Heaven's Gate by Toby Bennett Page A

gives him a taste of the unholy hunger which had been passed on to him from his long dead victims. While he waits he battles a terrible temptation, one he will not even admit exists, except in these moments of twilight. How easy the voices tell him, how easy it would be to find someone soft, her blood still warm, to feel the surge of power as he draws in another soul, not the old dry strength of the undead but a young vital, life force. Just a touch of his spur on his horse’s flanks and he could go down there, like a wolf among the chickens. So easy! So free! A freedom worth any price, the whispers promise. The rider remains still, not answering these desperate siren calls; he has long since learned not to debate with the beast raging within him, let it wear itself out and then ride on. His hand shakes and not with the growing cold, his anticipation is not all a predator’s need, he is waiting for something. Whatever is following him will be here soon, senses beyond any human understanding tell him of its coming. He smells it, though the wind is in the wrong direction, hears it, though it has no beating heart nor blood to tempt his wakened hunger. He knows all this because he knows it is dead, it is something he can never mistake, no matter how the dead might wreathe themselves in the trappings of the living. He does not need to see their pupiless eyes to recognize the shambling corpses and wind blown specters of the dessert. The creature that stalks him now is different, however, he can feel it, it has purpose, a portentous weight that decades of wandering have taught him is more than coincidence, what the ignorant might call fate. So the Pilgrim waits, caught between two worlds, the void of the desert and the false light of the western line.
     
    Sure enough his pursuer rounds the rock to his left, just as the last lights in Limit are winking on. The clown does not bother to hide its nature as others, who remember life more clearly sometimes do, the moonlight falls on white limbs, making jagged blades of the ribs poking through his once colourful clothes. Neither the bone clown nor the rider need any light to clearly see the other; a look of disgust curls the rider’s lips as he stares down on the skeletal face, made chalky white by the rising moon. Recognition halts his hand on his gun’s smooth handle, the figure before him is not simply some unfortunate spirit still animating a shambling corpse. His preternatural senses tell him of an intelligence behind those empty eyes, perhaps more than one. Taking the rider’s hesitation for welcome, the skeletal troubadour springs up onto a rock and squats, playing a tune that is little more than a whisper on a much-abused flute.
     
    “ Etine ?” The rider asks, the familiar tune and the battered jester’s hat fixing the corpse’s identity in the rider’s mind.
    For a while there is no reply, just the sad, low lament of the flute. The rider raises his weapon, thinking to make a quick end of the unfortunate abomination, when the crouched figure speaks.
    “Captain,” the thing says breathily, it has no lungs and yet its speech is halted and laboured as if it had just finished running a long race ,   “ Captain, it is good that you waited, I could not safely have followed you in there and I must speak with you on an urgent matter.”
    “What could I want with you?” Blake does not lower his weapon. “You have used this man, who was once my friend but it will not help you sway me. I sense that you are not truly the man I saw die, nor would it help if you were, I have no use for damned spirits or their bones.”
    “Please, at least listen, Captain, though I am sure you find my servant distasteful, I have news that relates directly to what you seek,”
    “And what do I seek?” Blake’s finger curls on the trigger.
    “What you have always sought, flame in the sky, the Gate, that was your last thought before you lost consciousness outside the Citadel and it is what