Gunlaw

Gunlaw 33

Chapter 20 – Fifty Years Ago

A long straight stretch of track in empty country almost becomes a command. This way, or that? As if its mere presence has narrowed all choice to a binary decision, follow it to the left, or follow it to the right. That you might not follow, that you might strike out into the featureless Dry where all directions soon become one and like as not no foot has trod in a thousand years, that possibility seems to vanish somewhere in the infinity where two rails meet.

Hemar looked to the left. The sun dazzled off gleaming rails that disappeared against a dusty horizon. Back there, along untold miles of track, lay Sweet Water, and beyond that the packlands where his mother whelped him. He looked to the right. The shadows pointed that way and the sun slid along the rails toward the devouring dusk crowding in from ridged badlands.

Hemar sniffed. Even with the train an hour gone he could smell the fire-stink of it, a faint edge of it on the hot air. He sniffed again. It wasn't a trail that had to be scented. The train's path lay written in steel, for the ages. Hemar went to all fours. In his paw the whiskey flask sloshed and his nose twitched, remembering the magic of that aroma. He shook his head, rejecting the memory, and set his ear to the closer rail. Wise Odar had it that a domen could hear a train coming by listening to the rails, long before he would know of its approach otherwise. A train could be ten miles off, twenty maybe, the roar of its engine still beneath the hush of the wind and yet the steel rail would be full pings and sighs, singing of what was to come. Wise Odar said the First Track always sang, train or no train. He said that in that track, first laid by the Old Ones in the distant long ago, the voices of the Gods echoed and that their song would tell a domen all he might ever need to know.

"Nothing." Hemar muttered it to himself, just to hear a voice. Whatever track this was it was not the First and it lay silent.

He looked along the rails, first one way, then the other. The packlands held no pack of his. Sect kept that ground now. A single day in a man-town had seen him stabbed, stolen, then abandoned. Onward was as good as back. George Ay had said he was taking Eben to a kin-town. Hemar had never so much as heard whisper of kin-towns, let alone seen one, and his ma had always said he was nothing if not curious.

He stood, shaking the dust from his fur, panting out the last heat of the day. In the pack they had howled to the moon and to the three sentinel stars that could still be seen even when the moon stood full and lit the plains with its cold light. Three stars that never moved. The Old Ones. One of the Domen. One of the Taur. One of the Hunska. And the moon above them all, and below them, the three that were one, the one that was the moon. Wise Odar said that most domen just liked to howl at the moon for the joy of it, an ancient bond that ran in all domen blood. He said more, he talked about the kin as messengers and bearers for the One of the Domen, but Hemar hadn't heard, he'd been too busy howling at the moon with all the rest, for the joy of it, for the joy and to fill the aching white emptiness of her silence, and to hear domen near and far lift their voices in reply.

Hemar shrugged to himself and set off after the train. His stomach bulged with water. He had drunk his fill from the water tower and his belly ached where the knife had slit him, but the kin had done his doctoring well and the wound had reduced to nothing more than a white scar. Hemar wondered if the kin would work their magics on Eben and untwist that broken body of his. It seemed unfair that such power might be held and not used, but the Three had power and more power and yet the world strained at its seams with misery and pain. Hemar whined to himself and pausing he craned forward to sniff at his stomach for any scent of the kin who had re-knit his flesh there. Nothing. The stink of corpse fingers, the tang of cripple-shed, and faint memories of the hunska-woman's perfume, but nothing of the kin. Something skittered by his foot. A beetle, blue-black and lustrous, dancing a jig around two broken legs on its left side, leaking drops of yellow ooze. He must have stepped on it as he walked.