Gunlaw

Gunlaw 7

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.