Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
It was with an explosive frantic fluttering that the quail broke from the scrub, barely registered before the gun’s thunder broke the twilight calm, before any thought of the bird came to the fore.
Only after the bird had dropped to the twisting shadows of the mesa, had the stranger known she had made a kill. There was no magic in the act, although it might have seemed so had anyone witnessed the event.
The quail had come to rest in scrub ten yards ahead of her. Her gait was unhurried as she strode to where it had fallen.
There was no ceremony in her work as she dressed it in the scrub. The work was quick and efficient, not a wasted movement — all in the way of someone who had done this many times before under many different conditions.
The Dusk lingered, a dark petulant bruise hanging over the land darkening everything in a transient, unreliable light refusing to respect the idea of the progression of time. Hours and days melted into one another, and the stranger had long ago ceased caring which direction the Dusk would take a fancy to. Seasoned travelers in the Wastes knew better than to try and mark the passage of time. One slept when they were tired, ate when they hungered. Chop wood. Carry water. Mark time as the tasks pass.
So she hunted. She gathered wood. She would eat soon and perhaps even sleep, although that was rare enough at these times. She wrapped the bird in leather, stowed it in the saddlebag she then slung over her shoulder, and walked on.
The bag rode wrong on her shoulder since she had left the camp and the carnage behind. The weight was still distributed for a horse’s back, causing the buckle to catch at her collarbone with every other step. She had adjusted the balance twice already and came up with the same result. She let it catch.
The mesa had been visible since what passed as midmorning in the Dusk-benighted wastes, rising up over the shattered and broken terrain without ceremony. It stood alone, a visual waypoint to set her steady gait toward, far too large to succumb to the bending of space that warped the badlands as the stranger drifted ever further from the Old Canaan road that marked the pilgrim and merchant paths leading to Absalom.
The weathered labyrinth of painted stone was the kind of terrain that punished inattention: shattered limestone, dry washes where ground slipped away without warning, the particular silence of places that had been empty of the ordinary kind of life long enough that something else had moved in. It occurred to her as she made her way through that these lands had likely not known the tread of a Walker of the Duskward since before the Founding, making it a wode-stained land. She wondered when what passed as its denizens might make themselves known.
There was a chance anything living between the washes, gullies and creases in the land might be more scared of an encounter than she might have been.
Yet, something had been keeping pace with her since the second wash out of camp.
Whatever it was, whether it meant ill or otherwise — she did not look for it. She had filed it the way she filed everything the Dusk put in her peripheral vision — present, noted, not yet requiring a decision. It was still deciding.
The compass in her pocket said she was pointed correctly when she checked it against the mesa at rests. The footwork between her and the mesa’s base was the last of the hard going. She wanted to arrive before the twilight flicker-cut and threatened to bring the night.
The quail would need a fire. The fire would need wood. The wood would not find itself. Following the instincts carried since the time people had first cultivated flames, she wanted a campfire burning, with plenty of fuel and the mesa at her back before then.
She picked up her pace. Making camp before night felt doable, leaving her only one other significant concern. Her water was low. Not a problem yet. Approaching one.
She had not slept well at the camp she’d made the night previous — or the night before that, she had lost reliable count — the ground harder than it looked and the kind of dreams that the Dusk brought left her less rested than the waking.
She kept on.
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The rock had been shedding itself from the mesa for long enough that the ground was littered with what had been given up — flat plates of stone, deadfall wedged into cracks and weathered to pale grey, the debris of dry washes that had come and gone over uncountable seasons. She gathered what would burn and set her camp where the rock offered a windbreak, working in the methodical way of someone who had stopped expecting the work to feel like anything in particular. Chop wood, carry water.
The crow was watching from somewhere above her on the rock face. She had not seen it land.
The thing that had been following her had stopped some distance back. She could feel the quality of its stopped attention without being able to say how she felt it.
She set the quail aside to cook once a fire had been started. Her stomach growled. However, gathering enough wood to last her for however long the night might last and more was the larger priority. The quail would keep.
The smell reached her while she was on her third trip for wood.
Water. Not the alkaline flatness of a standing pool. Moving water, carrying the smell of stone, cold and depth. With her armful of deadfall, she stood still and turned her head to find the direction of the source.
Setting the gathered wood down as she passed the camp, she followed the smell.
It led her along the mesa’s base, where the rock face met the ground in a seam. The smell strengthened. In the failing light of the Dusk holding as it always held — neither committing nor releasing — a shadow resolved in the rock face that had the quality of a shadow that went somewhere rather than simply casting itself darkly against the slate and siltstone.
A cave. Or the beginning of one.
She looked back toward her camp. The quail. The fire laid but not lit. The meagre woodpile beside the camp.
She faced the opening in the rock again.
The smell of water came from inside it: clear and certain and cold.
She went back to camp to get her water skin, half-afraid the cave might fade with the shifting of the twilight before she could return. When she turned and it was still there, she hurried back up the slope and went in.
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