Chapter 3

Shane did not sleep at all that night. He lay with his back to the hard dirt and stared up at a sky so vast that it made his head spin with vertigo.
Covenant.
A second tournament.
The idea of it was so abhorrent that he didn’t want to accept that it was true. But of course it’s true. Buchanan, with his perverse knack for finding just exactly what it was that would hurt a man had found the perfect way to avenge himself on Shane. The question now was how had Shane not heard about it sooner?
To many, the Fastest Guns were, like Covenant, a myth. Rumour spoke of a secret society of gunfighters who fought with each other in ritualised duels to the death in order to prove their superiority. Their origins dated back to the duellists of the Eighteenth Century but it had only been recently, in the wake of the August Third Massacre at Covenant, that the Fastest Guns had become consolidated into a formal institution. Jacob Priestley was revered as their posthumous messiah and Covenant was their unholy Jerusalem. In 1881, with the memory of the slaughtered still fresh in the town’s deserted streets, the Fastest Guns had held their first tournament and a hundred gunfighters had killed each other until only the six best remained.
Nobody had seen or heard of those men since.
Covenant was not much further away and early the following morning, Shane and Buchanan entered one of the many ghost towns that surrounded it.
The town was a small cluster of buildings, half-buried in the sand. Balls of tumbleweed rolled listlessly across the empty street, blown on a breeze that whispered like far-off voices in the sand. The whole place had the feel of something not quite dead.
Glancing around, Shane noted a strange uniformity in the way the buildings all leaned on their foundations. All of them were pitched at almost precisely the same angle towards the southeast, as if all were straining to uproot themselves and move further away from where Covenant lurked beyond the northwest horizon.
The ghost town was one of about a dozen that surrounded Covenant like desiccated husks in a spider’s web. They had all been abandoned within three years of the August Third Massacre, their inhabitants driven out by a mixture of drought and ill-fortune. Covenant’s curse had spread since 1879, reaching out like an enormous hand to steal the vitality from everything it touched, poisoning the land and bringing death and destitution.
Shane’s horse grew increasingly nervous the further they rode. She flared her nostrils and needed constant correction; a correction that Shane himself was reluctant to enforce. He knew exactly what it was that she could sense around them and shared her unease. Buchanan’s horse was unaffected, he noticed. Besides an occasional shaking of its head or worried snort through flared nostrils, it behaved perfectly well.
It’s had chance to grow accustomed, Shane realised. My God, he’s not only been here before, he’s spent time here.
It seemed unthinkable. Shane had heard stories of men who had travelled to Covenant. Mostly they were gunfighters, as he had once been, who went there seeking the Fastest Guns. The stories always spoke of the grisly end that befell those intruders. Shane had never once heard of anyone going and being allowed to leave.
But things had changed. It was late in the afternoon when Covenant appeared on the horizon and the first thing that Shane noticed about it – the first thing that jarred with his expectations – were the men who guarded its perimeter. They occupied rooftop nests, stood at balconies and upper-storey windows and were armed with heavy-calibre, long-distance rifles.
The Fastest Guns, it seemed, had secretly increased their numbers, though again Shane could not understand how they might have done so without his hearing of it.
The guards issued no challenge as they drew closer; they recognised Buchanan. Shane looked up at them as he rode by. Their eyes were hard, the thoughts behind them clipped and professional. They reminded Shane of the marksman who had lurked on Cantle Ridge. Each had that same killer’s edge.
Shane was back among his own kind.
They rode into town along the wide thoroughfare known as West Street. Covenant was a corpse of a town. Its buildings slumped on their foundations, their dirt-encrusted walls sagging, sloughing strips of old paint like rotting skin. Its windows had been mostly boarded-up or smashed. Those that remained intact were coated in a layer of hard, scabrous dirt. In places, the rooftops had caved in. In others, whole buildings had collapsed on themselves.
The air was hot and fetid. Shane smelled gunsmoke, as if a full-on battle had only recently been fought. Eight years on and still the memory of August Third remained, leaking out of the town’s every pore.
Further in, some of the buildings began to show signs of being lived in. Wooden boards had been torn from the windows and the dirt scrubbed from the glass, admitting light into the rooms beyond. Men watched him suspiciously as he passed. By the hungry look in their eyes, he judged that they were contestants, sizing him up in preparation for the tournament. A few of them were men that he recognised, at least by their reputations.
Shane felt as though he was watched by other eyes as well, though he saw nothing more. The sensation made his flesh creep.
West Street met with the South Street thoroughfare at the exact centre of town in a crossroads. The old town hall stood on one corner, its clock tower looming over the junction like a sentinel. The hands on its clock face had long ago rusted solid and become stuck at the strike of noon.
Buchanan hitched his horse outside a building that had once been the finest hotel in town, the Grande. It was a majestic building that still clung to a faded dignity even as it slumped into decay. The steps of its wooden porch flexed under Shane’s weight as he followed Buchanan inside, into a lobby that had been built with the hotel’s name in mind. Sunlight slanted through tall windows, lighting on the tarnished frame of a chandelier and an ornate stair that climbed the wall to a gallery overhead.
A brass bell sat on the front desk and Buchanan slapped his hand against it repeatedly, breaking the austere silence. After a short while, a door opened upstairs and a tall black man appeared at the gallery. He stared down at Buchanan with a look of cold disdain.
Grinning, Buchanan sauntered to the foot of the stairs. ‘Is your master at home?’ he asked.
The man did not answer him but flicked a curious glance towards Shane. The faintest suggestion of a grin twitched at the corners of his lips. Shane did not like that grin; it had a distinctly predatory look about it and he instantly decided that he did not like this man. This man was dangerous.
He descended the stairs with smooth, graceful steps, seeming to glide, the hem of a long, grey overcoat dragging on the steps behind him. A delicate, long-fingered hand brushed against the handrail, stirring up flakes of dust. Buchanan stepped out of his way as he reached the ground floor, affording him space the way a lone wolf avoids a bear. It was only when they stood side-by-side that Shane realised just how tall the man was: he towered a full head above Buchanan, who was himself over six feet tall.
The giant glided past Buchanan and Shane caught himself instinctively backing away as he drew closer. ‘You must be Shane Ennis,’ he said. His voice was soft and had a strange accent that Shane could not identify. Shane forced himself to meet the stranger’s gaze, and found himself staring into eyes that were as fathomless as his own.
‘I got him.’ Buchanan said proudly.
‘So I see.’ The man turned and beckoned for them to follow him into a dimly lit hall.
‘Have the other contestants arrived?’ Buchanan asked.
‘Ennis is the last,’ the giant replied.
‘How many have tried to kill each other already?’
‘None.’
Buchanan snorted derisively. ‘Well that’s no good. They’re supposed to be killers, aren’t they?’
The giant stopped beside a door and gestured for Shane to pass through. The room beyond was murky with dust. Tall windows dominated the far walls but their surfaces were so encrusted with years of accumulated grime that the light that shone through was stained a dirty shade of brown. In the centre of the room was a semi-circle of armchairs, each covered with a muslin cloth. Other furniture – broken and mouldering – had been stacked against the walls.
A man stood at the window, facing out through a small circle that he had wiped clean of dirt. He turned as Shane entered the room. He was grey-haired with tanned skin and a trimmed moustache and beard. His boots were made of soft leather and were worn with brown woollen pants, a white shirt and a brown waistcoat and jacket, all expensively-tailored by the look of them. At his side was a bone-handled Colt 1873 Single Action Army revolver, rigged for a right-handed cross-draw. The look of the man said that he was no stranger to the weapon, although his bearing did not indicate that he was a gunfighter by trade. He lacked the constant wariness that men in Shane’s former profession learned to possess. Judging by his confidence and the authority in his stance, Shane guessed that he was a military man, or had been once.
This was Buchanan’s employer, the man who had fronted the money to buy Shane’s capture. Shane was slightly disappointed that he was nobody he recognised.
‘You got him. Excellent,’ the man congratulated Buchanan. ‘Noonan gave you no trouble?’
‘None at all.’ Buchanan answered with a smile. ‘Penn and the boys will be along with your money shortly.’
‘Good. If there’s one thing that I appreciate, Mister Buchanan, it’s not having to pay for the things I want. Mister Ennis!’ He extended his hand warmly. ‘I’ve been very much looking forward to meeting you, sir. My name is Colonel Hartshorne.’
Shane had never met him but he had heard of him by reputation. Nathaniel Hartshorne had fought for the Union under General George McClellan and had earned himself an unsavoury reputation for being a butcher. During the Battle of James Point in 1861, rumour had it that he had pressed an attack upon Confederate forces despite their surrender, and had slaughtered an entire company of unarmed men.
After the war he had gone on to amass a considerable fortune on the stock market. Asked once how he picked his investments, he had confessed that he regularly consulted with a medium and that he cast his own horoscopes before embarking on any new venture.
Word in occult circles was that Nathaniel was secretly a practitioner of the black arts and that it was no medium he consulted, but a demon instead. It was rumoured that he had found something during the war – or that something had found him – wandering the battlefield among the dead and the wounded. It was to secure a deal with that something that he had led his brutal assault at James Point, and because of that deal that he had since become the thirteenth richest man in America.
But money wasn’t enough for Nathaniel. For the past eight years he had invested thousands of dollars into archaeological expeditions around the world. He had plundered tombs and ancient cities in Egypt, Africa, Tibet and India, supposedly searching for some form of supernatural power.
So far as Shane was aware, he had no connection to the Fastest Guns. What he was doing in Covenant was a mystery.
Shane ignored the occultist’s proffered hand. After a moment’s embarrassed hesitance, Nathaniel withdrew it.
‘You’ll have to excuse the means by which I brought you here,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you can appreciate, I very much doubted that you would have come had I simply asked you. Won’t you take a seat?’
Buchanan threw Shane into a chair. Dust erupted from the muslin sheet. Shane had no sooner recovered his breath when Nathaniel extended a glass of cognac to him. ‘Drink?’
Again, Shane refused. Nathaniel was indifferent. He sat opposite Shane and sipped from the glass himself, savouring it before swallowing. ‘Really, you should try to enjoy my hospitality Mister Ennis. I’m given to understand it that comfort is something that you cannot expect to look forward to where you’re going. You should make the most of it now.’
‘Fuck you.’
Buchanan stepped threateningly close, his fist raised, but Nathaniel stayed him. ‘I think that Mister Buchanan would gladly hit you all day,’ he told Shane. ‘But then how could you be expected to compete in the tournament?’
‘Who says I’m going to anyway?’ Shane growled.
Nathaniel held his cognac up to the light and contemplated it. He swirled the liquid with a deft rotation of his wrist. ‘Let me answer you with another question if you will, Mister Ennis. If I put you on that crossroads tomorrow with a gun in your hand and set another man opposite you, likewise armed; and if I then tell you that man will shoot you unless you shoot him first, would you choose to die? No, I think not. I know you, Mister Ennis. Buchanan has told me a lot about you; the rest I can fill in for myself. I’ve seen the things you’ve seen. I embrace them.’
He lowered the cognac to his lips and drained the glass. ‘You will compete in this tournament, Mister Ennis. You really don’t have any other choice.’



Shane’s eyes had grown accustomed to the Grande’s dark interior and the sunlight blinded him as he stepped outside. He shielded his face with one hand. Faded lettering on the wall of a building across the street identified the place as O’Malley’s Saloon, home, the sign boasted, to the best Irish whisky in the county. A man stood in the open doorway, staring at Shane.
‘Know him?’ Buchanan asked.
‘No.’ Shane lied.
They unhitched their horses and Buchanan took Shane to a stable off West Street. It was a barn-like building whose rafters were thick with cobwebs. Some fifteen horses were already stabled there. Some had clearly been in town longer than the others and had grown accustomed to its atmosphere, just as Buchanan’s had. Shane again marvelled that Covenant had tolerated a human presence for so long. It went completely against everything that he thought he knew about the place.
The stables were tended by an ostler with a surly disposition. Shane got the impression that he was there to guard the horses more than take care of them. He found his mare an empty stall by himself and rubbed her down and brushed her. She was nervous about being left on her own and she nuzzled him urgently.
‘Easy, girl,’ he whispered. She had been his only companion for years and he wondered what would happen to her after he was gone. He patted her lovingly on the flank and found her some grain to eat. There was a hoof pick lying on a wooden block close to the feed bags. Buchanan saw him look at it and smiled knowingly, aware of what Shane was thinking. He also knew that Shane didn’t have the nerve.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Nathaniel wants you to get cleaned up.’
Shane left the hoof pick where it was and followed him outside. They walked back onto West Street, where a pair of riflemen passed them by. ‘They’re not contestants.’ Shane observed.
‘No.’ Buchanan replied. ‘Nathaniel calls them his invigilators. They’re here to make sure everyone plays nicely.’
‘Does that include you?’
‘Hell, I always play nicely. It just depends on what kind of a game you happen to be playing.’
He led Shane down a narrow alleyway into a yard, enclosed by leaning walls and a ramshackle fence. At one end was a shed in which were three tin baths and a hearth for heating water. Buchanan showed him where there was a pump across the yard, then left him to it.
Alone, Shane filled his bath. He could not shake the suspicion that, even though he could not see anyone, he was being watched. His bath water was steaming when a soft tread alerted him that he had company. He expected it to be Buchanan, returning to taunt and threaten him some more, but instead it was the man from O’Malley’s Saloon. He leaned himself in the shed’s open doorway and glared at Shane through slitted eyes. ‘I heard you’d be competing this time,’ he said. ‘I had to kill three men before I got an invite, just so I can finally be the man to put you in your grave.’
Shane unbuttoned his shirt. ‘What’s the matter, Sullivan? You like me so much you’ve come to watch me undress?’’
‘No, I just come to look you in the eyes, tell you I’ll be seeing you in Hell real soon.’
Shane turned slowly away and finished undressing. ‘You’ll have to save me a seat,’ he said. The man swore at him and left him to his bath. It had been a good long while since Shane had bathed and the hot water felt good against his skin. He scrubbed himself clean. After a while, Buchanan returned with a razor and clean clothes.
‘I heard you had a visitor.’
‘Nobody special.’
Buchanan leaned his back against the wall and grinned. ‘David Sullivan. I heard he was looking for you a while back. You the man that killed his brother?’
Shane didn’t answer. He had killed lots of people.

After he had washed and dressed, Shane was taken back to the crossroads where a cell had been prepared for him in Covenant’s jailhouse. The building was a squalid brick extension added onto the side of the town hall and courthouse. In it, eight years ago, Jacob Priestley had shot three prisoners through the bars of their cells and the bullet holes remained, the mortar surrounding them coloured brown where the dead men’s blood had splattered. Only one of the cells had been empty on August Third, and that was the one that Shane was now put in. Some work had been done to strengthen it: the bars were set in fresh stone and the lock on the door was new. Buchanan produced the key from a chain around his neck and locked him in.
A guard was stationed in the next room and Buchanan spoke to him as he left. ‘No visitors. Anyone wants to speak with him, you send them to me.’
Shane walked over to the bars and tested them for strength. He was not surprised to find that they were properly secure. If he had any notion of escaping then he had left it far too late to put into action now. Feeling wretched, he sat on the edge of his bunk and put his head in his hands. He had always known that he would end up in a situation like this. For six long years he had known it was inevitable, but had run from it nevertheless. Now, the weight of his fear, all his certainty, bore down on him and crushed him with despair.
What made it worse, what really made him hate himself, was the joy he felt deep inside: that this was where he wanted to be. That finally he was where he belonged.
A noise outside made him cross to the window. His cell looked out into an alleyway, down which it was possible to see out to the front porch of the Grande on the opposite side of the street. Three riflemen had drawn up outside the hotel. Shane recognised them as the men from Saddle Horn Rock. Tethered in a line behind them were five horses that had once belonged to Noonan and his men, and a sixth that carried the money boxes containing the twenty-thousand dollars that Nathaniel had paid for Shane’s capture.
Nathaniel’s servant met with them and Shane overheard one of them refer to him by his name: Whisperer. He had them carry the boxes inside, then the horses were taken away to be stabled. Shane returned to his bunk and sat down to brood.