Gunlaw

Gunlaw 28

Chapter 16 - Fifty Years Ago

Somewhere between the dream of the hunska woman trying to lift him, and the dream of the dead man carrying him to the graveyard in the heat of the noonday sun, Hemar stopped caring, and soon enough he stopped dreaming.

He woke with the worst gut-ache, the kind that twists you around it and steals your breath. If he'd swallowed a pepper-spine whole he would expect to remember doing it. But for the longest time no memory came, nothing but the pain and the squeaking of his teeth as they ground one against the next.

" . . . Hemar . . ."

"Cripple's no better off . . ."

". . . done what I can."

In one of the lulls, where the agony faded to a howl and he could draw breath, it occurred to Hemar that the dull sounds around him were voices. He struggled to open an eye and found focus on a fabric-covered floor. Blinking he managed to resolve short metal struts jutting up around him, and boots, several pairs of boots, all with feet inside.

". . . Hemar . . ."

The floor kept jolting beneath him, banging against his cheekbone. The whole place seemed to sway, full of clanking and rattling. Perhaps they had him in one of those carts. Perhaps . . . He closed his eyes and thought of the hunska woman, her dress all cream lace and red ribbons and muck and blood . . . and the smell of her, the blood tang, the promise of whiskey, the sharp wrongness of sect, the spice of hunska sweat, the mustiness of old sex, and overriding all that: flowers and magic.

". . . Hemar . . ."

Hemar growled at the voice and ground his teeth against the pain. The muscles in his abdomen had locked together, iron hard, rigid in protest. The knife! His eyes flicked open. He remembered the knife. That human pulling the blade clear, scarlet and dripping.

"Hemar, lie still." Not a voice in his ears but one that echoed around in his memories. He lay still. He couldn't do much else.

"You remember who I am?" The voice again, inside him but not of him. He closed his eyes and written in the darkness stood a man, built in the image of Ronson Greeves but younger, cleaner, his eyes more kind, as if the idea of the man had risen from his corpse.

"You're Eben Lostchild. The boy in the shack. I'm sorry that I called you Heap." Hemar's muzzle twitched but the words sounded only in his head. His legs twitched but he neither drew closer nor ran away.

"That's ok." Eben smiled and for a moment he looked more like an idea risen from the boy on the board than from a gunslinger. It wasn't a killer's smile. "Thank you for saving me. I'm sorry you got stabbed. James Purbright is a dangerous man. You should have left me. Nobody would have minded. Ellie Lostchild would have been sad for me not being there perhaps, but he killed her."

"Where are we? Am I dying?"

"We're on a train bound for an unfounded pillar—"

"A train!" Hemar opened his eyes and lifted his head, despite what it cost him. "A train!" The metal struts supported covered seating, windows showed a pitiless blue sky, and the remaining two boots reached up to legs and then to a corpser in a range-rider's coat, as dirty and patched as his face.

"And no," Eben's voice continued in his mind, "you shouldn't be dying. The kin said the knife mostly missed the important bits, and he patched up what could be patched up."