Chapter 28

"Wake up!" Jenna slapped him again, hard enough to make her hand sting. This time Mikeos gave a low moan and the breath whistled in his throat as his chest rose. Jenna breathed in too, realising she hadn't drawn a breath for too long. "Come on, gunslinger." She shook him and he opened a bloodshot eye. The marks of each of Walker's fingers lay plain across Mikeos's neck, white on deep crimson. The bruises would be spectacular.

"Where?" He managed to turn his head a fraction but regretted it, pain screwing his eye back shut.

"We wrapped him in the curtains. Nice and tight."

Mikeos opened both eyes. "How?" His voice a rasp in his throat.

Jenna lifted the saw, the blade smeared and dark now, teeth clogged with bone fragments. Hemar had brought down the shelving and used the curtain to cover the eyes spilling from shattered jars. Sawing off Walker's arms had been her job. At one point Mikeos had nearly stabbed her in the thigh for her efforts but he'd fumbled the knife and dropped it. She'd used the knife to help take Walker's fingers from Mikeos's throat, while the corpser, blind and without arms, had careened around before tripping over the chair.

"Door?" Mikeos managed.

Hemar came to stand beside Jenna. "How's our boy?" he asked. Only in patches was his fur unstained, elsewhere fresh blood matted it into clumps. His teeth were crimson when he smiled. Hunska might be quicker, and taur stronger, but a domen defending friends is a savage and primal force. Jenna hadn't yet steeled herself to look at what Hemar had left of the two men who forced the door.

"Sit still and rest. Do not try to move!" She gave Mikeos her stern look, the one she'd copied from rote-sister Teresa and spent days perfecting before the mirror. The paper-spike worried her. She'd drawn it from his back while he lay unconscious. The wound it left was little larger than a pin prick but the spike stood four inches long and had been driven in to the base plate. She had set it aside, glistening with Mikeos's blood, and hoped that the corpser's touch hadn't tainted the spike.

With Mikeos propped up against the wall by the door, a canteen of water in his lap, Jenna examined the desk. She kept one eye on the still form wrapped in the curtain. Walker had decided to play dead it seemed, in the hope they'd forget about him. Jenna would leave him be – for now. She used Mikeos's crowbar to force the first of two draws on the desk.

"Money, ledgers, gun . . ." One heavy little bag held high dollars, even double eagles from the Ansos mint. These she stashed in an inner pocket. Gold is always useful.

The second resisted then flew out with such force that a jar of pickled tongues jumped up and smashed on the floor. "Lips, skin ... other parts. Scalpel, needles, thread..." She picked up a piece of black metal, shaped like an 'H', larger than her hand, finger-thick. Machinery mined from beneath the ruins. On the underside short black legs reached out as if to grip something. A mosaic of coppery marks covered most of the under surface like story written in another alphabet. The marks circled around and aimed at a region no larger than a dollar coin where short white tubes hung, still soft despite their age. These looked more animal than machine . . . unsettlingly like the undersides of the sect creatures that allowed Walker's men to operate unharmed in the smelter. She cut a length of curtain, wrapped the machine piece in it, and stashed it in her pack. She took the ledger too.

The cavernous part of the room, previously hidden by the rear curtain, seemed barren, the pool of congealed blood its only feature. Jenna scanned the walls and ceiling through hex-latticed fingers. Everything held the faint shifting darkness that spoke of corpser, but she saw no focus to it. On the ground the aura seemed to thicken into currents that drained into the pool. It could of course be a trick of the light and of the shadows and of tired eyes.But the aura was always like that, the hex too, real but not so real that you couldn't rationalise it away if you stretched yourself. The pool held power, the darkest kind of blood magic. For a moment she considered touching a black drop of the dead blood to her hex, tasting death magic as the Blood Sister did two centuries ago. She shook the impulse off. The Blood Sister had become a monster. Jenna continued her inspection. Here and there the dirt floor rose in very low mounds, graves no doubt. Jenna had no desire to go disinterring the rotten dead that Henry Walker kept for spares – she closed her hands.

"See anything?" Hemar called.

"Just death." Jenna turned away and shrugged. "Take a sniff if you like."

To her surprise Hemar came forward, cautious, nose lifted. How he expected to smell anything but the gore coating him she had no idea but she waited beside Mikeos to watch. The gunslinger had a better colour to him and offered a weak smile.

Hemar moved around the cave, drawing in the foulness, cocking his head, turning, walking back. He avoided the blood pool and seemed ready to give up when something drew him down to one of the mounds. He scratched at the dirt and tugged up a grimy handful. Rubbing his arm across whatever it was that he'd found only added fresh blood to the mix and so he returned with it to Jenna's side. "Let me wash it off." He held out a hand for the canteen. Jenna gave it over, reluctance making it a slow delivery. To waste water in the desert went against every instinct, but Hemar knew its importance better than her so he must have good reason.

Using a section of curtain and water dripped from the canteen with miser's care, Hemar wiped off the dirt and polished a section of the thing to a silver gleam. He held it up. A metal hip-flask.

"So?" Jenna asked.

"And when I'm dead . . ." Mikeos got the words out as a whisper past gritted teeth.

Hemar finished the doggerel. ". . . don't bury me deep. Just a jar o' whiskey at my feet, and then I'm sure my bones will keep." He shook the flask and a faint sloshing rewarded him.

"We don't have time for you to get drunk," Jenna told him. The thought of Hemar climbing those ladders while full of whiskey made her blood run cold, and who knew how far he'd run for his next drink once he got the taste of it in him.

Hemar bared his teeth. "If this was full it would hardly get me buzzing. But it ain't that. I recognise it. I used to own it." He shook his head, disbelieving. "Or one the same. Swapped it for liquor years ago . . ." He examined the gleaming surface in minute detail, one black claw tracing each scratch, feeling out every dent. "I took my first drink from this flask."

"Nonsense." Jenna could see the need in Hemar, written in each taut line of him. Drool hung in pink strings from his open jaw. "How could it—"

"George Ay gave it to me, when he put me off that train." Hemar set the flask on the desk and walked back to where he tugged it from the dirt. He started to dig.

Jenna took the flask and opened it, turning her back on Hemar to hide the action. A sniff confirmed its contents. What would he do if she tipped it away? Would the smell of it drive him crazy? Would he try to lick it from the stone floor? She caught sight of Mikeos looking at her. He tilted his head to the floor, wincing at the action, and directed his eyes to a fat candle burning on a nearby stand. A quick glance back at Hemar revealed him to be making good progress in his excavation, already several inches down with dirt flying out behind him. Jenna took the candle, gritted her teeth as she imagined Hemar's rage, and tipped the whiskey into a pool. She lit it quickly before the scent could spread. The flames spread with a whumph and danced blue across the liquid's surface.

"Drank the good stuff, this corpser," Mikeos rasped. "The rot-gut they serve in bars won't light – too watered down for that."

The fire had gone out by the time Hemar started grunting and heaving. He'd dug a trench less than two feet deep but he had hold of a pair of arms and appeared to be winning the battle to exhume the corpse. Three more tugs and he hauled the body out completely, shedding dirt. Hemar knelt down beside it and turned the face, or what remained of it, toward his.

"It's him."

Hemar left the body and started digging in a close-by grave running parallel to the first. Jenna felt tired watching just watching him. Her arms ached from sawing. The memory of how it had felt to saw through those dead muscles, made her stomach roil. She remembered how they tensed and tore and parted beneath the iron teeth of her blade.

Mikeos put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Jenna knew better than to think he wasn't alert though, listening under the sounds of digging for any approach. She wondered when the gunslinger last truly relaxed and whether he ever would again. A sudden sadness threatened to overwhelm her, though she couldn't say who she was sad for. She closed her own eyes for a moment and saw Mikeos ten years old, in the 'Bullet back at the 'Oh-Seven. She'd been very young herself back then, trying to turn Remos Jax from the gunlaw, knowing so little, thinking she knew so much. She knuckled away a tear and cursed her weakness in silence.

"It's his brother." Hemar's bark startled Jenna from her thoughts. She stood up, stiff in each limb.

"They're corpsers. They can't be dead?" They looked very dead. Hemar looked like hell, blood and filth over every inch of him.

Hemar shrugged. "Everyone says so. People say a lot of stuff though."

Jenna came to stand beside him. The newly disinterred dead made the cave smell no worse. It stunk of death already with the blood pool, and Hemar was none too fresh either.

"Who knows how long they've been buried? Perhaps their minds are broken." She tried to imagine being buried, unable to die. She kicked the foot closest to her. It gave no reaction. "I wonder how Walker caught them."

Hemar brushed some of the larger clumps of earth from his chest. "Not my concern. If I owed George Ay anything then I've repaid the debt. Let's go."

Jenna nodded. She went back to Mikeos and helped him stand. He winced as he straightened, setting a hand to his back. Leaving him Jenna took a lantern from one of the lower chains. The gunslinger went over to where Walker lay swaddled in the curtain, completely hidden. "Hemar!" His call came out so weak and hoarse the dogman didn't hear. Instead Hemar bent and rolled first one then the other corpse into the blood pool. They flopped in with unpleasant plops and sunk almost entirely from view. Hemar straightened and wiped his palms on his thighs. "Now that's one they owe me!"

"Hemar! Help me take this sack of shit topside." Mikeos got hold of the spare end of the curtain and Hemar joined him. Together they started to drag Walker behind Jenna. She heard the corpser's body scraping behind her as she led the way but never a sound from him. Perhaps playing dead was all he had left, any sect magics he might own suppressed by the ruins.

At the first junction Mikeos paused, looking down the way they hadn't taken. "Leads to the excavations, the seams where they're digging out machinery. You not hankering for a look, Jenna?" The lantern light caught the planes of his face, leaving his eyes in shadow.

Jenna thought of the machine plate in her pack, its soft parts fish-belly white. Her stomach turned and suddenly she wanted to be out of this place, out of the dark, out from under the insane weight of stone overhead, before it buried her too. The dark places could keep their secrets for now. Whatever Walker had hidden down there could stay hidden. "You don't want to go and make sure all the miners are free, Mikeos? Every last outlaw gunned down?"

Mikeos rubbed his neck, an unconscious gesture. "Reckon we both want out of here. We've broken the back of it." As he passed her she noticed the back of his shirt was stained red in an area her hand could only just cover. She bit her lip, hoping the spike wound would bleed clean.

They carried on, the tunnels somehow more mysterious and threatening in the swinging light of the lantern than they had been in the darkness on the way in. At several points Jenna noticed plunging holes, near vertical wurm tunnels touching the main path. How close had her feet come to those edges in their blind approach?

By the time they crossed the bridge and reached the tool chamber Walker's curtain was badly frayed, his jacket worn through beneath it to dead flesh. Mikeos took rope from a wall-hook and bound the corpser tight, still hooded with the red material. He measured out a length of rope and tied it to those around Walker's waist. "Look long enough to reach the top?" he asked.

Jenna didn't know. She remembered the descent as taking forever. "Tie another length on."

Mikeos found another thirty yards and attached it, then with Hemar's help shifted Walker into the bottom of the mineshaft. Looking up at the blinding circle of day far above, Jenna could imagine the sun stood directly over them. Despite the ache in her arms she had to restrain herself from starting the climb and to wait for the others to finish with Walker. The need to be out of that hole ate at her, as if somehow the darkness might reach out even here and draw her back to those graves. For the second time she cursed her weakness. When the hex-source pulsed through her she never felt alone, never harboured silly fears, but now her fingers found only dry scars on her forehead and not even a twinge of the pain that had once ruled her.

Emerging into daylight after the long climb seemed a rebirth. Even the deep shadow of the ruins seemed bright. Jenna moved away from the mineshaft. The crowd flowed around her, never touching, all of them wanting to hear Mikeos talk. Ansos trained its witches to go out into the world, to speak the creed and open men's minds. Jenna had been taken from those lessons early on. It had soon become clear that her talent was with ideas and with things, rather than with people. The gunslinger, without training and without the wisdom of Ansos to call upon, still drew people to him. A kind of magic in itself.

"We got Walker," he said, still hoarse, and a roar went up among the miners, not a cheer but something more violent and wholehearted. "Jenna of Ansos cut him to size." But few heard that last part, too busy patting Mikeos on the back, shaking Hemar's hands, hauling on the rope he offered. Jenna bit down on a pang of bitterness, ashamed at the pettiness of it.

Mikeos struggled through the crowd to join her, clasping hands, exchanging hugs. She wondered how he did that. A kind of magic that couldn't be taught. Hemar followed in his wake.

"Come on," he said. "Jim Bright's ahead of us, we need to move."

Behind him the taur took the rope from three or four men, bellowed and started to haul Walker up hand over hand, muscles bunching. Few among the miners noticed them leave. Love may be blind but vengeance has lost more senses still, keeping only direction. Jenna had no desire to stay and see what they did to Henry Walker, however richly he deserved it. Instead she hurried on after Mikeos Jones whose vengeance led him in along a different track.

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