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.
"They knew he'd come for the skull," Hemar said. "That's why they put it so far in."
Mikeos glanced over at Grum's skull. He imagined Elver crouched over it, scraping and cutting. The corpsers took from the dead, particular parts to match their needs. What would he have taken from Grum?
"That dust your mother snorts – ever wonder what the corpsers make it from?" Hemar asked.
Mikeos shook his head. He didn't want to know.
"At least whiskey is clean," Hemar said.
Elver came closer, taking each step as if held in the jaws of a gale. Mikeos could see the hollows of his eyes now, the motley flesh of his cheeks, rectangles stitched in a dry patchwork, pale here, dark there.
"You owe me, boy."
Mikeos could hear the strain in the corpser's voice.
"You owe me." Ten yards separated them. The corpser struggled to take another step and failed.
The same terror that had run through Mikeos at the bar raced in his veins again. He felt the ache of the corpser's touch on his neck. Hemar couldn't save him. A cur like Hemar couldn't even save himself.
"I can pay you." Mikeos sounded like a frightened child, even to himself. "If you give me time, I can pay."
Elver shook his head. Dust fell from the grey straggles of his hair. "Bring me bull-boy's skull." He pointed at it. "Pass it to me, and we'll be quits. I'll even discount your next bag of the good stuff."
Frayed lips scraped back over dead teeth, and Mikeos realized Elver was smiling.
***
Mikeos woke to a persistent grinding sound. He had a crick in his back and felt cold in every limb. It took several moments to get his bearings. Morning light reached him down a set of stone stairs. His feet rested against iron gates barring the way into a crypt.
"Will he still be waiting?" he asked.
The grinding noise stopped as Hemar abandoned his bone to consider the question.
"Yes."
Mikeos groaned and sat up. He felt like he'd been awake all night. Even out of the wind it was cold, and just as he fell asleep at last, it was morning.
"I should have given him the skull."
"You did right, Mikey." Hemar growled. "Besides, I didn't believe him. He wanted more than that. He wouldn't chase you into the Bullet, kill a bull taur, just for a dust-debt."
Mikeos hugged himself, staring into the shadow. There had been a hunger about the corpser, something more than rage when he refused Samms the skull, refused to go near. "This is you and me now, boy," the corpse had said. "Fuck the Walker and his master. I'm doing this for me."
Mikeos didn't know any Walker. Didn't want to either. He went up the steps on his hands and knees, blinking at the dawn as he emerged. The crypt lay almost at the pillar's base, one of hundreds, some elaborate, some plane, dozens of different styles, most housing some forgotten gunman from yesteryear.
"You're sure he's coming?" Mikeos asked.
"Yes." The grinding started up again, back in the gloom down the steps.
When Remos Jax and that girl came, Mikeos and Hemar would have a chance to leave in safety. Even if the sect champion killed Jax, they could go back to town with the girl. She seemed to have some kind of hold over the corpser.
"Damned if I'd come to draw on someone if I knew they were faster than me," Mikeos said.
He walked away from the crypt, hugging himself against the cold. At least the wind carried the bone yards' stench away from him. He watched as a flock of ravens took flight from some high niche on the pillar.
Mikeos found a place by the path and waited, crouched, his face in his knees. It didn't take long. The sun hadn't yet cleared the horizon when two figures showed in the distance. One tall, one short.
Mikeos waited until they drew level.
"Hello," he said.
Remos Jax looked at him. The girl kept her eyes on the pillar.
"Here for the showdown?" Remos asked. He had a gentle voice. Mellow.
Mikeos shrugged. "I guess." He stood up.
"There'll be a crowd by noon," the girl said. "Everyone from town, and some from around and about."
Mikeos frowned. He looked Remos up and down. Dust didn't seem to find a hold on all that black like it should.
"So how fast are you, mister?" Mikeos asked.
Remos gave a slow smile. "Fast as I need to be." And Mikeos found himself looking down the black eye of a Colt 45. There hadn't been an in between. One moment the gun had sat in its holster on Remos' hip. The next moment it had been an inch from Mikeos' nose.
"Damn!" Mikeos shook his head. "Hemar says the sect slinger is faster'n you."
Remos put the gun away. "Hemar might be right."
"So why did you come?"
Remos started walking again. Mikeos fell in beside him and the girl followed. "Sometimes you have to make a stand."
"You're not worried you'll get killed?" Mikeos cast a glance at the crypts.
Remos smiled again. "When you make the right stand, you're bulletproof. Fast or slow, that bullet won't harm you."
Mikeos stopped walking. "You can't be killed?" He felt betrayed. The gun-law could never allow such a thing.
"I didn't say that," Remos said. He holstered his gun with a spin. "When you pull a gun for the right reason, that reason remains right whether you live or die, that choice remains justified. That's what a gunfighter is. He's a set of ideas, he's a list of things worth dying for, and the will to do just that if need be. That's the gun-law, son."
Mikeos almost rolled his eyes, Remos sounded like a preacher from the Church of the Three. He looked back at the girl. "Can we go back to town with you after? Me and my friend, Hemar?"
"Sure," she said.
She took his hand and stopped walking. "Stay with me. Remos likes to see the ground where he's going to fight, and wait there until it's time."
They watched the gunslinger go on ahead, tiny against the bulk of the pillar.
Mikeos remembered his hand and pulled it back from hers. "What's your name?"
"Lilly."
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Very."
"Th . . ." Mikeos broke off, then started again. "Thanks for, you know, back in the Bullet'."
"That's OK."
"Why did you do it?" he asked.
"I don't like corpsers." She grinned. "A thing should know when to die."
"Remos had better hope the sect gunman does," Mikeos said.