4. Clifton Interlude

I

The moon saw all the deeds of night, drifting across ten thousand pinpricks of light punched in the black sheet of sky. Men since days long past saw figures and destiny in the stars; Jack saw music unstuck from page, bar and lines, a perfect melody if one could find order in the celestial cacophony. It was not his notion, but one he liked. He hummed one of the old songs to keep him company while he rode.

One of her songs.

Around him Oran was quiet, a small town like any of the small towns Jack had passed through on his journey west, with not a soul on its streets save himself. It was an early rising, early sleeping town, pegged forever to the waking of the sun. Men feared the dark and the blackness that swallowed the world when the setting sun drew shades across the sky and the night creatures roamed. They hid in their homes, as though shuttered windows and locked doors could keep out what lay beyond.

Jack had not slept since a few stolen hours in the afternoon, and he could feel the lack now. At the card table, whiskey and smoke had beckoned Jack towards sleep and even now the remembered tastes and smells played at the edges of his mind. Jack yawned as he rode through the empty streets with his rifle resting across his lap, glancing towards the cold, sleeping windows lining the street. No trouble for now, no shouted alarm, but that could change soon enough. Especially with what he was carrying. He had lashed Virgil Crowton's unconscious form in a heavy burlap sack across the back of his horse and the weight shifted awkwardly as he rode. It would bring trouble before the end.

Oran's gate, two dozen wooden logs banded with iron, was closed when he arrived. Next to it was the gatekeeper, an old man with a fringe of white hair like prairie grass and a beard like an upended broomstick. He was leaning back in a chair with two legs off the ground, smoking a cigarette that smelled as foul as milkweed.

When Jack approached, four legs (two of the old man's and two of the chair's) slapped the cold earth and the gatekeeper rose and walked over. His gait creaked with the rust of age. When he smiled, it was full of yellow and fouled teeth.

"Gate's closed 'til morning," he said, crossing his arms across his sunken chest.

"I need to go out now," Jack said.

"Not my say so," the gatekeeper replied. "Come back in a few hours. You can come and go as you please."

"I can't wait until then," Jack said, feeling his muscles tightening. He breathed deep.

The old man shrugged. "Not my business and not my rules."

"Virgil's rules," Jack said flatly.

"He that pays me," the old man spat. "Pays me to sit by the gate until Jord comes to spell me with the dawn. Least he's supposed to. Most days, Jord comes stinking of whiskey and the sun's halfway climbed the sky."

"I can pay you."

The gatekeeper took a puff from his cigarette, but shook his head. "Morning comes, you'll be gone and there'll be questions. And I'll be the one left to answer."

"You would prefer to take your chances with me?" Jack asked.

"Let a man choose, he'll take the devil he knows." The old man's face betrayed no other reaction, but the end of his cigarette lit up like a small sun.

"You're an easy goer, aren't you," Jack said with a smile that was half genuine. He moved his hand over the rifle that lay across his lap. "And not much perturbed by the sight of naked iron."

"Virgil has more, and the men to wield them." That orange light pulsed faster. "Besides, make quite a racket if you used it."

Jack's hand shot out bringing the butt end of his rifle in a shallow arc that met the old man's head with a crack. He fell, boneless, with a thud, his cigarette spreading sparks in a fan where it struck the ground.

"You'd be surprised."

Jack swung down from the saddle and walked to the gate, raising the wooden beam that held it closed, then shouldered the wooden door open. He lifted the crumpled form of the old man and slumped him back into his chair. The effect was unconvincing. From afar, he might have been sleeping, but it was the guileless sleep of an infant, not a grown man. Jack supposed that by morning it wouldn't matter. He hoped Jord was as derelict as the old man said. He reached into his belt pouch and removed a few bills, folding them and tucking them into the gatekeeper's breast pocket. Perhaps the money might make the coyotes think the old man was complicit in the act, or it might hold the old man's tongue of some of the details. Regardless, when the man was discovered, pursuit would follow, and by then Jack meant to be well gone. With any luck, he would have a few hours' head start, but the god of luck chose his favors with a fickle hand, and Jack counted only the luck he made for himself.

He rode west.

There was nothing left for him in the east but dreams and the memories of dreams. Conversations with ghosts. When he recalled that time, it was like watching another man live his life, and that stranger had left nothing for Jack to go back to. Nothing he could go back to, unless he was running away. So west it was, along the tracks of the Great Western Railroad that passed to the south of Oran, and a hard day's ride to Clifton, the largest settlement on the massive chasm called the Divide that cracked the earth and bisected the continent for a hundred miles in either direction. Civilization's coda before the endless expanse of the Reaches.

II

It was midday when he stopped to rest. Jack hunched in the not-shade of a bare tree, all driftwood branches without even the promise of leaves and white bark that looked more like stone than anything living. He gulped water from his skin and chewed on the last of his dried beef. He hadn't resupplied in Oran, but he'd either do so in Clifton, or it wouldn't matter. He wiped his hands on his thighs then went back to his horse to undo the bindings on the burlap sack that contained Virgil Crowton. Jack dumped him out onto the dirt. It was only in Oran the secret needed to be kept, anywhere else Virgil Crowton was a marked man, a wanted poster fugitive, like to be strung up in any town he could be tracked down in. The reward for his capture was a small fortune, but Jack hadn't taken him for blood money, but for blood.

Virgil had seen better days. His white shirt was rumpled and stained from the ride. Sweat and dust had caked into brackish puddles on his collar and beneath his armpits. Several of the shirt's buttons had been torn off and it hung open, exposing a dark tangle of chest hair matted to his brown skin. His dark hair fell limply like kelp across his face. Virgil had never been a handsome man, with the scars of his trade and skin that had been destroyed by the desert sun. A mixture of blood and sweat ran down his cheeks, dripping from his chin onto his chest.

Jack shook him and loosed the gag he had tied across Virgil's mouth. A harder shake and his eyes opened a crack, the one purple and blue from where Jack had struck him. Jack offered the water skin.

Virgil said nothing, watched Jack, unblinking.

Jack shrugged his shoulders and took another drink. "Your choice. I'll not be stopping again."

This time Virgil answered, but no sound came from between his lips.

Jack put a hand to his ear and cocked his head. "Want to rephrase that, Mr. Crowton?"

"Water," Virgil croaked.

Jack gave him some. Virgil coughed it out and Jack struck him.

"That water's worth more than your blood," Jack said.

Virgil laughed. The sound was like something tearing. "There must be gold in it."

"Fair point," Jack allowed.

"Bounty hunter?" Virgil asked.

"Everyone asks me that."

"Must be a reason."

"I suspect it's the company I keep."

"If you're not for the money, why risk all the trouble?"

Jack said nothing. He remembered the face of an old man in a white robe, how he had looked haunted in death. A terrible end for a man who had lived a life of peace.

Promises, he thought, and felt their weight on his shoulders.

"Can't much say," Jack said. "Time to saddle up."