Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (5 page)

       
He shuffled after her. “How did you know it was the leader?”

       
“Because he was in front.” She watched him slither and scramble back down the side of the rock, coming to rest on his haunches in front of her. “You going to walk, or do I need to put those hooks in your legs?”

       
“I’ll walk,” he said, picking himself up.

       
“Good.” She nodded and caught hold of his chain.

       
They climbed in silence for a while. She could all but hear the thoughts buzzing in his head.

       
“What did you do?” he said, eventually. “To those fellows that killed your man?”

       
Agnieska looked back. “I hunted them down and brought them all in, one at a time. I took the bounties and saw them judged and hanged.” All but one. “And then I took the King’s coin to keep on doing the same.”

       
Quiet, again, for a time. Then, “How long were you following us, before you kidnapped me?”

       
“Arrested you. Three days, before you stopped in the town.”

       
“The bounty on me’s the same, dead or alive,” he said. “You could’ve taken me down like that songdog, anytime.”

       
“Could have.” She didn’t need to add that she could’ve sat on that rock and waited for his mates to come under her sights, as well. “But I’m not a bounty hunter, anymore. And I’m not your judge, or your executioner.”

       
He looked like he was about to say something more. She tugged the chain to cut him off. “Come on.”

* * *

       
Over the first ridge, the hills were a confusion of scree-sided gullies and striated cliffs. Agnieska steered clear of the stunted eucalypts that clumped in the crevices and dry watercourses, clinging to the sparse soil amongst the rocks. Not worth the risk when any of them might turn out to be gnarly trees instead.

       
Late in the morning, the day turned overcast, blocking out the worst of the afternoon heat, and she decided to push on rather than rest.

       
“What will you do when we win?” he asked, when they paused at the head of a gully for water and food. They’d clambered awkwardly along its side to avoid the patch of bare sand at the bottom that almost certainly hid a jack-o-box.

       
“
When
?” Agnieska offered the canteen to him, then took a swig herself and screwed on the cap.

       
They hadn’t spoken much since she’d shot the songdog. The rest of the pack had since started up their cries again, but Agnieska judged that they’d opened up most of the gap the songdogs had closed before. Enough, anyway, she thought.

       
She offered him a strip of jerky. He folded it to one side of his mouth as she picked up his chain again and resumed walking. “
If
you won,” she said, “you’d still need the law. And you’d still need people to make it work.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Unless you’re planning to purge every magistrate, trooper and sheriff who’s taken the King’s coin, corrupt or not.”

       
“Too many are.”

       
“
One
is too many,” she said. “But I’ve seen as bad from your side. There was a town magistrate I reckon you remember, hung a couple of yours who’d been tried under the law and come up short. Your boys came and hung the magistrate’s family, his wife and kids. Where was
their
trial?”

       
“I gave the men who did it back to the people of that town,” he said, “for them to judge.”

       
Agnieska stopped to face him. “
Them
to judge?” She prodded him in the chest. “It was you that did the judging, my fine fellow. You wanted the town to be your executioners. They would’ve, too. If a sheriff hadn’t arrived after you rode those boys back in, the men of that town would’ve torn them apart.”

       
Carrick’s nostrils flared. “And what did the sheriff do but take them off to another hanging judge?”

       
“They had their trial.”

       
“You know what’ll happen to me if you take me in,” he said.

       
She couldn’t help a derisive snort. They all came around to this, sooner or later. Some begged, some made it a challenge, but the gist of the words was always the same. She knew her answer by rote: “You’ll be tried under the law. If you hang, then it’s because your own actions have sentenced you—just like those other boys.”

       
“You
know
I’ll hang,” he said. “Justice has nothing to do with it, only authority. The rule of those in power, not the rule of law.
You’ll
have sentenced me by taking me in.”

       
Agnieska shook her head. “Sentencing’s not my job.”

       
“Did you ever?” he asked. “Sentence someone? When you were a bounty hunter, did you ever claim a purse for a kill?”

       
The question got under her guard, like a punch to the stomach. She turned away from him, yanking on the chain to make him follow and wanting to kick herself for telling him about Olly.

       
“You did,” he said.

       
Agnieska heard surprise in his voice, rather than triumph. Shame heated her face and neck. She jerked the chain again, making him stumble.

       
“Once,” she admitted. “I never claimed the purse for him.” It made what she’d done no better, although she’d always told herself that it did. Not taking the purse was just a private admission of guilt.

       
“The man who killed your Olly.”

       
She was glad he couldn’t see her face. “It was a long time ago.”

       
Carrick was quiet. His footsteps crunched on rock, off-beat with hers.
 

       
“The man who started it,” she said, addressing the red stone ahead. “I’d brought all his mates in, one by one, saved him till last. I sat up on a hill and shot him while he ran away, just like that songdog. Not to kill, though. Just his leg.” She felt sick, recounting it. “Then I sat on that hillside and waited for the songdogs to find him.”

       
She half turned her head, expecting some comment, but Carrick said nothing.

       
The chain pulled taut in her hand. He’d stopped again. She rounded on him.

       
“We’ve come far enough,” he said.

       
“What?”

       
Agnieska realized a heartbeat after she’d spoken what he meant. By then it was far too late. She started to raise her carbine anyway, to mouth a defensive spell.

       
The world stretched like elastic. Pain lanced through her head like something had grabbed her skull with a fistful of claws.

       
She lay on her back, paralyzed.
 
Another face appeared beside Carrick’s—a hooded woman, a witch’s web of purple veins prominent on her chalk-pale skin.

       
Blackness.

* * *

       
She woke up where she’d fallen, at the lip of the gully. Deep evening shadows stretched away from the rocks. She felt warm and sleepy. To simply lie there and wait for the stars to come out seemed like the most wonderful idea in the world. Her tongue hurt, though, pulled taut from the floor of her mouth. She tried to move it and found that it was stuck.

       
They’d put the tongue clamp on her. Fuzzily, she tried to lift her hands to take it off, found them weighted down with the lead mittens. A little part of her, that didn’t seem to want to rest, thought: Damn you, Carrick.

       
She could hear a musical whistling. For a while, she just listened, and thought she might drift back off to sleep. But the wakeful little part of her brain refused to settle, demanding attention.

       
Songdogs. Her mind cleared abruptly. The tongue clamp muffled her bellow of outrage as she twisted to get her knees under her, willing herself upright.

       
Damn you, she thought again. I suppose you think this is bloody funny?

       
The songdogs trotted along the gully rim. Their whistles turned to trills like high-pitched laughter when they saw her. The black-and-white feathers of their shoulder ruffs flared as they broke into a gallop.

       
Panic jerked her into motion, a lunge downhill because that was the way her feet were pointed rather than any conscious decision.

       
She realized she was barreling straight towards the jack-o-box patch. The songdogs’ laughter seemed right on top of her. She whirled about, swinging the mitts in a pathetic last defense. The songdogs were still a few yards away, bounding across the scree.
Oh, Olly. I’ll see you soon, love.

       
A crackle of gunfire surprised her as much as them. Half the pack went down; the rest tumbled over themselves in their haste to flee.

       
Agnieska turned wildly to see where the shots had come from. Already off balance, she put her foot in the gap between two rocks, felt the ligaments in her ankle give. She landed on top of the mittens and skidded head first down the slope.

       
Winded and trapped by her lead-weighted hands, she twisted her neck, trying to see. She’d stopped only a few feet short of the jack-o-box. Her pulse hammered as she waited for the sand to erupt, for the jack-o-box’s muscular rope of a tongue to slash towards her.

       
Hard footsteps scraped on loose stone.
Lots
of feet. Her skin prickled. Something was
here,
something worse than any jack-o-box could handle. A shadow blocked out the sky. A fanged muzzle pushed into her face, large nostrils snuffling loudly. Horizontally slit eyes examined her from the other end of a long face.

       
A hand pushed the horse’s head aside.

       
Carrick tipped her over onto her back, then sat her up. A short distance away, other riders let their mounts feed on the songdog carcasses. LeMay sneered at Agnieska. The witch’s aura was like the static of an approaching storm front. Agnieska couldn’t hold her stare.

       
Carrick unbuckled the straps around her head and released the clamp. His horse nosed past his shoulder, teeth bared. He pushed it away again and reached up to slap its shoulder for good measure. With alarming abruptness for such a large animal, the horse spun away and trotted up the slope to its fellows. Agnieska watched it shoulder its way into the circle.

       
“Horses,” she said. Damn me.

       
“They can still be trained, if you get them young enough,” Carrick said. “Sometimes.”

       
“You didn’t have them while I was tracking you,” she said.

       
He tapped the side of his nose. “Been our little secret.” He regarded her with a wry smile. “Reckon that might be about to change.”

       
“When did they catch up with us?” she asked.

       
He chuckled. “Not long after you shot the songdog.”

       
“You were judging me.”