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start off with a little poker first and see how things move on from there?" I asked.
    Strip, offered the third, though I was fairly sure he would want me to take off more than just my undershirt.
    "How did you come to be here, little thing?" asked the woman, "I can't smell the grave on you."
    "Perhaps the earth was particularly sweet," suggested the bird. "You don't get here with a heart that still pumps, after all."
    The picture of a beating heart appeared above the third's head.
    "I may have got turned around a little. I was aiming for California."
    "California is not a dominion I've heard of," said the bird. "Perhaps it's one of the new settlements. They say there are camps springing up all the time on the shores of The Bristle."
    "Maybe he's one of Greaser's people," suggested the woman, "his popularity is on the rise, so the whispers tell me." Whispers, agreed the third. Soul farts.
    The old man had made it to the top of the gate and was now walking along behind their chairs. Still they seemed to have no idea he was there. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at the head of the bird creature.
    "The kid's with me," he said and pulled the trigger.
    There was a startled squawk and the air filled with feathers and brains.
    The old man kicked the woman's chair forward and she fell with a yell of surprise. When she hit the ground she exploded in a cloud of dead skin. The skeleton at the heart of her broke into separate pieces but immediately rolled around trying to reconnect.
    "The skull!" he shouted, "grab the bitch's skull!"
    This was not a suggestion I took kindly to, but the urgency of his words and the innate trust I'd developed for him had me running towards her thrashing bones before I really had time to question the sense of it.
    Her skin was whipping around like a swarm of flies wanting nothing more than to calm down and settle back down on a nice piece of shit.
    I grabbed hold of her skull, avoiding the gnashing teeth.
    "Throw it up into the air," he said, "high as you can."
    I did so, sending it sailing up above my head. A pair of eyes appeared from within the cloud of skin, clearly hoping to bed themselves back down in their sockets. They were too late, the gunslinger took his shot and blew the skull into fragments. The eyes dropped back down to earth like gelatinous hail stones.
    "What about that?" I asked, pointing to the third who was flexing in what could have been anger or panic. It presented itself as a series of static images, like a magic lantern show. Flickering silhouettes, some more human than others. A man throwing his hands in the air, a large wolf's head roaring, what looked like flames...
    "Yes," the old man asked, "what about you? Are you going to try and fight?"
    It swept towards him with the sound of a blanket being whipped in the air before seeming to vanish inside the gunslinger. For a few moments the old man looked troubled, as if stricken by gas after a heavy meal, then that flaming light in his throat sparked once and he exhaled a slow plume of deep, black smoke.
    "The Consequence is a conceptual creature," he said, "it's power lies in corrupting the mind with its thoughts and ideas."
    "And you're beyond corruption?"
    "Hardly that. But I'm certainly out of its league."
    He began to climb back down the slope, his boot heels kicking up twin waves of ash as he slid towards ground level.
    "Who were they?" I asked.
    "Lesser presences," he replied, "gatekeepers, loiterers, gossipers. Nothing worth talking about."
    "Oh good," I said, "as long as they weren't terrifying or anything."
    "Terror is more than an ugly face," he said, reaching the bottom. "There are things ahead that will make them seem like the pale shadows they were."
    "You say it as if that's reassuring. It's not."
    "Just saying it like it is."
    He walked up to the gate and threw his weight into pushing it wide open. "Appreciate a hand here," he said. "Fine," I stood next to him. "I just get to forgetting you can't do everything by