Gunlaw

Gunlaw 38

Chapter 25

Hemar led them past The Table, a vast sheet of rock more than a hundred yards thick and supported on a dozen legs of stone each as wide as the Ansos pillar. Mikeos stalked beside him leaving Jenna to trail behind. She watched him walk, the anger in each step. The blood they had shared still bound them, though Mikeos seemed not to feel it. The bonds lay weaker than before but she felt the echo of his rage, added to her own, his somehow more feral and more encompassing, as if he had heaped upon the shoulders of the murderers every sin and hurt of his own, as if their crimes weren't enough to damn a man. She had agreed to the assault because their bond told her Mikeos would not let this go. Could not let this go.

They passed a small stand of wire-thorn. Who knew how deep their roots had to quest for water. As deep as a pillar was high perhaps. Fluttering on the closest of them, a scrap of faded blue cloth. From a dress maybe. Jenna wondered about the owner of that dress. Had she been staked out back at Small Stones? And now the duty to avenge them was hers it seemed. Jenna who stepped away from the world at thirteen to devote herself to the mysteries of the hex, Jenna who cut her last emotional tie the day she and Hemar left her brother's body in the shadow of the 'Oh-Seven pillar, now stood avenging angel for a score of prospectors. The Stranger would appreciate the irony that what bound her to the task also took away the power she might use to accomplish it.

"We could do this once we have Eben." Jenna spoke the words to Mikeos's back. "We could do it a year from now. Does it have to be right now? Those bodies have lain there for months. If it needs your blood boiling to do it . . . what does that say about the need for it to be done?" She could have told Mikeos that saving his life had weakened her hold on the hex, had muddied waters that she needed crystal clear to focus on her power. She could try to explain the hex magics to him in terms that a gunslinger might understand. She could tell him that the hex was a pattern that drew to a point the combined will and efforts of all her sisterhood, stored through centuries of dedication, a reservoir of strength on which any of her order might call. She could tell him that each deviation of her actions or desires from the teachings of her order put her further from that store of potential, less able to aim and use it. What he would hear though were the excuses of a heartless woman turning old and bitter. And Jenna worried that if she voiced those words, she would hear that too. "Mikeos—"

Mikeos rounded on her, crowbar half raised as if he didn't know where to put it.

"Horse!" A bark from Hemar.

"What?" Jenna tore her gaze from Mikeos, full of thunder and fury, to Hemar dropping low, sniffing the air.

"Horse!"

For a moment neither Jenna nor Mikeos could make sense of the word, then Mikeos dropped into a crouch too, spinning to face the same way as Hemar. "Down. It'll be a scout."

"We should hide." Jenna looked for cover but the rider broke the line of the ridge before she could act on the thought.

"Shit." Mikeos immediately stood, lifting his crowbar into the crook of his arm and sighting along it.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jenna shouted at him, joining Hemar flat on the ground.

"If he doesn't think we're armed he'll just ride over and shoot us." Mikeos leaned into his fake rifle as if preparing to fire. The scout wheeled his horse. In moments he'd be gone. "If he escapes we're just as dead! He'll be back with more."

Hemar tensed a heartbeat away from giving chase. The horseman would be long gone by the time Hemar covered the three hundred yards to the ridge. Jenna spread the fingers of both hands and held them interlaced before her face so she could see the scout through the lattice they made. At Ansos the witches taught novices the guesture as a centring exercise, a way of making contact with the source. Each hex thereafter simply shaped the source before stamping its power across the world. That power though, for all the rumour and myth, was nine parts hollow with the tenth part wrapped around the aura of intimidation built over generations. Mikeos had seen almost true when he compared them to conjur-men earning nickels and dimes with their smoke and mirrors. Compared to the Old Ones Ansos' magics were less than conjur tricks.