The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(86)

“This is your lockhouse?” Looking up, Gabriel saw the marshals’ sigil not only painted on the door but carved into the wood, at least a fingertip deep. The paint filled the gouges, a darker red than he was used to seeing elsewhere in the Territory but reassuringly familiar.

“Locked up close and safe as certainty,” a voice said in his ear as one of the sledge-pullers pushed open the door and started unloading the bodies with ginger caution.

“You must be Possum.” It wasn’t a guess: narrow face, a shock of greying hair, and red-rimmed eyes over a disturbingly pointed, pink-skinned nose, and if the man in front of him had been called anything else, it would have been a crime.

“And you must be one of the road rats the marshal drug in. Welcome to Andreas.” Possum crossed long, bony arms over his chest and stared through the open double doors as the men laid the bodies out on the dirt floor. “Mind you don’t smudge any of my sigils,” he warned. “Or I’ll repaint ’em with your bodily fluids; see if I don’t.”

The two men took about as much notice of his threats as a horse did a fly.

Given the opportunity with someone who seemed to like to talk, Gabriel took it. “Solid, maybe, but a bit smallish. Your judge not throw many people into lockup?”

Possum shrugged, still glaring. “Bandits get what’s coming to ’em, they try Andreas’s walls. But winters are long, people get cussed, specially when they ain’t seen sunlight in a week. Easier to lock ’em in here than have to deal with sorting out the bloodshed after.”

Gabriel felt his eyebrows rise, then pursed his mouth and nodded. No lie there.

“Most a’ them sigils in there just make a fellow feel too lazy to cause trouble,” Possum went on. “Kinda like giving ’em whiskey without the mean part.”

Gabriel nodded appreciatively. “I don’t suppose you’d teach me those?”

Possum snorted, a wet, deeply unpleasant noise. “Nope.”

Gabriel was surprised both by the answer and the matter-of-fact way it’d been said. Bindings were the sort of thing that were shared freely, for the most part. To refuse a polite request?

Isolated, he reminded himself. Likely more than a bit wind-touched, some of them. He ought not take offense. They were guests here, however official the marshal’s presence might be, and Isobel hadn’t given her title. Even if she had, nobody save the marshal and the judge need answer to her if they didn’t wish to.

And perhaps more to the point, the lockhouse was now home to two magicians: it was not all that surprising that the man might not want anyone poking about the wards just then. Isobel had said they wouldn’t wake anytime soon, but he knew her, and he knew she hadn’t been certain on that. So, any sane man’d prefer to be on this side of the walls, if she was wrong, and keep the man responsible for those walls in his good graces, not annoy him with pushing.

Still. The refusal was odd. Gabriel frowned, hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, watching as the two men finished their work and came back out into the sunlight, closing the door behind them. The sigil flared once, a barely-there line of flame, before it returned to simply being paint.

The two men picked up the lines of the sledge and hauled it off without a word of farewell. Possum grunted after them, then turned to stare at Gabriel. “You plan on standing there all day?”

“No.” He decided, good graces or no, that he didn’t like Possum much, and from the way the two men had disappeared with the now-empty sledge, he didn’t think they did much either. “If you could direct me to the judge’s cabin, I’d be most appreciative.”

Despite his politeness, Gabriel made certain his tone couldn’t be mistaken for a request.

“Can’t miss it,” Possum said. “Just keep walking down the way until there ain’t no more to walk.”

There was a thump from inside the hut, something solid hitting ground, and Gabriel jumped, giving the now-closed door a suspicious look, doubled when something inside let out a muttered curse that lifted the hair on the back of his neck, even through the door.

“Don’t you worry none about them,” Possum said, looking like he hadn’t twitched since his feet first planted. “Short of them calling down Mother Breeze herself, them walls aren’t going nowhere and neither is they.”

“You’re certain?”

“Said so, didn’t I?”

He could stay and risk whatever Possum might do if annoyed enough, or he could go find the judge?—and, by proximity, hopefully also Isobel and the marshal—and tell them that at least one of the magicians had woken.

Gabriel briefly considered a third choice: getting his horse from wherever they’d stashed him, loading the mule up again, and riding back out through the stockade walls. He’d signed on to mentor Isobel, to make sure she knew how to survive on the Road, how to deal with marshals and handle posses and bandits, how to handle herself in bad weather, and how to feed herself when supplies ran low. He’d done all that.

In particular—and bargains were all about particulars—he had discharged the terms of his agreement with the devil. Isobel Devil’s Hand could fairly be called competent, with competence, res judicata.

He clapped a hand onto Possum’s thin shoulder, causing the man to startle where sudden noises did not. “I’ll be off, then.”