Bloody Knuckles (And Other Tales) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed within these stories are either products of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously.

  BLOODY KNUCKLES (AND OTHER TALES)

  Copyright © 2018 by Stormhaven Studios, LLC

  All rights reserved

  Cover illustration by Mikhail Greuli

  A Stormhaven Studios Book

  www.stormhavenstudios.com

  Stormhaven Studios® and Saga of Lucimia® are registered trademarks of Stormhaven Studios, LLC

  First Edition, November 2018

  ISBN 978-0-578-41428-7 (paperback)

  The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) applied so you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This ebook is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this ebook, or make this ebook publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook, other than to read it on your personal devices.

  Preface

  I never finished high school. I never went to college. Once upon a time, I was simply a third generation ceramic tile and natural stone contractor. It wasn’t a career path I willingly chose. Circumstances and life pushed me in that direction.

  From the time I was a child, enthralled by authors like Roger Zelazny, Robert Jordan, Tolkien, Lewis, Michael A. Stackpole, M.Z.B., George R.R. Martin, Kevin J. Anderson, C.J. Cherryh, and so many more, I had immersed myself in fanstical worlds as a way of escaping the drudgery of my childhood growing up on a dairy farm and unwillingly following in the family footsteps.

  I was the kid in high school who would bring handwritten stories into class for my friends to read. I was the only kid in my English class who the teacher allowed to go off-list when it was time to do book reports (she knew all the books on the list by heart, so she could tell if a student had actually read a book when giving a report), because she knew that I was an avid reader.

  In the pre-Internet, pre-streaming days of old before Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and beyond, the library was my refuge. We would go once every couple of weeks, and I would load up a brown paper grocery bag with as many as books as I could fit inside (at least 15 – 20); sometimes I would read a novel per day, hiding underneath my blankets with a flashlight and pouring over those ragged tomes until two or three in the morning. The following mornings doing chores around the farm often featured a book-weary youth who could barely keep his eyes open.

  As an adult, eBay and used bookstores became my havens. My book collection grew to more than 1,200 novels by 2004. An addiction, for sure.

  I always wanted to write for a living. But it didn’t work out that way for a long time.

  In late 2007, fate saw fit to intervene. The economy was slumped, and the year had been horrific for my ceramic tile and natural stone company. I laid off my last employee and saw my own wages cut by two thirds. At the time, I was involved with a Bulgarian girl, and we decided to move back to her home town of Sofia. I sold my truck, my tools, and we left Colorado behind.

  On January 5th of 2008, we arrived in Bulgaria. Two weeks later, I wrote my first story. A week after that, I sold it. Destiny, it appeared, had finally decided to show her face.

  This collection is made up of stories I wrote during those early days of 2008 when I was just getting going as a writer. I was experimenting with various points of view, styles, and subjects.

  In 2009, my career as a content writer on the Internet took off, and in 2011 my travel blog followed. Sci-fi and fantasy took a back burner for many years as I was off galivanting around the world working as a writer, photographer, videographer, and public speaker in the travel industry via Marginal Boundaries.

  When development for the Saga of Lucimia MMORPG kicked off in 2014 I knew I was heading back in that direction, but it wasn’t until the end of 2017 when I shut down the travel blog and transitioned full-time to the game studio that I came back around to these short stories.

  Over the course of 2018 as I was preparing Echoes of the Past for publication, drafting the second volume of the Saga of Lucimia, and working on the evolution of Stormhaven Studios, I’ve been tinkering with these stories. For those of you who followed along at the Patreon, this was initially the reason that project launched. I worked on some of these tales via the Story of the Month series that I published there, eventually working up to this anthology.

  First and foremost I want to thank my wife, Cris, who has offered unwavering support since we started the studio, allowing me to pursue a project that was, for many years, nothing more than a pipe dream, something I was working on in my spare time, outside of my day job with Marginal Boundaries.

  Secondly, I want to thank everyone who is part of our SoL community. Your support over the years is what has allowed me to transition back to my primary passion in life: writing fantasy and science fiction.

  Thirdly, I want to thank my partners at Stormhaven Studios, the bulk of whom have been working tirelessly alongside me since 2014 to build things up from scratch.

  And lastly, I want to thank all of the editors and publications who chose to take a risk with me in those early years, coming into this career with no higher education and nothing more than passion and desire. All I ever wanted to do was write for a living. You helped make that possible.

  - Tim

  Buy Volume I of the Saga of Lucimia, Echoes of the Past, at Amazon in either print or Kindle format.

  For more information on the MMORPG, visit www.sagaoflucimia.com

  Like what you see here? Support my Patreon and get ongoing blog posts and insights into my writing process, plus behind the scenes details on stories and novels as they happen in real time!

  Content

  Preface

  The Fixer

  Bloody Knuckles: A Bounty Hunter’s Tale

  A Hero and His Horse

  The Jarkath Blade

  The Spectres

  Richter: A Bounty Hunter’s Tale

  Caller ID

  Substance

  The Medallions of Lashiva

  About the Author

  The Fixer

  By T.W. Anderson

  The Fixer was the fourth story I wrote after launching my writing career in 2008. I was living in Bulgaria at the time, and had already written and sold the Medallions of Lashiva, plus started the first novel in that series. It was an idea that hit me in an afternoon, and the first draft was wrapped by that evening.

  He wasn’t what I expected. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with my initial take on the situation. Could have, I suppose. Maybe it was just another chance for me to see how even the mighty can fall.

  His beard was unkempt, wild and mangy. Not at all like the pictures you see when that time of year rolls around again. The edges of his mustache and beard around his mouth were tinged yellow from smoke. I lit one myself as I soaked in the view.

  His hair was thinning on top. They definitely don’t show you that in the pictures. Probably stress-related, though it could have had something to do with his age. His t-shirt had stains in a few spots, and there were holes in it. His belly protruded from beneath the bottom of the shirt like some barrel of lard, spilling out over the waistline of his sweatpants. He was wearing sandals, which struck me as odd, considering the temperature. I was wearing a thick overcoat, the collar turned up against the chill. I inhaled smoke from my cigarette and contemplated.

  “Can you Fix him?” Her voice was timid. She was a handsome woman, despite her age. A few centuries out of my league, though.

  I exhaled smoke and looked sideways at her. “Anything is possible.”

  She smiled nervously, wringing her hands in concern. It was a
lways like this with the emotional ones. A cheating spouse was one thing; they were driven by anger, usually, which made the process easier. People are more willing to forget when they have a reason to do so. Love, on the other hand…. Well, it certainly added something to the equation. I suddenly wondered if perhaps I had quoted the job too cheap. “How long has he been like this?”

  “Three months,” she replied as she smoothed her dress over her hips. I marveled for a moment at how little gray there was in her hair. “It was all of a sudden. One day he was in the workshop, busy like he always is overseeing things, and the next I found him his den, half drunk and going on about ‘those ungrateful little brats’.”

  Elves. I grunted. Perish the thought. I took another drag from my smoke. If he had gotten to this stage in merely three months, I definitely had my work cut out for me. “How did he get up there?” I asked curiously, pointing.

  She shrugged. “How does he do any of the things he does?” she answered cryptically.

  How, indeed. The sleigh was hanging from the rafters of the barn, the runners detached and leaning up against the wall, probably for servicing. In any case, it was a good six feet off the ground, and I’d have been hard-pressed to pull myself up despite being in relatively good shape and only weighing a buck seventy. One of his sandaled feet hung over the side and the other was propped up on the front dashboard, his head bowed forward onto his chest. There was an open bottle in one of his hands; whiskey from the look of it. It was three-quarters empty, and there were cigarette butts littering the ground beneath the sleigh. He snorted suddenly, and the whole contraption shook hard enough to cause the building to tremble slightly. I narrowed my eyes. “I’ll get my things.”

  Finding the source of the problem was the key. Once that was established it was relatively simple. But I couldn’t do my job until I uncovered the cause.

  Fixing thing was easy for me. I’d been doing it since I was a child. The first one was a bird with a broken wing. That had taken me three days, but I was only four years old. My dad’s old Corvette when I was nine. That had been my first really challenging Fix. It had taken me nearly a week. I’ll never understand why he wasn’t grateful. I can still feel the sting of his hand on my face, his voice in my ear yelling something about how I’d no right to tamper with other people’s things, that maybe some people wanted things broken, to give them something to work on. Masochism, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t subscribe.

  Each case is different. Machines are easy. People are the hardest. I’d had to use my hands in the early days, but now I could simply look at a broken watch, a sputtering car, a creaking hinge and it would Fix itself. Animals are also relatively easy, though I tend to let Nature take her course these days. Mostly my clients are humans, although I’d had a few ‘droids come through the office in recent years. They were always strange ones to work with. I could tell by the way they looked at me that they were trying to figure it out, to put it into mathematical terms. But you can’t. It just is.

  *

  “Call me Nick.” His voice was raspy, almost a gravely croak. He patted his pockets but came up empty. I offered him one of mine, lit it for him. He closed his eyes and inhaled. “I know why you’re here,” he rumbled, one eye opening to peer at me. I was amazed at how crystal that gaze was. They really did seem to twinkle merrily. I reminded myself not to let the charm of his station get to me. “Wife thinks I’m slipping in my old age.”

  I scratched notes on my pad of paper. “Are you?” I asked, curious.

  He snorted. “It’s not like I’m down in the Bahamas, whoring it up.” He took another drag of his cigarette, and poured himself a shot. I scribbled more notes. “I just need a few months away from it all. Christ, it’s like the world falls apart if I decide to take some personal time!”

  I nodded. “Everyone needs a vacation. But there is your position to think about.”

  “Damn my position!” he growled, slamming a fist down on his desk. The shot glass fell over, spilling whiskey. The tip of my pencil broke, and I cursed under my breath. “I’d like to see any other man do what I do, year in and year out, for as long as I have and see if they can keep their sanity.”

  “Look at Jesus,” I pointed out, then regretted the comparison. He glared at me and put the bottle to his lips, ignoring the shot glass entirely. It made my eyes water to see how much whiskey went down in those few swallows.

  He belched loudly as he finished. My eyes wandered to the walls. There were toy designs ranging from notes scribbled on restaurant napkins to full-on blueprints. Some of it I’d seen before in other incarnations, but there were a few designs I didn’t recognize. “Tell me about your parents,” I asked as I sharpened my pencil.

  He exhaled smoke and reached down to the desk, opened a drawer, and slid a picture frame across the desk top. “Not much to tell,” he said, smoke curling around his face. “A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Well, there you go.”

  I’m not sure how he was able to take the photograph. Cameras had only been around for a few hundred years, but the style of clothing and buildings in this picture were far older. I’m not a history expert, but either this was a fake and he was pulling my chain, or it was a real picture, and I had no idea how it could have been taken. The child was perhaps nine or ten years old, and the parents looked normal enough. I made a note of it on my pad. “Was your father in the business, or did you come up with the idea on your own?”

  He stared at me with his cigarette half-raised to his lips. “Do you drink?” he rebutted.

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  He took a drag and skewered me with his gaze. “My father was a toy-maker. I guess you could say I followed in his footsteps.”

  “Indeed.” I put my pencil down and stretched. The flight up had my timing all screwed. Jet lag is a bitch. “So when did you decide that you needed a change?”

  He took a last drag from his cigarette and ground it out in an overflowing ashtray. “I’ve had my moments over the years,” he replied thoughtfully. “But the breaking point was about three months ago, I’d say.”

  “Hmm,” I murmured, jotting more notes. “Any particular thing that set it off?”

  He reached down beneath his desk and pulled out another bottle. His eyes were starting to glaze over. “It’s those damn elves,” he said menacingly. “Always going on with their prattling about candy and laughter and children and toys.” He unscrewed the bottle and took a few swallows. I avoided wincing. It was like water to him. He didn’t even blink. “But the music. Gods, you have no idea what it’s like, day in, day out, for all these years.”

  I wondered for a moment if he was going to cry. The prospect was somewhat alarming. I sat up straighter in my chair and coughed slightly into my hand. “If you need a moment alone...” I began.

  “No!” He barked loudly.

  I nodded and looked briefly over my notes. “Have you considered a vacation? It might be the perfect solution.”

  “You’re telling me.” He took another large swallow. “And maybe trade my wife in for a newer model, eh?” He raised one eyebrow and grinned broadly.

  I did not smile back. He grumbled something under his breath and sank back into his chair. “So what exactly do you do?” he asked me pointedly.

  I closed my notebook, tucked my pencil into my pocket, and folded my hands into my lap. “I Fix things.”

  “You fix things.” It was not a question, merely a statement. “And I’m one of the little helpers,” he commented sarcastically. “Come on, you can tell me. Are you a psychiatrist or something? Some quack my wife called up to try and get me to admit the error of my ways?”

  I merely gazed back at him. Confrontational banter solved nothing. “If you will permit me?” I said as I leaned forward and gestured towards him. “Your hand, please.”

  He looked at me suspiciously for a few moments before leaning forward and placing his meaty palm on the edge of the desk. “You aren’t a queer or anything, are you?�
��

  I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Really, sir. In this day and age? I expected more from you.” I grasped his hand, marveled at the heat that was emanating from it, almost like a small furnace. And then I Pushed.

  It was impossible to tell how long I was out. The first thing I noticed was the smell of whiskey and cinnamon mixed together, and the tickling of his beard against my cheek. I opened my eyes slowly and found him kneeling over me. “Are you alright?” His voice was full of genuine concern.

  There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. My ears were still ringing from my head smacking up against the wall. I was going to have a lump for sure. I took his hand and let him pull me up. “I’ll take that drink now,” I said as I righted the chair I had been sitting in and sat down again. The room was spinning slightly.

  He poured. I contemplated.

  I’d never come across a thing or person I couldn’t Fix. But I was sure of one thing: I wasn’t about to try it on him again. This was one problem that would have to find another solution. I accepted the shot glass and downed it in a gulp, wincing slightly at the burn. Pure rotgut. At the very least I’d expected him to have some taste in liquor. My eyes watered and my nose hairs felt like they were burning to little crisps. I pushed my shot glass forward for another. He grinned and poured. I raised my glass and drank. Several times in a row.

  For the first time since my arrival I started to feel warm. The lump in my head faded away and the warm, fuzzy feeling of intoxication began to drift over me. “Have you ever considered the Caribbean?” I asked as I took another sip. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it tasted at first.

  He waved his hand towards the door. “Wife doesn’t like the beach. She burns too easily.”

  I lit a cigarette. “That makes it hard to get away, doesn’t it?”