1
The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler's Moon - called Late-summer's Moon by some - came full, and left it a day later.
Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile & Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.
Ritzy was like an ugly lowered head between a pair of huge shrugged shoulders - the foothills. Above town to the south were the clapped-out shacks where the Company housed its miners; each puff of breeze brought the stench of their unlimed communal privies. To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit.
Once there had been freehold mines up there, but they were all gone, regulated out by the Vi Castis Company. Depape knew all about it, because the Big Coffin Hunters had been a part of that little spin and raree. Just after he'd hooked up with Jonas and Reynolds, that had been. Why, they had gotten those coffins tattooed on their hands not fifty miles from here, in the town of Wind, a mudpen even less ritzy thanritzy. how long ago? he couldn't rightly say, although it seemed to him that he should be able to. But when it came to reckoning times past, Depape often felt lost. It was hard even to remember how old he was. Because the world had moved on, and time was different, now. Softer.
One thing he had no trouble remembering at all - his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl's paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.
Depape rode out the sunrise end of Ritzy's only street, trotted his horse up the flank of the first hill, and paused at the top for a single look back. Last night, when he'd been talking to the old bastard behind Hattigan's, Ritzy had been roaring. This morning at seven, it looked as ghostly as the Peddler's Moon, which still hung in the sky above the rim of the plundered hills. He could hear the mines tink-tonking away, though. You bet. Those babies tink-tonked away seven days a week. No rest for the wicked . . . and he supposed that included him. He dragged his horse's head around with his usual unthinking and ham-handed force, booted its flanks, and headed east, thinking of the old bastard as he went. He had treated the old bastard passing fair, he reckoned. A reward had been promised, and had been paid for information given.
"Yar," Depape said, his glasses flashing in the new sun (it was a rare morning when he had no hangover, and he felt quite cheerful), "I reckon the old bugger can't complain."
Depape had had no trouble following the young culls' backtrail; they had come east on the Great Road the whole way from New Canaan, it appeared, and at every town where they had stopped, they had been marked. In most they were marked if they did no more than pass through. And why not? Young men on good horses, no scars on their faces, no regulator tattoos on their hands, good clothes on their backs, expensive hats on their heads. They were remembered especially well at the inns and saloons, where they had stopped to refresh themselves but had drunk no hard liquor. No beer or graf, either, for that matter. Yes, they were remembered. Boys on the road, boys that seemed almost to shine. As if they had come from an earlier, better time.
Piss in their faces, Depape thought as he rode. One by one. Mr. Arthur "Ha-Ha " Heath last. I'll save enough so it 'd drown you, were you not already at the end of the path and into the clearing.
They had been noticed, all right, but that wasn't good enough - if he went back to Hambry with no more than that, Jonas would likely shoot his nose off. And he would deserve it. They may be rich boys, but that's not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.
He had hit two other saloons, sipping watered beer in each, before rolling into Hattigan's. He ordered yet another watered beer, and prepared to engage the bartender in conversation. Before he even began to shake the tree, however, the apple he wanted fell off and dropped into his hand, neat as you please.
It was an old man's voice (an old bastard's voice), speaking with the shrill, head-hurting intensity which is the sole province of old bastards in their cups. He was talking about the old days, as old bastards always did, and about how the world had moved on, and how things had been ever so much better when he was a boy. Then he had said something which caused Depape's ears to prick up: something about how the old days might be coming again, for hadn't he seen three young lords not two months a-gone, mayhap less, and even bought one of them a drink, even if 'twas only sasparilly soda?
"You wouldn't know a young lord from a young turd," said a miss who appeared to have all of four teeth left in her charming young head.
There was general laughter at this. The old bastard looked around, offended. "I know, all right," he said. "I've forgot more than you'll ever learn, so I have. One of them at least came from the Eld line, for I saw his father in his face . . . just as clear as I see your saggy tits, Jolene." And then the old bastard had done something Depape rather admired - yanked out the front of the saloon-whore's blouse and poured the remainder of his beer down it. Even the roars of laughter and heavy applause which greeted this couldn't entirely drown the girl's caw of rage, or the old man's cries when she began to slap and punch him about the head and shoulders. These latter cries were only indignant at first,but when the girl grabbed the old bastard's own beer-stein and shattered it against the side of his head, they became screams of pain. Blood - mixed with a few watery dregs of beer - began to run down the old bastard's face.
"Get out of here!" she yelled, and gave him a shove toward the door. Several healthy kicks from the miners in attendance (who had changed sides as easily as the wind changes directions) helped him along. "And don't come back! I can smell the weed on your breath, you old cock-sucker! Get out and take your gods-cussed stories of old days and young lords with you!"
The old bastard was in such manner conveyed across the room, past the tootling trumpet-player who served as entertainment for the patrons of Hattigan's (that young bowler-hatted worthy added his own kick in the seat of the old bastard's dusty trousers without ever missing so much as a single note of "Play, Ladies, Play"), and out through the batwing doors, where he collapsed face-first into the street.
Depape had sauntered after him and helped him up. As he did so, he smelled an acrid odor - not beer - on the old man's breath, and saw the telltale greenish-gray discolorations at the comers of his lips. Weed, all right. The old bastard was probably just getting started on it (and for the usual reason: devil-grass was free in the hills, unlike the beer and whiskey that was sold in town), but once they started, the finish came quick.
"They got no respect," the old bastard said thickly. "Nor understanding, either."
"Aye, so they don't," said Depape, who had not yet gotten the accents of the seacoast and the Drop out of his speech.
The old bastard stood swaying, looking up at him, wiping ineffectually at the blood which ran down his wrinkled cheeks from his lacerated scalp. "Son, do you have the price of a drink? Remember the face of your father and give an old soul the price of a drink!"
"I'm not much for charity, old-timer," Depape said, "but mayhap you could earn yourself the price of a drink. Step on over here, into my office, and let's us see."
He'd led the old bastard out of the street and back to the boardwalk, angling well to the left of the black batwings with their golden shafts of light spilling out above and below. He waited for a trio of miners to go by, singing at the top of their lungs ("Woman I love... is long and tall... she moves her body... like a cannonball... "), and then, still holding the old bastard by the elbow, hail guided him into the alley between Hattigan's and the undertaking establishment next door. For some people, Depape mused, a visit to Ritzy could damn near amount to one-stop shopping: get your drink, get your bullet, get laid out next door.
"Yer office," the old bastard cackled as Depape led him down the alley toward the board fence and the heaps of rubbish at the far end. The wind blew, stinging Depape's nose with odors of sulfur and carbolic from the mines. From their right, the sounds of drunken revelry pounded through the side of Hattigan's. "Your office, that's good."
"Aye, my office."
The old man gazed at him in the light of the moon, which rode the slot of sky above the alley. "Are you from Mejis? Or Tepachi?"
"Maybe one, maybe t'other, maybe neither."
"Do I know you?" The old bastard was looking at him even more closely, standing on tiptoe as if hoping for a kiss. Ugh.
Depape pushed him away. "Not so close, dad." Yet he felt marginally encouraged. He and Jonas and Reynolds had been here before, and if the old man remembered his face, likely he wasn't talking through his hat about fellows he'd seen much more recently.
"Tell me about the three young lords, old dad." Depape rapped on the wall of Hattigan's. "Them in there may not be interested, but I am."
The old bastard looked at him with a bleary, calculating eye. "Might there be a bit o' metal in it for me?"
"Yar," Depape said. "If you tell me what I want to hear, I'll give you metal."
"Gold?"
"Tell me, and we'll see."
"No, sir. Dicker first, tell second."
Depape seized him by the arm, whirled him around, and yanked a wrist which felt like a bundle of sticks up to the old bastard's scrawny shoulderblades. "Fuck with me, dad, and we'll start by breaking your arm."
"Let go!" the old bastard screamed breathlessly. "Let go, I'll trust to your generosity, young sir, for you have a generous face! Yes! Yes indeed!"
Depape let him go. The old bastard eyed him warily, rubbing his shoulder. In the moonlight the blood drying on his cheeks looked black.
"Three of them, there were," he said. "Fine-born lads."
"Lads or lords? Which is it, dad?"
The old bastard had taken the question thoughtfully. The whack on the head, the night air, and having his arm twisted seemed to have sobered him up, at least temporarily.
"Both, I do believe," he said at last. "One was a lord for sure, whether them in there believe it or not. For I saw his father, and his father bore the guns. Not such poor things such as you wear - beggin your pardon, I know they're the best to be had these days - but real guns, such as were seen when my own dad was a boy. The big ones with the sandalwood grips."
Depape had stared at the old man, feeling a rise of excitement . . . and a species of reluctant awe, as well. They acted like gunslingers, Jonas had said. When Reynolds protested they were too young, Jonas had said they might be apprentices, and now it seemed the boss had likely been right.
"Sandal-wood grips?" he had asked. "Sandalwood grips, old dad?"
"Yep." The old man saw his excitement, and his belief. He expanded visibly.
"A gunslinger, you mean. This one young fellow's father carried the big irons."
"Yep, a gunslinger. One of the last lords. Their line is passing, now, but my dad knew him well enough. Steven Deschain, of Gilead. Steven, son of Henry."
"And this one you saw not long ago - "
"His son. Henry the Tail's grandson. The others looked well-born, as if they might also come from the line of lords, but the one I saw come down all the way from Arthur Eld, by one line or another. Sure as you walk on two legs. Have I earned my metal yet?"
Depape thought to say yes, then realized he didn't know which of the three culls this old bastard was talking about.
"Three young men," he mused. "Three high-borns. And did they have guns?"
"Not out where the drift-diggers of this town could see em," the old bastard said, and laughed nastily. "But they had em, all right. Probably hid in their bedrolls. I'd set my watch and warrant on it."
"Aye," Depape said. "I suppose you would. Three young men, one the son of a lord. Of a gunslinger, you think. Steven of Gilead." And the name was familiar to him, aye, it was.
"Steven Deschain of Gilead, that's it."
"And what name did he give, this young lord?"
The old bastard had screwed his face up alarmingly in an effort to remember. "Deerfield? Deerstine? I don't quite remember - "
"That's all right, I know it. And you've earned your metal."
"Have I?" the old bastard had edged close again, his breath gagging-sweet with the weed. "Gold or silver? Which is it, my friend?"
"Lead," Depape replied, then hauled leather and shot the old man twice in the chest. Doing him a favor, really.
Now he rode back toward Mejis - it would be a faster trip without having to stop in every dipshit little town and ask questions.
There was a flurry of wings close above his head. A pigeon - dark gray, it was, with a white ring around its neck - fluttered down on a rock just ahead of him, as if to rest. An interesting-looking bird. Not, Depape thought, a wild pigeon. Someone's escaped pet? He couldn't imagine anyone in this desolate quarter of the world keeping anything but a half-wild dog to bite the squash off any would-be robber (although what these folks might have worth robbing was another question he couldn't answer), but he supposed anything was possible. In any case, roast pigeon would go down a treat when he stopped for the night.
Depape drew his gun, but before he could cock the hammer, the pigeon was off and flying east. Depape took a shot after it, anyway. Sometimes you got lucky, but apparently not this time; the pigeon dipped a little, then straightened out and disappeared in the direction Depape himself was going. He sat astride his horse for a moment, not much put out of countenance; he thought Jonas was going to be very pleased with what he had found out.
After a bit, he booted his horse in the sides and began to canter east along the Barony Sea Road, back toward Mejis, where the boys who had embarrassed him were waiting to be dealt with. Lords they might be, sons of gunslingers they might be, but in these latter days, even such as those could die. As the old bastard himself would undoubtedly have pointed out, the world had moved on.
2
On a late afternoon three days after Roy Depape left Ritzy and headed his horse toward Hambry again, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode north and west of town, first down the long swell of the Drop, then into the freeland Hambry folk called the Bad Grass, then into deserty waste lands. Ahead of them and clearly visible once they were back in the open were crumbled and eroded bluffs. In the center of these was a dark, almost vaginal cleft; its edges so splintered it looked as if it had been whacked into reality by an ill-tempered god wielding a hatchet.
The distance between the end of the Drop and the bluffs was perhaps six miles. Three quarters of the way across, they passed the flatlands' only real geographic feature: a jutting upthrust of rock that looked like a finger bent at the first knuckle. Below it was a small, boomerang-shaped greensward, and when Cuthbert gave a ululating yell to hear his voice bounce back at him from the bluffs ahead, a pack of chattering billy-bumblers broke from this greenplace and went racing back southeast, toward the Drop.
"That's Hanging Rock," Roland said. "There's a spring at the base of it - only one in these parts, they say."
It was all the talk that passed between them on the ride out, but a look of unmistakable relief passed between Cuthbert and Alain behind Roland's back. For the last three weeks they had pretty much marched in place as summer rolled around them and past them. It was all well for Roland to say they must wait, they must pay greatest attention to the things that didn't matter and count the things which did from the comers of their eyes, but neither of them quite trusted the dreamy, disconnected air which Roland wore these days like his own special version of Clay Reynolds's cloak. They didn't talk about this between themselves; they didn't have to. Both knew that if Roland began courting the pretty girl whom Mayor Thorin meant for his gilly (and who else could that long blonde hair have belonged to?), they would be in very bad trouble. But Roland showed no courting plumage, neither of them spied any more blonde hairs on his shirt-collars, and tonight he seemed more himself, as if he had put that cloak of abstraction aside. Temporarily, mayhap. Permanently, if they were lucky. They could only wait and see. In the end, ka would tell, as it always did.
A mile or so from the bluffs, the strong sea breeze which had been at their backs for the whole ride suddenly dropped, and they heard the low, atonal squalling from the cleft that was Eyebolt Canyon. Alain pulled up, grimacing like a man who has bitten into a fruit of extravagant sourness. All he could think of was a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand. Buzzards circled above the canyon as if drawn to the sound.
"The lookout don't like it. Will." Cuthbert said, knocking his knuckles on the skull. "I don't like it much, either. What are we out here for?"
"To count," Roland said. "We were sent to count everything and see everything, and this is something to count and see."
"Oh, aye," Cuthbert said. He held his horse in with some effort; the low, grinding wail of the thinny had made it skittish. "Sixteen hundred and fourteen fishing nets, seven hundred and ten boats small, two hundred and fourteen boats large, seventy oxen that nobody will admit to, and, on the north of town, one thinny. Whatever the hell that is."
"We're going to find out," Roland said.
They rode into the sound, and although none of them liked it, no one suggested they go back. They had come all the way out here, and Roland was right - this was their job. Besides, they were curious.
The mouth of the canyon had been pretty well stopped up with brush, as Susan had told Roland it would be. Come fall, most of it would probably be dead, but now the stacked branches still bore leaves and made it hard to see into the canyon. A path led through the center of the brush-pile, but it was narrow for the horses (who might have balked at going through, anyway), and in the failing light Roland could make out hardly anything.
"Are we going in?" Cuthbert asked. "Let the Recording Angel note that I'm against, although I'll offer no mutiny."
Roland had no intention of taking them through the brush and toward the source of that sound. Not when he had only the vaguest idea of what a thinny was. He had asked a few questions about it over the last few weeks, and gotten little useful response. "I'd stay away," was the extent of Sheriff Avery's advice. So far his best information was still what he had gotten from Susan on the night he met her.
"Sit easy, Bert. We're not going in."
"Good," Alain said softly, and Roland smiled.
There was a path up the canyon's west side, steep and narrow, but passable if they were careful. They went single file, stopping once to clear a rockfall, pitching splintered chunks of shale and hornfels into the groaning trench to their right. When this was done and just as the three of them were preparing to mount up again, a large bird of some sort - perhaps a grouse, perhaps a prairie chicken - rose above the lip of the canyon in an explosive whir of feathers. Roland dipped for his guns, and saw both Cuthbert and Alain doing the same. Quite funny, considering that their firearms were wrapped in protective oilcloth and secreted beneath the floorboards of the Bar K bunkhouse.
They looked at each other, said nothing (except with their eyes, which said plenty), and went on. Roland found that the effect of being this close to the thinny was cumulative - it wasn't a sound you could get used to. Quite the contrary, in fact: the longer you were in the immediate vicinity of Eye-bolt Canyon, the more that sound scraped away at your brain. It got into your teeth as well as your ears; it vibrated in the knot of nerves below the breastbone and seemed to eat at the damp and delicate tissue behind the eyes. Most of all, though, it got into your head, telling you that everything you had ever been afraid of was just behind the next curve of the trail or yonder pile of tumbled rock, waiting to snake out of its place and get you.
Once they got to the flat and barren ground at the top of the path and the sky opened out above them again it was a little better, but by then the light was almost gone, and when they dismounted and walked to the canyon's crumbling edge, they could see little but shadows.
"No good," Cuthbert said disgustedly. "We should have left earlier, Roland . . . Will, I mean. What dummies we are!"
"I can be Roland to you out here, if you like. And we'll see what we came to see and count what we came to count - one thinny, just as you said. Only wait."
They waited, and not twenty minutes later the Peddler's Moon rose above the horizon - a perfect summer moon, huge and orange. It loomed in the darkening violet swim of the sky like a crashing planet. On its face, as clear as anyone had ever seen it, was the Peddler, he who came out of Nones with his sackful of squealing souls. A hunched figure made of smudged shadows with a pack clearly visible over one cringing shoulder. Behind it, the orange light seemed to flame like hellfire.
"Ugh," Cuthbert said. "That's an ill sight to see with that sound coming up from below."
Yet they held their ground (and their horses, which periodically yanked back on their reins as if to tell them they should already be gone from this place), and the moon rose in the sky, shrinking a little as it went and turning silver. Eventually it rose enough to cast its bony light into Eyebolt Canyon. The three boys stood looking down. None of them spoke. Roland didn't know about his friends, but he didn't think he himself could have spoken even if called on to do so.
A box canyon, very short and steep-sided, Susan had said, and the description was perfectly accurate. She'd also said Eyebolt looked like a chimney lying on its side, and Roland supposed that was also true, if you allowed that a falling chimney might break up a little on impact, and lie with one crooked place in its middle.
Up to that crook, the canyon floor looked ordinary enough; even the litter of bones the moon showed them was not extraordinary. Many animals which wandered into box canyons hadn't the wit to find their way hack out again, and with Eyebolt the possibility of escape was further reduced by the choke of brush piled at the canyon's mouth. The sides were much too steep to climb except maybe for one place, just before that crooked little jog. There Roland saw a kind of groove running up the canyon wall, with enough jutting spurs inside it to - maybe! - provide handholds. There was no real reason for him to note this; he just did, as he would go on noting potential escape-routes his entire life.
Beyond the jag in the canyon floor was something none of them had ever seen before ... and when they got back to the bunkhouse several hours later, they all agreed that they weren't sure exactly what they had seen. The latter part of Eyebolt Canyon was obscured by a sullen, silvery liquescence from which snakes of smoke or mist were rising in streamers. The liquid seemed to move sluggishly, lapping at the walls which held it in. Later, they would discover that both liquid and mist were a light green; it was only the moonlight that had made them look silver.
As they watched, a dark flying shape - perhaps it was the same one that had frightened them before - skimmed down toward the surface of the thinny. It snatched something out of the air - a bug? another, smaller, bird? - and then began to rise again. Before it could, a silvery arm of liquid rose from the canyon's floor. For a moment that soupy, grinding grumble rose a notch, and became almost a voice. It snatched the bird out of the air and dragged it down. Greenish light, brief and unfocused, flashed across the surface of the thinny like electricity, and was gone.
The three boys stared at each other with frightened eyes.
Jump in, gunslinger, a voice suddenly called. It was the voice of the thinny; it was the voice of his father; it was also the voice of Marten the enchanter, Marten the seducer. Most terrible of all, it was his own voice.
Jump in and let all these cares cease. There is no love of girls to worry you here, and no mourning of lost mothers to weigh your child's heart. Only the hum of the growing cavity at the center of the universe; only the punky sweetness of rotting flesh.
Come, gunslinger. Be apart of the thinny.
Dreamy-faced and blank-eyed, Alain began walking along the edge of the drop, his right boot so close to it that the heel puffed little clouds of dust over the chasm and sent clusters of pebbles down into it. Before he could get more than five steps, Roland grabbed him by the belt and yanked him roughly back.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Alain looked at him with sleepwalker's eyes. They began to clear, but slowly. "I don't . . . know, Roland."
Below them, the thinny hummed and growled and sang. There was a sound, as well: an oozing, sludgy mutter.
"I know," Cuthbert said. "I know where we're all going. Back to the Bar K. Come on, let's get out of here." He looked pleadingly at Roland. "Please. It's awful."
"All right."
But before he led them back to the path, he stepped to the edge and looked down at the smoky silver ooze below him. "Counting," he said with a kind of clear defiance. "Counting one thinny." Then, lowering his voice: "And be damned to you."
3
Their composure returned as they rode back - the sea-breeze in their faces was wonderfully restorative after the dead and somehow baked smell of the canyon and the thinny.
As they rode up the Drop (on a long diagonal, so as to save the horses a little), Alain said: "What do we do next, Roland? Do you know?"
"No. As a matter of fact, I don't."
"Supper would be a start," Cuthbert said brightly, and tapped the lookout's hollow skull for emphasis.
"You know what I mean."
"Yes," Cuthbert agreed. "And I'll tell you something, Roland - "
"Will, please. Now that we're back on the Drop, let me be Will."
"Aye, fine. I'll tell you something, Will: we can't go on counting nets and boats and looms and wheel-irons much longer. We're running out of things that don't matter. I believe that looking stupid will become a good deal harder once we move to the horse-breeding side of life as it's lived in Hambry."
"Aye," Roland said. He stopped Rusher and looked back the way they had come. He was momentarily enchanted by the sight of horses, apparently infected with a kind of moon-madness, frolicking and racing across the silvery grass. "But I tell you both again, this is not just about horses. Does Farson need them? Aye, mayhap. So does the Affiliation. Oxen as well. But there are horses everywhere - perhaps not as good as these, I'll admit, but any port does in a storm, so they say. So, if it's not horses, what is it? Until we know, or decide we'll never know, we go on as we are."
Part of the answer was waiting for them back at the Bar K. It was perched on the hitching rail and flicking its tail saucily. When the pigeon hopped into Roland's hand, he saw that one of its wings was oddly frayed. Some animal - likely a cat - had crept up on it close enough to pounce, he reckoned.
The note curled against the pigeon's leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn't understood.
I'll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it, and felt a surge of gladness. His pulse quickened, and in the cold silver light of the Peddler's Moon, he smiled.