-soldier. Whores dressed in bright colors nearly neon in shade, violet and pink and verde, on their faces both old and young bright and garish paints glittering like fine ground gemstones. A pair of black skinned street musicians jiving down on a banjo and tin can drum, the sound echoing through the streets as onlookers dance through the mud and toss coins of silver and gold into their collection hat. Seedy cantinas of clapboard along those long and razor straight streets where men whoop and holler, outside their fronts braying mules and shards of glittering glass out there in the mud. Past the sheriffs office out front the hanging stand where two corpses stand swaying in the wind, already graffitied and their boots stolen as they look up through glazed eyes Easterly, away from the sun. On their exposed forearms tattooed there in midnight black the watchful eye.

Morgan lights up a cigarette as they come to the edge of town, passes it to Jesse. The taste of smoke sends a shiver of bad memory down Jesse’s spine and he quickly passes it back, hacking it out into the dry air. There the camps of wandering buffalo hunters set off in lines of white tarps out stretching to the horizon, campfires blazing and laden with bullets heated and forged, powder being laid out and prepared, rifles hanging there with glimmering barrel and inscriptions on their sides names and patterns of hunted beasts, tally marks indicating their skill at killing. The men themselves brown, white, and black of face united amongst them a sort of meanness as they stretch from men very young practically boys to the borderline geriatric.

There in the center of all the tents an enormous pile of buffalo skulls, perhaps ten thousand in number, gleaming and grinning white and swarming with flies. The degree of murder there causes the two young knights halt, standing there in near shock as they look upon the grim pyramid of gleaming bone and dentine, horns standing high and those once noble beasts slaughtered in whole, genocided and their bones stacked here like graveyard trophies. Near there enormous towers of stacked hickory brown hides ready to be shipped out, long lines of drying racks where mosquitoes swarm.

“Good Lord.” Morgan says, whistling. The bovidae skulls there staring at them, seeming almost satanic in scale like a ritual omen of enormous slit eyed goats, Godless pagan murder their only memory of this past life now as they lay there ready for commerce.

“Must be a profitable business.” Jesse says. He looks among the faces of the buffalo hunters and there they look quite similar to his. He takes the cigarette back from Morgan, takes a long drag. They stare upon the scene for perhaps another minute and then wander back to the hotel, this time much slower than on the way out.

That night after the sun has set and the stars are out and sparkling strong under blackest of tourmaline moons, the two brothers sit there in their room in a hotel called “The Grand Fortuner”, a vague reference to Rumruns sister city out across the desert in the West. They pass back and forth the bottle of whiskey, draining away their sorrow with the aid of the devil's drink as they watch the nighttime picaresque pass by beneath them. This town, nearly a city, seems to never sleep its sin continuing on long into the night. Far off the sounds of fornication and much closer some domestic argument which spindles off quickly into a gunshot. Morgan jumps at the shot but Jesse stays still, taking another shot of the whiskey down.

Just then a sound of footsteps coming up the three story stairs of The Fortuner, ragged and struggled and perhaps four sets in total though it's hard to tell. Morgan stands and reaches across to the nightstand where his gun lies, clicks down the hammer and aims it at the door. A faint sound of struggling and grunting from behind the door and then a rapid knocking. Morgan moves towards the door while Jesse shrinks back into the sheets, cigarillo burning fast towards his fingers and pistol drawn in spare hand. Another ragged burst of knocking.

“Who is it?” Morgan calls, crouching and peering down the iron sights of his pistol.

“Sunny, you dolt. Open the fucking door!” Sunny calls from behind the door, clearly agitated. Morgan looks to Jesse and moves towards the door, opening it with pistol still raised. There come in the three gone knights and one captive, all soaked in blood and stinking of acrid steely gunstench.

“Goddamn.” Jesse says, as the knights come into the hotel room and dump their captive rebel hogtied and gagged in ropes onto the floor. Sunny looks up to Jesse and grins.

“Hey, he's awake.”

“That I am. And who the fuck is this?”

“Our captive. Last of the rebels.”

“Last of the rebels who ambushed us at least.” Duncan says, picking up the rebel and dumping him on the bed at Jesse’s side, spilling blood onto the fresh sheets.

“You two can hug it out or somethin.” Duncan says with an insane smile. Jesse jumps up and away from the struggling man dressed in ragged clothes, looking into his eyes ringing with mad insanity. Those eyes, he notices, are a spooky sort of gold.

“Shit. That’s him.” Jesse says.

“Who?” Sunny says.

“We killed his brother back in Greenhorn.” The Rebel pauses a second and then goes into another mad thrashing, face grimaced behind the ropes, his blonde hair rendered roseate with blood and leaving there on the bed driplets of crimson.

“Well ain't that a funny coincidence.” Sunny says, wiping at his mouth. Jesse sees his teeth there are coated in blood.

“Jesus. Quite a fight, was it?”

“Most certainly. Gave us a run for our money but we got 'em.”

“Killed all of them?”

“All of em save this one here.”

“Why’d you keep him?”

“Figured he’d have something interesting to tell us. Help me with these ropes here, tie him up to the posts.” Jesse moves to help untie the man's ropes, Duncan pinning him down with his massive arms while they retie the ropes to stretch the man out amongst the bedposts like some grotesque puppet.

“What, we gonna torture him?” Morgan says, brow furrowed and cigarette discarded.

“That we are. Hand me that whiskey there.” Sunny says, motioning for the whiskey on the nightstand. Morgan passes it to Sunny along with a glass and he pours out a large shot, downs it with a grimace, on his face a massive grin.

“Lord, this is gonna be good fun.”

“Yessir.” Duncan says, in his eyes a similar wickedness. The Spooky Eyed Man there looking at them widely from beneath his gag, mouthing out unintelligible swears and slurs.

“Yer gonna have to speak up now.” Sunny says, drawing his sword and bringing it there to the mans stomach, the needle blade coated with cruel crimson gore. The five knights make around the rebel a circle, the man looking between them hatefully. Sunny draws a long cut along the man's abdomen like a twisting vine and there comes a fresh wave of blood and an attempt at a scream from The Spooky-Eyed Man.

“Gentle now.” Morgan says. Sunny only smiles.

“Don’t kill him fore we get around to questioning.” Giles says, lighting himself up a cigarette. Duncan reaches and rips off his gag in one rough motion, snapping the man's head forward

“You cunt motherfuckers I ought to kill the lot of you royal blood faggot motherfuckers-” The Spooky Eyed Man is silenced by a backhand from Duncan, sending one of his teeth onto the bed. His eyes go wide.

“We got some questions for ye and then we’ll let you go.” Sunny says.

“I ain't answering shit. Help!” The Man screams, and Sunny crawls onto the bed, puts a hand down to choke him, squeezing down on his windpipe there.

“Fuck the lot of you. Killed my friends killed my brother.” The Man says, gasping, as Sunny releases.

“Let's start with names, yeah?” The Man spits on Sunny's face and Duncan restrains Sunny as he reaches for his pistol. The Man's eyes go wide and he grows silent.

“Name.” Duncan says. Giles lowers his cigarette so it's within an inch of the man's throat, glowing the most devilish of oranges.

“Alright. Alright now don't do anything brash with those guns there.”

“Then tell us yer name.”

“Hosea Smith and my brother you killed’s name is Liam.”

“Was Liam.” Sunny says. Hosea Smith spits.

“Alright then. Everytime you don't answer one of these here questions you gonna get a little closer to dead so you best answer them well, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How many rebels are there, in Rumrun?”

“Shit. I dont fucking know.” Giles puts out his cigarette on the man's neck, the muscles straining there and a repulsive smell of smoldering flesh.

“Goddamnit. Maybe a hundred.”

“A hundred?” Giles says, sounding shocked.

“Yer, a hundred fighting men. Plus our supporters. Out of what a thousand total?”

“About that from the census. One thousand one hundred an twelve.” Giles says.

“Educated motherfucker.”

“I s’pose. Unlike ye.”

“Yer, unlike me. That’s the problem, you see.”

“You believe in yer cause?”

“Of course I do.”

“Enough to die for it.”

“Of course.” Sunny reaches for his pistol, Duncan once again pulls him back. A long silence and Sunny leans forwards over the man, reaching a hand onto his throat and pressing down there.

“Goddamn. Shit.”

“More questions. How many guns you have, total, from here to Fortune?”

“Maybe five hundred total. I wonder if half of em work though.”

“Old guns?”

“Old as shit. Muskets and blunderbusses, old scatter shooters. A few good rifles.”

“How many is a few?”

“Maybe fifty.”

“Who’s yer leader?” The Rebel laughs hoarsely.

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“We don’t got a leader. The rebellions a peoples democracy after all.”

“What the hell’s a democracy?” Giles says. Hosea laughs.

“Where the people vote. You wouldn't know, would you, patriots.” He slurs the last word.

“God hile The King.”

“God save the people. Yer on the wrong side of history, you know that?”

“And what does it matter, right now, right here?” Sunny says.

“It doesn't. But ten years from now. Fifty years, when my children are around.”

“You got children?”

“Yer. Two boys.”

“We’ll keep an eye out for them.” The Man snaps forwards, biting at Sunny's hand. Sunny draws his pistol and butts the man there square on the head, sending him back with a moan.

“You goddamned bastards. Just kids and they already made ye into murderers.”

“Sure thing. Ain't ye a killer too, doing that to my friend there?” The Man looks to Jesse’s bandaged face.

“We fucked him up good. Goddamn.” Morgan leans over and brings his knife into the mans thigh, there a spurting of blood and from the man's mouth a scream stifled by Duncan.

“Who’s leading the rebellion?” The Man squints his eyes.

“What?”

“Who’s leading the rebellion?”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes, the whole thing.”

“Why, The Piper. Ain't ye heard of him?” A silence. The Man laughs, a croaking and bitter sound.

“Billy Grin. He's a hero, you know. They really never told ye? Do they want ye dead and clueless? Ye’ll die patriots, and for what?”

“For The King. For our home.”

“You think King Peter cares for you? He’s a wicked bastard, he is. The taxes, the hangings, the executions. All while he lives there in his golden palace.”

“I'm getting sick of this.” Sunny says, raising his pistol to the man's head. The knights stand back.

“Now wait a moment.” Sunny smiles as he takes his hand off the triggers, instead whipping the gun around and bringing it down on the man's skull with a sickening thump of cracking bone. Hosea Smith falls back, unconscious and eyes rolling to whites. Sunny runs one stray finger over the man's lips, gently and slowly.

“Give me that whiskey, would ye?” Sunny says, in his eyes something awful.