1
Around ten o' the clock, the trio of young men from the Inner Baronies made their manners to host and hostess, then slipped off into the fragrant summer night. Cordelia Delgado, who happened to be standing near Henry Wertner, the Barony's stockliner, remarked that they must be tired. Wertner laughed at this and replied in an accent so thick it was almost comic: "Nay, ma'am, byes that age're like rats explorin en woodpile after hokkut rain, so they are. It'll be hours yet before the bunks out'ta Bar K sees em."
Olive Thorin left the public rooms shortly after the boys, pleading a headache. She was pale enough to be almost believable.
By eleven, the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the chief of his newly inaugurated security staff were conversing in the Mayor's study with the last few late-staying guests (all ranchers, all members of the Horsemen's Association). The talk was brief but intense. Several of the ranchers present expressed relief that the Affiliation's emissaries were so young. Eldred Jonas said nothing to this, only looked down at his pale, long-fingered hands and smiled his narrow smile.
By midnight, Susan was at home and undressing for bed. She didn't have the sapphire to worry about, at least; that was a Barony jewel, and had been tucked back into the strongbox at Mayor's House before she left, despite what Mr. Ain't-We-Fine Will Dearborn might think about it and her. Mayor Thorin (she couldn't bring herself to call him Hart, although he had asked her to do so - not even to herself could she do it) had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed. And he (Thorin, not the Eld) had taken the opportunity to kiss her mouth and have a quick fumble at her breasts - a part of her that had felt much too naked during that entire interminable evening. "1 burn for Reaping," he had whispered melodramatically in her ear. His breath had been redolent of brandy. "Each day of this summer seems an age."
Now, in her room, brushing her hair with harsh, quick strokes and looking out at the waning moon, she thought she had never been so angry in her life as she was at this moment: angry at Thorin, angry at Aunt Cord, furious with that self-righteous prig of a Will Dearborn. Most of all, however, she was angry at herself.
"There's three things ye can do in any situation, girl," her father had told her once. "Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing ... or ye can decide not to decide." That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn't needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself. . . and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.
In her room at Mayor's House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a night-dress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept. . . but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.
And what was the worst? That Hart didn't understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado's dress at every opportunity) to know that people - his own Chancellor among them - were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt's with a big belly, but that wouldn't be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humiliating thing of all? That she, John Haverty's daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.
There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart's turning into George o' Goats in his late middle age: she thought there was an intrigue of some sort going on, something dangerous and quite likely dishonorable. Hart knew a little about it, but she guessed he knew only what Kimba Rimer and that hideous limping man wanted him to know.
There was a time, and not so long ago, when Hart wouldn't have allowed himself to be fobbed off in such fashion by the likes of Rimer, a time when he would have taken one look at Eldred Jonas and his friends and sent them west ere they had so much as a single hot dinner in them. But that was before Hart had become besotted with sai Delgado's gray eyes. high bosom, and flat belly.
Olive turned down the lamp, blew out the flame, and crept off to bed, where she would lie wakeful until dawn.
By one o' the clock, no one was left in the public rooms of Mayor's House except for a quartet of cleaning women, who performed their chores silently (and nervously) beneath the eye of Eldred Jonas. When one of them looked up and saw him gone from the window-seat where he had been sitting and smoking, she murmured softly to her friends, and they all loosened up a little. But there was no singing, no laughter. Ilspectra, the man with the blue coffin on his hand, might only have stepped hack into the shadows. He might still be watching.
By two o' the clock, even the cleaning women were gone. It was an hour at which a party in Gilead would just have been reaching its apogee of glitter and gossip, but Gilead was far away, not just in another Barony hut almost in another world. This was the Outer Arc, and in the Outers, even gentry went to bed early.
There was no gentry on view at the Travellers' Rest, however, and beneath the all-encompassing gaze of The Romp, the night was still fairly young.
2
At one end of the saloon, fishermen still wearing their rolled-down boots drank and played Watch Me for small stakes. To their right was a poker table; to their left, a knot of yelling, exhorting men - cowpokes, mostly - stood along Satan's Alley, watching the dice bounce down the velvet incline. At the room's other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks. Beside and above him, standing drunk on a stool, Pettie the Trotter shook her enormous bottom and bawled out the words to the song at the top of her voice: "Come on over, baby, we got chicken in the hum, what hum. whose barn, my burn! Come on over, baby, baby got the bull by the horns ..."
Sheemie stopped beside the piano, the camel bucket in one hand, grinning up at her and attempting to sing along. Pettie swatted him on his way, never missing a word, bump, or grind, and Sheemie went with his peculiar laugh, which was shrill but somehow not unpleasant.
A game of darts was in progress; in a booth near the back, a whore who styled herself Countess Jillian of Up'ard Killian (exiled royalty from distant Garlan, my dears, oh how special we are) was managing to give two handjobs at the same time while smoking a pipe. And at the bar, a whole line of assorted toughs, drifters, cowpunchers, drovers, drivers, carters, wheelwrights, stagies, carpenters, conmen, stockmen, boatmen, and gunmen drank beneath The Romp's double head.
The only real gunmen in the place were at the end of the bar, a pair drinking by themselves. No one attempted to join them, and not just because they wore shooting irons in holsters that were slung low and tied down gunslinger fashion. Guns were uncommon but not unknown in Mejis at that time, and not necessarily feared, but these two had the sullen look of men who have spent a long day doing work they didn't want to do - the look of men who would pick a fight on no account at all, and be glad to end their day by sending some new widow's husband home in a hurry-up wagon.
Stanley the bartender served them whiskey after whiskey with no attempt to make conversation, not so much as a "Hot day, gents, wa'n't it?" They reeked of sweat, and their hands were pitchy with pine-gum. Not enough to keep Stanley from being able to see the blue coffin-shapes tattooed on them, though. Their friend, the old limping buzzard with the girl's hair and the gimp leg, wasn't here, at least. In Stanley's view, Jonas was easily the worst of the Big Coffin Hunters, but these two were bad enough, and he had no intention of getting aslant of them if he could help it. With luck, no one would; they looked tired enough to call it a night early.
Reynolds and Depape were tired, all right - they had spent the day out at Citgo, camouflaging a line of empty steel tankers with nonsense words (texaco, citgo, sunoco, exxon) printed on their sides, a billion pine-boughs they'd hauled and stacked, it seemed - but they had no consequent plans to finish their drinking early. Depape might have done so if Her Nibs had been available, but that young beauty (actual name: Gert Moggins) had a ranch-job and wouldn't be back until two nights hence. "And it'll be a week if there's hard cash on offer," Depape said morosely. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose.
"Fuck her," Reynolds said.
"That's just what I'd do if I could, but I can't."
"I'm going to get me a plate of that free lunch," Reynolds said, pointing down to the other end of the bar, where a tin bucket of steamed clams had just come out of the kitchen. "You want some?"
"Them look like hocks of snot and go down the same way. Bring me a strip of beef jerky."
"All right, partner." Reynolds went off down the bar. People gave him wide passage; gave even his silk-lined cloak wide passage.
Depape, more morose than ever now that he had thought of Her Nibs gobbling cowboy spareribs out there at the Piano Ranch, downed his drink, winced at the stench of pine-gum on his hand, then held his glass out in Stanley Ruiz's direction. "Fill this up, you dog!" he shouted. A cowhand leaning with his back, butt, and elbows against the bar jerked forward at the sound of Depape's bellow, and that was all it took to start trouble.
Sheemie was bustling toward the pass through from which the steamers had just appeared, now holding the camel bucket out before him in both hands. Later, when the Travellers' began to empty out, his job would he to clean up. For now, however, it was simply to circulate with the camel bucket, dumping in every unfinished drink he found. This combined elixir ended up in a jug behind the bar. The jug was labelled fairly enough - camel piss - and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stem gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug. And if it wasn't empty at the end of the night, why, there was always a fresh night coming along. Not to mention a fresh supply of thirsty fools.
But on this occasion Sheemie never made it to the Camel Piss jug behind the end of the bar. He tripped over the boot of the cowboy who had jerked forward, and went to his knees with a grunt of surprise. The contents of the bucket sloshed out ahead of him, and, following Satan's First Law of Malignity - to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will - they drenched Roy Depape from the knees down in an eye watering mixture of beer, graf, and white lightning.
Conversation at the bar stopped, and that stopped the talk of the men gathered around the dice-chute. Sheb turned, saw Sheemie kneeling before one of Jonas's men, and stopped playing. Pettie, her eyes squeezed shut as she poured her entire soul into her singing, continued on a capella for three or four bars before registering the silence which was spreading out like a ripple. She stopped singing and opened her eyes. That sort of silence usually meant that someone was going to be killed. If so, she didn't intend to miss it.
Depape stood perfectly still, inhaling the raw stench of alcohol as it rose. He didn't mind the smell; on the whole, it had the stink of pine-gum beat six ways to the Peddler. He didn't mind the way his pants were sticking to his knees, either. It might have been a bit of an irritation if some of that joy-juice had gotten down inside his boots, but none had.
His hand fell to the butt of his gun. Here, by god and by goddess, was something to take his mind off his sticky hands and absent whore. And good entertainment was ever worth a little wetting.
Silence blanketed the place now. Stanley stood as stiff as a soldier behind the bar, nervously plucking at one of his arm-garters. At the bar's other end, Reynolds looked back toward his partner with bright interest. He took a clam from the steaming bucket and cracked it on the edge of the bar like a boiled egg. At Depape's feet, Sheemie looked up, his eyes big and fearful beneath the wild snarl of his black hair. He was trying his best to smile.
"Well now, boy," Depape said. "You have wet me considerable."
"Sorry, big fella, I go trippy-trip." Sheemie jerked a hand back over his shoulder; a little spray of camel piss flew from the tips of his fingers. Somewhere someone cleared his throat nervously - raa-aach! The room was full of eyes, and quiet enough so that they all could hear both the wind in the eaves and the waves breaking on the rocks of Hambry Point, two miles away.
"The hell you did," said the cowpoke who had jerked. He was about twenty, and suddenly afraid he might never see his mother again. "Don't you go tryin to put your trouble off on me, you damned feeb."
"I don't care how it happened," Depape said. He was aware he was playing for an audience, and knew that what an audience mostly wants is to be entertained. Sai R. B. Depape, always a trouper, intended to oblige.
He pinched the corduroy of his pants above the knees and pulled the legs up, revealing the toes of his boots. They were shiny and wet.
"See there. Look at what you got on my boots."
Sheemie looked up at him, grinning and terrified.
Stanley Ruiz decided he couldn't let this happen without at least trying to stop it. He had known Dolores Sheemer, the boy's mother; there was even a possibility that he himself was the boy's father. In any case, he liked Sheemie. The boy was foolish, but his heart was good, he never took a drink, and he always did his work. Also, he could find a smile for you even on the coldest, foggiest winter's day. That was a talent many people of normal intelligence did not have.
"Sai Depape," he said, taking a step forward and speaking in a low, respectful tone. "I'm very sorry about that. I'll be happy to buy your drinks for the rest of the evening if we can just forget this regrettable - "
Depape's movement was a blur almost too fast to see, but that wasn't what amazed the people who were in the Rest that night; they would have expected a man running with Jonas to be fast. What amazed them was the fact that he never looked around to set his target. He located Stanley by his voice alone.
Depape drew his gun and swept it to the right in a rising arc. It struck Stanley Ruiz dead in the mouth, mashing his lips and shattering three of his teeth. Blood splashed the backbar mirror; several high-flying drops decorated the tip of The Romp's lefthand nose. Stanley screamed, clapped his hands to his face, and staggered back against the shelf behind him. In the silence, the chattery clink of the bottles was very loud.
Down the bar, Reynolds cracked another clam and watched, fascinated. Good as a play, it was.
Depape turned his attention back to the kneeling boy. "Clean my boots," he said.
A look of muddled relief came onto Sheemie's face. Clean his boots! Yes! You bet! Right away! He pulled the rag he always kept in his back pocket. It wasn't even dirty yet. Not very, at least.
"No," Depape said patiently. Sheemie looked up at him, gaping and puzzled. "Put that nasty clout back where it come from - I don't even want to look at it."
Sheemie tucked it into his back pocket again.
"Lick em," Depape said in that same patient voice. "That's what I want. You lick my boots until they're dry again, and so clean you can see your stupid rabbit's face in em."
Sheemie hesitated, as if still not sure what was required of him. Or perhaps he was only processing the information.
"I'd do it, boy," Barkie Callahan said from what he hoped was a safe place behind Sheb's piano. "If you want to see the sun come up, I'd surely do it."
Depape had already decided the mush-brain wasn't going to see another sunrise, not in this world, but kept quiet. He had never had his boots licked. He wanted to see what it felt like. If it was nice - kind of sexy-like - he could maybe try Her Nibs out on it.
"Does I have to?" Sheemie's eyes were filling with tears. "Can't just I-sorry and polish em real good?"
"Lick, you feeble-minded donkey," Depape said.
Sheemie's hair fell across his forehead. His tongue poked tentatively out between his lips, and as he bent his head toward Depape's boots, the first of his tears fell.
"Stop it, stop it, stop it," a voice said. It was shocking in the silence - not because it was sudden, and certainly not because it was angry. It was shocking because it was amused. "I simply can't allow that. Nope. I would if I could, but I can't. Unsanitary, you see. Who knows what disease might be spread in such fashion? The mind quails! Ab-so-lutely cuh-wails!"
Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except young man didn't really cover him, Depape realized; young man was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird's skull like an enormous comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place? Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.
The kid laughed as well, nodding as if he understood how ridiculous the whole thing looked, how ridiculous the whole thing was. His laughter was infectious; Pettie, still up on her stool, tittered herself before clapping her hands over her mouth.
"This is no place for a boy such as you," Depape said. His revolver, an old five-shooter, was still out; it lay in his fist on the bar, with Stanley Ruiz's blood dripping off the gunsight. Depape, without raising it from the ironwood, waggled it slightly. "Boys who come to places like this learn had habits, kid. Dying is apt to be one of them. So I give you this one chance. Get out of here."
"Thank you, sir, 1 appreciate my one chance," the boy said. He spoke with great and winning sincerity . . . but didn't move. Still he stood just inside the batwing doors, with the wide elastic strap of his sling pulled hack. Depape couldn't quite make out what was in the cup, but it glittered in the gaslight. A metal ball of some sort.
"Well, then?" Depape snarled. This was getting old, and fast.
"I know I'm being a pain in the neck, sir - not to mention an ache in (he ass and a milky drip from the tip of a sore dick - but if it's all the same to you, my dear friend, I'd like to give my chance to the young fellow on his knees before you. Let him apologize, let him polish your boots with his clout until you are entirely satisfied, and let him go on living his life."
There was an unfocused murmur of approval at this from the area where the card-players were watching. Depape didn't like the sound of it at all, and he made a sudden decision. The boy would die as well, executed for the crime of impertinence. The swabby who had spilled the bucket of dregs on him was clearly retarded. Yon brat had not even that excuse. He just thought he was funny.
From the comer of his eye, Depape saw Reynolds moving to flank the boy, smooth as oiled silk. Depape appreciated the thought, but didn't believe he'd need much help with the slingshot specialist.
"Boy, I think you've made a mistake," he said in a kindly voice. "I really believe - " The cup of the slingshot dipped a little ... or Depape fancied it did. He made his move.
3
They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.
Depape was young, and had the speed of a snake. Nevertheless, he never came close to getting a shot off at Cuthbert Allgood. There was a thip-TWANG! as the elastic was released, a steel gleam that drew itself across the saloon's smoky air like a line on a slateboard, and then Depape screamed. His revolver tumbled to the floor, and a foot spun it away from him across the sawdust (no one would claim that foot while the Big Coffin Hunters were still in Hambry; hundreds claimed it after they were gone). Still screaming - he could not bear pain - Depape raised his bleeding hand and looked at it with agonized, unbelieving eyes. Actually, he had been lucky. Cuthbert's ball had smashed the tip of the second finger and torn off the nail. Lower, and Depape would have been able to blow smoke-rings through his own palm.
Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. "Now," he said, "if I have your attention, good sir - "
"I can't speak for his," Reynolds said from behind him, "but you got mine, partner. I don't know if you're good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you're done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you's the place I want to see it."
"I've been blindsided," Cuthbert said sadly. "Betrayed once more by my own callow youth."
"I don't know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you've been blindsided, all right," Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers' Rest had become, the sound was very loud. "Now put that twanger down."
"I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline."
"What?"
"You see, I've got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend's head - " Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert's voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. "Stand still! Move again and you 're a dead man!"
Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night - for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact - Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away ... except how could it be? How could it be when he'd been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.
Lowering his voice to its former conversational - not to say playful - pitch, Cuthbert said: "If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too."
"I don't believe that," Reynolds said, but he didn't like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. "No man could make a shot like that."
"Why don't we let your friend decide?" Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. "Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?"
"No!" Depape's cry was shrill, verging on panic. "No, Clay! Don't
shoot!"
"So it's a standoff," Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam's apple.
"No, it's not," Alain said softly. "Put the gun down, my friend, or I'll cut your throat."
4
Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy's shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds's throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?
There's time to stop this before there's killing, mayhap. If you wantto. Do you?
Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.
Where's the other one? Dearborn?
A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.
Dearborn wasn't in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry's mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as marble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.
Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher's, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat's shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers' Rest. Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas's gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.
"Sonny, unless you're a barber, I think you'd better put that pigsticker down. You don't get a second warning."
"No," Alain said.
Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. "What? "
"You heard me," Alain said. "I said no."
5
After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had left his friends to their own amusements - they would finish up at the Travellers' Rest, he supposed, but wouldn't stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.
His mind was full of questions - things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he'd thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with "Rennie" Renfrew, he knew better. There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn't concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado's face intruded ... her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She'd be on Thorin's pillow come Reap-tide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?
I think I've gone and fallen in love with her. That's what it is to me.
A dismaying idea, but not a dismissible one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he'd had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he'd come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin - her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table - and his own mother. Hadn't some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother's eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father's advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?
His mind, tough as it already was, shrank from the image, horrified. It returned instead to that of Susan Delgado - her gray eyes and shining hair. He saw her laughing, chin uptilted, hands clasped before the sapphire Thorin had given her.
Roland could forgive her the gilly business, he supposed. What he could not forgive, in spite of his attraction to Susan, was that awful smile on Olive Thorin's face as she watched the girl sitting in what should have been her place. Sitting in her place and laughing.
These were the things that chased through his head as he paced off acres of moonlight. He had no business with such thoughts, Susan Delgado was not the reason he was here, nor was the ridiculous knuckle-cracking Mayor and his pitiable country-Mary of a wife . . . yet he couldn't put them away and get to what was his business. He had forgotten the face of his father, and walked in the moonlight, hoping to find it again.
In such fashion he came along the sleeping, silver-gilded High Street, walking north to south, thinking vaguely that he would perhaps stand Cuthbert and Alain to a taste of something wet and toss the dice down Satan's Alley a time or two before going back to get Rusher and call it a night. And so it was that he happened to spy Jonas - the man's gaunt figure and fall of long white hair were impossible to mistake - standing outside the batwings of the Travellers' Rest and peering in. Jonas did this with one hand on the butt of his gun and a tense set of body that put everything else from Roland's mind at once. Something was going on, and if Bert and Alain were in there, it might involve them. They were the strangers in town, after all, and it was possible - even likely - that not everyone in Hambry loved the Affiliation with the fervor that had been professed at tonight's dinner. Or perhaps it was Jonas's friends who were in trouble. Something was brewing, in any case.
With no clear thought as to why he was doing it, Roland went softly up the steps to the mercantile's porch. There was a line of carved animals there (and probably spiked firmly to the boards, so that drunken wags from the saloon across the street couldn't carry them away, chanting the nursery rhymes of their childhood as they went). Roland stepped behind the last one in line - it was the Bear - and bent his knees so that the crown of his hat wouldn't show. Then he went as still as the carving. He could see Jonas turn, look across the street, then look to his left, peering at something -
Very low, a sound: Waow! Waow!
It's a cat. In the alley.
Jonas looked a moment longer, then stepped into the Rest. Roland was out from behind the carved bear, down the steps, and into the street at once. He hadn't Alain's gift of the touch, but he had intuitions that were sometimes very strong. This one was telling him he must hurry.
Overhead, the Kissing Moon drifted behind a cloud.
6
Pettie the Trotter still stood on her stool, but she no longer felt drunk and singing was the last thing on her mind. She could hardly believe what she was seeing: Jonas had the drop on a boy who had the drop on Reynolds who had the drop on another boy (this last one wearing a bird's skull around his neck on a chain) who had the drop on Roy Depape. Who had, in fact, drawn some of Roy Depape's blood. And when Jonas had told the big boy to put down the knife he was holding to Reynolds's throat, the big boy had refused.
You can blow my lights out and send me to the clearing at the end of the path, thought Pettie, for now I've seen it all, so I have. She supposed she should get off the stool - there was apt to be shooting any second now, and likely a great lot of it - but sometimes you just had to take your chances.
Because some things were just too good to miss.
7
"We're in this town on Affiliation business," Alain said. He had one hand buried deep in Reynolds's sweaty hair; the other maintained a steady pressure on the knife at Reynolds's throat. Not quite enough to break the skin. "If you harm us, the Affiliation will take note. So will our fathers. You'll be hunted like dogs and hung upside down, like as not, when you're caught."
"Sonny, there's not an Affiliation patrol within two hundred wheels of here, probably three hundred," Jonas said, "and I wouldn't care a fart in a windstorm if there was one just over yon hill. Nor do your fathers mean a squitter to me. Put that knife down or I'll blow your fucking brains out."
"No."
"Future developments in this matter should be quite wonderful," Cuthbert said cheerily . . . although there was now a beat of nerves under his prattle. Not fear, perhaps not even nervous-ness, just nerves. The good kind, more likely than not, Jonas thought sourly. He had underestimated these boys at meat; if nothing else was clear, that was. "You shoot Richard, and Richard cuts Mr. Cloak's throat just as Mr. Cloak shoots me; my poor dying fingers release my sling's elastic and put a steel ball in what passes for Mr. Spectacles's brain. You'll walk away, at least, and I suppose that will be a great comfort to your dead friends."
"Call it a draw," Alain said to the man with the gun at his temple.
"We all stand back and walk away."
"No, sonny," Jonas said. His voice was patient, and he didn't think his anger showed, but it was rising. Gods, to be outfaced like this, even temporarily! "No one does like that to the Big Coffin Hunters. This is your last chance to - "
Something hard and cold and very much to the point pressed against the back of Jonas's shirt, dead center between the shoulderblades. He knew what it was and who held it at once, understood the game was lost, but couldn't understand how such a ludicrous, maddening turn of events could have happened.
"Holster the gun," the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow - not just calm, but emotionless. "Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking's done. Do it or die."
Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He bolstered his gun.
"You with the black hair. Take your gun out of my friend's ear and put it back in your holster. Now."
Clay Reynolds didn't have to be invited twice, and he uttered a long, shaky sigh when Alain took the blade off his throat and stood back. Cuthbert did not look around, only stood with the elastic of his slingshot pulled and his elbow cocked.
"You at the bar," Roland said. "Holster up."
Depape did so, grimacing with pain as he bumped his hurt finger against his gunbelt. Only when this gun was put away did Cuthbert relax his hold on his sling and drop the ball from the cup into the palm of his hand.
The cause of all this had been forgotten as the effects played themselves out. Now Sheemie got to his feet and pelted across the room. His cheeks were wet with tears. He grasped one of Cuthbert's hands, kissed it several times (loud smacking noises that would have been comic under other circumstances), and held the hand to his cheek for a moment. Then he dodged past Reynolds, pushed open the righthand batwing, and flew right into the arms of a sleepy-eyed and still half-drunk Sheriff. Avery had been fetched by Sheb from the jailhouse, where the Sheriff o' Barony had been sleeping off the Mayor's ceremonial dinner in one of his own cells.
8
"This is a nice mess, isn't it?"
Avery speaking. No one answering. He hadn't expected they would, not if they knew what was good for them.
The office area of the jail was too small to hold three men, three strapping not-quite-men, and one extra-large Sheriff comfortably, so Avery had herded them into the nearby Town Gathering Hall, which echoed to the soft flutter of the pigeons in the rafters and the steady beat-beat-beat of the grandfather clock behind the podium.
It was a plain room, but an inspired choice all the same. It was where the townsfolk and Barony landowners had come for hundreds of years to make their decisions, pass their laws, and occasionally send some especially troublesome person west. There was a feeling of seriousness in its moon-glimmered darkness, and Roland thought even the old man, Jonas, felt a little of it. Certainly it invested Sheriff Herk Avery with an authority he might not otherwise have been able to project.
The room was filled with what were in that place and time called "bareback benches" - oaken pews with no cushions for either butt or back. There were sixty in all, thirty on each side of a wide center aisle. Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds sat on the front bench to the left of the aisle. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain sat across from them on the right. Reynolds and Depape looked sullen and embarrassed; Jonas looked remote and composed. Will Dearborn's little crew was quiet. Roland had given Cuthbert a look which he hoped the boy could read: One smart remark and I'll rip the tongue right out of your head. He thought the message had been received. Bert had stowed his idiotic "lookout" somewhere, which was a good sign.
"A nice mess," Avery repeated, and blew liquor-scented wind at them in a deep sigh. He was sitting on the edge of the stage with his short legs hanging down, looking at them with a kind of disgusted wonder.
The side door opened and in came Deputy Dave, his white service jacket laid aside, his monocle tucked into the pocket of his more usual khaki shirt. In one hand he carried a mug; in the other a folded scrap of what looked to Roland like birch-bark.
"Did ye boil the first half, David?" Avery asked. He now wore a put-upon expression.
"Aye."
"Boiled it twice?"
"Aye,twice."
"For that was the directions."
"Aye," Dave repeated in a resigned voice. He handed Avery the cup and dumped the remaining contents of the birch-bark scrap in when the Sheriff held the cup out for them.
Avery swirled the liquid, peered in with a doubtful, resigned expression, then drank. He grimaced. "Oh, foul!" he cried. "What's so nasty as this?"
"What is it?" Jonas asked.
"Headache powder. Hangover powder, ye might say. From the old witch. The one who lives up the Coos. Know where I mean?" Avery gave Jonas a knowing look. The old gunny pretended not to see it, but Roland thought he had. And what did it mean? Another mystery.
Depape looked up at the word Coos, then went back to sucking his wounded finger. Beyond Depape, Reynolds sat with his cloak drawn about him, looking grimly down at his lap.
"Does it work?" Roland asked.
"Aye, boy, but ye pay a price for witch's medicine. Remember that: ye always pay. This 'un takes away the headache if ye drink too much of Mayor Thorin's damned punch, but it gripes the bowels somethin fierce, so it does. And the farts - !" He waved a hand in front of his face to demonstrate, took another sip from the cup, then set it aside. He returned to his former gravity, but the mood in the room had lightened just a little; they all felt it. "Now what are we to do about this business?"
Herk Avery swept them slowly with his eyes, from Reynolds on his far right to Alain - "Richard Stockworth" - on his far left. "Eh, boys? We've got the Mayor's men on one side and the Affiliation's . . . men ... on the other, six fellows at the point of murder, and over what? A halfwit and a spilled bucket of slops." He pointed first at the Big Coffin Hunters, then to the Affiliation's counters. "Two powderkegs and one fat sheriff in the middle. So what's yer thoughts on't? Speak up, don't be shy, you wasn't shy in Coral's whoreden down the road, don't be shy in here!"
No one said anything. Avery sipped some more of his foul drink, then set it down and looked at them decisively. What he said next didn't surprise Roland much; it was exactly what he would have expected of a man like Avery, right down to the tone which implied that he considered himself a man who could make the hard decisions when he had to, by the gods.
"I'll tell yer what we're going to do: We're going to forget it."
He now assumed the air of one who expects an uproar and is prepared to handle it. When no one spoke or even shuffled a foot, he looked discomfited. Yet he had a job to do, and the night was growing old. He squared his shoulders and pushed on.
"I'll not spend the next three or four months waiting to see who among you's killed who. Nay! Nor will I be put in a position where I might have to take the punishment for your stupid quarrel over that halfwit Sheemie.
"I appeal to your practical natures, boys, when I point out that I may he either your friend or your enemy during your time here . . . but I'd be wrong if 1 didn't also appeal to your more noble natures, which I am sure are both large and sensitive."
The Sheriff now tried on an exalted expression, which was not, in Roland's estimation, notably successful. Avery turned his attention to Jonas.
"Sai, I can't believe ye'll want to be causin trouble for three young men from the Affiliation - the Affiliation that's been like mother's milk and father's shelterin hand since aye or oh fifty generations back; ye'd not be so disrespectful as all that, would ye?"
Jonas shook his head, smiling his thin smile.
Avery nodded again. Things were going along well, that nod said. "Ye've all yer own cakes to bake and oats to roll, and none of ye wants something like this to get in the way of doin yer jobs, do yer?"
They all shook their heads this time.
"So what I want you to do is to stand up, face each other, shake hands, and cry each other's pardon. If ye don't do that, ye can all ride west out of town by sunrise, far as I'm concerned."
He picked up the mug and took a bigger drink this time. Roland saw that the man's hand was trembling the tiniest bit, and wasn't surprised. It was all bluff and blow, of course. The Sheriff would have understood that Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape were beyond his authority as soon as he saw the small blue coffins on their hands; after tonight, he must feel the same way about Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath. He could only hope that all would see where their self-interest lay. Roland did. So, apparently, did Jonas, for even as Roland got up, Jonas did the same.
Avery recoiled a little bit, as if expecting Jonas to go for his gun and Dearborn for the knife in his belt, the one he'd been holding against Jonas's back when Avery came puffing up to the saloon.
There was no gun or knife drawn, however. Jonas turned toward Roland and held out his hand.
"He's right, lad," Jonas said in his reedy, quavering voice.
"Yes."
"Will you shake with an old man, and vow to start over?"
"Yes." Roland held out his hand.
Jonas took it. "I cry your pardon."
"I cry your own, Mr. Jonas." Roland tapped left-hand at his throat, as was proper when addressing an elder in such fashion.
As the two of them sat down, Alain and Reynolds rose, as neatly as men in a prerehearsed ceremony. Last of all, Cuthbert and Depape rose. Roland was all but positive that Cuthbert's foolishness would pop out like Jack from his box - the idiot would simply not be able to help himself, although he must surely realize that Depape was no man to make sport of tonight.
"Cry your pardon," Bert said, with an admirable lack of laughter in his voice.
"Cryerown," Depape mumbled, and held out his bloodstreaked hand. Roland had a nightmare vision of Bert squeezing down on it as hard as he could, making the redhead yowl like an owl on a hot stove, but Bert's grip was as restrained as his voice.
Avery sat on the edge of the stage with his pudgy legs hanging down, watching it all with avuncular good cheer. Even Deputy Dave was smiling.
"Now I propose to shake hands with yer all myself, 'n then send yer on yer ways, for the hour's late, so it is, and such as me needs my beauty rest." He chuckled, and again looked uncomfortable when no one joined in. But he slipped off the stage and began to shake hands, doing so with the enthusiasm of a minister who has finally succeeded in marrying a headstrong couple after a long and stormy courtship.
9
When they stepped outside, the moon was down and the first lightening in the sky had begun to show at the far edge of the Clean Sea. "Mayhap we'll meet again, sai," Jonas said. "Mayhap we will," Roland said, and swung up into his saddle.
10
The Big Coffin Hunters were staying in the watchman's house about a mile south of Seafront - five miles out of town, this was.
Halfway there, Jonas stopped at a turnout beside the road. From here the land made a steep, rocky descent to the brightening sea.
"Get down, mister," he said. It was Depape he was looking at.
"Jonas...Jonas, I..."
"Get down."
Biting his lip nervously, Depape got down.
"Take off your spectacles."
"Jonas, what's this about? I don't - "
"Or if you want em broke, leave em on. It's all the same to me."
Biting his lip harder now, Depape took off his gold-rimmed spectacles. They were barely in his hand before Jonas had fetched him a terrific clip on the side of the head. Depape cried out and reeled toward the drop. Jonas drove forward, moving as fast as he had struck, and seized him by the shirt just before he went tumbling over the edge. Jonas twisted his hand into the shirt material and yanked Depape toward him. He breathed deep, inhaling the scent of pine-tar and Depape's sweat.
"I ought to toss you right over the edge," he breathed. "Do you know how much harm you've done?"
"I... Jonas, I never meant... just a little fun is all I... how was we supposed to know they ..."
Slowly, Jonas's hand relaxed. That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right. And if not for tonight, they might not have known. If you looked at it that way, Depape had actually done them a favor. The devil you knew was always preferable to the devil you didn't. Still, word would get around, and people would laugh. Maybe even that was all right, though. The laughter would stop in due time.
"Jonas, I cry your pardon."
"Shut up," Jonas said. In the east, the sun would shortly heave itself over the horizon, casting its first gleams on a new day in this world of toil and sorrow. "I ain't going to toss you over, because then I'd have to toss Clay over and follow along myself. They got the drop on us the same as you, right?"
Depape wanted to agree, but thought it might be dangerous to do so. He was prudently silent.
"Get down here, Clay."
Clay slid off his mount.
"Now hunker."
The three of them hunkered on their bootsoles, heels up. Jonas plucked a shoot of grass and put it between his lips. "Affiliation brats is what we were told, and we had no reason not to believe it," he said. "The bad boys are sent all the way to Mejis, a sleepy Barony on the Clean Sea, on a make-work detail that's two pans penance and three parts punishment. Ain't that what we were told?"
They nodded.
"Either of you believe it after tonight?"
Depape shook his head. So did Clay.
"They may be rich boys, but that's not all they are," Depape said. "The way they were tonight . . . they were like . . ." He trailed off, not quite willing to finish the thought. It was too absurd.
Jonas was willing. "They acted like gunslingers."
Neither Jonas nor Reynolds replied at first. Then Clay Reynolds said, "They're too young, Eldred. Too young by years."
"Not too young to be 'prentices, mayhap. In any case, we're going to find out." He turned to Depape. "You've got some riding to do, cully."
"Aww, Jonas - !"
"None of us exactly covered ourselves with glory, but you were the fool that started the pot boiling." He looked at Depape, but Depape only looked down at the ground between them. "You're going to ride their backtrail, Roy, and you're going to ask questions until you've got the answers you think will satisfy my curiosity. Clay and I are mostly going to wait. And watch. Play Castles with em, if you like. When I feel like enough time's gone by for us to be able to do a little snooping without being trigged, mayhap we'll do it."
He bit on the piece of grass in his mouth. The larger piece tumbled out and lay between his boots.
"Do you know why I shook his hand? That boy Dearborn's damned hand? Because we can't rock the boat, boys. Not just when it's edging in toward harbor. Latigo and the folks we've been waiting for will be moving toward us very soon, now. Until they get into these parts, it's in our interest to keep the peace. But I tell you this: no one puts a knife to Eldred Jonas's back and lives. Now listen, Roy. Don't make me tell you any of this twice."
Jonas began to speak, leaning forward over his knees toward Depape as he did. After awhile, Depape began to nod. He might like a little trip, actually. After the recent comedy in the Travellers' Rest, a change of air might be just the ticket.
11
The boys were almost back to the Bar K and the sun was coming over the horizon before Cuthbert broke the silence. "Well! That was an amusing and instructive evening, was it not?" Neither Roland nor Alain replied, so Cuthbert leaned over to the rook's skull, which he had returned to its former place on the horn of his saddle. "What say you, old friend? Did we enjoy our evening? Dinner, a circle-dance, and almost killed to top things off. Did you enjoy?"
The lookout only stared ahead of Cuthbert's horse with its great dark eyes.
"He says he's too tired for talk," Cuthbert said, then yawned. "So'm I, actually." He looked at Roland. "I got a good look into Mr. Jonas's eyes after he shook hands with you, Will. He means to kill you."
Roland nodded.
"They mean to kill all of us," Alain said.
Roland nodded again. "We'll make it hard for them, but they know more about us now than they did at dinner. We'll not get behind them that way again."
He stopped, just as Jonas had stopped not three miles from where they now were. Only instead of looking directly out over the Clean Sea, Roland and his friends were looking down the long slope of the Drop. A herd of horses was moving from west to east, barely more than shadows in this light.
"What do you see, Roland?" Alain asked, almost timidly.
"Trouble," Roland said, "and in our road." Then he gigged his horse and rode on. Before they got back to the Bar K bunkhouse, he was thinking about Susan again. Five minutes after he dropped his head on his flat burlap pillow, he was dreaming of her.