[a longer section but one that really needs to be together in one part]
Mikeos pushed in through the saloon doors. Twenty years absent and now twice in one day he found himself walking into the Bullet and Rye. The place hadn't changed. Different taur bellowed over their whiskey buckets, different whores decorated the stairs, different prospectors, cattle hands, outriders, gamblers, and drunks packed the place – but it had exactly the same stink to it, the same sound, the same creak and rattle and chink and splash and roar and hush. The same stickiness to the floorboards. Home.
It took a moment but recognition spread, the din fell, and the customary deployment of elbows was not required to reach the bar. They didn't recognise little Mikey, not the boy whose mother dreamed and fucked upstairs, but they sure as hell recognised the recently retired Ansos slinger who'd left eight men dead in the street and another missing important parts of his face.
"Whiskey."Mikeos looked at Jenna, raised his brow in question. She nodded. "A bottle and three."
The barkeep, a grim fellow with heavy features, shot Hemar a dark look but reached under for a bottle in any case. He fished out the passable stuff, Menahan's, a local still, and set three shot glasses on the bar. "Table free." He pointed to where one of the servers was approaching four card players at the hearth table. Jed Wesson sat a few yards back, alone at a small table, a game of patience laid out before him. He nodded and looked back to his cards. The reports Mikeos had in Ansos put Wesson tight with Sensa, the local holder. Tighter than holder and slinger should be, but clearly not tight enough to stand him alongside White Willis and the sheriff.
The server set a hand to the gamblers' table and pointed at the bar.
Mikeos shook his head. "No need . . ." But the men got up quick enough, sweeping stake and pack from the boards. Mikeos shrugged and led off. He felt like sitting.
Hemar followed along behind, biting the cork from the Menahan's like he was taking the head off a chicken, Jenna followed too with the glasses gleaming in her hand. Mikeos sat at the table, sodden clothes dripping, he set his back to the wall and rocked the chair onto two legs, taking in the crowd again. Plenty of eyes on him, but at least they were talking again, drinking again. The angles he knew, those he didn't have to check. He'd grown up here, fighting pretend gun battles around the sleeping drunks early on grey mornings. Remos Jax had chosen this table all those years ago, this chair, and for good reason. It had the best angles, best lines of sight. Anyone can get lucky and take down a quick hand by surprise or stealth, but there's no need to make it easy for them.
Jenna settled herself, back to the crowd. Hemar slumped in his chair, smelling of wet dog, he kept hand on the bottle as if unwilling to release it.
"Didn't take you for a whiskey drinker, Jenna," Mikeos said.
"Perhaps I got the taste from you." She frowned, wrinkling the dry wound on her brow. "Besides, do they serve anything else? A herbal tea perhaps? Glass of milk?"
Hemar snorted and lifted the bottle to swig before remembering himself. He eyed the glasses Jenna had set before her, his dissatisfaction with their limited capacity clear enough.
Mikeos reached for the bottle, filled the glasses with a steady hand. He lifted one and watched the light of lanterns in it, caught, reflected, refracted, golden. The bodies in the rain. He saw those too. Dead men in the mud, their boots probably stolen by now.
"So, are there any corpsers nearby?" He remembered the feel of Elver Samms' dead fingers at the back of his neck. Right here in this tavern a lifetime ago. Some things never leave you.
"How would I know?"
"But you said—"
"You know what's easier than magic? Lying. A lot easier."
Mikeos sipped his whiskey and watched her. He'd just have the one. Hemar stared too, tongue sweeping out the bottom of his glass.
"Oh don't give me that look. So I lied. You just shot eight men dead in the street."
Hemar filled his glass again and topped Mikeos'. "Why didn't you just leave town, Mikey? If Mayor Sensa wants you out you'll be going. Easy or hard."
"I think we've ruled out easy." Jenna sniffed her whiskey and blinked.
"The witch here wanted to speak to Miss Kitty, to find out something she knew," Mikeos said. "Only it turns out that the old Miss Kitty ain't in residence no more."
"Her trail's here. We just need to pick it up and follow on." Jenna tried the smallest sip from her glass, shuddered, licked her lips, tried another.
"Well I didn't know it wouldn't be the same old Miss Kitty." Miss Kitty had been a constant but near invisible presence at the 'Bullet all of Mikeos' childhood. The whores lived in fear of her, though she'd plied their trade herself they said, once upon a time. Hunska of course, all the best were. Fucking's no big deal to the hunska, leastways not with humans. About as important as breaking wind. And if a hunska's got feelings . . . well, they're are held too close for whoring to touch. "The old Miss Kitty, she might have been old enough to be the woman we wanted. Didn't reckon with it being a title she could just pass on though. Makes you wonder how many Miss Kittys this place has seen. This new one wasn't born when Eben—" Mikeos broke off. For a half-second Hemar grew still, paw frozen on its passage to his mouth, eyes widening. Just a flicker, but like poker players 'slingers know about watching a man and reading a man.
"What?" Hemar caught the look.
"You know." Mikeos nodded. It felt true. "You know about this. Why we're here. Who Eben Lostchild is."
"I don't know anything but whiskey." Hemar knocked his glass back. "I'm just Hemar, drunk-in-the-gutter Hemar. Washed all my memories away long time ago."
"You're Hemar who should have gone to grey and died years ago." Jenna gave her drink a look of mild surprise, licked her lips, and swallowed the rest in one gulp. "But here you are, twice as old as a pack elder and healthy with it, despite swimming in the bottle for twenty years. You know, Hemar. Doesn't take magic to tell that—" She broke off as Mikeos nodded toward the doors. A woman was approaching them, tall, wrapped in a richly tailored dress-cum-plainscoat like the women of consequence wore in Ansos, the latest fashion. Gun-hands flanked her, four of them, clearing a path, though in truth a path cleared itself.
Mikeos stood, Hemar too, though having risen from his chair the domen looked as if he'd rather go to his knees. Jenna remained seated, her back to the approach.
"Ma'am." Mikeos nodded.
The woman drew back her hood, trapped rain spilling over her shoulders. She looked young, surely no more than twenty, but with old eyes and an air of command to her. On the stairs whores in lace and crinoline fluttered fake smiles and carried hurt in their eyes. This woman was an entirely different creature.
"I'm Rema Sensa, mayor of this town." As she spoke Jed Wesson came from his table to stand beside her, his coat flicked clear of the single action colt peacemaker at his side.
"No."
It took a moment before Mikeos understood that Jenna had spoken, still hunched over her empty glass, her back to the mayor. Rema's glance flickered to Jenna then returned to Mikeos. "You're not welcome here, either of you. You're trouble, Jones, always have been, and the witch carries more trouble than you could dream of."
Mikeos let his body slide into the fighter's stance. "I'll leave when I choose to, Mrs Sensa." The need to test his speed again burned in him, worse than any whiskey thirst. He'd touched something out there in the street, facing Willis and the rest. He'd touched something and lives were starting to weigh less than the desire to touch it again. A smile bent his lips, not a smile he owned but one that owned him and made Hemar look away with a whimper. "Your husband's already sent nine men against me. What makes y—" Somehow Rema Sensa had his neck in her hand. She'd moved too fast to see, too fast for him to even understand before she held him in a grip that stopped his voice.
"No." Jenna again, still seated, still staring at her glass.
"Tell me 'no' again, witch, and I'll hand you this child's throat."
Jenna looked up, turning to watch the mayor and Mikeos both. Her eyes seemed darker and the hex on her forehead fresher like the unhealed scratches from a thorn bush. "Your name isn't Rema Sensa. You took it."
"Be careful what you say, Jenna Crossard. I already know your name and lineage. Born in the camps, left to run wild, a dirty little alley-haunter."
"Your name isn't Miss Kitty, you took that title, used it up, passed it on."
Mikeos tried to speak but words couldn't escape Rema's fingers and he believed her threat. His guns were no use now. Although this couldn't be the Miss Kitty his mother had worked for, too young, too fresh in her beauty ... he knew with a cold certainty that it was her.
"Your name isn't Sally Hunska either," Jenna said. "You took that too and wore it long enough."
Mikeos felt the claws pricking at his throat now, hunska claws, as if all it had taken to unmask them was Jenna's word. He rasped in a breath. It seemed obvious now. Only a hunska could move so fast. But mayor? Married to a holder? That wasn't the hunska way. They went for quick profits, played the short game, and left for the wilds as soon as possible as if man-stink offended their noses.
"I knew her as Sally first, back when I was a pup," Hemar said. He hunched, guilty, as if expecting a slap. The look the hunska gave him seemed to carry the same weight. Her face changed as she glared, sinking beneath the cheekbones into lines more reminiscent of her kind. "She was Sally back in Sweet Water." Hemar ducked his head.
"You knew her back in Sweet Water?" Jenna stared at Hemar as if truly seeing him for the first time in years.
"You make it sound like I've been denying it!" Hemar shrugged further into his hunch. "Nobody ever asked before. You didn't even ask now – I just said it because . . ." Something in the hunska's stare silenced him.
Mikeos set his hand to the hunska's to loosen her grip before the black dots at the edge of his vision joined into one blackness. She released him as his fingers touched her wrist, and he stepped back drawing in air through what felt like the straw's width of his throat. "Told you you'd meet her here." He coughed the words out, spitting on the boards.
Jenna rose from her chair, smoothly, setting no gun hands twitching. "What say we have a private conversation, Sally Hunska? You and me. Mikeos and the dogman can tag along too if they must. Perhaps the current Miss Kitty could lend us her office upstairs?" The conversation in the Bullet' had died to mutters, the push and shove stilled, but now Jenna's words wove a blanket of silence across what remained, she seemed taller, huge as a taur, every line of her sharp and clear whilst the rest of the world blurred around her. Mikeos found her words eminently sensible, compelling even, the matter settled.
"Let's." Sally nodded. "Jed, if you and the boys could wait to escort me home I'd be much obliged." She turned for the stairs, paused, turned back. "And, Jed, get a pack of cards for Jenna here to practice find-the-ace on, because these old hex tricks aren't what they used to be back in the day." The hunska's barb punctured whatever spell Jenna had unleashed and in an instant she was her old self once more, tight-lipped, too skinny, a bitter mix of nerves and temper. Sally showed a narrow smile, a glimpse of sharp hunska teeth and then with a drawing in of breath she offered a new face to the world, the short and tight-packed grey of her fur becoming pale skin, narrow cheekbones framed with chestnut coils, only the eyes remaining the same. Hemar seemed fascinated, watching with unusual focus. He sniffed once, as if to remind himself that hunksa games couldn't ever fool a dogman's nose, and followed on as she led off.
They passed the new Miss Kitty on the stairs, she didn't spare them a look, sweeping past in her brushed crinolines and lace, pretending to adjust the blonde curls of her wig. Sally led the way to her old office. Mikeos recognised her now, not the face, that was different, but the manner, the way she held herself, a coiled spring that he'd never seen released until that moment when she seized his throat. He rubbed his neck as he came to the door. In his childhood Mikeos hadn't ever seen her take action, but all that potential, that tight-wound energy, gives something off, some kind of warning to anyone with sense enough not to poke a rattlesnake, like the waiting eye of a gun - a promise and a threat.
Sally Hunska took her old seat behind Miss Kitty's long desk of dark and polished mahogany. She adjusted the wick in the table lamp, coaxing shadows from each corner of the room. Before this morning's meet with the current occupant, this office had always been a mystery to Mikeos, glimpsed through the narrowing gap of a door. The chintz curtains, flowered lampshades, oil portraits of elegant women with parasols by lakes that the artists had probably never seen, all of it sat like the paint on a whore, an affectation crafted to expectation and sharing nothing of the occupant.
Mikeos settled in a chair that looked too weak for a man's weight, a work of scrolling legs and delicate carving. Jenna perched on the chaise long by the window. Hemar crouched on the floor between the two of them, something about the stink of him a welcome antidote to the room's deceits.
"You've come about Eben Lostchild." Sally set her hands flat on the glossy wood before her.
"We need to find him," Jenna said.
"Need to? Or want to?"
"He needs to be found. Mankind's—"
"I'm hunska. Hemar's domen. We don't need the Lostchild found."
"There's no future for any of us under gunlaw," Jenna said.
Sally pursed her lips, or rather she made them see it. Mikeos reminded himself the hunska have no lips, any more than dogmen do. The thought unsettled him and he found his hand straying toward the comfort of his gun before cursing it to stillness and himself for a child. "The hunska have a history far older than any book you've read, Jenna Crossard. Our stories reach out further than rails. We were here before the tracks, the pillars, the gunlaw. The domen have lived here forever, the taur too. Men . . ." She flexed her hands on the desktop and Mikeos imagined those unseen claws. ". . . men are new. The solution to mankind's problems is to go home. Take those problems with you. Take your guns. Take the sect. Take the train."
"And that's the hunska answer, is it? Behave, do what the Old Ones tell us to, play the game. No change, no progress, no hope?" Rain beat against the windows, driven by gusts.
"No one speaks for the hunska – we are not like that. But ask another and you'll get the same reply. Ask any other. Men want change. Men like to break a thing open to see how it works. Even if they have no idea how to put it back together, they will break it open. Men always say the hunska are different. They look like us, but they ain't the same." She mimicked a prospector, rough-voiced, in off the Dry. "And that's right. We aren't the same. Your kind say it all the time, but you don't really seem to believe it, to appreciate it.
"Hunska can say the word 'forgiveness' but they don't understand it – it means drawing a different conclusion from the same facts – why would one change one's mind? Domen might be so flighty – but not hunska. The hunska you see, the women, they're in ska, it's what lets them forgive their children the hurt of birth and the annoyance of care. In the madness of ska they're children themselves. I was in ska so long it changed me. Made me too soft for the hills. Left me just soft enough to tolerate your kind and not leave a slaughter where I go. But don't push me, witch. It would be unwise."
Jenna shrugged. "The hunska go back. That's what they say. The hunska walk among us, take what they want, what they need, then go back. Back to their caves or their huts, back out to the wild where they can own whatever it is they piss on and not see another soul for weeks at a time."
"Not being afraid to be alone isn't a crime," Sally said. "The taur have their herds, the domen their packs, and humans are worse than either, they herd and they pack and they do so in one spot, living amidst their own filth, never moving on, bickering and fighting, killing each other but unable to go their separate ways. It's a kind of madness. And change? You talk of change all the time. You talk of change and stay in the same spot. The domen and the taur move on, they experience change every day. Men, they put down their roots, fix their windows on the same horizon and talk about change."
A silence then. A silence into which the beating rain rewrote itself, painting images of dead men on Main Street across Mikeos' thoughts.
Jenna shook her head. "This gets us nowhere. Where is Eben Lostchild?"
"I don't know." Sally leaned back in her chair, watching Mikeos rather than the witch. Her scrutiny made him uncomfortable, as if he were ten again, fidgeting in his seat. He wondered why she had spoken so long about the hunska, wondered who she was explaining herself to.
"When did you last see him?" Jenna asked.
"I don't recall saying that I had ever seen him."
Hemar growled at that, or whined, perhaps a bit of both.
"You can help us," Jenna said, fists in her lap, knuckles white. "I took this truth from one of the Three, and it has cost me."
Sally pressed her lips, her illusion of lips, into a firm and silent line.
Mikeos glanced at Hemar, crouched and unhappy. "Why aren't you dead, Hemar? If you knew Sally back in Sweet Water all those years ago, why aren't you dead? There's not a dogman elder more than forty and here you are ready to out-sprint a young hound for a drop of whiskey the moment the door's open."
"Eben did it." Hemar whined at the back of his throat, tongue lolling long and pink over ivory teeth.
"You knew Lostchild! You knew all this time and—" Mikeos bit down on his frustration to let Hemar continue.
"It must have been Eben that stopped the years getting a-hold of me. He probably thought it was a gift. Probably did the same to Sally and Remos and Daveos too, only Remos and Daveos met a bullet before it had time to show, and hunska don't get their first grey whisker 'til past a hundred."
"You knew Eben Lostchild." Mikeos shook his head, amazed.
"Wasn't a gift though. What's a domen to do with all those days? Specially a domen without a pack. I been drinking forty years now, trying to make each day as short as short." Hemar studied the pattern of the rug, one drop of saliva descending on a glistening thread from his open jaws.
"Daveos, you said? Sally and Remos and Daveos, you said." Jenna cast Hemar a sharp look from the chaise long. "Daveos Jones?"
"Yessum." A nod.
"My father?" Mikeos stood. "You knew my father? Both of you?"
A moment's silence then Hemar spoke to the rug. "I spent a day in Sweet Water. Long enough to get myself stabbed. I didn't meet . . . your Pa. He was just a kid back then, him and Remos, pups like me. Sally saved both boys from the sect that day, same day Eben got took by corpsers and I got a bellyful of knife. First meal a man ever offered me."
"Took by corpsers?" Jenna asked.
"Just one actually. Well there were two that day, brothers, but just one of them took me and Eben off on the train."
"Corpsers can't ride the train." For a moment Mikeos had been a believer, Hemar and his father and Remos Jax all snot-nosed kids running wild together. Lies, all of it. Lies or whiskey dreams. Reality had a bitter taste but if felt safer, saner.
"These weren't like other dead men." Sally sat with that hunska stillness that can stop a man even seeing them, but now she spoke and everyone looked. "The train brought the Ay brothers in. Might be the only train ever to run where those tracks go. They lead out of the dust now. The town's gone."
"The kin took a corpser onboard?" Mikeos had used the tracks out of the Oh-Seven to bushwhack Elver Samms one hot evening. Rail metal didn't have as strong a repulsion for corpsers as the pillars themselves, but a corpser never crossed the tracks lightly. It took effort and a focusing of will. The kind of pause that's apt to get you shot through the eyes. The idea of a corpser actually riding the trains took some getting used to. It had taken Sykes Bannon ten years to walk his way to Ansos. Not an undertaking he'd have chosen if he could endure the trains – even if there was a fare the kin would accept for his passage.
"Where?" asked Jenna.
Hemar offered her a blank look.
"Where did the corpser take you?"
"He put me off the train in the middle of nowhere. Out past any settled pillar, a thousand miles of dust between me and any place I knew. Took Eben off by himself. Said he was delivering him to a kin town."
"And where might this kin town be?" Jenna pointed the question at Sally.
The hunska shrugged. "George Ay never told me. Perhaps he didn't even know. 'Out there' – that's all any of us can say if we're talking more than a day or two from a pillar town. If Eben Lostchild is still alive he's out there." She swept her hand in a careless arc toward the wilds. "And he should stay there. The kin probably look after him better than his own kind ever did. Tell them where you found him, Hemar."
"Cripple-shack." The dogman whined, wrinkling his nose as if remembering a stink worse than his own. "A bad place to live. Bad place to die, too. I almost died there. Left enough of my blood on the floor."
"Tell them how you saved Eben," Sally said. "Tell them, Hemar. Tell them how this champion of theirs, this hero who is going to put the Three in their place and make mankind stand up tall, tell them how a domen pup had to save him."
"Met a fella named Purbright in there." Hemar shook his head, scratched behind an ear. "A man I'd never want to meet again. James Purbright—"
Mikeos stood, sharp enough to send his elegant chair tipping over its hind legs. "Jim Bright?" He saw for a moment the shadows and sun in Dai Gunder's mortuary, ink black and blinding white, his father's coffin half in shadow half in sun, already nailed shut. Bright had shot him in the face and there were to be no goodbyes. "He was there with Lostchild?"
"Three of them were there. Hunting the boy." Sally's mask cracked for a moment, darkened by a shadow of remembered fear. "One got killed. Henry Walker and James Purbright escaped."
"Three of them working for the Stranger. Often goes that way." Jenna motioned for Mikeos to sit, but he kept standing. "Henry Walker's a corpser now, a captain in the Stranger's army. Jim Bright, he's a free agent, does what pays and what lights him up. Spends a lot of time settling old scores. Meaner than a Dry day but not so rabid he'd open the door to let the sect in and get himself eaten for his troubles. Like all of them in the Stranger's pocket he thinks he's playing both sides for his own gain."
"Where did they take Lostchild?" Mikeos stepped forward to face Sally across the desk. Eben Lostchild would know where to find Bright.
Sally gave him a sharp look and he remembered her speed, taking a step back to be out of reach. "I don't know," she said.
"I believe her." Jenna's puzzled look hardened into anger. "Lilliana showed me that the story of men in this world started at Station Rock. I mean to go there and see what whispers of it remain. Eben Lostchild might be a new chapter in that story. The Stranger wants to burn the whole book. Looks like the kin isn't for book burning but has torn out an important page and kept it hidden away. And Lilliana she just wants to read the story and not have it change on her while she's reading."
Mikeos blinked at the hex-witch, trying to puzzle through what she'd said. In the end he shook it off and turned back to Sally. "And this corpser, George?" Mikeos asked the hunska. "He never came back?"
"Oh he came back sure enough." A smile twitched on Sally's lips. "Came back within the week. Set out again a week later. On foot. George and Billy Ay. Said all they got for their troubles was a book of tickets but they decided not to use them just yet. Not heard of them in more than twenty years." Her fingers touched something at the neckline of her dress, a dull silver disk lifted on a gold chain.
"That a coin?"
Sally snatched her hand back as if caught stealing, she frowned at her fingers perhaps scolding them for their unconscious betrayal. "A coin," she agreed, lifting it clear on its chain.
Mikeos blinked. "A true dollar?" Hemar gave a low whistle. Sally let it spin. A rail-metal dollar. Mikeos hadn't seen one before. Stories said Moss Peters collected the things, paid a herd of good Angus cattle for just one, and kept four in a strong box in his manse out on the Cray River. "You could buy most of Main Street with that."
"George Ay paid it me. For services rendered." She tucked it away.
"And he didn't say where they took Eben Lostchild." Mikeos tracked the coin until it became lost in ribbons and lace. He tried not to think what services a corpser would pay a true dollar for, or what they might have done to obtain one in the first place.
"No."
"I know." Hemar spoke so low that Mikeos almost mistook it for a whimper or the moan of the wind in woodstove's flue.
"What?" He turned from Sally's surprise to Hemar still crouched and miserable but with a spark of some old fire at the back of his eyes.
"I know." Hemar said it more loudly. "I know where they took Eben."
[while you're waiting for part 32 ... check out my kickstarter!
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