Gunlaw

Gunlaw 14

Chapter 5

Jenna followed Mikeos along the dusty track to Ansos Town. She kept her hood up to keep the harsh light from her skin. The heat pressed like a hand to the back of her robes but a chill kept her bones, so deep no sun would warm it. Flies buzzed and the dazzling light offered the low white walls of Ansos as slight variations in the brilliance of the day. Mikeos walked fast and Jenna's legs ached with the effort of keeping pace. She wished he'd brought his horse, but they liked the pillars less than men did. Her mind raced ahead of them, to the train, to the distant Five-oh-Seven. Miss Kitty would tell her about Sweet Water, how to get there, what happened. She'd stand where the first man stood. The world would speak its secrets to her. And Eben Lostchild. She would find Eben Lostchild, then perhaps the threats and promises written on the oldest scrolls would prove true.

The gunslinger stopped without warning and she almost went into his back. "What?"

"Freefighters," he said.

Jenna stepped to the side and squinted. Two black figures, tiny in the distance and rippled by the heat haze, both of them by the roadside, resting up against the wellhead in the shade of a sandthorn. "How can you tell?"

Mikeos shrugged. "There's a man with a rifle lying on the roof of the flour store."

Jenna found the sniper, further back at the edge of town, a faint grey bump on the dust-grey tiles. "We should go back."

"Back's not the way." Mikeos carried on. Five paces and he called over his shoulder, "You can't run from a rifle." And she followed on. The rifle would be for her. Nobody would shoot a slinger outside of a challenge. That would be suicide.

They paced three hundred yards and at each step Jenna felt the hot eye of that unseen rifle on her, drawing sweat where the sun could not. The sect she had expected, dreaded but expected – the price for knowledge was never going to be less than blood. But that the Old Ones would turn her own kind against her, that it might be a bullet that put an end to all her years of thinking, all her planning . . . that came as a shock.

Close up the two men could not be mistaken for anything but free-fighters. Even without the guns at their hips their profession was written in the way they moved. The gunslinger must have seen it even further off. Both younger than Mikeos one grinning, one serious.

"Gunslinger." The grinning man stepped into the track, shabby in his riding leathers where his companion stood smart in a dark suit almost free of dust.

"Nathan." Mikeos nodded. "Thought it'd be a few years yet before you decided to try your hand."

"Thought wrong." Again the grin, very white against his tanned face. "I ain't getting any faster." He poked his hat up to show his eyes. "Today's a good day for it."

Jenna stepped from the path as Mikeos flexed his neck. She thought both men looked young to challenge — it could take as few as three summers for a free-fighter to get the victories he needed to make an official challenge, but most preferred to take their time. Young men, enjoying the prestige of their occupation and the ease of the life that accompanied it, often lost their hunger for the challenge.

"No crowds, Nathan? We ain't doing this on the high street? It's a strange way to go about things. You'll die lonely, and even if you won, how's Ansos gonna take to a new slinger who robbed them of a show?"

"Got a hex-witch." Nathan cast her an appreciative look, no hint of fear in it. "She's witness enough. Let's get this done."

"Say it." Mikeos stood without motion, not in the stance, just as if he'd come to a natural halt.

Jenna watched Nathan's eyes. His grin lived there too. A young man drunk on the myth of his own immortality.

"Gunslinger Mikeos Jones, holder for the Oh-Oh-One, I stand qualified under the gun and challenge by right of tourney."