Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [43]
And I allowed them to come to our land. He almost choked on the thought. Great Spirit, forgive me!
‘Walking Crow?’ The girl spoke in a low voice that carried between them, as the Doctor continued to argue with the longriders. ‘Are you all right?’
He shook his head. He could not lie to her; she was the companion of Rides In Night and to do so would shame Walking Crow even further. ‘All this time, and I have been in step with an evil Manitou. . . I am ashamed.’
Martha touched his arm. ‘You can help us.’ She spoke in a whisper.
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‘These psychos are going to keep killing and destroying unless they find Godlove. Tell us where he’s gone.’
‘I do not know.’ The lie fell from Walking Crow’s lips automatically.
He had become so used to being untruthful for his master that he did it without thinking.
‘Yes you do,’ she replied, seeing the look in his eyes. ‘Godlove wouldn’t just up and leave all his property behind like that. Where are you going to meet him? Tell me. Trust me. ’
He hesitated. For all his many faults, Alvin Godlove had saved Walking Crow’s life. The youth would doubtless have been killed by the men who had taken him as a slave to work in a labour camp, if not for the trickster cheating them at cards and taking him in payment.
Godlove was a greedy man, but not a killer, and he had treated Walking Crow well. . .
But that was before. Before the fallen star, before he had started to change his ways.
‘Beyond the town, a few miles to the south west,’ he husked, ‘an old iron mine, abandoned now. He’s hiding there.’ The admission felt like a weight falling from his shoulders.
Martha nodded. ‘You did the right thing, telling me.’
Walking Crow nodded once; but he wondered if anything he could do would be enough to earn the Great Spirit’s forgiveness.
The cavern was cool and dark. In the flickering light cast by the oil lamp, Godlove sat atop an empty barrel. He leaned forward from his makeshift seat, hunched over the dust-covered wooden trestle table in front of him. His breath was coming in short, fast pulses, and all he could taste was the heavy rust smell of the rocks around him, the tang of the spent mine works stretching away into the darkness beyond the puddle of light cast by the lantern.
He gripped his wrist, feeling the veins beneath his skin pulsing and jumping; and in his hand he held the device, his fingers curled around the broad pistol-grip so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless and white.
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Godlove had been trying for the last ten minutes to do a single thing, a simple thing. He tried over and over to simply put the device down on the table, to unwrap his fingers from it and step away; but his flesh and bones refused to do as he told them.
‘Gah!’ He choked out a gasp and with all the force he could muster, he slammed the hand, device and all, against a support beam. The wooden stanchion creaked and he cried out in pain at the impact, but still the death-grip did not slacken. Tears streaking his face, Godlove sank to the floor and cradled the object in his hands, defeated.
It didn’t look the same as it had when he’d found it, dropped out of the sky like manna from heaven. It had been stubby and compact then, no bigger than a snub-nose pepperbox pistol. It had been that way to begin with. At first Godlove thought he’d been mistaken, but soon he noticed that the more he used it, the more it changed.
As if the throbbing rays that issued from the maw of the cure-all device somehow fed it, made it grow. The silhouette of the gun had taken on better definition, thickening in places, becoming more like the commonplace shape of a Colt single-action pistol. It felt easy and dangerous, heavy in his hands. There was something seductive about the poise of the thing, as if it was willing him to use it.
It feeds on decay. What can anything that feasts on death be, but bad