Gunlaw 43

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Chapter 29

They reached the tracks on that first evening out of The Ruins, a hard day's march with the sect an ever-present threat, whether in pursuit or just laying in wait among the dunes ahead. In the end through the dunes proved too sterile for any life, sect or not. The sect-mind seemed to quest across the desert, pangs of despair visiting them as if borne on the wind. Hemar suffered most, complaining of his thirst from one mile to the next, but never once asking after George's whiskey. Whatever dark place the sect-mind took him to though, the domen refused to quit and led a brutal pace north against the wind.

The sands thinned and gave way to hardpan a mile before Mikeos spotted the gleam of rails in the distance. When they approached the embankment bearing the tracks Jenna felt the wrongness of the sect lift from her, as if filth had been cleaned from a window.

On the embankment slope they enjoyed a meal of dried pemmican and dates, Mikeos and Hemar chatting about old times in the 'Oh-Seven, stringing along stories of some taur they both knew once upon a day. Jenna leaned back, chewed her dates, and leafed through Henry Walker's ledger.

By the time the light grew too dim to read more she had picked her way through over than half the book. It troubled her that the corpser hadn't been far from the truth when claiming their aims to be identical. The operation at The Ruins showed more invention, more free thinking and progress, than she'd seen in her lifetime across a dozen pillar towns. There were sketches of pump-handled flatcars that could move along tracks powered by nothing more than the muscle of two men. Whether they existed or were just imagination she couldn't say. Several pages concerned the controls of the kin trains, diagrammed from observations made by disparate sources. Others held more traditional accounts of comings and goings at the mines, hundred weight of machinery removed, pounds of gold smelted, ounces of germanium refined, columns of funds accumulated, monies spent on food and equipment. And at the end of it a number of special purchases, presumably brought in from the Six-oh-Two where they must have been unloaded off trains incoming from locations more exotic than any pillar. The price paid for some of the items looked like fantasy.

"Two mechanised guns: twenty thousand double weight Ansos dollars, three pounds germanium, nine pounds arsenic, four flux actuators."

Hemar whistled. "There ain't that many dollars in the world, surely."

"Mechanised guns?" Mikeos asked.

Jenna shrugged. "I think perhaps we should have stayed a while. Dug a little deeper."

"You were against the detour in the first place. Said justice could wait." Mikeos lay flat, cursed and shifted his position. "We'll check it out on the way back."

Atop the embankment the rails started clicking as the day's heat left them. It put Jenna in mind of the sound the mantis made stalking outside the carriage. Somewhere behind them sect would be in pursuit. Walker said as much. It wouldn't take many sect to mean that dying was the only thing they'd be doing on the way back. Without Eben Lostchild there wasn't a way back.

"Vultures." Mikeos stopped walking, shaded his eyes with a hand, and stared into the steel distance.

"I can't see them." Jenna squinted until tiny dots swam across her vision. When you try too hard to see something often you just see it. There was a lesson in that.

"Lean pickings out here." Hemar kept his head down. He managed two days without asking for George Ay's flask. When he did ask, and found it empty, the expected rage did not materialise. Instead something seemed to go out of him, perhaps more from the failure of resolve that made him ask than from finding his friends had not trusted him. The domen turned in on himself, and had spoken seldom in the two days since. "Lean pickings."

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