Free Wilde West by Walter Satterthwait Page A

chiseled nostrils flared.
    He is climbing, climbing. Once again that invincible energy begins to coalesce in the pockets and burrows of his body, the secret vents and channels. Soon, soon, soon.
    She moans from low within her throat, moans once, then moans again, longer this time and at higher pitch. The moans become a wail, a slowly rising keen as she arches her body toward his, as tense as a hunter’s bow.
    And he is there to meet her. Ball lightning rumbles down his spine and up his legs, trembles for an instant at his center, then all at once, as he lunges deep deep deep inside her, into her very core, it erupts through him in an explosion of infinite overwhelming sweetness and power that shatters the structure of his being and sends shards and shreds and blistered fragments spinning out across the universe.

    The applause began off toward the left of the auditorium—curious how it arose each time from some new locus—and then undulated to the right, growing in strength.
    He stepped aside from the lectern and with slow solemn dignity he bowed once from the waist toward the crowd.
    The applause thickened most satisfactorily.
    He turned to the left, to the box that held a handful of beaming frontier nonentities in formal wear. He bowed.
    He turned to the right, toward the box that held her and Tabor and the local eminences. Tabor had rediscovered his grin and he was clapping his small hands with a furious delight. The eminences, while showing somewhat less exuberance, in their stiff way still seemed eminently satisfied.
    And she, she was smiling widely as daintily she clapped, as her violet eyes met his.
    He bowed. And although he took care not to bow even a millimeter more deeply than he had before, this time as he bent forward his blood rushed, hot and thick, to his head.

A URID GLARE SPILLED FROM the windows of the saloons, splashed across the crooked wooden sidewalks, sputtered A through the churning crowds that bumped and jostled him as they babbled by.
    The smells here were worse than any he had ever encountered. The sour, feral odor curling off the unwashed bodies of the gaunt-faced cowboys and the grime-coated metal workers. The stinking sulfurous smoke of the smelters, hanging overhead in a low gray perpetual cloud, blotting out the stars. The reek of blood and manure and animal terror drifting from the nearby stockyards. And—dense, vile, almost palpable—the mephitic stench of raw sewage floating from the river.
    More intense even than the smells was the endless noise. Freight cars rumbled, locomotives groaned and hissed. Horses clopped, carriages rattled. Children bawled and whooped and screamed; grown men chittered and chattered, bellowed and roared.
    It was all too much: the crowds, the stink, the confining walls of clatter.
    The garish light.
    He needed the darkness. His work demanded the darkness.

    The dirt street on which finally he found himself was narrow and dim, lighted only infrequently by gaslamps overhead. On each side of it, wooden shacks and shanties stood in low, cramped, uneven file, like a row of worn and rotten teeth. The smells still lingered—the slaughterhouse, the smelter, the sewage—but here only a few people moved about, drunks and derelicts slowly puzzling their way through the desolate shadows.
    Where is the whore ?
    Soon, soon, he assured the sudden harsh voice within him; and he smiled.
    This was a new and astonishing thing: a benefaction. The entities who shared his dominion over the primal forces, the Lords of Light—they now communed with him directly. They permitted him, at last, to hear their speech, low and guttural yet thrilling. In recognition of his own authority, his dedication, his adamantine purpose, they had granted him this unique gift.
    There were two voices, one basso profundo, resonant, gravelly; the other, higher in pitch, slightly less raspy. One day he would work out their exact connection to each other, and to him. One day that