Brother Bound

Jason Fischer

“I do favors for friends,” was all Javier would ever say, but Desiderio Delgado Alvarez did not believe his brother.

Javier worked in Uncle’s cane field, but he owned his own car, a brand-new model T that he drove while the other cane-cutters walked to work. There were other signs. Late-night visitors, smoking cigars in the dark of the road while they spoke quietly. The newly installed telephone, jangling in the hallway at midnight, Javier rushing to answer it.

Mother watching all of this with wide eyes, and never saying a word, silently suffering a kiss on the cheek from her eldest son when he and a stranger filled the ice-box with pork. More cigars in the dark, but after the truck rumbled off into the night Desi blocked the front doorway against Javier. He was as stern as any nineteen year-old could manage to muster, and when he saw Javier fighting to hold in a smile, he scowled deeper.

“You have more questions than sense,” Javier said. “Be grateful we eat.”

“Is that pork from your honest labor?” Desi asked. “You must do the work of five men to afford it.”

“Desi. Listen to me. Go back to your room. Read your new schoolbooks, and I promise you that you shall never have to cut the cane.”

“Do you cut the cane?”

A pause, and then Javier placed his hands on Desi’s shoulders, leaning in with a twinkle in his eye.

“I thought you wanted to become a doctor, little brother, but here you are playing at lawyer. Get out of my way before I make you regret it.”

Desi stepped aside after a moment, still frowning as Javier patted him on the shoulder, lumbering up the hallway. A quiet enquiry from Mother, and more lies from Javier. Yes, I am to be the foreman soon. Uncle is paying me extra. Yes, the butcher is my friend, I helped fix his truck.

What wasn’t said was we are comfortable for now, but there will be a knock on the door one day, or worse.

Everything will fall apart.

•••

The cane fields made Desi’s skin crawl. Their leaves rubbed and whispered slick in the breeze, stalks creaking as they drew up wealth from the soil. The syrup, sickly sweet whenever Uncle cut a cane for him to taste.

The cane had a disturbing hidden depth to it, and five steps into it you were lost under that rustling sea, pressed in on all sides, slipping between the rows like some hunted fish. He’d had more than one nightmare where thousands of canes would twine around him, dragging him down and away from the sunlight, underneath the loamy earth to break his flesh down into more sugar.

He feared the dense undergrowth of the cane, the biting insects and vermin that lurked there, but oddly enough Desi feared Uncle’s cane cutters the most. They worked swiftly at the cane with their keen-edged machetes, hacking away at his nightmares one acre at a time. Cutting cane was backbreakingly hard work, and every stalk required a grown man to bend, hack at the root, stand again, hack at the grassy top, before reaching into the undergrowth for the next one.

Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top.

Uncle paid them a pittance, just enough to keep them from torching his fields in protest. He fancied himself as a Henry Ford, but only so far as controlling the lives of his workers – prayers over meals, no liquor except on special occasions, and no women to the dormitories, no visits to the brothels.

The cane cutters were a hard lot, sunburnt and filthy, and they watched him with dead eyes as he passed on the driveway. The cutting gangs were paid by the cartload and rarely stopped work, but they drew up short as Desi approached, and he saw elbows to ribs, lips moving in smiles around soggy old cigar butts or clay pipes.

They watched him, hard eyes assessing him. Finding him wanting.

“I’m looking for my brother,” he said.

“Ask at the house.”

Desi nodded, and walked away as fast as he could, face flushed with red. He heard the chopping as they returned to the cutting though, blades rising and falling, stalks laying littered in their wake.

Desi ran to the house to find Uncle watching the cane cutters from a seat on his front porch, a mojito in one hand, the other ruffling the fur of his favorite dog. Uncle had ruined the vicious dog when he named him Blando, an irony considering the enormous dogo cubano breed was a slave catcher of old.

“You are not at your studies,” Uncle observed. “Will you wander the streets of Havana when we send you there?”

Uncle’s wealth was a finite thing, and in its decline. His wife had left him for an American. The big plantation house was in disrepair, and Desi imagined the cane creeping in to drag it down, removing all reference to man and his makings, until there was nothing but the green sea, rustling and clicking. All his uncle had to keep it at bay was a gang of surly men and falling sugar prices.

“I’m looking for Javier,” Desi said. “An urgent message.”

A year ago, he could have phoned Uncle from the post office with his question, and now from his own house, but there was no one that Uncle wished to speak to, and he had no money for the telephone company anyway.

Uncle sipped his drink, and then nudged over another chair with the tip of his boot, wood grinding against wood.

“Please, Uncle, I–”

“Indulge an old man for a moment,” Uncle said, and so Desi sat.

“My abuelo told me a story about the old days, about our plantation. It’s always been in our family, since we turned away from sailing to take up farming. Delgado hands cleared the jungle to plant this mighty weed!”

The buzz of a mosquito, and Desi resisted the urge to swat at it.

“Now each harvest I must pay these brutes more than they are worth. Every year I must go cap in hand to the bank manager. Money for lawyers. Money for bribes. Money to send nephews to school.”

Desi had the grace to look at his hands.

“But my abuelo’s story was before this,” he said, vaguely gesturing at his crumbling house and the cane pressing in on all sides.

“He said, ‘Everything you need to learn about violence and brutality, you can learn from sugar. We hack it from the earth. Burn it at the root. Drive men to their deaths for every sweet drop.’

“‘Our family has seized upon learnings that are less than Catholic,’ abuelo told me. ‘Memories of the things that stalked the jungle before the Taino people, before us. We’ve heard of all of this through whispers and tall tales. It’s all about blood, boy, which is a holy and most dangerous thing, but we have forgotten an older truth.’”

Here Uncle stared through his drink and his constant surveillance of the cane cutting. The glass shook, only a little, but Desi noticed.

“‘For every animal slain over a god’s stone, for every war fought in the name of a god or a king, there is blood, and there is sugar in that blood. So here came our people, with our guns and Bibles, and forced the Taino into the ecomienda, and then came the slaves from Africa, and so they bled for our sweet crop.’

“‘This island, this world runs on blood, boy, and here we are, distilling it like fools, and every smiling child sticky with candy, every drunkard nursing his rum, they are all as bloated with blood as the old gods on their pyramids.’

“Abuelo told me the secret, Desiderio. When his time came, I followed my abuelo’s coffin into the cemetery, but I knew the truth. It was packed full of rocks.”

“He’s out there,” he said, pointing at the cane. “Burnt, turned into the earth, planted into the crop. Done in secret, and as it was with my father it will be with me.”

Another shake of the hand holding the glass. The enormous dog yawned, offering a quick flash of its powerful jaws. Desi felt deeply disturbed at this revelation, the knowledge that his uncle’s piety was a sham, worse, that his family practiced this dark magic.

“I know your future is not in the cane, Desiderio, and that is why you are allowed to chase your scholar’s hopes, but Javier has no talent, save for being a scoundrel.”

Mosquito buzz. The slosh of the shaking glass, a fat drop dripping onto the wooden boards. The shift and huff of a dog bred to terrorize and bring down escaped slaves.

“My wife bled me dry, but what is left of my plantation I offered to Javier. Drew up a new will,” Uncle said. “I shared the family story. Our blood is out there, Desiderio, and so we remain here always, pushing up the cane, passing on that violent wealth to our family, paying that awful price.”

Uncle raised the shaking glass to his lips, draining it in one pull, watching the cane. Desi wondered if he had the same types of dreams that he did.

“Javier put down his machete, and left the plantation. That was six months ago, Desiderio, and I have not seen him since.”

•••

Desi found Javier in the trainyard. Trains had always symbolized escape from Cienfuegos for young Desi. Even as the trains loaded with sugar cane sped towards the greedy mouths of the mills, there were passenger trains through to Havana.

Havana. A place away from family, from the quiet grind of obligations, and now from his family’s blood curse, the thought of which shook him deeply. For years now he’d driven himself forwards on the promise of leaving for university, then he would get a good job, send money to Mother, and never set foot in Cienfuegos ever again.

The train yards were a little like the town itself. There was the new steam engine the Hershey Company had brought in for its mill, but everyone else made do with the older locomotives, the mill owners telling lies about the price of sugar, running their machines until they burst or seized up. Desi had seen a derailment once, an old sugar-cane engine not worth the trouble of rescuing, and the town carved it apart like piranha fish, taking everything down to the bones of the machine, which still lay rusting out in the tropical weather.

Desi knew that tough times bred tough people and watched a parade of oxen delivering cart after cart of sugar cane, both beasts and their drivers exhausted, slaves in all but name. Ropes went around each bundle, and a crane made mockery of the muscles of the workers, easily hefting the sugar cane onto each car, sending on all of that pain to the mill to make rum, sweets, sticky chocolate to melt upon richer fingers.

Cane ruled all, but some of the trains were set aside for goods and passengers. Javier was in one of the seedier warehouses Desi knew about, where the storehands drank rum and played dominos for money. His older brother was losing, and was already in a foul mood when he spotted Desi.

“You should not be here,” he said.

“You weren’t at Uncle’s farm,” Desi countered, and Javier scowled, surrendering to his gleeful opponent with a slam of an open palm that scattered the dominos and set the gamblers to uproarious laughter. The brothers walked away, Javier seizing Desi by the elbow.

“Not a word to Mother,” he said fiercely.

“Why did you lie?”

“I am the man of the house, and I make money the way I choose.”

“Javier, there was trouble,” Desi said.

“What kind?” he said, eyes narrowed warily.

“Your butcher friend. I saw him getting arrested in the main street. Six policemen came for him. Javier, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“Damnation,” Javier muttered. “We’ll have to go.”

“You cannot run! They are the policia! Javier!”

Ignoring Desi’s protests, he led him to his Model T, which he cranked into life, and then the brothers were in the cabin of the motor car, Javier driving at a dangerous speed. Rain struck then, the sudden furious kind, fat drops from nowhere that the windscreen wiper struggled to clear.

“You have to go to the police station,” Desi said. “Whatever you have done, you may be forgiven if you are honest and penitent.”

“Of course I’m going there,” Javier said. “But not for the reasons you say.”

The road to the train station was little more than a muddy track, and Desi felt every pothole as the Model T bounced and jolted, sliding around the corners, and then they were in the cobbled streets of the city, people running for the shelters of the pillared verandas, horses and mules left out to suffer in the sudden downpour. Javier slowed to a respectable speed when he got within sight of the police station, and pulled in next to a soggy horse on the hitching rail.

“Be silent,” Javier warned. “I am now a lawyer, and you are my assistant.”

“What? You cannot lie to them!”

“See? You have already failed at this.”

Stepping out of the car and into the rain, Javier waved at the officer waiting under the portico, clicking his fingers at his brother as he held a newspaper over his head. Javier gave a curt nod to the policia, and just like that they were in the building.

Desi’s heart was pounding. Whatever his brother was up to, he was bearding the lion in its den. Everywhere he turned, he saw a lawman, and his imagination turned each casual glance into suspicion, and the handcuffs and pistola on each belt seemed heavy with significance.

Javier stepped up to the shining oak of the public desk, interrupting an old man who was arguing with the desk sergeant. He slammed his newspaper down and demanded immediate attention.

“You are holding my client Raoul Pérez in your cells!” he said, slamming the desk again. “He has been arrested unlawfully. I demand to see him at once.”

“No,” the desk sergeant said, unimpressed by the show.

“I shall have your badge for this, sir!” Javier thundered. “You will be carting dung by tomorrow!”

“You cannot see him, Mister Lawyer,” the policia said, “because he has already been granted his bail.”

“Oh.”

“His friends paid for him. Americans, out of Tampa. When Mister Pérez saw them, he turned around. Fought to go back into his cell.”

Face turning white, Javier turned from the desk sergeant’s nasty smile, and walked briskly towards the exit, Desi in his wake. At any moment Desi expected a hand clapped on his shoulder, a baton in his ribs, but they were back out in the rain, Javier cranking on the starter.

“They got him,” Javier said, and Desi knew enough of his brother to see the anguish, the tears that the rain hid. The car coughed into life and Javier drove them through the deluge, finally stopping at a butcher shop.

The door was open a crack, the bell tinkling merrily as the gusting wind waved it back and forth.

“Stay here,” Javier warned, hauling a snub-nosed pistol out of a jacket pocket. Wide-eyed, Desi obeyed. He watched as his older brother nudged open the door, gun up and tracking.

A moment later he was back outside, retching in the gutter, gun forgotten.

Desiderio Delgado Alvarez stood on a razor of possibilities then. In one life, he waited for his brother to recover, and stayed in the car. Went into hiding with Mother. Then came Javier’s disappearance, the cane farm failing, poverty and oblivion.

In this life, Desi came out of the car and into the rain. Comforted his brother. Took up the small pistol, scared witless but determined to protect Javier from whatever terrified him so.

Nothing but the gusting door, the merry tinkle inviting him in. Desi eased open the door, looking in on a neat butcher’s shop. Carcasses on hooks. Dried meats festooning the walls.

On a counter was a neat stack of parcels wrapped up in butcher’s paper, blood leaking through in the corners. It was a lot of meat, enough to feed Desi’s entire street for a week. Puzzled, Desi stepped forward into the gloom of the shop, fumbling around until he found the dangling light string.

With a snap, the shop was flooded in light, and he realized the true horror. The butcher’s severed head lay next to this pile of meat, frozen in a final scream of horror.

A moment later, Desi joined his brother’s vomit with his own.

•••

“What will we do?” Desi moaned over and over. Javier drove the car as fast as he dared, scattering livestock and setting off the klaxon whenever someone looked to wander over the road.

“You will do nothing,” Javier said. “I am sending you and Mother to stay with Uncle. It is not safe for you at home.”

“Let me help!” he said, as the new Desi who stepped into awful places and faced peril. “I am your brother!”

“This is beyond you, Desi. That is my final word on it.”

“Javier, what is this you are mixed up in?”

“Nothing I cannot fix,” he said, determined. As always Desi despised being brushed off, relegated to the role of the kid brother. To be protected, sheltered, and frequently lied to.

Next came the confusion from Mother, more lies as Javier followed her around her room filling up a carry-all with her things. Next the sudden appearance of a knife as Javier severed the cord for the telephone, and the hustle as he piled everyone back into his car.

“What is all this?” Mother said.

“We have an infestation,” Javier said. “Italian cockroaches. I have friends who can deal with this.”

“I did not see any cockroaches,” she said.

“That’s just the thing, Mother. You might run a clean house, but if one cockroach gets in, they all get in.”

“Mother in heaven,” she said, clutching her carry-all.

Javier deposited Desi and Mother at Uncle’s house, rapidly unloading their things, and then he was back in the car, crunching the gears as he turned the vehicle around, finally launching back down the driveway in a spray of mud and small stones.

Uncle welcomed them into the crumbling manor with open arms and liquor on his breath, but the first moment he could make his excuses, Desi slipped out through the kitchen. Something important had flipped in his universe today, a binary point, and he’d stepped into some other life now, as if peeking around the curtains in a theatre and seeing all the things that the audience wasn’t meant to.

Desi stole through the rain to the cane cutters’ quarters, pressing his ear to the door. They were inside, sheltering from the downpour, and he heard them playing at cards and sharing bawdy jokes, safe from the dubious morality of Uncle. Desi found a bicycle underneath a lean-to, and he did not feel bad for stealing it from such rough and rude men. Let the man walk home tonight!

Desi rode through the rain till his clothes were plastered to his skin, and into a true tropical storm. He rode past the sea-wall as waves battered it, casting spray up onto the esplanada. Desi fought the strong gusts, felt like the bicycle might sprout wings at any second. When he came into the trainyards he saw Javier’s Model T drawn up in front of the same warehouse he’d been gambling in, the engine still running.

Desi dropped the bicycle and ran inside, only to draw up short, arms wheeling as if he stood on the edge of a chasm.

The domino tables were overturned, the tiles scattered like broken teeth, and then he took in the turned over chairs, and saw where the corpses began, storemen riddled with bullet holes as they tried to flee.

Every instinct told Desi to turn and run, to fetch the policia, to save his brother even if it meant a life in a cell. Then he heard a distant cry of pain, and knew the author.

Javier!

Desi stole into the warehouse then, and immediately noticed the ransacking. Tea-chests had been torn apart, boxes smashed with hammers, sacks of coffee beans slashed open. A fast, brutal search, and deeper into the warehouse he heard the cracking of crowbars set to prying, a box being tipped. A question being asked, hard and brutal, and then a cry of pain.

Javier! I am coming!

Moving through the stacks of goods, he saw a swaying lamplight, and the shadows of people, perhaps a dozen or more.

“Where did you put it?” a nasally voice demanded in English.

“I do not have it,” Javier replied with a pained gasp.

Desi pushed through the sacks of mail bound for Havana, and looked on in horror as his brother floated in the air itself, arms and legs stretched out painfully, some invisible grip pulling him this way and that.

Around him stood goons in suits, cradling crowbars and guns, but strangest was an older man dressed in the same snappy American style, holding an iron rod he tapped gently with a small hammer. Even as lightly as he brushed it, each strike gave a loud crack, and then Javier would move again.

Desi was looking upon dark magic, but he was attentive and did not ignore the man’s companions.

He put together Americans from Tampa and Italian cockroaches and came up with the instant answer of mafia. He’d seen them before, visitors from America, swaggering around Cienfuegos, eyeing properties before traveling back to the casinos and partying in Havana. If there was anything he despised more than thieves and criminals, it was American thieves and criminals.

Once more the hammer to the iron, the unnatural crack that Desi could feel in his bones. His brother’s cry.

“Tell me where the Key is. Now.”

“I am dead anyway,” Javier gasped. He named the man with the iron rod then, but something went wrong with the speaking of it, and Desi’s ears could only phrase this sound as Magician.

“True,” the Magician said. “But you can earn a neat little love tap between the eyes, instant lights out and goodnight. Or you can get what happened to your friends back there. Slow and awful.”

Javier said nothing. The Magician and his goons were all looking at him, but Javier had noticed his brother hiding in the mail sacks, making the briefest of eye contact before looking away.

He then spat at the Magician, landing the spittle square on his forehead.

“You think this is funny?” the Magician shouted. “I can torture you for a thousand years!”

“I don’t need to last a thousand years,” Javier said. “I only need to last another day, maybe two. Because the Knight is coming for you.”

The Magician snarled then, and struck the iron rod hard, shaking the warehouse with a thunderclap. That invisible grip broke Javier in a hundred places, and he fell to the ground. Desi cried out and one of the gangsters noticed him then, and the cry went up. Desi ran for the exit, bullets striking the cases and sacks all around him.

He ran through the warehouse and into his brother’s Model T, trying his best to remember a handful of driving lessons, shouts and gunfire chasing him out of the trainyards and into a storm that matched how he felt.

•••

Magic is real. It is a dark and awful thing, and my brother is dead.

Desi drove blindly through the streets of Cienfuegos. He could not return to Uncle’s, and dared not go home. He’d witnessed his brother’s murder, and the dark magic used to do it. Worse, they were mafia, led by a sorcerer. He was a spitting image of his older brother, and there was no mistaking who he was. Desiderio Delgado Alvarez would not be permitted to live.

Looking to the rearview mirror, certain that the gangsters had their own motor car and would come to chase him, Desi almost missed the wet dog that was running across the street. He jammed on the brakes sudden and hard, the Model T sliding to a halt.

Next to him, he heard something heavy bang against the front of the seat. Fearing a mechanical malfunction, he pulled over to the curbside, and that was when he saw a wooden panel, pushing slightly out from the bench seat.

A secret compartment!

Sliding the panel aside with shaking fingers, he found a hidden briefcase and yanked it free. It was made of expensive leather, and was heavy.

Grieving as he was, the need for answers forced his hand. Watching carefully for any other motor cars that might be prowling for him, Desi hid the Model T down a side street. He ran for the public library with the briefcase over his head as a makeshift umbrella.

The librarian scowled at his soggy clothing, but Desi was a regular and beloved by the staff. No one stopped him as he retreated to a reading desk, and he breathed a sigh of relief that the case was not locked.

He saw notebooks, a road map. A stack of letters and loose papers. Shuffling through the briefcase, he saw the bottom was lined with fat stacks of pesos and American greenbacks, the most wealth Desi had ever seen. Underneath it all, a revolver still in its case, and a box of bullets.

Eyes widened, he slammed the briefcase shut. After a long heart-thumping moment he eased it open, taking out the first notebook. It was filled with his brother’s messy scrawl, evidence that would damn him in the hands of the policia. Stolen goods and their hiding places. Money owed to him by desperate men, and the atrocious interest he was charging them. A list of stores under his protection.

His dear, dead brother had not been dabbling in some shady dealings. Desi realized he’d been a genuine criminal, a very bad man. A crime boss, with people who answered to him. For some time, Javier had been the picture of familial love, a giver of favors, but the hard truth was that he was truly despicable.

Desi felt a flush of strong anger against Javier. How dare he put them through this?

The accountings of Javier’s nasty secret life ended abruptly some three months gone, as if he’d simply lost interest in the operation.

Pulling the road map out of the briefcase, he saw an X mark­ing a site in the nearby Escambray Mountains, some distance into the bush from a lonely road. He’d visited the area with his school on a field trip, and knew the mountains were rugged and remote, a place of rai­nforests and brutal humidity. No place his city-loving brother would choose to linger.

Desi rapidly scanned the other papers and notes. Fearing the policia breathing down his neck, it appeared Javier needed a place to store money, stolen goods, rum for thirsty Americans. Somewhere to bury the bodies of his foes. Javier had heard a rumor from Uncle of all people, the site of an old cave in the mountains, a place remote enough to hide ill deeds. He knew he had his answer.

Then the sheaf of papers, complete with drawings. Javier had been a neat hand at sketching, and he had drawn the entrance to the cave, sealed up long ago, but with a recent mudslide revealing part of the entryway. Notes describing his gang breaking into an old cavern, and finding the biggest surprise of all.

People had lived in here in ancient times, and the system was extensive, crudely tunneled into the mountain. Javier found ancient artifacts, and an archeologist who owed him money confirmed that these were incredibly old, predating even the original Taino and Guanahatabey peoples of the island.

There were Taino carvings on the walls though, a later addition. Petroglyphs captured in Javier’s sketchbook, with more messy notes. His archeologist contact had never seen anything like it, and observed that they had been carved quickly, and only near the entrance to the cavern.

Desi’s fingers shook as he looked over the drawings, the petroglyphs striking him at a primal level. There were the signs of people on their sides, and a sharp pointed shape, like a fang, and this was depicted over and over.

“A WARNING? KEEP OUT?” Javier had scrawled near these.

Then a rough chart of the cave system, as far as Javier had ventured, with notes describing where certain artifacts had been found, and then a final room, where Javier’s explorations had finally faltered.

“BONES?” he’d noted here.

Desi moved onto the stack of letters, and saw Javier’s next effort. To shift his debt to Javier, the archeologist had been helping him move and sell the pre-Taino artifacts to American collectors. He’d found a type of ceremonial seat, jars and pots, stone scrapers, and sculptures of spirits and ancestors, carved out of shell and bone, gold and precious stones.

Like the worst sort of grave robber, his dear brother had been plundering the dead to feather his own nest. No wonder Javier had hidden the secret of his good fortune from his own family!

The money had come in thick and fast, but these unique new artifacts brought questions, and then there was a correspondence with a new friend, a wealthy collector who only referred to himself as the Claret Knight.

What this Knight wanted most of all was to explore the cave to its fullest, and he was willing to fund Javier and his crew an absolute fortune to do so, far more money than all of the artifacts he’d sold for thus far.

“Complete the mapping of the cavern,” the Knight wrote. “But await my arrival before commencing the excavat­ions. You must beware the Mirroring Blade at all costs.”

There was a drawing on the letter, detailed painstakingly with colored ink. It was a sketch of what looked like a sharp jag of ice, as if the ancients had knapped a piece of flint from some dark and sinister glacier.

The second he looked upon the image, Desi felt his mind reel, and once more he felt that binary moment, that switch he could choose to flip one way, or the other. In one life, he took the suitcase into the policia, gun, money, and all, and told them everything he knew.

But in this life, he looked upon the image with hunger, and he had never wanted something so badly as he wanted this Mirroring Blade. Every shining edge called for him to run a loving thumb along it, and he knew it would draw deep, down to the bone if he pressed even lightly. Then there was the dark heart of the shard, and he knew there was a truth hidden in there, if only someone worthy of the Mirroring Blade were to look in here.

He made his choice. Desi took up his brother’s suitcase of secrets for himself, and soon he was back in the clattering motor car. He had the map open on the seat next to him, and he drove the Model T towards the mountains and to that beautiful shining blade, as if the tip of it was already scratching at his heart, and he had but to throw himself upon it to know all things.

•••

As night fell, Desi finally left Cienfuegos, but not in a way he’d ever hoped or planned for. Only yesterday he’d been ignorant of dark magic, fearing only the laws of man and his own disturbing dreams of the cane, and now he was climbing up into the mountains, where the prophets went to meet the gods, and the foolhardy went to defy them.

The road was empty, farmers and their wagons already home in ignorance and lamplight, and few owned motor cars this far away from town. He passed through a handful of sleepy villages and towns, but everything else was rough country road, bouncing and cracking across rut and pothole, steering wheel shaking in his hands as he climbed into the mountains.

Many bone-shaking hours later, Desi found the spot Javier had marked on the map. The rain had fallen back into a thick humidity, and as he climbed out of the car to shift some branches away from a hidden track, he realized his clothes were still soaking wet.

If he lived through this, was he likely to catch his death of the chill?

Then Desi felt it. A delicious tickle, a pull at his soul. The knowledge that he was meant for something here, and it belonged to him, he to it. He would not die here, not if he kept to his path and saw it through.

Then the roar of the engine, the sweep of headlights pushing through the switchback up the mountain behind him. Two motor cars, and they were getting closer now.

The Magician!

Fishing out a flashlight from the trunk of the car, Desi ran up a path made by many feet. In places someone had set a sleeper or piece of slate as a step, and in other places rocks and obstacles had been levered out of the way. He slid around in the mud as he scrambled up the mountain side, already sweating from the deep humidity of the rainforest around him.

Then he saw them below, two cars moving along the scar of the road, pulling up behind Javier’s car. The shouts of several men, answered by the nasal voice of the Magician. Once more came the stroke of the hammer upon the iron rod, and the sound echoed against the mountain, rocks and mud sliding down the mountainside and threatening to drive Desi back down to the road.

He held the flashlight close, hoping to hide his position in the trees. Another peal of that unnatural magic, and this time Desi’s footprints blazed for a brief moment with a bright magnesium arc of light, revealing his path to any who looked.

Desi froze in place like a terrified animal, betrayed by his own tracks. Again that moment where he’d peered around reality’s curtain, he found himself afraid of this power that defied all explanation, put lie to all of the science and logic he’d ever crammed into his head.

Tempted as he was to dart away and hide in the brush, Desi felt the pull again, knew the Blade was near. Was his.

Wild gunshots came then, winging through the trees. Gasping wildly, Desi drew out the revolver and forged upwards, flinching as a close shot cracked against a tree just inches to his left. Then he came upon the stack of boulders, splintered from dynamite, and his flashlight made out the cleft of the cavern, the entrance widened and easy to slip into.

His flashlight danced across crates of supplies, picks and shovels, lanterns and helmets, everything Javier had bought with the Claret Knight’s finances. The scale of the operation was impressive, considering this had all been ported in by hand. All of it was under the horrifying portico of the petroglyphs, and Desi immediately understood the intent of the message:

Great danger ahead. You should not be in here.

The shouts were getting closer, and the nearest of the gangsters let off a stutter of gunfire into the cave itself. A tommy gun in the hand of a killer, and here was untested Desi, never once having pulled a trigger. Casting about for succor, he found the answer as he fumbled through Javier’s supplies.

A matchbook, and he applied the flame to the dangling fuse-cord of a stick of dynamite.

With the strong right arm that had made him the pitcher for his school baseball team, Desi hurled the sputtering stick of dynamite out and into the darkness, and a moment later he was rewarded with an explosion and a scream. Grimacing, he threw out another stick, but the next time he reached for the matchbook the entire pack flared up in his hands.

Fearing this to be the work of the Magician, he looked to the dynamite fuses for a worried moment, but they stayed unlit. Why would the Magician start a cave-in when he wanted the blade for himself? Desi felt a sudden flash of jealousy, and it was odd to observe his fear washing away in this emotion. Once more an American was coming for something that rightly belong in Cuban hands, and he was furious. More of a Javier than a Desi in that moment.

Desi ran into the caves, stepping ever deeper into the past, as if sliding down the brown throat of an ancient, buried beast. Echoing footsteps as the gangsters entered the cave itself, their shouts overlapping until they were one man with a dozen or more mouths. Nonsense and chaos, and through it all came the Magician, clanging his rod, the sound dogging Desi’s every step.

A gangster lunged at him from the dark, and Desi pulled the trigger by instinct, dropping the man dead with a flash, the noise deafening within the tunnel. Instantly the clang of the rod, and Desi’s revolver grew red hot, burning and blistering his skin, and he was forced to discard the molten weapon as it turned into slag.

He ran, breath catching, until his foot stepped on something with a crunch.

Desi swept the flashlight down to realize he was standing on a carpet of human bones, hundreds of people thick, a pile of the dead, and he wasn’t sure how far down it even went. The chamber above was a thick node, a cathedral that seemed shaped by some ill hand, as if in the shape of a bizarre heart that had no business beating.

Desi stood at one more junction in this strangest of days – here stood the boy who froze up in fear, waiting for a handful of moments to be torn apart by a secret mafiosi cult, one more body added to this mass grave. The nasally Magician emerging triumphant with the Mirroring Blade.

But in this life, Desiderio Delgado Alvarez refused to be that person, for now and ever again, and he stepped further into bone, wading through that sharp tide of calcium. He heard the call, the aching throb of an energy that had been pent-up for too long.

Burrowing underneath skulls and spines, Desi breathed in the dust of that unknown people, and he felt the weight of an ancient ritual, knew they’d come to their deaths willingly. Happy even. He understood their urge, felt the same call. The Blade had found this forgotten people all wanting in some way, but they’d served as sustenance, over and over until the last pair of hands had driven the blade in deep, and it had been a glory and a service to bleed out in this cave.

Then the Taino had come, and resisted, and buried the Blade for thousands of years.

He supposed his own family’s ritual with the land was a cousin to this rite, but whereas the cane farmers had traded blood for something tangible, this was going to be a very different deal. Blood came to the Blade, and all it could return to the wielder was a sharp edge.

Desi accepted this trade, accepted this condition, and only then did he reach the bedrock underneath that weight of bone, closed his fingers around what he sought, felt that delicious sting and ache.

He emerged from that ancient grave with the Mirroring Blade in his bloody grip, and he stared at it in wonder. Just under a foot in length, the edges of the Blade were brilliant, sharp enough to shave steel, and it seemed to drink up his blood, thirsty for yet more. His flashlight could not penetrate the dark heart of the shard, but it served as a mirror with a black reflection. As he tilted the blade upwards, he recoiled in horror at what he saw.

His own face, twisted and malevolent, a grinning murderer ready to kill anyone and anything. He could not stare away from his reflection, and he knew this was the version of Desi that that Mirror knew, the secret self that lay deep below everything civilization could give him.

Faced with that dark reflection, Desi experienced a moment of the deepest clarity. He understood he was no better than the gangsters that hunted him, than Javier hurting others with his loansharking and other misery. Desi had reached for the books because he was simply too scared to project his will into the universe, to occupy a space and be known. Bound to the land by blood rite, true violence had always been his heritage – he’d just never had the chance to try it out.

He came out of the open grave and back into the tunnels. After a moment of thought, he smashed his flashlight against the wall, and slipped out of his shoes, skin now touching stone. The Blade knew this place of old, to the inch. He stalked through the honeycomb of caves and tunnels, creeping towards the footsteps and swaying flashlights of the gangsters.

There. A man with a pencil-thin mustache and a fedora, hesitating at a junction of tunnels. Desi darted forward, feet barely brushing stone, and he swung the blade down with all his might. He caught the gangster above the collarbone and tore through him on a diagonal, and met virtually no resistance.

The man fell to the ground in two pieces, but the Blade was not satisfied with that. It reached out and killed the same man in other places, other realities. Desi was a witness as he killed the man in a bath, stabbed him performing a baptism, murdered him as he piloted a zeppelin, and over and over he killed the man, finally leaving a ragged hole in reality where that person had once been.

And still, the Mirroring Blade was not satisfied. There were other realities where Desi also stood in the same spot, and drove the blade into his own heart there, waking with a gasp. He still lived, but felt a fraction lesser than he was, as if the Blade had shaved off a sliver of his soul for itself.

A mighty weapon, with a mighty cost.

Stalking the mafiosi cultists, Desi paid it gladly, again and again, and watched as he killed men in graveyards, in tea-rooms and train stations, even once on a ship that sailed between the stars, and again he slew himself, over and over, and still the Blade demanded more.

Then the tolling of the iron rod. Desi froze in place, every sinew and joint seizing up instantly.

A blood-soaked flashlight lay on the floor, and through its rosy light the Magician approached Desi, smiling widely. He circled him warily, watching as the Mirroring Blade continued to move and writhe, inch by inch.

“A conundrum,” the man said. “This Key has claimed you. So you’re an appointed champion, a guardian of this reality. All of that jazz.”

The man clucked, rubbing the hammer along the iron rod with a slight rasp, and the sound penetrated Desi’s teeth to the root.

“But you see, I don’t think you deserve it. You certainly can’t control it. That Mirroring Blade should be mine.”

Desi lurched forward then, and face wide with surprise, the Magician once more cast the stilling spell, now keeping a wary distance.

“You’re a strong one, even without the Blade. Makes sense why it picked you. Here, let’s give you a bit of leeway. The eyelids. Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Another rasp of the rod. Desi blinked.

“Good. You’re in that much control. Now, have you heard of Aesop and his fables?”

Blink.

“And have you heard of the dog in the manger? Couldn’t have something others wanted, so stopped others from getting it?”

Desi wanted to kill him so badly. Ached for it. A universe of desire urged him to cut, and laugh, and take the life of this rotten American man over and over.

But all he could do was…

Blink.

“So here’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to work something now. Likely to turn you inside out. But I’ll find a way to free the Blade from you, bind it to me, and become the champion, with all the fruits and laurels. Capisce?”

Blink.

“So if there’s a way you can release control of the Blade, all voluntarily like, I won’t need to do it the awful way. I’ll give you a peaceful way out, and I can still wield the Blade for its intended purpose, as well as carving up anyone I disagree with. Will you let go of the Blade?”

Blink. Blink.

“All right, dog in the manger time. I’ll kill you, hard. Here’s another truth; might not be able to kill you proper, and you might cling to life a little. So, if the Blade won’t take to me, I’ll apply some sour grapes to this situation. Bring the whole place down on you.”

Desi lurched, swung out with the Blade, coming within an inch of the Magician’s throat. Once more the unnerving sound, as the stilling magic settled upon his muscles.

“You won’t get that lucky, boy. Hand over the Blade, or you will spend a million years down here, dying in the dark.”

“I cannot allow this,” a voice said calmly. The Magician whirled around, rod and hammer raised. A man stepped into the flickering torchlight, and he stood in the ruddy glow, hands folded in front of him. The new arrival was a sophisticated gentleman, and he wore an old-fashioned set of formal clothing underneath a great coat.

“Stay back, Knight, or we all die!” the Magician said, and Desi thought he detected a quaver in his voice. Respect. Fear.

The Claret Knight! The hammer rasped against the rod, and the ceiling of the cave shivered in its own warning. The man nodded.

Desi thought about Javier’s papers, about the way this stranger had dangled money over him, no doubt also hunting the hiding place of the Blade. This man of culture and poise walked calmly through a site of ancient evil, and this told Desi everything he needed to know.

This man was even more dangerous than the Magician, and not necessarily a friend.

“You are as foolish as this boy,” the Knight said. He spoke English, but Desi detected an accent now. French, but with an odd archaic twang to it, as if the man was a provincial whose valley had been locked away from the world for a thousand years.

“The only fool in here is you, pal,” the Magician said. “You’re all alone, and a long way from all the places that protect you.”

“I’m not alone.”

Another stepped into the light, a Chinese woman who held herself like a ballerina, or a fencer. She held a closed parasol over her shoulders like a sword, and sneered at the Magician.

“Tzu San Niang!” the Magician gasped. “I’m warning you, stay back!”

“He means to bring the roof down with his little toy,” the Claret Knight said. “Suggestions?”

“Use the magic of our enemies,” the woman said. “Unname him.”

The Claret Knight gave a sudden clap of his hands, his eyes flashing with a scarlet brightness. Eyes widened, the Magician struck his instrument hard, and Desi flinched. The rod clanged again, and again, but the ceiling remained in place.

Desi realized another truth then. He’d heard the Magician’s name, many times. His own men had shouted it. His brother had named him in his notes. But he was a nameless person now, and it seemed that his own magic was failing him.

As did the spell which bound him in place. Freed, Desi fell upon the Magician, relishing in the glory as he slew the villain time and time again, and in each instance the man was more or less the villain that bled before him.

“Boy, you may stop,” the Claret Knight said, and Desi turned to face them, Mirroring Blade raised. The Claret Knight merely stood in place, unafraid.

“Get out of my way,” Desi snarled. “This is mine now.”

“This is true,” he said. “The Key has claimed you. You can go on your way and kill as you please, and the Coterie will not prevent this.”

“Coterie?”

“We are the Red Coterie,” the Claret Knight said. Desi could see now that the man’s formal garb was of deep scarlet, the woman’s parasol a brighter red.

“Young man, this secret world can destroy you,” the Knight said. “Let us show you a wiser path.”

“But you won’t take it from me?” he said, clutching the glassy knife close to his chest.

“No,” the woman with the red parasol said. “You are responsible for the Mirroring Blade now. You may entrust it to a new wielder, but even we would struggle to seize it from you.”

The Blade wriggled in his palm, shaving away a little bit more of his soul, aching to taste directly from his heart. Desi’s bond with the Blade felt like that of mother and child as much as it did predator and prey, and he despaired. He was as duped as any of the desperate gamblers that Javier had taken in, suddenly out of their depth and hand in hand with something dangerous.

Now these two had arrived, unfazed by this disturbing secret world, but they did not offer enticement or threat. Merely understanding, and the offer of knowledge, a currency he already respected.

He followed the other two sorcerers out of the cave, and watched in terror as they brought the entrance down with their magics, encasing the Magician and his cultists in that strangest of mausoleums.

•••

In his chase for the Blade, Desi had neglected his family, and he returned to Uncle’s farm with haste. Silence as he approached the house, where once Blando would have been out and snarling at strange visitors.

“Wait here,” he told his new friends, and the Knight and his companion nodded, relaxing in the back of the Model T as if they were on a lovely driving tour.

No one answered his cries or his frenzied rapping at the door, and he ran inside, the Blade held low by his side.

“Mother! Uncle!”

He found their bodies in Uncle’s parlor, looked wide-eyed at an awful ending that showed the worst depths of human invention. The Magician and his mafia goons had visited mere hours ago, meaning that Desi had already avenged his family without realizing it.

His heart felt like a sharp, painful rock. With the Mirroring Blade, Desi had killed the thugs a thousand times over, and even this didn’t feel like enough. He was the master of a strange sort of violence now, but it did nothing to stop his grief, his guilt. He took up the burden of his brother’s sins, and added his own actions to the pile. He piled this weight upon his soul and decided he could never put it aside.

Over their bodies, Desi swore an oath, to anything that would listen. Never again would he allow this secret world of magicians and monsters to hurt those he loved. The thought of violence disturbed him, but now he had a way to protect people, and new friends to learn from. If ever this secret world brought harm to Cuba, he would give the Mirroring Blade something tasty to nibble on.

Desi gave his family the manor as a funeral pyre, and he set about torching the cane fields, once and for all ending the family connection to that ancient blood rite. He still had all of Javier’s money in the suitcase, and Havana in his sights.

He found the workers still huddled in their quarters, where they’d hidden from the attack on the house. There they waited, gathering the courage to leave, afraid that Uncle’s killers still lingered nearby.

Desi simply carved through their barricades with the Mirroring Blade, and stood before them, hard-eyed, grown into manhood in that one horrible day.

“You work for me now,” he told them, and they nodded with fear. Respect.

Desiderio Delgado Alvarez decided he liked that.