The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [147]
“What are you?” Quire asked as he began to work his way through the movements needed to make the musket ready once more. It was mechanical now; the instinctive memory of it reawakened in him by repetition. He barely needed to watch what he was doing, and could keep his eyes upon Hare.
Hare was still trying to get to his feet, but his legs buckled beneath him and he went down. He lifted himself up on his hands and leered at Quire.
“What does that matter?” the beast laughed. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Quire grunted. “Future’s full of surprises, I’ve found. Best not to concern yourself overmuch with it. Concentrate on the present.”
He looked at his right hand. There was a fine layer of gunpowder dusted across it now. He wiped it clean on his trousers.
“Are you not the Devil, then?” he asked.
Hare laughed.
“No, Mr. Quire, I’m not your Devil. But think of me that way, if it makes you happy. I’ll not mind. Just stop with all your questions. You’d as well ask what the wind is, or the water, or the earth, as what I am.”
“They’ll have answers to all that, likely as not, the way the scientists and the philosophers and such are getting so busy these days,” Quire said as he raised the musket to his shoulder.
“Never to me,” Hare shouted, “never to me.”
To Quire’s amazement, he hauled himself to his feet yet again, bone crackling in his knees as he did so, his legs twisting and bending unnaturally. He took a long, sinking pace towards Quire, his face contorted into a mask of such pure hatred that it rendered it almost inhuman. More beast than man.
“Never to you,” Quire muttered, “Aye, you might be right about that.”
And he shot Hare for the fourth and last time, in the heart, and knocked him down with the force of it.
Quire set the Brown Bess aside then, leaving it safely out of reach of the still writhing figure in the heather. He drew his sabre as a flock of ravens went croaking overhead, rolling about. He glanced up at them, and saw for the first time that the sky was blue now; a pristine field of azure, from horizon to horizon.
He looked at Hare. He was lying face down. The violence of his movements was diminishing. Quire trod on one of the man’s outstretched arms and pinned it down. He hacked at the wrist with the sabre. It took a few blows to separate hand from arm, and it came away without much in the way of blood or gore. The spirit inhabiting Hare did not seem to notice.
Quire peeled the glove off the hand, and looked impassively at the crude writing and symbols scrawled across the skin. None of it he could understand; there was no meaning to it for him. But Durand had said to clear the writing from the hand, and Quire thought that taking the hand from the body should serve just as well.
He cut the other hand away more easily. He rolled Hare on to his back. There was no movement in the limbs now, but the eyes still darted from side to side. They found Quire’s face, and held on to his gaze. The lips trembled, trying to recall the shape of a sneer.
Quire trotted over to his backpack and tipped it out. He gathered up the flasks of lamp oil and carried them to Hare’s corpse. He poured most of the oil over the body, and then set about the business of gathering as much dry, old heather as he could, slashing at it with the sword. It would dull the blade, but he hoped to have no further use for the thing. He heaped the loose, leggy clumps of heather over Hare’s prostrate form.
He meant, as well, to have no further use for the cartridges in his belt pouches, so he tore them all open and made a little mound of the powder close by the pyre. He soaked some more heather in the last of the oil, and laid that over the pyramid of gunpowder. And then, at last, he knelt, and held the musket low down, and sent sparks from the flintlock scattering out into the powder and the oil-soaked heather.
He sat on a low rock, perhaps thirty yards away, and watched Hare burn. Great yellow flames