Gunlaw

Gunlaw 19

[This chapter is quite long and won't split into smaller pieces without being confusing - it really needs to be read as one to make sense of the two threads. So I'm just making one post this week rather than two ... and here it is!]

Chapter 10 – Fifty Years Ago

"Eb." The stream chuckled his name over the rocks. "Eb. Eb. Eb."

He stood and stretched. Sometimes all that's needed to make the world perfect is a good stretch. Something to crack the joints, draw the kinks out of each and every muscle, set the blood rushing in your ears.

The stream's chatter became one with birdsong from the woods, with the susurration of wind through leaves, distant laughter. Eb let his gaze wander, taking in the height of the pines. Between the trees where the logging paths cut, the mountains waited in the distance, almost blue behind the empty miles.

Water dripped from Eb's hands. He watched the drops fall, sparkles of light trapped within. But beneath it all, below the birds and the mountains and the stream, the world felt wrong today. As if creation had grown too thin to cover old injustice, too narrow for its purpose.

A sigh escaped his lips. He crossed by the stepping stones and carried on along the logging path. Sunlight reached down between the pines but it carried no heat.

A half mile on, where the path led between stumps of trees cut three years back, Eb saw the monster. It shouldered through the new growth, a green sea of needles and flexing branches, sticky with sap. From a hundred yards off he knew it for a big one, close on half his height again and more than twice as wide. A rubentwist, eyes black beneath the furrowed shelf of its brow, the wet mouth hidden within a dark bristling of spikes.

"Go back," Eb told it. The old fear clutched at him. Fear never left.

The rubentwist raised both hands, wider than wheelbarrows, hung with wrinkled hide, talons cracked and yellow. It came on at a run. Fifty yards now. Twenty. The saplings snapping like children's bones.

"No!"

Eb flung out his arm and the monster hit the wall of his denial. It stuck, a yard before him, with the blue light of Eb's will seething about those great and reaching hands.

"No!" And he hurled the rubentwist clear across the pine tops, winging toward the distant peaks.

Weakness crawled across his vision, bright worms and dark spots. He blinked and staggered.

"It's time." He said it aloud to himself so there would be no hiding from the truth. The nagging pain in his leg, just above the knee, reminded him at each step. Even so, weak or not, he would complete the perimeter.

****

Hemar ran, though his legs no longer belonged to him. Exhaustion had taken them and he could offer only suggestions. Even the pain felt distant now, as if it too belonged to someone else. The dusty wind kept his eyes to slits and offered only occasional glimpses of a harsh saltpan.

A rock loomed from the haze. A boulder. Hemar tried to stop but for ten paces his traitor limbs ignored him. When at last they listened, all strength drained from them and he pitched forward to the cracked and salty ground that had once been lake-bed. The wind taunted him until foot by foot he hauled himself back, into the lee of the boulder. He curled there shivering, wracked by a dry and hacking cough.

"Still alive." He ran a lolling tongue over the sharp ridges of his teeth. The dust tasted sour. "Still alive." No other pup would have made it so far. No other pup had. A whine escaped him. The tight curl of his tail, buried between his legs, spelled out misery and only misery. A howl rose from his belly but Hemar kept it inside. Instead he licked the blood from his knuckles and lay still beneath the Frostral's moan. He would lie quiet until the winter wind paused for breath.