Mikeos scrambled up the stairs to his mother's room. He crashed in, forgetting to listen first for a client. She lay under a heap of covers on the bed, alone and sprawled out in the death-sleep. A bar of dusty light from the gap in the drapes crossed her arms and face.

He went to the clothes chest and rummaged for his other pair of leggings. The wet pair he threw into a corner. The room stunk of sweat and old sex; a bit of piss wouldn't make much difference.

"Mikey? That you?"

He jerked upright at her voice, still jumpy from the business downstairs.

"Yes, Ma." Mikeos tied off the laces at the front and turned to the bed.

She watched him in a half daze, blinking, not lifting her head from the bed. "Is it night time?"

"Three past noon."

"I . . . I dreamed about your father," she said. "He told me you were in trouble."

"No trouble, Ma." He put his fingers to the back of his neck. The skin there felt dry and blistered.

Her eyes found sudden focus. "Did you get it?"

Mikeos sighed. "I got it." He tossed her the little pouch. He wouldn't tell her about Grum. She probably didn't even remember him.

She sat up, cross-legged, and took the pouch from the bed. White fingers fumbled at the tie. "You're a good boy, Mikey." She didn't look up from her work.

"I gotta go, Ma." She looked so old, grey in the blonde, hair thin on her scalp. "The gunslinger's in the bar." He remembered her strong and laughing, a time when she could throw him in the air. And catch him. But that was . . . how long? Two years? Before Jim Bright put a bullet through his father. Before his Ma found her comfort in dead dreams and the dust that gave them.

"I gotta go."

She didn't hear him. 

                                                                                                   *** 

Mikeos came down the stairs one slow step at a time. Grum had been removed. The crowd was as packed as ever.

Take someone away and they don't leave a hole, not in the Bullet and Rye. Not anywhere maybe.

The gunslinger sat where he had been before, the child with him. Mikeos looked away when she turned toward him. She left her table and met him at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to walk past.

"The clan took your friend away."

"He wasn't my friend."

"He died for you," she said. "They'll put his skull up by the pillar. A warrior's right."

"He died because he was a bull-head. A stupid cow-brain that never backed down, ever." He pressed his hands into his eyes, hard, and looked away from her.

"Maybe he knew when to back down. Maybe he just knew that this wasn't the time to do it."

Mikeos sniffed and watched the crowd for a moment. He turned to answer, but the girl had gone back to the table. All of a sudden he wanted to be out of the heat and the noise, out of it all. He dived into the crowd and fought a path toward the street doors.

                                                                                                          ***

The street lay empty save for a lone cart heaped with barrels, and a few prospectors straggling in, dust grey and trailing picks.

"Move it!" The carter lashed at his straining mule. It looked too small for the cart, and the cart looked too small for the load.

"Pesh!" Hemar sat with his back to the saloon wall and his legs stretched out across the boards of the raised sidewalk. "Man doesn't know mules from mutton."

The dogman had an empty whiskey bottle clutched protectively to his chest. A long line of slobber ran from his jowls down into the matted fur of his stomach.

"Hey, Hemar." Mikeos had time for Hemar, when he wasn't too drunk. Most of the dogmen were vicious and best avoided, but Hemar was OK.

"Heyah. I saw them pulling Grum out. Bad business, that."

"Yeah." Mikeos looked toward the pillar, towering over the roof of the Grand Hotel at the end of the street. It looked close, like you could hit it with a stone.

"Bad business. He was alright, Grum was." Hemar gave out a little howl of misery that showed several dozen big yellow teeth in jagged array along pink gums. "A good taur. Free with a drink for an old friend. Always free with a drink." He gave Mikeos a sideways look. "You're not packing a bottle there are you, Mikey boy?"

Mikeos shook his head. "No."

"Never mind." Hemar slumped back against the wall. "Never mind."

Mikeos stepped down into the street. "I'll see you later, Hemar."

The dogman leaned forward, resting on his knuckles. "Hey, wait up. Where you off to, little man?"

Mikeos nodded toward the pillar. "Guess I'll see where they put him."

"Hey, hey, that's quite a walk. Couple of miles outta town. Be dark before you get back, Mikey."

Mikeos shrugged. "I feel like a walk."

Hemar sniffed the air. "Me too." He growled to himself and rolled up to his feet. He looked to be just bone and gristle under all that lank and greasy hair. "Guess I could do with a stroll too."

Mikeos shrugged, and they walked on together. He kept two steps ahead; Hemar smelled rank.

They walked in silence, past the Grand Hotel, past Gore's Smithy, past the stockades and the lowing steers.

Hemar paused at Jonan's Lodgings on the corner of West Way. "That's where the trouble came from." A yellowed claw picked out the window of the room where Parker Hale, the Oh-Seven's much loved gunslinger, bled out three weeks earlier. "Heard she slit him from gut to gills with a letter-opener."

Mikeos nodded. Sharra Leo did the cutting they said. A lover's tiff taking on too sharp an edge. Rumour put Sharra on a southbound train, outpacing the law. That was rumour – 'fact' left the Oh-Seven without a gunslinger, an open town where anyone with the price of a ticket, or legs enough to arrive under their own steam, could show up to challenge for the slinger title.

Homesteads gave way to dusty scrub and grey shale. The dogman paused, sniffed the air with suspicion, and moved on.

"I never go to the pillar," Hemar said.

Mikeos shrugged. "I've been. It's big."

"The pack talk about it," Hemar said. "Out on the plains. We meet under the full moon, you know?"

Mikeos knew. How could you not know, with the howling rolling in off the plains every month?

The dogman looked over his shoulder, sniffing and sniffing again, harder. "There's a hundred of them pillars, a thousand. You know that?"

"Sure."

Mikeos' mother used to say the pillars were there before man, before the taur and hunska, before dogmen or corpsers. Even before the woodkin. She said they met in the middle of the world, made by whoever shaped the lands and set the gun-law above all magics.

"You know what else?"

"What?" Mikeos asked.

"Remos Jax is going to meet the sect's champion there, tomorrow noon."

"They're going to have their show-down by the pillar?" Mikeos remember the gunslinger's eyes. Flint. He almost felt sorry for the sect man.

Hemar woofed in agreement. Adding, "He's going to lose."

"Jax? No way." Mikeos shook his head.

"Oh yes."

"No-one's ever beaten Jax," Mikeos said.

"D'uh!" Hemar snorted. "That's why he's not dead."

The dogman ran his tongue over his teeth. "This sect champion is something new. Locust-born. He's not flesh and blood. It's all chitin and acid-reflex. It draws its gun and you hear the crack, like a whip breaking the air. A man can't measure against that. You didn't wonder why only Jax showed up to the challenge?"

"So why would he go, if he can't win?" Mikeos asked.

"Why did I fight the pack leader ten moons back? Why does a taur make a stand?Sometimes, right or wrong, you know it's time."