them. Quire darted around to the far side of the coach, hiding himself from their view. He watched Fleck doff his hat and call a greeting as they trundled past, but neither of the two police officers in the carriage responded. They looked, from the glimpse of their faces Quire caught through the windows of the coach, thoroughly dejected. As would he be, he supposed, if his official duties involved saving men such as Hare from the justified wrath of the common folk, and escorting them safely on their way.
Once the police carriage was out of sight, Quire went to the front of the coach and reached up to offer Fleck his hand. The coachman regarded it blankly for a moment or two, then took it in his own and gently shook it.
“I’m grateful for your help,” Quire said in the dawn’s gathering light.
Fleck just nodded.
“I’ll hope to see you in a day or two,” Quire said.
And with that they parted, Fleck to Dumfries, Quire to the moors. Before he went, he loaded the musket. The movements were more familiar now than they had been for years. He had made Fleck stop, on a wild stretch of road somewhere a couple of hours south of Edinburgh, and spared a few precious minutes from the pursuit to get a feel for the gun and his handling of it. Standing there, on the edge of bleak, empty fields, he loaded, and fired, four or five times over, the shots booming out over the barren land. Each time he had been a little faster, a little surer. As he would have to be, he suspected.
He ran out into the heather. He did not try for too much pace. He was tired enough already, and had no wish to bring himself to his knees any sooner than he had to. And he remembered, from his youth, just how treacherous these places could be to a man who attempted to cover too much ground too quickly, hiding all manner of pits and hollows and tripping roots beneath the endless, featureless carpet of heather.
Hare was out of sight, swallowed up by the vast landscape, but Quire did not concern himself with that. He had marked the man’s course, and angled his own to meet it, out there in the trackless waste. If he could not see his quarry for now, it would only be some hollow in the land, or the tiny dip of a valley cut by a little burn, that was hiding it from him.
Grouse burst from his feet and went churring away low over the heather, like winged balls shot from the mouth of a cannon. The first time it happened he almost fell, so alarming and unexpected was the noise and blur of movement; after that, he was not so easily startled. Watchful, though. Always watchful.
There came a time when he slowed, first to a trot, and then a walk. And, at last, to a halt. He stood, knee- deep in the brittle heather, and looked out across the undulating ground before him. Slowly, he unshipped the Brown Bess from his shoulder and pulled back the hammer until it locked into place. He fixed his gaze upon one patch of heath, a hundred yards or more away. There was a hue mixed in there, a patch of it, that did not quite belong. Quire stared at it, and waited.
Hare rose to his feet. Quire could see the feral glee in the man’s smile, even at that distance.
“You’re a plague, Quire,” Hare shouted out across the heather. “A revenant, sent to haunt me again and again, is that it? Do you not know I’m under the King’s protection?”
It was the first time Quire had heard the voice of his enemy. While it resided in Blegg, it had never once spoken to him. It did so now in a soft Irish brogue. Whether mimicry or memory or pure invention, Quire did not know. It did not matter. He did not mean to listen to much of what the thing might have to say.
Hare began to run towards him. Quire dipped his left shoulder to let the backpack slip from it. The pack’s fall was cushioned by the mat of springy heather. He dropped on to his right knee, and breathed slowly in and out. He rested his left elbow on his left leg and set the musket’s butt to his shoulder. He looked out along the line of the barrel, across the moor, to the figure running towards him.
He willed his weaker left arm to hold steady, willed his heart to slow, his eyes to clear. The fear was in him, but he pushed it away, far enough that it did not cloud him.
He could hear the heather thrashing against Hare’s legs. Could see the wild hatred in the man’s eyes. A tremor went through him, but he tensed himself to still it, and then let his muscles go slack once more. Closer and closer he let Hare come, knowing that if his first shot missed, he might not live long enough for a second. He had been a fine shot once, and needed to be again. Closer, until he could see little glints of the risen sun on the buttons of Hare’s waistcoat, until he could bear it no more.
He held his breath, and squeezed the trigger, and the Bess roared in his hands. He shot Hare in the knee. It spun the man about and sent him crashing down into the heather, tall and straggly enough there to swallow him up completely.
Quire did not wait for him to rise, as he knew he would. He leaped to his feet, and began the ritual of reloading. His fingers shook, just slightly, as he fumbled the next cartridge out of his belt pouch. He heard movement, out there in the heather. He bit out the top of the paper packet, tapped just enough of the grey, grainy powder into the pan to prime it. He heard Hare rising. Held the gun erect, tipped powder down the barrel.
“Quire, you bastard,” he heard Hare cry at him.
Turned the cartridge about in his fingers, still less steady than he would have liked. Hare was running at him. He saw the dark shape, coming unsteadily now, hampered by his ruined knee. Got the ball into the gun’s mouth, pulled the ramrod up and out from its home. Punched it down Bess’ gullet. He looked up. Twenty yards, no more. Hare’s lips were pulled back in a snarl. Quire kept hold of the ramrod, shouldered the musket, shot Hare in the other leg.
They were so close that the smoke plumed out over Hare, and he fell forwards through it.
“You’re a hard man to kill, someone told me a while ago,” Quire said as he stepped back, out of reach of the hands clawing for him, “so I’ve given it a bit of thought, on the road down here.”
Hare was not done yet, though. Quire had misjudged the ferocious will and power of what was inside the man. Hare surged up once more, and part-staggered, part-rushed forward, throwing himself at Quire, who sprang away. Quire’s heel caught on a gnarled heather stem, and he fell back. He tried to roll at once, but the dense heather hampered him, and in less than a heartbeat’s span, there were hands like stone wrapped around his left ankle, pulling at him. The scabbard of the sabre caught about a half-buried stone as Hare dragged him nearer, and he used that to lever himself up so that he could hammer with the butt of the musket at the arms that held him.
He hit his own leg as much as any limb of Hare’s, and the pain was excruciating, but the hands did come away from his ankle, once a few of the fingers were battered and broken. Quire scrambled away, and got rather gingerly to his feet. He put more ground between him and Hare as the latter rose again, swaying and rocking on legs too crippled to do much more than hold him there. He managed to move them, even so, and though he fell, and had to struggle back on to his feet, he came stubbornly on at Quire.
Who reloaded the Brown Bess again. He was strangely at peace, now that there was nothing to do, nothing to think about, save the immediate and obvious necessity. That calmness lent a speed to his hands. The musket was ready to fire again in no more than twenty seconds, and he brought it smoothly up and had the luxury of another second or two to measure his breathing and take good aim. That second shot had missed the knee at which it was aimed by some little way. The third did not, blasting out the joint in an eruption of shredded cloth and meat and bone splinters. Hare fell, and this time Quire did not think he would be rising soon.
“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.
