Chapter 18 – Present Day

The creosote bush offered patchy shade at best, the diffuse and shifting shadows of tiny leaves amid an infinite criss-crossing of twigs and thorns. Still, when the sun is pounding your skull from a steel sky without pause or mercy, and a hangover is hammering back from the inside just as hard, any shelter is worth having.

At first the sounds went unrecognised, lost in the din of sun and aching head, but with time the pinging of rails became unmistakeable. The train started as nothing, then a distant blur became a closer blur, and finally a huge blur, green and gleaming, squealing to a halt and panting steam. Hemar knuckled fur and gunk from his eyes, blinked, and looked again. A vast engine in deepest green enamel, carriages strung back along the tracks, maybe a dozen. The Wayne. He'd ridden The Wayne once, long ago, with a dead man for company. He shook his head and whimpered, wishing he'd kept it still.

"Nothing good." His tongue made a wet sound parting company from the roof of his mouth where it had been glued.

Hemar drew in a deep breath through his muzzle, sniffed, and sniffed again. The flow of whiskey, year upon year, had eroded much of what he had been, but even dulled as it was, little escaped his sense of smell. Among the sharpness of char, the moist comfort of steam, and the exotic aromas of engine oil, came other scents, faint as memory. "Time to go." He rolled to all fours, wincing at the stabbing pains behind his eyes, and scrambled away, even as the last door of the foremost carriage started to open.

He hurried from the rails toward the clustered roofs and dusty stockades of the 'Oh-Seven. The enormity of the pillar, standing miles behind the town, dwarfed it even so. From the scrub he took the cattle trail up to the slaughter pens, tasting old blood on the air. It seemed the train's wet breath had followed him, leaving the air hot and heavy, each scent accentuated. Puffed and panting he found himself in the narrow alley between the assay office and Wawrick's Hotel, a dosshouse for labourers down on their luck.

Hemar licked his lips and slid into the good solid shadow of the hotel. To sleep a drunk off you want an alley. Permanence. Not the fickle shelter of a thorn bush. Hemar closed his eyes and for a moment he saw splintered devastation, houses tossed aside, timbers shattered. The train had come to Sweet Water and erased what had seemed to be written there for the ages. In moments it had erased the illusion of permanence. Thorn bushes grew back in Sweet Water now, the town abandoned, population scattered. Change. That's what the trains brought. Then and now. Back when Hemar was a pup the Wayne had brought George and Billy Ay to Sweet Water. Hemar was in no hurry to find out who it brought to the Five-Oh-Seven today.

Without Eben Lostchild Sweet Water hadn't lasted a month. In the year it took Hemar to find his way back there the Dry had taken Sweet Water. Not a board was left – the settlers left nothing as precious as wood. Only Station Rock remained. The rock, the grave mounds, and the brief babble of the Sweet Water itself running as far as the recklessness of water would carry before being reclaimed by the ground.

Hemar curled in the shadow, wrapped around the misery of his aching head and the memories he'd thought washed out long ago by a river of whiskey. The scents of the Bullet and Rye called to him, reaching across Main Street, fingering down the alley, but oblivion spoke with a sweeter tongue and he let her take him.

Hemar woke, jerked from sleep by a sudden convulsion running nose to tail. For the longest time he lay, trying to make sense of what he saw. Finally it came to him. Stars. A strip of stars offered between the dark and rising walls of the alley, a black mass of cloud swallowing them as he watched. A fractious wind tugged at his fur but offered no release from the heat, sweltering and storm-heavy. His fingers curled in the dirt, curiously oily with the residue of filth that dry air couldn't steal away. Thirst woke him, thirst and the need to piss. He lifted up and added to the alley's pungency until only thirst remained. With a half stagger, still drunk on sleep, he lurched toward the faint greyness of Main where the alley disgorged. Torchlight glinted on the tack of a passing horse and rider. Hemar licked his lips, tasting the whiskey already, feeling the warmth of it rolling down his throat.

The current of Main Street took Hemar up and swept him along, dozens of people on the to and fro, shadows all of them, caught here and there in the glow of a hanging lantern or dancing light of tar-torches on a poles before some trader's tarp. Prospectors in off the Dry, herdsmen and taur back from the range, domen out-runners back from returning strays to the stockyards, a hunska man hidden in his cloak, here to barter and be gone, taking a copper pot back to the hills and leaving his pelts or some similar exchange. Torch flames guttered in the gusts between buildings, men sweated in the heat, and hang-jawed domen panted.

"Seems to me you should be heading for the next train outta here." A loud voice from in front of the Bullet and Rye, the words spoken for an audience. Hemar shook away the whiskey-thoughts and tried to focus. Just in front of him a large cow-taur came to a halt, the men to her left slowing too.

"Does it seem that way to all these other fellas here too?" A quieter voice, neither threatening nor threatened. Threads of the familiar wove through the man's words, Hemar's nose twitched. He elbowed past Anna-May with her dung sack, between two apprentices from Neddard's smithy, and found a line of broad backs blocking his way. To the left, hidden in the shadow of Rats Alley and revealed by the twitch of Hemar's nose, a woodkin watched, motionless in sack-robes. "You're all here to see me back onto a train?" the soft-spoken man again, prompting his accusers.

"You're done talking to Miss Kitty. You got what you wanted and upset her some too. Ain't nothing else here for you, Mikey. Best be going." Sheriff Marks was speaking. Hemar hadn't recognised his official tone. The old boy didn't leave his office much these days in any case.

"These here your deputies now are they, Sheriff? Don't seem to recall the 'Oh-Seven sheriff ever had himself five fine young deputies before, all mean-eyed and twitchy."

"Mikey—"

"Don't you 'Mikey' me, Marks." Hemar burrowed through the swelling crowd, the rankness of him helping to clear a path. He hunkered down where the sidewalk lifted from the dirt. He could see Mikeos clearly now, the lines of the boy he knew still there behind the stubble and the stare and the sharpness of his jaw. The lines of a boy who once upon a time tracked down the corpser, Elver Sams, and shot out his eyes. "Don't you 'Mikey' me. It'll be Mister Jones, thankee. And ain't you too long in the tooth for this game, sheriff? Lined up with Dean Sensa's boys, like you were holder-owned. Bought and sold?"

"I'm here to keep the peace, Mikeos Jones." Something querulous in the sheriff's voice now, a weakness that had always been there, untempered by age. "These here men volunteered to stand by the law and I'll deputise them all in heartbeat if I have to."

"The law?" Jenna Crossard stepped from the gloom behind Mikeos, pale, calm, every inch of her a threat. She wore the hex robes, bore the red scar on her forehead, framed by the fall of hair, dark as ravens' wings, but to Hemar's eye she held more of the girl that left the 'Oh-Seven for Ansos than of the witch who returned for Remos Jax a decade later. Her scar, he noted, no longer bled.

"The law?" Jenna repeated, commanding attention. "When did the law say who came and went, who they could and couldn't talk to? For that matter, when did Holder Sensa care, or start to think he can dictate to Ansos or to gunslingers?" A mutter of agreement ran through the crowd. People watched now from the windows of the hotels and saloons, and from the doorways of offices where oil burned til midnight. Others emerged from the 'Bullet, more further down the street, crowding from the Fifth Ace back along Main.

"To Ansos and to gunslingers? Seems to me you ain't neither of you those things though." White Willis spoke, Hemar hadn't seen him beside the sheriff, old Marks being the husk of a big man and Willis being small. "Seems to me a hex-witch ought to be bleeding." Willis took off his hat and mocked a bow toward Jenna, his hair sweeping forward white as milk. "And that a gunslinger wears a star so folks know not to shoot him by mistake." A nod to Mikeos. Willis bore watching. Had himself a name in the Five-Oh-Seven, did Willis. Hemar knew the man visited the Manse, spoke to holder Sensa, even dined at his table. Small he might be, but the deadliest poisons come in small bottles.

"I ceded Ansos to Doug Hoffsted." Mikeos lowered his head so Hemar could only just see his eyes below the brim of his hat. "I'm here as a private citizen." More muttering in the crowd. Is he here for Wesson? Did he come to challenge? Hemar didn't think it likely. Judd Wesson would be easy enough to find. The Five-Oh-Seven's resident 'slinger played poker in the Bullet most nights. Mikeos and Jenna would have passed him already if they went up to see Miss Kitty.

"And I have taken a sabbatical, you are correct, Mister Willis." Jenna nodded to White Willis, touching two fingers to her forehead and bringing them away dry. "Neither of us is bound by our old vows."

Hemar scooted back into the filth below the sidewalk. A 'slinger who's not a 'slinger anymore . . . free to be shot without the world caving in. And by the same coin, free to put his skills to his own ends . . .

"Puts a different spin on things don't it, Sheriff Marks?" Mikeos said, and for a moment Hemar saw not Mikeos, gunslinger of Ansos, not Mikey Jones who made a stand against Elver Sams, but a younger child, walking up Main Street the day after Jim Sharp had breezed through town and killed Daveos Jones outside the sheriff's office. A child sticky with horse blood and smelling of wrong, who watched the world with waiting eyes, unreadable as the barrel of a gun, dangerous as hell. The 'slinger kept his hands by his sides, fingers half bent as if anticipating the grips of his revolvers.

"You've lived a long life, Marks, and not a good one," Jenna said. The street held its breath waiting for her final judgement, even the wind died, but the witch kept her peace. Hemar remembered the serious little girl who had run wild in the 'Oh-Seven's alleys with her brother and a rag-pack of urchins. Sheriff Marks had been there the day her brother died. He had watched her try to drag that boy somewhere the corpsers wouldn't find his body. Watched and lifted not a finger.

"You need to leave, Jones." White Willis kept his smile, teeth gleaming in the lantern glow. People said he was a cold one, and quick with it. Too clever or too mean to be a free-fighter. Broke Dai Gunder's hands over some business of brass handles on a casket. Took an hour and broke each and every little bone that a hand holds. Dai Gunder saw the inside of one of his own caskets a month later, and not a happy month. Some said White could win himself a 'slinger challenge any time he chose. A gunslinger though is a target. He can't refuse a challenge - he can't pick his fights. Some men will put themselves in harm's way for the good of others. Hemar thought perhaps White Willis would rather put harm in others' way for the good of himself.

Hemar sniffed. He'd always had a nose for trouble. Rain was coming. A hard rain, and soon. But the bullets were coming sooner and would hit harder.