What if I can kill him? Suppose there is a round in the gun? How many more people die if he’s telling the truth?

“I’m sorry, Sharrow,” Geis said, and shook his head. The spur terminals crackled again; the bandanmyion trotted forward.

Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. Fate, I’m sick of it all.

Geis kicked once more at the bandamyion’s flanks and the animal cantered towards her. Geis raised the sword, swinging it out and back.

Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

She turned and ran.

In her pocket, her hand fitted round the grip of the gun.

The round might be there. How could she not take the chance?

When she heard the bandamyion’s hoofbeats right behind her, she dodged to the side and went down on one knee.

She pulled out the HandCannon, aimed and pulled the trigger.

The bandamyion was turning towards her. In the imperative physicality of that instant she had no idea what she had aimed at, only that she’d knelt and pulled the trigger. The gun fired, spasming once in her hands and then she was diving to the side, throwing the gun away in the same moment, falling and turning, eyes closing as she dropped and curled up.

There was a quick, keen slicing noise.

Something whacked into her side. The pain burst entirely through her body, making her cry out. She splashed into a shallow pool.

The water was cold. One side of her face and body had gone numb. She raised her head and tried to sit up.

The pain flicked on, making her gasp. She crouched, swivelling in the sandy pool so that she was hunched over; the pain faded.

She had at least one broken rib; she recognised the pain from injuries in childhood and adolescence.

She sat up carefully, shivering, and looked towards the Sea House. The bandamyion was hunkered down near the entrance to the underground stables, licking at some blood on one shank. Its saddle hung half-off, askew over its haunches.

She looked around and saw Geis, lying a few metres away in the direction the beast had been charging. She got up, shouting as the pain came back. She held her arm across her chest, waited for her head to clear, then limped towards the man.

The sword lay nearby on the sand. It was dull, the pink fire that had edged its blades extinguished. From the marks on the sand, it looked like the bandamyion had taken a tumble. She inspected her jacket over the place where her side hurt. There was no cut; the sword-stroke must have missed and she’d been hit by a bandamyion hoof. Her side ached; it felt like more than one burst rib. She supposed she had been lucky, even so.

She limped on, over spots of blood.

Geis lay face down in a shallow pool, his cloak stuck wetly to him over his shoulders and head. She pulled the cloak back; the water in the pool was filling with red. The GP round had taken most of Geis’s neck away.

His face was underwater. She pulled at him, turning him over. Blood poured from the fist-sized hole in his neck. His head hung slackly; his eyes were half-closed and pink water dribbled from his mouth. She pulled him out of the water onto the sand and laid him on his back by the side of the red-stained pool.

There was a muffled explosion from the Sea House. She turned; the bandamyion was jumping and bucking near the entrance to the stables, something at its rear end burning. One final kick sent the animal’s saddle smoking into the rocks. The bandamyion turned its head and licked at a patch of scorched hide.

Another explosion sounded from the House, then another and another. She saw debris rise and fall amongst some distant towers after one blast, and smoke started to rise from the vast building in a dozen different places.

She looked back at Geis’s slack, dead face.

A tremor shook the sand under her feet. The bandamyion, just starting to hunker down again, jerked upright and looked from side to side, grunting in distress.

She closed her eyes and waited for the Lazy Gun’s own thermonuclear farewell.

There was an almost inaudible rumbling for a few seconds, something close to infra-sound felt in the bones and the water and the ventricles of the heart and brain.

Then nothing.

She opened her eyes. The Sea House was still there. A few dark wisps of smoke rose from it. A grey-brown cloud flowed out of the stables entrance and drifted on the breeze. The bandamyion had hunkered down again, and looked annoyed at having to get up and move away from the smoke. It trotted along the weeded slope under the high granite walls, shaking its head and snorting.

She sat there for a while, beside the dead man on the cold sands in the foul wind and the soaking drizzle.

Eventually she rose slowly, favouring her injured side.

She looked around. The bandamyion was a still-moving tawny dot half-way round the side of the Sea House. A few small twists of smoke rose amongst the building’s undisturbed topography of towers. In the distance, the waves of the new tide creased grey across the horizon.

Nothing else moved that she could see.

She hobbled to the sword lying on the sand. She tried switching it on, but its flat edges remained dull. She let it fall back to the sand.

She lifted her face to the drizzle and the evening greyness, staring into the flat expanse of dull sky, as though listening for something.

She lowered her head and stood for some moments. She gazed from the sand at her feet, across the pools to the gravel banks and on up to the seaweed and the spray-froth beyond, and over that to the grey streaks of gravel and the weed-choked sands that rose into the tall dunes.

She shook her head and limped across the sands to where the HandCannon lay. She picked the gun up, turned it over in her good hand, blew sand off it and stuffed it into her jacket pocket.

Then she started back, retracing her steps towards the impassive granite walls of the Sea House.

She shook a handkerchief free from her breast pocket as she walked and started tying it round her nose and mouth, using only one hand; her muttered curses accompanying this undertaking were snatched and flung away by the stiffening breeze.

A little later the monowheel vehicle spun backwards out of the sewer outfall, pirouetted vertically like a saluting mount, swung down across the greasy slope of stones at the base of the House’s walls, dodged uncoordinated gunfire from a nearby tower and accelerated quickly away across the tide-flooding sands.