Chapter 26
In the desert there's little call for stealth. On the white sands the three of them would draw any eye turned their way. Still, Hemar led a cautious path, lingering in the depths between dunes and making swift transits over each crest. Even so, the fact they reached the ruins' shadow unchallenged was down to the complacency of whoever held command there, and to the expanse of remains giving such a long perimeter to patrol. They walked the last miles in the hours before sunset, the sun still striking parting blows between the blessing of shade on the eastern slopes of each dune. Hemar took them in from the direction of the deep desert, a place where nothing lived.
Before they made their final approach Mikeos settled in the lee of a dune, a hundred-foot wave of whispering sand, and checked the revolver. He took brushes, picks, and oil from his pack, muttering as he worked on the weapon. "Should've been the first damn thing you did ... gotta get your head straight, Mikey ... looks like he's been growing potatoes in this ... had to be a horse that needed shooting ... what are the odds." He released the cylinder, swung it out, eyed the chambers, swung it back. With a small screwdriver he removed one screw from the side plate, shielding his work from the wind.
"Problems?" Jenna asked, some part of her pleased that a gunslinger understood the workings of his weapon even if men didn't understand how to make them.
"Sand's a killer for guns. Dune's not the best place for this." Mikeos continued the disassembly, placing cylinder, ejector rod and half a dozen screws and pieces for which Jenna had no names in his lap on a roll of suede. His fingers moved with a swift surety that drew her closer. She blamed the sharing of their blood for the want she felt. The gunslinger worked a soft wire brush into the weapon's nooks and crannies, blowing continuously to free and dispatch tiny pieces of grit from the mechanism. She imagined herself the focus of such attention, and shook the foolish notion from her.
"Any good?" Jenna asked. She tipped the sand from her boot and wriggled her toes in the dune. The boot would fill up again soon enough, but for a few steps it would feel better.
"It's a piece of junk. Bottom of the range, badly maintained, barrel's too worn to put a bullet in the same place twice, and it's like to lock up on me at the worst moment." He grinned and spun the revolver's skeleton around his trigger finger. "But it beats the hell out of an iron bar!" Two minutes later the gun was once more complete. Cleaned, oiled, fired on empty until the cylinder spun. Mikeos chambered six bullets with religious care, then holstered his weapon. "Ready."
The Ruins, like Small Stones and The Table were vast blocks of stone without ornament or entrance, seemingly without purpose. Some towered a thousand yards and more into the sky, some lay half buried in the sand, others had fallen into a confusion of fragments each larger than any work of man. The wind sang around them, the shadows moved, the desert sighed and shifted. To Jenna it felt like a place where time itself was put to the test. Human lives were smeared out quickly beneath the passage of years but the work of the Old Ones resisted, stubborn and obdurate. They entered in the narrow gap between two huge blocks. A network of such voids and cracks led them deeper.
"This way." Hemar beckoned from the turn. He sniffed again. They were following his nose, trusting the convolutions of the wind to bring them warning of trouble ahead. Twice they passed openings to shafts that dove beneath the fallen stonework, but both times Hemar declared the workings disused. He led them on, taking one turn then another. The blocks were close together, just as at Small Stones, creating the impression of being constantly at the bottom of the deepest well. Looking up proved inadvisable, the bright slices of sky offered between the stone gave Jenna vertigo and left her near-blind when she returned her gaze to the shadows.
Within a few minutes Jenna could smell it too, the sharp corrosive stink of smelting, the stranger and less usable materials being burned away to leave precious metals. Mikeos went to the fore, holding his revolver at arms' length in a two-handed grip.
"What's the plan?" Hemar hissed at his side.
"Anyone with a gun I shoot in the head." Mikeos kept his eyes on the junction before them where two cracks in the fallen block intersected. "Anyone moves to stop me, I shoot them in the head. Anyone who looks to be in charge, I shoot in the head."
"Good plan." Hemar stepped back and let Mikeos turn the corner.
Jenna followed. A narrow passage took them fifty yards to an open space the size of a stockyard. The largest structure in The Ruins rose at the back of the space, a single rectangular block of stone rising to dizzying heights. Jenna had to look up. It would be a blasphemy not to. Anyone who fell from the top would have plenty of time to consider the view on the way down. In fact at the start of their fall they would be dots too small for Jenna to resolve against the sky, their screams more distant than birdsong.
Back at ground-level, in the narrow slice of the world open to men, half a hundred tents huddled against the rising wall of stone and flapped in the wind. Old tents, no two the same, torn and sun-bleached, though Jenna doubted the sun often managed to slide its fingers this deep into The Ruins. Three separate shafts were set close to the titanic slab, the mine-heads guarded by low stone walls. To the right of these sat a collection of lean-tos, some of old and faded planks, some of canvas over poles, and others of dry stone piled into unmortared structures. Jenna spotted mules sheltering in the larger of the lean-tos and a horse poking his nose from another.
Mikeos moved in, Hemar behind him. "When the shooting starts, stay behind me. If there's a break, bring me any guns that don't have owners." Mikoes returned his revolver to its holster, a move that made no sense to Jenna. Did he still dance to the gunlaw's tune, even now?
Past the lean-tos, and on the side of the camp where the wind took its smoke away, stood the smelter. A building of modest size fashioned from pieces of the ruins, shaped and mortared together. Whatever doors served it weren't visible from Jenna's position. Three terracotta chimneys rose from a slanting red-slate roof, each trailing a thin and unhealthy stream of black smoke. The stink of the stuff burned Jenna's nose even though the wind wasn't blowing toward her.
Jenna held to the mouth of the passage that had brought them to the opening. She interlaced her fingers once again although the hex on her forehead no longer pulsed or bled, and watched the scene through the lattice she'd made of her flesh. What she had taken as bails of rags and refuse heaps along the main wall now looked more like men taking their rest in that empty, boneless way which hard labour brings.
Mikeos walked into the clearing at ease and with no attempt at concealment. As he drew closer to the camp a dog started barking. Two men stood from behind the wall of the closest mineshaft, solid fellows, one in a faded tartan poncho, the other in a leather waistcoat, and a cowhand's hat despite the perpetual shade. This one had five playing cards in his fist and looked reluctant to put them down.
"Hey!" Mikeos called to them, his voice cheerful.
Neither man drew a weapon. They just moved to intercept his path, lazy with the heat. Back at the slab wall a third man came out of the mule stables, rubbing sleep away with palms smeared across his face. The heads on a few of the rag piles lifted but with little interest.
Jenna now saw the sense in Mikeos holstering his gun. One man walking empty handed into the camp wasn't to be feared. A messenger perhaps, or a gunman sent to bolster the guards' numbers. The dogman lent an unusual air to it, but more of a distraction. Dogmen didn't carry guns, their fingers ill-suited to the shape, their temperament inclined toward less lethal combat. In any event, a dogman's speed didn't lie in his arms but in his jaws and the way he covered open ground.
"Far enough, stranger. What you here for?" The taller man in his poncho.
"Here to kill the men that did for Small Stones," Mikeos said, tone conversational, hand resting by his gun.
Both men reached to draw.
Mikeos shot the pair, too quick to see, and sunk to one knee aiming two-handed at the man approaching from the mule-shack. The shot clipped his target's neck, sending up a spray of blood. The two dead men fell to the ground close at hand as Mikeos fired again. His second shot at the more distant target smashed through the man's skull at the far edge of his right eyebrow. The man collapsed and Mikeos reloaded in the cover of the mineshaft wall, where Hemar joined him. All three guards lay in the dirt before the echoes of the first shot died away.
With more rounds chambered Mikeos poked his head over the wall to survey the camp. He slapped Hemar's shoulder and the dogman scampered out on all fours to take the handguns from the two men who had fallen close by. The men at the base of the ruin crawled away, most hidden by the tents, a couple of faces appeared at opening flaps and withdrew swiftly. The acrid gun smoke reached Jenna and she breathed it deep, finding it clean compared to the stench of smelting.
Mikeos rose, slow and smooth, gun held out, aimed at the empty ground between tents and lean-tos, a second in his left now. "You in the tents!" He raised his voice. "We're here for justice. Here to put down the killers who did for the miners at Small Stones."
Nothing for a long moment. Jenna watched the tents through the crossings of her fingers, watched a thin somebody emerge from a tent flap, a pale someone who had spent too long underground, ribs stark through torn rags, hair shorn to the scalp. Jenna couldn't tell if it were a man or a woman. A bony arm lifted, pointing at the smelter. Jenna coughed, not on the throat-scratching stink that reached her but on the thought of what it would be like inside the smelting hut. How could men work in there, and why would the guards choose to be in there?
Mikeos nodded his thanks and turned toward the smelter. Jenna kept her gaze on the tents a while longer, not so trusting as the gunslinger. Only as he reached the wall of the building did she break from the passage and hurry across the intervening ground.
"Why haven't they come out?" she asked, catching her breath.
"Waiting for us to come in." Mikeos kept his voice low. "Or for us to go below so they can come at us from behind." He looked over to the tents. A handful of miners had emerged, one taur among them, his horns cut and his flesh loose about his great frame as if from illness or deprivation. Mikeos lifted a hand and extended first one finger, then another, then another. One of the men held up two fingers. "Two of them in there. Most likely sat pointing their guns at the door."
"Go on the roof and block the chimneys? Smoke them out?" Jenna suggested. The acrid stench of the smelter reached out to choke her even here. Inside it must be hell.
"Tiles aren't so good at stopping bullets." Mikeos frowned. "Still, if Hemar lobs a few rocks up there that will draw their fire from the doorway. The main problem then is if the door doesn't want to open for me."
"Burn the place down."
"Doesn't look very flammable and there will be workers in there as well as guards."
"I can hex a lock," Jenna said, far from sure she could. Ansos, whose power had once run through her like a second spine, felt very distant now.
"Look around. They won't have locks. It will be a bolt or a door-bar." Mikeos spun the revolver around his finger, frustrated. "Hemar, keep watching those mineshafts." He led the way around the smelter, keeping close to the wall. A single door faced the central ruin. It looked sturdy enough though the planks were old and drier than bone.
Hemar yipped a warning and Jenna looked round to see the taur approaching, one hoof dragging on each step. As he drew close he held out empty hands. "I'll open the door." He spoke in a low rumble. "Just make sure you kill them both. The ones with their faces covered." He held a great hand across his snout.
The taur moved before the smelter door, twenty yards off so his back was almost against the stone of the ruin. Mikeos stood to one side of the entrance, Jenna the other. Hemar positioned himself with an armful of rocks where he could see both the mineshafts and Mikeos. At the 'slinger's signal he started to throw. His first rock struck hard enough to smash a tile. Shots rang out from with the smelter, more roof tiles shattering, fragments exploding skyward. The taur lowered his head and began his charge. Hemar threw another rock and another.
When the taur hit the door there was no pause, he went straight through and its splintered fragments followed in his wake. Mikeos stepped in sharply behind him firing before the pieces of door had time to hit the ground. Jenna tried to move in after Mikeos but the first breath he drew set him reeling back coughing and choking, pushing her out of his path. The fumes hit her a second later and she fell to one side, doubled up, vomiting a wet mess into the dust. Swirls of smoke followed Mikeos out of the smelter, dark and unhealthy tendrils of whatever filled the room beyond.
Jenna straightened up, wiping the sourness from her mouth, stomach still in spasm. The taur emerged, dragging two men by their ankles, one with his chest crushed and the white shards of his ribs poking from the scarlet ruin, the other with a neat hole in his forehead, both with some kind of black mask covering their face from the bridge of their nose to their chin.
"Where—" Jenna started to ask after the workers, but the first of them followed out, coughing and pale. How they could stand the smelter and its fumes even for a moment was beyond her, but perhaps when there's no choice then standing it is all that's left.
The taur abandoned both corpses and slumped down some yards off, hacking and sneezing. Mikeos came to stand at Jenna's shoulder, his eyes red and watering. "Those masks must have kept them safe—" He stopped, staring. "What are those?"
Jenna stared too. Each man wore not the black bandana she had first thought it to be but a rigid mask of angular black plates, articulated and with a slight glisten to it. A series of small holes ran along both edges. Mikeos went to the wall of the smelter and took a rock-pick that leaned against it. He approached the headshot man and held the pick at arms' length, slipping the spike along his cheek until the point caught beneath the mask. He pulled and the dead man's head lifted. Mikeos pulled harder and, with a squelch that filled Jenna's mouth with acid bile once more, the mask lifted away, strands of snot-like stuff stretching between its underside and the pale skin beneath. Mikeos jerked it clear. It fell with the underneath exposed. Small black legs writhed in profusion and two soft and pallid tubes still connected it to the man's face, each running into a nostril. The tubes pulsed once before Mikeos brought the pick around in an overhead swing and with a cry of disgust skewered the sect to the ground. The second one he shot , still in place on the crushed man's face, blasting it three times and leaving it in ruin.
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I blog about critiques and crit some fantasy page 1s.
http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/you-really-want-me-to-critique-you.html