Gunlaw

Gunlaw 11

Aska took the creature's hand. He had big hands, but soft and without claws, not a blunt hand like the taur, but clever. He looked a bit like a cross between domen and hunska, though bald all over and a head taller than the tallest hunska she'd ever seen, thicker too, powerful, not like a taur, not nearly so big or heavy, but strong even so.

"Come on, Lilly," he said.

Aska couldn't understand the words, but his thoughts spilled out. At first she caught just images. She had shaped herself to copy the females in those flashes of memory, changing the texture and colour of her skin, and pushing his own pictures back into his eyes to cover what she couldn't copy.

The man, yes – he called himself a man – led her from the stone platform. Sykes, he also called himself Sykes. She tried to shape her mouth around the sound of it. He paused to look into the space at the front of the shining . . . thing . . . from which he had stepped.

Aska had been lost, beaten down by the sun, the sands burning her feet. She first saw the place distant, through a wobbling veil of heated air, and took it for a strange house. She aimed for it for no better reason than that it made a single point of difference in the white blindness of the desert. A little voice at the back of her heat-sick mind whispered that it was a house on the edge of the green lands where Mutti and Da and Hakka waited for her, cool in the shade. Water shimmered all around it. She knew she hadn't crossed the desert in a day and a night, but a small smile twisted her dry lips even so.

Aska had come sick and shivering to the strange house, her feet sinking in the dunes, the sand sucking away the last of her strength. Two bright lines led from the house, two straight lines side by side, vanishing in the distance, challenging the desert to swallow them.

The place was like no house Aska had ever seen, vast and open, a high roof held on tall posts. She climbed up steps from the hot sand onto a long stone platform beneath the roof. The gleaming lines ran alongside the structure and ended as they reached a huge rock that seemed no part of the platform with its high roof and hard straight edges. Each silvery line was as thick as a roof support in a hunska's hut and rested on many wooden beams laid one after the other on the ground atop crushed stone, the desert sand below. But the lines weren't wood, or stone . . . Metal! Aska had seen iron before, polished disks of it around the thick neck of a taur merchant. Her Da told her the taur would swap a whole cow for one disk. Just the lines alongside the platform would buy all the cows in the world! And they stretched off as far as she could see. If she followed them, where would they lead?

Aska had drawn a deep breath and the scent of water hooked her. She turned, following her nose, and there, against the planking of the back wall a barrel, bound with hoops --more metal – and filled with water. She drank, vomited, drank more slowly, rested, and drank again.

As she sat, her mouth wet, the fur on her neck heavy with water, she saw the carvings. Precise lines etched into the stone wall above the barrel. A taur, a domen, a hunska, all tall and strong and proud. She stared in wonder, stood, ran her fingers along the lines of the images.

This is a place of the lost gods.

But if the gods built this place in the world's dawn . . . who filled the barrel?

She had been lying in the shade, belly full of water, when the monster arrived, rushing along the metal lines faster than a diving eagle. It was on her and screeching to a halt before she could run. Terror overwhelmed her, taking the strength from her limbs, and she could do nothing but squeeze Leelee as the gleaming metal beast stood panting steam and shuddering beside the platform.

Aska had crouched trembling, breathing in the scent of the thing, fire and water and oil. The monster was a thing, a made thing. And then the door opened and she saw that all along its flanks were doors. The man had stepped out, Sykes, and she forgot about the monster that had carried him.