A Stillness of the Sun (Crowmakers: Book 1): A Science Fiction Western Adventure Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Stillness of the Sun (Crowmakers, #1)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  ALSO BY L. E. ERICKSON

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  A STILLNESS OF THE SUN

  Crowmakers: Book 1

  L. E. Erickson

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover art features illustration by ksutdija/shutterstock.com.

  Copyright ©2015 L. E. Erickson

  All rights reserved.

  JMA Publishing

  DEDICATION

  For Thomas, sometimes known as Grizz, who first read this book back when it was a short story and managed to sound enthusiastic about every draft since.

  And for Joey and Michael. I taught them to work hard if they really wanted something, and they paid me back by never allowing me to forget it.

  March 1806

  Chapter 1

  When Kellen got to the foot of Walnut, Vincent wasn't waiting.

  "Damn it." Her breath puffed a tight cloud in front of her mouth.

  Along the two blocks of Philadelphia nearest the waterfront, the city dropped, sometimes gently and sometimes less so, from high to low. West of Front Street, away from the river, scattered steeples mingled with more mundane homes and shops and grasped for the heavens: the State House, the courthouse, the Academy on Arch Street, the Presbyterian Church. Over all those, nearest to the center of the Philadelphia skyline, loomed the crisp lines of the Christ Church tower.

  East of Front, cobbled streets dipped toward the river with the inevitability of a sinner falling from grace. A series of dank, narrow stairwells descended from the steepled high ground to the waterfront, paths of plain stone steps that cut through the river's embankment to Philadelphia's wharves.

  Just like at the end of every other day, Kellen had clomped over the uneven footpath along the landward side of those wharves. Like every other docker hustling home, she wore trousers and a woolen coat and a cap. Hers were as threadbare as anyone else's, and they did just as piss poor a job of keeping her warm, even in the elbow-to-elbow jostling of bodies spilling through the day workers' pay lines.

  Since Kellen had been twelve, this had been her life—give or take, she wasn't exactly sure of her birth date and couldn't have figured the years between anyhow, since she'd never learned her numbers. She just knew what Vincent had told her—she'd been twelve, and it had been half their lives ago.

  Kellen shoved against the tide of men pushing along the street until she reached one side of the throng. Then she stood there, stamping her feet and blowing into her cupped hands and waiting.

  The ship holds where Kellen spent her days hooking cargo generally stank of livestock and spoiled food, but the wind was blocked, at least. Out in the open, that wind blew across the slush-clotted Delaware River, raging between the poles of tightly furled ship masts and driving sleet across the wharves. Thunder even rumbled.

  Wicked damn weather, and past time to be in out of it. She glanced back the way she'd come, to see if she could pick Vincent out from the most recent wave of workers crowding up to the clerks.

  Off the edge of the wharf, choppy waves thumped against pilings and casements and grumbled in an angry voice, as if they hoped to claw through wood and chew through years of made-earth to drop the waterfront back into the river. On days like this, Kellen thought that if the Delaware could figure out how, it would punch holes in all the hulls of all the moored ships and take them to the bottom of the river. Then it would pitch itself against the land until water covered Philadelphia. And if the river could manage that, maybe it would just keep going from there, until the whole world was one monstrous ocean.

  Beneath the sounds of wind and water curled a hesitant whisper, as if someone spoke nearby but just out of sight—except that there was no place that was close by and out of sight.

  Just the wind, probably, and Kellen didn't have time to dwell on it in any case. Suddenly, she spotted Vincent—not back at the clerks still, but closing in on her. His dark head bobbed into and out of view as he shoved past workers moving more slowly. His black hair, stringy and too long and damp from the rain, clung to the contours of his head.

  Vincent's dark eyes fixed on Kellen. The wind seemed less cold, and Kellen smiled.

  Vincent came straight at her, shoulders down and leaning forward like a dog on a trail. He wasn't smiling, and Kellen started to wonder if she should be worried. Then Vincent was five strides away. Four, three. Two.

  Before Kellen could say anything, Vincent grabbed her elbow and pressed it. "Just go."

  Vincent was taller than Kellen by a head, but past his shoulder she glimpsed a massive figure slouching along the crowded wharves. Hair so pale as to be nearly white was plastered against his too-big head. Kellen couldn't see his eyes from a distance, but she could nearly feel his gaze as he turned his head side to side, his nose lifted slightly as if he were a predator scenting prey.

  Burke Ripley. Kellen abruptly stopped noticing the cold altogether.

  Vincent spun Kellen around and shoved her between the shoulder blades. She started walking even before she'd gotten her bearings.

  "He's in a mood." Vincent's breath warmed Kellen's ear as he spoke beside it. "Don't need you in his path."

  Kellen preferred to stay out of Burke Ripley's path every day, mood or no mood. Real men might not hit women, but no one had ever accused Ripley of being a real man.

  "It's daylight and crowded." Kellen had some vague notion she could reassure Vincent, or maybe herself. "He won't start anything."

  "When has common sense ever stopped Burke Ripley? With some luck, someone else will get between him and us, and he'll get distracted beating on them. Now stop talking and go."

  Kellen went—uphill along Walnut, around the corner onto Front Street, and north toward Market. Vincent walked nearly on her heels, driving her before him.

  Philadelphia was supposed to be laid out in a grid spread tidily between the Schuylkill River on the west and the Delaware R
iver on the east. Nothing ever goes according to plan, though, so most of the city's buildings and people had ended up clumped along the Delaware, and there was little tidy about it. Houses of alternating red and black brick mingled with awning-fronted shops, walled estates kept company with coffee houses, and the hanging tree boughs and prim roses of gardens stood within an elbow's reach of smoky taverns. Alleys crept from street to street, insinuating themselves in zigs and zags wherever whim had thrown up rows of unplanned buildings. Streets and houses straggled off toward the Schuylkill, thinning out the further west you walked, but when you said Philadelphia, most people knew you meant the strip of city along the Delaware.

  Raucous laughter and tall tales interspersed with the tang of pipe smoke rolled out from the taverns and coffee houses Kellen and Vincent passed, alternating with the cool, quiet brick fronts of houses and shops. They broke through the rising and falling of sound and warmth, silence and cold, like swimmers breaking through waves.

  A few breathless minutes later, Kellen spotted a familiar pewter platter shuddering on a sign pole outside its namesake tavern, a landmark that pointed the way home. Kellen turned west onto Market, and Vincent fell into step beside her. As they rounded the corner, she glanced down Front Street, back the way they'd come, and saw no sign of Ripley's overbearing form.

  Vincent slowed his steps, and Kellen matched hers to his. She let her breathing ease, and her skin shivered from nothing more than cold again.

  The mall running up the middle of Market was empty, and the street itself nearly so. Two days of the week, the market teemed with color and sound and movement, not just inside the covered stalls but in and outside the shops lining both sides of the street and even out in the street itself. Today, damp muffled the sound of their shoes on the brick footpath, and a rain-dulled gray hung over the street's cobbled breadth. A block behind them, the Christ Church's heavy bell tolled the hour. Other, more distant bells joined the peal.

  Kellen skirted one of the posts that separated foot traffic from the street and shot a quick glance up at Vincent.

  His eyebrows were drawn together.

  "So what happened?" Kellen asked.

  Vincent shrugged without looking at Kellen. "Dunno. Ripley's temper's been on a short fuse lately, even for him."

  Kellen frowned. Like life wasn't hard enough, without another problem thrown in their path.

  A chaise rattled past, the hooves of its single horse clattering on the cobbled street. Smoke wafted out from the Indian King as they passed, but the voices drifting out were more cultured and less harsh than anything coming from one of the unlicensed tippling houses on the waterfront. The King sold wine and spirits, not just cider and ale, and to merchants and politicians, not to the sailors and water men who frequented the wharfside taverns.

  A brief wish to step inside one of those places, to be in warmth and noise and human company, tickled in Kellen's chest, but she shoved it away. She and Vincent only ever went straight home. Coins were for saving, not spending.

  "Hey."

  Vincent cupped his hand against the back of Kellen's neck, just below where her chopped-off hair bristled out from beneath her cap.

  She slowed her steps and looked up at him, and he leaned down and kissed her. The sleet freezing in his scruffy black beard rubbed off on her cheeks, cold touches surrounding the warm brush of his mouth.

  "It's all good." Vincent took his hand away from Kellen's neck and walked facing forward again. "Haven't I always taken care of you?"

  Despite his words, his mouth was turned down, and his eyes seemed distant. Kellen's worry didn't want to slip away from her, but that wouldn't be what he wanted to hear.

  She forced a smile. "You always have."

  Chapter 2

  Kellen always felt like a trespasser, strolling past the coffee houses on Fourth, past the Friends' meeting house and the Lutheran's looming church like she belonged there. Their ragged clothes clearly marked her and Vincent as belonging to the waterfront. Truthfully, Kellen wouldn't have minded a shorter walk every day, but Vincent refused to live even a block closer to the stretch of Philadelphia along the waterfront between Vine and Market. They called it "Hell Town" for a reason.

  The houses on Fourth were narrow, two rooms on each floor, one front and one back. In some places they sat close enough one to the next to form a nearly solid wall of white-trimmed brick, as far as the eye could see. Windows marched in regular lines along each of two or three stories, capped by tile roofs and often dormers.

  Chester's Alley cut between Fourth and Fifth Streets not far from the Christ Church burial ground. Kellen let Vincent steer her into its narrow confines, trusting him to cast a last glance behind them and ensure no one followed.

  The bottoms of white-painted doors sat level with the cobblestone alley, the unfailing line of which was broken here and there by steps cutting down to a lower door or the wedge shape of double cellar doors set at an angle to the alley's surface. Widow Howland's house was third on the left. Kellen passed the shuttered window and the plain, neat front door and unlatched the gate hung between the Widow's house and the next one. The gate squealed open for Kellen and clicked shut behind Vincent. They had to turn half-sideways to squeeze between the houses to the courtyard with well and gardens behind.

  Across the courtyard from the Widow's house, a round white face appeared in a ground-level window, close enough to the pane that breath fogged the glass. Kellen elbowed Vincent.

  He followed Kellen's gaze and chuckled. "Mistress Kreuger's like to die from lack of gossip before it thaws enough for her to lurk in the courtyard."

  Kellen grinned. "Has to be tough to hear much from there."

  Narrow, earth-lined steps led down to the back door, set at cellar level. Kellen clambered down and swung open the door.

  With only a pair of high, narrow windows to allow in outside light, the packed earth floor and brick walls of the single cellar room were cast into near-permanent dusk. A bed, a washstand, and a battered wooden chest were the only furnishings, and those were in such condition that the lack of light was probably a good thing.

  The cellar room was not much warmer than outside, but at least it lacked sleet and wind. An illusion of warmth tingled at Kellen's cheeks and nose. The savory scent of cooking food somewhere overhead teased through the cellar's musty gloom. Although Kellen knew supper would be a watery soup of shriveled turnips and old carrots, her stomach rumbled.

  "Thou'lt shut that door, before all winter comes in with thee!"

  Widow Howland's voice rattled down the tight staircase at the back of the cellar, near the door Kellen and Vincent had just come in.

  "Some winter never goes away," Kellen murmured.

  Vincent crowded inside behind Kellen and pulled the door closed behind him—loudly enough for Widow Howland to hear all the way upstairs.

  "You ever wonder how she got to be a widow?" Vincent leaned close and whispered. "Man died from frostbite."

  Kellen tilted her face up toward Vincent's and caught the gleam of teeth as he grinned at her. She grinned back.

  She had him. Whatever else she didn't or never had, she had Vincent, at least. Things could be a whole lot worse. They hung dripping coats and caps on wooden pegs driven into the wall and climbed the slanting brick stairs up into the kitchen.

  Despite Vincent's jest, Mr. Howland had actually died at sea some ten years before. Judging by the home's sparse furnishings, he had not left his widow well off. She sewed—the back room of the house served as her work space—and she took in boarders to make ends meet.

  Kellen stepped from the dim stairway and into the warm glow of the kitchen. A single pot hung over the hearth, near but not too near the narrow door leading to the pantry. On the hearth's other side, a bake oven was built into the brickwork. The aroma of yeast clung to the air, and Kellen dared to hope for bread with the night's soup.

  A ramrod-straight woman clad in a dove-colored dress and plain muslin mob cap, Widow Howland bustled between h
earth and table like a grim ghost. Her brow beetled into a sharp v as she glanced at Vincent and Kellen, her customary greeting and indication that they should sit and eat, and quickly now. Kellen settled into her chair at the Widow's simple kitchen table.

  The wooden bowls the Widow set on the table contained stew instead of soup, still thin but of enough substance to give Kellen's stomach cause to believe it would be filled. She even saw a chunk or two of fish poking up from the broth. A thick slice of brown bread nestled against the side of each bowl. Kellen looked up, intending to catch Vincent's gaze and share a grateful smile with him—bread. Stew. Oh, to sleep on a full stomach for once.

  Vincent did not look up, and he did not smile. He lowered himself slowly into his chair, regarding the evening meal with the mistrust of an oft-beaten dog for a stranger's extended hand. When he looked up again, it was at the Widow and not Kellen, and there was a question in his eyes.

  Widow Howland met Vincent's gaze for no longer than the beat of a gnat's wings before she turned her back. The stew needed attention, apparently, for she gave it a brisk stirring. It sounded to Kellen like the spoon rang against the sides of an empty pot.

  Kellen reached for her bread. It warmed her fingers, but she hesitated to lift it to her mouth. Vincent was still ignoring his in favor of frowning at the Widow's back.

  "T'will be an increase in board, beginning with the week due tomorrow." The Widow didn't so much as glance back, just carelessly tossed the words over her shoulder.

  The bread in Kellen's hand suddenly seemed cold.

  "Ma'am?" Vincent spoke carefully, politely, but Kellen heard frustration leashed in his voice and saw it snapping in his eyes.

  "Two cents and a half a week more. For thou each." Still Widow Howland didn't turn.

  Kellen resisted the urge to stand up, grab the woman by her arms, and make her turn around.

  But no. Vincent would make it right. He was wily enough to avoid trouble with even the likes of Burke Ripley. He could handle one aging Quaker woman.

  "But ma'am—" Vincent began.