Gunlaw

Gunlaw 24

Chapter 14 - Fifty Years Ago

The image of the boy, Heap, had gone but the scent of him hung above the water and beneath the rock. The trail of it led away along the banks of the Sweet Water. Hemar whined and dug his blunt claws into gravel; the cold stream made his fur flow. Instinct deeper than bone filled him with the need to pursue that trail. His heart told him to – Heap might not be pack, but Hemar's pack were gone. Heap had been the first and last living thing Hemar had touched since he ran from his home. Only fear kept Hemar there in the shade of the rock. Sometimes fear is all that's required.

"Domen are brave for the pack, fierce for a mate, and will die for their pup." Wise Odar taught that lesson to the youngsters, by the well where each breath carried the promise of water. "The domen fight together, each a warrior, bound by the howl, by the battle musk, by duty to each other."

But Wise Odar never spoke of a domen alone. As if such a thing were beyond imagining, as if it were without meaning. When Hemar gave his mother reason to grow cross with him, or the moon took her mood from sweet to sour, she would say he was as useless as one leg. Perhaps that's what a domen on his own amounted to. One leg.

"A broken child didn't build that dome." Hemar whispered it to himself. It sounded true. A child couldn't have woven that golden dome of power. Heap couldn't be protecting all of Sweet Water from the sect mind. It made no sense. They had left him to rot in that shed.

The thing Hemar had seen, or half seen, or rather had first caught the scent of and then glimpsed an edge of, had not looked like Heap. The thing Hemar had seen stood sideways to the world such that you could only see a flicker of it, and perhaps then only if you had second sight. It had looked like Ronson Greeves, but more like the idea of him, pure and woven from the light, young and tall, and fast. Even though he had moved without haste you could tell he was fast. And behind him had been a town, at once different and the same as what lay before him, cleaner, brighter, bursting with colour and life, overwriting the true Sweet Water. At first it had fooled Hemar, but such tricks of the eye can't keep a domen from the truth. Hemar had cleaned Heap's wound in the shack, drawn in the true scent of him beneath the dirt and sickness. And here by the rock he had seen past illusion, drawn in the scent of him once again and known him for what he was. He had named him too, and the name had power even though it seemed Heap himself had forgotten his own name.

Hemar whined. That name had hurt the boy. The woven light had fallen into bright fragments, the strong body melted away, and the broken boy's wandering spirit had fled or been drawn back to his true flesh, leaving only the faintest trail to point the way.

"Ah hell." Hemar had heard the man at the dice table say that a dozen times as he lost his gold, "Ah hell." It seemed like the phrase he needed. "Damnation." And the domen crossed the Sweet Water in three bounds and stepped out from the shadow of the rock.

                                                                                               ****

Eb held a memory of the sun distorted by the water's surface, bright but distant, far too far above his head. Since he could no more swim than move himself from wherever the last person had set him down, and since no one would ever think that he could, Eb imagined the memory came from a time when someone tried to drown him. Still, as memories go it wasn't a bad one. At least it was pretty.

Waking from his long dream felt like rising toward that distant surface, rising from the serenity of a slow fade, rising back into the chaos and noise of a world he had almost escaped.