Chapter 2– Present Day - Foundations
In a dark room blind hands caressed a sphere of crystal, learning its smoothness. Fingertips traced and retraced old paths across the surface and an old mind retraced its memories. With the right rhythm a finger circled around the rim of a wine glass will make the glass sing - so with the right pattern and timing can a ball of crystal be made to yield its own song, a song of light and shadow, and of times past. The first glimmer woke at the crystal's heart, deep in the flawless depths of it, then another, fainter, then a sparkle, bright enough to reveal those moving hands, white and bloodless both. Light built upon light, shadow upon shadow, and the crystal ball became an eye through which she watched. And in an instant she was swallowed whole, back through the years, back once again in that dusty dirty street she thought she would never escape, back to being a child and of no account.
"Don't." Jenna pulled her brother away.
He glared at her. "She's askin' for it." He lowered his fist though. When it counted, Kyle would always forget the three years he had on her.
The new girl stood a head shorter than the smallest of the street children. Maybe six, maybe seven. Short, dirt-coloured hair and pale eyes.
"What did you say to my brother?" Jenna demanded.
"I told him to leave." The girl didn't come from the Oh-Seven. Jenna couldn't place her accent.
"This here's our alley," Jenna said. Kyle towered at her shoulder, other kids lining up to watch. "You don't tell us nothing."
"Run away." The girl pointed behind her, toward Main Street, to distant sunlight and wagons rolling past, to where men strode by in dusty boots.
She didn't sound like a kid. Too self-assured.
Kyle made to reach for the girl. "Leave her." Jenna stopped him. "She's older than she looks."
Something ran out of the day. Like water from a fallen bucket, whatever it was that made things good, spilled out and drained away. Jenna couldn't see the change, but it poured through her. The alley's shadows became cold threats; the common stink turned to pure corruption seeking her lungs.
"Hello Lilly." It came from behind her, a broken voice bubbling with dark glee.
Jenna managed to turn, staggering back until her shoulders pressed against the boarded wall. Kyle fell to his hands and knees, vomiting in the dirt. Other children lay in spasm or retching as they tried to crawl.
The figure hunched as if loaded with an unseen burden. It had crept up behind them, advancing from the end of the alley that led from the slaughter pens.
"Hello Bannon." The new girl looked up at the man, her face calm.
The man drew closer, one leg dragging. All strength left Jenna and without the wall at her back she would have fallen. Close up she saw what lay beneath the broad brim of his leather hat. A patchwork face, other men's skin sewn over old bones, black thread crossing back and forth in blanket stitch. A corpser. She knew the name too. Sykes Bannon, the child thief. If there were an older or more foul corpser still walking, then they had escaped the tales told to scare the young.
"You're looking good, Lilliana." The corpser smiled, dry lips stretching over tombstone teeth. "Fresh."
"I'm not here for games, Bannon," the girl said. "Say your piece."
"But I'm all about games." Sykes Bannon glanced around the alley, one blue eye, one a black pupil in a pool of blood. His gaze counted each of the half dozen writhing street kids. "Oh I know, I know." He slid an open hand from his dust-grey poncho. "You remember when I was a twinkle's twinkle in my grandfather's eye. You could whisper the secrets of my old life and I'd fall apart for you. Well maybe, Lilly, and maybe not. Those tricks don't work so well on me . . . but that ain't why I called you here."
"You're here because the Walker sent you," Lilliana said. "Which means that if I follow your string far enough back I'll find my brother's hand tugging on it."
"Fuck Walker! Since when did I listen to a fresh dead whoreson? Still bleeding that one – still warm I warrant.We spoke, I grant you that, but he did the listening. I'd eat Walker for breakfast if he so much as said boo to me. I'm here on my own account, missy."
Lilliana shrugged, unconvinced. "Get to the point."
"The sect. They're the point." Sykes Bannon's hand wandered to the grip of the tarnished six-shooter on his hip. "A whole lot of point. They're coming for this world and we ain't got nothing but the gun-law to stop 'em. Seems to me you need any help you can get. Got a couple of brothers in off the Long Train you might like to meet, corpsers. But from 'out of town', got some new ideas . . ."
Lilly frowned. She looked up toward the blue bar of sky offered between the rooftops. "We're being watched." She turned and stared at Jenna. "This one's still standing, Bannon. Your terrors can't scare little children now?"
Sykes sniffed and straightened a little. "Ain't had no complaints." He peered at Jenna.
Jenna's skin crawled as his dead eyes crossed her. The thump of her heart grew faint.
"The girl's got a little something," Lilly said. She looked back at the sky again. "Quite a lot in fact."
***
Only the crystal ball gave light to the room. It showed a young girl's face, half a world and many years away. The girl's lips moved. Jenna felt the words through the tips of her fingers where they touched the crystal.
"Quite a lot in fact." Lillian looked up, out of the crystal, meeting Jenna's eyes.
Watched from above, the scene looked different from Jenna's memories. The alley narrower, the street kids dirtier and more skinny than she recalled. She could see herself, slumped against the wall of Wright's Leatherworking, fear in every line of her ten year-old body.
"Go away." Lilly waved at the air, as if a fly were bothering her.
At Lilly's gesture the crystal ball began to fog. The view pulled back with sickening speed. The alley became a black line amongst the rooftops of the Oh-Seven. The whole settlement became a dot in the vastness of the plains. Only the pillars kept any sense of size, studding the world like urchin spines. Pillar Five Hundred and Seven centre stage, Oh-Six to Oh-Nine flanking it, others marching to all horizons in patterns of hexagons and pentagons. And the fog took everything. Nothing but a sphere of clouded quartz, condensation beading on its sides, cold to the touch, and a room in darkness. The ball cracked. A loud retort, like a single pistol shot.
Jenna walked blind to the window and drew back velvet drapes. Far below her window the dust plains rolled out into grey infinities. She rested her hands on the ledge. An echo of that day's fear ran through her.
I was a child.
Left and right window after window watched the plains. Above and below, hundreds of windows, each fronting a chamber cut into the rock of Ansos, the first pillar. Jenna looked at her hands, gripping the stone. She saw that lazy wave again, the wave with which Lilliana broke her scrying sphere across a gulf of miles and years. It made all the enchantment Jenna had ever wrought look silly, feeble scratchings at the surface of something deeper than the world. Even the simplest work of hex-magic required precision, complex layering of voice and motion, and sacrifice. Above all sacrifice.
Jenna turned from the daylight and left the room. Mikeos waited in the corridor outside, slumped on one chair, his legs over another, spurred heels hanging over the end. She'd almost forgotten the gunslinger. He poked his hat up with an index finger and watched her.
"So?" he said.
"It makes a little more sense now," Jenna answered. "But I couldn't watch them talk."
"Back to what you remember then," Mikeos said. He pulled his legs off the chair, setting them down with a jingle, and sat up. "Tell me again."
And Jenna told him. She dug back into those old days, the bad days before she came to Ansos, the time of hard living and easy deaths. She had watched Sykes Bannon's back as he followed Lilliana from the alley. The corpser had stooped to touch her brother.
"Bannon!" Lilly didn't look back but her tone held a note of command.
Sykes had muttered and followed on. Where his fingers had brushed Kyle her brother carried a dark stain, marking the side of his face until the day he died.
"You know why there are only human corpsers, Bannon?" Lilly's voice carried back as she walked. "Not dogmen, or hunska, or taurs?"
"Because them others just ain't got enough badness in 'em?" Sykes stepped over another child and caught up with Lilly.
Jenna felt the wall-boards slide past her shoulder blades one by one as she slumped to the ground.
"Because humans are so far from home, Sykes. So damn far that sometimes the dead just can't find their way back."
And they were gone, out on main street, lost in the dust of a cattle drive and the yips of the dogmen driving them on.
"Well now, that ain't much to go on." Mikeos stood up, hands touched momentarily to the silver-handled Colt 45 on his hip. "I'd hoped for a little more, Miss Jenna. When I came to Ansos pillar looking for a hex-witch, I thought I might get a lot more than that."
"It's all I remember," Jenna said. Apart from the fear, the helpless wringing terror that had put her on the ground, and the way her brother had died, the slow relentless poisoning of his mind that took a year to lay him in a pauper's grave.
"I'm meeting Sykes Bannon in three days," Mikeos said. "I gotta meet his challenge. I spoke to a half-dozen fight masters, even that old woodkin who has to be six hundred years if he's a day."
"And?" Jenna knew the answer.
"None of 'em ever saw a thing like it, but the man died a gunslinger, and so he's still a gunslinger even if he ain't had the decency to lie down and rot. The gun-law holds for him, just like it holds for me, for the sect, all of us . . ."
"You're faster than him," Jenna said.
"Yes."
"First shot, hit him in the heart, and he's down for good." Jenna wanted that shot for herself. It would feel good.
"Miss, and he's going to plug me, slow or not. Miss and Ansos has a new slinger. All of Ansos in a corpser's hands."
"Don't miss."
"Tell me where he keeps his heart, and I won't."