Gunlaw

Gunlaw 37

Chapter 24

"Small Stones." Hemar waved an arm at them.

"Small?" Mikeos poked back his hat. He guessed there to be enough stone to fashion three pillars, maybe four, the smaller chunks the size of houses, the largest single piece almost a cube and three hundred yards on each side. "I can't see any signs of life."

Hemar frowned. "Your eyes are better than mine. Used to be camps at all the ruins, hundreds of people, more than lived in Sweet Water I heard. They camped out here, some under the rocks to get out of the dust. Sent their minings back to the assay office in town, got their water delivered. Had a cart that would take forty barrels at a time, with six oxen to pull it." He coughed, hunching about some inner pain. Mikeos could see a tremble in him, a shudder behind each movement - the shakes setting in. Hemar wanted a drink. Bad. How long before want turned into need? The miracle of it all was that the domen hadn't asked for whiskey once, not since leaving the 'Oh-Seven. At any other time in the past twenty years he'd ask for whiskey each time the bottle in his hand chanced to leave his mouth.

Jenna led on, aiming for the largest rock.

Hemar hurried after her, drawing up at her shoulder. "Wait up. We don't need to get close - just skirt round and aim for The Table."

"Could be anything lurking under there," Mikeos called after them, not moving from his spot.

"Anything except sect and corpsers," Jenna called back. "I've always wanted to examine ruins from the old time. There's no place like them. Not that a train will take you anyhows."

Mikeos shrugged and followed on. He couldn't recall Jenna ever sounding enthusiastic before. It was enough to get him moving.

It took much longer to reach Small Stones than Mikeos predicted. The rocks were just so damn big they warped a man's perception of distance. By the time they got close enough to touch the outlying pieces Mikeos realised the blocks he had thought the size of houses would have housed not just one family but hundreds. It struck him as odd that in world that offered vast expanses of nothing, dusty plains that could swallow structures a thousand times the size of these and reduce them to insignificant dots, it was still when men came to the pillars and other workings of the Old Ones that they felt smallest.

"What did they mine here?" He had to shout. The wind rushed and moaned as it sought to pass the ruins, and a cacophony of echoes tried to overwrite his voice.

"Gold, mostly." Hemar pointed to the mouths of shafts leading beneath the closest chunks of rock. "There's old wire and boxes buried deep under some of the ruins. They cook it up, burn off the coatings, and you get a mix of copper and gold and rarer stuff. The kin will pay for it. Goldsmiths too, and holders minting high dollars."

They moved in, the fragments of the old ones' great works towering on all sides, bigger than imagination might fashion. The reek of old char tainted the air despite the scouring wind. Old char and stranger stinks, both acrid and sour, that made Mikeos' eyes itch. What Hemar's sensitive nose suffered Mikeos couldn't say. Perhaps it would take his mind off his thirst.

"There!" Jenna pointed. Something lay in the yards wide canyon between two halves of a massive block that must have fractured when it fell. She led the way, Mikeos at her shoulder with the weight of the crowbar a comfort in his hand. Sand grains still clung to it where the mantis' juices had left the iron sticky. In his mind's eye the mantis surged up once more beneath the rain of his blows, launching its shattered body toward him. The sect brought new definition to the word 'tenacious'.

The something resolved into some things, and - as the distance closed - into some corpses. There looked to be more than a dozen, desiccated by the wind, twisted in their bonds. Each had been staked out by all four limbs, lengths of iron bar driven through hands and feet to secure them. The dry flesh hid the details of the tortures done, but several had been burned extensively.

"So many children." Jenna stepped among them, her face stiff, careful not to tread on anything but sand.

"Small tunnels take less digging and can fit between fragments." Hemar crouched by one tiny form, his fur covering his eyes. "A baby." He stayed there, the shakes gone from him, muttering some domen prayer.

Mikeos turned away, knuckles white on the crowbar. He hit the nearest wall, striking sparks, the impact hurting his hand. "Makes no sense. Sect eat people up. They don't ... do this."

"Men did this," Jenna said. "We did it to ourselves. Only men are cruel. Men and hunska, but this took cooperation, organisation. A lone hunska couldn't have done this."

"But why?" Mikeos could feel the dead lying there behind him. The narrow canyon still echoed with the ghosts of their screams. He saw his father's horse fall, the other horses screaming as he shot them. "Why would anyone do that? Why!" His own voice rising to fill the space and echo toward the sky.

"I heard they still mined here," Hemar said. "Didn't know it was true." For a time he kept silent, probably hunkered over the baby. Mikeos didn't look. He didn't trust himself. "I heard a wagon-convoy came out once or twice a year, thick with gunhands. Took the minings, left food."

"And water?" Jenna asked.

"Dunno. They must have found some. Must've dug deep enough. Couldn't deliver what they'd need for half a year."

"It'd be a valuable operation," Mikeos said.

"A lot of holders would like themselves a slice of that pie. All of the pie in fact. It's a rare holder who's content with just a slice of pie." Jenna came to stand beside him. "This was a message. Someone has moved in, taken over. This is telling anyone tempted to set up a competing operation - don't."

"How long ago did this happen? Hemar?" Mikeos forced himself to turn back to view the corpses, the dogman still crouched amongst them. For an instant he saw Elver Samms. The corpser used to crouch over the fallen, skinning knife in hand, sample boxes ready. Mikeos shook his head, shrugging the image away. This was a haunted place and the ghosts of his life were queuing at his shoulder ready to fill any space he allowed them.

Hemar sniffed at the baby's head, yellowed skin, sunken eyes, scraps of hair. "It's hard to say. The desert-"

"How long!"

"Months. Three maybe."

"We'll go to the main ruins. We'll find them there." The anger ran in him, hot and formless, seeking escape until he trembled with it as if Hemar's unspoken thirst had become his.

"We'll find them and ... you'll beat them with your stick?" Jenna pressed her lips into a narrow line, her face giving nothing away, still stiff with distaste as if she'd stepped in dung on Ansos high-street.

"This can't stand. I can't walk away and-"

"We're here for Eben Lostchild. The price I've paid is that the Stranger knows what we're doing. We can't delay."

"I'm a gunslinger. I can't-"

"You were a gunslinger. Doug Hoffsted stands for Ansos now. You're just a man. Without a gun. And we're here for the Lostchild."

"We're here for something bigger than finding one person." Mikeos forced himself kneel beside the closest of the dead. She had blonde hair, long, to her shoulders. Perhaps she had been beautiful. Mummified by the heat and the dry, and lacking a nose, it was hard to tell. "You say it's about men. About what we are - who controls us. I say this is too."

Jenna looked back down the canyon at the dead. "It's madness. What can you do?" She bit her lip, looking in that moment fifteen years his junior rather than his senior.

"You've got magic haven't you. All this blood sacrificed, all these amulets you never seem to use. I haven't seen you do a single trick a conjur-man couldn't pull off with quick hands and mirrors. So I'm asking it now. Put the hex on these fuckers. Get a gun in my hand and I'll see to the rest."

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