Gunlaw

Gunlaw 47

(continuing chapter)

Eben only watched. His rags were washed, his face clean, his hair long but swept back. Mikeos reasoned the kin must tend to him, though there were no signs of food or waste, or spare clothes or any of the necessities of desert living.

"He ain't much to look at." Bright spat. "Weren't much to see all them years back. Ain't much now." He hunkered down on his haunches five yards from Eben and the kin. "Whatchoo been doing out here, boy? Forty years building pretend cities? Ain't you too old for sandcastles? And how comes you ain't growed up?"

"Show some respect, Bright." Mikeos felt the murder welling up in him again. He let it bubble. The anger helped him forget about dying for a while.

"Oh shush." Bright didn't even glance back. "We're not here for some helpless cripple. Not a slinger and a hex-witch. Not days out in the Dry with the sect on our tail. We're here for a magic-man. We're here for the big saviour! Best show us something good, boy, or the first visitors you've had in an age and a half are going to be pissed visitors."

"James Purbright." The kin spoke, its mouth invisible until it opened, the lipless edges unsealing to release evenly modulated words.

As the kin said his name, Bright stepped neatly up behind Jenna and put the thin blade of his knife to her throat. "Yes I am," he said.

Mikeos drew fast, but not fast enough to compensate his lack of attention. The kin had distracted him. He pointed the gun at Bright's head. It seemed pointless to demand he release Jenna.

"I ain't fast, slinger. Not that fast anyhow. But when it comes to killing I've got me a knack. Reckon I'll hold this girl's life on my blade awhile, 'case any of those charitable thoughts of yours melt away." He nodded to the kin. "Speak on, kinny."

"I'm speaking through kin," the kin said. "But these are my words." Eben watched them. His gaze was unfocused and twitched away from time to time, but he watched them. Mikeos could feel the intelligence behind those eyes. The line of drool from the corner of Eben's mouth was nothing, just shop dressing. The kin inclined its head a touch, angled its gaze toward Bright. "James Purbright. Sara Lostchild was nine when you murdered her. You were seventeen."

"That the whiny crip in the shack with you?" Bright asked. "It's true I shot her. I'd fallen in with bad company."

"For someone expecting to profit from selling me, and to make that profit from powers I'm supposed to have ... you don't seem at all worried I might use those powers to make you pay for your crimes."

Bright shrugged, Jenna wincing as his blade scraped her throat. "I spent a lifetime a-killing and a-criming. Ain't never paid for any of it. Gets to a point where you start to think there's no paying to be done. Do as you please is the whole of the law, iffn you can get away with it. 'Sides, Walker told me I didn't have to worry about you. He's crazier than a hunska in a pond is Walker, but he ain't often wrong."

The ground seemed to surge around them. Mikeos staggered back before he realised it was more of Eben's illusions. Shapes rose and fell, half-formed from the dusty surface, some human, some more strange, briefly skinned in flesh tones or black armour, before coalescing into a single narrow bed, heaped with soiled rags across which the body of a small girl sprawled, her head the ruin that a gunshot leaves point-blank. "You chose a strange day to stay your hand, Mikeos Jones," Eben said with the kin's mouth. "You don't think James Purbright more deserving of your bullets than the score of young men who wanted to be Ansos gunslinger in your place? Did you never think of just stepping aside and letting them have the title?"