The Ebony man fled across the desert, and the slayer followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, vast, standing to the sky for what looked like infinity in all directions.
It was blinding, white, and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy mist of the mountains which sketched themselves on the boundary, and the devil grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, and death.
A periodic tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and bucks had followed it.
The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied. The slayer had been struck by momentary dizziness, a kind of yawing sensation that made the entire world seem fleeting, nearly a thing that could be looked through.
It passed and, like the world upon whose hide he walked, he moved on. He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing.
A hide waterbag was slung around his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed through the chef over many years and had reached perhaps the fifth level.
Had he been a Nera holy man, he might not have even been thirsty; he could have watched his own body dehydrate with clinical, unbiased attention, watering its chasms and dark inner scoops only when his logic told him it must be done.
He was not a Rasta, however, not a follower of the Man Yeshua, and considered himself in no way holy.
He was just an ordinary pilgrim, in other words, and all he could say with real certainty was that he was thirsty. And even so, he had no particular urge to drink.
Vaguely, all this pleased him. It was what the country required, it was a thirsty country, and he had in his long life been nothing if not adaptable.
Below the waterbag were his guns, carefully weighted to his hands; a plate had been added to each when they had come to him from his father, who had been lighter and not so tall.
The two belts intersected above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack.
The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow, and finely grained. Rawhide tie-downs held the holsters loosely to his thighs, and they swung a bit with his step; they had rubbed away the bluing of his jeans (and thinned the cloth) in a pair of arcs that looked almost like smiles.
The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gunbelts heliographed in the sun. There were fewer now. The leather made subtle creaking noises.
His shirt, the no color of rain or dust, was open at the throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in hand-punched eyelets.
His hat was gone. So was the horn he had once carried; gone for years, that horn, poured from the hand of a dying friend, and he missed them both.
He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert was hardpan and even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only a cloud of aggravating harsh dust like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny campfire on the lee side, the side the sun would quit earliest.
Small signs like this once more affirming the ebony man's possible humanity, never failed to please him.
His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his face. The grin was gruesome, painful. He squatted.
His quarry had burned the devil grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that you would burn. It burned with a greasy, flat light, and it burned slowly. Border residents had told him that devils lived even in the flames.
They burned it but would not look into the light. They said the devils bewitch, beckoned, and would ultimately draw the one who looked into the fires. And the next man foolish enough to look into the fire might see you.
The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now familiar ideographic pattern and crumbled to gray senselessness before the slayer's shoving hand.
There was nothing in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had always been this way.
The slayer had followed the ebony man across the desert for two months now, across the endless, screamingly dreary purgatorial wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic-sanitary ideographs of the ebony man in campfires.
He had not found a can, a bottle, or a waterbag (the slayer had abandoned four of those behinds, like dead snakeskins). He had not found any dung.
He assumed the ebony man buried it.
Perhaps the campfires were a message, spelled out one Great Letter at a time.
Keep your distance, partner, it might say. Or, The end draweth night. Or maybe even, Come and get me. It did not matter what they said or did not say.
He had no interest in statements of the advice they were. What counted was that these remains were as cold as all the others. Yet he had gained.
He knew he was closer, but did not know how he knew. A kind of scent, perhaps. That did not matter, either.
He would keep going until something changed, and if nothing changed, he would keep going, anyway. There would be water if God willed it, the old timers said. Water if God willed it, even in the wasteland.
The slayer stood up, wiping his hands. No other indication; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the hardpan might once have held.
No man-scat, no cast-off trash, never a sign of where those things might have been buried. Nothing. Only these cold campfires along the ancient expressway moving southeast and the relentless range-finder in his head.
Although of course, it was more than that; the pull southeast was more than just a sense of direction, was even more than appeal.