Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

3.

The man called Deadeye sat in the darkness of the abandoned tavern surrounded by the encroaching shadows of night, the creeping gloom edged away by the street lamps' unsteady illumination seeping uncertainly through aging curtains. Shadows flowed in with the ebb of the flickering lights. Outside, the stifling humidity of late summer hung in an unmoving mass over the city like a blanket, and even the long hours since the setting of the sun had done little to drive it away. The wind that blew in from the harbor was absent, and with nowhere to go, the heat had settled over every road, in every doorway and on every street corner. Within, the air was stale and heavy and offered no respite at all. Deadeye's long brown hair fell in damp tangles to his shoulders and sweat beaded on his forehead and glistened in the margins of his rumpled white shirt that looked like something slept in. His coat was torn at his left shoulder where the bullet had found him. Blood had seeped into the thick fabric, running down the arm that hung uselessly at his side where it did not, and dripped slowly from his middle finger that dangled above the ground, to pool at the foot of his chair.

He had killed tonight. Four men, in all. And when it was done, he had wanted a drink. He figured it would be wise to avoid to the room he rented in the dingy flophouse in Lowtown where the bottle of whiskey he kept at the foot of the bed with the battered mattress would have suited him. It was well past midnight when he had found the tavern, light-headed and clutching at his wounded shoulder. All the bars and taverns in the city were shuttered, so he had found one on a quiet street and let himself in. The door stood ajar where the broken lock kept it from closing.

Deadeye knew this day would come. Men had tried before to take his life, countless times over the past decade he had plied the gunslinger's trade in the city. This was different. These men had been sent to kill him, as he himself had been sent, times beyond remembering. He knew what it meant. His thin protection had worn out. He'd have to abandon his flophouse room next to the stairwell and the pipes that groaned through the night and the few possessions he left there. Two or three changes of clothes, money stashed behind the drawers, spare ammunition. His was not a life that couldn't be picked up and resettled. Wherever he went, memories and dreams would cling to him.

It had all unraveled of late. In retrospect, he should have known. He'd seen the way his employers had looked at him, felt the almost imperceptible changes in the manner of their meetings. Deadeye was a piece on the board in the secret battles for control of the city and its streets, moved by the hands of the men who lived in the other city, the one that drifted high up in the clouds. He was a useful tool, perhaps even the best tool, but no more than that in the end. Another gun would take his place, and the city would move on, waking to a new morning, ignorant of the replacement of one part with another.

There's no one left to shed tears for me when Deadeye's gone.

For hours he had stared sightlessly at the brick wall, its repetitious geometry nothing like the tangled shape of his dreary thoughts, until long after his cigarette and the one that followed had burned to stubs, and smoke hung thick in the air, and his blood had puddled shallowly next to one uneven chair leg.

The broken door creaked.

By the time it was open, Deadeye had his gun in hand, sight trained at the yawning rectangle of night. Neither drink nor loss of blood slowed his movements.

"Don't shoot," came a man's voice in the doorway. "It's not like to solve anything."

"Might make me feel better," said Deadeye with a voice hoarse from drink.

"I'm not so sure about that."

After Deadeye lowered his gun, the man came in. He was wearing a blue suit with a silver chain that ran from the third button of his vest into a pocket on his right side. The man had expensive tastes and careful grooming, and Deadeye was suspicious of men who bedecked themselves so. The blue-suited man slammed the door behind him, but it banged against the frame then opened again. Amused, the man gave a laugh and walked to Deadeye's table. Deadeye noted the unease in his movements. It was good to know that people still stepped warily around him.

"You're looking good, Deadeye," the blue-suited man said mildly as he sat in the chair on the other side of the table. "Not been sleeping well?"

Deadeye ignored him and reached into his breast pocket to withdraw the crumpled, foil-wrapped package of cigarettes and a book of matches. He felt the sticky wetness of his shirt peeling away from the half-dried blood on his shoulder as he moved, and felt the wound begin to bleed again. He slipped a cigarette from the pack and offered it to the man sitting across the table, who refused. With his good arm, Deadeye put the cigarette between his white teeth, struck the match on the tabletop and lit up. He flicked out the match, letting it fall among the detritus and blood on the tavern floor.

"What are you doing here, Baldric?" Deadeye said at last.

"Looking for you," Baldric said. "You should be hours gone. Nothing left for you here but the grave."

It was not the first time Baldric had told him so, but if four dead men hadn't changed Deadeye's mind, there was little Baldric could say to convince him. Deadeye looked vacantly past Baldric's shoulder into another world, not the darkened one before him. Deadeye's eyes were wrinkled and lined from lack of sleep, with heavy, dark bags beneath.

"Never was anything here for me. Can't say as much has changed."

"You have more enemies," Baldric said reasonably.

"Killers have enemies. Show me one who doesn't."

"A dead man."

"Maybe I am." Deadeye might have smiled, nothing more than a slight curl of his lips.

"There are those who'd make that a certainty. Especially now. I'm your only friend left in the world. Listen to me. It's time to go."

"I can't leave," he said. Not yet.

"What's keeping you here?" asked Baldric. "Good prospects?"

"Unfinished business," Deadeye said.

"It's finished. Let them forget about Deadeye. Stay here and you'll be fit only for the undertaker."

"This is my place," Deadeye said stubbornly.

Baldric pointed a finger towards Deadeye's chest. "Listen to my warning. It's the last you're like to get," he said. Heat and smoke hung between them.

Deadeye let the silence see him out.

Deadeye had never known a night's sleep. He spent his nights in the somnolent haze and half-dreams of the sleepwalker. He carried the weight of his endless waking with every step, his body and mind's need to slip into the unconscious was a thrist that could never be quenched. He wandered the streets while the city slept, alone in silence and darkness like a ghost, bound to haunt the world of the living and unable to pass on to the next. He could sit or lay down, but a scarecrow's rest gave neither solace nor refreshment. Drink might take the edge off of the exhaustion, but it was a poor substitute. Not even the chemists' exotic concoctions gave him respite, so he had learned to quiet the begging of his unconscious mind and its need to hide from the eternal questions and from the memories. But even in sleep, he suspected he could not escape. In dreams, he told himself, he might find a torment worse than his cursed waking.

In the silence of his solitude, he saw her face. It had once been as clear as day, even in the years after she left, but of late he felt the details fading, as the passage of time bleached away the clarity of memory, sharp lines fading from black to gray and the colors that were once as bright as spring gave way to the cold gray of autumn and promised to turn to winter snows. But the pain was as great as the day she left. It would come upon him without warning. He turned some corner and found her again and again. He found her face in the hours of somnambulant torment, when his eyes lay open but he did not see, and the hours slipped by like a silent river. He found her in the taste of salt and sea in his drink, in the sounds of a piano that played the chords she would hum unconsciously and in the smell of the little blue flowers she favored, with their constellations of white-yellow stars at the centers of petalled nebulae.

Deadeye was a killer. He had killed, and he had killed. It was the way of these chaotic times. For all the civilization and the wonders the architects had built, the world had become a ragged place, just as it had here in the shadows of the city in the sky, whose towers sprouted from among the streets, but whose heights rose above the clouds, connected by floating bridges that crisscrossed the thin air. It was the same in the massive sprawl of the south, where massive roads and bridges joined the cities and created the metropolis where lived almost two million people, a once unthinkable number. Even in the quiet north, where the floating railroad connected the continent to a city in the middle of the ocean, where the buildings plunged beneath the waves like icebergs, it was not immune.

The world was held together by gold and by iron and by blood, as it had ever been. Deadeye played his part. He worked for the men with gold. He fought their wars with iron, and spilled blood in the streets for them. He had made a name for himself a decade ago during the upheaval, when the old aristocracy lost their hold on the city and the new families who settled within its borders fought with them for its mastery. Not all had welcomed new authority with open arms, but they had, in the end, convinced by men like Deadeye.

Even after the city had been born anew from the blood of chaos, the dust of new construction, Deadeye continued to work for the city's new masters. Despite their public affectations of peace and reason, they would inevitably find Deadeye and call him into service. Always with another name, gold and no answers.

Once a man grows accustomed to a tool, his hand notices its lack. He finds it hard to put it away, Deadeye heard the voice from his past.

And so the years had passed for Deadeye, while he waited in his dead city, haunted by the litany of those he had killed and those he had lost. His life grew into the patterns of the city, and though he had little love for it, he was as much a part of it as anything. But even the city slept. And when it woke this morning past, it had turned against him, a tool that had finally outgrown its usefulness. He was the last sword to be put away when the end of the war had come at last, when men put down their swords and took up the skins of civility, pretending that all they had not been bought and paid for, inch for inch, by blood.

He left the tavern in the silence of the middle hours of night. In those hours, even the night creatures slept, and those of the day had not yet stirred before the dawn. The sky was weeping softly when he stepped outside, an unpleasantly warm rain that brought steam from the ground, like smoke from an unseen fire that curled along street. There was a pleasing irregularity to the paving stones beneath his feet as he passed back and forth between the haunted light of the street lamps and darkness that swallowed the night beyond. He turned up the collar of his well-worn coat, and walked past the cold rows of buildings with their darkened windows where within people slept, secure in the peace bought with pieces of men's souls.

Deadeye knew he was being followed. He wandered in a random pattern, up and down and along streets he had traced time and time again. After all his days and years of walking the city, he knew their pattern in his mind, the interconnecting roads that were the arteries of the city, better than the shape of his own life. And now, though he feigned a vagrant's aimlessness, there was a purpose behind the path he chose, something he did unconsciously, and one of the many reasons Deadeye had lived so long. He forced his pursuer to reveal the truth behind his movements and at one dim corner, Deadeye turned to face his shadow.

The shadow separated from the night. Underneath a stuttering street lamp stepped a man in a black coat and black shirt, and black everything else except for the silver spectacles he wore over a hawkish nose. The tips of his boots edged into the pool of lamplight. He had a vaguely foreign look to him, something in the shape of his eyes, the prominence of his nose and the unfamiliarity of his proportions, but then Deadeye knew little of the things beyond the city's borders. Whatever place he hailed from, he appeared to be a man cut from the same black cloth as Deadeye. He radiated a subdued menace and a grim capability. And he had a gun in his hand, a wild and twisted mass of iron as long as a child's forearm.

The foreign man's voice crumbled brittle as cheap iron, rusted and pitted. "Your life is a debt too long uncollected. Unseen hands consented you to live, while unjustly spilled blood lay upon you. The reaper keeps his own time, Deadeye. Who are you or I to judge his whim or schedule? But he knows and keeps his tallies, and when even the smallest man is not like to slip his gaze, how could a man like you?"

"Must be my good nature," said Deadeye.

"No more guardian angels. No one left to keep you around. You should have listened to your friend."

"And my debts would be off if I flew?" asked Deadeye.

The man gave him a sour smile.

"Not, I reckon," said Deadeye. "So, how is it to be? Will you let me die with iron in my hand?"

Deadeye never heard the response to his question. He saw the man's lips forming around his words and his finger curling around the trigger, but Deadeye was moving by the time the foreign man pulled. Deadeye dove to his left and drew as he fell. His shoulder howled in agony as he struck the ground. He heard the thud and crack of brick behind him as bullets missed their mark. Deadeye was as good as his name, and after his revolver's retort, the curtain of silence fell over the night once again. The foreign man crumpled. Deadeye's bullet had torn into his stomach just above his waist, and the man groaned in agony. Deadeye rose to his feet and stepped forward, his gun still raised, though Deadeye judged him to be dying.

"Who sent you to your death, stranger?" Deadeye asked. "The secret will do you no good where you're going."

The foreign man coughed blood, "I will not dishonor myself with my last act upon this world." He spat. "Leave me to die and I will leave you to your sleepless nights, Deadeye."

Deadeye knelt down next to him. "The pain must be great. You'll be long in the dying. Let me ease your passing."

The foreign man looked up while blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. The eyes of a dying man met the eyes of the dead.

Later, when his gun spoke again, Deadeye had a name.

At the early hour, the lift to the skycity was empty but for the lone operator. He was in uniform, a dark blue wool coat with large brass buttons and a pleasant, if perfunctory, expression that was his uniform, too. The operator took the fare from Deadeye and pointedly ignored the naked iron hanging at his hip, and with no other passengers, started up the lift. The large cage climbed from the darkness and the grime of the city below towards the steel walkways that latticed the sky as though they grew out of the clouds themselves. From below, the lights that lined the walkways had looked like an ordered constellation in the sky, but as he rose he saw them for what they were. Stars placed by the hand of men, not gods.

The first rays of the sun were spreading over the long sweep of the eastern coastline, turning ocean and sky to the color of morning. At the mouth of the harbor, the solitary spire of the lighthouse stood silent vigil, an ancient construction of stone worn by countless days of salt air that had lashed across it since the time the stones had first been set in an age long forgotten. The superstitious believed it warded away sea spirits and worse from the lands beyond. From where Deadeye stood, it looked a single piece of unbroken stone, capped at its peak by the angry visage of a god, its mouth gaping open in a wordless scream, though time and tide had worn its features to anonymity. Once, they said, the mouth was lit with a great bonfire, tended by a secret and silent brotherhood, but they had passed like the god they served into forgotten memory, and now it was the business of the engineers to ensure that the light never failed.

As he walked out of the elevator and onto the spiderwork walkways, Deadeye felt uneasy. He liked to feel the solid ground beneath his feet. The streets of the city in the sky were interconnected bridges of steel and iron, and between the perforated sheets, in the gaps between the clouds, one could see the ground far below. Here the massive towers that grew from ground reached their apexes, geometric fingers reaching towards the sky, and each one crowned at its peak with ornate statuary in the shapes of mythical beasts, trumpeting angels or other designs, very often cast in gold. There were few people on the streets at this hour, few to see the sunrise and the birth of a new day.

Deadeye wondered if it would be the last sunrise he would see. Not for the wound at his shoulder, he had seen and survived worse, but the course of action he had decided on, not content to wait for death to find him.

He weaved through streets the twin of the ones below, winding around the same blocks though where some surrounded buildings, here they enclosed plazas of open air. He found the building he was looking for, a rectangular tower of drab gray concrete and dark windows that reflected the light of the coming day. It rose another dozen or so stories from the level of the street, capped at its highest point by a polished golden star. He walked across the bridge that connected it to the street, the echoing sound of his boots on the thin metal swallowed in the nothingness below. The thought of that made Deadeye uneasy.

He walked in the front door that opened into a lobby with a frescoed floor and murals painted on either side. Deadeye had no eye for that sort of thing. Instead it was the doorman standing behind the mahogany desk with the wary expression that caught his eye.

"Good morning, sir," the doorman said uncertainly, his words trapped between greeting, question and warning.

Deadeye drew his gun. "Not worth your trouble. Give me your hands."

The doorman did as he was instructed, raising his arms in the air above his shoulders. It wasn't like Deadeye to work by impulse. He was a man of deliberation and plans. It was as though the unconscious ease that his finger worked the trigger of his gun had taken over the other parts of his life. He moved around behind the table and hit the man with the butt of his gun. The doorman crumpled to the floor in a disheveled heap. Deadeye opened the top drawer of the desk and found a neatly organized grid of rectangular spaces, a key in each one, and searched for the one he was looking for. When he had it, he left the doorman where he had fallen, then crossed to the stairwell at the back of the room.

Deadeye climbed the stairs until he reached the landing of the top floor. There was only one door of lacquered wood with a heavy golden knocker. He slid the key into the lock and turned it until he heard the click. He pushed the door open slowly with one hand, still holding his gun in the other. The hallway beyond was dark, illuminated only by the dawn creeping in through the east-facing windows. The room was extravagantly furnished and the thick carpets beneath his feet muffled the sound of his entry. There was a door to his left, another further up the hall to the right. The hallway ended in a larger sitting room at the end. He crept forward and checked the doors one at a time, the left led to the washroom, the right to the kitchen. All empty.

He turned his attention to the open room at the hallway's end, where the living room windows let in the red-orange light from outside. As he drew closer, he pressed his body up against the wall.

"Deadeye."

When he entered the room, he saw the man who had spoken. He was wearing a shirt that was unbuttoned down to his chest. He was overweight, with a fringe of sparse gray hair that clung unconvincingly to the top of a head that showed the signs of age. He was smoking a cigarette, letting the ashes drift carelessly to settle upon the carpet. He did not appear to be disturbed by Deadeye's presence, nor by the gun that Deadeye had sighted upon him by unthinking reflex.

"Some men do need sleep, you know." His voice was refined and articulate, and each word was picked out as though etched from crystal.

Deadeye kept his gun upon him. "Why do you want me dead?"

"No time for conversation, then? Come, I have waited so long to meet you in the flesh."

"Sending men to kill me was not like to satisfy that curiosity," Deadeye said impatiently.

"So you say. Perhaps I am merely adapting to the situation that has presented itself to me."

Deadeye's brow creased, annoyed by the old man's carelessness. "I'm not here to exchange empty words."

"No, surely not." He looked at Deadeye's gun meaningfully. "Forgive me, I am told I too much like to hear the sound of my own voice."

"Tell me why you want me dead."

"Are you sure? Know that once we start down this path of this questioning, there will be no return. You see, I am an old man with no great hurry to see things to their ends. Are you so eager?"

"Speak." Deadeye thumbed the hammer of his revolver.

The gray-haired man nodded amiably. "You were amusing to have around for a while. A creature of chaos. You had your uses after a fashion. It started with a man you killed. A man who could not be killed. That made you a curiosity, and it made you invaluable. But I suppose I knew that sooner or later, you would get it in your head that you should take my life. It appears that time is now."

"Riddles. I never killed a man who couldn't be killed. As to you, I make no guarantees."

"His name was Paul. Not an important man, but a man who was friend of important men. You would not even remember him. But when you killed him, it changed everything." He gave Deadeye a sour smile. "Now ask your other question. About her."

"How do you know?" Deadeye's voice betrayed his surprise.

"A man cannot erase all the links to his past. He can try to forget, change his name, but a man cannot change his face or bury his past so deep it cannot be found by someone who wishes to look."

"Where is she?" His voice was hoarse and he felt a tremor in his hand.

"Gone beyond where you can find her. Forget about her. Can a man like you have dreams?"

Deadeye pulled the hammer back on his revolver. "A better answer might have saved your life."

"Would it? Even you cannot kill me. Not even here in the east."

"I aim to try." His finger slipped over the trigger.

Deadeye never heard the footsteps behind him.

In his dreams there was a storm. Thunder rumbled across the beach and a howling wind drove the rain against him in sheets. The warm rain soaked his clothes and ran in rivers down his face and inside his shirt. The city was gone. He was standing on an endless expanse of sand that stretched without rise or fall for miles in every direction. The clouds were slate and gray and moved faster than any storm he had ever known. The edges of his vision seemed brittle and crumbling, as though beyond the fringe of his sight, the world fell away to nothing.

And she was there.

"It can't be," he said, or perhaps he thought.

She was wearing a white dress and in the pouring rain, it revealed the curves of her body and filled Deadeye with a gnawing ache. The fabric clung to her against the wind and rain, as did her sodden hair of gold. Even for the storm, he could see that she was crying.

"Why did you go?" he asked the dream.

"I had to." Even in sadness, her voice was sweet.

"Where did you go?" he asked the dream.

"Away."

"How do I find you?" he asked the dream.

But the howling of the wind was too loud and he could not hear his own words, even in his own mind. He screamed them again, but still there was no sound. The words clawed at his throat.

The dream pulled him under.

I'm waiting.

Deadeye woke on a bed of grass. The pain in his shoulder was gone. It was cold and damp and his breath fogged in the air. It was a gray morning and clouds rolled by in heavy banks across the horizon, pushing up against the great slopes of the mountains behind him, making indistinct their peaks. Snow came down near to the green foothills, but here only the morning dew clung to the ground. The first beams of sunlight were piercing through the clouds, heavenly spotlights that struck the fields and moved across them as the clouds marched. Sleep still clung to him.

"Morning, Deadeye," came a voice above him. "You're looking better."

Baldric.

"Where am I?" asked Deadeye.

"It seemed to me a good idea to get you on your way." Baldric said as he mounted up on his horse. "I took you out of the city and carried you through the mountains."

Memories clawed at Deadeye's mind. "It was you, wasn't it?"

"Only to save your life. Some people hold it to a greater value than you." Baldric looked out across the plain. "But now that you're awake, it's time we parted."

"Where are you going?"

"Here and there," Baldric said. "You're not the only one of my concerns. But for you, go west. There's a town about a half-day's ride from here. You should reach it before nightfall."

"Why did you bring me here, Baldric?" Deadeye asked.

"There's no man called Deadeye here in the west, and no man to recognize his face. These are the newborn lands. Might be you'll find what you're looking for." He reached to his saddlebags where Deadeye's gun belt was. He tossed it to him.

"You'll be needing this," Baldric said as he turned his horse. "Be seeing you, Deadeye."

"My name is Jack," said the man called Deadeye.

Baldric smiled at that and tipped his hat, gently spurring his horse towards the mountains and was gone.

Jack headed west.