Cossol was a city unlike any other. It was a mismatched landscape of rickety, leaning buildings that seemed to be stacked up on one another with no rhyme or reason. The people flooded the streets in a sea of sweat and grime. The streets were made of dirt turned to black mud in most places. The earth around Cossol was beaten down. Devastated and destitute. Somehow the farmers in the outlying lands were able to make food grow. Somehow.
The people of Cossol were of a tough, heartless breed. They were dangerous and bloodthirsty, all of them. They would fight you and kill you for looking at them, for breathing air that wasn?t yours, for drinking a beer that they wanted to drink. Death in Cossol was an everyday occurrence. People were sick. People were shot, or stabbed, or hanged, or beaten and left to drown in their own blood in the muck. The animals were either monstrous or sickly. The dogs were either gaunt or vicious mongrels ready to tear the flesh from a man?s throat. Everyone was armed.
There were few children in the streets and those who could be seen had a steely gaze to match the oldest, most grizzled gunslinger. They survived on instinct and cruelty alone. They were the worst of the lot. Because the children of Cossol, unlike most of the city?s citizens, had never known a place other than this. They had not come from loving families or peaceful towns. They grew up in the Black Heart of the West, and had never felt the tenderness of a mother?s love. They knew hunger, cold, and sickness. They knew violence and exploitation. The little monsters had their own gangs and in some parts of the city, they seemed to call the shots.
Cossol was not a place for the weak willed or the faint of heart. Cossol was meant for men beyond hope of redemption.
Cossol was Glenn Douglas? home.
The pursuit had worn at Madison in ways she hadn't expected it to. It had been months since she had been on horseback for so long a ride, she still felt the loss of equilibrium at times that came with bearing the body of a new mother, and the tiredness that had come from that tugged at her senses, at the eyes that peered from her wind-licked, determined face as she guided the horse into the edges of dirty Cossol, where what was a road was barely severely beaten dust and gravel from years of traffic. A raven cawed at her from the turreted edge of the dilapidated chapel which was graffitied and covered in lewd slogans on one side. A priest watched her grimly from its front staircase. She tore her eyes off him and continued into town. People passed her by with looks of resentment or anger or distaste. She didn't hold their gazes for very long, either. Coming to a rundown bar, she dismounted and walked the mare to the very far side where a few other horses, far less healthy than her own, were tied. Madison didn't like her chances of returning to find her horse was still there, but she wasn't a woman with many options at all right now, so she chalked it for the pile. Pulling down the brim of the black hat, beaten as the road underfoot, Madison Rye descended into the black heart that was Cossol, just another face amongst other faces, in the street thick with bodies and grime.
Eyes watched her from across the way. Eyes that were like two pools of amber. Gold, they were, and bright. When Madison dismounted a man who seemed, prior to this point, a fixture on the wall against which he leaned, stepped out and approached. He had in his hand an envelope made of yellowed paper. He held it out to her. His face was darkened by the sun, lined with wrinkles, and covered in coarse, salt and pepper hair. He had a groaning croak of a voice.
?Welcome to Cossol Miss Rye,? he said. ?Got a letter for you.?
Her eyes caught light and threw it the way a knife does as they met those of the strange man and he was given a close, bald study. Her hand was out swiping the letter from him. Her eyes still on his while she did so. "He expected me, huh." Her voice and her expression of it was dry; you could strike a match off her tone. She gave a quick glance around, at the passing folk. Amongst them, she was a scar - in all black, from head to toe, and the leather jacket, creased with the years. A scar of a woman, a slit in the throat of a city she didn't belong in. The place spoke to her as these towns always did. It occurred to her how little she liked that croon, the sound of it, the way it reached her, but that she knew it too well. Her eyes finally fell on the page.
The letter turned out to be a sentence long, nothing more. "Get out of Cossol, now." The man offered her a crooked, toothy smile and pulled a knife out from his hip and brandished it on her. "I was told you might need some convincing', Miss Rye," the man said, waving the knife around lazily.
There was only mild alarm on her face as the knife in the man's hand cut through the sentiment that hung in the air written on a piece of paper. A brow went up as the blade was held towards her and she smiled. "Did he pay you well, or suck your cock?" Her right leg went out to sweep his ankles while her left hand went to her hip. The smith and wesson was held out towards him. "Now tell me, where did he go?"
The crowd went on passing by, like nothing had happened at all. Only the raven at the chapel made a comment on the proceedings. It cawed twice loudly and took flight. A swoop into the air in a flash of black wings. It carried on over the rooftops
The man dropped the knife as he fell to the ground with a loud cry in surprise. He stared up at the gun that was now pointed down at him and opened a shark-tooth grinned. "He offered me something' better than that, Miss Rye," he laughed back up at the woman and placed his hands in the mud to push himself up. "I ain't tellin' you shit."
Her right hand balled the paper in a fist and tossed it to the ground. It was soon trampled with mud. Something in that made her sad, that everything between them seemed to go to just that. The man was retorting something to her, her mind too fat full of thoughts to really be paying any attention when she realised he wasn't going to cooperate. Spinning her gun in hand, she beat the handle across his face hard and stepped back. "Then sleep." And she moved on through the crowd, heedless of eyes but her own pair scanning the balconies and alcoves, windows and alleys in this mismatched hell hole. Even the air smelled wet with decay. Old, dead roses, a faded notion of smoke. She walked past the coffin maker and dared a look inside. Onwards she walked. "Where are you, Douglas. Where are you." She murmured. A pair of children moved up to her as she re-holstered the long nose of the pistol and held her hand at her side. One was selling small, hard boiled candies and the other was holding a small narrow stiletto at her. "Pay up, lady. We poor, 'ware or have pity o' our souls." Madison looked at the candy seller with a lengthy stare, the mother in her perturbed, but she pushed on past giving the one with the blade a square look. "If you touch me, I will hurt you." The children watched her go silently.
As she moved onwards, she regretted her words instantly. She inhaled sharply and continued to browse the streets. There were three coffin makers on the one street. Her face went solem.
The city thrummed with violence around her. Its people seemed to pay her little mind, seeming more intent on brutalizing one another. There was a bar at the end of a street and people were flooding around it in scores. Inside they formed a ring around a pair of men who were throwing wild punches at one another, their faces and bodies blooded beyond recognition. Glenn Douglas was not amidst the crowd, but he was nearby. One of the taller buildings had windows facing the street. He could see the crowd and the coffin makers and he could see a black scar cutting its way through the sea of bastards that toiled around Madison Rye. Glenn smiled at first, in a cruel way, and then he frowned. Cossol was no place for a woman like her. She was strong, but she had a heart. He opened the window and leaned out, bottle in hand, and watched her look for his dead body inside a coffin.
He couldn?t call out to her over the hollering crowd, so he hurled the bottle across the way and it shattered against a wall behind a coffin maker, making the gathered people nearby shout and cry out in surprise. They turned and raised their fists and their knives and their guns, looking for someone to beat and kill and blame.
Madison visibly gasped and seemed surprised at the bottle, the splinters of glass and leapt back in reflex as it shattered in front of her against the wall of the coffin maker. She looked down, it sparkled at her feet. She couldn't help but grin, though it was not laced with any warmth, as her eyes sought out the perpetrator. When they slowed to a stop on the window with Glenn peering out it she just shook her head. Her eyes glued on his from a distance.
He met her look and then he retreated back into the window and closed it. Glenn turned, his movements slow and methodical. He shrugged a shirt on and buttoned it up, threw on his belt with his gun, and walked toward the door. It opened into a narrow hall with a flight of stairs going up and down. He went up, taking his time like a man marching to a firing squad. Up and up he went, slipping past the people who littered the stairs as they stood around and yelled and tried to rob one another. Out on the roof he could see more of Cossol spreading out before him and he felt a strange sensation.
Pride? This was his home. His kingdom. Here, Glenn was in charge. The city knew him not, but he understood it implicitly, and could manipulate it to his whim. At least, that?s what he told himself.
?Hurry up, Madison.?
Her jaw worked and flexed as she stared up at him with a rage that had been simmering in her chest and was the single reason she had entered his wretched empire at all. She knew very well this was his court she was in, and the way things moved wasn't the way they had in Lofton or even York. Her eyes slowly drew from his and fixed on the door to the bar which she moved for. She shoved past the whores, the lecherous stares and hands which reached for her and stopped with but one single, shard of ice glare from her. The stairs she stumbled up past the bodies, the broken wood. The higher she went, the more she felt it wouldn't end. Every hall and staircase seeming more crooked than the last. When she reached the roof it was with a hungry gasp of air and a look that was withering. Her hand still at her side. She moved towards him and stopped only when it was they were face to face. Her jaw was still flexing, her teeth still grating, her eyes still on fire. Madison Rye just stared at Glenn Douglas, breathing in and breathing out. "I have been askin' myself one question this one long afternoon and I still don't have an answer. Not one that makes sense. I know you got it in your head that it is best without me, but we are both done talkin' about what won't ever be. We're not friend, but we're not enemies. Which is why, I can't answer that question, Douglas. I can't answer why, despite all the bad and all the good, you'd try to kill me in my own house and rob my bar. Again. To what end are you workin?"
He was standing there smoking a cigarette when she came up and only the faintest hint of surprise crossed his otherwise impassive face when she spoke. He flicked it and ash scattered in the wind to go off dusting over the city. He turned away from her and looked down into the street.
?You ever been to Cossol before, Madison? I know I mentioned it to you once before, but I don? think you?ve been here before now.?
He waved a hand over the city. ?Cossol is the place that made me, me. It?s a real shit hole, but it?s always here, waiting for me. Never lets me down.?
He breathed deep of air that was clogged with smoke and ash and smog. ?I?m just tryin? to get by,? he answered. ?I?m tryin? to let go of the past, but you don?t seem capable of doing that.?
?So what did you come here for, Madison Rye? To kill me? I already died for you once.?
She swallows and turns to look to the streets below them. Past the smoke and the smog. The air here was like the hands of the men downstairs, iyt clung and it grabbed and harassed and a hand held her hat to her head as she looked from the distance and to him, standing there smoking and like he didn't have a care in the world. "I rode here to do somethin'... I haven't decided just yet. I was in the house when it went up in flames... ... why would you possibly want to kill me when you died for me? How... " she trailed off and tore off her hat in frustration at the predicament, at the ceaseless tug of the air. She brought her arm back and then tossed it off the edge with a grunt. It spiralled in an eddy of wind to the world below. It fell like the swooping raven.
"I was in the house when you set it on fire...and accordin' to testin by the Watch, it was you who robbed my bar. And..why ain't we talkin' about what happened, with Glass Eye, all the damn dogs, what happened to your goddamn hand. Do you even damn well know yourself? Or are you happy to parade around half dead and angry forever? Or, all dead... as the case may be?" Her eyes settled on his mouth.
"What's your truth, Douglas. Do I have to kill you to be done with this? This can't go on forever?"
?I ain?t robbed you since the day we met, Madison Rye. And I didn?t try to kill you. What were you doin? in the house??
He shook his head took a drag off his cigarette. ?What do you want me to say about any of it? I died and then I didn?t. I was marked and then I wasn?t. Way I see it, it?s none of your concern anymore. We?re done. You?re the one who can?t seem to figure that out, you keep comin? back to me, keep bringin? up the past again.?
?Your man Tag know your here? What about your daughter? Kinda person leaves their family behind to come to a place like this for a man like me??
The people of Cossol were of a tough, heartless breed. They were dangerous and bloodthirsty, all of them. They would fight you and kill you for looking at them, for breathing air that wasn?t yours, for drinking a beer that they wanted to drink. Death in Cossol was an everyday occurrence. People were sick. People were shot, or stabbed, or hanged, or beaten and left to drown in their own blood in the muck. The animals were either monstrous or sickly. The dogs were either gaunt or vicious mongrels ready to tear the flesh from a man?s throat. Everyone was armed.
There were few children in the streets and those who could be seen had a steely gaze to match the oldest, most grizzled gunslinger. They survived on instinct and cruelty alone. They were the worst of the lot. Because the children of Cossol, unlike most of the city?s citizens, had never known a place other than this. They had not come from loving families or peaceful towns. They grew up in the Black Heart of the West, and had never felt the tenderness of a mother?s love. They knew hunger, cold, and sickness. They knew violence and exploitation. The little monsters had their own gangs and in some parts of the city, they seemed to call the shots.
Cossol was not a place for the weak willed or the faint of heart. Cossol was meant for men beyond hope of redemption.
Cossol was Glenn Douglas? home.
The pursuit had worn at Madison in ways she hadn't expected it to. It had been months since she had been on horseback for so long a ride, she still felt the loss of equilibrium at times that came with bearing the body of a new mother, and the tiredness that had come from that tugged at her senses, at the eyes that peered from her wind-licked, determined face as she guided the horse into the edges of dirty Cossol, where what was a road was barely severely beaten dust and gravel from years of traffic. A raven cawed at her from the turreted edge of the dilapidated chapel which was graffitied and covered in lewd slogans on one side. A priest watched her grimly from its front staircase. She tore her eyes off him and continued into town. People passed her by with looks of resentment or anger or distaste. She didn't hold their gazes for very long, either. Coming to a rundown bar, she dismounted and walked the mare to the very far side where a few other horses, far less healthy than her own, were tied. Madison didn't like her chances of returning to find her horse was still there, but she wasn't a woman with many options at all right now, so she chalked it for the pile. Pulling down the brim of the black hat, beaten as the road underfoot, Madison Rye descended into the black heart that was Cossol, just another face amongst other faces, in the street thick with bodies and grime.
Eyes watched her from across the way. Eyes that were like two pools of amber. Gold, they were, and bright. When Madison dismounted a man who seemed, prior to this point, a fixture on the wall against which he leaned, stepped out and approached. He had in his hand an envelope made of yellowed paper. He held it out to her. His face was darkened by the sun, lined with wrinkles, and covered in coarse, salt and pepper hair. He had a groaning croak of a voice.
?Welcome to Cossol Miss Rye,? he said. ?Got a letter for you.?
Her eyes caught light and threw it the way a knife does as they met those of the strange man and he was given a close, bald study. Her hand was out swiping the letter from him. Her eyes still on his while she did so. "He expected me, huh." Her voice and her expression of it was dry; you could strike a match off her tone. She gave a quick glance around, at the passing folk. Amongst them, she was a scar - in all black, from head to toe, and the leather jacket, creased with the years. A scar of a woman, a slit in the throat of a city she didn't belong in. The place spoke to her as these towns always did. It occurred to her how little she liked that croon, the sound of it, the way it reached her, but that she knew it too well. Her eyes finally fell on the page.
The letter turned out to be a sentence long, nothing more. "Get out of Cossol, now." The man offered her a crooked, toothy smile and pulled a knife out from his hip and brandished it on her. "I was told you might need some convincing', Miss Rye," the man said, waving the knife around lazily.
There was only mild alarm on her face as the knife in the man's hand cut through the sentiment that hung in the air written on a piece of paper. A brow went up as the blade was held towards her and she smiled. "Did he pay you well, or suck your cock?" Her right leg went out to sweep his ankles while her left hand went to her hip. The smith and wesson was held out towards him. "Now tell me, where did he go?"
The crowd went on passing by, like nothing had happened at all. Only the raven at the chapel made a comment on the proceedings. It cawed twice loudly and took flight. A swoop into the air in a flash of black wings. It carried on over the rooftops
The man dropped the knife as he fell to the ground with a loud cry in surprise. He stared up at the gun that was now pointed down at him and opened a shark-tooth grinned. "He offered me something' better than that, Miss Rye," he laughed back up at the woman and placed his hands in the mud to push himself up. "I ain't tellin' you shit."
Her right hand balled the paper in a fist and tossed it to the ground. It was soon trampled with mud. Something in that made her sad, that everything between them seemed to go to just that. The man was retorting something to her, her mind too fat full of thoughts to really be paying any attention when she realised he wasn't going to cooperate. Spinning her gun in hand, she beat the handle across his face hard and stepped back. "Then sleep." And she moved on through the crowd, heedless of eyes but her own pair scanning the balconies and alcoves, windows and alleys in this mismatched hell hole. Even the air smelled wet with decay. Old, dead roses, a faded notion of smoke. She walked past the coffin maker and dared a look inside. Onwards she walked. "Where are you, Douglas. Where are you." She murmured. A pair of children moved up to her as she re-holstered the long nose of the pistol and held her hand at her side. One was selling small, hard boiled candies and the other was holding a small narrow stiletto at her. "Pay up, lady. We poor, 'ware or have pity o' our souls." Madison looked at the candy seller with a lengthy stare, the mother in her perturbed, but she pushed on past giving the one with the blade a square look. "If you touch me, I will hurt you." The children watched her go silently.
As she moved onwards, she regretted her words instantly. She inhaled sharply and continued to browse the streets. There were three coffin makers on the one street. Her face went solem.
The city thrummed with violence around her. Its people seemed to pay her little mind, seeming more intent on brutalizing one another. There was a bar at the end of a street and people were flooding around it in scores. Inside they formed a ring around a pair of men who were throwing wild punches at one another, their faces and bodies blooded beyond recognition. Glenn Douglas was not amidst the crowd, but he was nearby. One of the taller buildings had windows facing the street. He could see the crowd and the coffin makers and he could see a black scar cutting its way through the sea of bastards that toiled around Madison Rye. Glenn smiled at first, in a cruel way, and then he frowned. Cossol was no place for a woman like her. She was strong, but she had a heart. He opened the window and leaned out, bottle in hand, and watched her look for his dead body inside a coffin.
He couldn?t call out to her over the hollering crowd, so he hurled the bottle across the way and it shattered against a wall behind a coffin maker, making the gathered people nearby shout and cry out in surprise. They turned and raised their fists and their knives and their guns, looking for someone to beat and kill and blame.
Madison visibly gasped and seemed surprised at the bottle, the splinters of glass and leapt back in reflex as it shattered in front of her against the wall of the coffin maker. She looked down, it sparkled at her feet. She couldn't help but grin, though it was not laced with any warmth, as her eyes sought out the perpetrator. When they slowed to a stop on the window with Glenn peering out it she just shook her head. Her eyes glued on his from a distance.
He met her look and then he retreated back into the window and closed it. Glenn turned, his movements slow and methodical. He shrugged a shirt on and buttoned it up, threw on his belt with his gun, and walked toward the door. It opened into a narrow hall with a flight of stairs going up and down. He went up, taking his time like a man marching to a firing squad. Up and up he went, slipping past the people who littered the stairs as they stood around and yelled and tried to rob one another. Out on the roof he could see more of Cossol spreading out before him and he felt a strange sensation.
Pride? This was his home. His kingdom. Here, Glenn was in charge. The city knew him not, but he understood it implicitly, and could manipulate it to his whim. At least, that?s what he told himself.
?Hurry up, Madison.?
Her jaw worked and flexed as she stared up at him with a rage that had been simmering in her chest and was the single reason she had entered his wretched empire at all. She knew very well this was his court she was in, and the way things moved wasn't the way they had in Lofton or even York. Her eyes slowly drew from his and fixed on the door to the bar which she moved for. She shoved past the whores, the lecherous stares and hands which reached for her and stopped with but one single, shard of ice glare from her. The stairs she stumbled up past the bodies, the broken wood. The higher she went, the more she felt it wouldn't end. Every hall and staircase seeming more crooked than the last. When she reached the roof it was with a hungry gasp of air and a look that was withering. Her hand still at her side. She moved towards him and stopped only when it was they were face to face. Her jaw was still flexing, her teeth still grating, her eyes still on fire. Madison Rye just stared at Glenn Douglas, breathing in and breathing out. "I have been askin' myself one question this one long afternoon and I still don't have an answer. Not one that makes sense. I know you got it in your head that it is best without me, but we are both done talkin' about what won't ever be. We're not friend, but we're not enemies. Which is why, I can't answer that question, Douglas. I can't answer why, despite all the bad and all the good, you'd try to kill me in my own house and rob my bar. Again. To what end are you workin?"
He was standing there smoking a cigarette when she came up and only the faintest hint of surprise crossed his otherwise impassive face when she spoke. He flicked it and ash scattered in the wind to go off dusting over the city. He turned away from her and looked down into the street.
?You ever been to Cossol before, Madison? I know I mentioned it to you once before, but I don? think you?ve been here before now.?
He waved a hand over the city. ?Cossol is the place that made me, me. It?s a real shit hole, but it?s always here, waiting for me. Never lets me down.?
He breathed deep of air that was clogged with smoke and ash and smog. ?I?m just tryin? to get by,? he answered. ?I?m tryin? to let go of the past, but you don?t seem capable of doing that.?
?So what did you come here for, Madison Rye? To kill me? I already died for you once.?
She swallows and turns to look to the streets below them. Past the smoke and the smog. The air here was like the hands of the men downstairs, iyt clung and it grabbed and harassed and a hand held her hat to her head as she looked from the distance and to him, standing there smoking and like he didn't have a care in the world. "I rode here to do somethin'... I haven't decided just yet. I was in the house when it went up in flames... ... why would you possibly want to kill me when you died for me? How... " she trailed off and tore off her hat in frustration at the predicament, at the ceaseless tug of the air. She brought her arm back and then tossed it off the edge with a grunt. It spiralled in an eddy of wind to the world below. It fell like the swooping raven.
"I was in the house when you set it on fire...and accordin' to testin by the Watch, it was you who robbed my bar. And..why ain't we talkin' about what happened, with Glass Eye, all the damn dogs, what happened to your goddamn hand. Do you even damn well know yourself? Or are you happy to parade around half dead and angry forever? Or, all dead... as the case may be?" Her eyes settled on his mouth.
"What's your truth, Douglas. Do I have to kill you to be done with this? This can't go on forever?"
?I ain?t robbed you since the day we met, Madison Rye. And I didn?t try to kill you. What were you doin? in the house??
He shook his head took a drag off his cigarette. ?What do you want me to say about any of it? I died and then I didn?t. I was marked and then I wasn?t. Way I see it, it?s none of your concern anymore. We?re done. You?re the one who can?t seem to figure that out, you keep comin? back to me, keep bringin? up the past again.?
?Your man Tag know your here? What about your daughter? Kinda person leaves their family behind to come to a place like this for a man like me??