Gunlaw

Gunlaw 21

Chapter 12 - Fifty Years Ago

Dawn found Hemar at the great rock, a piece of fractured stone like none he'd seen before, ten yards across, all sharp edges, straight lines, and fine, glinting grain. It could have been dropped there yesterday for all the weathering it showed, dropped from the day moon for all that was familiar about it. And yet the men built their houses so close they almost touched the rock, and from beneath its great mass the wounded earth gave up water, bubbling and chuckling through a gravel bed then winding away beneath small board-built bridges. How far the Sweet Water reached into the Dry before the sand and dust reclaimed it whole Hemar didn't know, but the running water held a fascination for him and in the dawn light its beauty stole his breath.

The rail tracks pointed at the rock but ended five yards short, as if the builders could contemplate neither deviation around nor removal of the obstacle. Hemar guessed there had been no train in his lifetime, maybe there had never been a train. The tracks, though unsullied, were built over in a dozen places by warehouses, stockyard fences, even by homes, and over arched by tents on the outskirts where bad luck and poor prospects drove men in their hundreds, hunska too, even a domen or three if Hemar's nose told it true.

Hemar crouched low, beneath a shelf of the great rock, but not so far back that the sweep of his tail might find scorpions hiding in more narrow places. He watched the water and the dawn. The stream gave him comfort after his long trail across the saltpans. The two rats he'd met in the night sat comfortably in his belly. If towns were all running water and slow, stupid rats then Hemar could get to like town.

All around, the sounds of Sweet Water's waking started to lift from the grey quiet of dawn. Creaks and cries, slamming doors, emptied chamber pots. The day, and the wider future beyond, stood before Hemar blank and unknown. He'd run from his troubles bringing nothing from the badlands but his thirst and his grief. But a dismembered taur out on the west trail said that something might have followed him.

Gorren Blackhoof had been identified by the charms he always wore. Great disks of iron stamped with runes by some taur shaman out on Bitter Lake. Ronson Greeves had said the taur merchant clanked when he walked, so thick were his protections against the evil eye. Hemar had followed the gunmen from the saloon, them and the rag-tag of hangers-on who hurried out too. He'd kept back, watching from the best cover he could find, but he thought the hunska woman saw him. The slinger Ronson Greeves too, but not the others, not even the other three gunmen, the skinny pup Purbright, scar-faced Eldreth Larrs, grey Henry Walker in his shabby bowler hat. Hemar had watched long enough to see the labourers start to drag away the dead hulk of the taur, then hastened off before the dawn took all the shadows.

The sound of gunfire had rung out behind him, distant, like the popping of logs on the fire – just as the pack tales had it. Hemar hoped the men had found the sect creature and put an end to it. Shaking off his doubts Hemar had followed the scent of water and found his way to the stream.

Magic has a scent to it too, at least Hemar had always found it so for domen magic. An elusive scent true enough, a spoor that must be tracked back and forth, an odour that creeps upon you over hours and days until you suddenly realise it's been there before you the whole time while you chased your tail. Human magic though, that had proved even harder to track down. Hemar had breathed in Sweet Water's ten-times-a-thousand odours, sniffed along its alleys and tracks and ways, and still the source of the dome eluded him. At the terminus of the tracks, nothing; even here at the source of the Sweet Water itself no trace or taste of the purity that suffused the protections surrounding and enfolding the town. The rock held a magic sure enough, deep within, tightly held, but not that magic.

And so he crouched and brooded on the dead taur and the death-scarab that must surely have killed it after following his own trail across the Barrens. He crouched, brooded, and listened to the voice of the water as if it might tell him something.

****

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

Eb had followed the Sweetwater back to its source, back to the great fragment of rock. If ever he had a problem he brought it to the source. The best place to think. The rock helped somehow. If he set a hand to cool flat surfaces the stone sang beneath his palm, a distant and wordless song that promised . . . many things . . . all of them beyond imagining.

And there, sniffing in suspicion beneath the rock's overhang, a shabby dog, a young one, long-limbed and ungainly. But ... not a dog. A dogman. More man than dog now Eb looked close, at least a little more.

"I know you, fellow," Eb said. The recollection itched at him, somewhere at the back of his skull, just beyond reach.

The dogman sniffed the air, eyes unfocused, almost as if blind to Eb's presence.

"Can you hear me? What's your name?" Something about the dogman pup felt wrong – almost as if he were too real, the dirt of him, the rankness rising from his fur, all making the day seem somehow counterfeit, stealing substance from the smart and whitewashed houses of Sweet Water, with only the rock itself resisting the influence.

"The cave." And as Eb said it the air around him fractured, a thousand crystal fault-lines racing through it. "I saw you . . ." He'd seen the dogboy through the window. "Hemar?"

At the sound of his name the dogboy cocked his head, listening, intent.

"Hemar?"

And the dogboy's eyes found focus, fixing on Eb for the first time. "I see you," he said, his voice so thick with growls and whines that the words almost hid themselves. "You look like Ronson Greeves, but you're not him."

"I'm Eb," said Eb. Ronson Greeves – the name woke old memories, cloudy, faint, laced with sharp recollections that would cut him if he touched them. Ronson had been a good slinger, protected Sweet Water well enough, until the monsters came. Those he couldn't seem to see. That's when Eb had had to step in.

Hemar stared, as if fearing he might lose Eb if he so much as blinked. He sniffed, or rather he inhaled, drawing the deepest breath in through that black muzzle. Dark eyes widened, gold flecks caught the sunlight. The dogboy blinked, snorted, sniffed again.

"You're Heap!" he said. "From the shack!"

And in one sudden moment Sweet Water vanished. Memory returned entire and awful, like a bullet hole in the forehead, and Eben Lostchild, Eben Foundling, Eben Dust ... Heap they called him, not even name ... a description, lay strapped to his board in the stinking shack with the other broken children that Ruben Twist fed once a day and watered twice.