The Damnation Affair

Chapter 19

Hathorn was no longer the youngest horse, but she was dependable and Gabe had ridden her out of town before. She didn’t get excited easily, but when she did she was fleet and smarter than the average equine. She was also prickly-tempered, and didn’t respect a rider who would put up with any foolishness.

Well now, that reminded him of a certain miss, didn’t it.

Don’t think about her.

There was plenty of other thinking to do, and he did it best when he was alone, scanning the horizon and eyeing the tops of ridges for any silhouette that didn’t belong. It was daylight, but the sky was too clouded for his comfort.

Still, he wouldn’t be able to rest until he checked that goddamn claim.

The dangers out here weren’t merely wildlife or some of the miners and panners getting a bit twitchy with a stranger. There were harpies higher up in the hills, and other, fouler things in some of the deep-scored gullies and valleys. The wild mancy out here, without a chartermage or people using its flood to shape and tame it, gave birth to oddities. Even the few remaining survivors of the Red Tribes wouldn’t come near this slice of the Territory, and they had coexisted with this continent and its oddities before Gabe’s kind had sailed west to find the spices of the Sun.

Disease and war had all but wiped out the tribes, though there was some talk of a hole in the world they had escaped through, into a paradise without invaders. Privately, Gabe hoped they had, and wished they hadn’t left any of their kind behind, given how his kind by and large dealt with those survivors. All the same, this was a fine land, and he’d been born on its shores. Working another country’s mancy would be problematic at best.

He didn’t mind. Much. The Ordo Templis was far more active across the Atlantica, and escaping to a country they didn’t have their fingers in would be a trick indeed. Unless he wanted to take Chinoisie lessons from Li Ang and keep heading West until it became East.

He found the lightning-blasted tree silhouetted against the sky, and suppressed a shiver as he turned Hathorn’s black head toward a thicket of spinesage. She didn’t like it, but she went, and when he left her at the edge of the hidden spring with its sweet-crystal bubbling top swirling with blown dust, she was content enough.

From there it was slogging through fragrant junip and wild tabac wilting under the heat, underground water heaving the devilpine trees up to clutch at the sky with their bony fingers. He was sweating by the time he was halfway up the side of the wash, and the midges had found him.

Damn biters. He didn’t risk a charm to shake them off, though. No need to announce his presence any more than he already had, or any more than the grace on him would.

The going became a little easier, but he slowed as it did. Something had come this way lately, breaking branches and scuffing the ground. Didn’t take a genius to read those signs, or to see the mark of a bootheel with nails crossed to ward off bad luck. Didn’t prove much, but he went cautiously, his breathing slow and even and a trickle of sweat tracing its way down his spine.

A sharp hairpin bend even a mountain goat would have trouble with, but Gabe knew its trick and leapt lightly. Landed catfoot, and crouched, hard up against an old devilpine whose bark smelled of crushed cinnamon when he leaned into its shade. He was leaving sign too; no way to avoid it. Damn the whole thing.

It was too quiet in this little defile. No bird sang here, and even the wind was muted. The dust didn’t reach too far up, the devilpines sheltering the hillsides wherever there was enough water for them to cling to. Nothing slithered in the undergrowth, nothing nested in the trees, and even the midges hung back.

That would have been a mercy, if not for the cold. His breath didn’t frost when it left him, but it felt like it should. The chill wasn’t physical. It was inside.

He crouched there near the tree, taking his time. Then he inched forward, using his shoulder on the trunk to brace himself, and took a peek.

And ducked back behind the devilpine, swearing internally, clear beads of sweat standing out on his forehead and cheeks, wetting his underarms and making his woolen stockings slippery inside his well-worn boots.

Oh God, protect a sinner, now and forever. Shine Your light on us, dear Lord, and let us be as lamps in darkness. I am a sword of the righteous and You are my shield.

Funny how the urge to pray returned, even though he’d sworn never to do it again after Annie died, screaming an undead’s unholy grinding cry. Only it was a pair of dark eyes he thought of now, and curls knocked loose, and her trembling against him.

He was shaking, but his hands knew what to do. One of them touched a pistol’s butt, the other drew a knife.

Another look, just to be sure. He ducked back again, and this time the fear was high and hard and sharp, bitter copper against his tongue and his heart pounding in his temples and wrists and ankles so hard he thought he might slide into unconsciousness right there on the hillside. And lie there, vulnerable and alone, with the unphysical coldness breathing over him.

That brought him up in a rush, and he stepped out into the open, facing the dark mouth of the unsealed claim. It yawned, a fracture in the hillside full of spilled-ink darkness even broad daylight wouldn’t penetrate, and the cold struck him like a wall of flash-flood water in a gully.

And Jack Gabriel, who had once been a priest, went about his holy work.

He slumped in the saddle instead of riding straight. Hathorn knew her way home, but he should have been more alert. Instead he was thinking through cotton. The chill exhaling from the mouth of the seal-cracked claim got into a man’s bones.

Think about something warm, then.

His thinking wouldn’t listen. Instead, it hitched on the boy. What was his name?

He couldn’t pull it out of his memory at first, and that was odd. More than odd, since he had a suspicion it wasn’t the first time. It was downright unnatural, the way the boy’s name kept slipping through the cracks.

Jack’s fingers were strips of ice; he had long ago ceased shivering. The sky was a congested mass, dust billowing as Hathorn picked her way carefully, the fan-shaped charmhood on her sleek head bobbing. A good horse, even if he was getting on in—

There it is again. Getting distracted.

Devilpine trees shook as the wind rattled them. Soon they’d be in the flats, heading for town, and he would see Catherine’s face again. Those wide dark eyes, and the sweet way her mouth turned down at the corners when she tried to put on a prim face. The single dimple in one soft cheek when she forgot herself and smiled.

There. That’s it.

“Robbie Browne.” His feet were numb and his hands, too. The cold was all through him, except for the flame in his chest that was the light in a pair of dark eyes. Such a small, still spark to hold back that ice. “That was him.”

Just a greenhorn, a boy with a quick tongue and deft hands at cards. An expensive charing and good cloth, but he slid around trouble like grease on a griddle. Dark eyes, a stubborn wave to his dark hair, and a jaw just begging to be set right with a fist when he smiled that easy smile.

With so much other trouble to keep in check, though, Gabe hadn’t worried about him. Just another dreamer come Westronward without the sense God gave a mule.

Like Catherine?

Damn the woman, dancing into his thoughts all the time. But the thought of her pushed the ice back, gave him space to breathe. He lifted his head slightly, checked his surroundings. The hills were behind him, falling away like a sodden coat.

When Robbie Browne showed up with gold bars and a mysterious smile, there was a certain amount of grumbling. But there was grumbling any time a miner struck anything worthwhile out there. But then there had been the incursion, the circuit broken and something deadly lurking in the junip and wild tabac, something whose breath brought the corpses up out of sandy soil and gave both Russ and Gabe plenty of trouble.

It was the claim, of course. Just sitting there waiting for someone, and the boy had stumbled across it. Tracing the incursion of bad mancy to its source had led Gabe straight to the claim, and he and Russ had arrived just in time to see the boy vanishing into the dark crack in the hillside. Waiting for Browne to come out had been nerve-wracking, but Gabe had been sure he would.

And lo, he had. Seeing a sheriff waiting for him, though, the boy had drawn, and Gabe’s gun spoke first.

At least they had buried the kid right. It had…bothered Gabe, a bit, to see Robbie Browne’s charing gone. It could have been lost in the claim, true. The thing that had chased Browne out into the fading dust-choked light of that long-ago afternoon could have broken the chain of his charing-charm.

Still, he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all, so he had gone out that night and made sure the earth around the hasty grave was blessed as one of the Ordo Templis could make it. If he had enough grace to seal up that hole in the hill again, and enough to take care of the death-charm left on Catherine’s porch, then Robbie Browne was sleeping safely.

Jack Gabriel’s head came up. The cold receded, its fingers scraping his shoulders and trickling down his spine.

The thought of her just kept coming back. The exact sound of her steps, her point-toe boots clipping along with authority. The graceful lift of her arm as she pointed to the large slate board and helped a child along with a recitation. Her inviting Mercy Tiergale in to tea, as if it were no great shakes. And her holding Li Ang’s baby, a disbelieving smile like sunlight on her wan face as she looked at Jack Gabriel.

A look like that could go straight through a man.

The smudge on the horizon was Damnation, and Hathorn picked up her pace a little as the wind’s moan mounted. The simoun had just been taking a breather, not spent yet.

If he made it back to town in time, he could see her. Might even tell Russ he’d take the wagon out himself, though with Hathorn’s gait that wasn’t too likely. It didn’t matter; Russ would see her home safe. One of the Bradford boys was riding the circuit with the chartermage tonight, so Gabe didn’t have to worry about that.

And tonight was also their weekly game at the Lucky Star. Maybe his luck had changed.

Gabe set his shoulders and rode on, the cold fading even as the hot rasping wind rose.