Mikeos returned to Ansos pillar on the morning of the day before his showdown with Sykes Bannon. Jenna stood by the Stair for an hour, too hot in her hex-robes, watching the road for his approach. He raised a hand as Jenna stepped out to greet him.

"Jenna, good to see you out in the light!"

She made a smile for him, wondering how it looked on her. "Let's go in."

"We could talk out here," Mikeos said. "When did you last leave the pillar?"

"It's been a while." Ten years.

"We could take a walk," Mikeos said. "Let the sun put some colour in you."

"It's been a while since I left Ansos tower, gunslinger, but it's been a mite longer than that since someone tried to tease me." Jenna knew even amongst witches she was pale, and blood sacrifice to the hex left every witch white.

Mikeos shrugged. "I'm given to living dangerously." He smiled. "Besides, I'm drawing on a dead man tomorrow."
"Which is why we should go inside. I want to talk about Lilliana."

"Who?" Mikeos frowned and pushed his hat back.

"Lilliana. Lilly."

"Rings a bell." He pursed his lips. "I'm seeing a girl, young. I can't place her though."

"Most wouldn't remember even her name." Jenna studied the gunslinger more closely. She made a fist, nails in palm to make it bloody. Mikeos' aura flickered into view, larger and more complex than she had expected. "The Old Ones tend to walk out of memories. They leave few footprints. The place to speak of Old Ones is at the beginning."

"The beginning?"

"The foundations. I'll take you. You'll remember Lilly all right."

Jenna turned and started up the steps.

"You'll need to come through with me," she said. "It can be . . . difficult . . . on your own."

Mikeos caught her at the top stair and they squeezed through together. He had to stoop to get through the entrance. He smelled of tobacco and sweat but somehow she didn't mind.

"Not much of a door," he said.

                                                                                                 ***

"Not much of a door," Jenna had said. Twenty-five dollars had not come easy. The tower of Ansos deserved a more impressive front door. In her mind the gates of Ansos, through which hex-witches passed in their hundreds, had reached for the heavens, wrought from iron and fire-bronze. This rough-hewn slot in the rock left her deflated.

"Try passing through it." A tall woman emerged from the shadowed passage, stooped to keep her head from scraping the stone.

Jenna gazed up at the woman. A hex-witch, her first. She thought she might have missed them on her walk up through Ansos town from the station, but now she saw that couldn't have happened. The hex-mark had been cut into the woman's forehead and the wound would never close, the flesh raw and livid.

"Try it." The witch laid a white hand on stonework.
Jenna shrugged and stepped forward. One step, and then her feet would carry her no further. The pressure she had felt at the Oh-Seven pillar wrapped the first pillar too. Here, just yards from the door, the repulsion worked on many different levels. Her muscles refused her in the way a hand refuses to touch hot iron. More subtle forces eroded her will to continue. Her dream of leaving the streets, of taking hold of a power that wit and determination alone could deliver, seemed suddenly futile, a shabby idle that had wasted her efforts. Stripped of the gloss, she saw her ambition naked, more like need than ambition, the need of a shield from the crawling fear that the corpser would return for her with his horrors and his dark touch.

"The first witch cut this door with a pick and hammer," the pale woman said. "She cut it piece by piece over years, fighting the will of the Old Ones every moment, fighting the same push you feel now."

Jenna tried again. She took a step, then another. The door seemed more impressive now, a monument to one woman's stubborn desire to know. Jenna's feet went back to ignoring her. She saw a faint smile in the curl of the witch's lips.

Jenna ground her teeth and strained to move. Nothing. She wondered what drove the first witch. Had she been striving for something, or running from it?

"Who says this is the first pillar?" Jenna asked. Some things are easier to do if you distract yourself.

"From here every direction is south," the witch said. "This pillar is the axle on which the world turns."

Jenna had once jumped into the sinkhole out past Reems' stockyards, a thirty foot fall into green water. Her feet had refused to take her when she watched the drop. Kyle had thrown himself over the precipice without hesitation. "Don't think about it," he had shouted from the water. In the end Jenna walked forward, staring at the sky, until she fell.

"Maybe the pillar where every direction is north should be number one." Jenna turned her back on the door.

The witch said nothing. Jenna imagined her frowning, puzzling over the south pillar and the north. She wondered if it would hurt to frown, with that hex carved into your forehead.

"Why have you come here, girl?" the witch asked, her voice soft and close.

"Answers," Jenna said, continuing to take one backward step after another. "I want to know. I need to understand."

"What do you need to understand?"

"Everything." And Jenna stepped through the doorway into the first pillar.

                                                                                        ***

"Where are we going?" Mikeos held the lantern high, his eyes scanning all the exits.

"Down." Jenna led the way through the passage, ignoring every turn. "Don't slip." Generations had worn the steps smooth.

"How far down?" Mikeos asked.

"All the way." The stone-faced walls gave way to natural rock.

The tunnels coiled, winding their way deeper, keeping below Ansos pillar. Mikeos and Jenna walked in silence for twenty minutes. Countless chisel marks spelled out the years of labour that had hewn these passage. A turn, a turn, and another turn. The stone beneath Jenna's fingertips became smooth.

"Witches didn't dig this part out." Mikeos didn't miss much.

"Dark wurms burrow here."

More turns, more branches, endless choices. The air warmed, the stone almost hot beneath her fingers.

The burrow became steep and they used the iron rungs that had been set in place.

"What's this?" Mikeos asked.

On their left the smooth-chewed wall gave way to stone blocks for several yards before the burrow veered away into bedrock.

"The pillar walls," Jenna said. "It reaches down into the ground-"

"How?" Mikeos gasped.

"The old ones have many secrets," Jenna said.

The air grew hotter, the passages steeper and more numerous.

"I . . . I remember Lilly now," Mikeos said. "A little girl. She was there when I was a kid. We watched Remos Jax fight the first sect gunslinger for the Oh-Seven. You were there too – the first time I saw you. Trying to make Remos cheat."

"Trying to save his life, yes," Jenna said. "And I was a child when I first met her too, years before that." For the longest time she'd thought Lilliana human, a witch of a different kind, grown old in her cleverness.

She stopped. "Put down the lantern. We'll talk here."

"This fight tomorrow . . . I want you to win," Jenna said.

"I didn't know you cared."

The lantern light caught Mikeos' grin from below and sculpted it in shadow. He looked older, how he'd look at forty maybe. Only he wouldn't make thirty, he even wouldn't make it to next week if he didn't put Sykes down. Gunslingers didn't have to worry about getting old.

"What?" Mikeos seemed unnerved by her silent inspection. He glanced behind him as if expecting a dark wurm to loom up, all grinding teeth and furnace breath.

I didn't know I cared.

"I can make you win," she said.

"You know where his heart is?"

"I can put a hex on your bullets. One shot, anywhere on him, and he'll burn from the inside, just enough to put him down. Nothing to see on the outside. Just wear this." She handed him the hex-worked amulet from her robe pocket. A dark and pointed work of iron and silver that would channel enchantment from the reservoirs of power to which the hex gave access.

"Yeah." Mikeos shook his head, chewing his lip as if to get rid of the half-smile. "Now that'd be what we slingers call 'breaking the gun-law'." He dangled the amulet from its cord.

"If you don't, you're going to lose," Jenna said.

"Now ain't that just exactly what you said to Remos Jax all them years back when he had to fight the sect slinger?"

"Pretty much." Jenna could still picture Remos shaking his head and patting his seven-shooters. "He said he'd stick to his guns. And he died."

"Remos won. He put the sect man down too, and he didn't break the gun-law." Mikeos frowned, his gaze flitting to her hex-mark. "Lilly tried to stop you helping him. She told him the Old Ones would know and the gun-law would be broken. It don't make sense, you bringing me down here so's I can remember Lilly being right . . ."

Jenna stepped towards Mikeos, breathing him in, leather and gun-oil, cheroots and sweat. She leaned close, whispering. "She was right that the Old Ones would know . . . because she's one of them, maybe all of them. And she would have known because she sat right there listening while I tried to talk Remos into accepting the help that would have kept him alive."

Mikeos shrugged. "I'd rather just know where the bastard keeps his heart."

"And I'd rather you just let me hex your damn bullets. This is hex-magic, human magic, our own, bought with blood. The Old Ones won't see it. Trust me."

"I'll stick to my guns." Mikeos stooped for the lantern.

"You think you're being honourable. You think you're walking in the great man's footsteps." Jenna felt the anger rising through her, poisoning her tongue. "Remos Jax was a fool. He's filling a grave, just waiting to be dust. And his life was spent playing the Old Ones' games. What's the gun-law for? Where's the sense in it? It's their damn amusement, to pit us one against one, to make us dance to their tune, to make us all their puppets. We're children. We can never grow up under the gun-law."

"Sounds to me like you're more interested in breaking the gun-law than in me winning." Mikeos walked past her and started back up the burrow.

Jenna let him go. She watched until the lantern's glimmers left the walls and the darkness became complete. At least he kept the amulet. After-images faded to blindness. She saw nothing. Jenna counted her heartbeats. Down in the deep burrows a wurm gnawed. In blindness she saw the alley where this had all begun. The memories the crystal ball had woken burned for her now. There had been two monsters that day. A horror out of old tales, and a little girl older than those tales. Lilliana. In the hot darkness, in the foundations of the world, Jenna saw what lay beneath her ambition. She wanted them gone, broken, both of the monsters. The gun-law was all the Old One owned, and only a gunslinger could break the gun-law.

"Sounds to me like you're more interested in breaking the gun-law than in me winning," Mikeos had said.

"Maybe I am," Jenna told the darkness.