Gunlaw 3

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The sun hovered above the horizon as they drew up to the first of the bone yards. The last light reached them across the wild plains, rippled by the dust-laden wind. It shimmered crimson across acres of clean-picked bones. The black finger of the Oh-Seven pillar loomed ahead, huge though still a quarter mile off, its shadow reaching to the east.

Mikeos stopped by the picket fence and looked out over the confusion of bleached skulls, ribs reaching like claws, leg bones half covered by wind-blown sand.

"Hunskas. They just leave them for the vultures." Hemar panted and lolled his tongue. "They don't care. A dogman can crack a bone or two, suck the marrow, the hunska don't care."

"If they don't care, why do they bring them out here?" Mikeos asked. "It's a long way to haul a body."

Hemar licked his teeth. "Maybe they think the corpsers won't come this near the pillar. Who knows with them? The hunska look like men, but they smell different."

Mikeos looked up. The pillar stood black against a paling sky. "It's just so damn big."

Hemar nodded.

"But it is," Mikeos said. "It makes me feel . . . like nothing."

"The world is big." Hemar filched an arm bone from the hunska yard. "But you don't see it all at once. The pillars, well they're just there in front of you. A billion tons of stone piled up to make you feel small. To show you that the Old Ones could do anything."

"And what they chose to do was leave?"

"I guess."

"My father left."

"Everyone leaves in the end." Hemar put the bone between his teeth and strained to crack it. "One way or the other."

Mikeos looked away. Old corruption hung on the air, a sick sweet smell that turned his stomach. Back among the long shadows on the path to town he glimpsed something, something moving. Tumbleweed, probably.

The wind felt cold now. "Let's keep going," he said.


                                                                                                   ***


They found Grum's skull as the very last of the sun's rays skimmed the plains. The clan had worked fast. It sat on a flat rock less than two hundred yards from the base of the pillar. Dust clung to the damp white bone, but the polished horns were unsullied.

"They honoured him," Hemar said.

The minotaurs framed their cemetery as a wedge, narrowing to a point that almost reached the pillar. Mikeos had thought to hunt for Grum in the wide expanse of the far end, but they had placed him close in, where the yard narrowed so that ten skull stones could span the wedge. Grum had been more important to his kind than Mikeos ever guessed.

"A corpser's out there." Hemar nodded back along their path. "Reckon I know which one, too. Been shadowing us a while."

They turned and watched the path together. For a few minutes the Frostral wind made the only sound, whispering through the forest of horns. At last the corpser stepped into view, emerging from the shadow of a crypt.

The dogman made a soft growl in his throat. "Elver."

She'd called it Elver Samms. The thing that had been Elver Sams. How long ago had that been, Mikeos wondered.

The corpser moved toward them as if wading through a deepening mire. Some said the pillars held a magic that kept corpsers from ever reaching them, and it seemed to be true. But Elver looked ready to try anyway.

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