Gunlaw

Gunlaw 40

            "Who's in charge here?" Mikeos called the question at the half dozen or so who'd stumbled from the smelter, but the taur answered.

"The Walker. He's down below. Centre shaft. Has chambers early on before the main diggings."

"The Walker?" Mikeos frowned as if troubled by a memory. "A man?"

"Corpser." The taur pulled a long red shard of wood from his shoulder and lay back, bleeding.

Mikeos spat. "Sect and corpsers! The two things you said we wouldn't meet in the ruins!"

"I said they hated it here." Jenna looked at the black haze still drifting from the smelter doorway. "But if they needed something bad enough – had no choice – they could stand it."

"What are these things anyhow?" Hemar asked, crouched close to the creature impailed on the rock-pick. "Looks like ... hell, I don't even know what it looks like." The legs along one side of the sect made a slow undulation and Hemar flinched away.

"Sect have one mind, many forms." Jenna shrugged. "Must be something hatched because it would be useful here. What bothers me is sect and men and corpsers together. Sect don't work with others – they eat them."

"Almost as if they're starting to break the rules!" Mikeos shot her a dark look, holstered his weapons, and set off toward the central and largest mineshaft.

Several miners had gathered with Mikeos at the mine-head and were giving him directions as Jenna and Hemar came up. Close by where the gunslinger stood an iron ladder jutted over the mineshaft wall. On the far side a large winding mechanism sat on a reinforced timber frame, a gantry dangling ropes down into the shaft.

"Follow the lanterns past the bridge. You'll find The Walker." A man with grey skin and no teeth in his mouth.

"Don't go down, mister." A child missing an eye, muscles twitching in the empty socket.

"Are there sect down there?" Mikeos asked.

"No, sir."

"Ever been sect round here, 'part from them face-plates?"

"No, sir. There's more of them face-huggers in the smelter. The Walker brought them in with him off the Dry one time."

A lean and mean-faced young man approached, trailing a rock-pick. "They like it in the smelter room. We'll root them out though."

"How many of you folk down there?" Mikeos asked.

"Its shift two. That's thirty-some." The shorn-headed figure that first pointed out the smelter. Jenna saw now that she was a woman, young, a girl perhaps.

Mikeos pulled the two spare revolvers from his belt and held them out, one for Jenna, one for Hemar. The dogman flinched back. "I'd shoot you by mistake." Mikeos shoved that one back into his belt, at the back this time. He gestured with the other. "Take it," he said, meeting Jenna's gaze. She reached for it, surprised at the weight although she had held a gun twice before. "Can you shoot?" he asked.

"Point and squeeze?" Jenna had never fired one before. The sisterhood of the hex did not oppose the Old Ones as she wished they would, but neither did they take up the Old One's gifts, knowing them for parts of a grand bargain into which they had elected not to enter. Guns were a thing of the Old Ones. Perhaps not their invention, but made by them, sold for coins whose only value to the Three seemed to be the value attached by those that paid them over. Sister Almah used to say that the day a man made a gun in his smithy, a product of human sweat and labour, would be the first day the sisterhood might consider such weapons.