Chapter 16 - Fifty Years Ago

Somewhere between the dream of the hunska woman trying to lift him, and the dream of the dead man carrying him to the graveyard in the heat of the noonday sun, Hemar stopped caring, and soon enough he stopped dreaming.

He woke with the worst gut-ache, the kind that twists you around it and steals your breath. If he'd swallowed a pepper-spine whole he would expect to remember doing it. But for the longest time no memory came, nothing but the pain and the squeaking of his teeth as they ground one against the next.

" . . . Hemar . . ."

"Cripple's no better off . . ."

". . . done what I can."

In one of the lulls, where the agony faded to a howl and he could draw breath, it occurred to Hemar that the dull sounds around him were voices. He struggled to open an eye and found focus on a fabric-covered floor. Blinking he managed to resolve short metal struts jutting up around him, and boots, several pairs of boots, all with feet inside.

". . . Hemar . . ."

The floor kept jolting beneath him, banging against his cheekbone. The whole place seemed to sway, full of clanking and rattling. Perhaps they had him in one of those carts. Perhaps . . . He closed his eyes and thought of the hunska woman, her dress all cream lace and red ribbons and muck and blood . . . and the smell of her, the blood tang, the promise of whiskey, the sharp wrongness of sect, the spice of hunska sweat, the mustiness of old sex, and overriding all that: flowers and magic.

". . . Hemar . . ."

Hemar growled at the voice and ground his teeth against the pain. The muscles in his abdomen had locked together, iron hard, rigid in protest. The knife! His eyes flicked open. He remembered the knife. That human pulling the blade clear, scarlet and dripping.

"Hemar, lie still." Not a voice in his ears but one that echoed around in his memories. He lay still. He couldn't do much else.

"You remember who I am?" The voice again, inside him but not of him. He closed his eyes and written in the darkness stood a man, built in the image of Ronson Greeves but younger, cleaner, his eyes more kind, as if the idea of the man had risen from his corpse.

"You're Eben Lostchild. The boy in the shack. I'm sorry that I called you Heap." Hemar's muzzle twitched but the words sounded only in his head. His legs twitched but he neither drew closer nor ran away.

"That's ok." Eben smiled and for a moment he looked more like an idea risen from the boy on the board than from a gunslinger. It wasn't a killer's smile. "Thank you for saving me. I'm sorry you got stabbed. James Purbright is a dangerous man. You should have left me. Nobody would have minded. Ellie Lostchild would have been sad for me not being there perhaps, but he killed her."

"Where are we? Am I dying?"

"We're on a train bound for an unfounded pillar—"

"A train!" Hemar opened his eyes and lifted his head, despite what it cost him. "A train!" The metal struts supported covered seating, windows showed a pitiless blue sky, and the remaining two boots reached up to legs and then to a corpser in a range-rider's coat, as dirty and patched as his face.

"And no," Eben's voice continued in his mind, "you shouldn't be dying. The kin said the knife mostly missed the important bits, and he patched up what could be patched up."

"Can't they stop it hurting?" Hemar realised he'd spoken the words aloud, growled them past his teeth.

The corpser flicked up his hat and looked down. "What kin can do and what kin will do are two completely different things, boy. All the Old Ones are like that. The rules we all live by don't got a hold on them no more so they make up their own rules to play by and put 'em on each other. And kin? Well kin gave away more power than my kind or your kind will ever see, just to slum it with us in the dirt. So maybe kin really can't do more for you than's been done already." He picked at a spot of something crusty on his pants, rubbing it into dust between finger and thumb.

Hemar heaved himself to his side and pushed up into a crouch, fighting the rock and sway of the carriage. His belly hurt like fire but despite what the corpser said about the kin the wound seemed to be less painful from one minute to the next. "What do you want with me?" The corpser scared him shitless, it smelt worse than dead. "And where's Eben?"

"Don't want nothing with you, boy. The hunska made a fuss – seemed easier to take you onboard. And talking of on board . . ." He lifted his head, gesturing with his eyes for Hemar to turn around.

Against all instincts Hemar turned his back on the corpser. He'd been lying at the creature's mercy for unknown hours. It wouldn't wait for him to wake up then jump him when he showed his back. Even so the fur along his spine crawled.

Behind him Eben, still strapped to his somewhat less filthy board, was wedged between two sets of seats. Hemar had been lying on the floor in the gap leading down the centre of the carriage between the rows of seats to either side. The boy had a new shirt on and the dirt around his face had been smudged to the edges. Their eyes met.

"What about my brothers and sisters? Who will look after them? Ask George." Hemar could hardly hear Eben's voice above the rattle of the train now, just a whisper at the back of his mind, growing more faint with each moment as his senses returned to him.

"What about the others in the shack? The young ones?" Hemar asked glancing back at the corpser. "You didn't—"

"What would your pack have done with them?" George asked.

Hemar had no answer to that, or rather none that he wanted to give voice to. He ran his tongue over his teeth, lolling the length of it over his canines, and gave a little whine. His jaw ached as if he'd been kicked in the mouth. Eben spoke again, too faint to hear, an image of him ghosting behind Hemar's eyes. Hemar knew what he would be asking though. "What happened to them?" At least none of the corpser's skin was fresh enough to weep at the stitching.

George spat, but nothing came from his dry mouth. "Billy stayed – my brother Billy, mean dude – to watch out for the last of those free-fighters. Doesn't like to leave a job half-done, does Billy. Looks like the whore will keep an eye out for the other cripples. Waste of good skin if you ask me, but it's done now."

"Hunska don't even look after their own. She's not going to—"

"Pregnant." George grinned. "Takes a lotta chemistry to turn a hunska's brain toward caring for their young. The goodwill tends to spill over a bit in the early stages."

Hemar levered himself into a sitting position, pressing his back to a set of upholstered bench seats. A sandstone butte flashed past the window, faster than a dustbuck at full tilt. "Where we going?"

"Ain't no 'we'. Me and skippy here are going someplace. Out past the incorporated pillars. A kin town."

"And me?" Hemar pushed back a little more, bared his teeth.

"Next stop's yours. I got what I want right here. Only took you along to keep the whore sweet and stop that boy of hers getting riled up. Coulda shot 'em both of course. Shoulda. Getting soft in my old age."

"What's incorporated?" Hemar struggled to sit higher, to get a look at the country racing past the windows. The idea of being kicked out in the middle of nowhere did not appeal. Of course by many measures he'd lived his whole life in the middle of nowhere, but that had been his nowhere!

"What's incorporated? Holy hell you really are just in off the dust ain'tcha?" George set his trail hat on the table between his bench seat and the one facing him, its wide brim reached over the edge. His hair hung long and dark, frayed with age, grey scalp showing in places. "There's pillars every place, right? But ain't even a quarter of them got a town or settlement cos the tracks don't run there. Every ten years a new pillar gets linked up. Tracks just rise up overnight and the train'll run there if you've got the fare. That's when you get a rush. Good times to be had in a rush town, boy. All the big holders making their play for it."

"Couldn't you just . . . walk there? Set up before the tracks come?" Helmar tried to picture it, the first train to a new pillar crowded with people, men, hunska, domen, taur, all eager to get their piece of something new.

"Sure you could. But it's eight hundred and three miles from one pillar to the next. Never more, never less. And that's a ways to go across bad land. Be off your bearing a couple of degrees and you won't see that next pillar. Don't matter if it's a thousand feet tall. You'll miss it. And the chances of you getting there in the first place, across barrens and stale land, with wild pack and war herds? And when you get there – no supplies, no nothing, on your own until the tracks come, and that could be next year or next century."

"Why— why can't I come with you. With Eben and you to the kin town?" He wondered how far they'd come already. How far he'd have to walk to get back to anything he knew. Not that there was anything left for him back in the places he knew.

"Kin only asked for one pup." George nodded at Eben. "A human one. Gonna give what was asked for, no more, no less. That way there's no wriggle room. You understand? No place for the kin to back out of our agreement."

"And what . . ." In the back of Hemar's mind he half hoped he could keep the corpser talking until they got where they were bound – make him forget this business of putting him out in the wilds injured and alone.

"What's the agreement?" George asked. "I could tell you." He drew his gun and pointed it at Hemar's face. "But then I'd have to shoot you."

Hemar put a hand up. He'd never seen a gun fired but he didn't like the black eye of that iron barrel watching him.

"Ha! Gonna catch a bullet, boy?" George returned the revolver to his holster. "I'm just fucking with you. Ain't no great secret, and the wild is gonna eat you up quick enough anyhow." He leaned toward the window, looking out in the direction they were going. "Thing is, these trains can take you anywhere. Absolutely anywhere. You just gotta have the fare." He reached for his hat and plonked it back upon his head. "Took me an age to learn that, and an age more to find out where I wanted to go. And where I want to go is home, the boy there's the fare. Kin will carry me and mine, and any other corpsers that can fit on a single train, all the way back to where we came from. The place where men got started. And that's a fuck of a long way off, boy. Not talking about one pillar to the next, or hauling ass all the way to Ansos. Men come from up there." He waved a hand carelessly at the sky. "One of those shiny little stars is all ours. We ain't from around here."

Hemar felt the train start to slow. Almost imperceptible at first, but growing more noticeable by the second. "Wh—"

"Why? Why'd a trainload of corpsers want to go back to our home world? Because if we get there we can all die at long last." The squeal of brakes rose across him and for a moment he fell silent. He spoke into the lull as the brakes hushed before finding their voice an octave higher. "At the bottom of it all, dying is all any corpser really wants to do."

Hemar used the seating behind him to haul himself onto his feet. The fire from his wound reached up along his bones, making him snarl. "Pack-shit!" The floor of the carriage wobbled and shook so that he didn't dare release his support. Invisible hands seemed to tear at him, wanting to throw him the length of the train as it squealed to halt. He fixed his eyes on the corpser's dead stare. "Wh—"

"Why do the kin want your friend here?" George shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. Seems like he'd be a valuable card to hold though, no? All I know is that if you scratch at any kin plot deep enough it turns out to be about stirring things up with the powers that be."

"The dark star and the bright?" Hemar wondered what Wise Odar would say about the Watchers being interested in a broken human-child.

"That what the dust packs call the Old Ones?" George stood as the carriage made its last jolt and the world outside stopped passing by. "The Stranger made a move on the boy, that meant kin was free to act too. The sister will have made a move too, but those are hard to see."

"I don't think—"

"Don't care what you think, boy." George took hold of Hemar by the scruff of the neck. Hemar made to bite the arm that held him, but repressed the urge. He'd no desire to taste that meat. Or a bullet. "Your stop."

Hemar caught a last glimpse of Eben before the corpser marched him out, through the end door, then another door that opened into the blazing heat of the day, and down two steep iron steps into the scrubland.

"This isn't a stop. There's nothing here," Hemar said.

George released his grip. "Train stopped here, so it's a stop." He reached into his coat and pulled out a flask, silvered metal in a worn leather sheath. "Whiskey," he said. "Good for pain. Your choice. And when it's gone . . ." He nodded to a rickety tower of metal struts close by the engine. A pipe ran up from the ground through the middle of the structure and fed into a huge barrel at the top, maybe twenty foot off the ground. "Water-tower."

"Wait!"

But the corpser climbed back aboard, and the gleaming door, enamelled in brown and green, slammed behind him. The train lurched forward, gathered its breath, and with a clatter like some vast battle-sect born of nightmare, the whole mass of it thundered into motion. Within the space of ten heartbeats Hemar stood alone, wreathed in steam. He watched the train become a dot, and the dot become imagination, and finally under the hot and heavy hand of the sun he crouched down into his misery.

The corpser's flask caught the brightness of the day and lanced it up into Hemar's eyes. He turned so he could hold it in his shadow. At the back of Hemar's mind a scent rose. The scent of fire and sex and chasing, of catching and of killing, and of gulping down hot blood. He lifted the flask, heard the heavy slosh of its contents. Domen's Ruin. He'd smelled it at the tavern, caught the tang of it on the clothes of this man and that. The scent had haunted him each hour since he first found Sweet Water. Wise Odar would tip it away, endure the pain, follow his friend.

But Wise Odar was dead.

[More on Thursday. 

Hope to break into the top 100 fantasy stories this week :)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26002086-gunlaw

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