Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (4 page)

       
Damn.

       
She duck-walked the couple of paces over to Carrick. Dark eyes blinked up at her in confusion. She wondered how much he recollected of the previous twelve hours.

       
“King’s Sheriff,” she said. “Got you at the hotel, while you were napping.” She’d caught up with his rebel gang on the road to a wildcat mining town, had watched and waited, mingled with them in town at the hotel bar, just another feral digger. She tapped the tongue clamp. “You need water and food. I’ll take this off, but you have to promise no spellcasting.”

       
His eyes flitted from one of hers to the other. He nodded.

       
“Your oath.”

       
He nodded again and grunted an affirmative. She helped him to sit and undid the buckles at the back of his head. “Try anything and I’ll burn you where you sit.”

       
Agnieska held the weight of the mask while she loosened the jaws of the clamp itself. His tongue came free and he gasped. She waited while he worked his cramped jaw, then helped him drink. There were tears in his eyes.

       
“I’ll get you some food,” she said.

       
She turned her back on him to reach for her pack, shielding her hands with her body so he wouldn’t see her fingers sketching the words of the attack spell that she mouthed under her breath. She licked her fingertips, holding the spell on the tip of her tongue, and turned round to face him while she dug in the pack for food. She was conscious of his gaze on her as she brought out two cans of beans and a pair of forks and opened one up with expert twists of her belt knife.

       
He opened his mouth. “Could...” was as far as he got.

       
Agnieska put everything she had behind the spell, which was enough to scorch all his nerves and knock him flat again, but not much more. She had to put a hand out to steady herself against a wave of dizziness.

       
Carrick groaned. One knee bent up, then flopped back again. He shifted the weight of the mittens from his belly to the ground beside him.

       
“You should be more concerned about LeMay than me,” he said, after a while. “I’m not nearly the spellsmith the stories would have you believe.”

       
Agnieska took a slow breath, trying to still her racing pulse. His witch girlfriend, he meant. Agnieska
was
worried about her. She’d heard enough about LeMay to think that the woman was a genuine headkicker, that little of
her
reputation was inflated.

       
“Here.” She sat him up again, wedged the open can of beans between his knees and jammed the fork into the hinge of one of his mittens.

       
“I was going to ask if you could loosen my boots,” Carrick said. “They’re cutting off the blood to my feet.”

       
She arched an eyebrow at him, and grunted a laugh at her and him, both, before she nodded.

       
“How’s that?” she asked, when she was done.

       
“Better.”

       
For a time he was silent, his concentration focused on getting food from the can into his mouth. Agnieska opened the other can and had a few forkfuls herself, watching him spill beans over his lap, before she relented.

       
“Here,” she said again. She took the can and fork and shoveled a load into his mouth.

       
“She’ll be coming after me,” he said, when he’d swallowed.

       
Agnieska fed him another mouthful. Neither his tone or expression made it sound like a threat. “I reckon she will,” she said. “And the others.”

       
“Your compulsion spell’s worn off,” he said. “Unless you’re planning to cut my feet again.”

       
She didn’t say that that was exactly what she’d been planning—although she’d be stretching what was left of her strength, now. “You hear those songdogs?”

       
A bean from the next forkload escaped down his chin and she deftly scooped it back into his mouth. He listened a moment. His eyes widened slightly and he nodded.

       
“That’s our trail they’re on,” Agnieska said. “They’re closer than your mates.”

       
Carrick chewed another mouthful. His lips twitched. “Reckon I’ll walk, then.”

* * *

       
Agnieska pressed down on her knees with her hands, willing her legs to keep pushing her up the slope. To her left, the hillside sheared off into unevenly stepped cliffs. Killjoys inflated their gas sacs in the morning warmth and spun themselves up into the sky, off in search of last night’s leftover carcasses. Her head felt stuffed with cotton.

       
Nothing but sharp rocks for a bed. Keep moving.

       
She scanned the scree ahead for a good vantage point. She wanted to be up over the first line of hills before they stopped to shelter through the heat of the day, but the songdogs were still following, and gaining ground. Willpower alone was still enough to resist the soporific effect of their singing, but she didn’t want to let them get any closer.

       
“What made you become a Sheriff?”

       
She guessed Carrick wanted to talk to distract himself from the hunters’ cries. She’d left the tongue clamp off, since there wasn’t much he could do without the use of his hands, anyway, and she judged his mates were too far behind for any voice-only spellcasting to reach them. She reckoned, too, that he’d be leery enough of what experience he’d already had of it, as well as the scorching she’d given him, not to try anything.

       
Too soft, Aggy
.

       
“What made you become a rebel?” she said.

       
“I asked first.”

       
She glanced back, his head level with her elbow. He peered up at her from under the hem of the shirt she’d given him as a shawl, having neglected to put his hat on his head before she’d dragged him out the back of the hotel.

       
“I’ve got the gun,” she said.

       
His toe caught on a rock and he returned his attention to his feet. Agnieska shook her head but stole a glance at her own footing.

       
“Rebellion chose me,” Carrick said, “rather than the other way around.”

       
There was a large, broad-shouldered boulder jutting from the hillside, off to their right. She veered towards it, levering a shell into the chamber of her carbine. The click-clunk of it echoed back off the rocks.

       
“The town I grew up in was too small to warrant a police station,” he went on. “Until someone dug a chunk of gold out of the riverbed. Then we got a whole squad of troopers. They were scum, and their lieutenant was worse. Ran the town and the diggers’ camp as a private protection racket. Townsfolk got sick of it. Day came when I led a mob down to the police station, took their guns off them, and put them in their own lock-up. Then we sent off a petition to the district magistrate demanding to have them removed from our town and kicked out of the King’s service.

       
“What we didn’t know was that the bloody magistrate was the trooper lieutenant’s uncle. He declared the whole town rebel, put a price on the head of everyone who’d signed the petition, and sent in the redcoats.”

       
Agnieska stopped on the uphill side of the big rock and unhitched her pack.

       
“What are you doing?”

       
“I want to slow those songdogs down before we get into the hills,” she said. “Stay here.”

       
She tucked her carbine under one arm and climbed up the sloping side of the boulder, crawling on elbows and knees across the top. She heard the dull clank of lead on rock and knew that Carrick had disregarded her instruction. She didn’t look back. He wasn’t so stupid as to clobber her from behind, when there was no way he could unlock the mitts for himself and no help was near enough to reach him before the songdogs did.

       
“Don’t break your neck, will you?” she said, scanning the red dirt and scrub below. She cradled the carbine’s stock against her cheek and peered down the sights, keeping her eyes on the flickers of black-and-white movement among the mulgas as he lay down beside her. Focusing on them seemed to amplify the effect of their song.

       
The carbine’s barrel wavered. Agnieska steadied herself. “So you fought back.”

       
“We fought back,” he said. “Fight’s grown since then, taken on its own life. There’s too much of that kind of corruption about for it to still be just about me and mine. Lots of folks are angry.”

       
It’s not all corrupt, she wanted to say. There’s those about that still uphold the law. Carrick’s story lined up near enough to the official version of events that she didn’t think he’d concocted it for her benefit. It sounded like something Olly would’ve done.

       
“I don’t see them,” he said.

       
“Gun’s pointed right at them.”

       
There was a patch of clear ground right in the songdogs’ path. Agnieska tracked them towards it. Her eyelids wanted to droop. She creased up her forehead to stretch them open.

       
“That’s a long way out.”

       
“A fair distance,” she agreed.

       
“It’s your turn now,” he said, the mittens scraping over the boulder’s surface as he rested his head.

       
The carbine wobbled. Damn it. Was he really stubborn enough to risk his life just to score a point off her? “What does it matter to you?”

       
His eyes were half shut. “It doesn’t. Does it matter to
you
?”

       
She swore under her breath—the songdogs had changed course, following the scent.

       
She searched for another clearing in their path, found one, and steadied the carbine again.

       
“Used to be,” she said, “I had a fiancé.” She could’ve talked about something else, but what did it matter, really?

       
As cold as she could, she told the tale. “He was a peaceable fellow, my Olly, but not one to take nonsense. Happened that one day he got himself into some fisticuffs at the pub. He was good with his fists, Olly was, and knocked this other fellow silly.”
     

       
She fell quiet a moment, tracking the progress of the hunters down on the plain. “Problem was, this fellow had a gang of mates. That night, they made Olly walk into the desert, and they staked him out and left him for the songdogs.”

       
The first four-legged shape trotted out into the open, serrated beak close to the ground as it followed the trail, scorpion tail held high over its black-and-white back. It raised its head to sing. Agnieska squeezed the trigger. The crack of the carbine echoed around the hills. Out on the plain, the hunting chorus erupted into startled shrieks. The rest of the pack scattered through the scrub.

       
“That’ll buy us some time,” she said, trying to sound satisfied rather than relieved. “It’ll take them a while to choose a new pack leader.”

       
She lifted herself back up onto her knees. Carrick’s mates would’ve heard the shot, but there was no point trying to hide from them if it just meant getting run down by the songdogs instead.