Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 Read Online Free Page B

mouth.
            “She’ll be coming after me,” he said, when he’d swallowed.
            Agnieska fed him another mouthful. Neither his tone or expression made it sound like a threat. “I reckon she will,” she said. “And the others.”
            “Your compulsion spell’s worn off,” he said. “Unless you’re planning to cut my feet again.”
            She didn’t say that that was exactly what she’d been planning—although she’d be stretching what was left of her strength, now. “You hear those songdogs?”
            A bean from the next forkload escaped down his chin and she deftly scooped it back into his mouth. He listened a moment. His eyes widened slightly and he nodded.
            “That’s our trail they’re on,” Agnieska said. “They’re closer than your mates.”
            Carrick chewed another mouthful. His lips twitched. “Reckon I’ll walk, then.”
    * * *
            Agnieska pressed down on her knees with her hands, willing her legs to keep pushing her up the slope. To her left, the hillside sheared off into unevenly stepped cliffs. Killjoys inflated their gas sacs in the morning warmth and spun themselves up into the sky, off in search of last night’s leftover carcasses. Her head felt stuffed with cotton.
            Nothing but sharp rocks for a bed. Keep moving.
            She scanned the scree ahead for a good vantage point. She wanted to be up over the first line of hills before they stopped to shelter through the heat of the day, but the songdogs were still following, and gaining ground. Willpower alone was still enough to resist the soporific effect of their singing, but she didn’t want to let them get any closer.
            “What made you become a Sheriff?”
            She guessed Carrick wanted to talk to distract himself from the hunters’ cries. She’d left the tongue clamp off, since there wasn’t much he could do without the use of his hands, anyway, and she judged his mates were too far behind for any voice-only spellcasting to reach them. She reckoned, too, that he’d be leery enough of what experience he’d already had of it, as well as the scorching she’d given him, not to try anything.
            Too soft, Aggy .
            “What made you become a rebel?” she said.
            “I asked first.”
            She glanced back, his head level with her elbow. He peered up at her from under the hem of the shirt she’d given him as a shawl, having neglected to put his hat on his head before she’d dragged him out the back of the hotel.
            “I’ve got the gun,” she said.
            His toe caught on a rock and he returned his attention to his feet. Agnieska shook her head but stole a glance at her own footing.
            “Rebellion chose me,” Carrick said, “rather than the other way around.”
            There was a large, broad-shouldered boulder jutting from the hillside, off to their right. She veered towards it, levering a shell into the chamber of her carbine. The click-clunk of it echoed back off the rocks.
            “The town I grew up in was too small to warrant a police station,” he went on. “Until someone dug a chunk of gold out of the riverbed. Then we got a whole squad of troopers. They were scum, and their lieutenant was worse. Ran the town and the diggers’ camp as a private protection racket. Townsfolk got sick of it. Day came when I led a mob down to the police station, took their guns off them, and put them in their own lock-up. Then we sent off a petition to the district magistrate demanding to have them removed from our town and kicked out of the King’s service.
            “What we didn’t know was that the bloody magistrate was the trooper lieutenant’s uncle. He declared the whole town rebel, put a price on the head of everyone who’d signed the petition, and sent in the