Chapter 11 - Fifty Years Ago

A town as small as Sweet Water ought to sleep. There ought to be some hour deep in the dark where the pulse of such a place grows slow and the people lie fast in their slumbers. But even in that time before the dawn breaks, when all light is withdrawn from the world like the sea drawing back before the hugest wave crashes ashore, even then the lanterns still burned along Main Street. Hemar crept in the dry dirt beneath the sidewalk where it raised up against the threat of winter mud.

" . . . spooking cattle down at Janer's yard . . ."

". . . smell it on the wind, I tell you. Trouble, I tell you . . ."

Two men, ripe with tobacco and sweat. Hemar waited for distance to swallow their conversation. He wondered what might reek so bad a man could smell it on the wind.

". . . ain't seen Nobby Reese in an age. Could balance a pint on his head, Nobby. That was his trick. Flat head." The swish of a hand sketching how flat. "Fat too. Uncommon fat . . ."

Another quiet minute of waiting and Hemar slunk into the open, choosing places where shadow pooled. He moved slow, sniffing at doorways, peering through shutters, listening with ears cocked and high. The pack had tales of town, tales enough for many long nights, passed along long chains of storytelling and anchored on the word of domen who had thrown their lot in with men, lived in their towns, herded rather than hunted. The scent of the place, the multitude of stinks from sharp through sewage to sour, the murmurs, cries, chinks, clinks, and exclamations, scenes glimpsed past shutter slats, all served to put flesh on the chewed bones of those stories. From the darkest corners Hemar watched humans come and go. Drifters following the run of cards or cattle, prospectors over-rich with gold-dust and bent on being rid as fast as possible, free guns waiting for a kill, whores a whoring, stitchers raw fingered in the seamstress' shed, Black Sam dead and yet not dead, wriggling in his grave, these were the night folk of Sweet Water, standing the long watch before dawn.

Warmth drew Hemar to the Broken Horn saloon, warmth and the scent of something beyond anything he'd known, past the thrill of a lean swift bitch in heat, past even the hot melting wildness of spilled blood sharp with fear. It smelled as if fire itself had threaded the air, an aroma that ran from nose to veins. He stole a look past the low swing doors, summer doors despite the night chill. In that moment's glance he saw the source, golden in small glasses, liquid flame, returning the lamplight, twinkling. Whiskey. He knew it from the pack-tales. Domen's Ruin they called it, for few that had run on the badlands would ever return to the hunt after they'd poured whiskey over their tongues. Hemar had only scented it and already the need pulsed in him.

****

"Four and one. The house wins." Johnny scooped the chips whilst the player sagged against the craps table.

Sally tipped the whiskey into her mouth, tongue making a swift lap of the glass' rim. The shot glass made a satisfying clunk against the table. She let the liquor swill around the sharp points of her teeth. Once upon a time the stuff had taken her breath, made her gasp, even watered down like Ed's. Shock becomes commonplace becomes tedium. First fucking, then whiskey. She watched the free-fighters at the bar, slouched, hung with belt and bullets, trail dust still bedded in their skin. Had the shock of killing graduated to tedium for them, had drawing down on a man become commonplace? Perhaps not, perhaps the day it stopped setting their hearts a-pounding was the day they caught their bullet.

"Three and two, house wins." Johnny's voice carried the apology. The house always won and Johnny was always sorry. His mark, a fat gold-panner, all sweat stains and whiskey, in off the dust, didn't seem to mind. Deep down all gamblers play to lose, whatever their game.

Ruben Twist had been an hour at the card table beneath the green reach of Ed's yucca – perhaps the only potted plant in Sweet Water, certainly in the places to which Sally was invited. He'd sat nursing his way through two cactus sours while he watch the redneck roll away a small fortune in gold so new from the earth the tiny nuggets still hid dirt. If Ruben came her way Sally would hike her price, but with enough dollars Twist could hike her skirts. Were the Horn to catch fire Sally would drag Ed's damn yucca bush and its damn pot to safety before she laid hand on Ruben Twist, but you can't take to whoring and be picky over much more than price. Not with Ed's cut to pay and an empty room running up tariff. Sally glanced at Ruben. In truth she had more money than she knew what to do with. Most hunska weren't in ska more than a year or two. Sally's had lasted five years and showed no signs of fading. Birth madness the male hunska called it, a softening of the mind, a changing of attitudes. Without it no hunska mother would feed her young. With it they became almost sociable. Certainly sociable enough to stand the crush of life in pillar towns and earn fortunes that would buy prestige in the wilds when they whelped and the madness left them.

Both doors swung in so sudden it made Sally jump, made her claws slide from their sheaths. Ronson Greeves strode through, the saloon doors banging the walls behind him, dust hanging in his wake. The gunslinger reached the bar and set his hat in a dry spot before the doors had stopped their swinging.

"Whiskey."

It seemed to Sally that they served so little else no-one had ever to say the word, but only to note the rare occasions when something else was required.

The free-fighters eyed Ronson from the far end of the bar where a trio of them had waited since sunset, always two on station when nature called the third outback to the latrine or shitter. Ronson Greeves might be the reason they came, that rarest among men, a retired gunslinger.

"I'd buy you that drink, Mister Greeves." The youngest of the trio, a boy scarce old enough to shave. He stood tall and skinny, weed-grown, looking too awkward to be fast. He wiped a palm on his waistcoat, shiny with grease and wear, from a dead man no doubt, watch chain dangling pocket to pocket, silver, at least in colour.

"No. Thank you kindly." Ronson threw his drink back. He wouldn't have another, not with free-fighters in town.

"I ain't good enough to drink with, is that it?" The boy didn't look dangerous until you noticed his eyes, cold, and with a half-light in them that set hairs on the back of Sally's neck standing.

Ronson showed the boy an easy smile. "I believe I just drank with you, son." A sensible man, Mister Greeves, he'd had the sense to give up his star and relinquish his pillar to another slinger without a fight. That didn't stop others from lacking the sense to leave him alone now though. Twenty-nine kills under his belt and nothing to be won from victory yet still they came. Even without the prize of a gunslinger's title men rolled into Sweet Water to try their speed against his. Of all the races only men fought for no reason. Where hunska would fight for territory and domen would battle for status among their kin, men with neither herd nor pack would fight even so, and to the death, firm in the belief that they could carry that reputation with them wherever their path led.

The second of the free-fighters stepped in, tall but lacking an inch on the boy, a thin seam of scar running from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth, stark against the flow of his face and catching the lantern light. "Saw you draw on Kendrick Mill back in the 'Eleven." This one had an accent, a short, clipped tone that told you he'd come a long ways and more.

Sally crossed the room, weaving around stray chairs. Any walk's a chance to advertise what a whore sells but she dropped that for swiftness. All four of the men watched her, fingers straightening on their gun hands.

"Ronson Greeves," she drawled it out, "Last time you were here you promised to take me upstairs and show me your gun." She pushed her face toward the blonde girl's, the one he always thought of. "These boys can stand in line if they want to see it too." Ed would thank her for holding off the shooting. His woodwork had enough holes in it already and if one of his drunks got a stray bullet the bills might not get paid in a long time.

"I might at that." Ronson smiled again but there was nothing real in it, Sally could sense that now they stood close. Something had spooked him, something outside.

The third of the gunmen reached out a hand for Sally, a long fingered hand in a glove of thin black leather stretched like a second skin and cut to leave his palm naked. She caught his wrist, claws extended just a fraction to pinprick at his tendons and the artery where his heart's blood ran.

"Pay first, touch later," she told him. A cold one this, the oldest of them, fifty and gray with it, late in life to the gun, or at least to the fair fight. He smelled of murder and old sin.

"Quick," he said, making no attempt to free his hand, instead watching her, a pale stare lacking passion.

"So's Ronson," she said. "For a human." And she let go his wrist, suppressing the shiver that wanted to run through her.

"Snake eyes," Johnny called out at the table. "House wins." And the fat man rolled once more, glassy-eyed and sweating.

The saloon doors banged again, harder even than when Ronson Greeves had strode in a touch too fast. One of the stockmen, too poor for the Broken Horn, blood all up his work-smock, dark crimson soaking the dirty linen.

"Bull dead up on the road, up past the crip shack." He looked down at himself as if seeing the gore for the first time. "Looks like . . . like he got turned inside out."

"Escaped from the yards?" Ronson asked.

"Bull taur." The man shook his head as if still seeing the corpse. "Couldn't tell who."

"Damn!" Ronson set off for the doors.

"Fuck me." Ed from behind the bar, a hand in the thin straggles of his hair. "Last thing we need's a mino die in town. Who could even kill one without shooting? Fuck, I hope it's not Gorren."

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