Bloodstone by David Gemmell

Author:David Gemmell [Gemmell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307797537
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

Jacob Moon watched as the painted wagons moved slowly out of sight, the tall, slender blond woman riding the last of them. He hawked and spit. On another day he would have extracted a price for freeing the sandy-haired young man … Meredith? And the price would have been the woman Isis. Mostly Jacob Moon liked his women fat, but there was something about this girl that excited him. And he knew what it was: innocence and a fragile softness. He wondered if she was consumptive, for her skin was unnaturally pale and she had had, he noticed, difficulty climbing into the wagon. Turning away, he focused on more important matters.

Dillon’s body lay in the undertaker’s parlor, and the Jerusalem Man rode free somewhere in the mountains. The trackers had followed him but had lost the trail in the desert. Shannow and a companion had ridden their horses into a circle of stones and vanished. Moon shivered.

Could the man be an angel? Could the whole sorry Bible fairy tale be fact? No. He could not believe that. If God exists, then why does he not strike me down? Christ alive, I’ve killed enough people! He was quick enough to strike down Jenny, and she had never harmed anyone.

It’s all random, he thought. A game of chance.

The strong survive; the weak die.

Bullshit! We all die someday.

The town was unnaturally quiet. The previous day’s shooting had astonished them. True, Dillon had been a feared man, but more than that he had been full of life. A loud, powerful bull of a man radiating strength and certainty. Yet in the space of a few heartbeats he had been cut down by a stranger who had stood in the street and named their sins.

Jacob Moon had arrived in Domango three hours after the killing, when the hunters had just been returning. Then a rider had come in from the Hankin farm. Two more men dead. The Jerusalem Man? Probably, thought Moon.

Still, sooner or later he would have Shannow in his sights. Then that problem would be over.

Moon smiled and recalled the woman. With Dillon’s blood still staining the street, she had walked into the Crusader office and approached him. “I understand, sir, that you are a Jerusalem Rider.” Moon had nodded, his hooded eyes raking the slender lines of her body. “My name is Isis. I have come to you for justice, sir. Our doctor, Meredith, has been wrongly imprisoned. Would you release him?”

Moon had leaned back in his chair and thrown a glance at the stocky Crusader standing by the gun rack. The man cleared his throat. “They’re Movers,” he said. “They come in beggin’.”

“That is not true,” said Isis. “Doctor Meredith merely erected a sign saying that he was a doctor and inviting people to visit him.”

“We already got a doctor,” snapped the Crusader.

“Let him go,” said Moon.

The Crusader stood silent for a moment, then lifted a ring of keys from a hook by the gun rack and moved back through to the rear of the building.

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