The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

There are prisons for men the law can hold.

And then there is North Pole Tartarus Penitentiary, built on the roof of the world for everything the law can only bury.

No trial had ever been broadcast from Tartarus. No release had ever been announced.

Governments that officially denied it existed quietly paid for its heating.

On this gray Alaskan morning, for the first time in its history, its gates were opening to let someone out.

They ground apart, and the sound went across the yard and came back off the mountain.

Up in the towers four guards watched it happen and not one of them put a hand near his weapon.

The warden had signed the release himself at four that morning. Nobody above him objected. None of them wanted to be the man who kept Damon Huntley locked up.

Damon Huntley walked out into the wind. Black hair, a plain prison coat, eight years older than the boy they'd thrown inside.

He didn't look back. He moved like an apex predator that has never once needed to hurry.

Sixteen years old. A warehouse fire he never set.

Seven dead workers he never met. A confession he never made.

The trial took less time than the fire had.

His father's heart went in the third month of it, in a courthouse corridor, waiting to be let in. His mother lasted the year and then stopped getting out of bed.

Dorne City talked about the case for nine days and then forgot all three of them.

Damon hadn't thought about any of that in eight years. He was saving it.

In his pocket, his thumb found a small iron ring. His sister's.

It was worth nothing. He'd killed three men in Tartarus who tried to take it off him.

Along the inner fence, forty men stood in the cold with their heads down.

They were the reason Tartarus got built.

Any government on earth would have gone to war to see them standing in one place.

At the front stood Artemis, lean and weathered from a lifetime behind a rifle scope.

He held a world record nobody had ever written down. A head of state, one shot, three miles.

"Damon the Phantom. You raised hell in here long enough, and now it's the rest of the world's turn."

Artemis laughed. There was nothing warm in it, but from a man who killed for money on four continents, that was a fond goodbye.

"Good riddance."

Beside him, Hannibal nodded once.

The mute warlord had put so many people in the ground that two countries still had the pits fenced off.

He hadn't spoken a word in eleven years. The nod was the whole goodbye.

Pompei came forward next, a thin-fingered old man who had crashed the global economy once for a bet. Four countries were still paying it off.

He pressed a black card into Damon's hand with both of his own.

"There's no withdrawal limit on that card. None at all. Spend as much as you like and it will never stop working."

He stepped back and bowed his head like a man laying something at an altar. Pompei had not bowed to anybody in sixty years, including the two governments that had tried to hang him.

Then Harlan pushed a battered canvas bag into Damon's arms.

"Property deeds. My finest houses, one in every city worth owning."

Harlan had owned federal judges and senators on both coasts. He closed his hand around Damon's forearm.

"Take the Dorne one. Best view in the country, and Dorne is where the money is."

Damon held each man's eyes in turn.

These were the worst men the planet had ever produced. They had all fought him at some point, and they had all lost.

Now they worked for him.

They called him the Phantom because the problems he handled disappeared, permanently, and without a sound.

"The search," Damon said.

It was the only thing he had said all morning that mattered to him, and every man at that fence heard it.

The fence went quiet. Down the line, men who had ordered massacres found somewhere else to look.

The last time Damon saw his sister she was eight years old and screaming his name across a courtroom. They took her out that afternoon, gave her somebody else's name, and closed the file on her.

In eight years he had asked these men for nothing else.

Harlan had been dreading this conversation for a month, and he got it out in one breath.

"Eight years and nothing. Those files weren't lost, Damon. Somebody salted them.

"He scrubbed a little girl out of that system line by line. He's paid every month since to keep her gone."

Every man on the line took half a step back. Nobody at that fence wanted to be standing closest to him when he heard the answer.

"Then she's alive," Damon said. "Nobody spends that kind of money on a corpse."

He closed his hand around the ring in his pocket.

"Find the man signing those payments. Don't touch him. He's mine."

Harlan let go of his arm and picked his next words carefully, because he had watched what happened to men who wasted this one's time.

"He hid a child for eight years and never missed a payment once. That man won't scare, Damon."

"He hasn't met me."

Damon shouldered the bag and walked the last stretch of frozen yard.

Behind him, the monsters bowed lower.

"Keep your heads down," he said. "Or I'll come back for you."

Forty of the worst men alive stood in the snow and shook. Not one of them opened his mouth.

At the outer gate, where the frozen road began, one figure waited in the wind.

An old man in gray, leaning on nothing. Up in the towers, the guards were very carefully not aiming at him.

Damon stopped.

Then he did the thing nobody on earth would have believed of him.

He dipped his head.

There was exactly one man alive that the Phantom of Tartarus answered to.

"Eight years," Periander Fox said. "You've grown taller. I made the rest of you."

"Master."

The old man's eyes went over him once, checking his own work, and found nothing that needed correcting.

"I have two tasks for you, and I'll say them once."

"Yes, Master."

"Decades ago a billionaire in Dorne City did me a favor when he owed me nothing at all. I promised him a protector for his family in return, and I don't break promises."

"You'll go to Dorne City and you'll marry his granddaughter."

Periander reached into his coat and held out a heavy envelope, sealed in dark red wax. The seal showed a mountain with a running fox beneath it.

"That's the contract. It has the family name, the terms, and my seal on it."

Damon slid the envelope into the canvas bag. He'd stopped asking the old man questions years ago.

His first task was to fly to Dorne City and marry a woman he'd never met.