Infernal Machines

by John Hornor Jacobs

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

The world is burning. Rume is under attck. The Autumn Lords, rulers of the Tchinee empire, have had their true nature revealed. The Emperor descends into madness. And Fisk and Shoe - unlikely heroes, very likely mercenaries - must find their way to Fisk's wife and child, who he has never seen. There might be quite a lot in their way. A war, for one thing. But Livia is as determined as Fisk to be reunited. And Shoe may have a plan...

Release date: July 27, 2017

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 368

Sample

ONE

Kill Their Horses

‘IA-DAMN IT,’ FISK said. ‘Ia-damn it all to Hell.’ His horse, the new one, had froth working out from under the saddle-blanket and champed the bit furiously in her mouth. Fisk wore a pinched expression – he was irked. Like most men accustomed to the rigours of the Hardscrabble, he liked to do the chasing. Not be chased.

‘They’re what, a half day behind? This godsdamned place has a million hidey-holes we can bolt to,’ I said, sweeping my arm to take in the cracked and sundered expanse of the eastern reaches of the Hardscrabble. The bright, brittle sky became hazy at the edges this late in the summer, and the heat was on us something fierce. Bess barked and coughed occasionally, due to the burns on her rump from the titanic blast of Hellfire that had destroyed Harbour Town.

And now the Hardscrabble, and soon the rest of Occidentalia, would be lousy with Medierans. Like the ones pursuing us – Beleth and his new moustachioed friends.

‘Half day, yes,’ Fisk said. ‘Maybe more. But he had some daemon-gripped stretchers with him, leaping this way and that. If he sets those damned dogs on us, we’ll be in a spot.’

‘We can’t keep this pace forever,’ I said. ‘We don’t have enough water and we’re too far from anywhere or anyone who might give us succour. We could make for the Bitter Spring, maybe.’

Fisk thought for a long while.

‘We’ll rest the horses for a bit, over there, in the shadow of those rocks. Then we’ll push hard on to the Long Slide, and wait.’

‘You’re getting sly in your old age, Fisk,’ said I. ‘An ambush?’

‘That’s about all we can do, unless we discover that half-century of legionnaires toddling about the Hardscrabble.’

‘Don’t hold your breath,’ I said.

We rested the horses in the shade of a crag of sundered rock as the sun rose. I stripped Bess of tack and saddle and tended her wound as best I could – water, maguey sap slathered on her arse, and kind words. She blew hot air through her nose and nipped at my britches with yellow-green teeth, her stubbly mane bristling. Fisk tended his own mount and we gave them what water we could, though there was scant to spare.

The brutal sun rose in the sky and the shadow where we rested the mounts narrowed and shrank so that we ended up pressed against the rock face, moving to stay out of hammer-blow light. Weariness passed over me, and the injuries and insults all over my body pricked memories – burns on my hands, ears, and back of my neck recalled the incandescent flame of Harbour Town’s destruction; the throbbing knot on my scalp where he sapped me, Beleth and his daemon-gripped stretchers; my abraded wrists, where they bound me – Gynth, the vaettir, fighting, saving me; my hunger and thirst, the taproom of militarised dvergar. Beyond that, and before, I could not recall then. I passed a hand over my stubbled head where the hair was almost burned away.

Everything had gone to Hell. And my old carcass was just a mirror of it.

Not much shadow, by then. Even the horses seemed to feel the growing tension as pursuit neared.

‘This is Ia-damned ridiculous,’ Fisk said, finally, his boots on the line where rock-shadow met brilliant Hardscrabble. ‘Let’s go.’

Bess and Fisk’s mount weren’t ready to move in the heat of the day, but our urgency swayed them, though Bess hawed something fierce. I loved Bess dearly, but she was still wilful, like any beast, or offspring, possessed of abnormal intelligence where parents simply want for a docile and accepting child.

When I had her tacked out, I took the saddle and she chuffed hot air and chucked her head – in annoyance or agitation from the chase, I could not tell. Her smarts were hard to fathom.

We lit out, taking it easy. Taking it easy, urgently. No canter, but alternating between trotting and walking, over the Hardscrabble. It was a matter of hours before the Long Slide hove into view and then a matter of hours more before the ascent was well made.

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ I asked Fisk as we took the rise.

‘We wait here for them, there’s no other approach except up the Long Slide for miles around.’ He looked back behind him, over his horse’s rump. Far in the heat-warped distance, something moved on the horizon. Horses, maybe. ‘We kill as many as we can. If he’s got daemon-gripped with him, kill them first and then, once it’s just us …’ He paused, thinking. ‘Just us men, well, we know what to do then.’

I assumed he meant more killing. ‘We need water. We can’t hold out pinned down here for days on end.’

Fisk nodded. ‘If it comes to that, then, you’ll ride on to the Bitter Spring. But it won’t come to that.’ He looked at me closely. ‘You let the stretchers and the daemon-gripped get right on top of us, Shoe. Close enough for a kiss,’ he said, pulling his carbine and checking the rounds. He thumbed each one’s warding, checking the integrity. He’d restocked his supply in Harbour Town – possibly the work of Samantha or one of her junior engineers. Some paltry comfort there, that she was here with us now, even if it was solely through her handiwork.

I laid out my six-guns and began unloading and reloading them.

Almost to himself, Fisk said, ‘Yes. You kill the stretchers and daemon-gripped, my friend. And I’ll kill their horses.’

TWO

A Thousand Tomorrowless Days

THE HARDSCRABBLE: THE tawny gold of the dirt from which sprang the dvergar and vaettir, emerged from some fathomless, impossible origin; the countless skeins of bramblewrack veining through the gulleys and mountainside, the impassable breaks and soars of gambel and ash and keening pine, traced now with the passage of native creatures – shoal auroch and turkey buzzard and lickerfish suspended in eternal movement, to rise and fall, to eat and be eaten, in a steady progression of a thousand tomorrowless days; now comes the tread of man, first the Medieran boots flickering across the Hardscrabble plains, then Northmen for a year or day, for a blinking moment, and then again Medieran for years following the mapless miles of the Occidentalia wildernesses; blood, the piping-hot blood of the creatures hunted and harvested by man, dvergar, and vaettir alike, spilling into the dust to be joined by the blood of Medieran and Ruman and Northmen, watered with blood, drenched in the hot stuff, at the clawed hands of vaettir, and the swords and guns of men. Dispossessed, too, the land: the dwarves held it, and the stretchers hunted it, ravenous ghosts, not knowing the bounty and treasure they had and with the coming of the Ruman, Hellfire in one hand and whiskey in the other, they lost it; dispossessed of land and identity too, not knowing where to belong and only realising it maybe when the Rumans – when we – gave them something to fight against. Dispossessed of home and hearth, but never the vaettir, never the stretcher, the genius loci, the leaping lord. It is he that is the possessor of the land, and the West, and while he might die, he will never relent of it or be dispossessed.

Unlike me.

We sail to Rume.

I have no home but where Fisk is, and he is lost to me.



Juvenus, pale-faced and sweating, entered our stateroom after a polite knock. He’d put on his suit and even worn a tie, though we’d become inured to the sight of the man sweating in shirtsleeves. The Nous Sea grew high with towering swells and the weather had turned cold, but the innards of the Malphas were always hot. Hellish hot.

I greeted him as Lupina fed young Fiscelion and Carnelia stretched, sore from her armatura.

‘Miss Livia,’ the captain said. Behind him stood two lascars bearing carbines and frightened, taut expressions. He cleared his throat and scratched at his arm. The bare white of a fresh bandage peeked from the cuff.

‘How may I help you?’ I asked. I pointed at his wrist. ‘You come to me freshly bandaged, and not by my hand, so I assume you have had use of a Quotidian and have received a message and that it bodes ill for us.’

‘I am here,’ he said, clearing his throat and tugging down his cuff to cover the bandage, ‘to relieve you of your Quotidian device, Madame. By order of Tamberlaine himself.’ He looked uncomfortable and his voice pitched toward nervousness, rather than villainy.

‘And what reason did he give?’ Carnelia said, straightening. She had sweat plastering her hair to her neck and was dressed in the loose, flowing garb that Sun Huáng had insisted they – lost Secundus, Tenebrae, and her – train in. Carnelia placed her hand on the jian that she’d negligently sat upon the dresser. The two lascars shifted their weight.

‘He is Emperor and our Great Father,’ Juvenus said. The words were rote, and came from him like stones falling from one’s mouth. ‘He need not explain himself to me.’

‘I am of as noble blood as he,’ Carnelia said. ‘Cornelians can trace our history back to the gods, just as Tamberlaine can.’

Juvenus lowered his head. The muscles popped and worked in his cheek. ‘I am sorry, Livia, Carnelia. I am sorry. You are to be placed under guard until we reach Rume. This is his command.’

‘Is Tenebrae also to be placed under guard?’ I asked.

Juvenus paused. ‘No, he is not.’

‘I see. We are to be corralled home to become pawns on the knightboard of Tamberlaine once more.’ I went and took Fiscelion from Lupina and kissed his fat cheek. He cooed. ‘Are we to be confined below decks?’

‘No, Madame,’ Juvenus said. He gestured to the lascars standing behind him, white-knuckling their carbines. ‘You will have an escort should you want to venture about.’

‘Guards, you mean,’ I said.

‘Escorts. You remain my guest and will receive all due honour and civility that the Malphas and I have to offer,’ Juvenus said. ‘I am sorry it has come to this.’

‘You are sorry,’ I said, thinking of how the folk of the Hardscrabble used that word. ‘I have never seen someone as sorry.’

Juvenus, bowing his head, said, ‘Please send me a message if you have any needs and I will make sure they are addressed.’

‘Wonderful,’ said I, though I can only imagine that my tone belied my words. ‘Thank you. You may go,’ I said, waving a hand toward the passageway behind him.

He stood there a long while, looking agitated and sheepish. Eventually he screwed his courage up to say, ‘But you have not turned over your Quotidian. I cannot leave until you do.’

Handing Fiscelion to Carnelia, I retrieved the argent-warded box. It smelled of sulphur and blood and woodsmoke and when I handed it to Juvenus, I felt heavier rather than lighter because of it.



When Juvenus was gone, Carnelia began cursing and clenching her fists – maybe because she felt some great furore at being controlled once more by the patriarchs of Rume, or maybe because she knew that by forcing us to return to Rume, Juvenus consigned Fiscelion to be bereft of a father. I did not know. Lupina watched implacably, sucking her teeth.

‘Sissy,’ said I. ‘We must come to an accord.’

‘What? And let them do this to us again? Let us be corralled like beasts? I think not,’ Carnelia said. Her neck was flushed red, as if the anger in her belly grew and moved through her like fallowfires across the shoal grasses.

I approached her and lowering my voice, said, ‘I do not know if they will stoop to eavesdropping on us, but I say to you now I will not submit. We will not submit to Tamberlaine. I will not remain in Rume. The Emperor has said I am divorced, but I am not here.’ I struck my breast with a fingertip. ‘And I will get back to Fisk and Occidentalia.’

‘I will stay with you, sissy, unto the ends of the earth,’ Carnelia said.

I embraced her then, which was made awkward by Fiscelion being held between us, and he squawked and made infantile coos and gurgling noises.

‘Oh, sissy, how you have changed,’ I said, looking at her. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, and a fierceness in her disposition that was marked and new. She had always been fierce and wild – but before, it was the fierce outrage of uselessness, the restlessness of chattel. But now she was like me, dispossessed, divided from a home, her fierceness had meaning and usefulness. And she had her jian, her talon. And her wits, which had never been inconsequential, but the pettiness had fallen away and left something altogether remarkable.

She smiled, but it did not touch her eyes. ‘And what of this accord?’

‘We must wait and watch for a time to escape. I doubt we will be allowed off ship at the Ætheopicum port when they take on fresh water, wine, and supplies. And so, we will find ourselves at the Ostia pier before the Ides to be returned to the society of our father and the rest of Rume.’ I touched her hand. ‘We will appear entirely content with our situation until the moment we must move. We will dote and exclaim over our father, as he dotes and exclaims over Fiscelion, and do whatever Juvenus asks with absolute aplomb and grace.’

‘That’s a fucking bitter role,’ Carnelia said. ‘Where’s the fun in playing nice? I would spit in their faces. Or,’ Carnelia said, wetting her finger in her mouth and then drawing circles in the air with it as if it were a sword, ‘Better, prick them with my sword.’

She smiled, and it was not wicked, but avid and predatory.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know you would. I hope you will not have to.’

Carnelia was quiet for a long while, thinking of it. Fiscelion reached up and played with her hair with fat, pink hands, and gurgled.

‘We must raise no suspicions of our intent,’ I said. ‘And be compliant.’

‘And mendacious.’

‘Yes, mendacious. Yes, coy. Yes, docile, if we are to have a chance,’ I said.

‘Too much of my life have I been so,’ Carnelia said. ‘I do not want to be so again.’

‘Would it ease the chafe of having to be so to know you will be working toward that break?’

‘A little,’ Carnelia said, and wandered over to the settee, where her hand found the jian’s hilt as if of its own accord.

‘Can you do it?’

She thought for a while. ‘Livia, once you denounced Rume and parentage and everything else in front of our father, and tossed it all into his teeth. I watched you then with a little girl’s grubby heart, only thinking of my own pleasure and ease. But when you said those words, something stirred in me that I didn’t know was part of my make-up. And I was jealous and envious and terrified for you all at once.’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘It has taken me a long while to get to that place myself. Gnaeus is gone. Secundus is gone. I would renounce all, like you, without home and without destiny except that which I make and I will not give that up lightly.’

‘So, you will be compliant until it is time to not comply?’

Carnelia withdrew her sword and held it up so that it caught the daemonlight.

‘I will,’ she said, looking at the blade and turning it this way and that to catch the light as she once might have a mirror.



Writing becomes habit. Over the long months separated from Fisk, I’ve become used to taking down a history of my events of the day, my thoughts. And now the Quotidian has been taken from me, it is to myself I write, instead of my love. Indulgent. Indulgent but necessary. A much less bloody endeavour altogether, and I have not yet decided if that is a good or bad thing. Sometimes, when I write, it is like whispering my secrets into the great Occulus of the Cælian, the eye of Rume peering toward the heavens, the hushed voices of its visitors echoing strangely. Other times, it is like a cough, a reflexive exhalation – all my love, my hate, my worries, my concern for Fiscelion the Younger – all exhorted in a mad rush of words that I pen down.

There are nights, though. There are nights when young Fiscelion snuggles with Carnelia or Lupina in our stateroom, and on numb feet I go onto the deck and stand on the prow, in the shadow of the swivel guns, the salted air heavy and cold, the Malphas rising and falling on the swells as the lascar guards watch me silently, gripping their carbines. I ignore them as best I can. I would scream but for the observers and the accord Carnelia and I made. Off in the distance Rume awaits, and there’s no turning away from it. No amount of bribery or wheedling could change Juvenus from this course.

At times, Carnelia joins me on deck, under the stars, with her jian, and she makes the arcane moments, the tracery of air, the turnings and jumpings of Sun Huáng’s swordplay until she is slathered in sweat and panting. Once Tenebrae appeared on deck, a wooden gladius in hand, as if to join Carnelia, but the look she gave him was so frightful he paused and then went back below decks.

We both have our armatura of grief.

THREE

Time Enough And Bullets

THE DAY GREW long, and we found a vantage at the peak of the Long Slide, where Beleth, the Medierans, and the daemon-gripped thralls they had in tow would have to approach. The Long Slide is a curious tilt of solid rock, and has been so for aeons; a stone raft two miles long, tilting up in the dirt waters of the Hardscrabble’s eastern reaches and bordered by mapless leagues of impassable and impenetrable gulleys. Even the most agile of vaettir would have trouble making their way through the scrawls of deep fissures and eroded passageways, choked with bramblewrack and ruin. At the peak of the Long Slide, a slurry of boulders and a worn, thousand-year-old switchback trail threads its way down and away from the tilted rock plane. There was nowhere to hide on the face of it, and it was in full view of the summit for a mile or more.

The perfect spot for an ambush.

‘They’ll wait until night,’ Fisk said, leaning against a rock and pulling the dusty brim of his grey hat over his grey eyes. I watched the Long Slide, searching the far end where stone met dust. ‘And you won’t have any trouble seeing them, with your—’ He waggled two fingers in a V at my eyes. ‘Dvergar nighteyes, or dim sight, or whatever you want to call it. But I should make sure I nap beforehand. When I open my eyes it will be dark and I might not have your vision, but it’ll be good enough to kill the engineer and his Ia-damned followers,’ he said and then, with no more fuss or talk of it, he gave his hat a second tug, settled back further into the rock and sand, and promptly fell asleep.

You take rest when and where you can find it, in the Hardscrabble.

Shadows grew long, drawing east as the sun fell across the western vault of sky. I kept watch on the foot of the Long Slide, letting my mind drift off, trying to stay away from brooding about recent events and the current situation, with no success, and found myself considering Gynth, the vaettir who saved me. He’d been a strange one, and it niggled at me that I knew not if he were alive, or dead. It takes an enormous amount of damage – traumatic bodily damage – to kill a vaettir, and while he’d been deep in the shite, torn to bloody ribbons when I last saw him, I never saw him cease to breathe or give up whatever spirit that propelled him, be it fierce will or some other inscrutable working of the stretcher heart.

But I’d be lying if I said I hoped he was dead.

And from there my mind emptied, finally, and I found that un-fettered ease that comes with staring for long periods, mindlessly, at the big wide world underneath the big unbroken Hardscrabble sky, bruising now pink to purple to the deepest blue, the billions of pinpricks of stars spraying across the heavens. In the distance, coyotes yipped and called. Fisk snored with light chuffing sounds under his hat.

And there, in the distance, smoke. I marked it, imagined I smelled it, though that was near impossible since it was miles away. There lay the ruinous husk of Harbour Town; the charred bodies of thousands of men, women, children, dvergar and human alike. Countless tonnes of goods, timber, wickerwares, fish, goat, shoal auroch, sage and gambelnut, honeycomb and garum. All gone, all blown to vapour – the integument of their corpus destroyed, rendered to char, reduced to ash and now that carbonite stuff spread to the winds of the Illvatch to spread over the Hardscrabble as a caul. Weeping would not do. Nor remorse. No emotion seated in the heart but lust for vengeance would suffice.

I kept watch, closely, waiting until it was full dark before nudging Fisk with my boot.

His head came up, and he pushed his hat back, as if he’d been waiting for that touch all along. And perhaps he had been.

‘They’ve set a camp and built a fire,’ I said, pointing in the direction of a new sliver of smoke. They were burning bramblewrack, or some other thin combustible. Charcoal, maybe, which they’d toted along with them inside saddlebags or rucksacks.

‘They’ll not stay at it. It’s a ruse to draw our eyes away, and they’ll be coming,’ he said, and spat downwind toward where the smoke rose. ‘They won’t wait until dawn.’

‘No,’ I said, considering. ‘You’re right.’

‘They might have a native with them who could’ve anticipated our use of the Long Slide,’ he said. ‘Someone that knows this country. Or, maybe one of the daemon-gripped could answer questions, if that’s the way the engineer’s summoning works. If so, they’ll know this is an ambush.’ He put his hand on the carbine, worked the action, and checked the chamber.

‘Let’s hope they lack foresight.’

Fisk nodded. ‘Shoe, we’ve got to be patient, and wait. We have to let their Hellborn pets get as close to us as possible and make sure they’re dead, and hope they show themselves on horseback.’

‘We’ve been over this, pard,’ I said. ‘I know the plan. I drop the stretchers, then whatever daemon-gripped men are on us, you’ll kill their horses.’

Fisk nodded, once more, and pursed his lips and turned to face the Long Slide.

It was in the small hours of the morning when they made their move. Two shadows, creeping up over either edge of the Long Slide, up from the gulleys. They remained low, crouched and walking on all fours like a lizard or other creature – but faster, moving with a speed born of infernal desire. The big one, the vaettir, scurried up the face of the Long Slide in the weak illumination, its head turning on gimbaled pivot, scenting the air like a hunting hound. Some sort of ichor oozed from its jagged mouth, blood maybe, the wet stuff catching starlight, my dvergar vision catching its glint. The smaller one – a daemon-gripped man – followed, tracing the northern edge of the Slide.

Fisk patted my arm to draw my attention and inclined his head toward the possessed man. Plans change with the situation. No horses in sight. It took just his nod to indicate intention. I was to take the possessed man, and he would meet the stretcher. I nodded my agreement and eased down from the view we had and softly made my way around the boulders and up a higher path, until I was perched upon a pile of stones high enough to regain vantage. After a moment I found the man again, and he was much closer and had picked up devilish speed.

The daemon-gripped stretcher was almost upon Fisk. He’d reached the base of the boulder slurry that capped the Long Slide and had craned his leering face upwards, toward where my partner waited, eyes sharp glints of broken glass. The thing was dressed in frontiersmen clothing, new, short at the sleeves and the cuffs. The undersized human garb gave it a strange, otherworldly appearance, like a lanky man dressed in children’s clothes, and the half-light of stars washed it clean of all colour. He looked as if he smelled like corpseflowers, but I guessed Fisk – and maybe I – would know soon enough.

The stretcher scrabbled up the boulder, vaulting higher than a steamboat’s top stack, and found purchase on another slab of rock some fifty feet shy of the crest of the Long Slide where we waited. From the corner of my eye I noticed movement from Fisk; he stooped, snatched up a large rock and threw it toward me, but down-slope. It fell with a short, sharp clatter, and the stretcher’s head whipped about, gaze fixing on the area where the sound came from, while the daemon-gripped man scuttled like a crab toward it.

My breath caught. Down-slope, horses with riders stepped into the open and onto the Long Slide. There were three, moving slowly.

Fisk held up his hand to me, gesturing to hold.

The riders walked onto the Slope, leisurely. It occurred to me that they might not, after all, know we were there and were simply following our trail.

All the better.

The possessed man and vaettir came together where the rock had fallen and turned to look toward us, again reminding me of Hellish dogs of war. Fisk snatched up another rock and let it fly, beyond and behind them, but they only turned their heads to glance down-slope and then gazed back up at us. They began to move.

Motion congealed to slowness, my breath came short and fast in my chest. Screams. From the possessed stretcher, or the daemon-gripped man, or from me, I could not tell you with any veracity now. The creatures moved like wind over the shoal grasses, up and over the lip of the crest and were suddenly between Fisk and myself, and moving fast.

But, in some vagary of fate, neither of the creatures noticed Fisk; their cold, fervent gazes fell upon me and they raced forward.

I sighted the vaettir’s chest with my carbine and fired, filling the air with a booming report, despair, and brimstone. I whipped the carbine around, levering another round into the chamber, then fired again. The stretcher pitched forward and then the daemon-gripped man was upon me.

He hit me like a bull auroch, bellowing. I fell backward with him on top of me, slamming me into the ground. All the breath whooshed out of me in a great heave, and I could not find air.

The man’s hands ripped at my chest and I felt the carbine spin away, then there was a hot explosion of pain as black gnashing teeth bit where my neck met my shoulder, furrowing toward the vital sanguiducts below my skin. Reflexively I pulled in my chin, like a turtle ducking its head into its shell, but the infernal man’s teeth tore through my shirt and into the meat of my shoulder.

The pain was excruciating and I cannot recall now what desperate sounds I might have made, but I can recall clearly the Hellish grunting the daemon-gripped man made, whipping and fretting his head, fast and vicious. There was a separation and his face pulled away, mouth full of a gob of my flesh, a spray of blood in the air.

I fumbled toward his face with my hands, catching his stubbled cheek and following the contour to sink my thumb into the socket of his eye. Dvergar are many things, but our hands are made for industry and rough work. I was knuckle-deep in the man’s face before he gathered whatever infernal wits he had – I know not what a man with such a rider upon his soul has in the way of reasoning. Was he a creature purely of instinct, divorced from higher thought, except for what impetus that Beleth gave him?

With my thumb sunk in the socket, I jerked the possessed head to the side, slamming it into a boulder – once, twice – impacting with deep meaty sounds. My other hand fumbled to my gunbelt and drew Hellfire. The mind splits, awareness separates: the sound of distant drums, the reports of a carbine, echoing away into the night; the tug and fret of my hand, knuckled deep in a man’s eye socket, smashing skull to rock; the trigger, cold, the pistol unsteady in my hand.

I stilled. The barrel came to rest on the man’s chest. I pulled the trigger. The six-gun jerked in my hand in an eruption of smoke and noise and his body fell away.

I lay there breathing for longer than I care to admit.

Pulling myself up, I saw Fisk at the crest of the Long Slide, his attention down-slope.

I wiped the gore on my trouser leg and looked down at my spattered clothes. Fastidiousness is as useless in gunplay as it is in the Hardscrabble. As I joined Fisk, he said, ‘Put a couple more notches on that gunbelt, friend.’

He glanced at me when I said nothing.

‘There’s three dead horses halfway down the Slide. The idiots rode Hellbent for leather up-slope when they heard the gunshots.’ He shook his head and allowed a grim smile to flash across his features. ‘They’re hiding behind the carcasses.’

I made my way over to Bess, who chuffed and stood nervously, agitated by the scent of Hellfire and blood hanging about me in stinking streamers. I dug out a clean handkerchief from her saddlebag. Having no cacique, I wadded the cloth into my freely-flowing wound in my shoulder, collected my carbine, and went to rejoin Fisk.

We stood breathing in the pre-morning light, waiting for the sun to rise. I peeked my head over the boulder to look where the dead horses lay, and the bright sound of a rifle came skittering across the stony distance between us and the fallen horses as a whistling sounded overhead, the bullet passing inches from my skull.

‘Not a bad shot, that one,’ Fisk said.

‘He didn’t get me,’ I said.

‘Nor did those daemon-gripped. You’re fearsome, Shoestring.’

I checked the bleeding of my shoulder. ‘Don’t feel so fearsome.’

‘Neither does the bear or badger,’ he said, dipping his fingers into his shirt pocket and fishing out a hand-rolled cigarette.

‘Real easy to be fearsome when you’re toting Hellfire,’ I said, and peered over the crest again, then ducked my head before the rifle report could sound. A little explosion of rock and debris came from overhead where the