The Vorrh

this was a narcissistic whim, that he wanted an animal that looked like him. But they had been wrong: the photographer had another horse in mind, one from a stable of madness and violent dreams. But that was his business, not theirs; he was ready to make a picture that the world had never seen.
    Muybridge picked up a handful of cables and nodded to the two men at the far end of the barn. One put his fingers in his mouth, while the other lifted what looked like a forging hammer from a polished wooden box. Muybridge called to the other, lesser man, who shuffled nervously at the far end, by the doors. The signal was given. The man outside whipped the horse hard into a stampede. The man with the fingers in his mouth whistled, a series of tearing notes. The horse bolted between them into the glaring, disembodied light of the fathomless hall. The other man lifted his iron. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the huge gun in the man’s hand, and the sound that followed swallowed everything else. The horse collapsed onto its running legs, sending up a cloud of black, swirling dust, its thrashing body digging into the white grid and splattering the walls from the exit wound in its spine. It snapped its neck in the violence of its death throes which, like everything else, seemed to be instantaneous. With its last snort of breath, the cameras ceased and a tidal wave of silence wallowed into the barn.
    All stood still in the settling air. After a moment, the nervous new electricity was turned off. The scene became operatic in the sliding light of the opening doors. The whistler and the horseman put on overalls and began to clean up around the corpse; the shooter put the monstrous gun back in its icon-like box and unpacked a maroon-coloured rubber apron and gloves and a box of equine surgical instruments. Some of the black dust still eddied, high in the shafts of daylight that flooded the barn, giving celestial animation to the actions of the industrious men. Muybridge seemed totally uninterested with the current activities and busied himself with the cameras, collecting their precious thoughts and taking them away, to be unlocked next door in his night-black chapel of chemicals.
    The Gabbet-Fairfax ‘Mars’ pistol was one of the first of its kind. A self-loading semi-automatic with an astonishing ballistic power, it looked like an axe or a hammer, and possessed a rudimentary ‘L’ of a body, an ugly, unique elegance of top-heavy dense steel, smooth and uncluttered. The rear end of the pistol was infested with a knurled mechanical contrivance of the breech, hammer and sights. The Mars was intended for military mass-production, but it entered the world backwards, and at the wrong time. It came with the same consideration that sent the mounted cavalry into the gas and machine guns of the First World War, with the pedigree of a medieval killing field: it could stop a horse. It sounded like the end of the world. Its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist and spit hot, spent cartridge cases back into their face. The imagined accuracy was never achieved because its marksman, having taken the first shot, shivered and flinched so greatly before squeezing the trigger that it was impossible to aim. It was the most powerful pistol ever conceived or constructed at the turn of that century, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Less than a hundred were manufactured. So how one found its way, sheltering with the Enfields, into the heartland of the True People was unknown. What was known was that it vanished at the same time as Peter Williams.
    * * *

    Twine, splinters of wood and weightless teeth-shards lie with the wingless bodies of twenty swallows at my feet, their strange, streamlined eyes looking in all directions. The shape of their eyes is echoed in their wings, the same wings that now grace my arrows. A sea fret rises at my back, and the horizon is gated, hinged on shadow. I am ready to leave these bleak, soft lands.
    * * *

    Tsungali unwound his sitting body and dropped soundlessly to stand, waiting a few seconds before he was called inside. Slow-motion dust clouded around his long, shoeless feet. He walked behind the soldier, who escorted him to the barracks door. As he entered, the soldier grabbed at the Enfield, gripping it midway. Tsungali barked a word or a sound