The yellow sun had baked orange, the dusty earth eager to swallow it. The town of Trist waited for darkness to embrace it.
Twelfth Street. Calvert walked.
Denims, overalls, hat, guns. His cheeks sallow, broad jaw, eyes ochre of the earth. His gait was almost lazy, hiding the suppleness of his joints. He seemed to be wandering, yet there was purpose in each breath. He didn’t have an imposing figure; he had long known his ordinariness was a gift. He blended right in.
At the end of the street, he turned into a tavern – The Brewster. A stuffy, smoke-filled room, probably full of Newshires. Drawing no attention to himself, he directly went up the wooden staircase and halted at the door of room twelve.
He waited. Listened. His hands rested on his guns.
The world was reduced to a matrix of sounds. Drunken laughter, smoke puffs, clinking bottles, roosters, crows, carts, footsteps …
The door opened. His informer took him into the room. They talked.
The puzzle of ‘the stilled’ had convoluted further. There were reports from as far as Mudgaon, a frontier town. Trist had seen five stilled bodies in the last ten days. No physician could tell if they would ever wake up again, or the cause.
“Any new sightings?”
“Not apart from the usual. So far the same old gibberish of red-eyed ravens, mile-long snakes, metal roaches...”
“Enough. Any deaths among the stilled?”
“Their bodies still seem to be breathing, but they can’t eat or drink. We have intubated …”
A shriek sliced up the air. Calvert dashed to the window — a man was lying on the ground. He had heard no shots. His instinct willed him to scan the surroundings, his fingers were coiling around his gun, his mind racing to fit the pieces – when his gun fired. But it was a shot into the sky – a miss from the looks of it.
Calvert was disconcerted – he hadn’t intended to fire. But there was no time. It would be difficult to navigate the crowd of the bar. He was already over the parapet, jumping lithely onto the sloping tin roof of the barroom, and sliding effortlessly onto the ground. He was the first to reach the body.
Every stilled body had the same green pallor; sightless, open eyes; clenched hands and stiff legs. The man now wore the vacant expression of delta sleep, or meditation. His life was now still.
Calvert took in the new vantage point. Dusk, clear space of twenty feet, no footmarks, no open windows. In vain he looked up at the sky. Raptors, cirrus clouds, a half-hearted moon…
He searched the man’s trench-coat. A wallet with some visiting cards. This man had a business. Loose change, crumpled up receipts. He had a home. Weed cigarettes. He had his sins. A photo. He had a life. This man might have been guffawing in the bar till a few minutes ago. Why couldn’t I save him?
A crowd had gathered. People knew him. They respectfully gave him way. He opened his compass and walked steadfast into the direction he had fired. He walked for a long time. It was in the wan silvery moonlight that he finally came to a cactus. He had found his bullet.
It bore no clues.
How could he have fired? He replayed his reaction in his mind, again and again. He was at the window. His finger had not been on the trigger. The gun had been pointed towards the ground. Am I getting old?
He felt an unfamiliar chill clasp his spine. Snap out of it, shake it off, off! It was alien, subjugative, destructive.
For a long time he stood still. The mockingbird crooned its sad song.
Amrash leaned away from the Curtain. His Peraptor had been shot at – it was not a freak accident. The bullet had almost grazed the eagle.
The gunslinger could not have known of his presence. But somehow his gun had.
Amrash had been successful in his plan, but this volitional gun could become a problem. He had heard of the lore of gunslingers’ magic-infused guns. His glee swelled.
His gun would be mine!