Wild Arms: The Dee Legacy

By Robin "JChance" MacLachlan

Prologue 3: Blood in the Grass

Anne Hardin patted the sabre on her belt as her horse walked alongside the cattle, and wished she could use an ARM like the compact black machine-pistol that hung on Alan's back next to his sword. Something had had the herd on edge for the last two days. Of course, Alan never had used that ARM in the three encounters they'd had with monsters so far, instead relying on the long, strangely designed sword, improbably long for a one-handed weapon in fact. He always fought dismounted too, unlike the other cowboys on the drive; this, and his profession that he didn't know who he had originally been, had predictably led to jokes that he thought he was that other Alan, the legendary First Bird, Migrant King Smithee, of almost a thousand years ago. There was something about him that almost could have made her believe it; his ageless look, his odd blue-silver hair, the way he never seemed to tire even after a fight or a long day's ride, or the way he seemed to be able to see father than the trailboss's spyglass.

Speaking of which--he was standing up in his stirrups now. He never did that unless he saw something. “Boss?” Alan's voice didn't sound like you'd expect from a cowboy, or any Wanderer--he sounded like an Adlehyde noble or something, somehow seeming quiet even when he made it carry long distances across the plains. “I see them, the ones who've been following us.” “Yeah?”, the trailboss asked around his cigar, “What kind and how many?” “Five, just like us,” Alan responded, drawing an offended “Six!” from the cook in his mule-drawn cart, “and not monsters. Human.” “Rustlers,” the boss filled in with a note of infinite contempt. As much meat on the hoof as the crew was escorting would have been an unimaginable luxury when Anne was a kid and the plains of high grass between the mountains and Saint Centaur were sere waste, and they'd still fetch almost a million gella if they all made it to the town. A tempting prize for any bandit with the manpower to challenge their herders.

Blades were loosened in scabbards, and the boss unslung the bow from his saddle and pulled an arrow out of his quiver. “They're coming,” Alan announced, “All except for one.” “Confident, huh,” the boss answered. “Y'all know what to do. I figure Alan can handle two if that last guy comes down, so Fred, Tom, you get ready to round the meat back up if they run. Girl, you, Alan, and Jim stay with me. Let 'em come to us.” Anne had stopped insisting she had a name somewhere around the second day after she signed on, and the guys had stopped making indecent comments after she'd punched Tom off his horse for it later the same day. She figured it was a deal.

She couldn't see them coming yet, except for the one who stayed behind making his way up a hill until an arrow from the trailboss made him reconsider it, but she could hear them all right, whooping and shouting as they approached, almost enough to drown out their horses' hooves. Sure enough, as the noise got louder, the herd broke away in the opposite direction, a thundering, lowing mass, and Fred and Tom rode off to recollect them. Then the bandits burst out of the grass, and the battle was joined. Sword clashed on sword, aimed as much at the horses as their riders. Except in Alan's case; he had jumped down from his animal, and was indefatigably driving back first one, then two of the attackers with long strokes of his gleaming blade. Anne's opponent, although he couldn't have been more than sixteen, was easily her equal, riding in with single strikes that she barely parried then turning his mount away before she could return the attack, and looping around to come from another direction. The boss had backed his horse away and was now lining up for a clear shot against the final enemy, who, with a short, straight sword hardly suited to mounted fighting, seemed to be holding steady against Jim.

This changed, though, when the boss loosed another arrow straight into his horse's chest--the animal and rider fell together, and the bandit, finding his leg pinned under a dying horse and a sabre over his head, dropped his weapon and offered no further resistance. Anne, meanwhile, tracked the boy facing her as he made another looping approach, feeling her mind and body beginning to become one, become what her old swordmaster had called Force--a rocksteady certainty that overrode the twitchy intoxication of adrenaline. Her opponent didn't seem to be so much coming slower as coming more clearly, and it suddenly seemed easy to slash at his hand before he even began to bring his blade down, drawing a loud yelp from him--he'd probably, at his age, never been wounded before--and sending his blade down into the trampled grass. Anne couldn't help letting out a whoop of her own as she followed up by unhorsing him with a swift kick to his midsection, then dismounting to hold the point of her weapon to his throat.

She looked back to see how Alan and the boss were doing. The slim Wanderer with the improbable sword was still backing his two opponents away, almost as if he were toying with them rather than trying to finish the fight, but his eyes were elsewhere--on the hill the lone bandit had been ascending before. He was now securely at the top of it, though not for long, it seemed; the boss was already drawing his bow again. However, there was something long in that rider's hands, and Alan identified it before Anne did. “ARM! Boss, get--” There was a crack, and a streak of light, and the trailboss rocked back in his saddle, blood starting to flow from a glowing-edged hole squarely in the centre of his chest. A clean heart shot. He tumbled backward from his steed, the arrow uselessly zipping into the air. For once Alan seemed taken aback, and one of the men he faced managed to slice into his shoulder. Bizarrely, the blade seemed to come away chipped, and its wielder lost his head a moment later, to...not Alan's weapon itself, but an enormous arc of red light that had suddenly come to surround it. Then, incandescent plumes like the ones that trailed behind a fireworks rocket sprouted from several places on the sword's--no, the ARM's--thick handguard, and it flew, dragging Alan behind it, towards the lone rider on the hill, the vast light-blade bisecting the dead man's horse and then leaving a gouge in the ground as it passed. Following it with her eyes, Anne suddenly found herself looking straight into the bandit's rifle.

Terror seized her, but it still lay distantly beneath the bewitchment of Force, and, acting on some strange instinct, she raised her sabre away from the boy at her feet just as another light-wrapped projectile erupted from the rustler's ARM. The bullet knocked a piece out of the blade's edge with a ping that would sicken anyone who cared for their weapon, but it was deflected upwards, and Anne lived. The battle-harmony left her, and she fell to her knees, shaking. A moment later, Alan reached the rifleman; the crimson light split him and his mount alike as if they were nothing more than paper, and the rockets cut off. Alan dropped lightly to his feet on the now-bloody ground, the crimson energy blade stretching out a good ten feet to his side. The one man still alive who had, a short while ago, been fighting the ARM-user was now staring after him in mute terror. Once he closed his mouth, he quickly turned his horse and spurred it to a gallop, thinking of nothing but escape. His two unhorsed compatriots struggled to their feet and ran after. For a moment, their hooves and feet were the only sound--then the rockets on Alan's sword roared to life again. He flew after them with contemptuous ease, the light-blade now held sidewise off the ground, cutting down first the runners and then the rider as if he were scything wheat.

He landed again and let the deadly glow dissipate, then calmly resheathed the sword and walked back towards the staring Jim, who, as the Wanderer approached, could barely keep his frightened mount under control. Something was very wrong here. Anne could faintly hear Jim's voice. “They were runnin' away...why...” Alan responded absent-mindedly. “They could have had friends. And we're down one.” He wasn't looking at Jim, though; he was looking at the wound on his shoulder. Something about his intent bafflement made Anne stand again, and come close enough to see. Beneath the tear in his shirt, there was skin, and blood, but at the centre of the wound, there seemed to be something else--gleaming steel. And it could have been her imagination, but the blood that ran slowly from the injury seemed to be shifting back and forth between red and silver. Alan kept staring at it for uncomfortably long. Shouldn't he tend it already? He was still looking, and the strange blood still dripping to the ground, when the other two rode back along with the cattle. They joined in staring--then Alan's face changed.

Somehow, the thoughts and feelings in his mind were suddenly powerful enough that Anne could perceive them almost like her own--Years of confusion, too many memories for one normal lifetime, of playing a hero, trying to make up for a fault he had forgotten. Some of the adventures she recognised--as those of the Migrant King. Then, these thoughts were replaced by far stranger ones. Laboratories of strange equipment, seen through the distortion of water and glass. A gentle-faced man with ears like a lop rabbit's, speaking to him like a father. That same “father”'s disappointment as he looked at a complex weapon with befuddled disgust. Him running away from the laboratory, now seen to be in an oddly rustic village. The disgust and confusion, now risen to outright shock, as he watched beings he considered brothers lay waste to friend and foe alike. The creator one more time, apologetic as he set free a sparkling mist. That mist eating into his flesh, turning it against him, intent burning in it spell-like to neutralise weapons that lived. Tumbling from a precipice, the mist still burning in him--then his mind aligning with it, desperately trying to convince the magical devices that he too wanted nothing so much as an end to war.

Success a moment too late, as he was horribly broken by the impact--then blessed relief as it helped rebuild him, at the cost of memory, forcing all that had gone before too deep to recall except, cruelly, for the guilt that had followed him since his father had been disappointed, and had painedly joked that, as a failed creator, he'd have to call himself “Alan Smithee.” People--human, demon, the fuzzy-eared things--marching to war, over and over again, with a sadness in the memory and a very current anger. It wasn't the metal lives that brought war and suffering, Alan thought, but the organic ones, the animals who thought they were too good to be animals. His head snapped away from the wound--which was now closing itself with a magical rapidity--and towards the cattle. Food on the hoof, to be killed and eaten in a cruel parody of predation, without a chase, without a chance.

The anger only grew through all this--then Alan drew the other ARM from his back. He pressed the trigger and swept it across the staring cowboys, keeping it too high to strike the cattle or horses. Anne threw herself to the ground as it passed overhead, and only this, giving the impression she had been cut down like the others, saved her. Alan's mind was still pouring out irresistibly, but now the cold rage blotted any such subtleties as thought. He turned towards the cook's cart, and fired a couple more shots, carefully. Anne could hear a body drop to the ground. Alan now turned his back and began walking away, mercifully taking the radiating anger with him. Before he grew indistinct, though, she thought she could see him grip the hilt of his other ARM, and both sword and pistol melt and vanish into his body.