Free Wish You Were Here by Tom Holt

‘It’s very . . .’ She remembered the technical term the cab driver had used. ‘Kinda pretty,’ she parrotted.
    It seemed that she’d said the right thing, because the old man smiled, revealing a set of teeth that reminded her of baked beans swimming in mustard. ‘You said it, miss,’ he replied, and wheezed; a general purpose combination laugh/cough. ‘Kinda pretty all right. Though,’ he added, after a tiny pause, ‘they do say this here lake is haunted.’
    Linda stepped up the smile by an amp or so. ‘Really,’ she cooed. ‘How fascinating. You don’t say.’
    â€˜That’s right,’ the old man said, doing something disgusting with his tongue. ‘By the ghost of an ole Injun sperrit, name of Okeewana or some such. By Jiminy, miss, the tales I could tell you ’bout that ole—’
    â€˜Submarines.’
    The old man hesitated, like a jammed machine. ‘Beg pardon, miss?’
    â€˜Have you seen any submarines, by any chance? You know, ships that suddenly appear from out of the water and then—’
    â€˜You mean like that one?’ He pointed.
    Linda swivelled round like a small boy on an office chair and saw a thing ; something that looked for all the world like a wood-carving of a dragon’s head, just breaking the surface of the water, surrounded by ripples swarming like disturbed bees.
    â€˜A periscope!’ Linda breathed.
    â€˜Keep lookin’.’
    The thing rose steadily up out of the water, followed a moment later by what was unmistakably a mast, and then by a whole ship; broad-beamed, clinker-built, bristling with oars like a squashed-flat centipede. Brightly painted round shields encircled its bows, and a few disgusted-looking fish flapped wearily on the planks of the deck.
    â€˜Right,’ said Linda contentedly. ‘Thought so.’
    Â 
    Cursing fluently, Talks To Squirrels loosed his last arrow, following it with his eye all the way from his bowstring to the newcomer’s heart. Bang on the money, as always; enough to make a man weep. He’d just put six consecutive arrows into a space the size of a playing-card at a range of a hundred and seventy-five yards, and the bugger hadn’t even noticed. The irony, the cruel, savage, merciless irony of it was that when he’d been alive he’d been hard put to it to hit a sleeping bison at five paces.
    Where the hell were they all coming from? Three of the sons of bitches, all in one morning; and he’d come out with just two dozen arrows and a small flint knife. The question was, if he sprinted back Flipside for more arrows and his business tomahawk, would the scumbags still be here when he returned, or would he come running back, armed to the teeth, only to find they’d moved on? Whereas if he stayed here, at least he could pelt them with insubstantial rocks and batter them around the head with non-existent tree-branches. It was a difficult choice to make. Or rather, it wasn’t, since he wouldn’t be able to stir so much as a hair on their heads even if he had a battery of cannon and a Gatling gun at his disposal. Quit kidding yourself, Talks.
    Gloomily he shoved his bow back into its buckskin case, sat down on top of a disused anthill, wrapped his hands round his chin and sulked. When he’d made his wish, all those years ago, to be able to carry on fighting the paleface until the sun went out and the moon fell from the sky and the mountains slid down into the lake and were swallowed up, he hadn’t pictured it working out quite like this. Admittedly, if you worked on the basis of mortal wounds delivered and direct hits inflicted, at the last count he had eighty-six thousand, four hundred and ninety-seven notches on his bowhandle; not bad going for a brave who used to be known as Trips Over Own Feet While Running Away. The figures were, however, deceptive, not least because of the duplication factor. At least