The rubber tires of the mine ambulance made a heavy, squelching sucking sound as they rolled through the black sludge of the clinic cutting. Behind the two casks of crude pitch, wedged between the timber staves and the rear axle, Bevin Soot was curled into a ball of trembling green wool. His fat shoulders shook with convulsive, silent sobs.
The cutting was a freezing dark rock trench fifty paces deep. Its upright walls wept black water that smelled of sulfur filings and dead moss. Overhead, the sky was an unbroken ceiling of soot-stained cloud, lit only by the faint, poisonous viridian glow of the Great Quartz dome up on the crest. Every ten paces, the rubber tires hit an exposed cross-tie where the ballast had washed away, jarring the heavy chassis and sending a sickening creak through the ash push-bars.
Bram Ash didn’t look down at the merchant with pity. He stepped over the rear push-bar, his heavy hobnailed boot planting hard on the calf of Bevin’s trousers, pinning the man’s leg against the iron axle-tree. His right shoulder was soaked with dark blood where the morning’s gunshot wound had pulled open, the linen wrapping stiff with dried rust-colored gore. But his jaw remained locked in an expression of flat, homicidal fury.
