Gunlaw 1

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Gunlaw

There's a cold weight to a handgun that speaks of purpose. A six-shooter, the dull iron gleam of it, the forged simplicity, may seem a weapon but it is a tool, an agent of change. A philosopher or an engineer – for they are not much different - once said, give me a fulcrum and a lever of sufficient length and I can move the world. A six-shooter is the fulcrum: your finger on the trigger, the lever. A six-shooter is all about potential, about cardinality, accusations loud-spoken which cannot be retracted.



Chapter 1 – 15 years ago


"Scram, kid." 

Mikeos danced away from the minotaur's lazy swing. He ducked beneath a busboy's arm, nearly taking out a tray of ales, and fetched up amid the tatter-robes of a hunska sex-woman. 

"Not for you, boy," she husked.

A quick struggle saw him clear of soft breasts and musk-laced velvet. He pressed on, through the throng, making for the bar.


A hand, huge as a chair, took him about the shoulders, lifting him from the floor.

"You looking to get ate?"

Mikeos dangled six inches from the wet snout of another minotaur, a clansman in bull hides sewn with iron plates.

"Hey Grum!" Mikeos grinned; he liked the big warrior, except when he got to drinking his whiskey by the bucket of course. Taurs make for roaring drunks, it's the woodkin that get maudlin.
"You've come for the gunslinger," Grum said. He didn't have to raise his voice above the hubbub. He spoke so deep it just rumbled through a man.


He set the boy on his shoulder. From his perch, across a sea of heads, Mikeos could see the hearth and the tables set around it. The Frostral had yet to blow in earnest and the hearth lay cold, but the people who counted sat around the fireplace. No elbowing for space there.

Grum was half right. Mikeos had been looking for the gunslinger's arrival every day for a week. Today, however, he'd actually been running from trouble. Even so, now he really was here to catch sight of the gunman. 

"Which one is he?" Mikeos felt a twinge of disappointment. He should be able to tell. The fastest hand under gun-law should look like something. Something important. 

"The dude in the black hat," Grum said. He buried his snout in his tankard and seemed to inhale about a gallon of beer.

Mikeos could see him now. He had missed the man at first, a dark figure at the table to the left of the hearth, his back to the wall. Beside him the stairs, leading up to Miss Kitty's room and the Kitty girls behind their doors along the long corridor.

"He doesn't look so much." Mikeos heard the whine in his voice and hated it.

Grum snorted out beer foam and grunted an aside to the girl with him. He had to lean over so far that Mikeos nearly lost his seat. 

"Who's that with him?" A child of six, maybe seven, had the seat to the gunslinger's left, and a robed figure sat opposite, back facing Mikeos. 

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