Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4)

Page 21

Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain came out onto the porch of the Bar K bunkhouse almost two hours after Jonas had left Coral's room at the Travellers' Rest. By then the sun was well up over the horizon. They weren't late risers by nature, but as Cuthbert put it, "We have a certain In-World image to maintain. Not laziness but lounginess."

Roland stretched, arms spread toward the sky in a wide Y, then bent and grasped the toes of his boots. This caused his back to crackle.

"I hate that noise," Alain said. He sounded morose and sleepy. In fact, he had been troubled by odd dreams and premonitions all night - things which, of the three of them, only he was prey to. Because of the touch, perhaps - with him it had always been strong.

"That's why he does it," Cuthbert said, then clapped Alain on the shoulder. "Cheer up, old boy. You're too handsome to be downhearted."

Roland straightened, and they walked across the dusty yard toward the stables. Halfway there, he came to a stop so sudden that Alain almost ran into his back. Roland was looking east. "Oh," he said in a funny, bemused voice. He even smiled a little.

"Oh?" Cuthbert echoed. "Oh what, great leader? Oh joy, I shall see the perfumed lady anon, or oh rats, I must work with my smelly male companions all the livelong day?"

Alain looked down at his boots, new and uncomfortable when they had left Gilead, now sprung, trailworn, a little down at the heels, and as comfortable as workboots ever got. Looking at them was better than looking at his friends, for the time being. There was always an edge to Cuthbert's teasing these days; the old sense of fun had been replaced by something that was mean and unpleasant. Alain kept expecting Roland to flash up at one of Cuthbert's jibes, like steel that has been struck by sharp flint, and knock Bert sprawling. In a way, Alain almost wished for it. It might clear the air.

But not the air of this morning.

"Just oh," Roland said mildly, and walked on.

"Cry your pardon, for I know you'll not want to hear it, but I'd speak a further word about the pigeons," Cuthbert said as they saddled their mounts. "I still believe that a message - "

"I'll make you a promise," Roland said, smiling.

Cuthbert looked at him with some mistrust. "Aye?"

"If you still want to send by flight tomorrow morning, we'll do so. The one you choose shall be sent west to Gilead with a message of your devising banded to its leg. What do you say, Arthur Heath? Is it fair?"

Cuthbert looked at him for a moment with a suspicion that hurt Alain's heart. Then he also smiled. "Fair," he said. "Thank you."

And then Roland said something which struck Alain as odd and made that prescient part of him quiver with disquiet. "Don't thank me yet."

"I don't want to go up there, sai Thorin," Sheemie said. An unusual expression had creased his normally smooth face - a troubled and fearful frown. "She's a scary lady. Scary as a beary, she is. Got a wart on her nose, right here." He thumbed the tip of his own nose, which was small and smooth and well molded.

Coral, who might have bitten his head off for such hesitation only yesterday, was unusually patient today. "So true," she said. "But Sheemie, she asked for ye special, and she tips. Ye know she does, and well."

"Won't help if she turns me into a beetle," Sheemie said morosely. "Beetles can't spend coppers."

Nevertheless, he let himself be led to where Caprichoso, the inn's pack-mule, was tied. Barkie had loaded two small tuns over the mule's back. One, filled with sand, was just there for balance. The other held a fresh pressing of the graf Rhea had a taste for.

"Fair-Day's coming," Coral said brightly. "Why, it's not three weeks now."

"Aye." Sheemie looked happier at this. He loved Fair-Days passionately - the lights, the firecrackers, the dancing, the games, the laughter. When Fair-Day came, everyone was happy and no one spoke mean.

"A young man with coppers in his pocket is sure to have a good time at the Fair," Coral said.

"That's true, sai Thorin." Sheemie looked like someone who has just discovered one of life's great principles. "Aye, truey-true, so it is."

Coral put Caprichoso's rope halter into Sheemie's palm and closed the fingers over it. "Have a nice trip, lad. Be polite to the old crow, bow yer best bow .. . and make sure ye're back down the hill before dark."

"Long before, aye," Sheemie said, shivering at the very thought of still being up in the Coos after nightfall. "Long before, sure as loaves 'n fishes."

"Good lad." Coral watched him off, his pink sombrero now clapped on his head, leading the grumpy old pack-mule by its rope. And, as he disappeared over the brow of the first mild hill, she said it again: "Good lad."

Jonas waited on the flank of a ridge, belly-down in the tall grass, until the brats were an hour gone from the Bar K. He then rode to the ridgetop and picked them out, three dots four miles away on the brown slope. Off to do their daily duty. No sign they suspected anything. They were smarter than he had at first given them credit for ... but nowhere near as smart as they thought they were.

He rode to within a quarter mile of the Bar K - except for the bunk-house and stable, a burned-out hulk in the bright sunlight of this early autumn day - and tethered his horse in a copse of cottonwoods that grew around the ranch house spring. Here the boys had left some washing to dry. Jonas stripped the pants and shirts off the low branches upon which they had been hung, made a pile of them, pissed on them, and then went back to his horse.

The animal stamped the ground emphatically when Jonas pulled the dog's tail from one of his saddlebags, as if saying he was glad to be rid of it. Jonas would be glad to be rid of it, too. It had begun giving off an unmistakable aroma. From the other saddlebag he took a small glass jar of red paint, and a brush. These he had obtained from Brian Hockey's eldest son, who was minding the livery stable today. Sai Hookey himself would be out to Citgo by now, no doubt.

Jonas walked to the bunkhouse with no effort at concealment . . . not that there was much in the way of concealment to be had out here. And no one to hide from, anyway, now that the boys were gone.

One of them had left an actual book - Mercer's Homilies and Meditations- on the seat of a rocking chair on the porch. Books were things of exquisite rarity in Mid-World, especially as one travelled out from the center. This was the first one, except for the few kept in Seafront, that Jonas had seen since coming to Mejis. He opened it. In a firm woman's hand he read: To my dearest son, from his loving MOTHER. Jonas tore j (Ins page out, opened his jar of paint, and dipped the tips of his last two lingers inside. He blotted out the word MOTHER with the pad of his third linger, then, using the nail of his pinky as a makeshift pen, printed CUNT above MOTHER. He poked this sheet on a rusty nailhead where it was sure to be seen, then tore the book up and stamped on the pieces. Which boy had it belonged to? He hoped it was Dearborn's, but it didn't really matter.

The first thing Jonas noticed when he went inside was the pigeons, cooing in their cages. He had thought they might be using a helio to send (heir messages, but pigeons! My! That was ever so much more trig!

"I'll get to you in a few minutes," he said. "Be patient, darlings; peck and shit while you still can."

He looked around with some curiosity, the soft coo of the pigeons soothing in his ears. Lads or lords? Roy had asked the old man in Ritzy. The old man had said maybe both. Neat lads, at the very least, from the way they kept their quarters, Jonas thought. Well trained. Three bunks, all made. Three piles of goods at the foot of each, stacked up just as neat. In each pile he found a picture of a mother - oh, such good fellows they were - and in one he found a picture of both parents. He had hoped for names, possibly documents of some kind (even love letters from the girl, mayhap), but there was nothing like that. Lads or lords, they were careful enough. Jonas removed the pictures from their frames and shredded them. The goods he scattered to all points of the compass, destroying as much as he could in the limited time he had. When he found a linen handkerchief in the pocket of a pair of dress pants, he blew his nose on it and then spread it carefully on the toes of the boy's dress boots, so that the green splat would show to good advantage. What could be more aggravating - more unsettling - than to come home after a hard day spent tallying stock and find some stranger's snot on one of your personals?

The pigeons were upset now; they were incapable of scolding like jays or rooks, but they tried to flutter away from him when he opened their cages. It did no good, of course. He caught them one by one and twisted their heads off. That much accomplished, Jonas popped one bird beneath the strawtick pillow of each boy.

Beneath one of these pillows he found a small bonus: paper strips and a storage-pen, undoubtedly kept for the composition of messages. He broke the pen and flung it across the room. The strips he put in his own pocket. Paper always came in handy.

With the pigeons seen to, he could hear better. He began walking slowly back and forth on the board floor, head cocked, listening.

When Alain came riding up to him at a gallop, Roland ignored the boy's strained white face and burning, frightened eyes. "I make it thirty-one on my side," he said, "all with the Barony brand, crown and shield. You?"

"We have to go back," Alain said. "Something's wrong. It's the touch. I've never felt it so clear."

"Your count?" Roland asked again. There were times, such as now, when he found Alain's ability to use the touch more annoying than helpful.

"Forty. Or forty-one, I forget. And what does it matter? They've moved what they don't want us to count. Roland, didn't you hear me? We have to go back! Something's wrong! Something's wrong at our place /"

Roland glanced toward Bert, riding peaceably some five hundred yards away. Then he looked back at Alain, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.

"Bert? He's numb to the touch and always has been - you know it. I'm not. You know I'm not! Roland, please! Whoever it is will see the pigeons! Maybe find our guns!" The normally phlegmatic Alain was nearly crying in his excitement and dismay. "If you won't go back with me, give me leave to go back by myself! Give me leave, Roland, for your father's sake!"

"For your father's sake, I give you none," Roland said. "My count is thirty-one. Yours is forty. Yes, we'll say forty. Forty's a good number - good as any, I wot. Now we'll change sides and count again."

"What's wrong with you?" Alain almost whispered. He was looking at Roland as if Roland had gone mad.

"Nothing."

"You knew! You knew when we left this morning!"

"Oh, I might have seen something," Roland said. "A reflection, perhaps, but ... do you trust me, Al? That's what matters, I think. Do you trust me, or do you think I lost my wits when I lost my heart? As he does?" He jerked his head in Cuthbert's direction. Roland was looking at Alain with a faint smile on his lips, but his eyes were ruthless and distant it was Roland's over-the-horizon look. Alain wondered if Susan Delgado had seen that expression yet, and if she had, what she made of it.

"I trust you." By now Alain was so confused that he didn't know for Mire if that was a lie or the truth.

"Good. Then switch sides with me. My count is thirty-one, mind."

"Thirty-one," Alain agreed. He raised his hands, then dropped them hack to his thighs with a slap so sharp his normally stolid mount laid his cars back and jigged a bit under him. "Thirty-one."

"I think we may go back early today, if that's any satisfaction to you," Roland said, and rode away. Alain watched him. He'd always wondered what went on in Roland's head, but never more than now.

Creak. Creak-creak.

Here was what he'd been listening for, and just as Jonas was about to give up the hunt. He had expected to find their hidey-hole a little closer to their beds, but they were trig, all right.

He went to one knee and used the blade of his knife to pry up the board which had creaked. Under it were three bundles, each swaddled in dark strips of cotton cloth. These strips were damp to the touch and smelled fragrantly of gun-oil. Jonas took the bundles out and unwrapped each, curious to see what sort of calibers the youngsters had brought. The answer turned out to be serviceable but undistinguished. Two of the bundles contained single five-shot revolvers of a type then called (for no reason I know) "carvers." The third contained two guns, six-shooters of higher quality than the carvers. In fact, for one heart-stopping moment, Jonas thought he had found the big revolvers of a gunslinger - true-blue steel barrels, sandalwood grips, bores like mineshafts. Such guns he could not have left, no matter what the cost to his plans. Seeing the plain grips was thus something of a relief. Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.

He rewrapped the guns and put them back, put the board back as well. A gang of ne'er-do-well clots from town might possibly come out here, and might possibly vandalize the unguarded bunkhouse, scattering what they didn't tear up, but find a hiding place such as this? No, my son. Not likely.

Do you really think they'll believe it was hooligans from town that did this?

They might; just because he had underestimated them to start with didn't mean he should turn about-face and begin overestimating them now. And he had the luxury of not needing to care. Either way, it would make them angry. Angry enough to rush full-tilt around their Hillock, perhaps. To throw caution to the wind . . . and reap the whirlwind.

Jonas poked the end of the severed dog's tail into one of the pigeon-cages, so it stuck up like a huge, mocking feather. He used the paint to write such charmingly boyish slogans as

on the walls. Then he left, standing on the porch for a moment to verify he still had the Bar K to himself. Of course he did. Yet for a blink or two, there at the end, he'd felt uneasy - almost as though he'd been scented. By some sort of In-World telepathy, mayhap.

There is such; you know it. The touch, it's called.

Aye, but that was the tool of gunslingers, artists, and lunatics. Not of boys, be they lords or just lads.

Jonas went back to his horse at a near-trot nevertheless, mounted, and rode toward town. Things were reaching the boil, and there would be a lot to do before Demon Moon rose full in the sky.

Rhea's hut, its stone walls and the cracked guijarros of its roof slimed with moss, huddled on the last hill of the Coos. Beyond it was a magnificent view northwest - the Bad Grass, the desert, Hanging Rock, Eyebolt Canyon - but scenic vistas were the last thing on Sheemie's mind as he led Capriccioso cautiously into Rhea's yard not long after noon. He'd been hungry for the last hour or so, but now the pangs were gone. He hated this place worse than any other in Barony, even more than Citgo with its big towers always going creakedy-creak and clangety-clang.

"Sai?" he called, leading the mule into the yard. Capi balked as they neared the hut, planting his feet and lowering his neck, but when Sheemie tugged the halter, he came on again. Sheemie was almost sorry.

"Ma'am? Nice old lady that wouldn't hurt a fly? You therey-air? It's good old Sheemie with your graf." He smiled and held out his free hand, palm up, to demonstrate his exquisite harmlessness, but from the hut there was still no response. Sheemie felt his guts first coil, then cramp. For a moment he thought he was going to shit in his pants just like a babby; then he passed wind and felt a little better. In his bowels, at least.

He walked on, liking this less at every step. The yard was rocky and the straggling weeds yellowish, as if the hut's resident had blighted the very earth with her touch. There was a garden, and Sheemie saw that the vegetables still in it - pumpkins and sharproot, mostly - were muties. Then he noticed the garden's stuffy-guy. It was also a mutie, a nasty thing with two straw heads instead of one and what appeared to be a stuffed hand in a woman's satin glove poking out of the chest area.

Sai Thorin'll never talk me up here again, he thought. Not for all the pennies in the world.

The hut's door stood open. To Sheemie it looked like a gaping mouth. A sickish dank smell drifted out.

Sheemie stopped about fifteen paces from the house, and when Capi nuzzled his bottom (as if to ask what was keeping them), the boy uttered a brief screech. The sound of it almost set him running, and it was only by exercising all his willpower that he was able to stand his ground. The day was bright, but up here on this hill, the sun seemed meaningless. This wasn't his first trip up here, and Rhea's hill had never been pleasant, but it was somehow worse now. It made him feel the way the sound of the thinny made him feel when he woke and heard it in the middle of the night. As if something awful was sliding toward him - something that was all insane eyes and red, reaching claws.

"S-S-Sai? Is anyone here? Is - "

"Come closer." The voice drifted out of the open door. "Come to where I can see you, idiot boy."

Trying not to moan or cry, Sheemie did as the voice said. He had an idea that he was never going back down the hill again. Capriccioso, perhaps, but not him. Poor old Sheemie was going to end up in the cookpot - hot dinner tonight, soup tomorrow, cold snacks until Year's End. That's what he would be.

He made his reluctant way to Rhea's stoop on rubbery legs - if his knees had been closer together, they would have knocked like castanets. She didn't even sound the same.

"S-Sai? I'm afraid. So I a-a-am."

"So ye should be," the voice said. It drifted and drifted, slipping out into the sunlight like a sick puff of smoke. "Never mind, though - just do as I say. Come closer, Sheemie, son of Stanley."

Sheemie did so, although terror dragged at every step he took. The mule followed, head down. Capi had honked like a goose all the way up here - honked ceaselessly - but now he had fallen silent.

"So here ye be," the voice buried in those shadows whispered. "Here ye be, indeed."

She stepped into the sunlight falling through the open door, wincing for a moment as it dazzled her eyes. Clasped in her arms was the empty graf barrel. Coiled around her throat like a necklace was Ermot.

Sheemie had seen the snake before, and on previous occasions had never failed to wonder what sort of agonies he might suffer before he died if he happened to be bitten by such. Today he had no such thoughts. Compared to Rhea, Ermot looked normal. The old woman's face had sunken at the cheeks, giving the rest of her head the look of a skull. Brown spots swarmed out of her thin hair and over her bulging brow like an army of invading insects. Below her left eye was an open sore, and her grin showed only a few remaining teeth.

"Don't like the way I look, do'ee?" she asked. "Makes yer heart cold, don't it?"

"N-No," Sheemie said, and then, because that didn't sound right: "I mean yes!" But gods, that sounded even worse. "You're beautiful, sai!" he blurted.

She chuffed nearly soundless laughter and thrust the empty tun into his arms almost hard enough to knock him on his ass. The touch of her fingers was brief, but long enough to make his flesh crawl.

"Well-a-day. They say handsome is as handsome does, don't they?

And that suits me. Aye, right down to the ground. Bring me my graf, idiot child."

"Y-yes, sai! Right away, sai!" He took the empty tun back to the mule, set it down, then fumbled loose the cordage holding the little barrel of graf . He was very aware of her watching him, and it made him clumsy, hut finally he got the barrel loose. It almost slid through his grasp, and there was a nightmarish moment when he thought it would fall to the stony ground and smash, but he caught his grip again at the last second. He took it to her, had just a second to realize she was no longer wearing the snake, then felt it crawling on his boots. Ermot looked up at him, hissing and baring a double set of fangs in an eerie grin.

"Don't move too fast, my boy. 'Twouldn't be wise - Ermot's grumpy today. Set the barrel just inside the door, here. It's too heavy for me. Missed a few meals of late, I have."

Sheemie bent from the waist (bow yer best bow, Sai Thorin had said, and here he was, doing just that), grimacing, not daring to ease the pressure on his back by moving his feet because the snake was still on them. When he straightened, Rhea was holding out an old and stained envelope. The flap had been sealed with a blob of red wax. Sheemie dreaded to think what might have been rendered down to make wax such as that.

"Take this and give it to Cordelia Delgado. Do ye know her?"

"A-Aye," Sheemie managed. "Susan-sai's auntie."

"That's right." Sheemie reached tentatively for the envelope, but she held it back a moment. "Can't read, can ye, idiot boy?"

"Nay. Words 'n letters go right out of my head."

"Good. Mind ye show this to no one who can, or some night ye'll find Ermot waiting under yer pillow. I see far, Sheemie, d'ye mark me? I see far"

It was just an envelope, but it felt heavy and somehow dreadful in Sheemie's fingers, as if it were made out of human skin instead of paper. And what sort of letter could Rhea be sending Cordelia Delgado, anyway? Sheemie thought back to the day he'd seen sai Delgado's face all covered with cobwebbies, and shivered. The horrid creature lurking before him in the doorway of her hut could have been the very creature who'd spun those webs.

"Lose it and I'll know," Rhea whispered. "Show my business to another, and I'll know. Remember, son of Stanley, I see far."

"I'll be careful, sai." It might be better if he did lose the envelope, but he wouldn't. Sheemie was dim in the head, everyone said so, but not so dim that he didn't understand why he had been called up here: not to deliver a barrel ofgraf, but to receive this letter and pass it on.

"Would ye care to come in for a bit?" she whispered, and then pointed a ringer at his crotch. "If I give ye a little bit of mushroom to eat - special to me, it is - I can look like anyone ye fancy."

"Oh, I can't," he said, clutching his trousers and smiling a huge broad smile that felt like a scream trying to get out of his skin. "That pesky thing fell off last week, that did."

For a moment Rhea only gawped at him, genuinely surprised for one of the few times in her life, and then she once more broke out in chuffing bursts of laughter. She held her stomach in her waxy hands and rocked back and forth with glee. Ermot, startled, streaked into the house on his lengthy green belly. From somewhere in its depths, her cat hissed at it.

"Go on," Rhea said, still laughing. She leaned forward and dropped three or four pennies into his shirt pocket. "Get out of here, ye great galoophus! Don't ye linger, either, looking at flowers!"

"No, sai - "

Before he could say more, the door clapped to so hard that dust puffed out of the cracks between the boards.

Roland surprised Cuthbert by suggesting at two o' the clock that they go back to the Bar K. When Bert asked why, Roland only shrugged and would say nothing more. Bert looked at Alain and saw a queer, musing expression on the boy's face.

As they drew closer to the bunkhouse, a sense of foreboding filled Cuthbert. They topped a rise, and looked down at the Bar K. The bunk-house door stood open.

"Roland!" Alain cried. He was pointing to the cottonwood grove where the ranch's spring was. Their clothes, neatly hung to dry when they left, were now scattered hell-to-breakfast.

Cuthbert dismounted and ran to them. Picked up a shirt, sniffed it, flung it away. "Pissed on!" he cried indignantly.

"Come on," Roland said. "Let's look at the damage."

There was a lot of damage to look at. As you expected, Cuthbert thought, gazing at Roland. Then he turned to Alain, who appeared gloomy but not really surprised. As you both expected.

Roland bent toward one of the dead pigeons, and plucked at something so fine Cuthbert at first couldn't see what it was. Then he straightened up and held it out to his friends. A single hair. Very long, very white. He opened the pinch of his thumb and forefinger and let it waft to the floor. There it lay amid the shredded remains of Cuthbert Allgood's mother and father.

"If you knew that old corbie was here, why didn't we come back and end his breath?" Cuthbert heard himself ask.

"Because the time was wrong," Roland said mildly.

"He would have done it, had it been one of us in his place, destroying his things."

"We're not like him," Roland said mildly.

"I'm going to find him and blow his teeth out the back of his head."

"Not at all," Roland said mildly.

If Bert had to listen to one more mild word from Roland's mouth, he would run mad. All thoughts of fellowship and ka-tet left his mind, which sank back into his body and was at once obliterated by simple red fury. Jonas had been here. Jonas had pissed on their clothes, called Alain's mother a cunt, torn up their most treasured pictures, painted childish obscenities on their walls, killed their pigeons. Roland had known . . . done nothing . . . intended to continue doing nothing. Except fuck his gilly-girl. He would do plenty of that, aye, because now that was all he cared about.

But she won't like the look of your face the next time you climb into the saddle, Cuthbert thought. I'll see to that.

He drew back his fist. Alain caught his wrist. Roland turned away and began picking up scattered blankets, as if Cuthbert's furious face and cocked fist were simply of no account to him.

Cuthbert balled up his other fist, meaning to make Alain let go of him, one way or the other, but the sight of his friend's round and honest face, so guileless and dismayed, quieted his rage a little. His argument wasn't with Alain. Cuthbert was sure the other boy had known something bad was happening here, but he was also sure that Roland had insisted Alain do nothing until Jonas was gone.

"Come with me," Alain muttered, slinging an arm around Bert's shoulders. "Outside. For your father's sake, come. You have to cool off. This is no time to be fighting among ourselves."

"It's no time for our leader's brains to drain down into his prick, either," Cuthbert said, making no effort to lower his voice. But the second time Alain tugged him, Bert allowed himself to be led toward the door.

I'll stay my rage at him this one last time, he thought, but I think - I know - that is all I can manage. I'll have Alain tell him so.

The idea of using Alain as a go-between to his best friend - of knowing that things had come to such a pass - filled Cuthbert with an angry, despairing rage, and at the door to the porch he turned back to Roland. "She has made you a coward, " he said in the High Speech. Beside him, Alain drew in his breath sharply.

Roland stopped as if suddenly turned to stone, his back to them, his arms full of blankets. In that moment Cuthbert was sure Roland would turn and rush toward him. They would fight, likely until one of them was dead or blind or unconscious. Likely that one would be him, but he no longer cared.

But Roland never turned. Instead, in the same speech, he said: "He came to steal our guile and our caution. With you, he has succeeded. "

"No," Cuthbert said, lapsing back into the low speech. "I know that part of you really believes that, but it's not so. The truth is, you've lost your compass. You've called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. I - "

"For gods' sake, come!" Alain nearly snarled, and yanked him out the door.

With Roland out of sight, Cuthbert felt his rage veering toward Alain in spite of himself; it turned like a weathervane when the wind shifts. The two of them stood facing each other in the sunshiny dooryard, Alain looking unhappy and distracted, Cuthbert with his hands knotted into fists so tight they trembled at his sides.

"Why do you always excuse him? Why?"

"Out on the Drop, he asked if I trusted him. I said I did. And I do."

"Then you're a fool."

"And he's a gunslinger. It he says we must wait longer, we must."

"He's a gunslinger by accident! A freak! A mutie!"

Alain stared at him in silent shock.

"Come with me, Alain. It's time to end this mad game. We'll find Jonas and kill him. Our ka-tet is broken. We'll make a new one, you and I."

"It's not broken. If it does break, it'll be you responsible. And for that I'll never forgive you."

Now it was Cuthbert's turn to be silent.

"Go for a ride, why don't you? A long one. Give yourself time to cool off. So much depends on our fellowship - "

"Tell him that!"

"No, I'm telling you. Jonas wrote a foul word about my mother. Don't you think I'd go with you just to avenge that, if I didn't think that Roland was right? That it's what Jonas wants? For us to lose our wits and come charging blindly around our Hillock?"

"That's right, but it's wrong, too," Cuthbert said. Yet his hands were slowly unrolling, fists becoming fingers again. "You don't see and I don't have the words to explain. If I say that Susan has poisoned the well of our ka-tet, you would call me jealous. Yet I think she has, all unknowing and unmeaning. She's poisoned his mind, and the door to hell has opened. Roland feels the heat from that open door and thinks it's only his feeling for her . . . but we must do better, Al. We must think better. For him as well as for ourselves and our fathers."

"Are you calling her our enemy?"

"No! It would be easier if she was." He took a deep breath, let it out, took another, let it out, took a third and let it out. With each one he felt a little saner, a little more himself. "Never mind. There's no more to say on't for now. Your advice is good - I think I will take a ride. A long one."

Bert started toward his horse, then turned back.

"Tell him he's wrong. Tell him that even if he's right about waiting, he's right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong." He hesitated. "Tell him what I said about the door to hell. Say that's my piece of the touch. Will you tell him?"

"Yes. Stay away from Jonas, Bert."

Cuthbert mounted up. "I promise nothing."

"You're not a man." Alain sounded sorrowful; on the point of tears, in fact. "None of us are men."

"You better be wrong about that," Cuthbert said, "because men's work is coming."

He turned his mount and rode away at a gallop.

He went far up the Seacoast Road, to begin with trying not to think at all. He'd found that sometimes unexpected things wandered into your head if you left the door open for them. Useful things, often.

This afternoon that didn't happen. Confused, miserable, and without a fresh idea in his head (or even the hope of one), Bert at last turned back to Hambry. He rode the High Street from end to end, waving or speaking to people who hiled him. The three of them had met a lot of good people here. Some he counted as friends, and he rather felt the common folk of Hambrytown had adopted them - young fellows who were far from their own homes and families. And the more Bert knew and saw of these common folk, the less he suspected that they were a part of Rimer's and Jonas's nasty little game. Why else had the Good Man chosen Hambry in the first place, if not because it provided such excellent cover?

There were plenty of folk out today. The farmers' market was booming, the street-stalls were crowded, children were laughing at a Pinch and Jilly show (Jilly was currently chasing Pinch back and forth and bashing the poor old longsuffering fellow with her broom), and the Reaping Fair decorations were going forward at speed. Yet Cuthbert felt only a little joy and anticipation at the thought of the Fair. Because it wasn't his own, wasn't Gilead Reaping? Perhaps . . . but mostly just because his mind and heart were so heavy. If this was what growing up was like, he thought he could have skipped the experience.

He rode on out of town, the ocean now at his back, the sun full in his face, his shadow growing ever longer behind him. He thought he'd soon veer off the Great Road and ride across the Drop to the Bar K. But before he could, here came his old friend, Sheemie, leading a mule. Sheemie's head was down, his shoulders slumped, his pink 'brera askew, his boots dusty. To Cuthbert he looked as though he had walked all the way from the tip of the earth.

"Sheemie!" Cuthbert cried, already anticipating the boy's cheery grin and loony patter. "Long days and pleasant nights! How are y - "

Sheemie lifted his head, and as the brim of his sombrero came up, Cuthbert fell silent. He saw the dreadful fear on the boy's face - the pale checks, the haunted eyes, the trembling mouth.

Sheemie could have been at the Delgado place two hours ago, if he'd wanted, but he had trudged along at a turtle's pace, the letter inside his shirt seeming to drag at his every step. It was awful, so awful. He couldn't even think about it, because his thinker was mostly broken, so it was.

Cuthbert was off his horse in a flash, and hurrying to Sheemie. He put his hands on the boy's shoulders. "What's wrong? Tell your old pal. He won't laugh, not a bit."

At the sound of "Arthur Heath's" kind voice and the sight of his concerned face, Sheemie began to weep. Rhea's strict command that he should tell no one flew out of his head. Still sobbing, he recounted everything that had happened since that morning. Twice Cuthbert had to ask him to slow down, and when Bert led the boy to a tree in whose shade the two of them sat together, Sheemie was finally able to do so. Cuthbert listened with growing unease. At the end of his tale, Sheemie produced an envelope from inside his shirt.

Cuthbert broke the seal and read what was inside, his eyes growing large.

Roy Depape was waiting for him at the Travellers' Rest when Jonas returned in good spirits from his trip to the Bar K. An outrider had finally shown up, Depape announced, and Jonas's spirits rose another notch. Only Roy didn't look as happy about it as Jonas would have expected. Not happy at all.

"Fellow's gone on to Seafront, where I guess he's expected," Depape said. "He wants you right away. I wouldn't linger here to eat, not even a popkin, if I were you. I wouldn't take a drink, either. You'll want a clear head to deal with this one."

"Free with your advice today, ain't you, Roy?" Jonas said. He spoke in a heavily sarcastic tone, but when Pettie brought him a tot of whiskey, he sent it back and asked for water instead. Roy had a bit of a look to him, Jonas decided. Too pale by half, was good old Roy. And when Sheb sat down at his piano-bench and struck a chord, Depape jerked in that direction, one hand dropping to the butt of his gun. Interesting. And a little disquieting.

"Spill it, son - what's got your back hair up?"

Roy shook his head sullenly. "Don't rightly know."

"What's this fellow's name?"

"I didn't ask, he didn't say. He showed me Farson's sigul, though. You know." Depape lowered his voice a little. "The eye."

Jonas knew, all right. He hated that wide-open staring eye, couldn't imagine what had possessed Farson to pick it in the first place. Why not a mailed fist? Crossed swords? Or a bird? A falcon, for instance - a falcon would have made a fine sigul. But that eye -

"All right," he said, finishing the glass of water. It went down better than whiskey would have done, anyway - dry as a bone, he'd been. "I'll find out the rest for myself, shall I?"

As he reached the batwing doors and pushed them open, Depape called his name. Jonas turned back.

"He looks like other people," Depape said. "What do you mean?"

"I don't hardly know." Depape looked embarrassed and bewildered... but dogged, too. Sticking to his guns. "We only talked five minutes in all, but once I looked at him and thought it was the old bastard from Ritzy - the one I shot. Little bit later I th'ow him a glance and think, 'Hellfire, it's my old pa standin there.' Then that went by, too, and he looked like himself again."

"And how's that?"

"You'll see for yourself, I reckon. I don't know if you'll like it much, though."

Jonas stood with one batwing pushed open, thinking. "Roy, 'twasn't Farson himself, was it? The Good Man in some sort of disguise?" Depape hesitated, frowning, and then shook his head. "No." "Are you sure? We only saw him the once, remember, and not close-to." Latigo had pointed him out. Sixteen months ago that had been, give or take.

"I'm sure. You remember how big he was?"

Jonas nodded. Farson was no Lord Perth, but he was six feet or more, and broad across at both brace and basket.

"This man's Clay's height, or less. And he stays the same height no matter who he looks like." Depape hesitated a moment and said: "He laughs like a dead person. 1 could barely stand to hear him do it."

"What do you mean, like a dead person?"

Roy Depape shook his head. "Can't rightly say."

Twenty minutes later, Eldred Jonas was riding beneath come in peace mid into the courtyard of Seafront, uneasy because he had expected Latigo . . . and unless Roy was very much mistaken, it wasn't Latigo he was getting.

Miguel shuffled forward, grinning his gummy old grin, and took the reins of Jonas's horse.

"Reconocimiento."

"Por nada, jefe."

Jonas went in, saw Olive Thorin sitting in the front parlor like a forlorn ghost, and nodded to her. She nodded back, and managed a wan smile.

"Sai Jonas, how well you look. If you see Hart - "

"Cry your pardon, lady, but it's the Chancellor I've come to see," Jonas said. He went on quickly upstairs toward the Chancellor's suite of rooms, then down a narrow stone hall lit (and not too well) with gas-jets.

When he reached the end of the corridor, he rapped on the door waiting there - a massive thing of oak and brass set in its own arch. Rimer didn't care for such as Susan Delgado, but he loved the trappings of power; that was what took the curve out of his noodle and made it straight. Jonas rapped.

"Come in, my friend," a voice - not Rimer's - called. It was followed by a tittery laugh that made Jonas's flesh creep. He laughs like a dead person, Roy had said.

Jonas pushed open the door and stepped in. Rimer cared for incense no more than he cared for the hips and lips of women, but there was incense burning in here now - a woody smell that made Jonas think of court at Gilead, and functions of state in the Great Hall. The gas-jets were turned high. The draperies - purple velvet, the color of royalty, Rimer's absolute favorite - trembled minutely in the breath of sea breeze coming in through the open windows. Of Rimer there was no sign. Or of anyone else, come to that. There was a little balcony, but the doors giving on it were open, and no one was out there.

Jonas stepped a little farther into the room, glancing into a gilt-framed mirror on the far side to check behind him without turning his head. No one there, either. Ahead and to the left was a table with places set for two and a cold supper in place, but no one in either chair. Yet someone had spoken to him. Someone who'd been directly on the other side of the door, from the sound. Jonas drew his gun.

"Come, now," said the voice which had bid him enter. It came from directly behind Jonas's left shoulder. "No need for that, we're all friends here. All on the same side, you know."

Jonas whirled on his heels, suddenly feeling old and slow. Standing there was a man of medium height, powerfully built from the look of him, with bright blue eyes and the rosy cheeks of either good health or good wine. His parted, smiling lips revealed cunning little teeth which must have been filed to points - surely such points couldn't be natural. He wore a black robe, like the robe of a holy man, with the hood pushed back. Jonas's first thought, that the fellow was bald, had been wrong, he saw. The hair was simply cropped so stringently that it was nothing but fuzz.

"Put the beanshooter away," the man in black said. "We're friends here, I tell you - absolutely palsy-walsy. We'll break bread and speak of many things - oxen and oil-tankers and whether or not Frank Sinatra really was a better crooner than Der Bingle."

"Who? A better what?"

"No one you know; nothing that matters." The man in black tittered again. It was, Jonas thought, the sort of sound one might expect to hear drifting through the barred windows of a lunatic asylum.

He turned. Looked into the mirror again. This time he saw the man in black standing there and smiling at him, big as life. Gods, had he been there all along?

Yes, but you couldn't see him until he was ready to be seen. I don't know if he's a wizard, but he's a glamor-man, all right. Mayhap even Farson 's sorcerer.

He turned back. The man in the priest's robe was still smiling. No pointed teeth now. But they had been pointed. Jonas would lay his watch and warrant on it.

"Where's Rimer?"

"I sent him away to work with young sai Delgado on her Reaping Day catechisms," the man in black said. He slung a chummy arm around Jonas's shoulders and began leading him toward the table. "Best we palaver alone, I think."

Jonas didn't want to offend Farson's man, but he couldn't bear the touch of that arm. He couldn't say why, but it was unbearable. Pestilential. He shrugged it off and went on to one of the chairs, trying not to shiver. No wonder Depape had come back from Hanging Rock looking pale. No damned wonder.

Instead of being offended, the man in black tittered again (Yes, Jonas thought, he does laugh like the dead, very like, so he does). For one moment Jonas thought it was Fardo, Cort's father, in this room with him - that it was the man who had sent him west all those years ago - and he reached for his gun again. Then it was just the man in black, smiling at him in an unpleasantly knowing way, those blue eyes dancing like the flame from the gas-jets.

"See something interesting, sai Jonas?"

"Aye," Jonas said, sitting down. "Eats." He took a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. The bread stuck to his dry tongue, but he chewed determinedly all the same.

"Good boy." The other also sat, and poured wine, filling Jonas's glass first. "Now, my friend, tell me everything you've done since the three troublesome boys arrived, and everything you know, and everything you have planned. I would not have you leave out a single jot."

"First show me your sigul."

"Of course. How prudent you are."

The man in black reached inside his robe and brought out a square of metal - silver, Jonas guessed. He tossed it onto the table, and it clattered across to Jonas's plate. Engraved on it was what he had expected - that hideous staring eye.

"Satisfied?"

Jonas nodded.

"Slide it back to me."

Jonas reached for it, but for once his normally steady hand resembled his reedy, unstable voice. He watched the fingers tremble for a moment, then lowered the hand quickly to the table.

"I... I don't want to."

No. He didn't want to. Suddenly he knew that if he touched it, the engraved silver eye would roll... and look directly at him.

The man in black tittered and made a come-along gesture with the fingers of his right hand. The silver buckle (that was what it looked like to Jonas) slid back to him . . . and up the sleeve of his homespun robe.

"Abracadabra! Bool! The end! Now," the man in black went on, sipping his wine delicately, "if we have finished the tiresome formalities..."

"One more," Jonas said. "You know my name; I would know yours."

"Call me Walter," the man in black said, and the smile suddenly fell off his lips. "Good old Walter, that's me. Now let us see where we are, and where we're going. Let us, in short, palaver."

When Cuthbert came back into the bunkhouse, night had fallen. Roland and Alain were playing cards. They had cleaned the place up so that it looked almost as it had (thanks to turpentine found in a closet of the old foreman's office, even the slogans written on the walls were just pink ghosts of their former selves), and now were deeply involved in a game of Casa Fuerte, or Hotpatch, as it was known in their own part of the world. Either way, it was basically a two-man version of Watch Me, the card-game which had been played in barrooms and bunkhouses and around campfires since the world was young.

Roland looked up at once, trying to read Bert's emotional weather. Outwardly, Roland was as impassive as ever, had even played Alain to a draw across four difficult hands, but inwardly he was in a turmoil of pain and indecision. Alain had told him what Cuthbert had said while the two of them stood talking in the yard, and they were terrible things to hear from a friend, even when they came at second hand. Yet what haunted him more was what Bert had said just before leaving: You've called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. Was there even a chance he had done such a thing? Over and over he told himself no - that the course he had ordered them to follow was hard but sensible, the only course that made sense. Cuthbert's shouting was just so much angry wind, brought on by nerves .. . and his fury at having their private place defiled so outrageously. Still. . .

Tell him he's right for the - wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.

That couldn't be.

Could it?

Cuthbert was smiling and his color was high, as if he had galloped most of the way back. He looked young, handsome, and vital. He looked happy, in fact, almost like the Cuthbert of old - the one who'd been capable of babbling happy nonsense to a rook's skull until someone told him lo please, please shut up.

But Roland didn't trust what he saw. There was something wrong with the smile, the color in Bert's cheeks could have been anger rather than good health, and the sparkle in his eyes looked like fever instead of humor. Roland showed nothing on his own face, but his heart sank. He'd hoped the storm would blow itself out, given a little time, but he didn't think it had. He shot a glance at Alain, and saw that Alain felt the same.

Cuthbert, it will be over in three weeks. If only I could tell you that.

The thought which returned was stunning in its simplicity: Why can't you?

He realized he didn't know. Why had he been holding back, keeping his own counsel? For what purpose? Had he been blind? Gods, had he?

"Hello, Bert," he said, "did you have a nice r - "

"Yes, very nice, a very nice ride, an instructive ride. Come outside. I want to show you something."

Roland liked the thin glaze of hilarity in Bert's eyes less and less, but he laid his cards in a neat facedown fan on the table and got up.

Alain pulled at his sleeve. "No!" His voice was low and panicky. "Do you not see how he looks?"

"I see," Roland said. And felt dismay in his heart.

For the first time, as he walked slowly toward the friend who no longer looked like a friend, it occurred to Roland that he had been making decisions in a state close akin to drunkenness. Or had he been making decisions at all? He was no longer sure.

"What is it you'd show me, Bert?"

"Something wonderful," Bert said, and laughed. There was hate in the sound. Perhaps murder. "You'll want a good close look at this. I know you will."

"Bert, what's wrong with you?" Alain asked.

"Wrong with me? Nothing wrong with me, Al - I'm as happy as a dart at sunrise, a bee in a flower, a fish in the ocean." And as he turned away to go back through the door, he laughed again.

"Don't go out there," Alain said. "He's lost his wits."

"If our fellowship is broken, any chance we might have of getting out of Mejis alive is gone," Roland said. "That being the case, I'd rather die at the hands of a friend than an enemy."

He went out. After a moment of hesitation, Alain followed. On his face was a look of purest misery.

Huntress had gone and Demon had not yet begun to show his face, but the sky was powdered with stars, and they threw enough light to see by. Cuthbert's horse, still saddled, was tied to the hitching rail. Beyond it, the square of dusty dooryard gleamed like a canopy of tarnished silver.

"What is it?" Roland asked. They weren't wearing guns, any of them. That was to be grateful for, at least. "What would you show me?"

"It's here." Cuthbert stopped at a point midway between the bunk-house and the charred remains of the home place. He pointed with great assurance, but Roland could see nothing out of the ordinary. He walked over to Cuthbert and looked down.

"I don't see - "

Brilliant light - starshine times a thousand - exploded in his head as Cuthbert's fist drove against the point of his chin. It was the first time, except in play (and as very small boys), that Bert had ever struck him. Roland didn't lose consciousness, but he did lose control over his arms and legs. They were there, but seemingly in another country, flailing like the limbs of a rag doll. He went down on his back. Dust puffed up around him. The stars seemed strangely in motion, running in arcs and leaving milky trails behind them. There was a high ringing in his ears.

From a great distance he heard Alain scream: "Oh, you fool! You stupid fool!"

By making a tremendous effort, Roland was able to turn his head. He saw Alain start toward him and saw Cuthbert, no longer smiling, push him away. "This is between us, Al. You stay out of it."

"You sucker-punched him, you bastard!" Alain, slow to anger, was now building toward a rage Cuthbert might well regret. Ihave to get up, Roland thought. Ihave to get between them before something even worse happens. His arms and legs began to swim weakly in the dust.

"Yes - that's how he's played us," Cuthbert said. "I only returned the favor." He looked down. "That's what I wanted to show you, Roland.

That particular piece of ground. That particular puff of dust in which you are now lying. Get a good taste of it. Mayhap it'll wake you up."

Now Roland's own anger began to rise. He felt the coldness that was seeping into his thoughts, fought it, and realized he was losing. Jonas ceased to matter; the tankers at Citgo ceased to matter; the supply conspiracy they had uncovered ceased to matter. Soon the Affiliation and the ka-tet he had been at such pains to preserve would cease to matter as well.

The surface numbness was leaving his feet and legs, and he pushed himself to a sitting position. He looked up calmly at Bert, his tented hands on the ground, his face set. Starshine swam in his eyes.

"I love you, Cuthbert, but I'll have no more insubordination and jealous tantrums. If I paid you back for all, I reckon you'd finish in pieces, so I'm only going to pay you for hitting me when I didn't know it was coming."

"And I've no doubt ye can, cully," Cuthbert said, falling effortlessly into the Hambry patois. "But first ye might want to have a peek at this." Almost contemptuously, he tossed a folded sheet of paper. It hit Roland's chest and bounced into his lap.

Roland picked it up, feeling the fine point of his developing rage lose its edge. "What is it?"

"Open and see. There's enough starlight to read by."

Slowly, with reluctant fingers, Roland unfolded the sheet of paper and read what was printed there.

He read it twice. The second time was actually harder, because his hands had begun to tremble. He saw every place he and Susan had met - the boathouse, the hut, the shack-and now he saw them in a new light, knowing someone else had seen them, too. How clever he had believed they were being. How confident of their secrecy and their discretion. And yet someone had been watching all the time. Susan had been right. Someone had seen.

I've put everything at risk. Her life as well as our lives.

Tell him what I said about the doorway to hell.

And Susan's voice, too: Ka like a wind . . . if you love me, then love me.

So he had done, believing in his youthful arrogance that everything would turn out all right for no other reason - yes, at bottom he had believed this - than that he was he, and ka must serve his love.

"I've been a fool," he said. His voice trembled like his hands.

"Yes, indeed," Cuthbert said. "So you have." He dropped to his knees in the dust, facing Roland. "Now if you want to hit me, hit away. Hard as you want and as many as you can manage. I'll not hit back. I've done all I can to wake you up to your responsibilities. If you still sleep, so be it. Either way, I still love you." Bert put his hands on Roland's shoulders and briefly kissed his friend's cheek.

Roland began to cry. They were partly tears of gratitude, but mostly those of mingled shame and confusion; there was even a small, dark part of him that hated Cuthbert and always would. That part hated Cuthbert more on account of the kiss than because of the unexpected punch on the jaw; more for the forgiveness than the awakening.

He got to his feet, still holding the letter in one dusty hand, the other ineffectually brushing his cheeks and leaving damp smears there. When he staggered and Cuthbert put out a hand to steady him, Roland pushed him so hard that Cuthbert himself would have fallen, if Alain hadn't caught hold of his shoulders.

Then, slowly, Roland went back down again - this time in front of Cuthbert with his hands up and his head down.

"Roland, no!" Cuthbert cried.

"Yes," Roland said. "I have forgotten the face of my father, and cry your pardon."

"Yes, all right, for gods' sake, yes!" Cuthbert now sounded as if he were crying himself. "Just... please get up! It breaks my heart to see you so!"

And mine to be so, Roland thought. To be humbled so. But I brought it on myself, didn't I? This dark yard, with my head throbbing and my heart full of shame and fear. This is mine, bought and paid for.

They helped him up and Roland let himself be helped. "That's quite a left, Bert," he said in a voice that almost passed for normal.

"Only when it's going toward someone who doesn't know it's coming," Cuthbert replied.

"This letter - how did you come by it?"

Cuthbert told of meeting Sheemie, who had been dithering along in his own misery, as if waiting for ka to intervene ... and, in the person of "Arthur Heath," ka had.

"From the witch," Roland mused. "Yes, but how did she know? For she never leaves the Coos, or so Susan has told me."

"I can't say. Nor do I much care. What I'm most concerned about right now is making sure that Sheemie isn't hurt because of what he told me and gave me. After that, I'm concerned that what old witch Rhea has tried to tell once she doesn't try to tell again."

"I've made at least one terrible mistake," Roland said, "but I don't count loving Susan as another. That was beyond me to change. As it was beyond her. Do you believe that?"

"Yes," Alain said at once, and after a moment, almost reluctantly, Cuthbert said, "Aye, Roland."

"I've been arrogant and stupid. If this note had reached her aunt, she could have been sent into exile."

"And we to the devil, by way of hangropes," Cuthbert added dryly. "Although I know that's a minor matter to you by comparison."

"What about the witch?" Alain asked. "What do we do about her?" Roland smiled a little, and turned toward the northwest. "Rhea," he said. "Whatever else she is, she's a first-class troublemaker, is she not? And troublemakers must be put on notice."

He started back toward the bunkhouse, trudging with his head down. Cuthbert looked at Alain, and saw that Al was also a little teary-eyed. Bert put out his hand. For a moment Alain only looked at it. Then he nodded - to himself rather than to Cuthbert, it seemed - and shook it.

"You did what you had to," Alain said. "I had my doubts at first, but not now."

Cuthbert let out his breath. "And I did it the way I had to. If I hadn't surprised him - "

" - he would have beaten you black and blue."

"So many more colors than that," Cuthbert said. "I would have looked like a rainbow."

"The Wizard's Rainbow, even," Alain said. "Extra colors for your penny."

That made Cuthbert laugh. The two of them walked back toward the bunkhouse, where Roland was unsaddling Bert's horse.

Cuthbert turned in that direction to help, but Alain held him back. "Leave him alone for a little while," he said. "It's best you do."

They went on ahead, and when Roland came in ten minutes later, he found Cuthbert playing his hand. And winning with it.

"Bert," he said.

Cuthbert looked up.

"We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Coos." "Are we going to kill her?"

Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. "We should."

"Aye. We should. But are we going to?"

"Not unless we have to, I reckon." Later he would regret this decision - if it was a decision - bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. "Not unless she makes us."

"Perhaps it would be best if she did," Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.

"Yes. Perhaps it would. It's not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early."

"All right. Do you want your hand back?"

"When you're on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all."

Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.

The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to bum with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing bolstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.

Cuthbert said not a word - he knew that if he started, he'd do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense - and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.

"I said I made at least one very bad mistake," Roland told him. "One that this note" - he touched his breast pocket - "brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?"

"Not loving her - not that," Cuthbert said. "You called that ka, and I call it the same." It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not us his best friend's lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.

"No," Roland said. "Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives - one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lilt me above ka, the way a bird's wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?"

"It made you blind." Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.

"Yes," Roland said sadly. "It made me blind . . . but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over."

They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing "Careless Love" beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea's yard, they stopped.

"Wonderful view," Roland murmured. "You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here."

"Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though."

That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear comer, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.

Roland had seen plenty of huts like it - the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead - but never one that felt as powerfully wrong as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.

Cuthbert felt it, too. "Do we have to go closer?" lie swallowed. "Do we have to go in? Because . . . Roland, the door is open. Do you see?"

He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.

"Stay here." Roland gigged Rusher forward.

"No! I'm coming!"

"No, cover my back. If I need to go inside, I'll call you to join me ... but if I need to go inside, the old woman who lives here will breathe no more. As you said, that might be for the best."

At every slow step Rusher took, the feeling of wrongness grew in Roland's heart and mind. There was a stench to the place, a smell like rotten meat and hot putrefied tomatoes. It came from the hut, he supposed, but it also seemed to come wafting out of the very ground. And at every step, the whine of the thinny seemed louder, as if the atmosphere of this place somehow magnified it.

Susan came up here alone, and in the dark, he thought. Gods, I'm not sure I could have come up here in the dark with my friends for company.

He stopped beneath the tree, looking through the open door twenty paces away. He saw what could have been a kitchen; the legs of a table, the back of a chair, a filthy hearthstone. No sign of the lady of the house. But she was there. Roland could feel her eyes crawling on him like loathsome bugs.

I can't see her because she's used her art to make herself dim... but she's there.

And just perhaps he did see her. The air had a strange shimmer just inside the door to the right, as if it had been heated. Roland had been told that you could see someone who was dim by turning your head and looking from the comer of your eye. He did that now.

"Roland?" Cuthbert called from behind him.

"Fine so far, Bert." Barely paying attention to the words he was saying, because ... yes! That shimmer was clearer now, and it had almost the shape of a woman. It could be his imagination, of course, but...

But at that moment, as if understanding he'd seen her, the shimmer moved farther back into the shadows. Roland glimpsed the swinging hem of an old black dress, there and then gone.

No matter. He had not come to see her but only to give her her single warning . . . which was one more than any of their fathers would have given her, no doubt.

"Rhea!" His voice rolled in the harsh tones of old, stem and commanding. Two yellow leaves fell from the tree, as if shivered loose by that voice, and one fell in his black hair. From the hut came only a waiting, listening silence . . . and then the discordant, jeering yowl of a cat.

"Rhea, daughter of none! I've brought something back to you, woman! Something you must have lost!" From his shirt he took the folded letter and tossed it to the stony ground. "Today I've been your friend, Rhea - if this had gone where you had intended it to go, you would have paid with your life."

He paused. Another leaf drifted down from the tree. This one landed in Pusher's mane.

"Hear me well, Rhea, daughter of none, and understand me well. I have come here under the name of Will Dearborn, but Dearborn is not my name and it is the Affiliation I serve. More, 'tis all which lies behind the Affiliation - 'tis the power of the White. You have crossed the way of our ka, and I warn you only this once: do not cross it again. Do you understand?"

Only that waiting silence.

"Do not touch a single hair on the head of the boy who carried your had-natured mischief hence, or you'll die. Speak not another word of those things you know or think you know to anyone - not to Cordelia Delgado, nor to Jonas, nor to Rimer, nor to Thorin - or you'll die. Keep your peace and we will keep ours. Break it, and we'll still you. Do you understand?"

More silence. Dirty windows peering at him like eyes. A puff of breeze sent more leaves showering down around him, and caused the stuffy-guy to creak nastily on his pole. Roland thought briefly of the cook, Hax, twisting at the end of his rope.

"Do you understand?"

No reply. Not even a shimmer could he see through the open door now.

"Very well," Roland said. "Silence gives consent." He gigged his horse around. As he did, his head came up a little, and he saw something green shift above him among the yellow leaves. There was a low hissing sound.

"Roland look out! Snake!" Cuthbert screamed, but before the second word had left his mouth, Roland had drawn one of his guns.

He fell sideways in the saddle, holding with his left leg and heel as Rusher jigged and pranced. He fired three times, the thunder of the big gun smashing through the still air and then rolling back from the nearby hills. With each shot the snake flipped upward again, its blood dotting red across a background of blue sky and yellow leaves. The last bullet tore off its head, and when the snake fell for good, it hit the ground in two pieces. From within the hut came a wail of grief and rage so awful that Roland's spine turned to a cord of ice.

"You bastard!" screamed a woman's voice from the shadows. "Oh, you murdering cull! My friend! My friend! "

"If it was your friend, you oughtn't to have set it on me," Roland said. "Remember, Rhea, daughter of none."

The voice uttered one more shriek and fell silent. Roland rode back to Cuthbert, bolstering his gun. Bert's eyes were round and amazed. "Roland, what shooting! Gods, what shooting!" "Let's get out of here."

"But we still don't know how she knew!"

"Do you think she'd tell?" There was a small but minute shake in Roland's voice. The way the snake had come out of the tree like that, right at him ... he could still barely believe he wasn't dead. Thank gods for his hand, which had taken matters over.

"We could make her talk," Cuthbert said, but Roland could tell from his voice that Bert had no taste for such. Maybe later, maybe after years of trail-riding and gunslinging, but now he had no more stomach for torture than for killing outright.

"Even if we could, we couldn't make her tell the truth. Such as her lies as other folks breathe. If we've convinced her to keep quiet, we've done enough for today. Come on. I hate this place."

As they rode back toward town, Roland said: "We've got to meet."

"The four of us. That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Yes. I want to tell everything I know and surmise. I want to tell you my plan, such as it is. What we've been waiting for."

"That would be very good indeed."

"Susan can help us." Roland seemed to be speaking to himself. Cuthbert was amused to see that the lone, crown like leaf was still caught in his dark hair. "Susan was meant to help us. Why didn't I see that?"

"Because love is blind," Cuthbert said. He snorted laughter and clapped Roland on the shoulder. "Love is blind, old son."

When she was sure the boys were gone, Rhea crept out of her door and into the hateful sunshine. She hobbled across to the tree and fell on her knees by the tattered length of her snake, weeping loudly.

"Ermot, Ermot!" she cried. "See what's become of ye!"

There was his head, the mouth frozen open, the double fangs still dripping poison - clear drops that shone like prisms in the day's strengthening light. The glazing eyes glared. She picked Ermot up, kissed the scaly mouth, licked the last of the venom from the exposed needles, crooning and weeping all the while.

Next she picked up the long and tattered body with her other hand, moaning at the holes which had been torn into Ermot's satiny hide; the holes and the ripped red flesh beneath. Twice she put the head against the body and spoke incantations, but nothing happened. Of course not. Ermot had gone beyond the aid of her spells. Poor Ermot.

She held his head to one flattened old dug, and his body to the other. Then, with the last of his blood wetting the bodice of her dress, she looked in the direction the hateful boys had gone.

"I'll pay ye back," she whispered. "By all the gods that ever were, I'll pay ye back. When ye least expect it, there Rhea will be, and your screams will break your throats. Do you hear me? Your screams will break your throats!"

She knelt a moment longer, then got up and shuffled back toward her hut, holding Ermot to her bosom.