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."
Jenna only nodded. Her stomach clenched further into the tight and painful knot that hunger made of it. If the vultures left so much as a bone she would fight them for it.
"Ten miles yet. More maybe." Mikeos lowered his hand and walked on. He favoured his left side now. Beneath the broad brim of his hat his eyes glittered. He too had said little on their journey along the tracks, and hadn't once complained of hunger, perhaps sustained by his need to reach Bright – an appetite for revenge that outweighed the needs of his body.
"Were you close to your father?" Jenna had asked him the previous evening beneath water tower 11080. The question felt awkward in her mouth. She never pursued people's stories. Everyone had them, legions of dull, painful tales about their lives. Her interest lay in the grand story of mankind, not in the minutae of each example, but even so she had asked Mikeos about his father. She told herself it was prudent to know the foundations of those you would have to depend upon. It sounded reasonable. But she knew it for misdirection. Lying to yourself was the first habit the witches at Ansos broke their recruits from.
"The weaver birds that infest the ledges of this pillar make themselves a nest from interlaced reeds and grasses," Sister Almah said in a windowless room lit by a small and singular lamp. "Each of you." And she ran the gleam of her eyes across Jenna and the three girls who sat cross legged beside her. "Each of you lives in such a nest, though you have woven yours from the lies you tell yourself. You live in comfort within these fabrications, blind to the world of truth."
Jenna had asked Mikeos about his father because she wanted to know about him, about Mikeos, for no reason other than that he pleased her... In some curious way he pleased her. He woke fires in her, opened doors, and drew memories from forgotten days.
"Were you close to your father?" Jenna had asked, and Mikeos, normally so quick to speak, so easy in his skin, had hesitated then lied.
"Of course."
Jenna had said nothing then. She said nothing now, only drew her cowl against the beating sun and walked on along the only possible path, following the tracks toward the vultures.
The gyre of vultures grew until it resembled one of the dark and gritty tornadoes that come in off the Dry from time to time, almost lazy in their upper reaches and roaring fury where they touch the ground.
Approaching the corpse Jenna could see nothing but black wings and red necks, the occasional gore-dripping head raised above the mass.
"Horse," Hemar said.
When they came close enough to scatter the birds Jenna could see he was right. Little of the outside remained, but the hooves and the long angle of the red skull confirmed it. A saddle remained among the welter of ribs and guts, scarred by the vultures' sickle beaks but too tough to be considered food whilst more tender parts remained.
"Guess Bright's walking now," Mikeos said. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin and stared along the unforgiving straightness of the track.
"Might be there by now." Hemar leaned over the remains, reached in, tore out a chunk of liver, dark and glistening and quivering. He took half of it in one huge bite before offering it out. Jenna almost hesitated but her hands reached without consultation and took the warm slippery mass.
"I've got charcoal. We'll roast it up," Mikeos said. "Like to make you vomit raw."
The slinger crouched by his pack, grimacing as he lowered himself. He dug in amongst his gear and pulled out a wire grill, two handfuls of charcoal, and a magnifying lens to light it with. The sat on the down-slope west of the track, still in the blaze of the sun, and waited while the meat sizzled on the grill and Hemar chewed the flesh from bones.
Gnawing hunger pains drove Jenna in search of distraction. She squatted beside Mikeos and stared at him until he looked up. "What are you doing here?"
"Cooking."
"I mean here. In the middle of nowhere? Me, I'm chasing Eben Lostchild to change the world, to make a difference to humanity."
"A good difference?" Mikeos returned his gaze to the meat.
"We're pets here, Mikeos. We're fed enough of what we want to keep us from changing, moving on, getting better. That's what I'm doing. But you? You're chasing Eben Lostchild to find and kill one man and providence, or the Old Ones, have put him right here for you. You're waiting to eat his goddamn horse... All that effort for a father you weren't close to. How does that work? Did Bright murder him in his bed? Shoot him in the back?"
The smell of charring liver filled Jenna's mouth with saliva. The look Mikeos gave made her swallow.
"You don't understand people any better than the kin do. But at least they know it."
"And you're the expert?" Jenna's words came out sharper than she intended. "Putting so many bullets through so many brains has helped you figure out how they work?"
"Seeing a man face his last minutes helps, yes." Mikeos turned the meat. Fats sizzled, flames leapt up orange and hungry. "Facing your own helps too."
"What did you learn when Walker was choking the life from you?" A low blow that made her curse the well of pettiness it came from.
"That I could trust you." Mikeos managed a crooked smile. "And that I should trust a witch's choice of weapon, even when it's stupid."
"Answer the question." Jenna stuck to her course.
"There was a question? How about you answer it. You're not hunting Eben to save mankind from whatever it was you said. You don't even like mankind very much. This is about you, Jenna. If I've ever met anyone who isn't doing what they do for themselves at the bottom of it all – well I didn't recognise it. Hemar here maybe." Hemar looked up from his bone, eyes serious. "But even Hemar might just be trying to make up for some old guilt if you carve it back far enough. Is that pup who survived the sect still inside there pulling the strings? Still looking for a way to make it right – make up for not dying with his pack?"
The bone cracked under Hemar's ridged molars. He sucked the marrow and said nothing.
"The horse-meat's burning," Jenna said.
Mikeos lifted the chunk of liver on his knife, juices running. "We're all chasing answers to ourselves. Maybe Eben has them, maybe Bright." He divided the chunk on his tin plate and took half on the knife, offering the plate and remains to her. "This at least will answer hunger." A flashed grin, gone quicker than it came.
They sat then, chewing, burning their mouths, staring out across the Dry. Mikeos spoke only once more before they moved on. He held the meat out on his knife, a puzzled look on his face, his gaze fixed way off, perhaps way back across years. "An odd-shaped cow is all." He took only small bites, his appetite dwarfed by hers.
Hemar stood, tossing a bone aside. "We have to go."
Jenna and Mikeos found their feet, still chewing. The dust plains to either side looked clear. "Why?"
Hemar pointed up.
"No vultures," Mikeos said.
On the horizon in the direction of The Ruins a slight haze drew Jenna's eye. She pointed.
"Dust storm?" Mikeos asked.
It looked like a low and dirty cloud, trail dust from a herd perhaps, but with a yellow tinge.
"We should go." Hemar started off down the tracks, keeping his pace to something they could match, though Jenna could see the need to run twitching through him.
Ten miles on and the sun had fallen almost to the western hills. Mikeos moved without looking left or right, his skin grey, no word of complaint but Jenna knew the signs. The corpser's touch had tainted the spike that wounded Mikeos back at The Ruins. The poison was in his blood now, eating at him. And her hex lay dry upon her forehead. There would be no healing the gunslinger this time.
The first locust whirred past Jenna's head and landed without grace on the slope to their left. "What?" Jenna could find no other words. A second came down in a flutter of dry wings. Then three more. Then dozens. Some the size of a thumb, some the size of a hand. The sky behind them was dark with the things. "I don't understand."
Mikeos shrugged and pulled his bandana over his face. "They can't eat us. There's nothing for them to eat here. Just gonna improve the soil."
Hemar snatched one from the air and crammed it into his mouth crunching noisily. "What?" He returned Jenna's stare. "Catch your own!" He started to jog on again, head bowed to keep the things from his face. Jenna followed, flinching with revulsion when a locust careened into her cowl and she had to fish it out, broken legs scrabbling at her palm. She just snagged the thing before it disappeared down her neck and inside her robe.
Mikeos caught them up, hat low, bandana high. "Filthy things."
"It'll get worse," Hemar said. "This is just the leading edge. And the sect are coming behind them."
"What?" Jenna saved the rest of her breath for running. She didn't want to get too winded and start panting for fear of breathing in one of the smaller locusts.
"When the sect are on the move locusts swarm. Fire ants pour out of their towers, spiders of all kinds come together in rivers, hornets and scorpions give up hunting and come too. It's a reaction to their scent I think, there's messages in sect odours. I can almost sniff them out sometimes but it's too delicate for domen noses really."
"Was it like this when they came for your pack, Hemar?" Mikeos batted locusts from his face. The things crunched beneath Jenna's boots now every step she took. The pulped bodies drew still more, feeding on their dead.
"Only one came for the pack. One death-scarab. The locusts came a day before, a light rain of them, stripping bushes to bare thorns. We didn't know what it meant. I learned since – you hear a lot of stories when you're boozing. Cloud like this . . . it's going to mean scarabs, mantis, bugs, flickers . . ."
"How many?" Mikeos's fingers moved over the ammunition in his belt as he ran.
Hemar glanced back. The sky to the south of them was black, a black storm cloud with crimson highlights courtesy of the sinking sun. The domen started to run faster and Jenna strained to keep up, heedless now of the locusts crawling over her like a second skin. "How many?" Mikeos demanded again.
"All of them," Hemar barked.
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