Gunlaw

Gunlaw 42

Chapter 28

"Wake up!" Jenna slapped him again, hard enough to make her hand sting. This time Mikeos gave a low moan and the breath whistled in his throat as his chest rose. Jenna breathed in too, realising she hadn't drawn a breath for too long. "Come on, gunslinger." She shook him and he opened a bloodshot eye. The marks of each of Walker's fingers lay plain across Mikeos's neck, white on deep crimson. The bruises would be spectacular.

"Where?" He managed to turn his head a fraction but regretted it, pain screwing his eye back shut.

"We wrapped him in the curtains. Nice and tight."

Mikeos opened both eyes. "How?" His voice a rasp in his throat.

Jenna lifted the saw, the blade smeared and dark now, teeth clogged with bone fragments. Hemar had brought down the shelving and used the curtain to cover the eyes spilling from shattered jars. Sawing off Walker's arms had been her job. At one point Mikeos had nearly stabbed her in the thigh for her efforts but he'd fumbled the knife and dropped it. She'd used the knife to help take Walker's fingers from Mikeos's throat, while the corpser, blind and without arms, had careened around before tripping over the chair.

"Door?" Mikeos managed.

Hemar came to stand beside Jenna. "How's our boy?" he asked. Only in patches was his fur unstained, elsewhere fresh blood matted it into clumps. His teeth were crimson when he smiled. Hunska might be quicker, and taur stronger, but a domen defending friends is a savage and primal force. Jenna hadn't yet steeled herself to look at what Hemar had left of the two men who forced the door.

"Sit still and rest. Do not try to move!" She gave Mikeos her stern look, the one she'd copied from rote-sister Teresa and spent days perfecting before the mirror. The paper-spike worried her. She'd drawn it from his back while he lay unconscious. The wound it left was little larger than a pin prick but the spike stood four inches long and had been driven in to the base plate. She had set it aside, glistening with Mikeos's blood, and hoped that the corpser's touch hadn't tainted the spike.

With Mikeos propped up against the wall by the door, a canteen of water in his lap, Jenna examined the desk. She kept one eye on the still form wrapped in the curtain. Walker had decided to play dead it seemed, in the hope they'd forget about him. Jenna would leave him be – for now. She used Mikeos's crowbar to force the first of two draws on the desk.

"Money, ledgers, gun . . ." One heavy little bag held high dollars, even double eagles from the Ansos mint. These she stashed in an inner pocket. Gold is always useful.

The second resisted then flew out with such force that a jar of pickled tongues jumped up and smashed on the floor. "Lips, skin ... other parts. Scalpel, needles, thread..." She picked up a piece of black metal, shaped like an 'H', larger than her hand, finger-thick. Machinery mined from beneath the ruins. On the underside short black legs reached out as if to grip something. A mosaic of coppery marks covered most of the under surface like story written in another alphabet. The marks circled around and aimed at a region no larger than a dollar coin where short white tubes hung, still soft despite their age. These looked more animal than machine . . . unsettlingly like the undersides of the sect creatures that allowed Walker's men to operate unharmed in the smelter. She cut a length of curtain, wrapped the machine piece in it, and stashed it in her pack. She took the ledger too.

The cavernous part of the room, previously hidden by the rear curtain, seemed barren, the pool of congealed blood its only feature. Jenna scanned the walls and ceiling through hex-latticed fingers. Everything held the faint shifting darkness that spoke of corpser, but she saw no focus to it. On the ground the aura seemed to thicken into currents that drained into the pool. It could of course be a trick of the light and of the shadows and of tired eyes.But the aura was always like that, the hex too, real but not so real that you couldn't rationalise it away if you stretched yourself. The pool held power, the darkest kind of blood magic. For a moment she considered touching a black drop of the dead blood to her hex, tasting death magic as the Blood Sister did two centuries ago. She shook the impulse off. The Blood Sister had become a monster. Jenna continued her inspection. Here and there the dirt floor rose in very low mounds, graves no doubt. Jenna had no desire to go disinterring the rotten dead that Henry Walker kept for spares – she closed her hands.