THE DARK TOWER IV
STEPHEN
KING
wizard  and   glass
ILLUSTRATIONS  BY DAVE  MCKEAN

 

 
A PLUME BOOK
 
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin 
Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Published by Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
A limited hardcover edition was published by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc., 
Hampton Falls, NH.
First Plume Printing, November, 1997 10    987654321
Copyright © Stephen King, 1997
Illustrations copyright © Dave McKean, 1997
All rights reserved
acknowledgments
The lyrics from "The Green Door," words by Marvin Moore, music by Bob Davis,
copyright © 1956 Alley Music Corp. and Trio Music Co., Inc. Copyright renewed. 
All
rights reserved. Used by permission. The lyrics from "Whole Lot-ta Shakin' Goin' 
On"
by Dave Williams and Sonny David, copyright © 1957.
^^ REGISTERED TRADEMARK——MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
King, Stephen
Wizard and glass / Stephen King, p.    cm. — (The Dark Tower ; 4)
ISBN 0-452-27917-8 I. Series: King, Stephen. Dark Tower ; 4.
PS3561.I483W59    1997
813'.54—dc21                                                                     
      97-15995
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Times Roman Designed by Jesse Cohen
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This book is dedicated to Julie Eugley and
Marsha DeFilippo. They answer the mail, and
most of the mail for the last couple of years has
been about Roland of Gilead—the gunslinger.
Basically, Julie and Marsha nagged me back
to the word processor. Julie, you nagged the
most effectively, so your name comes first.

 

 

 

 

 
 
CONTENTS
ARGUEMENT
 
PROLOGUE
BLAINE
 
PART ONE
RIDDLES
PART TWO
SUSAN
PART THREE
COME, REAP
PART FOUR
ALL GOD'S CHILLUN GOT SHOES
AFTERWORD
ILLUSTRATIONS
Rose
All hail the crimson king!
Her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh
Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded
But he and his love were no longer children
Smiling lips revealed cunning little teeth
There they died together-o
Of the three of them, only Roland saw her
It cut the old man's throat efficiently enough
A flash as the big-bang exploded
The dark tower rearing to the sky
The wicked witch of the East
 
ARGUEMENT

 

 

 

Wizard and Glass is the fourth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert 
Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland of Gilead pursues and at last 
catches Walter, the man in black, who pretended friendship with Roland's father 
but who actually served Marten, a great sorcerer. Catching the half-human Walter 
is not Roland's goal but only a means to an end: Roland wants to reach the Dark 
Tower, where he hopes the quickening de­struction of Mid-World may be halted, 
perhaps even reversed.
Roland is a kind of knight, the last of his breed, and the Tower is his 
ob­session, his only reason for living when first we meet him. We learn of an 
early test of manhood forced upon him by Marten, who has seduced Roland's 
mother. Marten expects Roland to fail this test and to be "sent west," his 
fa­ther's guns forever denied him. Roland, however, lays Marten's plans at 
nines, passing the test . . .due mostly to his clever choice of weapon.
We discover that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in some 
fundamental and terrible way. This link is first revealed when Roland meets 
Jake, a boy from the New York of 1977, at a desert way station. There are doors 
between Roland's world and our own; one of them is death, and that is how Jake 
first reaches Mid-World, pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. 
The pusher was a man named Jack Mort . . . except the thing hiding inside of 
Mort's head and guiding his murderous hands on this par­ticular occasion was 
Roland's old enemy, Walter.
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies again ... this time be­cause the 
gunslinger faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark 
Tower, chooses the Tower. Jake's last words before plung­ing into the abyss are 
"Go, then—there are other worlds than these."
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea. 
In a long night of palaver, the man in black tells Roland's future with a 
strange Tarot deck. Three cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death 
("but not for you, gunslinger")—are especially called to Roland's attention.
The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, begins on the edge of the Western 
Sea not long after Roland awakens from his confrontation with his old nemesis 
and discovers Walter long dead, only more bones in a place of bones. The 
exhausted gunslinger is attacked by a horde of carnivorous "lobstrosities," and 
before he can escape them, he has been seriously wounded, losing the first two 
fingers of his right hand. He is also poisoned by their bites, and as he resumes 
his trek northward along the Western Sea, Roland is sickening ... perhaps dying.
On his walk he encounters three doors standing freely on the beach. These open 
into our city of New York, at three different whens. From 1987, Roland draws 
Eddie Dean, a prisoner of heroin. From 1964, he draws Odetta Susannah Holmes, a 
woman who has lost her lower legs in a subway mis­hap . . . one that was no 
accident. She is indeed a lady of shadows, with a vi­cious second personality 
hiding within the socially committed young black woman her friends know. This 
hidden woman, the violent and crafty Detta Walker, is determined to kill both 
Roland and Eddie when the gunslinger draws her into Mid-World.
Between these two in time, once again in 1977, Roland enters the hellish mind of 
Jack Mort, who has hurt Odetta/Detta not once but twice. "Death," the man in 
black told Roland, "but not for you, gunslinger." Nor is Mort the third of whom 
Walter foretold; Roland prevents Mort from murdering Jake Chambers, and shortly 
afterward Mort dies beneath the wheels of the same train which took Odetta's 
legs in 1959. Roland thus fails to draw the psy­chotic into Mid-World ... but, 
he thinks, who would want such a being in any case?
Yet there's a price to be paid for rebellion against a foretold future; isn't 
there always? Ka, maggot, Roland's old teacher, Cort, might have said; Such is 
the great wheel, and always turns. Be not in front of it when it does, or you 
'II be crushed under it, and so make an end to your stupid brains and use­less 
bags of guts and water.
Roland thinks that perhaps he has drawn three in just Eddie and Odetta, since 
Odetta is a double personality, yet when Odetta and Detta merge as one in 
Susannah (thanks in large part to Eddie Dean's love and courage), the 
gun­slinger knows it's not so. He knows something else as well: he is being 
tor­mented by thoughts of Jake, the boy who, dying, spoke of other worlds. Half 
of the gunslinger's mind, in fact, believes there never was a boy. In 
prevent­ing Jack Mort from pushing Jake in front of the car meant to kill him, 
Roland has created a temporal paradox which is tearing him apart. And, in our 
world, it is tearing Jake Chambers apart as well.
The Wastelands, the third volume of the series, begins with this paradox. After 
killing a gigantic bear named either Mir (by the old people who went in fear of 
it) or Shardik (by the Great Old Ones who built it... for the bear turns out to 
be a cyborg), Roland, Eddie, and Susannah backtrack the beast and dis­cover Path 
of the Beam. There are six of these beams, running between the twelve portals 
which mark the edges of Mid-World. At the point where the beams cross—at the 
center of Roland's world, perhaps the center of all worlds—the gunslinger 
believes that he and his friends will at last find the Dark Tower.
By now Eddie and Susannah are no longer prisoners in Roland's world. In love and 
well on the way to becoming gunslingers themselves, they are full participants 
in the quest and follow him willingly along the Path of the Beam.
In a speaking ring not far from the Portal of the Bear, time is mended, paradox 
is ended, and the real third is at last drawn. Jake reenters Mid-World at the 
conclusion of a perilous rite where all four—Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and 
Roland—remember the faces of their fathers and acquit themselves hon­orably. Not 
long after, the quartet becomes a quintet, when Jake befriends a billy-bumbler. 
Bumblers, which look like a combination of badger, raccoon, and dog, have a 
limited speaking ability. Jake names his new friend Oy.
The way of the pilgrims leads them toward Lud, an urban wasteland where the 
degenerate survivors of two old factions, the Pubes and the Grays, carry on the 
vestige of an old conflict. Before reaching the city, they come to a little town 
called River Crossing, where a few antique residents still remain. They 
recognize Roland as a remnant of the old days, before the world moved on, and 
honor him and his companions. After, the old people tell them of a monorail 
train which may still run from Lud and into the wastelands, along the Path of 
the Beam and toward the Dark Tower.
Jake is frightened by this news, but not really surprised; before being drawn 
away from New York, he obtained two books from a bookstore owned by a man with 
the thought-provoking name of Calvin Tower. One is a book of riddles with the 
answers torn out. The other, Charlie the Choo-Choo, is a children's book about a 
train. An amusing little tale, most might say . . . but to Jake, there's 
something about Charlie that isn't amusing at all. Something frightening. Roland 
knows something else: in the High Speech of his world, the word char means 
death.
Aunt Talitha, the matriarch of the River Crossing folk, gives Roland a silver 
cross to wear, and the travellers go their course. Before reaching Lud, they 
discover a downed plane from our world—a German fighter from the 1930s. Jammed 
into the cockpit is the mummified corpse of a giant, almost certainly the 
half-mythical outlaw David Quick.
While crossing the dilapidated bridge which spans the River Send, Jake and Oy 
are nearly lost in an accident. While Roland, Eddie, and Susannah are distracted 
by this, the party is ambushed by a dying (and very dangerous) out­law named 
Gasher. He abducts Jake and takes him underground to the Tick-Tock Man, the last 
leader of the Grays. Tick-Tock's real name is Andrew Quick; he is the 
great-grandson of the man who died trying to land an air­plane from another 
world.
While Roland (aided by Oy) goes after Jake, Eddie and Susannah find the Cradle 
of Lud, where Blaine the Mono awakes. Blaine is the last above-ground tool of 
the vast computer-system which lies beneath the city of Lud, and it has only one 
remaining interest: riddles. It promises to take the trav­ellers to the 
monorail's final stop if they can solve a riddle it poses them. Otherwise, 
Blaine says, the only trip they'll be taking will be to the place where the path 
ends in the clearing ... to their deaths, in other words. In that case they'll 
have plenty of company, for Blaine is planning to release stocks of nerve-gas 
which will kill everyone left in Lud: Pubes, Grays, and gun-slingers alike.
Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock Man for dead ... but An­drew Quick is 
not dead. Half blind, hideously wounded about the face, he is rescued by a man 
who calls himself Richard Fannin. Fannin, however, also identifies himself as 
the Ageless Stranger, a demon of whom Roland has been warned by Walter.
Roland and Jake are reunited with Eddie and Susannah in the Cradle of Lud, and 
Susannah—with a little help from "dat bitch" Detta Walker—is able to solve 
Blaine's riddle. They gain access to the mono, of necessity ig­noring the 
horrified warnings of Blaine's sane but fatally weak undermind (Eddie calls this 
voice Little Blaine), only to discover that Blaine means to commit suicide with 
them aboard. The fact that the actual mind running the mono exists in computers 
falling farther and farther behind them, running be­neath a city which has 
become a slaughtering-pen, will make no difference when the pink bullet jumps 
the tracks somewhere along the line at a speed in excess of eight hundred miles 
an hour.
There is only one chance of survival: Blaine's love of riddles. Roland of Gilead 
proposes a desperate bargain. It is with this bargain that The Waste­lands ends; 
it is with this bargain that Wizard and Glass begins.

romeo: Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—
 
juliet: O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
 
romeo: What shall I swear by?
 
juliet: Do not swear at all.
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.
—Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare

On the fourth day, to [Dorothy's] great joy, Oz sent for her, and when she 
entered the Throne Room, he greeted her pleasantly.
"Sit down; my dear. I think I have found a way to get you out of this country."
"And back to Kansas?" she asked eagerly. 
"Well, I'm not sure about Kansas," said Oz, "for I haven't the faintest notion 
which way it lies...."
—The Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum

 

 

 

 

I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards—the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights!
—Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
Robert Browning

 

 

 
 
PROLOGUE
 
BLAINE

 

"ASK ME A RIDDLE," Blaine invited.
"Fuck you," Roland said. He did not raise his voice.
"WHAT DO YOU SAY?" In its clear disbelief, the voice of Big Blaine had become 
very close to the voice of its unsuspected twin.
"I said fuck you," Roland said calmly, "but if that puzzles you, Blaine, I can 
make it clearer. No. The answer is no."
There was no reply from Blaine for a long, long time, and when he did respond, 
it was not with words. Instead, the walls, floor, and ceiling began to lose 
their color and solidity again. In a space of ten seconds the Barony Coach once 
more ceased to exist. They were now flying through the mountain-range they had 
seen on the horizon: iron-gray peaks rushed toward them at suicidal speed, then 
fell away to disclose sterile valleys where gigantic beetles crawled about like 
landlocked turtles. Roland saw something that looked like a huge snake suddenly 
uncoil from the mouth of a cave. It seized one of the beetles and yanked it back 
into its lair. Roland had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, 
and the sight made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. Blaine might have 
transported them to some other world.
"PERHAPS I SHOULD DERAIL US HERE," Blaine said. His voice was meditative, but 
beneath it the gunslinger heard a deep, pulsing rage.
"Perhaps you should," the gunslinger said indifferently.
Eddie's face was frantic. He mouthed the words What are you DO­ING? Roland 
ignored him; he had his hands full with Blaine, and he knew perfectly well what 
he was doing.
"YOU ARE RUDE AND ARROGANT," Blaine said. "THESE MAY SEEM LIKE INTERESTING 
TRAITS TO YOU, BUT THEY ARE NOT TO ME."
"Oh, I can be much ruder than I have been."
Roland of Gilead unfolded his hands and got slowly to his feet. He stood on what 
appeared to be nothing, legs apart, his right hand on his hip and his left on 
the sandalwood grip of his revolver. He stood as he had so many times before, in 
the dusty streets of a hundred forgotten towns, in a score of rocky canyon 
killing-zones, in unnumbered dark saloons with their smells of bitter beer and 
old fried meals. It was just another show­down in another empty street. That was 
all, and that was enough. It was khef, ka, and ka-tet. That the showdown always 
came was the central fact of his life and the axle upon which his own ka 
revolved. That the battle would be fought with words instead of bullets this 
time made no differ­ence; it would be a battle to the death, just the same. The 
stench of killing in the air was as clear and definite as the stench of exploded 
carrion in a swamp. Then the battle-rage descended, as it always did ... and he 
was no longer really there to himself at all.
"I can call you a nonsensical, empty-headed, foolish machine. I can call you a 
stupid, unwise creature whose sense is no more than the sound of a winter wind 
in a hollow tree."
"STOP IT."
Roland went on in the same serene tone, ignoring Blaine completely. "You're what 
Eddie calls a 'gadget.' Were you more, I might be ruder yet."
"I AM A GREAT DEAL MORE THAN JUST—"
"I could call you a sucker of cocks, for instance, but you have no mouth. I 
could say you're viler than the vilest beggar who ever crawled the lowest street 
in creation, but even such a creature is better than you; you have no knees on 
which to crawl, and would not fall upon them even if you did, for you have no 
conception of such a human flaw as mercy. I could even say you fucked your 
mother, had you one."
Roland paused for breath. His three companions were holding theirs. All around 
them, suffocating, was Blaine the Mono's thunderstruck silence.
"I can call you a faithless creature who let your only companion kill herself, a 
coward who has delighted in the torture of the foolish and the slaughter of the 
innocent, a lost and bleating mechanical goblin who—"
"I COMMAND YOU TO STOP IT OR I'LL KILL YOU ALL RIGHT HERE!"
Roland's eyes blazed with such wild blue fire that Eddie shrank away from him. 
Dimly, he heard Jake and Susannah gasp.
"Kill if you will, but command me nothing!" the gunslinger roared. "You have 
forgotten the faces of those who made you! Now either kill us or be silent and 
listen to me, Roland of Gilead, son of Steven, gunslinger, and lord of ancient 
lands! I have not come across all the miles and all the years to listen to your 
childish prating! Do you understand? Now you will listen to ME!"
There was another moment of shocked silence. No one breathed. Roland stared 
sternly forward, his head high, his hand on the butt of his gun.
Susannah Dean raised her hand to her mouth and felt the small smile there as a 
woman might feel some strange new article of clothing—a hat, perhaps—to make 
sure it is still on straight. She was afraid this was the end of her life, but 
the feeling which dominated her heart at that moment was not fear but pride. She 
glanced to her left and saw Eddie regarding Roland with an amazed grin. Jake's 
expression was even simpler: pure adoration.
"Tell him!" Jake breathed. "Kick his ass! Right!"
"You better pay attention," Eddie agreed. "He really doesn't give much of a 
fuck, Blaine. They don't call him The Mad Dog of Gilead for nothing."
After a long, long moment, Blaine asked: "DID THEY CALL YOU SO, ROLAND SON OF 
STEVEN?"
"They may have," Roland replied, standing calmly on thin air above the sterile 
foothills.
"WHAT GOOD ARE YOU TO ME IF YOU WON'T TELL ME RIDDLES?" Blaine asked. Now he 
sounded like a grumbling, sulky child who has been allowed to stay up too long 
past his usual bedtime.
"I didn't say we wouldn't," Roland said.
"NO?" Blaine sounded bewildered. "I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, YET VOICE-PRINT ANALYSIS 
INDICATES RATIONAL DISCOURSE. PLEASE EXPLAIN."
"You said you wanted them right now" the gunslinger replied. "That was what I 
was refusing. Your eagerness has made you unseemly."
"I DON'T UNDERSTAND."
"It has made you rude. Do you understand that?”
There was a long, thoughtful silence. Centuries had passed since the computer 
had experienced any human responses other than ignorance, ne­glect, and 
superstitious subservience. It had been eons since it had been exposed to simple 
human courage. Finally: "IF WHAT I SAID STRUCK YOU AS RUDE, I APOLOGIZE."
"It is accepted, Blaine. But there is a larger problem."
"EXPLAIN."
"Close the carriage again and I will." Roland sat down as if further 
argument—and the prospect of immediate death—was now unthinkable.
Blaine did as he was asked. The walls filled with color and the night­mare 
landscape below was once more blotted out. The blip on the route-map was now 
blinking close to the dot marked Candleton.
"All right," Roland said. "Rudeness is forgivable, Blaine; so I was taught in my 
youth. But I was also taught that stupidity is not."
"HOW HAVE I BEEN STUPID, ROLAND OF GILEAD?" Blame's voice was soft and ominous. 
Susannah thought of a cat crouched out­side a mouse-hole, tail swishing back and 
forth, green eyes shining with malevolence.
"We have something you want," Roland said, "but the only reward you offer if we 
give it to you is death. That's very stupid."
There was a long, long pause as Blaine thought this over. Then: "WHAT YOU SAY IS 
TRUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD, BUT THE QUALITY OF YOUR RIDDLES IS NOT PROVEN. I WILL 
NOT RE­WARD YOU WITH YOUR LIVES FOR BAD RIDDLES."
Roland nodded. "I understand, Blaine. Listen, now, and take under­standing from 
me. I have told some of this to my friends already. When I was a boy in the 
Barony of Gilead, there were seven Fair-Days each year—Winter, Wide Earth, 
Sowing, Mid-Summer, Full Earth, Reaping, and Year's End. Riddling was an 
important part of every Fair-Day, but it was the most important event of the 
Fair of Wide Earth and that of Full Earth, for the riddles told were supposed to 
augur well or ill for the suc­cess of the crops."
"THAT IS SUPERSTITION WITH NO BASIS AT ALL IN FACT," Blaine said. "I FIND IT 
ANNOYING AND UPSETTING."
"Of course it was superstition," Roland agreed, "but you might be surprised at 
how well the riddles foresaw the crops. For instance, riddle me this, Blaine: 
What is the difference between a grandmother and a granary?"
"THAT IS OLD AND NOT VERY INTERESTING," Blaine said, but he sounded happy to 
have something to solve, just the same. "ONE IS ONE'S BORN KIN; THE OTHER IS 
ONE'S CORN-BIN. A RIDDLE
BASED ON PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. ANOTHER OF THIS TYPE, ONE TOLD ON THE LEVEL WHICH 
CONTAINS THE BARONY OF NEW YORK, GOES LIKE THIS: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BE­TWEEN 
A CAT AND A COMPLEX SENTENCE?"
Jake spoke up. "I know. A cat has claws at the end of its paws, and a complex 
sentence has a pause at the end of its clause."
"YES," Blaine agreed. "A VERY SILLY OLD RIDDLE, USEFUL ONLY AS A MNEMONIC 
DEVICE."
"For once I agree with you, Blaine old buddy," Eddie said.
"I AM NOT YOUR BUDDY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
"Well, jeez. Kiss my ass and go to heaven."
"THERE IS NO HEAVEN."
Eddie had no comeback for that one.
"I WOULD HEAR MORE OF FAIR-DAY RIDDLING IN GILEAD, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN."
"At noon on Wide Earth and Full Earth, somewhere between sixteen and thirty 
riddlers would gather in the Hall of the Grandfathers, which was opened for the 
event. Those were the only times of year when com­mon folk—merchants and farmers 
and ranchers and such—were allowed into the Hall of the Grandfathers, and on 
that day they all crowded in."
The gunslinger's eyes were far away and dreamy; it was the expres­sion Jake had 
seen on his face in that misty other life, when Roland had told him of how he 
and his friends, Cuthbert and Jamie, had once sneaked into the balcony of that 
same Hall to watch some sort of dance-party. Jake and Roland had been climbing 
into the mountains when Roland had told him of that time, close on the trail of 
Walter.
Marten sat next to my mother and father, Roland had said. I knew them even from 
so high above—and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the 
others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. But the 
gunslingers did not clap....
Jake looked curiously at Roland, wondering again where this strange man had come 
from . . . and why.
"A great barrel was placed in the center of the floor," Roland went on, "and 
into this each riddler would toss a handful of bark scrolls with rid­dles writ 
upon them. Many were old, riddles they had gotten from the el­ders—even from 
books, in some cases—but many others were new, made up for the occasion. Three 
judges, one always a gunslinger, would pass on these when they were told aloud, 
and they were accepted only if the judges deemed them fair."
"YES, RIDDLES MUST BE FAIR," Blaine agreed.
"So they riddled," the gunslinger said. A faint smile touched his mouth as he 
thought of those days, days when he had been the age of the bruised boy sitting 
across from him with the billy-bumbler in his lap. "For hours on end they 
riddled. A line was formed down the center of the Hall of the Grandfathers. 
One's position in this line was determined by lot, and since it was much better 
to be at the end of the line than at the head, everyone hoped for a high draw, 
although the winner had to answer at least one riddle correctly.
"OF COURSE."
"Each man or woman—for some of Gilead's best riddlers were women—approached the 
barrel, drew a riddle, and if the riddle was still unanswered after the sands in 
a three-minute glass had run out, that con­testant had to leave the line."
"AND WAS THE SAME RIDDLE ASKED OF THE NEXT PER­SON IN THE LINE?"
"Yes."
"SO THE NEXT PERSON HAD EXTRA TIME TO THINK."
"Yes."
"I SEE. IT SOUNDS PRETTY SWELL."
Roland frowned. "Swell?"
"He means it sounds like fun," Susannah said quietly.
Roland shrugged. "It was fun for the onlookers, I suppose, but the contestants 
took it very seriously. Quite often there were arguments and fistfights after 
the contest was over and the prize awarded."
"WHAT PRIZE WAS THAT, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?"
"The largest goose in Barony. And year after year my teacher, Cort, carried that 
goose home."
"I WISH HE WERE HERE," Blaine said respectfully. "HE MUST HAVE BEEN A GREAT 
RIDDLER."
"Indeed he was," Roland said. "Are you ready for my proposal, Blaine?"
"OF COURSE. I WILL LISTEN WITH GREAT INTEREST, ROLAND OF GILEAD."
"Let these next few hours be our Fair-Day. You will not riddle us, for you wish 
to hear new riddles, not tell some of those millions you already know—"
"CORRECT."
"We couldn't solve most of them, anyway," Roland went on. "I'm sure you know 
riddles that would have stumped even Cort, had they been pulled out of the 
barrel." He was not sure of it at all, but the time to use the fist had passed 
and the time to use the feather had come.
"OF COURSE," Blaine agreed.
"Instead of a goose, our lives shall be the prize," Roland said. "We will riddle 
you as we run, Blaine. If, when we come to Topeka, you have solved every one of 
our riddles, you may carry out your original plan and kill us. That is your 
goose. But if we pose you—if there is a riddle in ei­ther Jake's book or one of 
our heads which you don't know and can't an­swer—you must take us to Topeka and 
then free us to pursue our quest. That is our goose."
Silence.
"Do you understand?"
"YES."
"Do you agree?"
More silence from Blaine the Mono. Eddie sat stiffly with his arm around 
Susannah, looking up at the ceiling of the Barony Coach. Susan­nah's left hand 
slipped across her belly, stroking the secret which might be hidden there. Jake 
stroked Oy's fur lightly, avoiding the bloody tangles where the bumbler had been 
stabbed. They waited while Blaine—the real Blaine, now far behind them, living 
his quasi-life beneath a city where all the inhabitants lay dead by his 
hand—considered Roland's proposal.
"YES," Blaine said at last. "I AGREE. IF I SOLVE ALL THE RID­DLES YOU ASK ME, I 
WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME TO THE PLACE WHERE THE PATH ENDS IN THE CLEARING. IF ONE 
OF YOU TELLS A RIDDLE I CANNOT SOLVE, I WILL SPARE YOUR LIVES AND LEAVE YOU IN 
TOPEKA, FROM WHENCE YOU MAY CONTINUE YOUR QUEST FOR THE DARK TOWER, IF YOU SO 
CHOOSE. HAVE I UNDERSTOOD THE TERMS AND LIMITS OF YOUR PROPOSAL CORRECTLY, 
ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?"
"Yes."
"VERY WELL, ROLAND OF GILEAD.
"VERY WELL, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.
"VERY WELL, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK.
"VERY WELL, JAKE OF NEW YORK.
"VERY WELL, OY OF MID-WORLD."
Oy looked up briefly at the sound of his name.
"YOU ARE KA-TET; ONE MADE FROM MANY. SO AM I. WHOSE KA-TET IS THE STRONGER IS 
SOMETHING WE MUST NOW PROVE."
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the hard steady throb of the 
slo-trans turbines bearing them on across the waste lands, bearing them along 
the Path of the Beam toward Topeka, where Mid-World ended and End-World began.
"SO," cried the voice of Blaine. "CAST YOUR NETS, WANDER­ERS! TRY ME WITH YOUR 
QUESTIONS, AND LET THE CONTEST BEGIN."

 

 

 
 
PART  ONE
RIDDLES

 

 

 
 
CHAPTER     1
beneath the
demon moon (I)
1
The town of Candleton was a poisoned and irradiated ruin, but not dead; after 
all the centuries it still twitched with tenebrous life—trundling beetles the 
size of turtles, birds that looked like small, misshapen dragonlets, a few 
stumbling robots that passed in and out of the rotten build­ings like stainless 
steel zombies, their joints squalling, their nuclear eyes flickering.
"Show your pass, pard!" cried the one that had been stuck in a corner of the 
lobby of the Candleton Travellers' Hotel for the last two hundred and 
thirty-four years. Embossed on the rusty lozenge of its head was a six-pointed 
star. It had over the years managed to dig a shallow concavity in the 
steel-sheathed wall blocking its way, but that was all.
"Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible south and east of 
town! Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible south and east of 
town!"
A bloated rat, blind and dragging its guts behind it in a sac like a rot­ten 
placenta, struggled over the posse robot's feet. The posse robot took no notice, 
just went on butting its steel head into the steel wall. "Show your pass, pard! 
Elevated radiation levels possible, dad rattit and gods cuss it!" Behind it, in 
the hotel bar, the skulls of men and women who had come in here for one last 
drink before the cataclysm caught up with them grinned as if they had died 
laughing. Perhaps some of them had.
When Blaine the Mono blammed overhead, running up the night like a bullet 
running up the barrel of a gun, windows broke, dust sifted down, and several of 
the skulls disintegrated like ancient pottery vases. Outside, a brief hurricane 
of radioactive dust blew up the street, and the hitching post in front of the 
Elegant Beef and Pork Restaurant was sucked into the squally updraft like smoke. 
In the town square, the Candleton Fountain split in two, spilling out not water 
but only dust, snakes, mutie scorpions, and a few of the blindly trundling 
turtle-beetles.
Then the shape which had hurtled above the town was gone as if it had never 
been, Candleton reverted to the mouldering activity which had been its 
substitute for life over the last two and a half centuries . .. and then the 
trailing sonic boom caught up, slamming its thunderclap above the town for the 
first time in seven years, causing enough vibration to tumble the mercantile 
store on the far side of the fountain. The posse ro­bot tried to voice one final 
warning: "Elevated rad—" and then quit for good, facing into its corner like a 
child that has been bad.
Two or three hundred wheels outside Candleton, as one travelled along the Path 
of the Beam, the radiation levels and concentrations of DEP3 in the soil fell 
rapidly. Here the mono's track swooped down to less than ten feet off the 
ground, and here a doe that looked almost normal walked prettily from piney 
woods to drink from a stream in which the wa­ter had three-quarters cleansed 
itself.
The doe was not normal—a stumpish fifth leg dangled down from the center of her 
lower belly like a teat, waggling bonelessly to and fro when she walked, and a 
blind third eye peered milkily from the left side of her muzzle. Yet she was 
fertile, and her DNA was in reasonably good order for a twelfth-generation 
mutie. In her six years of life she had given birth to three live young. Two of 
these fawns had been not just viable but nor­mal—threaded stock, Aunt Talitha of 
River Crossing would have called them. The third, a skinless, bawling horror, 
had been killed quickly by its sire.
The world—this part of it, at any rate—had begun to heal itself.
The deer slipped her mouth into the water, began to drink, then looked up, eyes 
wide, muzzle dripping. Off in the distance she could hear a low humming sound. A 
moment later it was joined by an eyelash of light. Alarm flared in the doe's 
nerves, but although her reflexes were fast and the light when first glimpsed 
was still many wheels away across the desolate countryside, there was never a 
chance for her to escape. Before she could even begin to fire her muscles, the 
distant spark had swelled to a searing wolf's eye of light that flooded the 
stream and the clearing with its glare. With the light came the maddening hum of 
Blaine's slo-trans en­gines, running at full capacity. There was a blur of pink 
above the con­crete ridge which bore the rail; a rooster-tail of dust, stones, 
small dismembered animals, and whirling foliage followed along after. The doe 
was killed instantly by the concussion of Blaine's passage. Too large to be 
sucked in the mono's wake, she was still yanked forward almost sev­enty yards, 
with water dripping from her muzzle and hoofs. Much of her hide (and the 
boneless fifth leg) was torn from her body and pulled after Blaine like a 
discarded garment.
There was brief silence, thin as new skin or early ice on a Year's End pond, and 
then the sonic boom came rushing after like some noisy crea­ture late for a 
wedding-feast, tearing the silence apart, knocking a single mutated bird—it 
might have been a raven—dead out of the air. The bird fell like a stone and 
splashed into the stream.
In the distance, a dwindling red eye: Blaine's taillight.
Overhead, a full moon came out from behind a scrim of cloud, paint­ing the 
clearing and the stream in the tawdry hues of pawnshop jewelry. There was a face 
in the moon, but not one upon which lovers would wish to look. It seemed the 
scant face of a skull, like those in the Candleton Travellers' Hotel; a face 
which looked upon those few beings still alive and struggling below with the 
amusement of a lunatic. In Gilead, before the world had moved on, the full moon 
of Year's End had been called the Demon Moon, and it was considered ill luck to 
look directly at it.
Now, however, such did not matter. Now there were demons every­where.
 
2
 
Susannah looked at the route-map and saw that the green dot marking their 
present position was now almost halfway between Candleton and Rilea, Blaine's 
next stop. Except who's stopping? she thought.
From the route-map she turned to Eddie. His gaze was still directed up at the 
ceiling of the Barony Coach. She followed it and saw a square which could only 
be a trapdoor (except when you were dealing with fu­turistic shit like a talking 
train, she supposed you called it a hatch, or something even cooler). Stencilled 
on it was a simple red drawing which showed a man stepping through the opening. 
Susannah tried to imagine following the implied instruction and popping up 
through that hatch at over eight hundred miles an hour. She got a quick but 
clear image of a woman's head being ripped from her neck like a flower from its 
stalk; she saw the head flying backward along the length of the Barony Coach, 
perhaps bouncing once, and then disappearing into the dark, eyes staring and 
hair rippling.
She pushed the picture away as fast as she could. The hatch up there was almost 
certainly locked shut, anyway. Blaine the Mono had no inten­tion of letting them 
go. They might win their way out, but Susannah didn't think that was a sure 
thing even if they managed to stump Blaine with a riddle.
Sorry to say this, but you sound like just one more honky motherfucker to me, 
honey, she thought in a mental voice that was not quite Detta Walker's. I don't 
trust your mechanical ass. You apt to be more dangerous beaten than with the 
blue ribbon pinned to your memory banks.
Jake was holding his tattered book of riddles out to the gunslinger as if he no 
longer wanted the responsibility of carrying it. Susannah knew how the kid must 
feel; their lives might very well be in those grimy, well-thumbed pages. She 
wasn't sure she would want the responsibility of holding onto it, either.
"Roland!" Jake whispered. "Do you want this?"
"Ont!" Oy said, giving the gunslinger a forbidding glance. "Olan-ont-iss!" The 
bumbler fixed his teeth on the book, took it from Jake's hand, and stretched his 
disproportionately long neck toward Roland, of­fering him Riddle-De-Dum! 
Brain-Twisters and Puzzles for Everyone!
Roland glanced at it for a moment, his face distant and preoccupied, then shook 
his head. "Not yet." He looked forward at the route-map. Blaine had no face, so 
the map had to serve them as a fixing-point. The flashing green dot was closer 
to Rilea now. Susannah wondered briefly what the countryside through which they 
were passing looked like, and decided she didn't really want to know. Not after 
what they'd seen as they left the city of Lud.
"Blaine!" Roland called.
"YES."
"Can you leave the room? We need to confer."
You nuts if you think he's gonna do that, Susannah thought, but Blaine's reply 
was quick and eager.
"YES, GUNSLINGER. I WILL TURN OFF ALL MY SENSORS IN THE BARONY COACH. WHEN YOUR 
CONFERENCE IS DONE AND YOU ARE READY TO BEGIN THE RIDDLING, I WILL RETURN."
"Yeah, you and General MacArthur," Eddie muttered.
"WHAT DID YOU SAY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself, that's all."
"TO SUMMON ME, SIMPLY TOUCH THE ROUTE-MAP," said Blaine. "AS LONG AS THE MAP IS 
RED, MY SENSORS ARE OFF. SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR. AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE. 
DON'T FORGET TO WRITE." A pause. Then: "OLIVE OIL BUT NOT CASTORIA."
The route-map rectangle at the front of the cabin suddenly turned a red so 
bright Susannah couldn't look at it without squinting.
"Olive oil but not castoria?" Jake asked. "What the heck does that mean?"
"It doesn't matter," Roland said. "We don't have much time. The mono travels 
just as fast toward its point of ending whether Blaine's with us or not."
"You don't really believe he's gone, do you?" Eddie asked. "A slip­pery pup like 
him? Come on, get real. He's peeking, I guarantee you."
"I doubt it very much," Roland said, and Susannah decided she agreed with him. 
For now, at least. "You could hear how excited he was at the idea of riddling 
again after all these years. And—"
"And he's confident," Susannah said. "Doesn't expect to have much trouble with 
the likes of us."
"Will he?" Jake asked the gunslinger. "Will he have trouble with us?"
"I don't know," Roland said. "I don't have a Watch Me hidden up my sleeve, if 
that's what you're asking. It's a straight game . . . but at least it's a game 
I've played before. We've all played it before, at least to some ex­tent. And 
there's that." He nodded toward the book which Jake had taken back from Oy. 
"There are forces at work here, big ones, and not all of them are working to 
keep us away from the Tower."
Susannah heard him, but it was Blaine she was thinking of—Blaine who had gone 
away and left them alone, like the kid who's been chosen "it" obediently 
covering his eyes while his playmates hide. And wasn't that what they were? 
Blaine's playmates? The thought was somehow worse than the image she'd had of 
trying the escape hatch and having her head torn off.
"So what do we do?" Eddie asked. "You must have an idea, or you never would have 
sent him away."
"His great intelligence—coupled with his long period of loneliness and forced 
inactivity—may have combined to make him more human than he knows. That's my 
hope, anyway. First, we must establish a kind of geography. We must tell, if we 
can, where he is weak and where he is strong, where he is sure of the game and 
where not so sure. Riddles are not just about the cleverness of the riddler, 
never think it. They are also about the blind spots of he who is riddled."
"Does he have blind spots?" Eddie asked.
"If he doesn't," Roland said calmly, "we're going to die on this train."
"I like the way you kind of ease us over the rough spots," Eddie said with a 
thin smile. "It's one of your many charms."
"We will riddle him four times to begin with," Roland said. "Easy, not so easy, 
quite hard, very hard. He'll answer all four, of that I am con­fident, but we 
will be listening for how he answers."
Eddie was nodding, and Susannah felt a small, almost reluctant glim­mer of hope. 
It sounded like the right approach, all right.
"Then we'll send him away again and hold palaver," the gunslinger said. "Mayhap 
we'll get an idea of what direction to send our horses. These first riddles can 
come from anywhere, but"—he nodded gravely toward the book—"based on Jake's 
story of the bookstore, the answer we really need should be in there, not in any 
memories I have of Fair-Day riddlings. Must be in there."
"Question," Susannah said.
Roland looked at her, eyebrows raised over his faded, danger­ous eyes.
"It's a question we're looking for, not an answer," she said. "This time it's 
the answers that are apt to get us killed."
The gunslinger nodded. He looked puzzled—frustrated, even—and this was not an 
expression Susannah liked seeing on his face. But this time when Jake held out 
the book, Roland took it. He held it for a moment (its faded but still gay red 
cover looked very strange in his big sunburned hands . . . especially in the 
right one, with its essential reduction of two fingers), then passed it on to 
Eddie.
"You're easy," Roland said, turning to Susannah.
"Perhaps," she replied, with a trace of a smile, "but it's still not a very 
polite thing to say to a lady, Roland."
He turned to Jake. "You'll go second, with one that's a little harder. I'll go 
third. You'll go last, Eddie. Pick one from the book that looks hard—"
"The hard ones are toward the back," Jake supplied.
". . . but none of your foolishness, mind. This is life and death. The time for 
foolishness is past."
Eddie looked at him—old long, tall, and ugly, who'd done God knew how many ugly 
things in the name of reaching his Tower—and wondered if Roland had any idea at 
all of how much that hurt. Just that casual admo­nition not to behave like a 
child, grinning and cracking jokes, now that their lives were at wager.
He opened his mouth to say something—an Eddie Dean Special, something that would 
be both funny and stinging at the same time, the kind of remark that always used 
to drive his brother Henry dogshit— and then closed it again. Maybe long, tall, 
and ugly was right; maybe it was time to put away the one-liners and dead baby 
jokes. Maybe it was finally time to grow up.
 
3
 
After three more minutes of murmured consultation and some quick flip­ping 
through Riddle-De-Dum! on Eddie's and Susannah's parts (Jake al­ready knew the 
one he wanted to try Blaine with first, he'd said), Roland went to the front of 
the Barony Coach and laid his hand on the fiercely glowing rectangle there. The 
route-map reappeared at once. Although there was no sensation of movement now 
that the coach was closed, the green dot was closer to Rilea than ever.
"SO, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN!" Blaine said. To Eddie he sounded more than jovial; 
he sounded next door to hilarious. "IS YOUR KA-TET READY TO BEGIN?"
"Yes. Susannah of New York will begin the first round." He turned to her, 
lowered his voice a little (not that she reckoned that would do much good if 
Blaine wanted to listen), and said: "You won't have to step for­ward like the 
rest of us, because of your legs, but you must speak fair and address him by 
name each time you talk to him. If—when—he answers your riddle correctly, say 
'Thankee-sai, Blaine, you have answered true.' Then Jake will step into the 
aisle and have his turn. All right?"
"And if he should get it wrong, or not guess at all?"
Roland smiled grimly. "I think that's one thing we don't have to worry about 
just yet." He raised his voice again. "Blaine?"
"YES, GUNSLINGER."
Roland took a deep breath. "It starts now."
"EXCELLENT!"
Roland nodded at Susannah. Eddie squeezed one of her hands; Jake patted the 
other. Oy gazed at her raptly with his gold-ringed eyes.
Susannah smiled at them nervously, then looked up at the route-map. "Hello, 
Blame."
"HOWDY, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK."
Her heart was pounding, her armpits were damp, and here was some­thing she had 
first discovered way back in the first grade: it was hard to begin. It was hard 
to stand up in front of the class and be first with your song, your joke, your 
report on how you spent your summer vacation . . . or your riddle, for that 
matter. The one she had decided upon was one from Jake Chambers's crazed English 
essay, which he had recited to them almost verbatim during their long palaver 
after leaving the old people of River Crossing. The essay, titled "My 
Understanding of Truth," had con­tained two riddles, one of which Eddie had 
already used on Blaine.
"SUSANNAH? ARE YOU THERE, L’IL COWGIRL?"
Teasing again, but this time the teasing sounded light, good-natured. 
Good-humored. Blaine could be charming when he got what he wanted. Like certain 
spoiled children she had known.
"Yes, Blaine, I am, and here is my riddle. What has four wheels and flies?"
There was a peculiar click, as if Blaine were mimicking the sound of a man 
popping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It was followed by a brief 
pause. When Blaine replied, most of the jocularity had gone out of his voice. 
"THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, OF COURSE. A CHILD'S RIDDLE. IF THE REST OF YOUR 
RIDDLES ARE NO BET­TER, I WILL BE EXTREMELY SORRY I SAVED YOUR LIVES FOR EVEN A 
SHORT WHILE."
The route-map flashed, not red this time but pale pink. "Don't get him mad," the 
voice of Little Blaine begged. Each time it spoke, Susannah found herself 
imagining a sweaty little bald man whose every movement was a kind of cringe. 
The voice of Big Blaine came from everywhere (like the voice of God in a Cecil 
B. DeMille movie, Susannah thought), but Lit­tle Blaine's from only one: the 
speaker directly over their heads. "Please don't make him angry, fellows; he's 
already got the mono in the red, speedwise, and the track compensators can 
barely keep up. The trackage has degenerated terribly since the last time we 
came out this way."
Susannah, who had been on her share of humpy trolleys and subways in her time, 
felt nothing the ride was as smooth now as it had been when they had first 
pulled out of the Cradle of Lud—but she believed Little Blaine anyway. She 
guessed that if they did feel a bump, it would be the last thing any of them 
would ever feel.
Roland poked an elbow into her side, bringing her back to her current situation.
"Thankee-sai," she said, and then, as an afterthought, tapped her throat rapidly 
three times with the fingers of her right hand. It was what Roland had done when 
speaking to Aunt Talitha for the first time.
"THANK YOU FOR YOUR COURTESY," Blaine said. He sounded amused again, and 
Susannah reckoned that was good even if his amuse­ment was at her expense. "I AM 
NOT FEMALE, HOWEVER. INSO­FAR AS I HAVE A SEX, IT IS MALE."
Susannah looked at Roland, bewildered.
"Left hand for men," he said. "On the breastbone." He tapped to demonstrate.
"Oh."
Roland turned to Jake. The boy stood, put Oy on his chair (which did no good; Oy 
immediately jumped down and followed after Jake when he stepped into the aisle 
to face the route-map), and turned his attention to Blaine.
"Hello, Blaine, this is Jake. You know, son of Elmer."
"SPEAK YOUR RIDDLE."
"What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a bed but never 
sleeps, has a head but never weeps?"
"NOT BAD! ONE HOPES SUSANNAH WILL LEARN FROM YOUR EXAMPLE, JAKE SON OF ELMER. 
THE ANSWER MUST BE SELF-EVIDENT TO ANYONE OF ANY INTELLIGENCE AT ALL, BUT A 
DECENT EFFORT, NEVERTHELESS. A RIVER."
"Thankee-sai, Blaine, you have answered true." He tapped the bunched fingers of 
his left hand three times against his breastbone and then sat down. Susannah put 
her arm around him and gave him a brief squeeze. Jake looked at her gratefully.
Now Roland stood up. "Hile, Blaine," he said.
"HILE, GUNSLINGER." Once again Blaine sounded amused . . . possibly by the 
greeting, which Susannah hadn't heard before. Heil what? she wondered. Hitler 
came to mind, and that made her think of the downed plane they'd found outside 
Lud. A Focke-Wulf, Jake had claimed. She didn't know about that, but she knew it 
had contained one seriously dead harrier, too old even to stink. "SPEAK YOUR 
RIDDLE, ROLAND, AND LET IT BE HANDSOME."
"Handsome is as handsome does, Blaine. In any case, here it is: What has four 
legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?"
"THAT IS INDEED HANDSOME," Blaine allowed. "SIMPLE BUT HANDSOME, JUST THE SAME. 
THE ANSWER IS A HUMAN BE­ING, WHO CRAWLS ON HANDS AND KNEES IN BABYHOOD, WALKS 
ON TWO LEGS DURING ADULTHOOD, AND WHO GOES ABOUT WITH THE HELP OF A CANE IN OLD 
AGE."
Blaine sounded positively smug, and Susannah suddenly discovered a mildly 
interesting fact: she loathed the self-satisfied, murderous thing. Machine or 
not, it or he, she loathed Blaine. She had an idea she would have felt the same 
even if he hadn't made them wager their lives in a stu­pid riddling contest.
Roland, however, did not look the slightest put out of countenance. 
"Thankee-sai, Blaine, you have answered true." He sat down without tap­ping his 
breastbone and looked at Eddie. Eddie stood up and stepped into the aisle.
"What's happening, Blaine my man?" he asked. Roland winced and shook his head, 
putting his mutilated right hand up briefly to shade his eyes.
Silence from Blaine.
"Blaine? Are you there?"
"YES, BUT IN NO MOOD FOR FRIVOLITY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK. SPEAK YOUR RIDDLE. I 
SUSPECT IT WILL BE DIFFI­CULT IN SPITE OF YOUR FOOLISH POSES. I LOOK FORWARD TO 
IT."
Eddie glanced at Roland, who waved a hand at him—Go on, for your father's sake, 
go on!—and then looked back at the route-map, where the green dot had just 
passed the point marked Rilea. Susannah saw that Eddie suspected what she 
herself all but knew: Blaine understood they were trying to test his 
capabilities with a spectrum of riddles. Blaine knew . . . and welcomed it.
Susannah felt her heart sink as any hopes they might find a quick and easy way 
out of this disappeared.
 
4
 
"Well," Eddie said, "I don't know how hard it'll seem to you, but it struck me 
as a toughie." Nor did he know the answer, since that section of Riddle-De-Dum! 
had been torn out, but he didn't think that made any difference; their knowing 
the answers hadn't been part of the ground-rules.
"I SHALL HEAR AND ANSWER."
"No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?"
"SILENCE, A THING YOU KNOW LITTLE ABOUT, EDDIE OF NEW YORK," Blaine said with no 
pause at all, and Eddie felt his heart drop a little. There was no need to 
consult with the others; the answer was self-evident. And having it come back at 
him so quickly was the real bummer. Eddie never would have said so, but he had 
harbored the hope— almost a secret surety—of bringing Blaine down with a single 
riddle, ker-smash, all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put 
Blaine together again. The same secret surety, he supposed, that he had harbored 
every time he picked up a pair of dice in some sharpie's back-bedroom crap game, 
every time he called for a hit on seventeen while playing blackjack. That 
feeling that you couldn't go wrong because you were you, the best, the one and 
only.
"Yeah," he said, sighing. "Silence, a thing I know little about. Thankee-sai, 
Blaine, you speak truth."
"I HOPE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED SOMETHING WHICH WILL HELP YOU," Blaine said, and 
Eddie thought: You fucking mechanical liar. The complacent tone had returned to 
Blaine's voice, and Eddie found it of some passing interest that a machine could 
express such a range of emo­tion. Had the Great Old Ones built them in, or had 
Blaine created an emo­tional rainbow for himself at some point? A little dipolar 
pretty with which to pass the long decades and centuries? "DO YOU WISH ME TO GO 
AWAY AGAIN SO YOU MAY CONSULT?"
"Yes," Roland said.
The route-map flashed bright red. Eddie turned toward the gunslinger. Roland 
composed his face quickly, but before he did, Eddie saw a hor­rible thing: a 
brief look of complete hopelessness. Eddie had never seen such a look there 
before, not when Roland had been dying of the lobstrosities' bites, not when 
Eddie had been pointing the gunslinger's own revolver at him, not even when the 
hideous Gasher had taken Jake pris­oner and disappeared into Lud with him.
"What do we do next?" Jake asked. "Do another round of the four of us?"
"I think that would serve little purpose," Roland said. "Blame must know 
thousands of riddles—perhaps millions—and that is bad. Worse, far worse, he 
understands the how of riddling ... the place the mind has to go to in order to 
make them and solve them." He turned to Eddie and Susannah, sitting once more 
with their arms about one another. "Am I right about that?" he asked them. "Do 
you agree?"
"Yes," Susannah said, and Eddie nodded reluctantly. He didn't want to agree . . 
. but he did.
"So?" Jake asked. "What do we do, Roland? I mean, there has to be a way out of 
this . . . doesn't there?"
Lie to him, you bastard, Eddie sent fiercely in Roland's direction. Roland, 
perhaps hearing the thought, did the best he could. He touched Jake's hair with 
his diminished hand and ruffled through it. "I think there's always an answer, 
Jake. The real question is whether or not we'll have time to find the right 
riddle. He said it took him a little under nine hours to run his route—"
"Eight hours, forty-five minutes," Jake put in. ". . . and that's not much time. 
We've already been running almost an hour—"
"And if that map's right, we're almost halfway to Topeka," Susannah said in a 
tight voice. "Could be our mechanical pal's been lying to us about the length of 
the run. Hedging his bets a little." "Could be," Roland agreed. "So what do we 
do?" Jake repeated.
Roland drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out. "Let me riddle him alone, for 
now. I'll ask him the hardest ones I remember from the Fair-Days of my youth. 
Then, Jake, if we're approaching the point of... if we're approaching Topeka at 
this same speed with Blaine still unposed, I think you should ask him the last 
few riddles in your book. The hardest riddles." He rubbed the side of his face 
distractedly and looked at the ice sculpture. This chilly rendering of his own 
likeness had now melted to an unrecognizable hulk. "I still think the answer 
must be in the book. Why else would you have been drawn to it before coming back 
to this world?" 
"And us?" Susannah asked. "What do Eddie and I do?" 
"Think, " Roland said. "Think, for your fathers' sakes." 
" 'I do not shoot with my hand,' " Eddie said. He suddenly felt far away, 
strange to himself. It was the way he'd felt when he had seen first the 
slingshot and then the key in pieces of wood, just waiting for him to whittle 
them free ... and at the same time this feeling was not like that at all.
Roland was looking at him oddly. "Yes, Eddie, you say true. A gun-slinger shoots 
with his mind. What have you thought of?"
"Nothing." He might have said more, but all at once a strange im­age—a strange 
memory—intervened: Roland hunkering by Jake at one of their stopping-points on 
the way to Lud. Both of them in front of an unlit campfire. Roland once more at 
his everlasting lessons. Jake's turn this time. Jake with the flint and steel, 
trying to quicken the fire. Spark after spark licking out and dying in the dark. 
And Roland had said that he was being silly. That he was just being . . . well. 
. . silly.
"No," Eddie said. "He didn't say that at all. At least not to the kid, he 
didn't."
"Eddie?" Susannah. Sounding concerned. Almost frightened.
Well why don't you ask him what he said, bro? That was Henry's voice, the voice 
of the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. First time in a long time. Ask him, he's 
practically sitting right next to you, go on and ask him what he said. Quit 
dancing around like a baby with a load in his diapers.
Except that was a bad idea, because that wasn't the way things worked in 
Roland's world. In Roland's world everything was riddles, you didn't shoot with 
your hand but with your mind, your motherfucking mind, and what did you say to 
someone who wasn't getting the spark into the kindling? Move your flint in 
closer, of course, and that's what Roland had said: Move your flint in closer, 
and hold it steady.
Except none of that was what this was about. It was close, yes, but close only 
counts in horseshoes, as Henry Dean had been wont to say be­fore he became the 
Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. Eddie's memory was jinking a little because 
Roland had embarrassed him... shamed him . . . made a joke at his expense . . .
Probably not on purpose, but... something. Something that had made him feel the 
way Henry always used to make him feel, of course it was, why else would Henry 
be here after such a long absence?
All of them looking at him now. Even Oy.
"Go on," he told Roland, sounding a little waspish. "You wanted us to think, 
we're thinking, already." He himself was thinking so hard 
 (I shoot with my mind )
that his goddam brains were almost on fire, but he wasn't going to tell old 
long, tall, and ugly that. "Go on and ask Blaine some riddles. Do your part."
"As you will, Eddie." Roland rose from his seat, went forward, and laid his hand 
on the scarlet rectangle again. The route-map reappeared at once. The green dot 
had moved farther beyond Rilea, but it was clear to Eddie that the mono had 
slowed down significantly, either obeying some built-in program or because 
Blaine was having too much fun to hurry.
"IS YOUR KA-TET READY TO CONTINUE OUR FAIR-DAY RIDDLING, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?"
"Yes, Blaine," Roland said, and to Eddie his voice sounded heavy. "I will riddle 
you alone for awhile now. If you have no objection."
"AS DINH AND FATHER OF YOUR KA-TET, SUCH IS YOUR RIGHT. WILL THESE BE FAIR-DAY 
RIDDLES?"
"Yes."
"GOOD." Loathsome satisfaction in that voice. "I WOULD HEAR MORE OF THOSE."
"All right." Roland took a deep breath, then began. "Feed me and I live. Give me 
to drink and I die. What am I?"
"FIRE." No hesitation. Only that insufferable smugness, a tone which said That 
was old to me when your grandmother was young, but try again! This is more fun 
than I've had in centuries, so try again!
"I pass before the sun, Blaine, yet make no shadow. What am I?"
"WIND." No hesitation.
"You speak true, sai. Next. This is as light as a feather, yet no man can hold 
it for long."
"ONE'S BREATH." No hesitation.
Yet he did hesitate, Eddie thought suddenly. Jake and Susannah were watching 
Roland with agonized concentration, fists clenched, willing him to ask Blaine 
the right riddle, the stumper, the one with the Get the Fuck Out of Jail Free 
card hidden inside it; Eddie couldn't look at them—Suze, in particular—and keep 
his concentration. He lowered his gaze to his own hands, which were also 
clenched, and forced them to open on his lap. It was surprisingly hard to do. 
From the aisle he heard Roland continuing to trot out the golden oldies of his 
youth.
"Riddle me this, Blaine: If you break me, I'll not stop working. If you can 
touch me, my work is done. If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon 
after. What am I?"
Susannah's breath caught for a moment, and although he was looking down, Eddie 
knew she was thinking what he was thinking: that was a good one, a damned good 
one, maybe—
"THE HUMAN HEART," Blaine said. Still with not a whit of hesita­tion. "THIS 
RIDDLE IS BASED IN LARGE PART UPON HUMAN POETIC CONCEITS; SEE FOR INSTANCE JOHN 
AVERY, SIRONIA HUNTZ, ONDOLA, WILLIAM BLAKE, JAMES TATE, VERONICA MAYS, AND 
OTHERS. IT IS REMARKABLE HOW HUMAN BE­INGS PITCH THEIR MINDS ON LOVE. YET IT IS 
CONSTANT FROM ONE LEVEL OF THE TOWER TO THE NEXT, EVEN IN THESE DE­GENERATE 
DAYS. CONTINUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD."
Susannah's breath resumed. Eddie's hands wanted to clench again, but he wouldn't 
let them. Move your flint in closer, he thought in Ro­land's voice. Move your 
flint in closer, for your father's sake!
And Blaine the Mono ran on, southeast under the Demon Moon.

 

 
 
CHAPTER II
 
THE FALLS OF 
THE HOUNDS

1
 
Jake didn't know how easy or difficult Blaine might find the last ten puz­zlers 
in Riddle-De-Dum!, but they looked pretty tough to him. Of course, he reminded 
himself, he wasn't a thinking-machine with a citywide bank of computers to draw 
on. All he could do was go for it; God hates a cow­ard, as Eddie sometimes said. 
If the last ten failed, he would try Aaron Deepneau's Samson riddle (Out of the 
eater came forth meat, and so on). If that one also failed, he'd probably . . . 
shit, he didn't know what he'd do, or even how he'd feel. The truth is, Jake 
thought, I'm fried.
And why not? He had gone through an extraordinary swarm of emo­tions in the last 
eight hours or so. First, terror: of being sure he and Oy were going to drop off 
the suspension bridge and to their deaths in the River Send; of being driven 
through the crazed maze that was Lud by Gasher; of having to look into the 
Tick-Tock Man's terrible green eyes and try to answer his unanswerable questions 
about time, Nazis, and the nature of transitive circuits. Being questioned by 
Tick-Tock had been like having to take a final exam in hell.
Then the exhilaration of being rescued by Roland (and Oy; without Oy he would 
almost certainly be toast now), the wonder of all they had seen beneath the 
city, his awe at the way Susannah had solved Blaine's gate-riddle, and the final 
mad rush to get aboard the mono before Blaine could release the stocks of 
nerve-gas stored under Lud.
After surviving all that, a kind of blissed-out surety had settled over him—of 
course Roland would stump Blaine, who would then keep his part of the bargain 
and set them down safe and sound at his final stop (whatever passed for Topeka 
in this world). Then they would find the Dark Tower and do whatever they were 
supposed to do there, right what needed righting, fix what needed fixing. And 
then? They Lived Happily Ever After, of course. Like folk in a fairy tale.
Except...
They shared each other's thoughts, Roland had said; sharing khef was part of 
what ka-tet meant. And what had been seeping into Jake's thoughts ever since 
Roland stepped into the aisle and began to try Blaine with riddles from his 
young days was a sense of doom. It wasn't coming just from the gunslinger; 
Susannah was sending out the same grim blue-black vibe. Only Eddie wasn't 
sending it, and that was because he'd gone off somewhere, was chasing his own 
thoughts. That might be good, but there were no guarantees, and—
—and Jake began to be scared again. Worse, he felt desperate, like a creature 
that is pressed deeper and deeper into its final comer by a relent­less foe. His 
fingers worked restlessly in Oy's fur, and when he looked down at them, he 
realized an amazing thing: the hand which Oy had bitten into to keep from 
falling off the bridge no longer hurt. He could see the holes the bumbler's 
teeth had made, and blood was still crusted in his palm and on his wrist, but 
the hand itself no longer hurt. He flexed it cau­tiously. There was some pain, 
but it was low and distant, hardly there at all.
"Blaine, what may go up a chimney down but cannot go down a chimney up?"
"A LADY'S PARASOL," Blaine replied in that tone of jolly compla­cency which 
Jake, too, was coming to loathe.
"Thankee-sai, Blaine, once again you have answered true. Next—"
"Roland?"
The gunslinger looked around at Jake, and his look of concentration lightened a 
bit. It wasn't a smile, but it went a little way in that direction, at least, 
and Jake was glad.
"What is it, Jake?"
"My hand. It was hurting like crazy, and now it's stopped!"
"SHUCKS," Blaine said in the drawling voice of John Wayne. "I COULDN'T WATCH A 
HOUND SUFFER WITH A MASHED-UP FOREPAW LIKE THAT, LET ALONE A FINE LITTLE TRAIL 
HAND LIKE YOURSELF. SO I FIXED IT UP."
"How?" Jake asked.
"LOOK ON THE ARM OF YOUR SEAT."
Jake did, and saw a faint gridwork of lines. It looked a little like the speaker 
of the transistor radio he'd had when he was seven or eight.
"ANOTHER BENEFIT OF TRAVELLING BARONY CLASS," Blaine went on in his smug voice. 
It crossed Jake's mind that Blaine would fit in perfectly at the Piper School. 
The world's first slo-trans, dipo­lar nerd. "THE HAND-SCAN SPECTRUM MAGNIFIER IS 
A DIAG­NOSTIC TOOL ALSO CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING MINOR FIRST AID, SUCH AS I HAVE 
PERFORMED ON YOU. IT IS ALSO A NUTRIENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, A BRAIN-PATTERN 
RECORDING DEVICE, A STRESS-ANALYZER, AND AN EMOTION-ENHANCER WHICH CAN NATURALLY 
STIMULATE THE PRODUCTION OF ENDORPHINS. HAND-SCAN IS ALSO CAPABLE OF CREATING 
VERY BELIEVABLE ILLUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. WOULD YOU CARE TO HAVE YOUR FIRST 
SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH A NOTED SEX-GODDESS FROM YOUR LEVEL OF THE TOWER, JAKE OF 
NEW YORK? PERHAPS MARILYN MONROE, RAQUEL WELCH, OR EDITH BUNKER?"
Jake laughed. He guessed that laughing at Blaine might be risky, but this time 
he just couldn't help it. "There is no Edith Bunker," he said. "She's just a 
character on a TV show. The actress's name is, um, Jean Stapleton. Also, she 
looks like Mrs. Shaw. She's our housekeeper. Nice, but not—you know—a babe."
A long silence from Blaine. When the voice of the computer returned, a certain 
coldness had replaced the jocose ain't-we-having-fun tone of voice.
"I CRY YOUR PARDON, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I ALSO WITH­DRAW MY OFFER OF A SEXUAL 
EXPERIENCE."
That'll teach me, Jake thought, raising one hand to cover a smile. Aloud (and in 
what he hoped was a suitably humble tone of voice) he said:
"That's okay, Blaine. I think I'm still a little young for that, anyway."
Susannah and Roland were looking at each other. Susannah didn't know who Edith 
Bunker was—All in the Family hadn't been on the tube in her when. But she 
grasped the essence of the situation just the same;
Jake saw her full lips form one soundless word and send it to the gun-slinger 
like a message in a soap bubble:
Mistake.
Yes. Blaine had made a mistake. More, Jake Chambers, a boy of eleven, had picked 
up on it. And if Blaine had made one, he could make another. Maybe there was 
hope after all. Jake decided he would treat that possibility as he had treated 
the graf of River Crossing and allow himself just a little.
 
2
 
Roland nodded imperceptibly at Susannah, then turned back to the front of the 
coach, presumably to resume riddling. Before he could open his mouth, Jake felt 
his body pushed forward. It was funny; you couldn't feel a thing when the mono 
was running flat-out, but the minute it began to de­celerate, you knew.
"HERE IS SOMETHING YOU REALLY OUGHT TO SEE," Blaine said. He sounded cheerful 
again, but Jake didn't trust that tone; he had sometimes heard his father start 
telephone conversations that way (usu­ally with some subordinate who had FUB, 
Fucked Up Big), and by the end Elmer Chambers would be up on his feet, bent over 
the desk like a man with a stomach cramp and screaming at the top of his lungs, 
his cheeks red as radishes and the circles of flesh under his eyes as purple as 
an eggplant. "I HAVE TO STOP HERE, ANYWAY, AS I MUST SWITCH TO BATTERY POWER AT 
THIS POINT AND THAT MEANS PRE-CHARGING."
The mono stopped with a barely perceptible jerk. The walls around them once more 
drained of color and then became transparent. Susannah gasped with fear and 
wonder. Roland moved to his left, felt for the side of the coach so he wouldn't 
bump his head, then leaned forward with his hands on his knees and his eyes 
narrowed. Oy began to bark again. Only Eddie seemed unmoved by the breathtaking 
view which had been pro­vided them by the Barony Coach's visual mode. He glanced 
around once, face preoccupied and somehow bleary with thought, and then looked 
down at his hands again. Jake glanced at him with brief curiosity, then stared 
back out.
They were halfway across a vast chasm and seemed to be hovering on the 
moon-dusted air. Beyond them Jake could see a wide, boiling river. Not the Send, 
unless the rivers in Roland's world were somehow able to run in different 
directions at different points in their courses (and Jake didn't know enough 
about Mid-World to entirely discount that possi­bility); also, this river was 
not placid but raging, a torrent that came tumbling out of the mountains like 
something that was pissed off and wanted to brawl.
For a moment Jake looked at the trees which dressed the steep slopes along the 
sides of this river, registering with relief that they looked pretty much all 
right—the sort of firs you'd expect to see in the mountains of Colorado or 
Wyoming, say—and then his eyes were dragged back to the lip of the chasm. Here 
the torrent broke apart and dropped in a waterfall so wide and so deep that Jake 
thought it made Niagara, where he had gone with his parents (one of three family 
vacations he could remember; two had been cut short by urgent calls from his 
father's Network), look like the kind you might see in a third-rate theme-park. 
The air filling the en­closing semicircle of the falls was further thickened by 
an up rushing mist that looked like steam; in it half a dozen moonbows gleamed 
like gaudy, interlocking dream-jewelry. To Jake they looked like the overlapping 
rings which symbolized the Olympics.
Jutting from the center of the falls, perhaps two hundred feet below the point 
where the river actually went over the drop, were two enormous stone 
protrusions. Although Jake had no idea how a sculptor (or a team of them) could 
have gotten down to where they were, he found it all but im­possible to believe 
they had simply eroded that way. They looked like the heads of enormous, 
snarling dogs.
The Falls of the Hounds, he thought. There was one more stop be­yond 
this—Dasherville—and then Topeka. Last stop. Everybody out.
"ONE MOMENT," Blaine said. "I MUST ADJUST THE VOLUME FOR YOU TO ENJOY THE FULL 
EFFECT."
There was a brief, whispery hooting sound—a kind of mechanical throat 
clearing—and then they were assaulted by a vast roar. It was wa­ter—a billion 
gallons a minute, for all Jake knew—pouring over the lip of the chasm and 
falling perhaps two thousand feet into the deep stone basin at the base of the 
falls. Streamers of mist floated past the blunt almost-faces of the jutting dogs 
like steam from the vents of hell. The level of sound kept climbing. Now Jake's 
whole head vibrated with it, and as he clapped his hands over his ears, he saw 
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah do­ing the same. Oy was barking, but Jake couldn't 
hear him. Susannah's lips were moving again, and again he could read the 
words—Stop it, Blaine, stop it!—but he couldn't hear them any more than he could 
hear Oy's barks, although he was sure Susannah was screaming at the top of her 
lungs.
And still Blame increased the sound of the waterfall, until Jake could feel his 
eyes shaking in their sockets and he was sure his ears were going to short out 
like overstressed stereo speakers.
Then it was over. They still hung above the moon-misty drop, the moonbows still 
made their slow and dreamlike revolutions before the cur­tain of endlessly 
falling water, the wet and brutal stone faces of the dog-guardians continued to 
jut out of the torrent, but that world-ending thunder was gone.
For a moment Jake thought what he'd feared had happened, that he had gone deaf. 
Then he realized that he could hear Oy, still barking, and Susannah crying. At 
first these sounds seemed distant and flat, as if his ears had been packed with 
cracker-crumbs, but then they began to clarify.
Eddie put his arm around Susannah's shoulders and looked toward the route-map. 
"Nice guy, Blaine."
"I MERELY THOUGHT YOU WOULD ENJOY HEARING THE SOUND OF THE FALLS AT FULL 
VOLUME," Blaine said. His boom­ing voice sounded laughing and injured at the 
same time. "I THOUGHT IT MIGHT HELP YOU TO FORGET MY REGRETTABLE MISTAKE IN THE 
MATTER OF EDITH BUNKER."
My fault, Jake thought. Blaine may just be a machine, and a suicidal one at 
that, but he still doesn’t like to be laughed at.
He sat beside Susannah and put his own arm around her. He could still hear the 
Falls of the Hounds, but the sound was now distant.
"What happens here?" Roland asked. "How do you charge your batteries?"
"YOU WILL SEE SHORTLY, GUNSLINGER. IN THE MEAN­TIME, TRY ME WITH A RIDDLE."
"All right, Blaine. Here's one of Cort's own making, and has posed many in its 
time."
"I AWAIT IT WITH GREAT INTEREST."
Roland, pausing perhaps to gather his thoughts, looked up at the place where the 
roof of the coach had been and where there was now only a starry spill across a 
black sky (Jake could pick out Aton and Lydia—Old Star and Old Mother—and was 
oddly comforted by the sight of them, still glaring at each other from their 
accustomed places). Then the gunslinger looked back at the lighted rectangle 
which served them as Blaine's face.
" 'We are very little creatures; all of us have different features. One of us in 
glass is set; one of us you'll find in jet. Another you may see in tin, and a 
fourth is boxed within. If the fifth you should pursue, it can never fly from 
you. What are we?' "
"A AND E AND I AND O AND U," Blaine replied. "THE VOWELS OF THE HIGH SPEECH." 
Still no hesitation, not so much as a whit. Only that voice, mocking and just 
about two steps from laughter; the voice of a cruel little boy watching bugs run 
around on top of a hot stove. "ALTHOUGH THAT PARTICULAR RIDDLE IS NOT FROM YOUR 
TEACHER, ROLAND OF GILEAD; I KNOW IT FROM JONATHAN SWIFT OF LONDON—A CITY IN THE 
WORLD YOUR FRIENDS COME FROM."
"Thankee-sai," Roland said, and his sai sounded like a sigh. "Your answer is 
true, Blaine, and undoubtedly what you believe of the riddle's origins is true 
as well. That Cort knew of other worlds is something I long suspected. I think 
he may have held palaver with the manni who lived outside the city."
"I CARE NOT ABOUT THE MANNI, ROLAND OF GILEAD. THEY WERE ALWAYS A FOOLISH SECT. 
TRY ME WITH AN­OTHER RIDDLE."
"All right. What has—"
"HOLD, HOLD. THE FORCE OF THE BEAM GATHERS. LOOK NOT DIRECTLY AT THE HOUNDS, MY 
INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS! AND SHIELD YOUR EYES!"
Jake looked away from the colossal rock sculptures jutting from the falls, but 
didn't get his hand up quite in time. With his peripheral vision he saw those 
featureless heads suddenly develop eyes of a fiercely glow­ing blue. Jagged 
tines of lightning leaped out of them and toward the mono. Then Jake was lying 
on the carpeted floor of the Barony Coach with the heels of his hands pasted 
against his closed eyes and the sound of Oy whining in one faintly ringing ear. 
Beyond Oy, he heard the crackle of electricity as it stormed around the mono.
When Jake opened his eyes again, the Falls of the Hounds were gone;
Blaine had opaqued the cabin. He could still hear the sound, though—a waterfall 
of electricity, a force somehow drawn from the Beam and shot out through the 
eyes of the stone heads. Blaine was feeding himself with it, somehow. When we go 
on, Jake thought, he 'II be running on batteries. Then Lud really will be behind 
us. For good.
"Blaine," Roland said. "How is the power of the Beam stored in that place? What 
makes it come from the eyes of yon stone temple-dogs? How do you use it?"
Silence from Blaine.
"And who carved them?" Eddie asked. "Was it the Great Old Ones? It wasn't, was 
it? There were people even before them. Or ... were they people?"
More silence from Blaine. And maybe that was good. Jake wasn't sure how much he 
wanted to know about the Falls of the Hounds, or what went on beneath them. He 
had been in the dark of Roland's world before, and had seen enough to believe 
that most of what was growing there was neither good nor safe.
"Better not to ask him," the voice of Little Blaine drifted down from over their 
heads. "Safer."
"Don't ask him silly questions, he won't play silly games," Eddie said. That 
distant, dreaming look had come onto his face again, and when Susannah spoke his 
name, he didn't seem to hear.
 
3
 
Roland sat down across from Jake and scrubbed his right hand slowly up the 
stubble on his right cheek, an unconscious gesture he seemed to make only when 
he was feeling tired or doubtful. "I'm running out of riddles," he said.
Jake looked back at him, startled. The gunslinger had posed fifty or more to the 
computer, and Jake supposed that was a lot to just yank out of your head with no 
preparation, but when you considered that riddling had been such a big deal in 
the place where Roland had grown up ...
He seemed to read some of this on Jake's face, for a small smile, lemon-bitter, 
touched the comers of his mouth, and he nodded as if the boy had spoken out 
loud. "I don't understand, either. If you'd asked me yesterday or the day 
before, I would have told you that I had at least a thousand riddles stored up 
in the junkbin I keep at the back of my mind. Perhaps two thousand. But. . ."
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, shook his head, rubbed his hand up his cheek 
again.
"It's not like forgetting. It's as if they were never there in the first place. 
What's happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon."
"You're moving on," Susannah said, and looked at Roland with an expression of 
pity which Roland could look back at for only a second or two; it was as if he 
felt burned by her regard. "Like everything else here."
"Yes, I fear so." He looked at Jake, lips tight, eyes sharp. "Will you be ready 
with the riddles from your book when I call on you?"
"Yes."
"Good. And take heart. We're not finished yet."
Outside, the dim crackle of electricity ceased.
"I HAVE FED MY BATTERIES AND ALL IS WELL," Blaine announced.
"Marvelous," Susannah said dryly.
"Luss!" Oy agreed, catching Susannah's sarcastic tone exactly.
"I HAVE A NUMBER OF SWITCHING FUNCTIONS TO PER­FORM. THESE WILL TAKE ABOUT FORTY 
MINUTES AND ARE LARGELY AUTOMATIC. WHILE THIS SWITCHOVER TAKES PLACE AND THE 
ACCOMPANYING CHECKLIST IS RUNNING, WE SHALL CONTINUE OUR CONTEST. I AM ENJOYING 
IT VERY MUCH."
"It's like when you have to switch over from electric to diesel on the train to 
Boston," Eddie said. He still sounded as if he wasn't quite with them. "At 
Hartford or New Haven or one of those other places where no one in their right 
fucking mind would want to live."
"Eddie?" Susannah asked. "What are you—"
Roland touched her shoulder and shook his head.
"NEVER MIND EDDIE OF NEW YORK," Blaine said in his expan­sive, 
gosh-but-this-is-fun voice.
"That's right," Eddie said. "Never mind Eddie of New York."
"HE KNOWS NO GOOD RIDDLES. BUT YOU KNOW MANY, ROLAND OF GILEAD. TRY ME WITH 
ANOTHER."
And, as Roland did just that, Jake thought of his Final Essay. Blaine is a pain, 
he had written there. Blaine is a pain and that is the truth. It was the truth, 
all right.
The stone truth.
A little less than an hour later, Blaine the Mono began to move again.
 
4
 
Susannah watched with dreadful fascination as the flashing dot approached 
Dasherville, passed it, and made its final dogleg for home. The dot's movement 
said that Blaine was moving a bit more slowly now that it had switched over to 
batteries, and she fancied the lights in the Barony Coach were a little dimmer, 
but she didn't believe it would make much differ­ence, in the end. Blaine might 
reach his terminus in Topeka doing six hundred miles an hour instead of eight 
hundred, but his last load of pas­sengers would be toothpaste either way.
Roland was also slowing down, going deeper and deeper into that mental junkbin 
of his to find riddles. Yet he did find them, and he refused to give up. As 
always. Ever since he had begun teaching her to shoot, Su­sannah had felt a 
reluctant love for Roland of Gilead, a feeling that seemed a mixture of 
admiration, fear, and pity. She thought she would never really like him (and 
that the Detta Walker part of her might always hate him for the way he had 
seized hold of her and dragged her, raving, into the sun), but her love was 
nonetheless strong. He had, after all, saved Eddie Dean's life and soul; had 
rescued her beloved. She must love him for that if for nothing else. But she 
loved him even more, she suspected, for the way he would never, never give up. 
The word retreat didn't seem to be in his vocabulary, even when he was 
discouraged ... as he so clearly was now.
"Blaine, where may you find roads without carts, forests without trees, cities 
without houses?"
"ON A MAP."
"You say true, sai. Next. I have a hundred legs but cannot stand, a long neck 
but no head; I eat the maid's life. What am I?"
"A BROOM, GUNSLINGER. ANOTHER VARIATION ENDS, 'I EASE THE MAID'S LIFE.' I LIKE 
YOURS BETTER."
Roland ignored this. "Cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be 
smelt. It lies behind the stars and beneath the hills. Ends life and kills 
laughter. What is it, Blaine?"
"THE DARK."
"Thankee-sai, you speak true."
The diminished right hand slid up the right cheek—the old fretful gesture—and 
the minute scratching sound produced by the callused pads of his fingers made 
Susannah shiver. Jake sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the gunslinger 
with a kind of fierce intensity.
"This thing runs but cannot walk, sometimes sings but never talks. Lacks arms, 
has hands; lacks a head but has a face. What is it, Blaine?"
"A CLOCK."
"Shit," Jake whispered, lips compressing.
Susannah looked over at Eddie and felt a passing ripple of irritation. He seemed 
to have lost interest in the whole thing—had "zoned out," in his weird 1980s 
slang. She thought to throw an elbow into his side, wake him up a little, then 
remembered Roland shaking his head at her and didn't. You wouldn't know he was 
thinking, not from that slack expres­sion on his face, but maybe he was.
If so, you better hurry it up a little, precious, she thought. The dot on the 
route map was still closer to Dasherville than Topeka, but it would reach the 
halfway point within the next fifteen minutes or so.
And still the match went on, Roland serving questions, Blaine send­ing the 
answers whistling right back at him, low over the net and out of reach.
What builds up castles, tears down mountains, makes some blind, helps others to 
see? SAND.
Thankee-sai.
What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its roots up­ward? AN 
ICICLE.
Blaine. you say true.
Man walks over; man walks under; in time of war he bums asunder? A BRIDGE.
Thankee-sai.
A seemingly endless parade of riddles marched past her, one after the other, 
until she lost all sense of their fun and playfulness. Had it been so in the 
days of Roland's youth, she wondered, during the riddle contests of Wide Earth 
and Full Earth, when he and his friends (although she had an idea they hadn't 
all been his friends, no, not by a long chalk) had vied for the Fair-Day goose? 
She guessed that the answer was probably yes. The winner had probably been the 
one who could stay fresh longest, keep his poor bludgeoned brains aerated 
somehow.
The killer was the way Blaine came back with the answer so damned promptly each 
time. No matter how hard the riddle might seem to her, Blaine served it right 
back to their side of the court, ka-slam.
"Blaine, what has eyes yet cannot see?"
"THERE ARE FOUR ANSWERS," Blaine replied. "NEEDLES, STORMS, POTATOES, AND A TRUE 
LOVER."
"Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak—"
"LISTEN. ROLAND OF GILEAD. LISTEN, KA-TET"
Roland fell silent at once, his eyes narrowing, his head slightly cocked.
"YOU WILL SHORTLY HEAR MY ENGINES BEGIN TO CYCLE UP," Blaine said. "WE ARE NOW 
EXACTLY SIXTY MINUTES OUT OF TOPEKA. AT THIS POINT—"
"If we've been riding for seven hours or more, I grew up with the Brady Bunch," 
Jake said.
Susannah looked around apprehensively, expecting some new terror or small act of 
cruelty in response to Jake's sarcasm, but Blaine only chuck­led. When he spoke 
again, the voice of Humphrey Bogart had resurfaced.
"TIME'S DIFFERENT HERE, SHWEETHEART. YOU MUST KNOW THAT BY NOW. BUT DON'T WORRY; 
THE FUNDAMEN­TAL THINGS APPLY AS TIME GOES BY. WOULD I LIE TO YOU?"
"Yes," Jake muttered.
That apparently struck Blame's funny bone, because he began to laugh again—the 
mad, mechanical laughter that made Susannah think of funhouses in sleazy 
amusement parks and roadside carnivals. When the lights began to pulse in sync 
with the laughter, she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears.
"Stop it, Blaine! Stop it!"
"BEG PARDON, MA'AM," drawled the aw-shucks voice of Jimmy Stewart. "AH'M RIGHT 
SORRY IF I RUINT YOUR EARS WITH MY RISABILITY."
"Ruin this," Jake said, and hoisted his middle finger at the route-map.
Susannah expected Eddie to laugh—you could count on him to be amused by 
vulgarity at any time of the day or night, she would have said—but Eddie only 
continued looking down at his lap, his forehead creased, his eyes vacant, his 
mouth hung slightly agape. He looked a little too much like the village idiot 
for comfort, Susannah thought, and again had to restrain herself from throwing 
an elbow into his side to get that doltish look off his face. She wouldn't 
restrain herself for much longer; if they were going to die at the end of 
Blaine's run, she wanted Eddie's arms around her when it happened, Eddie's eyes 
on her, Eddie's mind with hers.
But for now, better let him be.
"AT THIS POINT," Blaine resumed in his normal voice, "I INTEND TO BEGIN WHAT I 
LIKE TO THINK OF AS MY KAMIKAZE RUN. THIS WILL QUICKLY DRAIN MY BATTERIES, BUT I 
THINK THE TIME FOR CONSERVATION HAS PASSED, DON'T YOU? WHEN I STRIKE THE 
TRANSTEEL PIERS AT THE END OF THE TRACK, I SHOULD BE TRAVELLING AT BETTER THAN 
NINE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR—FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY IN WHEELS, THAT IS. SEE YOU 
LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER AWHILE, CROCO­DILE, DON'T FORGET TO WRITE. I TELL YOU 
THIS IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN 
SAVING YOUR BEST RIDDLES FOR LAST, YOU MIGHT DO WELL TO POSE THEM TO ME NOW."
The unmistakable greed in Blaine's voice—its naked desire to hear and solve 
their best riddles before it killed them—made Susannah feel tired and old.
"I might not have time even so to pose you all my very best ones," Roland said 
in a casual, considering tone of voice. "That would be a shame, wouldn't it?"
A pause ensued—brief, but more of a hesitation than the computer had accorded 
any of Roland's riddles—and then Blaine chuckled. Susan­nah hated the sound of 
its mad laughter, but there was a cynical weariness in this chuckle that chilled 
her even more deeply. Perhaps because it was almost sane.
"GOOD, GUNSLINGER. A VALIANT EFFORT. BUT YOU ARE NOT SCHEHERAZADE, NOR DO WE 
HAVE A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS IN WHICH TO HOLD PALAVER."
"I don't understand you. I know not this Scheherazade."
"NO MATTER. SUSANNAH CAN FILL YOU IN, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW. PERHAPS EVEN 
EDDIE. THE POINT, ROLAND, IS THAT I'LL NOT BE DRAWN ON BY THE PROMISE OF MORE 
RIDDLES. WE VIE FOR THE GOOSE. COME TOPEKA, IT SHALL BE AWARDED, ONE WAY OR 
ANOTHER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?"
Once more the diminished hand went up Roland's cheek; once more Susannah heard 
the minute rasp of his fingers against the wiry stubble of his beard.
"We play for keeps. No one cries off."
"CORRECT. NO ONE CRIES OFF."
"All right, Blaine, we play for keeps and no one cries off. Here's the next."
"AS ALWAYS, I AWAIT IT WITH PLEASURE."
Roland looked down at Jake. "Be ready with yours, Jake; I'm almost at the end of 
mine."
Jake nodded.
Beneath them, the mono's slo-trans engines continued to cycle up-mat 
beat-beat-beat which Susannah did not so much hear as feel in the hinges of her 
jaw, the hollows of her temples, the pulse-points of her wrists.
It's not going to happen unless there's a stumper in Jake's book, she thought. 
Roland can't pose Blame, and I think he knows it. I think he knew it an hour 
ago.
"Blame, I occur once in a minute, twice in every moment, but not once in a 
hundred thousand years. What am I?"
And so the contest would continue, Susannah realized, Roland asking and Blaine 
answering with his increasingly terrible lack of hesitation, like an all-seeing, 
all-knowing god. Susannah sat with her cold hands clasped in her lap and watched 
the glowing dot draw nigh Topeka, the place where all rail service ended, the 
place where the path of their ka-tet would end in the clearing. She thought 
about the Hounds of the Falls, how they had jutted from the thundering white 
billows below the dark and starshot sky; she thought of their eyes.
Their electric-blue eyes.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      III
the fair-day goose
 
1
 
Eddie Dean—who did not know Roland sometimes thought of him as ka mai, ka's 
fool—heard all of it and heard none of it; saw all of it and saw none of it. The 
only thing to really make an impression on him once the riddling began in 
earnest was the fire flashing from the stone eyes of the Hounds; as he raised 
his hand to shield his eyes from that chain-lightning glare, he thought of the 
Portal of the Beam in the Clearing of the Bear, how he had pressed his ear 
against it and heard the distant, dreamy rumble of machinery.
Watching the eyes of the Hounds light up, listening as Blaine drew that current 
into his batteries, powering up for his final plunge across Mid-World, Eddie had 
thought: Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even 
now some of the stuff the Old Ones left be­hind still works. And that's really 
the horror of it, wouldn’t 't you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.
Eddie had been with his friends for a short time after that, mentally as well as 
physically, but then he had fallen back into his thoughts again. Eddie's zonin. 
Henry would have said. Let 'im be.
It was the image of Jake striking flint and steel that kept recurring; he would 
allow his mind to dwell on it for a second or two, like a bee alight­ing on some 
sweet flower, and then he would take off again. Because that memory wasn't what 
he wanted; it was just the way in to what he wanted, another door like the ones 
on the beach of the Western Sea, or the one he had scraped in the dirt of the 
speaking ring before they had drawn Jake.. . only this door was in his mind. 
What he wanted was behind it; what he was doing was kind of... well... diddling 
the lock.
Zoning, in Henry-speak.
His brother had spent most of his time putting Eddie down—because Henry had been 
afraid of him and jealous of him, Eddie had finally come to realize—but he 
remembered one day when Henry had stunned him by saying something that was nice. 
Better than nice, actually; mind-boggling.
A bunch of them had been sitting in the alley behind Dahlie's, some of them 
eating Popsicles and Hoodsie Rockets, some of them smoking Kents from a pack 
Jimmie Polino—Jimmie Polio, they had all called him, because he had that 
fucked-up thing wrong with him, that clubfoot—had hawked out of his mother's 
dresser drawer. Henry, predictably enough, had been one of the ones smoking.
There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of 
(and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the ar­got of 
their miserable little ka-tet. In Henry's gang, you never beat anyone else up; 
you sent em home with a fuckin rupture. You never made out with a girl; you 
fucked that skag til she cried. You never got stoned; you went on a fuckin 
bombin-run. And you never brawled with another gang; you got in a fuckin pisser.
The discussion that day had been about who you'd want with you if you got in a 
fuckin pisser. Jimmie Polio (he got to talk first because he had supplied the 
cigarettes, which Henry's homeboys called the fuckin cancer-sticks) opted for 
Skipper Brannigan, because, he said, Skipper wasn't afraid of anyone. One time, 
Jimmie said, Skipper got pissed off at this teacher—at the Friday night PAL 
dance, this was—and beat the living shit out of him. Sent THE FUCKIN CHAPERONE 
home with a fuckin rupture, if you could dig it. That was his homie Skipper 
Brannigan.
Everyone listened to this solemnly, nodding their heads as they ate their 
Rockets, sucked their Popsicles, or smoked their Kents. Everyone knew that 
Skipper Brannigan was a fuckin pussy and Jimmie was full of shit, but no one 
said so. Christ, no. If they didn't pretend to believe Jim­mie Polio's 
outrageous lies, no one would pretend to believe theirs.
Tommy Fredericks opted for John Parelli. Georgie Pratt went for Csaba Drabnik, 
also known around the nabe as The Mad Fuckin Hun­garian. Frank Duganelli 
nominated Larry McCain, even though Larry was in Juvenile Detention; Larry 
fuckin ruled, Frank said.
By then it was around to Henry Dean. He gave the question the weighty 
consideration it deserved, then put his arm around his surprised brother's 
shoulders. Eddie, he said. My little bro. He's the man.
They all stared at him, stunned—and none more stunned than Eddie. His jaw had 
been almost down to his belt-buckle. And then Jimmie Polio said. Come on. Henry, 
stop fuckin around. This a serious question. Who 'd you want watching your hack 
if the shit was gonna come down?
I am being serious. Henry had replied.
Why Eddie? Georgie Pratt had asked, echoing the question which had been in 
Eddie's own mind. He couldn’t 't fight his way out of a paper bag. A wet one. So 
why the fuck?
Henry thought some more—not, Eddie was convinced, because he didn't know why, 
but because he had to think about how to articulate it. Then he said: Because 
when Eddie's in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself 
on fire.
The image of Jake returned, one memory stepping on another. Jake scraping steel 
on flint, flashing sparks at the kindling of their campfire, sparks that fell 
short and died before they lit.
He could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Move your flint in closer, Roland said, and now there was a third memory, one of 
Roland at the door they'd come to at the end of the beach, Roland burning with 
fever, close to death, shaking like a maraca, cough­ing, his blue bombardier's 
eyes fixed on Eddie, Roland saying, Come a little closer, Eddie—come a little 
closer for your father's sake!
Because he wanted to grab me, Eddie thought. Faintly, almost as if it were 
coming through one of those magic doors from some other world, he heard Blaine 
telling them that the endgame had commenced; if they had been saving their best 
riddles, now was the time to trot them out. They had an hour.
An hour! Only an hour!
His mind tried to fix on that and Eddie nudged it away. Something was happening 
inside him (at least he prayed it was), some desperate game of association, and 
he couldn't let his mind get fucked up with deadlines and consequences and all 
that crap; if he did, he'd lose what­ever chance he had. It was, in a way, like 
seeing something in a piece of wood, something you could carve out—a bow, a 
slingshot, perhaps a key to open some unimaginable door. You couldn't look too 
long, though, at least to start with. You'd lose it if you did. It was almost as 
if you had to carve while your own back was turned.
He could feel Blaine's engines powering up beneath him. In his mind's eye he saw 
the flint flash against the steel, and in his mind's ear he heard Roland telling 
Jake to move the flint in closer. And don't hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape 
it.
Why am I here? If this isn't what I want, why does my mind keep com­ing hack to 
this place?
Because it’s as close as I can get and still stay out of the hurt-zone. Only a 
medium-sized hurt, actually, but it made me think of Henry. Being put down by 
Henry.
Henry said you could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Yes. I always loved him for that. That was great.
And now Eddie saw Roland move Jake's hands, one holding flint and the other 
steel, closer to the kindling. Jake was nervous. Eddie could see it; Roland had 
seen it, too. And in order to ease his nerves, take his mind off the 
responsibility of lighting the fire, Roland had—
He asked the kid a riddle.
Eddie Dean blew breath into the keyhole of his memory. And this time the 
tumblers turned.
 
2
 
The green dot was closing in on Topeka, and for the first time Jake felt 
vi­bration ... as if the track beneath them had decayed to a point where 
Blaine's compensators could no longer completely handle the problem. With the 
sense of vibration there at last came a feeling of speed. The walls and ceiling 
of the Barony Coach were still opaqued, but Jake found he didn't need to see the 
countryside blurring past to imagine it. Blaine was rolling full out now, 
leading his last sonic boom across the waste lands to the place where Mid-World 
ended, and Jake also found it easy to imagine the transteel piers at the end of 
the monorail. They would be painted in di­agonal stripes of yellow and black. He 
didn't know how he knew that, but he did.
"TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES," Blaine said complacently. "WOULD YOU TRY ME AGAIN, 
GUNSLINGER?"
"I think not, Blaine." Roland sounded exhausted. "I've done with you; you've 
beaten me. Jake?"
Jake got to his feet and faced the route-map. In his chest his heartbeat seemed 
very slow but very hard, each pulse like a fist slamming on a drumhead. Oy 
crouched between his feet, looking anxiously up into his face.
"Hello, Blaine," Jake said, and wet his lips.
"HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK." The voice was kindly—the voice, perhaps, of a nice 
old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads 
into the bushes. "WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME 
TOGETHER GROWS SHORT."
"Yes," Jake said. "I would try you with these riddles. Give me your 
understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine."
"IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK."
Jake opened the book to the place he had been keeping with his fin­ger. Ten 
riddles. Eleven, counting Samson's riddle, which he was saving for last. If 
Blaine answered them all (as Jake now believed he probably would), Jake would 
sit down next to Roland, take Oy onto his lap, and wait for the end. There were, 
after all, other worlds than these.
"Listen, Blaine: In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only 
attack when pulled back. What is it?"
"A BULLET." No hesitation.
"Walk on the living, they don't even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and 
grumble. What are they?"
"FALLEN LEAVES." No hesitation, and if Jake really knew in his heart that the 
game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger?
Because he's a pain, that's why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I'd like to 
push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that 
on my wish-list.
Jake turned the page. He was very close to Riddle-De-Dum's tom-out answer 
section now; he could feel it under his finger, a kind of jagged lump. Very 
close to the end of the book. He thought of Aaron Deepneau in the Manhattan 
Restaurant of the Mind, Aaron Deepneau telling him to come back anytime, play a 
little chess, and oh just by the way, old fatso made a pretty good cup of 
coffee. A wave of homesickness so strong it was like dying swept over him. He 
felt he would have sold his soul for a look at New York; hell, he would have 
sold it for one deep lung-filling breath of Forty-second Street at rush hour.
He fought it off and went to the next riddle.
"I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked 
up soon. What am I?"
"DEW."
Still relentless. Still unhesitating.
The green dot grew closer to Topeka, closing the last of the distance on the 
route-map. One after another, Jake posed his riddles; one after an­other, Blaine 
answered them. When Jake turned to the last page, he saw a boxed message from 
the author or editor or whatever you called someone who put together books like 
this: We hope you've enjoyed the unique combination of imagination and logic 
known as RIDDLING!
I haven't, Jake thought. I haven't enjoyed it one little bit, and I hope you 
choke. Yet when he looked at the question above the message, he felt a thin 
thread of hope. It seemed to him that, in this case, at least, they really had 
saved the best for last.
On the route-map, the green dot was now no more than a finger's width from 
Topeka.
"Hurry up, Jake," Susannah murmured.
"Blaine?"
"YES, JAKE OF NEW YORK."
"With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More 
frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and 
tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?"
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her 
expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine's an­swer was as prompt as 
ever: "THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN."
Jake briefly considered arguing, then thought, Why waste our time? As always, 
the answer, when it was right, seemed almost self-evident. "Thankee-sai, Blaine, 
you speak true."
"AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT. NINETEEN MINUTES AND FIFTY 
SECONDS TO TERMINATION. WOULD YOU SAY MORE, JAKE OF NEW YORK? VISUAL SEN­SORS 
INDICATE YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF YOUR BOOK, WHICH WAS NOT, I MUST SAY, AS 
GOOD AS I HAD HOPED."
"Everybody's a goddam critic," Susannah said sotto voce. She wiped a tear from 
the comer of one eye; without looking directly at her, the gun­slinger took her 
free hand. She clasped it tightly.
"Yes, Blaine, I have one more," Jake said.
"EXCELLENT."
"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came sweetness."
"THIS RIDDLE COMES FROM THE HOLY BOOK KNOWN AS 'OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE OF KING 
JAMES.'" Blaine sounded amused, and Jake felt the last of his hope slip away. He 
thought he might cry—not so much out of fear as frustration. "IT WAS MADE BY 
SAM­SON THE STRONG. THE EATER IS A LION; THE SWEETNESS IS HONEY, MADE BY BEES 
WHICH HIVED IN THE LION'S SKULL. NEXT? YOU STILL HAVE OVER EIGHTEEN MINUTES, 
JAKE."
Jake shook his head. He let go of Riddle-De-Dum! and smiled when Oy caught it 
neatly in his jaws and then stretched his long neck up to Jake, holding it out 
again. "I've told them all. I'm done."
"SHUCKS, L’IL TRAILHAND, THAT'S A PURE-D SHAME," Blaine said. Jake found this 
drawly John Wayne imitation all but unbear­able in their current circumstances. 
"LOOKS LIKE I WIN THAT THAR GOOSE, UNLESS SOMEBODY ELSE CARES TO SPEAK UP. WHAT 
ABOUT YOU, OY OF MID-WORLD? GOT ANY RIDDLES, MY LIT­TLE BUMBLER BUDDY?"
"Oy!" the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, 
Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.
"SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK?"
She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland's hand over in her 
own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had 
been.
"ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY 
RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?"
Roland also shook his head . . . and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising 
his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie's face, a peculiar shine in Eddie's 
eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn't deserted him, after all. It suddenly 
flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like . . . well, like a rose. 
A rose in the full fever of its summer.
"Blaine?" Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.
"YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK." Unmistakable disdain.
"I have a couple of riddles," Eddie said. "Just to pass the time be­tween here 
and Topeka, you understand." No, Jake realized, Eddie didn't sound as if he were 
choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."

 

3
 
Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had 
mused on Roland's tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned 
to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative 
thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose 
to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. 
Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn't the only way; there was also, he 
said, such a thing as going cool turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a 
hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a 
beat, Henry had said. You call that baked turkey. How they had laughed . . . but 
now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was 
going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean 
brother's new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before 
much longer.
Unless you can yank it out of the zone.
Yes.
Then do it, Eddie. It was Henry's voice again, that old resident of his head, 
but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend 
instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the 
old hatchets buried. Do it—make the devil set himself on fire. It 'II hurt a 
little, maybe, but you've hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you 
survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.
Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally man­aged to 
light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle to loosen him up, Jake had struck a 
spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. 
Talking and riddling.
Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they 
ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had 
answered every single one of them without hesita­tion. Eddie had thought much 
the same . . . but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized 
an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward 
him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had 
almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger—make it seem 
like nothing but more exasperation—but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He 
had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to 
all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too—not Roland's anger itself, 
exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been 
one of Henry's favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to 
the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless 
but not pointless, Roland's response had been strangely like Blaine's: / don't 
care about taste. It's senseless and unsolvable, and that's what makes it silly. 
A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, lib­erating 
thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even 
if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo 
Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never 
been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too 
deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, 
Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his 
contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never 
carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my 
mates, but I've never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles de­signed to help 
you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, 
Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ig­nore someone's description of a 
rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more 
riddles—even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine's voice, could hear 
it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled 
zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No 
gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right 
because—
Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown 
calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.
"Blaine?" he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: "I have a 
couple of riddles." As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was 
struggling to hold back laughter.
 
4
 
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and 
from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his 
mil attention to Blaine.
"What has four wheels and flies?"
"THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID." Disapproval—and dislike? Yeah, 
probably—all but oozing out of that voice. "ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE 
THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME."
Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed—because we were fixated on stumping 
you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book—is that the 
contest almost ended right there.
"You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine?"
"I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID," Blaine agreed. "PER­HAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED 
IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?"
A smile lit Eddie's face; he shook his finger at the route-map. "Sticks and 
stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say 
back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never 
lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' "
"Hurry up!" Jake whispered at him. "If you can do something, do it!"
"It doesn't like silly questions," Eddie said. "It doesn't like silly games. And 
we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? 
Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw 
it."
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake's Final Essay, found 
it, posed it.
"Blaine: when is a door not a door?"
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four 
legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his 
tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had 
followed Susannah's opening riddle, but it was still there—Eddie heard it. "WHEN 
IT'S A JAR, OF COURSE" Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. "THIRTEEN MINUTES 
AND FIVE SEC­ONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE 
WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?"
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel 
warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
"Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the 
landscape, you'll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren't quite up to 
your standards of logic."
"YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER."
"Or what? You'll kill me? Don't make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the 
game; now play it."
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. "You're making him angry," 
Little Blaine mourned. "Oh, you're making him so angry."
"Get lost, squirt," Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, 
once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, 
Eddie said: "Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were 
standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big mo­ron fell off. How come 
the little moron didn't fall off, too?"
"THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT AN­SWER." On the last word Blaine's 
voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a 
fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland's eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. "What do you say, Blaine? 
I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?"
"NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT—"
"Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle."
"IT'S NOT A RIDDLE!" Blaine almost bleated. "IT'S A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID 
CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!"
"Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner," Roland 
said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in 
the town of River Crossing. "You must answer, for it is stu­pidity you complain 
of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually."
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder— so loud, in 
fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was 
followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
"THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON." Blaine 
sounded sulky. "MORE PHONETIC CO­INCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY 
RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED."
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
"WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?"
"It's the world's smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,' 
" Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. "But never mind 
the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear 
belts?"
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to 
the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward 
transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out 
of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
"Blaine? Answer."
"Answer," Roland agreed. "Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold 
you to your promise."
Something touched Eddie's elbow. He looked down and saw Susan­nah's small and 
shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was 
more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the 
contest—he was almost sure of that—but he had no idea what Blaine would do if 
and when they did.
"TO ... TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?" Blame's voice firmed, and repeated the question 
as a statement. "TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED 
SIMPLICITY OF—"
"Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time—it won't work. 
Next—"
"I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY—"
"Then stop the mono," Eddie said. "If you're that upset, stop right here, and I 
will."
"NO."
"Okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in 
the rain?"
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt 
spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five sec­onds. Now the flashing 
green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon 
each time it flashed. Then: "PADDY O'FURNITURE."
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind 
Dahlie's, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had appar­ently paid a 
price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony 
Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Ed­die could hear a low 
humming from inside the walls—the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before 
its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. "Stop!" Little Blaine cried, his voice 
so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. 
cartoon. "Stop it, you're killing him!"
What do you think he's trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they'd been sitting around 
the campfire that night—What's green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the 
bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot!—and then didn't. He wanted to stick further 
inside the bounds of logic than that one al­lowed . . . and he could do it. He 
didn't think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a 
third-grader with a fair-to-good col­lection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order 
to fuck Blaine up royally ... and permanently. Because no matter how many 
emotions his fancy dipo­lar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an 
it—a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom's Twilight Zone had 
caused Blaine's sanity to totter.
"Why do people go to bed, Blaine?"
"BECAUSE ... BECAUSE ... GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE ..."
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach 
swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her 
lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
"BECAUSE THE BED WON'T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY 
SECONDS!"
"Give up, Blaine," Eddie said. "Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. 
If you don't quit, it's going to happen. We both know it."
"NO!"
"I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people 
it's recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?"
"NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!"
"Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby 
cross the road?"
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn't under­stand how it 
could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from 
beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to 
cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, 
at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat 
and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.
The voice which came from the speakers was now that of a panicky child: "I KNOW 
IT, JUST A MOMENT, I KNOW IT, RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS, ALL LOGIC CIRCUITS IN USE—"
"Answer," Roland said.
"I NEED MORE TIME! YOU MUST GIVE IT TO ME!" Now there was a kind of cracked 
triumph in that splintered voice. "NO TEMPORAL LIMITS FOR ANSWERING WERE SET, 
ROLAND OF GILEAD, HATEFUL GUNSLINGER OUT OF A PAST THAT SHOULD HAVE STAYED 
DEAD!"
"No," Roland agreed, "no time limits were set, you are quite right. But you may 
not kill us with a riddle still unanswered, Blaine, and Topeka draws nigh. 
Answer!"
The Barony Coach cycled into invisibility again, and Eddie saw what appeared to 
be a tall and rusty grain elevator go flashing past; it was in his view barely 
long enough for him to identify it. Now he fully appreciated the maniacal speed 
at which they were travelling; perhaps three hundred miles faster than a 
commercial jet at cruising speed.
"Let him alone!" moaned the voice of Little Blaine. "You're killing him, I say! 
Killing him!"
"Isn't that 'bout what he wanted?" Susannah asked in the voice of Detta Walker. 
"To die? That's what he said. We don't mind, either. You not so bad, Little 
Blaine, but even a world as fucked up as this one has to be better with your big 
brother gone. It's just him takin us with him we been objectin to all this 
time."
"Last chance," Roland said. "Answer or give up the goose, Blaine."
"I ... I ... YOU . . . SIXTEEN LOG THIRTY-THREE . . . ALL COSINE SUBSCRIPTS ... 
ANTI ... ANTI ... IN ALL THESE YEARS . . . BEAM . . . FLOOD . . . PYTHAGOREAN . 
. . CARTESIAN LOGIC . . . CAN I ... DARE I ... A PEACH . . . EAT A PEACH ... 
ALLMAN BROTHERS . . . PATRICIA . . . CROCODILE AND WHIPLASH SMILE ... CLOCK OF 
DIALS . . . TICK-TOCK, ELEVEN O'CLOCK, THE MAN'S IN THE MOON AND HE'S READY TO 
ROCK . . . INCESSAMENT . . . INCESSAMENT, MON CHER ... OH MY HEAD . . . BLAINE . 
. . BLAINE DARES . . . BLAINE WILL ANSWER ... I ..."
Blaine, now screaming in the voice of an infant, lapsed into some other language 
and began to sing. Eddie thought it was French. He knew none of the words, but 
when the drums kicked in, he knew the song per­fectly well: "Velcro Fly" by Z.Z. 
Top.
The glass over the route-map blew out. A moment later, the route-map itself 
exploded from its socket, revealing twinkling lights and a maze of 
circuit-boards behind it. The lights pulsed in time to the drums. Sud­denly blue 
fire flashed out, sizzling the surface around the hole in the wall where the map 
had been, scorching it black. From deeper within that wall, toward Blaine's 
blunt, bullet-shaped snout, came a thick grinding noise.
"It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!" 
Eddie yelled. He got to his feet and started to walk toward the smoking hole 
where the route-map had been. Susannah grabbed at the back of his shirt, but 
Eddie barely felt it. Barely knew where he was, in fact. The battle-fire had 
dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his 
sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow. He had 
Blaine in his sights, and although the thing behind the voice was already 
mortally wounded, he was unable to stop squeezing the trigger: I shoot with my 
mind.
"What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of 
dead woodchucks?" Eddie raved. "You can't unload a truck-load of bowling balls 
with a pitchfork!"
A terrible shriek of mingled anger and agony issued from the hole where the 
route-map had been. It was followed by a gust of blue fire, as if somewhere 
forward of Barony Coach an electric dragon had exhaled vio­lently. Jake called a 
warning, but Eddie didn't need it; his reflexes had been replaced with 
razor-blades. He ducked, and the burst of electricity went over his right 
shoulder, making the hair on that side of his neck stand up. He drew the gun he 
wore—a heavy .45 with a worn sandalwood grip, one of two revolvers which Roland 
had brought out of Mid-World's ruin. He kept walking as he bore down on the 
front of the coach .. . and of course he kept talking. As Roland had said, Eddie 
would die talking. As his old friend Cuthbert had done. Eddie could think of 
many worse ways to go, and only one better.
"Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we're talking riddles, what is the 
greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So 
solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why'd the woman name her son Seven and a 
Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!"
He had reached the pulsing square. Now he lifted Roland's gun and the Barony 
Coach suddenly filled with its thunder. He put all six rounds into the hole, 
fanning the hammer with the flat of his hand in the way Roland had shown them, 
knowing only that this was right, this was proper . . . this was ka, goddammit, 
fucking ka, it was the way you ended things if you were a gunslinger. He was one 
of Roland's tribe, all right, his soul was probably damned to the deepest pit of 
hell, and he wouldn't have changed it for all the heroin in Asia.
"I HATE YOU!" Blaine cried in his childish voice. The splin­ters were gone from 
it now; it was growing soft, mushy. "I HATE YOU FOREVER!"
"It's not dying that bothers you, is it?" Eddie asked. The lights in the hole 
where the route-map had been were fading. More blue fire flashed, but he hardly 
had to pull his head back to avoid it; the flame was small and weak. Soon Blaine 
would be as dead as all the Pubes and Grays in Lud. "It's losing that bothers 
you."
"HATE . . . FORRRRrmr . . ."
The word degenerated into a hum. The hum became a kind of stuttery thudding 
sound. Then it was gone.
Eddie looked around. Roland was there, holding Susannah with one arm curved 
around her butt, as one might hold a child. Her thighs clasped his waist. Jake 
stood on the gunslinger's other side, with Oy at his heel.
Drifting out of the hole where the route-map had been was a peculiar charred 
smell, somehow not unpleasant. To Eddie it smelled like burning leaves in 
October. Otherwise, the hole was as dead and dark as a corpse's eye. All the 
lights in there had gone out.
Your goose is cooked, Blaine, Eddie thought, and your turkey's baked. Happy 
fuckin Thanksgiving.
 
5
 
The shrieking from beneath the mono stopped. There was one final, grinding thud 
from up front, and then those sounds ceased, too. Roland felt his legs and hips 
sway gently forward and put out his free hand to steady himself. His body knew 
what had happened before his head did:
Blaine's engines had quit. They were now simply gliding forward along the track. 
But—
"Back," he said. "All the way. We're coasting. If we're close enough to Blaine's 
termination point, we may still crash."
He led them past the puddled remains of Blaine's welcoming ice sculpture and to 
the back of the coach. "And stay away from that thing," he said, pointing at the 
instrument which looked like a cross between a piano and a harpsichord. It stood 
on a small platform. "It may shift. Gods, I wish we could see where we are! Lie 
down. Wrap your arms over your heads."
They did as he told them. Roland did the same. He lay there with his chin 
pressing into the nap of the royal blue carpet, eyes shut, thinking about what 
had just happened.
"I cry your pardon, Eddie," he said. "How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to 
ask the same of my friend Cuthbert . . . and for the same reason. There's a kind 
of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness."
"I hardly think there's any need of pardon-crying," Eddie said. He sounded 
uncomfortable.
"There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry 
your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father."
"You don't need any pardon and you didn't forget anybody's face," Eddie said. 
"You can't help your nature, Roland."
The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something which was 
wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never oc­curred to him. Not 
once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka— this he had known since 
earliest childhood. But his nature ... his very nature. ..
"Thank you, Eddie. I think—"
Before Roland could say what he thought, Blaine the Mono crashed to a final 
bitter halt. All four of them were thrown violently up Barony Coach's central 
aisle, Oy in Jake's arms and barking. The cabin's front wall buckled and Roland 
struck it shoulder-first. Even with the padding (the wall was carpeted and, from 
the feel, undercoated with some resilient stuff), the blow was hard enough to 
numb him. The chandelier swung for­ward and tore loose from the ceiling, pelting 
them with glass pendants. Jake rolled aside, vacating its landing-zone just in 
time. The harpsichord-piano flew off its podium, struck one of the sofas, and 
overturned, coming to rest with a discordant brrrannnggg sound. The mono tilted 
to the right and the gunslinger braced himself, meaning to cover both Jake and 
Susan­nah with his own body if it overturned completely. Then it settled back, 
the floor still a little canted, but at rest.
The trip was over.
The gunslinger raised himself up. His shoulder was still numb, but the arm below 
it supported him, and that was a good sign. On his left, Jake was sitting up and 
picking glass beads out of his lap with a dazed expres­sion. On his right, 
Susannah was dabbing a cut under Eddie's left eye. "All right," Roland said. 
"Who's hur—"
There was an explosion from above them, a hollow Pow! that re­minded Roland of 
the big-bangers Cuthbert and Alain had sometimes lit and tossed down drains, or 
into the privies behind the scullery for a prank. And once Cuthbert had shot 
some big-bangers with his sling. That had been no prank, no childish folly. That 
had been—
Susannah uttered a short cry—more of surprise than fear, the gun­slinger 
thought—and then hazy daylight was shining down on his face. It felt good. The 
taste of the air coming in through the blown emergency exit was even 
better—sweet with the smell of rain and damp earth.
There was a bony rattle, and a ladder—it appeared to be equipped with rungs made 
of twisted steel wire—dropped out of a slot up there.
"First they throw the chandelier at you, then they show you the door," Eddie 
said. He struggled to his feet, then got Susannah up. "Okay, I know when I'm not 
wanted. Let's make like bees and buzz off."
"Sounds good to me." She reached toward the cut on Eddie's face again. Eddie 
took her fingers, kissed them, and told her to stop poking the moichandise.
"Jake?" the gunslinger asked. "Okay?"
"Yes," Jake said. "What about you, Oy?"
"Oy!"
"Guess he is," Jake said. He raised his wounded hand and looked at it ruefully.
"Hurting again, is it?" the gunslinger asked.
"Yeah. Whatever Blaine did to it is wearing off. I don't care, though—I 'm just 
glad to still be alive."
"Yes. Life is good. So is astin. There's some of it left."
"Aspirin, you mean."
Roland nodded. A pill of magical properties, but one of the words from Jake's 
world he would never be able to say correctly.
"Nine out of ten doctors recommend Anacin, honey," Susannah said, and when Jake 
only looked at her quizzically: "Guess they don't use that one anymore in your 
when, huh? Doesn't matter. We're here, sugarpie, right here and just fine, and 
that's what matters." She pulled Jake into her arms and gave him a kiss between 
the eyes, on the nose, and then flush on the mouth. Jake laughed and blushed 
bright red. "That's what matters, and right now that's the only thing in the 
world that does."
 
6
 
"First aid can wait," Eddie said. He put his arm around Jake's shoulders and led 
the boy to the ladder. "Can you use that hand to climb with?"
"Yes. But I can't bring Oy. Roland, will you?"
"Yes." Roland picked Oy up and tucked him into his shirt as he had while 
descending a shaft under the city in pursuit of Jake and Gasher. Oy peeked out 
at Jake with his bright, gold-ringed eyes. "Up you go."
Jake climbed. Roland followed close enough so that Oy could sniff the kid's 
heels by stretching out his long neck.
"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Need a boost?"
"And get your nasty hands all over my well-turned fanny? Not likely, white boy!" 
Then she dropped him a wink and began to climb, pulling herself up easily with 
her muscular arms and balancing with the stumps of her legs. She went fast, but 
not too fast for Eddie; he reached up and gave her a soft pinch where the 
pinching was good. "Oh, my purity!" Su­sannah cried, laughing and rolling her 
eyes. Then she was gone. Only Eddie was left, standing by the foot of the ladder 
and looking around at the luxury coach which he had believed might well be their 
ka-tet's coffin.
You did it, kiddo. Henry said. Made him set himself on fire. I knew you could, 
fuckin-A. Remember when I said that to those scag-bags behind Dahlie's? Jimmie 
Polio and those guys? And how they laughed? But you did it. Sent him home with a 
fuckin rupture.
Well, it worked, anyway, Eddie thought, and touched the butt of Roland's gun 
without even being aware of it. Well enough for us to walk away one more time.
He climbed two rungs, then looked back down. The Barony Coach al­ready felt 
dead. Long dead, in fact, just another artifact of a world that had moved on.
"Adios, Blaine," Eddie said. "So long, partner."
And he followed his friends out through the emergency exit in the roof.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      IV
topeka
 
1
 
Jake stood on the slightly tilted roof of Blame the Mono, looking south­east 
along the Path of the Beam. The wind riffled his hair (now quite long and 
decidedly un-Piperish) back from his temples and forehead in waves. His eyes 
were wide with surprise.
He didn't know what he had expected to see—a smaller and more provincial version 
of Lud, perhaps—but what he had not expected was what loomed above the trees of 
a nearby park. It was a green roadsign (against the dull gray autumn sky, it 
almost screamed with color) with a blue shield mounted on it:

Roland joined him, lifted Oy gently out of his shirt, and put him down. The 
humbler sniffed the pink surface of Blaine's roof, then looked toward the front 
of the mono. Here the train's smooth bullet shape was broken by crumpled metal 
which had peeled back in jagged wings. Two dark slashes—they began at the mono's 
tip and extended to a point about ten yards from where Jake and Roland 
stood—gored the roof in parallel lines. At the end of each was a wide, flat 
metal pole painted in stripes of yellow and black. These seemed to jut from the 
top of the mono at a point just forward of the Barony Coach. To Jake they looked 
a little like foot­ball goalposts.
"Those are the piers he talked about hitting," Susannah murmured.
Roland nodded.
"We got off lucky, big boy, you know it? If this thing had been going much 
faster ..."
"Ka, " Eddie said from behind them. He sounded as if he might be smiling.
Roland nodded. "Just so. Ka."
Jake dismissed the transteel goalposts and turned back toward the sign. He was 
half convinced it would be gone, or that it would say some­thing else (mid-world 
toll road, perhaps, or beware of demons), but it was still there and still said 
the same thing.
"Eddie? Susannah? Do you see that?"
They looked along his pointing finger. For a moment—one long enough for Jake to 
fear he was having a hallucination—neither of them said anything. Then, softly, 
Eddie said: "Holy shit. Are we back home? If we are, where are all the people? 
And if something like Blaine has been stopping off in Topeka—our Topeka, Topeka, 
Kansas—how come I haven't seen anything about it on Sixty Minutes?"
"What's Sixty Minutes'?" Susannah asked. She was shading her eyes, looking 
southeast toward the sign.
"TV show," Eddie said. "You missed it by five or ten years. Old white guys in 
ties. Doesn't matter. That sign—"
"It's Kansas, all right," Susannah said. "Our Kansas. I guess." She had spotted 
another sign, just visible over the trees. Now she pointed until Jake, Eddie, 
and Roland had all seen it:

 
"There a Kansas in your world, Roland?"
"No," Roland replied, looking at the signs, "we're far beyond the boundaries of 
the world I knew. I was far beyond most of the world I knew long before I met 
you three. This place . .."
He stopped and cocked his head to one side, as if he was listening to some sound 
almost too distant to hear. And the expression on his face ... Jake didn't like 
it much.
"Say, kiddies!" Eddie said brightly. "Today we're studying Wacky Geography in 
Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel 
southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come 
to the Dark Tower . .. which happens to be smack in the middle of everything. 
First, fight the giant lobsters! Next, ride the psychotic train! And then, after 
a visit to our snackbar for a popkin or two—"
"Do you hear anything?" Roland broke in. "Any of you?"
Jake listened. He heard the wind combing through the trees of the nearby 
park—their leaves had just begun to turn—and he heard the click of Oy's toenails 
as he strolled back toward them along the roof of the Barony Coach. Then Oy 
stopped, so even that sound—
A hand seized him by the arm, making him jump. It was Susannah. Her head was 
tilted, her eyes wide. Eddie was also listening. Oy, too; his ears were up and 
he was whining far down in his throat.
Jake felt his arms ripple with gooseflesh. At the same time he felt his mouth 
tighten in a grimace. The sound, though very faint, was the audi­tory version of 
biting a lemon. And he'd heard something like it before. Back when he was only 
five or six, there had been a crazy guy in Central Park who thought he was a 
musician . . . well, there were lots of crazy guys in Central Park who thought 
they were musicians, but this was the only one Jake had ever seen who played a 
workshop tool. The guy had had a sign beside his upturned hat which read world's 
greatest SAW-PLAYER! SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN'T IT! PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO MY 
WELFARE!
Greta Shaw had been with Jake the first time he encountered the saw-player, and 
Jake remembered how she had hurried past the guy. Just sit­ting there like a 
cellist in a symphony orchestra he'd been, only with a rust-speckled handsaw 
spread across his open legs; Jake remembered the expression of comic horror on 
Mrs. Shaw's face, and the quiver of her pressed-together lips, as if—yes, as if 
she'd just bitten into a lemon.
This sound wasn't exactly like the one
(SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN'T IT)
the guy in the park had made by vibrating the blade of his saw, but it was 
close: a wavery, trembly, metallic sound that made you feel like your sinuses 
were filling up and your eyes would shortly begin to gush water. Was it coming 
from ahead of them? Jake couldn't tell. It seemed to be coming from everywhere 
and nowhere; at the same time, it was so low he might have been tempted to 
believe the whole thing was just his imagina­tion, if the others hadn't—
"Watch out!" Eddie cried. "Help me, you guys! I think he's going to faint!"
Jake wheeled toward the gunslinger and saw that his face had gone as white as 
cottage cheese above the dusty no-color of his shirt. His eyes were wide and 
blank. One corner of his mouth twitched spastically, as if an invisible fishhook 
were buried there.
"Jonas and Reynolds and Depape," he said. "The Big Coffin Hunters. And her. The 
Coos. They were the ones. They were the ones who—"
Standing on the roof of the mono in his dusty, broken boots, Roland tottered. On 
his face was the greatest look of misery Jake had ever seen.
"Oh Susan," he said. "Oh, my dear."
 
2
 
They caught him, they formed a protective ring around him, and the gunslinger 
felt hot with guilt and self-loathing. What had he done to deserve such 
enthusiastic protectors? What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary 
lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?
He tried to tell them he was all right, they could stand back, he was fine, but 
no words would come out; that terrible wavery sound had trans­ported him back to 
the box canyon west of Hambry all those years ago. Depape and Reynolds and old 
limping Jonas. Yet most of all it was the woman from the hill he hated, and from 
black depths of feeling only a very young man can reach. Ah, but how could he 
have done aught else but hate them? His heart had been broken. And now, all 
these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human 
existence was that broken hearts mended.
My first thought was, he lied in every word/That hoary cripple, with malicious 
eye ...
What words? Whose poem?
He didn't know, but he knew that women could lie, too; women who hopped and 
grinned and saw too much from the comers of their rheumy old eyes. It didn't 
matter who had written the lines of poesy; the words were true words, and that 
was all that mattered. Neither Eldred Jonas nor the crone on the hill had been 
of Marten's stature—nor even of Wal­ter's—when it came to evil, but they had 
been evil enough.
Then, after... in the box canyon west of town . . . that sound . . . that, and 
the screams of wounded men and horses . . . for once in his life, even the 
normally voluble Cuthbert had been struck silent.
But all that had been long ago, in another when; in the here and now, the 
warbling sound was either gone or had temporarily fallen below the threshold of 
audibility. They would hear it again, though. He knew that as well as he knew 
the fact that he walked a road leading to damnation.
He looked up at the others and managed a smile. The trembling at the comer of 
his mouth had quit, and that was something.
"I'm all right," he said. "But hear me well: this is very close to where 
Mid-World ends, very close to where End-World begins. The first great course of 
our quest is finished. We have done well; we have remembered the faces of our 
fathers; we have stood together and been true to one an­other. But now we have 
come to a thinny. We must be very careful."
"A thinny?" Jake asked, looking around nervously.
"Places where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away. There are 
more since the force of the Dark Tower began to fail. Do you remember what we 
saw below us when we left Lud?"
They nodded solemnly, remembering ground which had fused to black glass, ancient 
pipes which gleamed with turquoise witchlight, mis­shapen bird-freaks with wings 
like great leathern sails. Roland suddenly could not bear to have them grouped 
around him as they were, looking down on him as folk might look down on a rowdy 
who had fallen in a bar­room brawl.
He lifted his hands to his friends—his new friends. Eddie took them and helped 
him to his feet. The gunslinger fixed his enormous will on not swaying and stood 
steady.
"Who was Susan?" Susannah asked. The crease down the center of her forehead 
suggested she was troubled, and probably by more than a co­incidental similarity 
of names.
Roland looked at her, then at Eddie, then at Jake, who had dropped to one knee 
so he could scratch behind Oy's ears.
"I'll tell you," he said, "but this isn't the place or time."
"You keep sayin that," Susannah said. "You wouldn't just be putting us off 
again, would you?"
Roland shook his head. "You shall hear my tale—this part of it, at least—but not 
on top of this metal carcass."
"Yeah," Jake said. "Being up here is like playing on a dead dinosaur or 
something. I keep thinking Blaine's going to come back to life and start, I 
don't know, screwing around with our heads again."
"That sound is gone," Eddie said. "The thing that sounded like a wah-wah pedal."
"It reminded me of this old guy I used to see in Central Park,"
Jake said.
"The man with the saw?" Susannah asked. Jake looked up at her, his eyes round 
with surprise, and she nodded. "Only he wasn't old when I used to see him. It's 
not just the geography that's wacky here. Time's kind of funny, too."
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brief squeeze. "Amen to 
that."
Susannah turned to Roland. Her look was not accusing, but there was a level and 
open measurement in her eyes that the gunslinger could not help but admire. "I'm 
holding you to your promise, Roland. I want to know about this girl that got my 
name."
"You shall hear," Roland repeated. "For now, though, let's get off this 
monster's back."
 
3
 
That was easier said than done. Blaine had come to rest slightly askew in an 
outdoor version of the Cradle of Lud (a littered trail of torn pink metal lay 
along one side of this, marking the end of Blaine's last journey), and it was 
easily twenty-five feet from the roof of the Barony Coach to the ce­ment. If 
there was a descent-ladder, like the one which had popped conve­niently through 
the emergency hatch, it had jammed when they crunched to a halt.
Roland unslung his purse, rummaged, and removed the deerskin har­ness they used 
for carrying Susannah when the going got too rough for her wheelchair. The 
chair, at least, would not worry them anymore, the gunslinger reflected; they 
had left it behind in their mad scramble to board Blaine.
"What you want that for?" Susannah asked truculently. She always sounded 
truculent when the harness came into view. I hate them honky mahfahs down in 
Miss'ippi worse'n I hate that harness, she had once told Eddie in the voice of 
Detta Walker, but sometimes it be a close thing, sugar.
"Soft, Susannah Dean, soft," the gunslinger said, smiling a little. He unbraided 
the network of straps which made up the harness, set the seat-piece aside, then 
pigtailed the straps back together. He wedded this to his last good hank of rope 
with an old-fashioned sheetbend knot. As he worked, he listened for the warbling 
of the thinny ... as the four of them had listened for the god-drums; as he and 
Eddie had listened for the lobstrosities to begin asking their lawyerly 
questions ("Dad-a-cham? Did-a-chee? Dum-a-chum?") as they came tumbling out of 
the waves each night.
Ka is a wheel, he thought. Or, as Eddie liked to say, whatever went around came 
around.
When the rope was finished, he fashioned a loop at the bottom of the braided 
section. Jake stepped a foot into it with perfect confidence, gripped the rope 
with one hand, and settled Oy into the crook of his other arm. Oy looked around 
nervously, whined, stretched his neck, licked Jake's face.
"You're not afraid, are you?" Jake asked the humbler.
" 'Fraid," Oy agreed, but he was quiet enough as Roland and Eddie lowered Jake 
down the side of the Barony Coach. The rope wasn't quite long enough to take him 
all the way down, but Jake had no trouble twist­ing his foot free and dropping 
the last four feet. He set Oy down. The bumbler trotted off, sniffing, and 
lifted his leg against the side of the ter­minal building. This was nowhere near 
as grand as the Cradle of Lud, but it had an old-fashioned look that Roland 
liked—white boards, over­hanging eaves, high, narrow windows, what looked like 
slate shingles. It was a Western look. Written in gold gilt on a sign which 
stretched above the terminal's line of doors was this message:
ATCHISON, TOPEKA, AND SANTA FE
Towns, Roland supposed, and that last one sounded familiar to him; had there not 
been a Santa Fe in the Barony of Mejis? But that led back toward Susan, lovely 
Susan at the window with her hair unbraided and all down her back, the smell of 
her like jasmine and rose and honeysuckle and old sweet hay, smells of which the 
oracle in the mountains had been able to make only the palest mimicry. Susan 
lying back and looking solemnly up at him, then smiling and putting her hands 
behind her head so that her breasts rose, as if aching for his hands.
If you love me, Roland, then love me . . . bird and bear and hare and fish...
". . . next?"
He looked around at Eddie, having to use all of his will to pull himself back 
from Susan Delgado's when. There were thinnies here in Topeka, all right, and of 
many sorts. "My mind was wandering, Eddie. Cry your pardon."
"Susannah next? That's what I asked."
Roland shook his head. "You next, then Susannah. I'll go last."
"Will you be okay? With your hand and all?"
"I'll be fine."
Eddie nodded and stuck his foot into the loop. When Eddie had first come into 
Mid-World, Roland could have lowered him easily by himself, two fingers short 
the full complement or no, but Eddie had been without his drug for months now, 
and had put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle. Roland accepted Susannah's help 
gladly enough, and together they low­ered him down.
"Now you, lady," Roland said, and smiled at her. It felt more natural to smile 
these days.
"Yes." But for the nonce she only stood there, biting her lower lip.
"What is it?"
Her hand went to her stomach and rubbed there, as if it ached or griped her. He 
thought she would speak, but she shook her head and said, "Nothing."
"I don't believe that. Why do you rub your belly? Are you hurt? Were you hurt 
when we stopped?"
She took her hand off her tunic as if the flesh just south of her navel had 
grown hot. "No. I'm fine."
"Are you?"
Susannah seemed to think this over very carefully. "We'll talk," she said at 
last. "We'll palaver, if you like that better. But you were right be­fore, 
Roland—this isn't the place or time."
"All four of us, or just you and me and Eddie?"
"Just you and me, Roland," she said, and poked the stump of her leg through the 
loop. "Just one hen and one rooster, at least to start with. Now lower away, if 
you please."
He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea—the 
one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rub­bing hand—was 
wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned 
there had had its way with her while Jake was try­ing to cross between the 
worlds. Sometimes—often—demonic contact changed things.
Never for the better, in Roland's experience.
He pulled his rope back up after Eddie had caught Susannah around the waist and 
helped her to the platform. The gunslinger walked forward to one of the piers 
which had torn through the train's bullet snout, fash­ioning the rope's end into 
a shake-loop as he went. He tossed this over the pier, snubbed it (being careful 
not to twitch the rope to the left), and then lowered himself to the platform 
himself, bent at the waist and leaving boot-tracks on Blaine's pink side.
"Too bad to lose the rope and harness," Eddie remarked when Roland was beside 
them.
"I ain't sorry about that harness," Susannah said. "I'd rather crawl along the 
pavement until I got chewin-gum all the way up my arms to the elbows."
"We haven't lost anything," Roland said. He snugged his hand into the rawhide 
foot-loop and snapped it hard to the left. The rope slithered down from the 
pier, Roland gathering it in almost as fast as it came down.
"Neat trick!" Jake said.
"Eat! Rick!" Oy agreed.
"Cort?" Eddie asked.
"Cort," Roland agreed, smiling.
"The drill instructor from hell," Eddie said. "Better you than me, Roland. 
Better you than me."
 
4
 
As they walked toward the doors leading into the station, that low, liquid 
warbling sound began again. Roland was amused to see all three of his cohorts 
wrinkle their noses and pull down the comers of their mouths at the same time; 
it made them look like blood family as well as ka-tet. Su­sannah pointed toward 
the park. The signs looming over the "trees were wavering slightly, the way 
things did in a heat-haze.
"Is that from the thinny?" Jake asked.
Roland nodded.
"Will we be able to get around it?"
"Yes. Thinnies are dangerous in much the way that swamps full of quicksand and 
saligs are dangerous. Do you know those things?"
"We know quicksand," Jake said. "And if saligs are long green things with big 
teeth, we know them, too."
"That's what they are."
Susannah turned to look back at Blaine one last time. "No silly ques­tions and 
no silly games. The book was right about that." From Blaine she turned her eyes 
to Roland. "What about Beryl Evans, the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? 
Do you think she's part of this? That we might even meet her? I'd like to thank 
her. Eddie figured it out, but—"
"It's possible, I suppose," Roland said, "but on measure, I think not. My world 
is like a huge ship that sank near enough shore for most of the wreckage to wash 
up on the beach. Much of what we find is fascinating, some of it may be useful, 
if ka allows, but all of it is still wreckage. Sense­less wreckage." He looked 
around. "Like this place, I think."
"I wouldn't exactly call it wrecked," Eddie said. "Look at the paint on the 
station—it's a little rusty from the gutters up under the eaves, but it hasn't 
peeled anywhere that I can see." He stood in front of the doors and ran his 
fingers down one of the glass panels. They left four clear tracks behind. "Dust 
and plenty of it, but no cracks. I'd say that this building has been left 
unmaintained at most since .. . the start of the summer, maybe?"
He looked at Roland, who shrugged and nodded. He was listening with only half an 
ear and paying attention with only half a mind. The rest of him was fixed upon 
two things: the warble of the thinny, and keeping away the memories that wanted 
to swamp him.
"But Lud had been going to wrack and ruin for centuries" Susannah said. "This 
place ... it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is 
one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don't 
remember that one, but—"
"Yes, I do," Eddie and Jake said in perfect unison, then looked at each other 
and laughed. Eddie stuck out his hand and Jake slapped it.
"They still show the reruns," Jake said.
"Yeah, all the time," Eddie added. "Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who 
look like shorthair terriers. And you're right. This place isn't like Lud. Why 
would it be? It's not in the same world as Lud. I don't know where we crossed 
over, but—" He pointed again at the blue Inter­state 70 shield, as if that 
proved his case beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"If it's Topeka, where are the people?" Susannah asked.
Eddie shrugged and raised his hands—who knows?
Jake put his forehead against the glass of the center door, cupped his hands to 
the sides of his face, and peered in. He looked for several sec­onds, then saw 
something that made him pull back fast. "Oh-oh," he said. "No wonder the town's 
so quiet."
Roland stepped up behind Jake and peered in over the boy's head, cupping his own 
hands to reduce his reflection. The gunslinger drew two conclusions before even 
looking at what Jake had seen. The first was that although this was most 
assuredly a train station, it wasn't really a Blame station . . . not a cradle. 
The other was that the station did indeed belong to Eddie's, Jake's, and 
Susannah's world .. . but perhaps not to their where.
It's the thinny. We'll have to be careful.
Two corpses were leaning together on one of the long benches that filled most of 
the room; but for their hanging, wrinkled faces and black hands, they might have 
been revellers who had fallen asleep in the station after an arduous party and 
missed the last train home. On the wall behind them was a board marked 
departures, with the names of cities and towns and baronies marching down it in 
a line. denver, read one. wichita, read another. omaha, read a third. Roland had 
once known a one-eyed gambler named Omaha; he had died with a knife in his 
throat at a Watch Me table. He had stepped into the clearing at the end of the 
path with his head thrown back, and his last breath had sprayed blood all the 
way up to the ceiling. Hanging down from the ceiling of this room (which 
Roland's stu­pid and laggard mind insisted on thinking of as a stage rest, as if 
this were a stop along some half-forgotten road like the one that had brought 
him to Tull) was a beautiful four-sided clock. Its hands had stopped at 4:14, 
and Roland supposed they would never move again. It was a sad thought. . . but 
this was a sad world. He could not see any other dead people, but ex­perience 
suggested that where there were two dead, there were likely four more dead 
somewhere out of sight. Or four dozen.
"Should we go in?" Eddie asked.
"Why?" the gunslinger countered. "We have no business here; it doesn't lie along 
the Path of the Beam."
"You'd make a great tour-guide," Eddie said sourly. " 'Keep up, everyone, and 
please don't go wandering off into the—' "
Jake interrupted with a request Roland didn't understand. "Do either of you guys 
have a quarter?" The boy was looking at Eddie and Susannah. Beside him was a 
square metal box. Written on it in blue was:
The Topeka Capital-Journal covers Kansas like no other! Your hometown paper! 
Read it every day!
Eddie shook his head, amused. "Lost all my change at some point. Probably 
climbing a tree, just before you joined us, in an all-out effort to avoid 
becoming snack-food for a robot bear. Sorry."
"Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . ." Susannah had her purse open and was 
rummaging through it in a way that made Roland grin broadly in spite of all his 
preoccupations. It was so damned womanly, somehow. She turned over crumpled 
Kleenex, shook them to make sure there was noth­ing caught inside, fished out a 
compact, looked at it, dropped it back, came up with a comb, dropped that back—
She was too absorbed to look up as Roland strode past her, drawing his gun from 
the docker's clutch he had built her as he went. He fired a single time. 
Susannah let out a little scream, dropping her purse and slap­ping at the empty 
holster high up under her left breast.
"Honky, you scared the livin Jesus out of me!"
"Take better care of your gun, Susannah, or the next time someone takes it from 
you, the hole may be between your eyes instead of in a ... what is it, Jake? A 
news-telling device of some kind? Or does it hold paper?"
"Both." Jake looked startled. Oy had withdrawn halfway down the platform and was 
looking at Roland mistrustfully. Jake poked his finger at the bullet-hole in the 
center of the newspaper box's locking device. A lit­tle curl of smoke was 
drifting from it.
"Go on," Roland said. "Open it."
Jake pulled the handle. It resisted for a moment, then a piece of metal clunked 
down somewhere inside, and the door opened. The box itself was empty; the sign 
on the back wall read when all papers are gone, please take display copy. Jake 
worked it out of its wire holder, and they all gathered round.
"What in God's name . . . ?" Susannah's whisper was both horrified and accusing. 
"What does it mean? What in God's name happened^"
Below the newspaper's name, taking up most of the front page's top half, were 
screaming black letters:
 
"CAPTAIN TRIPS" SUPERFLU RAGES UNCHECKED
Govt. Leaders May Have Fled Country
Topeka Hospitals Jammed with Sick, Dying
Millions Pray for Cure
 
"Read it aloud," Roland said. "The letters are in your speech, I cannot make 
them all out, and I would know this story very well."
Jake looked at Eddie, who nodded impatiently.
Jake unfolded the newspaper, revealing a dot-picture (Roland had seen pictures 
of this type; they were called "fottergrafs") which shocked them all: it showed 
a lakeside city with its skyline in flames. cleveland fires burn unchecked, the 
caption beneath read.
"Read, kid!" Eddie told him. Susannah said nothing; she was already reading the 
story—the only one on the front page—over his shoulder. Jake cleared his throat 
as if it were suddenly dry, and began.
 
5
 
"The byline says John Corcoran, plus staff and AP reports. That means a lot of 
different people worked on it, Roland. Okay. Here goes. 'America's greatest 
crisis—and the world's, perhaps—deepened overnight as the so-called superflu, 
known as Tube-Neck in the Midwest and Captain Trips in California, continues to 
spread.
" 'Although the death-toll can only be estimated, medical experts say the total 
at this point is horrible beyond comprehension: twenty to thirty million dead in 
the continental U.S. alone is the estimate given by Dr. Morris Hackford of 
Topeka's St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Bodies are being burned from 
Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massa­chusetts, in crematoria, factory 
furnaces, and at landfill sites.
" 'Here in Topeka, the bereaved who are still well enough and strong enough to 
do so are urged to take their dead to one of three sites: the dis­posal plant 
north of Oakland Billard Park; the pit area at Heartland Park Race Track; the 
landfill on Southeast Sixty-first Street, east of Forbes Field. Landfill users 
should approach by Berryton Road; California has been blocked by car wrecks and 
at least one downed Air Force transport plane, sources tell us.' "
Jake glanced up at his friends with frightened eyes, looked behind him at the 
silent railway station, then looked back down at the newspaper.
" 'Dr. April Montoya of the Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center points out 
that the death-toll, horrifying as it is, constitutes only part of this terrible 
story. "For every person who has died so far as a result of this new 
flu-strain," Montoya said, "there are another six who are lying ill in their 
homes, perhaps as many as a dozen. And, so far as we have been able to 
determine, the recovery rate is zero." Coughing, she then told this reporter: 
"Speaking personally, I'm not making any plans for the weekend."
" 'In other local developments:
" 'All commercial flights out of Forbes and Phillip Billard have been cancelled.
" 'All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all 
of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further 
notice.
" 'All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes 
Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka 
Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.
" 'Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks 
ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a "slow shutdown" of the Kaw River 
Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke's Office of Public Relations 
answered this newspaper's calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is 
no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to 
on-line status, the announcement concludes, "when the current crisis is past." 
Any com­fort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded 
statement's final words, which are not "Goodbye" or "Thank you for call­ing" but 
"God will help us through our time of trial." ' "
Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more 
pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum 
of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper 
to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been 
hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for 
the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; 
memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud. When the god-drums started 
up this time, it was Spanker's stone what came out of the hat, Maud had said. We 
set him to dance. Except, of course, what she'd meant was that they had set him 
to hang. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New 
York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.
Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the 
other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible. 
Like the god-drums, Susannah thought, and shuddered.
" 'In national developments,' " Jake read, " 'conviction continues to grow that, 
after denying the superflu's existence during its early days, when quarantine 
measures might still have had some effect, national lead­ers have fled to 
underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of 
nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not 
been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen 
since Sunday morning, when he at­tended prayer services at Green Valley 
Methodist Church in San Simeon.
" ' "They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi 
sewer-rats at the end of World War II," said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he 
had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas's first-term representative, a 
Republican, laughed and said: "Why should I? I've got a real fine case myself. 
I'll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week."
" 'Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre 
Haute.
" 'A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati's Riverfront Sta­dium was 
apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, but oc­curred as the 
result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised . . .' "
Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the 
length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy 
stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward 
Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.
"No, Oy, I don't want it," Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.
"At least we know where all the folks are," Susannah said, bending and taking 
the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries 
printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, 
no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, 
that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t'other one died, beloved of 
them-and-those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of 
the type which convinced her it was all real.
But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end, she thought, and a 
lump rose in her throat. How hard they tried.
She folded the quarto together and looked on the back—the last page of the 
Capital-Journal. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands 
outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark 
words in huge type:
 
PRAY FOR US
 
She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one 
brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been 
drawn into the gunslinger's world a year later.
He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as 
if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up 
at them and shook his head. "No. I can't explain this town, this paper, or the 
dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one 
thing—everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn't it, Roland?"
The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. "Nothing in your city seemed very fine to 
me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be sur­vivors of such a 
plague as this, no."
"There was something called Legionnaires' disease," Eddie said. "And AIDS, of 
course—"
"That's the sex one, right?" Susannah asked. "Transmitted by fruits and drug 
addicts?"
"Yes, but calling gays fruits isn't the done thing in my when," Eddie said. He 
tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away 
again.
"So this . . . this never happened," Jake said, tentatively touching the face of 
Christ on the back page of the paper.
"But it did," Roland said. "It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand 
nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. 
If Eddie's right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this 
'superflu' was this past June-sowing. We're in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of 
eighty-six. That's the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it's not 
Eddie's. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your 
world before this arrived." He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at 
Jake. "You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it's 
one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: 'Go, then, there 
are other worlds than these.' "
"More riddles," Eddie said, scowling.
"Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive 
and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the moun­tains? That you 
have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you 
have your reasons."
Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. "You lie when it suits your purpose, 
but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage 
anything but the truth."
Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said—You lie when it 
suits your purpose—but he went on. After all, it was essen­tially true.
"We went back to time's pool," the gunslinger said, "and pulled him out before 
he could drown."
"You pulled him out," Eddie corrected.
"You helped, though," Roland said, "if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but 
let that go for now. It's beside the point. What's more to it is that there are 
many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of 
those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors . . . only one much 
bigger than the ones we found on the beach."
"How big?" Eddie asked. "As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the 
warehouse?"
Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky—who knows?
"This thinny," Susannah said. "We're not just near it, are we? We came through 
it. That's how we got here, to this version of Topeka."
"We may have," Roland admitted. "Did any of you feel something strange? A 
sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?"
They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his 
head this time.
"No," Roland said, as if he had expected this. "But we were concen­trating on 
the riddling—"
"Concentrating on not getting killed," Eddie grunted.
"Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies 
aren't natural—they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because 
things are going wrong. Things in all worlds."
"Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower," Eddie said.
Roland nodded. "And even if this place—this when, this where—is not the ka of 
your world now, it might become that ka. This plague—or others even worse—could 
spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and 
number. I've seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, 
and heard maybe two dozen more. The first ... the first one 1 ever saw was when 
I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry." He rubbed his hand up his 
cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles. Love me, 
Roland. If you love me, then love me.
"Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland," Jake said. 
"We've fallen off the Beam. Look." He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving 
slowly above them, but no longer in the direc­tion Blame's smashed snout was 
pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they 
had grown so used to following were gone.
"Does it matter?" Eddie asked. "I mean ... the Beam may be gone, but the Tower 
exists in all worlds, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Roland said, "but it may not be accessible from all worlds."
The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin 
addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bi­cycle 
messenger. Now he remembered certain office-building elevators he'd been in 
while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, 
mostly. There were some floors where you couldn't stop the car and get off 
unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When 
the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was 
replaced by an X.
"I think," Roland said, "we need to find the Beam again."
"I'm convinced," Eddie said. "Come on, let's get going." He took a couple of 
steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. "Where?"
"The way we were going," Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and 
walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the 
way.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      V
TURNPIKIN’
 
1
 
Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his 
way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. "Mare 
dead. Be ready."
"They're not. . . um ... runny, are they?" Jake asked.
Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. "No. Not 
runny. Dry."
"That's all right, then," Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susan­nah, who 
was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded 
her fingers around his.
At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side 
of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. 
Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer 
spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any 
stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be pass­ing) had given the toddler a 
look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan 
pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had 
been a boy, but it was impossi­ble to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin 
faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender—why did the dead baby cross the 
road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.
Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka's empty post-plague 
months better than the adults around it. They were lit­tle more than skeletons 
with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, 
one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that looked like the Samsonites 
Jake's parents owned. As with the baby (as with all of them), his eyes were 
gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth 
jutted in a pugnacious grin. What took you so long, kid? the dead man who was 
still clutch­ing his suitcase seemed to be asking. Been waiting for you, and 
it's been a long hot summer!
Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap 
did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still 
holding Susannah's hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to 
descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
"Slow down, Roland," Eddie said. "I want to check the crip spaces before we go 
on. We might get lucky."
"Crip spaces?" Susannah said. "What're those?"
Jake shrugged. He didn't know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. "I only ask, sugarpie, be­cause it 
sounds a little on-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes 'blacks' or gay 
folks 'fruits.' I know I'm just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 
1964, but—"
"There." Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the 
station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and 
white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a lit­tle closer, Jake saw the 
one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 
fine for improper use of handicapped PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA 
P.D.
"See there!" Susannah said triumphantly. "They shoulda done that a long time 
ago! Why, back in my when, you're lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair 
through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop 'n Save. Hell, lucky if you 
can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!"
The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the world at 
hand, only two cars that didn't have little wheelchair symbols on their license 
plates were parked in the row Eddie had called "the crip spaces."
Jake guessed that respecting the "crip spaces" was just one of those things that 
got a mysterious lifelong hold on people, like putting zip-codes on letters, 
parting your hair, or brushing your teeth before breakfast.
"And there it is!" Eddie cried. "Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a 
Bingo!"
Still carrying Susannah on his hip—a thing he would have been inca­pable of 
doing for any extended period of time even a month ago—Eddie hurried over to a 
boat of a Lincoln. Strapped on the roof was a complicated-looking racing 
bicycle; poking out of the half-open trunk was a wheelchair. Nor was this the 
only one; scanning the row of "crip spaces," Jake saw at least four more 
wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or 
station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed 
of a pickup truck.
Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the 
trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of 
locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father's desk drawer. 
"Fire in the hole," he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think 
of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the 
security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The 
warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it 
awake. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it? Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. 
Half an hour ago, he wouldn't have believed that a sound could be as physically 
upsetting, as ... well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. 
He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their 
tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again. It throws 
some kind of field, Jake thought. The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static 
on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms 
stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to 
come up and stand next to it.
Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland's knife to cut the elastic 
cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, 
and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level. "Voila!" he 
said.
Susannah had propped herself on one hand—Jake thought she looked a little like 
the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Chris­tina 's World—and was 
examining the chair with some wonder.
"God almighty, it looks so little 'n light!"
"Modem technology at its finest, darlin," Eddie said. "It's what we fought 
Vietnam for. Hop in." He bent to help her. She didn't resist him, but her face 
was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the 
chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of 
her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.
Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his 
fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing 
once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.
"Make you homesick, honey?" Susannah asked from behind Jake. "Probably thought 
you'd never see an honest-to-God American auto­mobile again, am I right?"
Jake considered this and decided she was not right. It had never crossed his 
mind that he would remain in Roland's world forever; that he might never see 
another car. He didn't think that would bother him, actu­ally, but he also 
didn't think it was in the cards. Not yet, anyway. There was a certain vacant 
lot in the New York when he had come from. It was on the comer of Second Avenue 
and Forty-sixth Street. Once there had been a deli there—Tom and Gerry's, Party 
Platters Our Specialty—but now it was just rubble, and weeds, and broken glass, 
and ...
... and a rose. Just a single wild rose growing in a vacant lot where a bunch of 
condos were scheduled to go up at some point, but Jake had an idea that there 
was nothing quite like it growing anywhere else on Earth. Maybe not on any of 
those other worlds Roland had mentioned, either. There were roses as one 
approached the Dark Tower; roses by the bil­lion, according to Eddie, great 
bloody acres of them. He had seen them in a dream. Still, Jake suspected that 
his rose was different even from those . . . and that until its fate was 
decided, one way or the other, he was not done with the world of cars and TVs 
and policemen who wanted to know if you had any identification and what your 
parents' names were.
And speaking of parents, I may not be done with them, either, Jake thought. The 
idea hurried his heartbeat with a mixture of hope and alarm.
They stopped halfway down the row of cars, Jake staring blankly across a wide 
street (Gage Boulevard, he assumed) as he considered these things. Now Roland 
and Eddie caught up to them.
"This baby's gonna be great after a couple of months pushing the Iron Maiden," 
Eddie said with a grin. "Bet you could damn near puff it along." He blew a deep 
breath at the back of the wheelchair to demonstrate. Jake thought of telling 
Eddie that there were probably others back there in the "crip spaces" with 
motors in them, then realized what Eddie must have known right away: their 
batteries would be dead.
Susannah ignored him for the time being; it was Jake she was inter­ested in. 
"You didn't answer me, sug. All these cars get you homesick?"
"Nah. But I was curious about whether or not they were all cars I knew. I 
thought maybe . . . if this version of 1986 grew out of some other world than my 
1977, there'd be a way to tell. But I can't tell. Because things change so dam 
fast. Even in nine years .. ." He shrugged, then looked at Eddie. "You might be 
able to, though. I mean, you actually lived in 1986."
Eddie grunted. "I lived through it, but I didn't exactly observe it. I was 
fucked to the sky most of the time. Still... I suppose . .."
Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot 
again, pointing to cars as they passed them. "Ford Explorer ... Chevrolet 
Caprice . . . and that one there's an old Pontiac, you can tell be­cause of the 
split grille—"
"Pontiac Bonneville," Jake said. He was amused and a little touched by the 
wonder in Susannah's eyes—most of these cars must look as futur­istic to her as 
Buck Rogers scout-ships. That made him wonder how Roland felt about them, and 
Jake looked around.
The gunslinger showed no interest in the cars at all. He was gazing across the 
street, into the park, toward the turnpike . . . except Jake didn't think he was 
actually looking at any of those things. Jake had an idea that Roland was simply 
looking into his own thoughts. If so, the expression on his face suggested that 
he wasn't finding anything good there.
"That's one of those little Chrysler K's," Eddie said, pointing, "and that's a 
Subaru. Mercedes SEL 450, excellent, the car of champions . . . Mustang .. . 
Chrysler Imperial, good shape but must be older'n God—"
"Watch it, boy," Susannah said, with a touch of what Jake thought was real 
asperity in her voice. "I recognize that one. Looks new to me."
"Sorry, Suze. Really. This one's a Cougar . .. another Chevy .. . and one more 
... Topeka loves General Motors, big fuckin surprise there . . . Honda Civic . . 
. VW Rabbit... a Dodge ... a Ford . . . a—"
Eddie stopped, looking at a little car near the end of the row, white with red 
trim. "A Takuro," he said, mostly to himself. He went around to look at the 
trunk. "A Takuro Spirit, to be exact. Ever hear of that make and model, Jake of 
New York?"
Jake shook his head.
"Me, neither," he said. "Me fucking neither."
Eddie began pushing Susannah toward Gage Boulevard (Roland with them but still 
mostly off in his own private world, walking when they walked, stopping where 
they stopped). Just shy of the lot's automated en­trance (stop TAKE TICKET), 
Eddie halted.
"At this rate, we'll be old before we get to yonder park and dead be­fore we 
raise the turnpike," Susannah said.
This time Eddie didn't apologize, didn't seem even to hear her. He was looking 
at the bumper sticker on the front of a rusty old AMC Pacer. The sticker was 
blue and white, like the little wheelchair signs marking the "crip spaces." Jake 
squatted for a better look, and when Oy dropped his head on Jake's knee, the boy 
stroked him absently. With his other hand he reached out and touched the 
sticker, as if to verify its reality. kansas city monarchs, it said. The 0 in 
Monarchs was a baseball with speedlines drawn out behind it, as if it were 
leaving the park.
Eddie said: "Check me if I'm wrong on this, sport, because I know al­most zilch 
about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn't that say Kansas City 
Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?"
Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young 
player in Jake's when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie's.
"Kansas City Athletics, you mean," Susannah said, sounding bewil­dered. Roland 
ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.
"Not by '86, darlin," Eddie said kindly. "By '86 the Athletics were in Oakland." 
He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. "Minor-league team, maybe?" he 
asked. "Triple A?"
"The Triple A Royals are still the Royals," Jake said. "They play in Omaha. Come 
on, let's go."
And although he didn't know about the others, Jake himself went on with a 
lighter heart. Maybe it was stupid, but he was relieved. He didn't believe that 
this terrible plague was waiting up ahead for his world, be­cause there were no 
Kansas City Monarchs in his world. Maybe that wasn't enough information upon 
which to base a conclusion, but it felt true. And it was an enormous relief to 
be able to believe that his mother and father weren't slated to die of a germ 
people called Captain Trips and be burned in a ... a landfill, or something.
Except that wasn't quite a sure thing, even if this wasn't the 1986 ver­sion of 
his 1977 world. Because even if this awful plague had happened in a world where 
there were cars called Takuro Spirits and George Brett played for the K.C. 
Monarchs, Roland said the trouble was spreading . . .that things like the 
superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating 
its way into a piece of cloth.
The gunslinger had spoken of time's pool, a phrase which had at first struck 
Jake as romantic and charming. But suppose the pool was growing stagnant and 
swampy? And suppose these Bermuda Triangle-type things Roland called thinnies, 
once great rarities, were becoming the rule rather than the exception? 
Suppose—oh, and here was a hideous thought, one guaranteed to keep you lying 
awake until way past three—all of reality was sagging as the structural 
weaknesses of the Dark Tower grew? Sup­pose there came a crash, one level 
falling down into the next... and the next... and the next... until—
When Eddie grasped his shoulder and squeezed, Jake had to bite his tongue to 
keep from screaming.
"You're giving yourself the hoodoos," Eddie said.
"What do you know about it?" Jake asked. That sounded rude, but he was mad. From 
being scared or being seen into? He didn't know. Didn't much care, either.
"When it comes to the hoodoos, I'm an old hand," Eddie said. "I don't know 
exactly what's on your mind, but whatever it is, this would be an excellent time 
to stop thinking about it."
That, Jake decided, was probably good advice. They walked across the street 
together. Toward Gage Park and one of the greatest shocks of Jake's life.
 
2
 
Passing under the wrought-iron arch with gage park written on it in 
old-fashioned, curlicued letters, they found themselves on a brick path lead­ing 
through a garden that was half English Formal and half Ecuadorian Jungle. With 
no one to tend it through the hot Midwestern summer, it had run to riot; with no 
one to tend it this fall, it had run to seed. A sign just in­side the arch 
proclaimed this to be the Reinisch Rose Garden, and there were roses, all right; 
roses everywhere. Most had gone over, but some of the wild ones still throve, 
making Jake think of the rose in the vacant lot at Forty-sixth and Second with a 
longing so deep it was an ache.
Off to one side as they entered the park was a beautiful old-time carousel, its 
prancing steeds and racing stallions now still on their posts. The carousel's 
very silence, its flashing lights and steamy calliope music stilled forever, 
gave Jake a chill. Hung over the neck of one horse, dan­gling from a rawhide 
strip, was some kid's baseball glove. Jake was barely able to look at it.
Beyond the carousel, the foliage grew even thicker, strangling the path until 
the travellers edged along single-file, like lost children in a fairy-tale wood. 
Thorns from overgrown and unpruned rosebushes tore at Jake's clothes. He had 
somehow gotten into the lead (probably because Roland was still deep inside his 
own thoughts), and that was why he saw Charlie the Choo-Choo first.
His only thought while approaching the narrow-gauge train-tracks which crossed 
the path—they were little more than toy tracks, really— was of the gunslinger 
saying that ka was like a wheel, always rolling around to the same place again. 
We 're haunted by roses and trains, he thought. Why? I don't know. I guess it's 
just another rid—
Then he looked to his left, and "OhgoodnesstoChrist" fell out of his mouth, all 
in one word. The strength ran out of his legs and he sat down. His voice sounded 
watery and distant to his own ears. He didn't quite faint, but the color drained 
out of the world until the running-to-riot fo­liage on the west side of the park 
looked almost as gray as the autumn sky overhead.
"Jake! Jake, what's wrong!" It was Eddie, and Jake could hear the genuine 
concern in his voice, but it seemed to be coming over a bad long-distance 
connection. From Beirut, say, or maybe Uranus. And he could feel Roland's 
steadying hand on his shoulder, but it was as distant as Ed­die's voice.
"Jake!" Susannah. "What's wrong, honey? What—"
Then she saw, and stopped talking at him. Eddie saw, and also stopped talking at 
him. Roland's hand fell away. They all stood looking ... except for Jake, who 
sat looking. He supposed that strength and feeling would come back into his legs 
eventually and he would get up, but right now they felt like limp macaroni.
The train was parked fifty feet up, by a toy station that mimicked the one 
across the street. Hanging from its eaves was a sign which read topeka. The 
train was Charlie the Choo-Choo, cowcatcher and all; a 402 Big Boy Steam 
Locomotive. And, Jake knew, if he found enough strength to get up on his feet 
and go over there, he would find a family of mice nested in the seat where the 
engineer (whose name had undoubtedly been Bob Something-or-other) had once sat. 
There would he another family, this one of swallows, nested in the smokestack.
And the dark, oily tears, Jake thought, looking at the tiny train wait­ing in 
front of its tiny station with his skin crawling all over his body and his balls 
hard and his stomach in a knot. At night it cries those dark, oily tears, and 
they're rusting the hell out of his fine Stratham headlight. But in your time, 
Charlie-boy, you pulled your share of kids, right? Around and around Gage Park 
you went, and the kids laughed, except some of them weren't really laughing; 
some of them, the ones who were wise to you, were screaming. The way I'd scream 
now, if I had the strength.
But his strength was coming back, and when Eddie put a hand under one of his 
arms and Roland put one under the other, Jake was able to get up. He staggered 
once, then stood steady.
"Just for the record, I don't blame you," Eddie said. His voice was grim; so was 
his face. "I feel a little like falling over myself. That's the one in your 
book; that's it to the life."
"So now we know where Miss Beryl Evans got the idea for Charlie the Choo-Choo" 
Susannah said. "Either she lived here, or sometime be­fore 1942, when the damned 
thing was published, she visited Topeka—"
"—and saw the kids' train that goes through Reinisch Rose Garden and around Gage 
Park," Jake said. He was getting over his scare now, and he—not just an only 
child but for most of his life a lonely child—felt a burst of love and gratitude 
for his friends. They had seen what he had seen, they had understood the source 
of his fright. Of course—they were ka-tet.
"It won't answer silly questions, it won't play silly games," Roland said 
musingly. "Can you go on, Jake?"
"Yes."
"You sure?" Eddie asked, and when Jake nodded, Eddie pushed Su­sannah across the 
tracks. Roland went next. Jake paused a moment, re­membering a dream he'd had—he 
and Oy had been at a train-crossing, and the bumbler had suddenly leaped onto 
the tracks, barking wildly at the oncoming headlight.
Now Jake bent and scooped Oy up. He looked at the rusting train standing 
silently in its station, its dark headlamp like a dead eye. "I'm not afraid," he 
said in a low voice. "Not afraid of you."
The headlamp came to life and flashed at him once, brief but glare-bright, 
emphatic: I know different; I know different, my dear little squint.
Then it went out.
None of the others had seen. Jake glanced once more at the train, ex­pecting the 
light to flash again—maybe expecting the cursed thing to ac­tually start up and 
make a run at him—but nothing happened.
Heart thumping hard in his chest, Jake hurried after his companions.
 
3
 
The Topeka Zoo (the World Famous Topeka Zoo, according to the signs) was full of 
empty cages and dead animals. Some of the animals that had been freed were gone, 
but others had died near to hand. The big apes were still in the area marked 
Gorilla Habitat, and they appeared to have died hand-in-hand. That made Eddie 
feel like crying, somehow. Since the last of the heroin had washed out of his 
system, his emotions always seemed on the verge of blowing up into a cyclone. 
His old pals would have laughed.
Beyond Gorilla Habitat, a gray wolf lay dead on the path. Oy ap­proached it 
carefully, sniffed, then stretched out his long neck and began to howl.
"Make him quit that, Jake, you hear me?" Eddie said gruffly. He sud­denly 
realized he could smell decaying animals. The aroma was faint, mostly boiled off 
over the hot days of the summer just passed, but what was left made him feel 
like upchucking. Not that he could precisely re­member the last time he'd eaten.
"Oy! To me!"
Oy howled one final time, then returned to Jake. He stood on the kid's feet, 
looking up at him with those spooky wedding-ring eyes of his. Jake picked him 
up, took him in a circle around the wolf, and then set him down again on the 
brick path.
The path led them to a steep set of steps (weeds had begun to push through the 
stonework already), and at the top Roland looked back over the zoo and the 
gardens. From here they could easily see the circuit the toy train-tracks made, 
allowing Charlie's riders to tour the entire perime­ter of Gage Park. Beyond it, 
fallen leaves clattered down Gage Boulevard before a rush of cold wind.
"So fell Lord Perth," murmured Roland.
"And the countryside did shake with that thunder," Jake finished.
Roland looked down at him with surprise, like a man awakening from a deep sleep, 
then smiled and put an arm around Jake's shoulders. "I have played Lord Perth in 
my time," he said.
"Have you?"
"Yes. Very soon now you shall hear."
 
4
 
Beyond the steps was an aviary full of dead exotic birds; beyond the aviary was 
a snackbar advertising (perhaps heartlessly, given the loca­tion) topeka's best 
buffaloburger; beyond the snackbar was another wrought iron arch with a sign 
reading come back to gage park real soon! Beyond this was the curving upslope of 
a limited-access-highway entrance ramp. Above it, the green signs they had first 
spotted from across the way stood clear.
"Tumpikin' again," Eddie said in a voice almost too low to hear. "Goddam." Then 
he sighed.
"What's tumpikin', Eddie?"
Jake didn't think Eddie was going to answer; when Susannah craned around to look 
at him as he stood with his fingers wrapped around the handles of the new 
wheelchair, Eddie looked away. Then he looked back, first at Susannah, then at 
Jake. "It's not pretty. Not much about my life be­fore Gary Cooper here yanked 
me across the Great Divide was."
"You don't have to—"
"It's also no big deal. A bunch of us would get together—me, my brother Henry, 
Bum O'Hara, usually, 'cause he had a car, Sandra Corbitt, and maybe this friend 
of Henry's we called Jimmie Polio—and we'd stick all our names in a hat. The one 
we drew out was the ... the trip-guide, Henry used to call him. He—she, if it 
was Sandi—had to stay straight. Relatively, anyway. Everyone else got seriously 
goobered. Then we'd all pile into Bum's Chrysler and go up 1-95 into Connecticut 
or maybe take the Taconic Parkway into upstate New York . . . only we called it 
the Catatonic Parkway. Listen to Creedence or Marvin Gaye or maybe even Elvis 's 
Greatest Hits on the tape-player.
"It was better at night, best when the moon was full. We'd cruise for hours 
sometimes with our heads stuck out the windows like dogs do when they're riding, 
looking up at the moon and watching for shooting stars. We called it tumpikin'." 
Eddie smiled. It looked like an effort. "A charm­ing life, folks."
"It sounds sort of fun," Jake said. "Not the drug part, I mean, but rid­ing 
around with your pals at night, looking at the moon and listening to the music . 
. . that sounds excellent."
"It was, actually," Eddie said. "Even stuffed so full of reds we were as apt to 
pee on our own shoes as in the bushes, it was excellent." He paused. "That's the 
horrible part, don't you get it?"
"Tumpikin'," the gunslinger said. "Let's do some."
They left Gage Park and crossed the road to the entrance ramp.
 
5
 
Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp's ascend­ing curve. 
On the one reading st. louis 215, someone had slashed
 
in black. On the one marked   next rest area 10 mi.,
 
had been written in fat red letters. That scarlet was still bright enough to 
scream even after an entire summer. Each had been decorated with a symbol—

"Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?" Susannah asked. Roland shook 
his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own 
eyes. They went on.
 
6
 
At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and 
the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked 
east.
Eddie didn't know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared 
Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones 
on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were 
piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season's worth of rain.
But the traffic was the least of their concerns as they stood there, looking 
silently eastward. For half a mile or so on either side of them, the city 
continued—they could see church steeples, a strip of fast food places (Arby's, 
Wendy's, McD's, Pizza Hut, and one Eddie had never heard of called Boing Boing 
Burgers), car dealerships, the roof of a bowling alley called Heartland Lanes. 
They could see another turnpike exit ahead, the sign by the ramp reading Topeka 
State Hospital and S.W. 6th. Beyond the off-ramp there bulked a massive old red 
brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing 
ivy. Eddie figured a place that looked so much like Attica had to be a hospital, 
probably the kind of welfare purgatory where poor folks sat in shitty plastic 
chairs for hours on end, all so some doctor could look at them like they were 
dogshit.
Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began.
To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up 
to the raised barrel of 1-70 on both sides, silvery and shim­mering, making the 
signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mi­rages; it gave off that 
liquidy humming sound like a stench.
Susannah put her hands to her ears, her mouth drawn down. "I don't know as I can 
stand it. Really. I don't mean to be spleeny, but already I feel like vomiting, 
and I haven't had anything to eat all day."
Eddie felt the same way. Yet, sick as he felt he could hardly take his eyes away 
from the thinny. It was as if unreality had been given . . . what? A face? No. 
The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very 
antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body ... an as­pect ... a presence.
Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the 
circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.
Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig 
all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. 
He plucked Susannah's right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the 
bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into 
his ears. Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, 
she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled 
her face.
Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of .44s 
that went with Jake's Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his 
hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.
"What's wrong with these?" Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had 
come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers's desk drawer.
"They're from your world and they won't block out the sound. Don't ask me how I 
know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won't work."
Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. "Those are from our world, 
too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements', wasn't that the name?"
"These didn't come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but 
originally brought from the green land. From Gilead."
"You mean the wets?” Eddie asked incredulously. "The last of the wet shells from 
the beach? The ones that really got soaked?"
Roland nodded.
"You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the 
powder had been .. . what did you say? 'Flattened.' "
Roland nodded again.
"So why'd you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?"
"What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?"
" 'Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be 
wasted.' "
Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie 
took the last two, but first he tried the ones he'd shaken from the box. They 
muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vi­brating in the 
center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a 
cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was go­ing to explode. He 
picked them out, and put the bigger slugs—the ones from Roland's ancient 
revolvers—in their place. Putting bullets in my ears, he thought. Ma would shit. 
But that didn't matter. The sound of the thinny was gone—or at least down to a 
distant drone—and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he 
expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing 
earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.
"Is there anything you don't know?" he asked Roland.
"Yes," Roland said. "Quite a lot."
"What about Oy?" Jake asked.
"Oy will be fine, I think," Roland said. "Come on, let's make some miles before 
dark."
 
7
 
Oy didn't seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake 
Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which 
clogged the eastbound lanes of 1-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not 
clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left 
downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the 
dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed 
right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in 
the metro area and grass outside of town.
Somebody's been at work with a wrecker, that's my guess, Susannah thought. The 
idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clear­ing a path down the center 
of the highway while the plague was still rag­ing, and if someone had done it 
after—if someone had been around to do it after—that meant the plague hadn't 
gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren't the whole story.
There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of 
the station steps, were dry, not runny—mummies wearing seat-belts, for the most 
part. The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers 
caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, 
she supposed, but she guessed that wasn't the only reason they had taken to 
their feet.
Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steer­ing wheel 
to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fa­tal disease 
setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God's open air. 
A hill would be best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield 
would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the 
air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
At one time Susannah guessed they would have been able to see many of the 
corpses of the fleeing dead, but not now. Because of the thinny. They approached 
it steadily, and she knew exactly when they en­tered it. A kind of tingling 
shudder ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the 
wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, 
and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all 
been stricken with the bellyache at the same time. Then Eddie and Roland 
straightened up. Jake bent to stroke Oy, who had been staring at him anxiously.
"You boys all right?" Susannah asked. The question came out in the 
half-querulous, half-humorous voice of Detta Walker. Using that voice was 
nothing she planned; sometimes it just came out.
"Yeah," Jake said. "Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though." He was 
staring uneasily at the thinny. Its silvery blankness was all around them now, 
as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn. Nearby, trees 
poked out of its silver surface, casting distorted re­flections that never 
stayed quite still or quite in focus. A little farther away, Susannah could see 
a grain-storage tower, seeming to float. The words gaddish feeds were written on 
the side in pink letters which might have been red under normal conditions.
"Feels to me like I got a bubble in my mind," Eddie said. "Man, look at that 
shit shimmer."
"Can you still hear it?" Susannah asked.
"Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?"
"Uh-huh. Let's go."
It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Su­sannah 
decided. They'd go for what felt like miles through that humming brightness that 
was not quite fog and not quite water, sometimes seeing shapes (a bam, a 
tractor, a Stuckey's billboard) loom out of it, then losing everything but the 
road, which ran consistently above the thinny's bright but somehow indistinct 
surface.
Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to 
a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least 
until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas ...
Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn't exactly have vistas, but there were 
open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or 
cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, hut at least 
you could see a by-God horizon off in the distance, and lose some of that 
unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back into the goop you went. Jake came 
closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thinny was 
like finally reaching the shining water-mirage you could often see far up the 
highway on hot days.
Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was 
claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of 
the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a 
frozen ocean.
Please help us get out of this, Susannah prayed to a God in whom she no longer 
precisely believed—she still believed in something, but since awakening to 
Roland's world on the beach of the Western Sea, her con­cept of the invisible 
world had changed considerably. Please help us find the Beam again. Please help 
us escape this world of silence and death.
They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which 
read big springs 2 mi. Behind them, in the west, the set­ting sun shone through 
a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the 
thinny and lighting the windows and taillights of the stalled cars in tones of 
fire. On either side of them empty fields stretched away. Full Earth come and 
gone, Susannah thought. Reaping come and gone, too. This is what Roland calls 
closing the year. The thought made her shiver.
"We'll camp here for the night," Roland said soon after they had passed the Big 
Springs exit ramp. Up ahead they could see the thinny en­croaching on the 
highway again, but that was miles farther on—you could see a damn long way in 
eastern Kansas, Susannah was discovering. "We can get firewood without going too 
near the thinny, and the sound won't be too bad. We may even be able to sleep 
without bullets stuffed into our ears."
Eddie and Jake climbed over the guardrails, descended the bank, and foraged for 
wood along a dry creekbed, staying together as Roland ad­monished them to do. 
When they came back, the clouds had gulped the sun again, and an ashy, 
uninteresting twilight had begun to creep over the world.
The gunslinger stripped twigs for kindling, then laid his fuel around them in 
his usual fashion, building a kind of wooden chimney in the breakdown lane. As 
he did it, Eddie strolled across to the median strip and stood there, hands in 
pockets, looking east. After a few moments, Jake and Oy joined him.
Roland produced his flint and steel, scraped fire into the shaft of his chimney, 
and soon the little campfire was burning.
"Roland!" Eddie called. "Suze! Come over here! Look at this!"
Susannah started rolling her chair toward Eddie, then Roland—after a final check 
of his campfire—took hold of the handles and pushed her.
"Look at what?" Susannah asked.
Eddie pointed. At first Susannah saw nothing, although the turnpike was 
perfectly visible even beyond the point where the thinny closed in again, 
perhaps three miles ahead. Then ... yes, she might see something. Maybe. A kind 
of shape, at the farthest edge of vision. If not for the fad­ing daylight...
"Is it a building?" Jake asked. "Cripes, it looks like it's built right across 
the highway!"
"What about it, Roland?" Eddie asked. "You've got the best eyes in the 
universe."
For a time the gunslinger said nothing, only looked up the median strip with his 
thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. At last he said, "We'll see it better when we get 
closer."
"Oh, come on!" Eddie said. "I mean, holy shit! Do you know what it is or not?"
"We'll see it better when we get closer," the gunslinger repeated ... which was, 
of course, no answer at all. He moseyed back across the east-bound lanes to 
check on his campfire, bootheels clicking on the pave­ment. Susannah looked at 
Jake and Eddie. She shrugged. They shrugged back . . . and then Jake burst into 
bright peals of laughter. Usually, Susan­nah thought, the kid acted more like an 
eighteen-year-old than a boy of eleven, but that laughter made him sound about 
nine-going-on-ten, and she didn't mind a bit.
She looked down at Oy, who was looking at them earnestly and rolling his 
shoulders in an effort to shrug.
 
8
 
They ate the leaf-wrapped delicacies Eddie called gunslinger burritos, drawing 
closer to the fire and feeding it more wood as the dark drew down. Somewhere 
south a bird cried out—it was just about the loneliest sound he had ever heard 
in his life, Eddie reckoned. None of them talked much, and it occurred to him 
that, at this time of their day, hardly anyone ever did. As if the time when the 
earth swapped day for dark was special, a time that somehow closed them off from 
the powerful fellowship Roland called ka-tet.
Jake fed Oy small scraps of dried deermeat from his last burrito; Su­sannah sat 
on her bedroll, legs crossed beneath her hide smock, looking dreamily into the 
fire; Roland lay back on his elbows, looking up at the sky, where the clouds had 
begun to melt away from the stars. Looking up himself, Eddie saw that Old Star 
and Old Mother were gone, their places taken by Polaris and the Big Dipper. This 
might not be his world— Takuro automobiles, the Kansas City Monarchs, and a food 
franchise called Boing Boing Burgers all suggested it wasn't—but Eddie thought 
it was too close for comfort. Maybe, he thought, the world next door.
When the bird cried in the distance again, he roused himself and looked at 
Roland. "You had something you were going to tell us," he said. "A thrilling 
tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn't it?"
For a moment longer the gunslinger continued to look up at the sky— now it was 
Roland who must find himself adrift in the constellations, Eddie realized—and 
then he shifted his gaze to his friends. He looked strangely apologetic, 
strangely uneasy. "Would you think I was cozen­ing," he said, "if I asked for 
one more day to think of these things? Or per­haps it's a night to dream of them 
that I really want. They are old things, dead things, perhaps, but I. . ." He 
raised his hands in a kind of distracted gesture. "Some things don't rest easy 
even when they're dead. Their bones cry out from the ground."
"There are ghosts," Jake said, and in his eyes Eddie saw a shadow of the horror 
he must have felt inside the house in Dutch Hill. The horror he must have felt 
when the Doorkeeper came out of the wall and reached for him. "Sometimes there 
are ghosts, and sometimes they come back."
"Yes," Roland said. "Sometimes there are, and sometimes they do."
"Maybe it's better not to brood," Susannah said. "Sometimes—espe­cially when you 
know a thing's going to be hard—it's better just to get on your horse and ride."
Roland thought this over carefully, then raised his eyes to look at her. "At 
tomorrow night's fire I will tell you of Susan," he said. "This I prom­ise on my 
father's name."
"Do we need to hear?" Eddie asked abruptly. He was almost as­tounded to hear 
this question coming out of his mouth; no one had been more curious about the 
gunslinger's past than Eddie himself. "I mean, if it really hurts, Roland . . . 
hurts big-time . . . maybe..."
"I'm not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the 
Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as 
best I may. There's no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past 
is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand 
for all the rest."
"Is it a Western?" Jake asked suddenly.
Roland looked at him, puzzled. "I don't take your meaning, Jake. Gilead is a 
Barony of the Western World, yes, and Mejis as well, but—"
"It'll be a Western," Eddie said. "All Roland's stories are Westerns, when you 
get right down to it." He lay back and pulled his blanket over him. Faintly, 
from both east and west, he could hear the warble of the thinny. He checked in 
his pocket for the bullets Roland had given him, and nodded with satisfaction 
when he felt them. He reckoned he could sleep without them tonight, but he would 
want them again tomorrow. They weren't done tumpikin' just yet.
Susannah leaned over him, kissed the tip of his nose. "Done for the day, sugar?"
"Yep," Eddie said, and laced his hands together behind his head. "It's not every 
day that I hook a ride on the world's fastest train, destroy the world's 
smartest computer, and then discover that everyone's been scragged by the flu. 
All before dinner, too. Shit like that makes a man tired." Eddie smiled and 
closed his eyes. He was still smiling when sleep took him.
 
9
 
In his dream, they were all standing on the comer of Second Avenue and 
Forty-sixth Street, looking over the short board fence and into the weedy vacant 
lot behind it. They were wearing their Mid-World clothes—a mot­ley combination 
of deerskin and old shirts, mostly held together with spit and shoelaces—but 
none of the pedestrians hurrying by on Second seemed to notice. No one noticed 
the billy-bumbler in Jake's arms or the artillery they were packing, either.
Because we're ghosts. Eddie thought. We're ghosts and we don't rest easy.
On the fence there were handbills—one for the Sex Pistols (a reunion tour, 
according to the poster, and Eddie thought that was pretty funny— the Pistols 
was one group that was never going to get back together), one for a comic, Adam 
Sandier, that Eddie had never heard of, one for a movie called The Craft, about 
teenage witches. Beyond that one, written in letters the dusky pink of summer 
roses, was this:
 
See the bear of fearsome size!
All the world's within his eyes.
time grows thin, the past's a riddle;
The tower awaits you in the middle.
 
"There, " Jake said, pointing. "The rose. See how it awaits us, there in the 
middle of the lot. "
"Yes, it's very beautiful, " Susannah said. Then she pointed to the sign 
standing near the rose and facing Second Avenue. Her voice and her eyes were 
troubled. "But what about that? "
According to the sign, two outfits—Mills Construction and Sombra Real 
Estate—were going to combine on something called Turtle Bay Condominiums, said 
condos to be erected on this very spot. When? com­ing soon was all the sign had 
to say in that regard.
"I wouldn't worry about that, " Jake said. "That sign was here before. It's 
probably old as the hi—"
At that moment the revving sound of an engine tore into the air. From beyond the 
fence, on the Forty-sixth Street side of the lot, chugs of dirty brown exhaust 
ascended like bad-news smoke signals. Suddenly the boards on that side burst 
open, and a huge red bulldozer lunged through. Even the blade was red, although 
the words slashed across its scoop—all hail the crimson king—were written in a 
yellow as bright as panic. Sit­ting in the peak-seat, his rotting face leering 
at them from above the con­trols, was the man who had kidnapped Jake from the 
bridge over the River Send—their old pal Gasher. On the front of his cocked-back 
hard-hat, the words lamerk foundry stood out in black. Above them, a single 
staring eye had been painted.
Gasher lowered the 'dozer's blade. It tore across the lot on a diagonal, 
smashing brick, pulverizing beer and soda bottles to glittering powder, striking 
sparks from the rocks. Directly in its path, the rose nodded its delicate head.
"Let's see you ask some of yer silly questions now!" this unwelcome apparition 
cried. "Ask all yer wants, my dear little culls, why not? Wery fond of riddles 
is yer old pal Gasher! Just so you understand that, no mat­ter what yer ask, I'm 
gointer run that nasty thing over, mash it flat, aye, so I will! Then back over 
it I'll go! Root and branch, my dear little culls! Aye, root and branch!"
Susannah shrieked as the scarlet bulldozer blade bore down on the rose, and 
Eddie grabbed for the fence. He would vault over it, throw him­self on the rose, 
try to protect it...
... except it was too late. And he knew it.
He looked back up at the cackling thing in the bulldozer's peak-seat and saw 
that Gasher was gone. Now the man at the controls was Engineer Bob, from Charlie 
the Choo-Choo.
"Stop!" Eddie screamed. "For Christ's sake, stop!"
"I can't, Eddie. The world has moved on, and I can't stop. I must move on with 
it. "
And as the shadow of the 'dozer fell over the rose, as the blade tore through 
one of the posts holding up the sign (Eddie saw coming soon had changed to 
coming now), he realized that the man at the controls wasn't Engineer Bob, 
either.
It was Roland.
 
10
 
Eddie sat up in the breakdown lane of the turnpike, gasping breath he could see 
in the air and with sweat already chilling on his hot skin. He was sure he had 
screamed, must have screamed, but Susannah still slept beside him with only the 
top of her head poking out of the bedroll they shared, and Jake was snoring 
softly off to the left, one arm out of his own blankets and curled around Oy. 
The bumbler was also sleeping.
Roland wasn't. Roland sat calmly on the far side of the dead campfire, cleaning 
his guns by starlight and looking at Eddie.
"Bad dreams." Not a question.
"Yeah."
"A visit from your brother?"
Eddie shook his head.
"The Tower, then? The field of roses and the Tower?" Roland's face remained 
impassive, but Eddie could hear the subtle eagerness which al­ways came into his 
voice when the subject was the Dark Tower. Eddie had once called the gunslinger 
a Tower junkie, and Roland hadn't denied it.
"Not this time."
"What, then?"
Eddie shivered. "Cold."
"Yes. Thank your gods there's no rain, at least. Autumn rain's an evil to be 
avoided whenever one may. What was your dream?"
Still Eddie hesitated. "You'd never betray us, would you, Roland?"
"No man can say that for sure, Eddie, and I have already played the betrayer 
more than once. To my shame. But ... I think those days are over. We are one, 
ka-tet. If I betray any one of you—even Jake's furry friend, perhaps—I betray 
myself. Why do you ask?"
"And you'd never betray your quest."
"Renounce the Tower? No, Eddie. Not that, not ever. Tell me your dream."
Eddie did, omitting nothing. When he had finished, Roland looked down at his 
guns, frowning. They seemed to have reassembled them­selves while Eddie was 
talking.
"So what does it mean, that I saw you driving that 'dozer at the end? That I 
still don't trust you? That subconsciously—"
"Is this ology-of-the-psyche? The cabala I have heard you and Susan­nah speak 
of?"
"Yes, I guess it is."
"It's shit," Roland said dismissively. "Mudpies of the mind. Dreams either mean 
nothing or everything—and when they mean everything, they almost always come as 
messages from . . . well, from other levels of the Tower." He gazed at Eddie 
shrewdly. "And not all messages are sent by friends."
"Something or someone is fucking with my head? Is that what you mean?"
"I think it possible. But you must watch me all the same. I bear watching, as 
you well know."
"I trust you," Eddie said, and the very awkwardness with which he spoke lent his 
words sincerity. Roland looked touched, almost shaken, and Eddie wondered how he 
ever could have thought this man an emotionless robot. Roland might be a little 
short on imagination, but he had feelings, all right.
"One thing about your dream concerns me very much, Eddie."
"The bulldozer?"
"The machine, yes. The threat to the rose."
"Jake saw the rose, Roland. It was fine."
Roland nodded. "In his when, the when of that particular day, the rose was 
thriving. But that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. If the con­struction 
the sign spoke of comes . . . if the bulldozer comes ..."
"There are other worlds than these," Eddie said. "Remember?"
"Some things may exist only in one. In one where, in one when." Roland lay down 
and looked up at the stars. "We must protect that rose," he said. "We must 
protect it at all costs."
"You think it's another door, don't you? One that opens on the Dark Tower."
The gunslinger looked at him from eyes that ran with starshine. "I think it may 
be the Tower," he said. "And if it's destroyed—"
His eyes closed. He said no more.
Eddie lay awake late.
 
11
 
The new day dawned clear and bright and cold. In the strong morning sunlight, 
the thing Eddie had spotted the evening before was more clearly visible .. . but 
he still couldn't tell what it was. Another riddle, and he was getting damned 
sick of them.
He stood squinting at it, shading his eyes from the sun, with Susannah on one 
side of him and Jake on the other. Roland was back by the camp-fire, packing 
what he called their gunna, a word which seemed to mean all their worldly goods. 
He appeared not to be concerned with the thing up ahead, or to know what it was.
How far away? Thirty miles? Fifty? The answer seemed to depend on how far could 
you see in all this flat land, and Eddie didn't know the an­swer. One thing he 
felt quite sure of was that Jake had been right on at least two counts—it was 
some kind of building, and it sprawled across all four lanes of the highway. It 
must; how else could they see it? It would have been lost in the thinny ... 
wouldn't it?
Maybe it's standing in one of those open patches—what Suze calls "the holes in 
the clouds."  Or maybe the thinny ends before we get that far. Or maybe it's a 
goddam hallucination. In any case, you might as well put it out of your mind for 
the time being. Got a little more turnpikin' to do.
Still, the building held him. It looked like an airy Arabian Nights con­fection 
of blue and gold . . . except Eddie had an idea that the blue was stolen from 
the sky and the gold from the newly risen sun.
"Roland, come here a second!"
At first he didn't think the gunslinger would, but then Roland cinched a rawhide 
lace on Susannah's pack, rose, put his hands in the small of his back, 
stretched, and walked over to them.
"Gods, one would think no one in this band has the wit to housekeep but me," 
Roland said.
"We'll pitch in," Eddie said, "we always do, don't we? But look at that thing 
first."
Roland did, but only with a quick glance, as if he did not even want to 
acknowledge it.
"It's glass, isn't it?" Eddie asked.
Roland took another brief look. "I wot," he said, a phrase which seemed to mean 
Reckon so, partner.
"We've got lots of glass buildings where I come from, but most of them are 
office buildings. That thing up ahead looks more like something from Disney 
World. Do you know what it is?"
"No."
"Then why don't you want to look at it?" Susannah asked.
Roland did take another look at the distant blaze of light on glass, but once 
again it was quick—little more than a peek.
"Because it's trouble," Roland said, "and it's in our road. We'll get there in 
time. No need to live in trouble until trouble comes."
"Will we get there today?" Jake asked.
Roland shrugged, his face still closed. "There'll be water if God wills it," he 
said.
"Christ, you could have made a fortune writing fortune cookies," Eddie said. He 
hoped for a smile, at least, but got none. Roland simply walked back across the 
road, dropped to one knee, shouldered his purse and his pack, and waited for the 
others. When they were ready, the pil­grims resumed their walk east along 
Interstate 70. The gunslinger led, walking with his head down and his eyes on 
the toes of his boots.
 
12
 
Roland was quiet all day, and as the building ahead of them neared (trouble, and 
in our road, he had said), Susannah came to realize it wasn't grumpiness they 
were seeing, or worry about anything which lay any farther ahead of them than 
tonight. It was the story he'd promised to tell them that Roland was thinking 
about, and he was a lot more than worried.
By the time they stopped for their noon meal, they could clearly see the 
building ahead—a many-turreted palace which appeared to be made entirely of 
reflective glass. The thinny lay close around it, but the palace rose serenely 
above all, its turrets trying for the sky. Madly strange here in the flat 
countryside of eastern Kansas, of course it was, but Susannah thought it the 
most beautiful building she had ever seen in her life; even more beautiful than 
the Chrysler Building, and that was going some.
As they drew closer, she found it more and more difficult to look else­where. 
Watching the reflections of the puffy clouds sailing across the glass castle's 
blue-sky wains and walls was like watching some splendid illusion ... yet there 
was a solidity to it, as well. An inarguability. Some of that was probably just 
the shadow it threw—mirages did not, so far as she knew, create shadows—but not 
all. It just was. She had no idea what such a fabulosity was doing out here in 
the land of Stuckey's and Hardee's (not to mention Boing Boing Burgers), but 
there it was. She reckoned that time would tell the rest.
 
13
 
They made camp in silence, watched Roland build the wooden chimney that would be 
their fire in silence, then sat before it in silence, watching the sunset turn 
the huge glass edifice ahead of them into a castle of fire. Its towers and 
battlements glowed first a fierce red, then orange, then a gold which cooled 
rapidly to ocher as Old Star appeared in the firmament above them—
No, she thought in Delta's voice. Ain't dat one, girl. Not 'tall. That's the 
North Star. Same one you seen back home, sittin on yo' daddy's lap.
But it was Old Star she wanted, she discovered; Old Star and Old Mother. She was 
astounded to find herself homesick for Roland's world, and then wondered why she 
should be so surprised. It was a world, after all, where no one had called her a 
nigger bitch (at least not yet), a world where she had found someone to love . . 
. and made good friends as well. That last made her feel a little bit like 
crying, and she hugged Jake to her. He let himself be hugged, smiling, his eyes 
half-closed. At some dis­tance, unpleasant but bearable even without bullet 
earplugs, the thinny warbled its moaning song.
When the last traces of yellow began to fade from the castle up the road, Roland 
left them to sit in the turnpike travel lane and returned to his fire. He cooked 
more leaf-wrapped deermeat, and handed the food around. They ate in silence 
(Roland actually ate almost nothing, Susannah ob­served). By the time they were 
finished, they could see the Milky Way scattered across the walls of the castle 
ahead of them, fierce points of re­flection that burned like fire in still 
water.
Eddie was the one who finally broke the silence. "You don't have to," he said. 
"You're excused. Or absolved. Or whatever the hell it is you need to take that 
look off your face."
Roland ignored him. He drank, tilting the waterskin up on his elbow like some 
hick drinking moonshine from a jug, head back, eyes on the stars. The last 
mouthful he spat to the roadside.
"Life for your crop," Eddie said. He did not smile.
Roland said nothing, but his cheek went pale, as if he had seen a ghost. Or 
heard one.
 
14
 
The gunslinger turned to Jake, who looked back at him seriously. "I went through 
the trial of manhood at the age of fourteen, the youngest of my ka-tel—of my 
class, you would say—and perhaps the youngest ever. I told you some of that, 
Jake. Do you remember?"
You told all of us some of that, Susannah thought, but kept her mouth shut, and 
warned Eddie with her eyes to do the same. Roland hadn't been himself during 
that telling; with Jake both dead and alive within his head, the man had been 
fighting madness.
"You mean when we were chasing Walter," Jake said. "After the way station but 
before I... I took my fall."
"That's right."
"I remember a little, but that's all. The way you remember the stuff you dream 
about."
Roland nodded. "Listen, then. I would tell you more this time, Jake, because you 
are older. I suppose we all are."
Susannah was no less fascinated with the story the second time: how the boy 
Roland had chanced to discover Marten, his father's advisor (his father's 
wizard) in his mother's apartment. Only none of it had been by chance, of 
course; the boy would have passed her door with no more than a glance had Marten 
not opened it and invited him in. Marten had told Roland that his mother wanted 
to see him, but one look at her rueful smile and downcast eyes as she sat in her 
low-back chair told the boy he was the last person in the world Gabrielle 
Deschain wanted to see just then.
The flush on her cheek and the love-bite on the side of her neck told him 
everything else.
Thus had he been goaded by Marten into an early trial of manhood, and by 
employing a weapon his teacher had not expected—his hawk, David—Roland had 
defeated Cort, taken his stick ... and made the enemy of his life in Marten 
Broadcloak.
Beaten badly, face swelling into something that looked like a child's goblin 
mask, slipping toward a coma, Cort had fought back unconscious­ness long enough 
to offer his newest apprentice gunslinger counsel: stay away from Marten yet 
awhile, Cort had said.
"He told me to let the story of our battle grow into a legend," the gun­slinger 
told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. "To wait until my shadow had grown hair on its 
face and haunted Marten in his dreams."
"Did you take his advice?" Susannah asked.
"I never got a chance," Roland said. His face cracked in a rueful, painful 
smile. "I meant to think about it, and seriously, but before I even got started 
on my thinking, things ... changed."
"They have a way of doing that, don't they?" Eddie said. "My good­ness, yes."
"I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. 
Then—and this part I'm sure I didn't tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower 
town. That summer's heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room 
above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a 
woman for the first time."
He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the 
unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided 
grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went 
out.
"It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought 
about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—"
"I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar," Susannah 
said.
"I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and 
to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in ... well. . . 
let's just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a 
place."
Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland's 
cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and be­low his lower lip. 
And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that 
long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened 
summer air; what had happened in a whore's crib above a drinking-dive in the 
lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located 
in the western re­gions of Mid-World.
One boy, still aching from his battle of the day before and newly edu­cated in 
the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his 
lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shutter­ing those 
extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore's breast, 
his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counter­pane. One boy in the final 
instants of his life's last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, 
who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of 
scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those 
pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth 
shakes with the sound of the landslide.
One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.
A knot exploded in the fire. Somewhere in this dream of Kansas, an animal 
yipped. Susannah watched sparks swirl up past Roland's incredi­bly ancient face 
and saw in that face the sleeping boy of a summer's mom, lying in a bawd's bed. 
And then she saw the door crash open, end­ing Gilead's last troubled dream.
 
15
 
The man who strode in, crossing the room to the bed before Roland could open his 
eyes (and before the woman beside him had even begun to register the sound), was 
tall, slim, dressed in faded jeans and a dusty shirt of blue chambray. On his 
head was a dark gray hat with a snakeskin band. Lying low on his hips were two 
old leather holsters. Jutting from them were the sandalwood grips of the pistols 
the boy would someday bear to lands of which this scowling man with the furious 
blue eyes would never dream.
Roland was in motion even before he was able to unseal his eyes, rolling to the 
left, groping beneath the bed for what was there. He was fast, so fast it was 
scary, but—and Susannah saw this, too, saw it clearly— the man in the faded 
jeans was faster yet. He grabbed the boy's shoulder and yanked, turning him 
naked out of bed and onto the floor. The boy sprawled there, reaching again for 
what was beneath the bed, lightning-quick. The man in the jeans stamped down on 
his fingers before they could grasp.
"Bastard!" the boy gasped. "Oh, you bas—"
But now his eyes were open, he looked up, and saw that the invading bastard was 
his father.
The whore was sitting up now, her eyes puffy, her face slack and petulant. 
"Here!" she cried. "Here, here! You can't just be a-comin in like that, so you 
can't! Why, if I was to raise my voice—"
Ignoring her, the man reached beneath the bed and dragged out two gunbelts. Near 
the end of each was a bolstered revolver. They were large, and amazing in this 
largely gunless world, but they were not so large as those worn by Roland's 
father, and the grips were eroded metal plates rather than inlaid wood. When the 
whore saw the guns on the invader's hips and the ones in his hands—the ones her 
young customer of the night before had been wearing until she had taken him 
upstairs and divested him of all weapons save for the one with which she was 
most familiar— the expression of sleepy petulance left her face. What replaced 
it was the foxlike look of a born survivor. She was up, out of bed, across the 
floor, and out the door before her bare bum had more than a brief moment to 
twinkle in the morning sun.
Neither the father standing by the bed nor the son lying naked upon the floor at 
his feet so much as looked at her. The man in the jeans held out the gunbelts 
which Roland had taken from the fuzer beneath the ap­prentices' barracks on the 
previous afternoon, using Cort's key to open the arsenal door. The man shook the 
belts under Roland's very nose, as one might hold a torn garment beneath the 
nose of a feckless puppy that has chewed. He shook them so hard that one of the 
guns tumbled free. Despite his stupefaction, Roland caught it in midair.
"I thought you were in the west," Roland said. "In Cressia. After Far-son and 
his—"
Roland's father slapped him hard enough to send the boy tumbling across the room 
and into a corner with blood pouring from one comer of his mouth. Roland's 
first, appalling instinct was to raise the gun he still held.
Steven Deschain looked at him, hands on hips, reading this thought even before 
it was fully formed. His lips pulled back in a singularly mirth­less grin, one 
that showed all of his teeth and most of his gums.
"Shoot me if you will. Why not? Make this abortion complete. Ah, gods, I'd 
welcome it!"
Roland laid the gun on the floor and pushed it away, using the back of his hand 
to do it. All at once he wanted his fingers nowhere near the trig­ger of a gun. 
They were no longer fully under his control, those fingers. He had discovered 
that yesterday, right around the time he had broken Cort's nose.
"Father, I was tested yesterday. I took Cort's stick. I won. I'm a man."
"You're a fool," his father said. His grin was gone now; he looked haggard and 
old. He sat down heavily on the whore's bed, looked at the gunbelts he still 
held, and dropped them between his feet. "You're a fourteen-year-old fool, and 
that's the worst, most desperate kind." He looked up, angry all over again, but 
Roland didn't mind; anger was better than that look of weariness. That look of 
age. "I've known since you toddled that you were no genius, but I never believed 
until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a 
chute! Gods! You have forgotten the face of your father! Say it!"
And that sparked the boy's own anger. Everything he had done the day before he 
had done with his father's face firmly fixed in his mind.
"That's not true!" he shouted from where he now sat with his bare butt on the 
splintery boards of the whore's crib and his back against the wall, the sun 
shining through the window and touching the fuzz on his fair, unscarred cheek.
"It is true, you whelp! Foolish whelp! Say your atonement or I'll strip the hide 
from your very—"
"They were together!" he burst out. "Your wife and your minister— your magician! 
I saw the mark of his mouth on her neck! On my mother's neck!" He reached for 
the gun and picked it up, but even in his shame and fury was still careful not 
to let his fingers stray near the trigger; he held the apprentice's revolver 
only by the plain, undecorated metal of its barrel. "Today I end his 
treacherous, seducer's life with this, and if you aren't man enough to help me, 
at least you can stand aside and let m—"
One of the revolvers on Steven's hip was out of its holster and in his hand 
before Roland's eyes saw any move. There was a single shot, deaf­ening as 
thunder in the little room; it was a full minute before Roland was able to hear 
the babble of questions and commotion from below. The 'prentice-gun, meanwhile, 
was long gone, blown out of his hand and leav­ing nothing behind but a kind of 
buzzing tingle. It flew out the window, down and gone, its grip a smashed ruin 
of metal and its short turn in the gunslinger's long tale at an end.
Roland looked at his father, shocked and amazed. Steven looked back, saying 
nothing for a long time. But now he wore the face Roland remem­bered from 
earliest childhood: calm and sure. The weariness and the look of half-distracted 
fury had passed away like last night's thunderstorms.
At last his father spoke. "I was wrong in what I said, and I apologize. You did 
not forget my face, Roland. But still you were foolish—you al­lowed yourself to 
be driven by one far slyer than you will ever be in your life. It's only by the 
grace of the gods and the working of ka that you have not been sent west, one 
more true gunslinger out of Marten's road . . . out of John Farson's road . . . 
and out of the road which leads to the creature that rules them." He stood and 
held out his arms. "If I had lost you, Roland, I should have died."
Roland got to his feet and went naked to his father, who embraced him fiercely. 
When Steven Deschain kissed him first on one cheek and then the other, Roland 
began to weep. Then, in Roland's ear, Steven Des­chain whispered six words.
 
16
 
"What?" Susannah asked. "What six words?"
" 'I have known for two years,' " Roland said. "That was what he whispered."
"Holy Christ," Eddie said.
"He told me I couldn't go back to the palace. If I did, I'd be dead by 
nightfall. He said, 'You have been born to your destiny in spite of all Marten 
could do; yet he has sworn to kill you before you can grow to be a problem to 
him. It seems that, winner in the test or no, you must leave Gilead anyway. For 
only awhile, though, and you'll go east instead of west. I'd not send you alone, 
either, or without a purpose.' Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: 'Or 
with a pair of sorry 'prentice revolvers.' "
"What purpose?" Jake asked. He had clearly been captivated by the story; his 
eyes shone nearly as bright as Oy's. "And which friends?"
"These things you must now hear," Roland said, "and how you judge me will come 
in time."
He fetched a sigh—the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of 
work—and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving 
the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he 
talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the 
east and painting the glass castle yon­der with all the bright hues of a fresh 
day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.

 

 

 
PART TWO
SUSAN

 

 
CHAPTER   I
.............................
BENEATH THE
KISSING MOON

 
1
 
A perfect disc of silver—the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth—hung 
above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt 
Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two 
hours after sundown, but atop the Coos, it was as if Reap had already come, with 
its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no 
company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.
Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they 
are.
She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors' horses had faded, sit­ting 
quietly by the window in the hut's large room (there was only one other, a 
bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her 
shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.
Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called 
themselves.
She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amus­ing thing 
about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swag­gering, 
belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their 
drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their 
pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot nothing 
but strange, bent seed that produced children fit only to be drowned in the 
nearest well. Ah, but it was never their fault, was it, dear? No, always it was 
the woman—her womb, her fault. Men were such cow­ards. Such grinning cowards. 
These three had been no different from the general run. The old one with the 
limp might bear watching—aye, so he might, a clear and overly curious pair of 
eyes had looked out at her from his head—but she saw nothing in them she could 
not deal with, came it to that.
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods 
made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their 
bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like 
snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that 
second bit of wisdom need only look at her night's second bit of business, the 
one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o' Barony! No 
fool like an old fool!
Yet none of these thoughts had any real power over her or any real malice to 
them, at least not now; the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin 
Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her 
eyes with it, so she would.
The gimp, Jonas, had insisted she put it away—he had been told she had a place 
for such things, not that he wanted to see it himself, not any of her secret 
places, gods forbid (at this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like 
trolls)—and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by 
the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what 
little there was of Hart Thorin's mind would not be here for another hour, at 
least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the 
purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put 
a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she 
would do as she liked.
"Oh, it's beautiful, I'm sure 'tis," she whispered, and did she feel a certain 
heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture 
in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!
"Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beau­tiful, 
Musty, like you." She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her 
eyes. The old torn purred and stretched out its pug of a face toward hers. She 
kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. "So 
beautiful, like you—so y'are, so y'are! Hee!"
She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire 
lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty's tail, split at the tip so it 
looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and 
forth in the room's dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, 
twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the 
wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.
The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the 
thing Jonas had given her.
"Lose that and you'll lose your head," he'd said.
"Never fear me, my good friend," she'd replied, directing a cringing, servile 
smile back over her shoulder, all the while thinking: Men! Foolish strutting 
creatures they were!
Now she went to the foot of her bed, knelt, and passed one hand over the earth 
floor there. Lines appeared in the sour dirt as she did. They formed a square. 
She pushed her fingers into one of these lines; it gave be­fore her touch. She 
lifted the hidden panel (hidden in such a way that no one without the touch 
would ever be able to uncover it), revealing a com­partment perhaps a foot 
square and two feet deep. Within it was an ironwood box. Curled atop the box was 
a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth 
yawned in a silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs—two on top, two on the 
bottom.
She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her 
own, its mouth yawned wider and it’s hissing became audible. She opened her own 
mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling 
mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison— enough to kill an entire dinner-party, 
if mixed in the punch—fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat 
and chest bum, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of 
focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut—the 
voices of those she called "the unseen friends." Her eyes ran sticky water down 
the trenches time had drawn in her cheeks. Then she blew out a breath and the 
room steadied. The voices faded.
She kissed Ermot between his lidless eyes (time o' the Kissing Moon, all right, 
she thought) and then set him aside. The snake slipped beneath her bed, curled 
itself in a circle, and watched as she passed her palms over the top of the 
ironwood box. She could feel the muscles in her upper arms quivering, and that 
heat in her loins was more pronounced. Years it had been since she had felt the 
call of her sex, but she felt it now, so she did, and it was not the doing of 
the Kissing Moon, or not much.
The box was locked and Jonas had given her no key, but that was nothing to her, 
who had lived long and studied much and trafficked with creatures that most men, 
for all their bold talk and strutting ways, would run from as if on fire had 
they caught even the smallest glimpse of them. She stretched one hand toward the 
lock, on which was inlaid the shape of an eye and a motto in the High Speech (I 
see who opens me), and then withdrew it. All at once she could smell what her 
nose no longer noticed under ordinary circumstances: must and dust and a dirty 
mattress and the crumbs of food that had been consumed in bed; the mingled 
stench of ashes and ancient incense; the odor of an old woman with wet eyes and 
(ordinarily, at least) a dry pussy. She would not open this box and look at the 
wonder it contained in here; she would go outside, where the air was clean and 
the only smells were sage and mesquite.
She would look by the light of the Kissing Moon.
Rhea of Coos Hill pulled the box from its hole with a grunt, rose to her feet 
with another grunt (this one from her nether regions), tucked the box under her 
arm, and left the room.
 
2
 
The hut was far enough below the brow of the hill to block off the bitter­est 
gusts of the winter wind which blew almost constantly in these high­lands from 
Reaping until the end of Wide Earth. A path led to the hill's highest vantage; 
beneath the full moon it was a ditch of silver. The old woman toiled up it, 
puffing, her white hair standing out around her head in dirty clumps, her old 
dugs swaying from side to side under her black dress. The cat followed in her 
shadow, still giving off its rusty purr like a stink.
At the top of the hill, the wind lifted her hair away from her ravaged face and 
brought her the moaning whisper of the thinny which had eaten its way into the 
far end of Eyebolt Canyon. It was a sound few cared for, she knew, but she 
herself loved it; to Rhea of the Coos, it sounded like a lullaby. Overhead rode 
the moon, the shadows on its bright skin sketch­ing the faces of lovers kissing 
... if you believed the ordinary fools be­low, that was. The ordinary fools 
below saw a different face or set of faces in each full moon, but the hag knew 
there was only one—the face of the Demon. The face of death.
She herself, however, had never felt more alive.
"Oh, my beauty," she whispered, and touched the lock with her gnarled fingers. A 
faint glimmer of red light showed between her bunched knuckles, and there was a 
click. Breathing hard, like a woman who has run a race, she put the box down and 
opened it.
Rose-colored light, dimmer than that thrown by the Kissing Moon but infinitely 
more beautiful, spilled out. It touched the ruined face hanging above the box, 
and for a moment made it the face of a young girl again.
Musty sniffed, head stretched forward, ears laid back, old eyes rimmed with that 
rose light. Rhea was instantly jealous.
"Get away, foolish, 'tis not for the likes of you!"
She swatted the cat. Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in 
dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill. There he sat, 
affecting disdain and licking one paw as the wind combed ceaselessly through his 
fur.
Within the box, peeping out of a velvet drawstring bag, was a glass globe. It 
was filled with that rosy light; it flowed in gentle pulses, like the beat of a 
satisfied heart.      \
"Oh, my lovely one," she murmured, lifting it out. She held it up be­fore her; 
let its pulsing radiance run down her wrinkled face like rain. "Oh, ye live, so 
ye do!"
Suddenly the color within the globe darkened toward scarlet. She felt it thrum 
in her hands like an immensely powerful motor, and again she felt that amazing 
wetness between her legs, that tidal tug she believed had been left behind long 
ago.
Then the thrumming died, and the light in the globe seemed to furl up like 
petals. Where it had been there was now a pinkish gloom . . . and three riders 
coming out of it. At first she thought it was the men who had brought her the 
globe—Jonas and the others. But no, these were younger, even younger than 
Depape, who was about twenty-five. The one on the left of the trio appeared to 
have a bird's skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle—strange but true.
Then that one and the one on the right were gone, darkened away somehow by the 
power of the glass, leaving only the one in the middle. She took in the jeans 
and boots he wore, the flat-brimmed hat that hid the upper half of his face, the 
easy way he sat his horse, and her first alarmed thought was Gunslinger! Come 
east from the Inner Baronies, aye, per­haps from Gilead itself! But she did not 
have to see the upper half of the rider's face to know he was little more than a 
child, and there were no guns on his hips. Yet she didn't think the youth came 
unarmed. If only she could see a little better .. .
She brought the glass almost to the tip of her nose and whispered, "Closer, 
lovie! Closer still!"
She didn't know what to expect—nothing at all seemed most likely—but within the 
dark circle of the glass, the figure did come closer. Swum closer, almost, like 
a horse and rider underwater, and she saw there was a quiver of arrows on his 
back. Before him, on the pommel of his saddle, was not a skull but a shortbow. 
And to the right side of the saddle, where a gunslinger might have carried a 
rifle in a scabbard, there was the feather-fluffed shaft of a lance. He was not 
one of the Old People, his face had none of that look ... yet she did not think 
he was of the Outer Arc, either.
"But who are ye, cully?" she breathed. "And how shall I know ye? Ye've got yer 
hat pulled down so far I can't see your God-pounding eyes, so ye do! By yer 
horse, mayhap ... or p'raps by yer ... get away, Musty! Why do yer trouble me 
so? Arrrr!"
The cat had come back from its lookout point and was twining back and forth 
between her swollen old ankles, waowing up at her in a voice even more rusty 
than its purr. When the old woman kicked out at him, Musty dodged agilely away . 
. . then immediately came back and started in again, looking up at her with 
moonstruck eyes and making those soft yowls.
Rhea kicked out at it again, this one just as ineffectual as the first one, then 
looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were 
gone. The rose light was gone, as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she 
held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.
The wind gusted, pressing her dress against the ruination that was her body. 
Musty, undaunted by the feeble kicks of his mistress, darted for­ward and began 
to twine about her ankles again, crying up at her the whole time.
"There, do ye see what you've done, ye nasty bag of fleas and dis­ease? The 
light's gone out of it, gone out just when I—"
Then she heard a sound from the cart track which led up to her hut, and 
understood why Musty had been acting out. It was singing she heard. It was the 
girl she heard. The girl was early.
Grimacing horribly—she loathed being caught by surprise, and the little miss 
down there would pay for doing it—she bent and put the glass back in its box. 
The inside was lined with padded silk, and the ball fit as neatly as the 
breakfast egg in His Lordship's cup. And still from down the hill (the cursed 
wind was wrong or she would have heard it sooner), the sound of the girl 
singing, now closer than ever:
 
"Love, o love, o careless love.
Can't you see what careless love has done?"
 
"I'll give'ee careless love, ye virgin bitch," the old woman said. She could 
smell the sour reek of sweat from under her arms, but that other moisture had 
dried up again. "I'll give ye payday for walking in early on old Rhea, so I 
will!"
She passed her fingers over the lock on the front of the box, but it wouldn't 
fasten. She supposed she had been overeager to have it open, and had broken 
something inside it when she used the touch. The eye and the motto seemed to 
mock her: i see who opens me. It could be put right, and in a jiffy, but right 
now even a jiffy was more than she had.
"Pestering cunt!” She whined, lifting her head briefly toward the ap­proaching 
voice (almost here now, by the gods, and forty-five minutes be­fore her time!). 
Then she closed the lid of the box. It gave her a pang to do it, because the 
glass was coming to life again, filling with that rosy glow, but there was no 
time for looking or dreaming now. Later, perhaps, after the object of Thorin's 
unseemly late-life prickishness had gone.
And you must restrain yourself from doing anything too awful to the girl, she 
cautioned herself. Remember she's here because of him, and at least ain't one of 
those green girls with a bun in the oven and a boyfriend acting reluctant about 
the cries o' marriage. It's Thorin 's doing, this one's what he thinks about 
after his ugly old crow of a wife is asleep and he takes himself in his hand and 
commences the evening milking; it's Thorin's doing, he has the old law on his 
side, and he has power. Further­more, what's in that box is his man's business, 
and if Jonas found out ye looked at it... that ye used it. ..
Aye, but no fear of that. And in the meantime, possession were nine-tenths of 
the law, were it not?
She hoisted the box under one arm, hoisted her skirts with her free hand, and 
ran back along the path to the hut. She could still run when she had to, aye, 
though few there were who'd believe it.
Musty ran at her heels, bounding along with his cloven tail held high and his 
extra legs flopping up and down in the moonlight.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      II
proving honesty
 
1
 
Rhea darted into her hut, crossed in front of the guttering fire, then stood in 
the doorway to her tiny bedroom, swiping a hand through her hair in a distracted 
gesture. The bitch hadn't seen her outside the hut—she surely would have stopped 
caterwauling, or at least faltered in it if she had— and that was good, but the 
cursed hidey-hole had sealed itself up again, and that was bad. There was no 
time to open it again, either. Rhea hurried to the bed, knelt, and pushed the 
box far back into the shadows beneath.
Ay, that would do; until Susy Greengown was gone, it would do very well. Smiling 
on the right side of her mouth (the left was mostly frozen), Rhea got up, 
brushed her dress, and went to meet her second appointment of the night.
 
2
 
Behind her, the unlocked lid of the box clicked open. It came up less than an 
inch, but that was enough to allow a sliver of pulsing rose-colored light to 
shine out.
 
3
 
Susan Delgado stopped about forty yards from the witch's hut, the sweat chilling 
on her arms and the nape of her neck. Had she just spied an old woman (surely 
the one she had come to see) dart down that last bit of path leading from the 
top of the hill? She thought she had.
Don't stop singing—when an old lady hurries like that, she doesn't want to be 
seen. If you stop singing, she'll likely know she was.
For a moment Susan thought she'd stop anyway—that her memory would close up like 
a startled hand and deny her another verse of the old song which she had been 
singing since youngest childhood. But the next verse came to her, and she 
continued on (with feet as well as voice):
 
"Once my cares were far away, 
Yes, once my cares were far away,
Now my love has gone from me
And misery is in my heart to stay."
 
A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way 
without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; al­ways had^ She was 
frightened to be out by moonlight, when werewolves were said to walk, she was 
frightened of her errand, and she was fright­ened by what that errand portended. 
Yet when she had gained the Great Road out of Hambry and her heart had demanded 
she run, she had run— under the light of the Kissing Moon and with her skirt 
held above her knees she had galloped like a pony, with her shadow galloping 
right be­side her. For a mile or more she had run, until every muscle in her 
body tingled and the air she pulled down her throat tasted like some sweet 
heated liquid. And when she reached the upland track leading to this high 
sinister, she had sung. Because her heart demanded it. And, she supposed, it 
really hadn't been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of 
her megrims away. Singing was good for that much, anyway.
Now she walked to the end of the path, singing the chorus of "Care­less Love." 
As she stepped into the scant light which fell through the open door and onto 
the stoop, a harsh raincrow voice spoke from the shadows: "Stop yer howling, 
missy—it catches in my brains like a fishhook!"
Susan, who had been told all her life that she had a fair singing voice, a gift 
from her gramma, no doubt, fell silent at once, abashed. She stood on the stoop 
with her hands clasped in front of her apron. Beneath the apron she wore her 
second-best dress (she only had two). Beneath it, her heart was thumping very 
hard.
A cat—a hideous thing with two extra legs sticking out of its sides like 
toasting forks—came into the doorway first. It looked up at her, seemed to 
measure her, then screwed its face up in a look that was eerily human: contempt. 
It hissed at her, then flashed away into the night.
Well, good evening to you, too, Susan thought.
The old woman she had been sent to see stepped into the doorway.
She looked Susan up and down with that same expression of flat-eyed contempt, 
then stood back. "Come in. And mind ye clap the door tight. The wind has a way 
of blowin it open, as ye see!"
Susan stepped inside. She didn't want to close herself into this bad-smelling 
room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesita­tion was ever a 
fault. So her father had said, whether the matter under discussion was sums and 
subtractions or how to deal with boys at barn-dances when their hands became 
overly adventurous. She pulled the door firmly to, and heard it latch.
"And here y'are," the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. 
It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the 
nursery—Winter's tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons 
full of toad-green liquid. There was no caul­dron over the fire in this room 
(nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan's opinion), but the girl 
guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better 
not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing 
as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea 
darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was 
something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag's 
skin.
"Yes," she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. 
"Here I am."
"And it's early y'are, my little sweeting. Early y'are! Hee!"
"I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That's what my da would 
have said."
The old woman's horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of 
the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. 
"Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and 
beard, the life mashed out of 'im by 'is own horse, aye, and went into the 
clearing at the end of the path with the music of his own snapping bones in his 
ears, so he did!"
The nervous smile slipped from Susan's face as if slapped away. She felt tears, 
always close at the mere mention of her da's name, bum at the back of her eyes. 
But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow's sight, she 
wouldn't.
"Let our business be quick and be done," she said in a dry voice that was far 
from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. 
But she was Pat Delgado's child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the 
Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a 
stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to 
reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her 
efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.
The hag, meanwhile, was watching Susan shrewdly, her bunch-knuckled hands 
planted on her hips while her cat twined around her an­kles. Her eyes were 
rheumy, but Susan saw enough of them to realize they were the same gray-green 
shade as the cat's eyes, and to wonder what sort of fell magic that might be. 
She felt an urge—a strong one—to drop her eyes, and would not. It was all right 
to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
"You look at me pert, missy," Rhea said at last. Her smile was dis­solving 
slowly into a petulant frown.
"Nay, old mother," Susan replied evenly. "Only as one who wishes to do the 
business she came for and be gone. I have come here at the wish of My Lord Mayor 
of Mejis, and at that of my Aunt Cordelia, sister of my father. My dear father, 
of whom I would hear no ill spoken."
"I speak as I do," the old woman said. The words were dismissive, yet there was 
a trace of fawning servility in the hag's voice. Susan set no im­portance on 
that; it was a tone such a thing as this had probably adopted her whole life, 
and came as automatically as breath. "I've lived alone a long time, with no 
mistress but myself, and once it begins, my tongue goes where it will."
"Then sometimes it might be best not to let it begin at all."
The old woman's eyes flashed uglily. "Curb your own, stripling girl, lest you 
find it dead in your mouth, where it will rot and make the Mayor think twice 
about kissing you when he smells its stink, aye, even under such a moon as 
this!"
Susan's heart filled with misery and bewilderment. She'd come up here intent on 
only one thing: getting the business done as quickly as pos­sible, a barely 
explained rite that was apt to be painful and sure to be shameful. Now this old 
woman was looking at her with flat and naked hatred. How could things have gone 
wrong with such suddenness? Or was it always this way with witches?
"We have begun badly, mistress—can we start over?" Susan asked suddenly, and 
held out her hand.
The hag looked startled, although she did reach out and make brief contact, the 
wrinkled tips of her fingers touching the short-nailed lingers of the 
sixteen-year-old girl who stood before her with her clear-skinned face shining 
and her long hair braided down her back. Susan had to make a real effort not to 
grimace at the touch, brief as it was. The old woman's fingers were as chilly as 
those of a corpse, but Susan had touched chilly fingers before ("Cold hands, 
warm heart," Aunt Cord sometimes said). The real unpleasantness was in the 
texture, the feel of cold flesh spongy and loose on the bones, as if the woman 
to whom they were attached had drowned and lain long in some pool.
"Nay, nay, there's no starting over," the old woman said, "yet may-hap we'll go 
on better than we've begun. Ye've a powerful friend in the Mayor, and I'd not 
have him for my enemy."
She's honest, at least, Susan thought, then had to laugh at herself. This woman 
would be honest only when she absolutely had to be; left to her own devices and 
desires, she'd lie about everything—the weather, the crops, the flights of birds 
come Reaping.
"Ye came before I expected ye, and it's put me out of temper, so it has. Have ye 
brought me something, missy? Ye have, I'll warrant!" Her eyes were glittering 
once more, this time not with anger.
Susan reached beneath her apron (so stupid, wearing an apron for an errand on 
the backside of nowhere, but it was what custom demanded) and into her pocket. 
There, tied to a string so it could not be easily lost (by young girls suddenly 
moved to run in the moonlight, perchance), was a cloth bag. Susan broke the 
binding string and brought the bag out. She put it in the outstretched hand 
before her, the palm so worn that the lines marking it were now little more than 
ghosts. She was careful not to touch Rhea again ... although the old woman would 
be touching her again, and soon.
"Is it the sound o' the wind makes ye shiver?" Rhea asked, although Susan could 
tell her mind was mostly fixed on the little bag; her fingers were busy tugging 
out the knot in the drawstring.
"Yes, the wind."
"And so it should. 'Tis the voices of the dead you hear in the wind, and when 
they scream so, 'tis because they regret—ah!"
The knot gave. She loosened the drawstring and tumbled two gold coins into her 
hand. They were unevenly milled and crude—no one had made such for 
generations—but they were heavy, and the eagles engraved upon them had a certain 
power. Rhea lifted one to her mouth, pulled back her lips to reveal a few 
gruesome teeth, and bit down. The hag looked at the faint indentations her teeth 
had left in the gold. For several seconds she gazed, rapt, then closed her 
fingers over them tightly.
While Rhea's attention was distracted by the coins, Susan happened to look 
through the open door to her left and into what she assumed was the witch's 
bedchamber. And here she saw an odd and disquieting thing: a light under the 
bed. A pink, pulsing light. It seemed to be coming from some kind of box, 
although she could not quite ...
The witch looked up, and Susan hastily moved her eyes to a comer of the room, 
where a net containing three or four strange white fruits hung from a hook. 
Then, as the old woman moved and her huge shadow danced ponderously away from 
that part of the wall, Susan saw they were not fruits at air, but skulls. She 
felt a sickish drop in her stomach.
"The fire needs building up, missy. Go round to the side of the house and bring 
back an armload of wood. Good-sized sticks are what's wanted, and never mind 
whining ye can't lug 'em. Ye're of a strappin good size, so ye are!"
Susan, who had quit whining about chores around the time she had quit pissing 
into her clouts, said nothing . . . although it did cross her mind to ask Rhea 
if everyone who brought her gold was invited to lug her wood. In truth, she 
didn't mind; the air outside would taste like wine after the stench of the hut.
She had almost reached the door when her foot struck something hot and yielding. 
The cat yowled. Susan stumbled and almost fell. From be­hind her, the old woman 
issued a series of gasping, choking sounds which Susan eventually recognized as 
laughter.
"Watch Musty, my little sweet one! Tricksy, he is! And tripsy as well, betimes, 
so he is! Hee!" And off she went, in another gale.
The cat looked up at Susan, its ears laid back, its gray-green eyes wide. It 
hissed at her. And Susan, unaware she was going to do it until it was done, 
hissed back. Like its expression of contempt, Musty's look of surprise was 
eerily—and, in this case, comically—human. It turned and fled for Rhea's 
bedroom, its split tail lashing. Susan opened the door and went outside to get 
the wood. Already she felt as if she had been here a thousand years, and that it 
might be a thousand more before she could go home.
 
4
 
The air was as sweet as she had hoped, perhaps even sweeter, and for a moment 
she only stood on the stoop, breathing it in, trying to cleanse her lungs . . . 
and her mind.
After five good breaths, she got herself in motion. Around the side of the house 
she went... but it was the wrong side, it seemed, for there was no woodpile 
here. There was a narrow excuse for a window, however, half-buried in some tough 
and unlovely creeper. It was toward the back of the hut, and must look in on the 
old woman's sleeping closet.
Don't look in there, whatever she's got under her bed isn't your busi­ness, and 
if she were to catch you. . .
She went to the window despite these admonitions, and peeked in.
It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face through the dense 
overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, 
and she wasn't. She was on her knees, the drawstring bag caught in her teeth, 
reaching under the bed.
She brought out a box and opened its lid, which was already ajar. Her face was 
flooded with soft pink radiance, and Susan gasped. For one mo­ment it was the 
face of a young girl—but one filled with cruelty as well as youth, the face of a 
self-willed child determined to learn all the wrong things for all the wrong 
reasons. The face of the girl this hag once had been, mayhap. The light appeared 
to be coming from some sort of glass ball.
The old woman looked at it for several moments, her eyes wide and fascinated. 
Her lips moved as if she were speaking to it or perhaps even singing to it; the 
little bag Susan had brought from town, its string still clamped in the hag's 
mouth, bobbed up and down as she spoke. Then, with what appeared to be great 
effort of will, she closed the box, cutting off the rosy light. Susan found 
herself relieved—there was something about it she didn't like.
The old woman cupped one hand over the silver lock in the middle of the lid, and 
a brief scarlet light spiked out from between her fingers. All this with the 
drawstring bag still hanging from her mouth. Then she put the box on the bed, 
knelt, and began running her hands over the dirt just beneath the bed's edge. 
Although she touched only with her palms, lines appeared as if she had used a 
drawing tool. These lines darkened, becom­ing what looked like grooves.
The wood, Susan! Gel the wood before she wakes up to how long you've been gone! 
For your father's sake!
Susan pulled the skirt of her dress all the way up to her waist—she did not want 
the old woman to see dirt or leaves on her clothing when she came back inside, 
did not want to answer the questions the sight of such smuts might provoke—and 
crawled beneath the window with her white cotton drawers flashing in the 
moonlight. Once she was past, she got to her feet again and hurried quietly 
around to the far side of the hut. Here she found the woodpile under an old, 
moldy-smelling hide. She took half a dozen good-sized chunks and walked back 
toward the front of the house with them in her arms.
When she entered, turning sideways to get her load through the door­way without 
dropping any, the old woman was back in the main room, staring moodily into the 
fireplace, where there was now little more than embers; Of the drawstring bag 
there was no sign.
"Took; you long enough, missy," Rhea said. She continued to look into the 
fireplace, as if Susan were of no account... but one foot tapped below the dirty 
hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.
Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she 
could while she walked. It wouldn't surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking 
near, hoping to trip her up. "I saw a spider," she said. "I flapped my apron at 
it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do."
"Ye'll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough," Rhea said, 
grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. "Out of old Thorin's nightshirt it'll 
come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, 
ye've brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire."
Rhea took two fat logs from Susan's pile and tossed them indiffer­ently onto the 
coals. Embers spiraled up the dark and faintly roaring shaft of the chimney. 
There, ye've scattered what's left of yer fire, ye silly old thing, and will 
likely have to rekindle the whole mess, Susan thought. Then Rhea reached into 
the fireplace with one splayed hand, spoke a gut­tural word, and the logs blazed 
up as if soaked in oil.
"Put the rest over there," she said, pointing at the woodbox. "And mind ye not 
be a scatterbark, missy."
What, and dirty all this neat? Susan thought. She bit the insides of her cheeks 
to kill the smile that wanted to rise on her mouth.
Rhea might have sensed it, however; when Susan straightened again, the old woman 
was looking at her with a dour, knowing expression.
"All right, mistress, let's do our business and have it done. Do ye know why 
you're here?"
"I am here at Mayor Thorin's wish," Susan repeated, knowing that was no real 
answer. She was frightened now—more frightened than when she had looked through 
the window and seen the old woman crooning to the glass ball. "His wife has come 
barren to the end of her courses. He wishes to have a son before he is also 
unable to—"
"Pish-tush, spare me the codswallop and pretty words. He wants tits and arse 
that don't squish in his hands and a box that'll grip what he pushes. If he's 
still man enough to push it, that is. If a son come of it, aye, fine, he'll give 
it over to ye to keep and raise until it's old enough to school, and after that 
ye'll see it no more. If it's a daughter, he'll likely take it from ye and give 
it to his new man, the one with the girl's hair and the limp, to drown in the 
nearest cattle-wallow."
Susan stared at her, shocked out of all measure.
The old woman saw the look and laughed. "Don't like the sound of the truth, do 
yer? Few do, missy. But that's neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a 
trig one, and she'll have done all right out of Thorin and Thorin's treasury. 
What gold you see of it's none o' mine . . . and won't be none o' yours, either, 
if you don't watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!"
I won't was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut 
(and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a 
hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west 
as she was now, without even the two gold coins she'd brought up here? And that 
was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At 
first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father's name, she 
had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice.'' And when there was 
no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.
She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then 
untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near 
the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shiv­ered it from her 
shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not 
to mind the greedy way Rhea of Coos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat 
came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs hobbling, and sat at 
Rhea's feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was 
cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.
"Hurry, girl, for yer father's sake!"
Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in 
only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm 
orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds 
behind her knees.
"And still she's not nekkid!" the old crow laughed. "Ain't we lah-di-dah! Aye, 
we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from 
yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart 
Thorin then, did ye? Hee!"
Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush 
uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She low­ered them to her sides.
"Ah, no wonder he wants ye!" the old woman said." 'Tis beautiful ye are, and 
true! Is she not, Musty?"
The cat waowed.
"There's dirt on yer knees," Rhea said suddenly. "How came it there?"    \
Susan felt a moment of awful panic. She had lifted her skirts to crawl beneath 
the hag's window . . . and hung herself by doing it.
Then an answer rose to her lips, and she spoke it calmly enough. "When I came in 
sight of your hut, I grew fearful. I knelt to pray, and raised my skirt so as 
not to soil it."
"I'm touched—to want a clean dress for the likes o' me! How good y'are! Don't 
you agree, Musty?"
The cat waowed, then began to lick one of its forepaws.
"Get on with it," Susan said. "You've been paid and I'll obey, but stop teasing 
and have done."
"You know what it is I have to do, mistress."
"I don't," Susan said. The tears were close again, burning the backs of her 
eyes, but she would not let them fall. Would not. "I have an idea, but when I 
asked Aunt Cord if I was right, she said that you'd 'take care of my education 
in that regard.' "
"Wouldn't dirty her mouth with the words, would she? Well, that's all right. Yer 
Aunt Rhea's not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won't. I'm to make sure 
that ye're physically and spiritually intact, missy.
Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it's a good enough name. So 
it is. Step to me."
Susan took two reluctant steps forward, so that her bare toes were al­most 
touching the old woman's slippers and her bare breasts were almost touching the 
old woman's dress.
"If a devil or demon has polluted yer spirit, such a thing as might taint the 
child you'll likely bear, it leaves a mark behind. Most often it's a suck-mark 
or a lover's bite, but there's others . .. open yer mouth!"
Susan did, and when the old woman bent closer, the reek of her was so strong 
that the girl's stomach clenched. She held her breath, praying this would be 
over soon.
"Run out yer tongue."
Susan ran out her tongue.
"Now send yer breezes into my face."
Susan exhaled her held breath. Rhea breathed it in and then, merci­fully, pulled 
her head away a little. She had been close enough for Susan to see the lice 
hopping in her hair.
"Sweet enough," the old woman said. "Aye, good's a meal. Now turn around."
Susan did, and felt the old witch's fingers trail down her back and to her 
buttocks. Their tips were cold as mud.
"Bend over and spread yer cheeks, missy, be not shy, Rhea's seen more than one 
pultry in her time!"
Face flushing—she could feel the beat of her heart in the center of her forehead 
and in the hollows of her temples—Susan did as told. And then she felt one of 
those corpselike fingers prod its way into her anus. Susan bit her lips to keep 
from screaming.
The invasion was mercifully short ... but there would be another, Su­san feared.
"Turn around."
She turned. The old woman passed her hands over Susan's breasts, flicked lightly 
at the nipples with her thumbs, then examined the under­sides carefully. Rhea 
slipped a finger into the cup of the girl's navel, then hitched up her own skirt 
and dropped to her knees with a grunt of effort. She passed her hands down 
Susan's legs, first front, then back. She seemed to take special pains with the 
area just below the calves, where the ten­dons ran.
"Lift yer right foot, girl."
Susan did, and uttered a nervous, screamy laugh as Rhea ran a thumb­nail down 
her instep to her heel. The old woman parted her toes, looking between each 
pair.
After this process had been repeated with the other foot, the old woman—still on 
her knees—said: "You know what comes next."
"Aye." The word came out of her in a little trembling rush.
"Hold ye still, missy—all else is well, clean as a willow-strip, ye are, but now 
we've come to the cozy nook that's all Thorin cares for; we've come to where 
honesty must really be proved. So hold ye still!"
Susan closed her eyes and thought of horses running along the Drop—nominally 
they were the Barony's horse, overlooked by Rimer, Thorin's Chancellor and the 
Barony's Minister of Inventory, but the horses didn't know that; they thought 
they were free, and if you were free in your mind, what else mattered?
Let me be free in my mind, as free as the horses along the Drop, and don't let 
her hurt me. Please, don't let her hurt me. And if she does, please help me to 
bear it in decent silence.
Cold fingers parted the downy hair below her navel; there was a pause, and then 
two cold fingers slipped inside her. There was pain, but only a moment of it, 
and not bad; she'd hurt herself worse stubbing her toe or barking her shin on 
the way to the privy in the middle of the night. The humiliation was the bad 
part, and the revulsion of Rhea's ancient touch.
"Caulked tight, ye are!" Rhea cried. "Good as ever was! But Thorin'll see to 
that, so he will! As for you, my girl, I'll tell yer a secret yer prissy aunt 
with her long nose 'n tight purse 'n little goosebump tits never knew: even a 
girl who's intact don't need to lack for a shiver now 'n then, if she knows 
how!"
The hag's withdrawing fingers closed gently around the little nubbin of flesh at 
the head of Susan's cleft. For one terrible second Susan thought they would 
pinch that sensitive place, which sometimes made her draw in a breath if it 
rubbed just so against the pommel of her saddle when she was riding, but instead 
the fingers caressed . . . then pressed ... and the girl was horrified to feel a 
heat which was far from unpleasant kindle in her belly.
"Like a little bud o' silk," the old woman crooned, and her meddling fingers 
moved faster. Susan felt her hips sway forward, as if with a mind and life of 
their own, and then she thought of the old woman's greedy, self-willed face, 
pink as the face of a whore by gaslight as it hung over the open box; she 
thought of the way the drawstring bag with the gold pieces in it had hung from 
the wrinkled mouth like some disgorged piece of flesh, and the heat she felt was 
gone. She drew back, trembling, her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in 
gooseflesh.
"You've finished what you were paid to do," Susan said. Her voice was dry and 
harsh.
Rhea's face knotted. "Ye'll not tell me aye, no, yes, or maybe, impu­dent 
stripling of a girl! I know when I'm done, I, Rhea, the Weirding of Coos, and—"
"Be still, and be on your feet before I kick you into the fire, unnatural 
thing."
The old woman's lips wriggled back from her few remaining teeth in a doglike 
sneer, and now, Susan realized, she and the witch-woman were back where they had 
been at the start: ready to claw each other's eyes out.
"Raise hand or foot to me, you impudent cunt, and what leaves my house will 
leave handless, footless, and blind of eye."
"I do not much doubt you could do it, but Thorin should be vexed," Susan said. 
It was the first time in her life she had ever invoked a man's name for 
protection. Realizing this made her feel ashamed . . . small, somehow. She 
didn't know why that should be, especially since she had agreed to sleep in his 
bed and bear his child, but it was.
The old woman stared, her seamed face working until it folded into a parody of a 
smile that was worse than her snarl. Puffing and pulling at the, arm of her 
chair, Rhea got to her feet. As she did, Susan quickly began to dress.
"Aye, vexed he would be. Perhaps you know best after all, missy;
I've had a strange night, and it's wakened parts of me better left asleep. 
Anything else that might have happened, take it as a compliment to yer youth'n 
purity . . . and to yer beauty as well. Aye. You're a beautiful thing, and 
there's no doubtin it. Yer hair, now . . . when yer let it down, as ye will for 
Thorin, I wot, when ye lay with him ... it glows like the sun, doesn't it?"
Susan did not want to force the old hag out of her posturing, but she didn't 
want to encourage these fawning compliments, either. Not when she could still 
see the hate in Rhea's rheumy eyes, not when she could feel the old woman's 
touch still crawling like beetles on her skin. She said nothing, only stepped 
into her dress, set it on her shoulders, and began to button up the front.
Rhea perhaps understood the run of her thoughts, for the smile dropped off her 
mouth and her manner grew businesslike. Susan found this a great relief.
"Well, never mind it. Ye've proved honest; ye may dress yerself and go. But not 
a word of what passed between us to Thorin, mind ye! Words between women need 
trouble no man's ear, especially one as great as he." Yet at this Rhea could not 
forbear a certain spasming sneer. Susan didn't know if the old woman was aware 
of it or not. "Are we agreed?"
Anything, anything, just as long as I can be out of here and away.
"You declare me proved?"
"Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it's not what I say that matters. 
Now ... wait... somewhere here ..."
She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked 
saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery 
flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then 
putting it aside.
"Where .. . where .. . arrrrr.. . here!"
She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (citgo stamped on it in 
ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the 
pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the 
sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to 
Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not 
understand at first:

Below it was a symbol:

 
"What's this?" she asked, tapping the little drawing. "Rhea, her mark. Known for 
six Baronies around, it is, and can't be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. 
Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself—I 
know her, y'see, and her bossy ways—tell her no, Rhea says no, she's not to have 
the keeping of it." "And if Thorin wants it?"
Rhea shrugged dismissively. "Let him keep it or bum it or wipe his bum with it, 
for all of me. It's nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all 
along, so you did. True?"
Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand 
inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in 
more ways than this nasty creature meant.
"But don't lose that paper. Unless you'd see me again, that is, and go through 
the same business a second time."
Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put 
the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.
"Now, come to the door, missy." She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan's 
arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, 
not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, 
Rhea did grip Susan's arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright 
silver disc hanging over the top of the Coos.
"The Kissing Moon," Rhea said. " 'Tis midsummer."
"Yes."
"Tell Thorin he's not to have you in his bed—or in a haystack, or on the 
scullery floor, or anywhere else—until Demon Moon rises full in the sky."
"Not until Reaping?" That was three months—a lifetime, it seemed to her. Susan 
tried not to show her delight at this reprieve. She'd thought Thorin would put 
an end to her virginity by moonrise the next night. She wasn't blind to the way 
he looked at her.
Rhea, meanwhile, was looking at the moon, seeming to calculate. Her hand went to 
the long tail of Susan's hair and stroked it. Susan bore this as well as she 
could, and just when she felt she could bear it no longer, Rhea dropped her hand 
back to her side and nodded. "Aye, not just Reaping, but true fin de 
ano—Fair-Night, tell him. Say that he may have you after the bonfire. You 
understand?"
"True fin de ano, yes." She could barely contain her joy.
"When the fire in Green Heart bums low and the last of the red-handed men are 
ashes," Rhea said. "Then and not until then. You must tell him so."
"I will."
The hand came out and began to stroke her hair again. Susan bore it.
After such good news, she thought, it would have been mean-spirited to do 
otherwise. "The time between now and Reaping you will use to medi­tate, and to 
gather your forces to produce the male child the Mayor wants ... or mayhap just 
to ride along the Drop and gather the last flowers of your maidenhood. Do you 
understand?"
"Yes." She dropped a curtsey. "Thankee-sai."
Rhea waved this off as if it were a flattery. "Speak not of what passed between 
us, mind. "Tis no one's affair but our own."
"I won't. And our business is done?"
"Well ... mayhap there's one more small thing ..." Rhea smiled to show it was 
indeed small, then raised her left hand in front of Susan's eyes with three 
fingers together and one apart. Glimmering in the fork be­tween was a silver 
medallion, seemingly produced from nowhere. The girl's eyes fastened on it at 
once. Until Rhea spoke a single guttural word, that was.
Then they closed.
 
5
 
Rhea looked at the girl who stood asleep on her stoop in the moonlight. As she 
replaced the medallion within her sleeve (her fingers were old and bunchy, but 
they moved dexterously enough when it was required, oh, aye), the businesslike 
expression fell from her face, and was replaced by a look of squint-eyed fury. 
Kick me into the fire, would you, you trull? Tat­tle to Thorin? But her threats 
and impudence weren't the worst. The worst had been the expression of revulsion 
on her face when she had pulled back from Rhea's touch.
Too good for Rhea, she was! And thought herself too good for Thorin as well, no 
doubt, she with sixteen years' worth of fine blonde hair hang­ing down from her 
head, hair Thorin no doubt dreamed of plunging his hands into even as he plunged 
and reared and plowed down below.
She couldn't hurt the girl, much as she wanted to and much as the girl deserved 
it; if nothing else, Thorin might take the glass ball away from her, and Rhea 
couldn't bear that. Not yet, anyway. So she could not hurt the girl, but she 
could do something that would spoil his pleasure in her, at least for awhile.
Rhea leaned close to the girl, grasped the long braid which lay down her back, 
and began to slip it through her fist, enjoying its silky smoothness.
"Susan," she whispered. "Do'ee hear me, Susan, daughter of Patrick?"
"Yes." The eyes did not open.
"Then listen." The light of the Kissing Moon fell on Rhea's face and turned it 
into a silver skull. "Listen to me well, and remember. Remember in the deep cave 
where yer waking mind never goes."
She pulled the braid through her hand again and again. Silky and     ?| smooth. 
Like the little bud between her legs.
"Remember," the girl in the doorway said.
"Aye. There's something ye'll do after he takes yer virginity. Ye'll do it right 
away, without even thinking about it. Now listen to me, Susan, daughter of 
Patrick, and hear me very well."
Still stroking the girl's hair, Rhea put her wrinkled lips to the smooth cup of 
Susan's ear and whispered in the moonlight.

 

 
 
C H A P T E R III
A MEETING ON
THE ROAD
 
1
 
She had never in her life had such a strange night, and it was probably not 
surprising that she didn't hear the rider approaching from behind until he was 
almost upon her.
The thing that troubled her most as she made her way back toward town was her 
new understanding of the compact she had made. It was good to have a 
reprieve—months yet before she would have to live up to her end of the 
bargain—but a reprieve didn't change the basic fact: when the Demon Moon was 
full, she would lose her virginity to Mayor Thorin, a skinny, twitchy man with 
fluffy white hair rising like a cloud around the bald spot on top of his head. A 
man whose wife regarded him with a cer­tain weary sadness that was painful to 
look at. Hart Thorin was a man who laughed uproariously when a company of 
players put on an enter­tainment involving head-knocking or pretend punching or 
rotten fruit-throwing, but who only looked puzzled at a story which was pathetic 
or tragical. A knuckle-cracker, a back-slapper, a dinner-table belcher, a man 
who had a way of looking anxiously toward his Chancellor at almost every other 
word, as if to make sure he hadn't offended Rimer in some way.
Susan had observed all these things often; her father had for years been in 
charge of the Barony's horse and had gone to Seafront often on business. Many 
times he had taken his much loved daughter with him. Oh, she had seen a lot of 
Hart Thorin over the years, and he had seen a lot of her, as well. Too much, 
mayhap! For what now seemed the most im­portant fact about him was that he was 
almost fifty years older than the girl who would perhaps bear his son.
She had made the bargain lightly enough—
No, not lightly, that was being unfair to herself... but she had lost little 
sleep over it, that much was true. She had thought, after listening to all Aunt 
Cord's arguments: Well, it's little enough, really, to have the in­denture off 
the lands; to finally own our little piece of the Drop in fact as well as in 
tradition . . . to actually have papers, one in our house and one in Rimer's 
files, saying it's ours. Aye, and to have horses again. Only three, 'tis true, 
but that's three more than we have now. And against that? To lie with him a time 
or two, and to bear a child, which millions of women have done before me with no 
harm. 'Tis not, after all, a mutant or a leper I'm being asked to partner with 
but just an old man with noisy knuckles. 'Tis not forever, and, as Aunt Cord 
says, I may still marry, if time and ka decree; I should not be the first woman 
to come to her hus­band's bed as a mother. And does it make me a whore to do 
such? The law says not, but never mind that; my heart's law is what matters, and 
my heart says that if I may gain the land that was my da's and three horses to 
run on it by being such, then it's a whore I'll be.
There was something else: Aunt Cord had capitalized—rather ruth­lessly, Susan 
now saw—on a child's innocence. It was the baby Aunt Cord had harped on, the 
cunning little baby she would have. Aunt Cord had known that Susan, the dolls of 
her childhood put aside not all that long ago, would love the idea of her own 
baby, a little living doll to dress and feed and sleep with in the heat of the 
afternoon.
What Cordelia had ignored (perhaps she's too innocent even to have considered 
it, Susan thought, but didn't quite believe) was what the hag-woman had made 
brutally clear to her this evening: Thorin wanted more than a child.
He wants tits and arse that don't squish in his hands and a box that 'll grip 
what he pushes.
Just thinking of those words made her face throb as she walked through the 
post-moonset dark toward town (no high-spirited running this time; no singing, 
either). She had agreed with vague thoughts of how managed livestock mated—they 
were allowed to go at it "until the seed took," then separated again. But now 
she knew that Thorin might want her again and again, probably would want her 
again and again, and com­mon law going back like iron for two hundred 
generations said that he could continue to lie with her until she who had proved 
the consort honest should prove her honestly with child as well, and that child 
honest in and of itself . . . not, that was, a mutant aberration. Susan had made 
discreet enquiries and knew that this second proving usually came around the 
fourth month of pregnancy ... around the time she would begin to show, even with 
her clothes on. It would be up to Rhea to make the judgment... and Rhea didn't 
like her.
Now that it was too late—now that she had accepted the compact for­mally 
tendered by the Chancellor, now that she had been proved honest by yon strange 
bitch—she rued the bargain. Mostly what she thought of was how Thorin would look 
with his pants off, his legs white and skinny, like the legs of a stork, and 
how, as they lay together, she would hear his long bones crackling: knees and 
back and elbows and neck.
And knuckles. Don't forget his knuckles.
Yes. Big old man's knuckles with hair growing out of them. Susan chuckled at the 
thought, it was that comical, but at the same time a warm tear ran unnoticed 
from the comer of one eye and tracked down her cheek. She wiped it away without 
knowing it, any more than she heard the clip-clip of approaching hoofs in the 
soft road-dust. Her mind was still far away, returning to the odd thing she had 
seen through the old woman's bedroom window—the soft but somehow unpleasant 
light coming from the pink globe, the hypnotized way the hag had been looking 
down at it...
When Susan at last heard the approaching horse, her first alarmed thought was 
that she must get into the copse of trees she was currently passing and hide. 
The chances of anyone aboveboard being on the road this late seemed small to 
her, especially now that such bad times had come to Mid-World—but it was too 
late for that.
The ditch, then, and sprawled flat. With the moon down, there was at least a 
chance that whoever it was would pass without—
But before she could even begin in that direction, the rider who had sneaked up 
behind her while she was thinking her long and rueful thoughts had hailed her. 
"Goodeven, lady, and may your days be long upon the earth."
She turned, thinking: What if it's one of the new men always lounging about 
Mayor's House or in the Travellers' Rest? Not the oldest one, the voice isn't 
wavery like his, but maybe one of the others . . . it could be the one they call 
Depape...
"Goodeven," she heard herself saying to the man shape on the tall horse. "May 
yours be long also."
Her voice didn't tremble, not that she could hear. She didn't think it was 
Depape, or the one named Reynolds, either. The only thing she could tell about 
the fellow for sure was that he wore a flat-brimmed hat, the sort she associated 
with men of the Inner Baronies, back when travel between east and west had been 
more common than it was now. Back before John Farson came—the Good Man—and the 
bloodletting began.
As the stranger came up beside her, she forgave herself a little for not hearing 
him approach—there was no buckle or bell on his gear that she could see, and 
everything was tied down so as not to snap or flap. It was almost the rig of an 
outlaw or a harrier (she had the idea that Jonas, he of the wavery voice, and 
his two friends might have been both, in other times and other climes) or even a 
gunslinger. But this man bore no guns, unless they were hidden. A bow on the 
pommel of his saddle and what looked like a lance in a scabbard, that was all. 
And there had never, she reckoned, been a gunslinger as young as this.
He clucked sidemouth at the horse just as her da had always done (and she 
herself, of course), and it stopped at once. As he swung one leg over his 
saddle, lifting it high and with unconscious grace, Susan said:
"Nay, nay, don't trouble yerself, stranger, but go as ye would!"
If he heard the alarm in her voice, he paid no heed to it. He slipped off the 
horse, not bothering with the tied-down stirrup, and landed neatly in front of 
her, the dust of the road puffing about his square-toed boots. By starlight she 
saw that he was young indeed, close to her own age on one side or the other. His 
clothes were those of a working cowboy, al­though new.
"Will Dearborn, at your service," he said, then doffed his hat, extended a foot 
on one bootheel, and bowed as they did in the Inner Baronies.
Such absurd courtliness out here in the middle of nowhere, with the acrid smell 
of the oil patch on the edge of town already in her nostrils, startled her out 
of her fear and into a laugh. She thought it would likely offend him, but he 
smiled instead. A good smile, honest and artless, its inner part lined with even 
teeth.
She dropped him a little curtsey, holding out one side of her dress. "Susan 
Delgado, at yours."
He tapped his throat thrice with his right hand. "Thankee-sai, Susan Delgado. 
We're well met, I hope. I didn't mean to startle you—"
"Ye did, a little."
"Yes, I thought I had. I'm sorry."
Yes. Not aye but yes. A young man, from the Inner Baronies, by the sound. She 
looked at him with new interest.
"Nay, ye need not apologize, for I was deep in my own thoughts," she said. "I'd 
been to see a ... friend ... and hadn't realized how much time had passed until 
I saw the moon was down. If ye stopped out of concern, I thankee, stranger, but 
ye may be on yer way as I would be on mine. It's only to the edge of the village 
I go—Hambry. It's close, now."
"Pretty speech and lovely sentiments," he answered with a grin, "but it's late, 
you're alone, and I think we may as well pass on together. Do you ride, sai?"
"Yes, but really—"
"Step over and meet my friend Rusher, then. He shall carry you the last two 
miles. He's gelded, sai, and gentle."
She looked at Will Dearborn with a mixture of amusement and irrita­tion. The 
thought which crossed her mind was If he calls me sai again, as though I were a 
schoolteacher or his doddery old great aunt, I'm going to take off this stupid 
apron and swat him with it. "I never minded a bit of temper in a horse docile 
enough to wear a saddle. Until his death, my fa­ther managed the Mayor's horses 
... and the Mayor in these parts is also Guard o' Barony. I've ridden my whole 
life."
She thought he might apologize, perhaps even stutter, but he only nodded with a 
calm thoughtfulness that she rather liked. "Then step to the stirrup, my lady. 
I'll walk beside and trouble you with no conversation, if you'd rather not have 
it. It's late, and talk palls after moonset, some say."
She shook her head, softening her refusal with a smile. "Nay. I thank ye for yer 
kindness, but it would not be well, mayhap, for me to be seen riding a strange 
young man's horse at eleven o' the clock. Lemon-juice won't take the stain out 
of a lady's reputation the way it will out of a shirt­waist, you know."
"There's no one out here to see you," the young man said in a mad­deningly 
reasonable voice. "And that you're tired, I can tell. Come, sai—"
"Please don't call me that. It makes me feel as ancient as a . . ." She 
hesitated for a brief moment, rethinking the word
(witch)
that first came to her mind. ". . . as an old woman."
"Miss Delgado, then. Are you sure you won't ride?"
"Sure as can be. I'd not ride cross-saddle in a dress in any case, Mr. 
Dearborn—not even if you were my own brother. 'Twouldn't be proper."
He stood in the stirrup himself, reached over to the far side of his sad­dle 
(Rusher stood docilely enough at this, only flicking his ears, which Susan would 
have been happy to flick herself had she been Rusher—they were that beautiful), 
and stepped back down with a rolled garment in his hands. It was tied with a 
rawhide hank. She thought it was a poncho.
"You may spread this over your lap and legs like a duster," he said. "There's 
quite enough of it for decorum's sake—it was my father's, and he's taller than 
me." He looked off toward the western hills for a moment, and she saw he was 
handsome, in a hard sort of way that jagged against his youth. She felt a little 
shiver inside her, and wished for the thousandth time that the foul old woman 
had kept her hands strictly on her business, as unpleasant as that business had 
been. Susan didn't want to look at this handsome stranger and remember Rhea's 
touch.
"Nay," she said gently. "Thankee again, I recognize yer kindness, but I must 
refuse."
"Then I'll walk along beside, and Rusher'll be our chaperone," he said 
cheerfully. "As far as the edge of town, at least, there'll be no eyes to see 
and think ill of a perfectly proper young woman and a more-or-less proper young 
man. And once there, I'll tip my hat and wish you a very good night."
"I wish ye wouldn't. Really." She brushed a hand across her fore­head. "Easy for 
you to say there are no eyes to see, but sometimes there are eyes even where 
there shouldn't be. And my position is ... a little delicate just now."
"I'll walk with you, however," he repeated, and now his face was somber. "These 
are not good times. Miss Delgado. Here in Mejis you are far from the worst of 
the troubles, but sometimes trouble reaches out."
She opened her mouth—to protest again, she supposed, perhaps to tell him that 
Pat Delgado's daughter could take care of herself—and then she thought of the 
Mayor's new men, and the cold way they had run their eyes over her when Thorin's 
attention had been elsewhere. She had seen those three this very night as she 
left on her way to the witch's hut. Them she had heard approaching, and in 
plenty of time for her to leave the road and rest behind a handy pinon tree (she 
refused to think of it as hiding, ex­actly). Back toward town they had gone, and 
she supposed they were drinking at the Travellers' Rest right now—and would 
continue to until Stanley Ruiz closed the bar—but she had no way of knowing that 
for sure. They could come back.
"If I can't dissuade ye, very well," she said, sighing with a vexed res­ignation 
she didn't really feel. "But only to the first mailbox—Mrs. Beech's. That marks 
the edge of town."
He tapped his throat again, and made another of those absurd, en­chanting 
bows—foot stuck out as if he would trip someone, heel planted in the dirt. 
"Thankee, Miss Delgado!"
At least he didn’t 't call me sai, she thought. That's a start.

 
2
 
She thought he'd chatter away like a magpie in spite of his promise to be 
silent, because that was what boys did around her—she was not vain of her looks, 
but she thought she was good-looking, if only because the boys could not shut up 
or stop shuffling their feet when they were around her. And this one would be 
full of questions the town boys didn't need to ask—how old was she, had she 
always lived in Hambry, were her parents alive, half a hundred others just as 
boring—but they would all circle in on the same one: did she have a steady 
fellow?
But Will Dearborn of the Inner Baronies didn't ask her about her schooling or 
family or friends (the most common way of approaching any romantic rivals, she 
had found). Will Dearborn simply walked along be­side her, one hand wrapped 
around Rusher's bridle, looking off east toward the Clean Sea. They were close 
enough to it now so that the teary smell of salt mingled with the tarry stench 
of oil, even though the wind was from the south.
They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn's presence, even 
if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oil patch, with 
its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had 
stopped pumping long since, and there was nei­ther the parts, the need, nor the 
understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along—nineteen out 
of about two hundred—could not be stopped. They just pumped and pumped, the 
supplies of oil be­neath them seemingly inexhaustible. A little was still used, 
but a very little—most simply ran back down into the wells beneath the dead 
pumping stations. The world had moved on, and this place reminded her of a 
strange mechanical graveyard where some of the corpses hadn't quite—
Something cold and smooth nuzzled the small of her back, and she wasn't quite 
able to stifle a little shriek. Will Dearborn wheeled toward her, his hands 
dropping toward his belt. Then he relaxed and smiled.
"Rusher's way of saying he feels ignored. I'm sorry, Miss Delgado."
She looked at the horse. Rusher looked back mildly, then dipped his head as if 
to say he was also sorry for having startled her.
Foolishness, girl, she thought, hearing the hearty, no-nonsense voice of her 
father. He wants to know why you 're being so standoffy, that's all. And so do 
I. 'Tisn't like you, so it's not.
"Mr. Dearborn, I've changed my mind," she said. "I'd like to ride."
 
3
 
He turned his back and stood looking out at Citgo with his hands in his pockets 
while Susan first laid the poncho over the cantle of the saddle (the plain black 
saddle of a working cowboy, without a Barony brand or even a ranch brand to mark 
it), and then mounted into the stirrup. She lifted her skirt and glanced around 
sharply, sure he would be stealing a peek, but his back was still to her. He 
seemed fascinated with the rusty oil derricks.
What's so interesting about them, cully? she thought, a trifle crossly— it was 
the lateness of the hour and the residue of her stirred-up emotions, she 
supposed. Filthy old things have been there six centuries and more, and I've 
been smelling their stink my whole life.
"Stand easy now, my boy," she said once she had her foot fixed in the stirrup. 
One hand held the top of the saddle's pommel, the other the reins. Rusher, 
meanwhile, flicked his ears as if to say he would stand easy all night, were 
that what she required.
She swung up, one long bare thigh flashing in the starlight, and felt the 
exhilaration of being horsed that she always felt . . . only tonight it seemed a 
little stronger, a little sweeter, a little sharper. Perhaps because the horse 
was such a beauty, perhaps because the horse was a stranger .. .
Perhaps because the horse's owner is a stranger, she thought, and fair.
That was nonsense, of course . . . and potentially dangerous nonsense. Yet it 
was also true. He was fair.
As she opened the poncho and spread it over her legs, Dearborn be­gan to 
whistle. And she realized, with a mixture of surprise and supersti­tious fear, 
what the tune was: "Careless Love." The very lay she had been singing on her way 
up to Rhea's hut.
Mayhap it's ka, girl, her father's voice whispered.
No such thing, she thought right back at him. I'll not see ka in every passing 
wind and shadow, like the old ladies who gather in Green Heart of a summer's 
evening. It's an old tune: everyone knows it.
Mayhap better if you're right. Pat Delgado's voice returned. For if it's ka, it 
'II come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da's 
barn stood before the cyclone when it came.
Not ka; she would not be seduced by the dark and the shadows and the grim shapes 
of the oil derricks into believing it was. Not ka but only a chance meeting with 
a nice young man on the lonely road back to town.
"I've made myself decent," she said in a dry voice that didn't sound much like 
her own. "Ye may turn back if you like, Mr. Dearborn."
He did turn and gazed at her. For a moment he said nothing, but she could see 
the look in his eyes well enough to know that he found her fair as well. And 
although this disquieted her—perhaps because of what he'd been whistling—she was 
also glad. Then he said, "You look well up there. You sit well."
"And I shall have horses of my own to sit before long," she said. Now the 
questions will come, she thought.
But he only nodded, as though he had known this about her already, and began to 
walk toward town again. Feeling a little disappointed and not knowing exactly 
why, she clucked sidemouth at Rusher and twitched her knees at him. He got 
moving, catching up with his master, who gave Rusher's muzzle a companionable 
little caress.
"What do they call that place yonder?" he asked, pointing at the derricks.
"The oil patch? Citgo."
"Some of the derricks still pump?"
"Aye, and no way to stop them. Not that anyone still knows."
"Oh," he said, and that was all—just oh. But he left his place by Rusher's head 
for a moment when they came to the weedy track leading into Citgo, walking 
across to look at the old disused guard-hut. In her childhood there had been a 
sign on it reading authorized personnel only, but it had blown away in some 
windstorm or other. Will Dearborn had his look and then came ambling back to the 
horse, boots puffing up summer dust, easy in his new clothes.
They went toward town, a young walking man in a flat-crowned hat, a young riding 
woman with a poncho spread over her lap and legs. The star­light rained down on 
them as it has on young men and women since time's first hour, and once she 
looked up and saw a meteor flash overhead—a brief and brilliant orange streak 
across the vault of heaven. Susan thought to wish on it, and then, with 
something like panic, realized she had no idea what to wish for. None at all.
 
4
 
She kept her own silence until they were a mile or so from town, and then asked 
the question which had been on her mind. She had planned to ask hers after he 
had begun asking his, and it irked her to be the one to break the silence, but 
in the end her curiosity was too much.
"Where do ye come from, Mr. Dearborn, and what brings ye to our little bit o' 
Mid-World ... if ye don't mind me asking?"
"Not at all," he said, looking up at her with a smile. "I'm glad to talk and was 
only trying to think how to begin. Talk's not a specialty of mine." Then what 
is. Will Dearborn? she wondered. Yes, she wondered very much, for in adjusting 
her position on the saddle, she had put her hand on the rolled blanket behind . 
. . and had touched something hidden inside that blanket. Something that felt 
like a gun. It didn't have to be, of course, but she remembered the way his 
hands had dropped instinctively toward his belt when she had cried out in 
surprise.
"I come from the In-World. I've an idea you probably guessed that much on your 
own. We have our own way of talking."
"Aye. Which Barony is yer home, might I ask?"
"New Canaan."
She felt a flash of real excitement at that. New Canaan! Center of the 
Affiliation! That did not mean all it once had, of course, but still—
"Not Gilead?" she asked, detesting the hint of a girlish gush she heard in her 
voice. And more than just a hint, mayhap.
"No," he said with a laugh. "Nothing so grand as Gilead. Only Hemphill, a 
village forty or so wheels west of there. Smaller than Hambry, I wot."
Wheels, she thought, marvelling at the archaism. He said wheels.
"And what brings ye to Hambry, then? May ye tell?"
"Why not? I've come with two of my friends, Mr. Richard Stock-worth of 
Pennilton, New Canaan, and Mr. Arthur Heath, a hilarious young man who actually 
does come from Gilead. We're here at the order of the Affiliation, and have come 
as counters."
"Counters of what?"
"Counters of anything and everything which may aid the Affiliation in the coming 
years," he said, and she heard no lightness in his voice now. " The business 
with the Good Man has grown serious."
"Has it? We hear little real news this far to the south and east of the hub."
He nodded. "The Barony's distance from the hub is the chief reason we're here. 
Mejis has been ever loyal to the Affiliation, and if supplies need to be drawn 
from this part of the Outers, they'll be sent. The ques­tion that needs 
answering is how much the Affiliation can count on."
"How much of what?"
"Yes," he agreed, as if she'd made a statement instead of asking a question. 
"And how much of what."
"Ye speak as though the Good Man were a real threat. He's just a bandit, surely, 
frosting his thefts and murders with talk of 'democracy' and 'equality'?"
Dearborn shrugged, and she thought for a moment that would be his only comment 
on the matter, but then he said, reluctantly: " 'Twas once so, perhaps. Times 
have changed. At some point the bandit became a general, and now the general 
would become a ruler in the name of the people." He paused, then added gravely, 
"The Northern and West'rd Baronies are in flames, lady."
"But those are thousands of miles away, surely!" This talk was upset­ting, and 
yet strangely exciting, too. Mostly it seemed exotic, after the pokey 
all-days-the-same world of Hambry, where someone's dry well was good for three 
days of animated conversation.
"Yes," he said. Not aye but yes—the sound was both strange and pleasing to her 
ear. "But the wind is blowing in this direction." He turned to her and smiled. 
Once more it softened his hard good looks, and made him seem no more than a 
child, up too late after his bedtime. "But I don't think we'll see John Farson 
tonight, do you?"
She smiled back. "If we did, Mr. Dearborn, would ye protect me from him?"
"No doubt," he said, still smiling, "but I should do so with greater 
en­thusiasm, I wot, if you were to let me call you by the name your father gave 
you."
"Then, in the interests of my own safety, ye may do so. And I suppose I must 
call ye Will, in those same interests."
" 'Tis both wise and prettily put," he said, the smile becoming a grin, wide and 
engaging. "I—" Then, walking as he was with his face turned back and up to her, 
Susan's new friend tripped over a rock Jutting out of the road and almost fell. 
Rusher whinnied through his nose and reared a little. Susan laughed merrily. The 
poncho shifted, revealing one bare leg, and she took a moment before putting 
matters right again. She liked him, aye, so she did. And what harm could there 
be in it? He was only a boy, after all. When he smiled, she could see he was 
only a year or two re­moved from jumping in haystacks. (The thought that she had 
recently graduated from haystack-jumping herself had somehow fled her mind.)
"I'm usually not clumsy," he said. "I hope I didn't startle you."
Not at all. Will; boys have been stubbing their toes around me ever since I grew 
my breasts.
"Not at all," she said, and returned to the previous topic. It interested her 
greatly. "So ye and yer friends come at the behest of the Affiliation to count 
our goods, do you?"
"Yes. The reason I took particular note of yon oil patch is because one of us 
will have to come back and count the working derricks—"
"I can spare ye that, Will. There are nineteen."
He nodded. "I'm in your debt. But we'll also need to make out—if we can—how much 
oil those nineteen pumps are bringing up."
"Are there so many oil-fired machines still working in New Canaan that such news 
matters? And do ye have the alchemy to change the oil into the stuff yer 
machines can use?"
"It's called refinery rather than alchemy in this case—at least I think so—and I 
believe there is one that still works. But no, we haven't that many machines, 
although there are still a few working filament-lights in the Great Hall at 
Gilead."
"Fancy it!" she said, delighted. She had seen pictures of filament-lights and 
electric flambeaux, but never the lights themselves. The last ones in Hambry 
(they had been called "spark-lights" in this part of the world, but she felt 
sure they were the same) had burned out two genera­tions ago.
"You said your father managed the Mayor's horses until his death," Will Dearborn 
said. "Was his name Patrick Delgado? It was, wasn't it?"
She looked down at him, badly startled and brought back to reality in an 
instant. "How do ye know that?"
"His name was in our lessons of calling. We're to count cattle, sheep, pigs, 
oxen . . . and horses. Of all your livestock, horses are the most im­portant. 
Patrick Delgado was the man we were to see in that regard. I'm sorry to hear 
he's come to the clearing at the end of the path, Susan. Will you accept my 
condolence?"
"Aye, and with thanks."
"Was it an accident?"
"Aye." Hoping her voice said what she wanted it to say, which was leave this 
subject, ask no more.
"Let me be honest with you," he said, and for the first time she thought she 
heard a false note there. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Certainly she had 
little experience of the world (Aunt Cord reminded her of this almost daily), 
but she had an idea that people who set on by saying Let me be honest with you 
were apt to go on by telling you straight-faced that rain fell up, money grew on 
trees, and babies were brought by the Grand Featherex.
"Aye, Will Dearborn," she said, her tone just the tiniest bit dry. "They say 
honesty's the best policy, so they do."
He looked at her a bit doubtfully, and then his smile shone out again. That 
smile was dangerous, she thought—a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy 
to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.
"There's not much Affiliation in the Affiliation these days. That's part of the 
reason Parson's gone on as long as he has; that's what has al­lowed his 
ambitions to grow. He's come a far way from the harrier who began as a 
stage-robber in Garlan and Desoy, and he'll come farther yet if the Affiliation 
isn't revitalized. Maybe all the way to Mejis."
She couldn't imagine what the Good Man could possibly want with her own sleepy 
little town in the Barony which lay closest to the Clean Sea, but she kept 
silent.
"In any case, it wasn't really the Affiliation that sent us," he said. "Not all 
this way to count cows and oil derricks and hectares of land un­der 
cultivation."
He paused a moment, looking down at the road (as if for more rocks in the way of 
his boots) and stroking Rusher's nose with absentminded gentleness. She thought 
he was embarrassed, perhaps even 'shamed. "We were sent by our fathers."
"Yer—" Then she understood. Bad boys, they were, sent out on a make-work quest 
that wasn't quite exile. She guessed their real job in Hambry might be to 
rehabilitate their reputations. Well, she thought, it certainly explains the 
quicksand smile, doesn't it? 'Ware this one, Susan; he's the sort to burn 
bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merry way without a single look 
back. Not in meanness but in plain old boy-carelessness.
That made her think of the old song again, the one she'd been singing, the one 
he'd been whistling.
"Our fathers, yes."
Susan Delgado had cut a caper or two (or perhaps it was two dozen) other own in 
her time, and she felt sympathy for Will Dearborn as well as caution. And 
interest. Bad boys could be amusing ... up to a point. The question was, how bad 
had Will and his cronies been?
"Helling?" she asked.
"Helling," he agreed, still sounding glum but perhaps brightening just a bit 
about the eyes and mouth. "We were warned; yes, warned very well. There was ... 
a certain amount of drinking."
And a few girls to squeeze with the hand not busy squeezing the ale-pot? It was 
a question no nice girl could outright ask, but one that couldn't help occurring 
to her mind.
Now the smile which had played briefly around the comers of his mouth dropped 
away. "We pushed it too far and the fun stopped. Fools have a way of doing that. 
One night there was a race. One moonless night. After midnight. All of us drunk. 
One of the horses caught his hoof in a gopher-hole and snapped a foreleg. He had 
to be put down."
Susan winced. It wasn't the worst thing she could think of, but bad enough. And 
when he opened his mouth again, it got worse.
"The horse was a thoroughbred, one of just three owned by my friend Richard's 
father, who is not well-to-do. There were scenes in our house­holds which I 
haven't any desire to remember, let alone talk about. I'll make a long story 
short and say that, after much talk and many proposals for punishment, we were 
sent here, on this errand. It was Arthur's father's idea. I think Arthur's da 
has always been a bit appalled by Arthur. Cer­tainly Arthur's ructions didn't 
come from George Heath's side."
Susan smiled to herself, thinking of Aunt Cordelia saying, "She cer­tainly 
doesn't get it from our side of the family." Then the calculated pause, followed 
by: "She had a great-aunt on her mother's side who ran crazy . . . you didn't 
know? Yes! Set herself on fire and threw herself over the Drop. In the year of 
the comet, it was."
"Anyway," Will resumed, "Mr. Heath set us on with a saying from his own 
father—'One should meditate in purgatory.' And here we are."
"Hambry's far from purgatory."
He sketched his funny little how again. "If it were, all should want to be bad 
enough to come here and meet the pretty denizens."
"Work on that one a bit," she said in her driest voice. "It's still rough, 1 
fear. Perhaps—"
She fell silent as a dismaying realization occurred to her: she was go­ing to 
have to hope this boy would enter into a limited conspiracy with her. Otherwise, 
she was apt to be embarrassed.
"Susan?"
"I was just thinking. Are you here yet, Will? Officially, I mean?"
"No," he said, taking her meaning at once. And likely already seeing where this 
was going. He seemed sharp enough, in his way. "We only ar­rived in Barony this 
afternoon, and you're the first person any of us has spoken to ... unless, that 
is, Richard and Arthur have met folks. I couldn't sleep, and so came out to ride 
and to think things over a little. We're camped over there." He pointed to the 
right. "On that long slope that runs toward the sea."
"Aye, the Drop, it's called." She realized that Will and his mates might even be 
camped on what would be her own land by law before much more time had passed. 
The thought was amusing and exciting and a little startling.
"Tomorrow we ride into town and present our compliments to My Lord Mayor, Hart 
Thorin. He's a bit of a fool, according to what we were told before leaving New 
Canaan."
"Were ye indeed told so?" she asked, raising one eyebrow.
"Yes—apt to blabber, fond of strong drink, even more fond of young girls," Will 
said. "Is it true, would you say?"
"I think ye must judge for yerself," said she, stifling a smile with some 
effort.
"In any case, we'll also be presenting to the Honorable Kimba Rimer, Thorin's 
Chancellor, and I understand he knows his beans. And counts his beans, as well."
"Thorin will have ye to dinner at Mayor's House," Susan said. "Per­haps not 
tomorrow night, but surely the night after."
"A dinner of state in Hambry," Will said, smiling and still stroking Rusher's 
nose. "Gods, how shall I bear the agony of my anticipation?"
"Never mind yer nettlesome mouth," she said, "but only listen, ifye'd be my 
friend. This is important."
His smile dropped away, and she saw again—as she had for a moment or two 
before—the man he'd be before too many more years had passed. The hard face, the 
concentrated eyes, the merciless mouth. It was a frightening face, in a way—a 
frightening prospect—and yet, still, the place the old hag had touched felt warm 
and she found it difficult to take her eyes off him. What, she wondered, was his 
hair like under that stupid hat he wore?
"Tell me, Susan."
"If you and yer friends come to table at Thorin's, ye may see me. If ye see me, 
Will, see me for the first time. See Miss Delgado, as I shall see Mr. Dearborn. 
Do'ee take my meaning?"
"To the letter." He was looking at her thoughtfully. "Do you serve? Surely, if 
your father was the Barony's chief drover, you do not—"
"Never mind what I do or don't do. Just promise that if we meet at Seafront, we 
meet for the first time."
"I promise. But—"
"No more questions. We've nearly come to the place where we must part ways, and 
I want to give ye a warning—fair payment for the ride on this nice mount of 
yours, mayhap. If ye dine with Thorin and Rimer, ye'll not be the only new folk 
at his table. There'll likely be three others, men Thorin has hired to serve as 
private guards o' the house."
"Not as Sheriff' s deputies?"
"Nay, they answer to none but Thorin ... or, mayhap, to Rimer. Their names are 
Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds. They look like hard boys to me ... although Jonas's 
boyhood is so long behind him that I imagine he's forgot he ever had one."
"Jonas is the leader?"
"Aye. He limps, has hair that falls to his shoulders pretty as any girl's, and 
the quavery voice of an old gaffer who spends his days polishing the 
chimney-comer... but I think he's the most dangerous of the three all the same. 
I'd guess these three have forgot more about helling than you and yer friends 
will ever learn."
Now why had she told him all that? She didn't know, exactly. Grati­tude, 
perhaps. He had promised to keep the secret of this late-night meeting, and he 
had the look of a promise-keeper, in hack with his father or not.
"I'll watch them. And I thank you for the advice." They were now climbing a 
long, gentle slope. Overhead, Old Mother blazed relentlessly. "Bodyguards," he 
mused. "Bodyguards in sleepy little Hambry. It's strange times, Susan. Strange 
indeed."
"Aye." She had wondered about Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds her­self, and could 
think of no good reason for them to be in town. Had they been Rimer's doing. 
Rimer's decision? It seemed likely—Thorin wasn't the sort of man to even think 
about bodyguards, she would have said; the High Sheriff had always done well 
enough for him—but still... why?
They breasted the hill. Below them lay a nestle of buildings—the vil­lage of 
Hambry. Only a few lights still shone. The brightest cluster marked the 
Travellers' Rest. From here, on the warm breeze, she could hear the piano 
beating out "Hey Jude" and a score of drunken voices gleefully murdering the 
chorus. Not the three men of whom she had warned Will Dearborn, though; they 
would be standing at the bar, watching the room with their flat eyes. Not the 
singing type were those three. Each had a small blue coffin-shape tattooed on 
his right hand, burned into the web­bing between thumb and forefinger. She 
thought to tell Will this, then re­alized he'd see for himself soon enough. 
Instead, she pointed a little way down the slope, at a dark shape which overhung 
the road on a chain. "Do ye see that?"
''Yes." He heaved a large and rather comical sigh. "Is it the object I fear 
beyond all others? Is it the dread shape of Mrs. Beech's mailbox?"
"Aye. And it's there we must part."
"If you say we must, we must. Yet I wish—" Just then the wind shifted, as it 
sometimes did in the summer, and blew a strong gust out of the west. The smell 
of sea-salt was gone in an instant, and so was the sound of the drunken, singing 
voices. What replaced them was a sound infinitely more sinister, one that never 
failed to produce a scutter of gooseflesh up her back: a low, atonal noise, like 
the warble of a siren be­ing turned by a man without much longer to live.
Will took a step backward, eyes widening, and again she noticed his hands take a 
dip toward his belt, as if reaching for something not there.
"What in gods' name is that?"
"It's a thinny," she said quietly. "In Eyebolt Canyon. Have ye never heard of 
such?"
"Heard of, yes, but never heard until now. Gods, how do you stand it? It sounds 
alive!"
She had never thought of it quite like that, but now, in a way listening with 
his ears instead of her own, she thought he was right. It was as if some sick 
part of the night had gained a voice and was actually trying to sing.
She shivered. Rusher felt the momentary increased pressure of her knees and 
whickered softly, craning his head around to look at her.
"We don't often hear it so clearly at this time of year," she said. "In the 
fall, the men bum it to quiet."
"I don't understand."
Who did? Who understood anything anymore? Gods, they couldn't even turn off the 
few oil-pumps in Citgo that still worked, although half of them squealed like 
pigs in a slaughtering chute. These days you were usually just grateful to find 
things that still worked at all.
"In the summer, when there's time, drovers and cowboys drag loads of brush to 
the mouth of Eyebolt," she said. "Dead brush is all right, but live is better, 
for it's smoke that's wanted, and the heavier the better. Eye-bolt's a box 
canyon, very short and steep-walled. Almost like a chimney lying on its side, 
you see?"
"Yes."
"The traditional time for burning is Reap Mom—the day after the fair and the 
feast and the fire."
"The first day of winter."
"Aye although in these parts it doesn't feel like winter so soon. In any case 
it's no tradition; the brush is sometimes lit sooner, if the winds have been 
prankish or if the sound's particularly strong. It upsets the live­stock, you 
know—cows give poorly when the noise of the thinny's strong—and it makes sleep 
difficult."
"I should think it would." Will was still looking north, and a stronger gust of 
wind blew his hat off. It fell to his back, the rawhide tugstring pulling 
against the line of his throat. The hair so revealed was a little long, and as 
black as a crow's wing. She felt a sudden, greedy desire to run her hands 
through it, to let her fingers tell its texture—rough or smooth or silky? And 
how would it smell? At this she felt another shiver of heat down low in her 
belly. He turned to her as though he had read her mind, and she flushed, 
grateful that he wouldn't be able to see the darkening of her cheek.
"How long has it been there?"
"Since before I was born," she said, "but not before my da was born. He said 
that the ground shook in an earthquake just before it came. Some say the 
earthquake brought it, some say that's superstitious nonsense. All I know is 
that it's always been there. The smoke quiets it awhile, the way it will quiet a 
hive of bees or wasps, but the sound always comes back. The brush piled at the 
mouth helps to keep any wandering livestock out, too—sometimes they're drawn to 
it, gods know why. But if a cow or sheep does happen to yet in—after the burning 
and before the next year's pile has started to grow, mayhap—it doesn't come back 
out. Whatever it is, it's hungry."
She put his poncho aside, lifted her right leg over the saddle without so much 
as touching the horn, and slipped off Rusher—all this in a single liquid 
movement. It was a stunt made for pants rather than a dress, and she knew from 
the further widening of his eyes that he'd seen a good lot of her . . . but 
nothing she had to wash with the bathroom door closed, so what of that? And that 
quick dismount had ever been a favorite trick of hers when she was in a showoffy 
mood.
"Pretty!" he exclaimed.
"I learned it from my da," she said, responding to the more innocent 
interpretation of his compliment. Her smile as she handed him the reins, 
however, suggested that she was willing to accept the compliment any way it was 
meant.
"Susan? Have you ever seen the thinny?"
"Aye, once or twice. From above."
"What does it look like?"
"Ugly," she responded at once. Until tonight, when she had observed Rhea's smile 
up close and endured her twiddling, meddling fingers, she would have said it was 
the ugliest thing she had ever seen. "It looks a lit­tle like a slow-burning 
peat fire, and a little like a swamp full of scummy green water. There's a mist 
that rises off it. Sometimes it looks like long, skinny arms. With hands at the 
end of em."
"Is it growing?"
"Aye, they say it is, that every thinny grows, but it grows slowly. 'Twon't 
escape Eyebolt Canyon in your time or mine."
She looked up at the sky, and saw that the constellations had contin­ued to tilt 
along their tracks as they spoke. She felt she could talk to him all night—about 
the thinny, or Citgo, or her irritating aunt, or just about anything—and the 
idea dismayed her. Why should this happen to her now, for the gods' sake? After 
three years of dismissing the Hambry boys, why should she now meet a boy who 
interested her so strangely? Why was life so unfair?
Her earlier thought, the one she'd heard in her father's voice, recurred to her: 
If it's ka, it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more 
than a barn before a cyclone.
But no. And no. And no. So set she, with all her considerable determi­nation, 
her mind against the idea. This was no bam; this was her life.
Susan reached out and touched the rusty tin of Mrs. Beech's mailbox, as if to 
steady herself in the world. Her little hopes and daydreams didn't mean so much, 
perhaps, but her father had taught her to measure herself by her ability to do 
the things she'd said she would do, and she would not overthrow his teachings 
simply because she happened to encounter a good-looking boy at a time when her 
body and her emotions were in a stew.
"I'll leave ye here to either rejoin yer friends or resume yer ride," she said. 
The gravity she heard in her voice made her feel a bit sad, for it was an adult 
gravity. "But remember yer promise, Will—if ye see me at Seafront—Mayor's 
House—and ifye'd be my friend, see me there for the first time. As I'd see you."
He nodded, and she saw her seriousness now mirrored in his own face. And the 
sadness, mayhap. "I've never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she'd 
accept a visit of me. I'd ask of you, Susan, daughter of Patrick—I'd even bring 
you flowers to sweeten my chances—but it would do no good, I think."
She shook her head. "Nay. Twouldn't."
"Are you promised in marriage? It's forward of me to ask, I know, but I mean no 
harm."
"I'm sure ye don't, but I'd as soon not answer. My position is a deli­cate one 
just now, as I told ye. Besides, it's late. Here's where we part, Will. But stay 
. . . one more moment . . ."
She rummaged in the pocket of her apron and brought out half a cake wrapped in a 
piece of green leaf. The other half she had eaten on her way up to the Coos ... 
in what now felt like the other half of her life. She held what was left of her 
little evening meal out to Rusher, who sniffed it, then ate it and nuzzled her 
hand. She smiled, liking the velvet tickle in the cup of her palm. "Aye, thee's 
a good horse, so ye are."
She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots 
and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he 
looked her age again, or younger. "We were well met, weren't we?" he asked.
She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was 
doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on 
the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
"Aye, very well met. Will." But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a 
flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to re­peat the experience, 
she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
"Nay, that was only a thank-you, and one thank-you should be enough for a 
gentleman. Go yer course in peace, Will."
He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a mo­ment as if 
he didn't know what in the world they were, and then looked hack at her. She 
could see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had 
made. She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.
"And you yours," he said, swinging into the saddle. "I look forward to meeting 
you for the first time."
He smiled at her, and she saw both longing and wishes in that smile. Then he 
gigged the horse, turned him, and started back the way they'd come—to have 
another look at the oil patch, mayhap. She stood where she was, by Mrs. Beech's 
mailbox, willing him to turn around and wave so she could see his face once 
more. She felt sure he would . . . but he didn't. Then, just as she was about to 
turn away and start down the hill to town, he did turn, and his hand lifted, 
fluttering for a moment in the dark like a moth.
Susan lifted her own in return and then went her way, feeling happy and unhappy 
at the same time. Yet—and this was perhaps the most im­portant thing—she no 
longer felt soiled. When she had touched the boy's lips, Rhea's touch seemed to 
have left her skin. A small magic, perhaps, but she welcomed it.
She walked on, smiling a little and looking up at the stars more fre­quently 
than was her habit when out after dark.

 

 
 
CHAPTER IV
LONG AFTER MOONSET
 
1
 
He rode restlessly for nearly two hours back and forth along what she called the 
Drop, never pushing Rusher above a trot, although what he wanted to do was 
gallop the big gelding under the stars until his own blood began to cool a 
little.
It'll cool plenty if you draw attention to yourself, he thought, and likely you 
won't even have to cool it yourself. Fools are the only folk on the earth who 
can absolutely count on getting what they deserve. That old saying made him 
think of the scarred and bowlegged man who had been his life's greatest teacher, 
and he smiled.
At last he turned his horse down the slope to the trickle of brook which ran 
there, and followed it a mile and a half upstream (past several gathers of 
horse; they looked at Rusher with a kind of sleepy, wall-eyed surprise) to a 
grove of willows. From the hollow within, a horse whick­ered softly. Rusher 
whickered in return, stamping one hoof and nodding his head up and down.
His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and 
suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper 
half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.
He dipped for his guns—the third time tonight he'd done that, and for the third 
time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he rec­ognized what 
was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook's skull.
The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off 
his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, "ugly as 
an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed") and hung it here as a prank greeting. 
Him and his jokes! Rusher's master batted it aside hard enough to break the 
string and send the skull flying into the dark.
"Fie, Roland," said a voice from the shadows. It was reproachful, but there was 
laughter bubbling just beneath ... as there always was. Cuthbert was his oldest 
friend—the marks of their first teeth had been embed­ded on many of the same 
toys—but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his 
laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a 
traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. 
He'd told Roland he couldn't stay, couldn't watch . . . but in the end he had 
done both. Be­cause neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were 
the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.
As Roland entered the hollow at the center of the grove, a dark shape stepped 
out from behind the tree where it had been keeping. Halfway across the clearing, 
it resolved itself into a tall, narrow-hipped boy who was barefooted below his 
jeans and bare-chested above them. In one hand he held an enormous antique 
revolver—a kind which was sometimes called a beer-barrel because of the 
cylinder's size.
"Fie," Cuthbert repeated, as if he liked the sound of this word, not ar­chaic 
only in forgotten backwaters like Mejis. "That's a fine way to treat the guard 
o' the watch, smacking the poor thin-faced fellow halfway to the nearest 
mountain-range!"
"If I'd been wearing a gun, I likely would have blown it to smith­ereens and 
woken half the countryside."
"I knew you wouldn't be going about strapped," Cuthbert answered mildly. "You're 
remarkably ill-looking, Roland son of Steven, but no­body's fool even as you 
approach the ancient age of fifteen."
"I thought we agreed we'd use the names we're travelling under. Even among 
ourselves."
Cuthbert stuck out his leg, bare heel planted in the turf, and bowed with his 
arms outstretched and his hands strenuously bent at the wrist—an inspired 
imitation of the sort of man for whom court has become career. He also looked 
remarkably like a heron standing in a marsh, and Roland snorted laughter in 
spite of himself. Then he touched the inside of his left wrist to his forehead, 
to see if he had a fever. He felt feverish enough in­side his head, gods knew, 
but the skin above his eyes felt cool.
"I cry your pardon, gunslinger," Cuthbert said, his eyes and hands still turned 
humbly down.
The smile on Roland's face died. "And don't call me that again, Cuth­bert. 
Please. Not here, not anywhere. Not if you value me."
Cuthbert dropped his pose at once and came quickly to where Roland sat his 
horse. He looked honestly humbled.
"Roland—Will—I'm sorry."
Roland clapped him on the shoulder. "No harm done. Just remember from here on 
out. Mejis may be at the end of the world . . . but it still is the world. 
Where's Alain?"
"Dick, do you mean? Where do you think?" Cuthbert pointed across the clearing, 
to where a dark hulk was either snoring or slowly choking to death.
"That one," Cuthbert said, "would sleep through an earthquake."
"But you heard me coming and woke."
"Yes," Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland's face, searching it with an 
intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. "Did something happen to you? 
You look different."
"Do I?"
"Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow."
If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided 
without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of 
them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor's House, 
it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm 
in that?
"I've been properly aired, all right," he said, dismounting and bending to 
uncinch the girths of his saddle. "I've seen some interesting things, too."
"Ah? Speak, companion of my bosom's dearest tenant."
"I'll wait until tomorrow, I think, when yon hibernating bear is finally awake. 
Then I only have to tell once. Besides, I'm tired. I'll share you one thing, 
though: there are too many horses in these parts, even for a Barony renowned for 
its horseflesh. Too many by far."
Before Cuthbert could ask any questions, Roland pulled the saddle from Rusher's 
back and set it down beside three small wicker cages which had been bound 
together with rawhide, making them into a carrier which could be secured to a 
horse's back. Inside, three pigeons with white rings around their necks cooed 
sleepily. One took his head out from be­neath his wing, had a peek at Roland, 
and then tucked himself away again.
"These fellows all right?" Roland asked.
"Fine. Pecking and shitting happily in their straw. As far as they're concerned, 
they're on vacation. What did you mean about—"
"Tomorrow," Roland said, and Cuthbert, seeing that there would be no more, only 
nodded and went to find his lean and bony lookout.
Twenty minutes later, Rusher unloaded and rubbed down and set to forage with 
Buckskin and Glue Boy (Cuthbert could not even name his horse as a normal person 
would), Roland lay on his back in his bedroll, looking up at the late stars 
overhead. Cuthbert had gone back to sleep as easily as he had awakened at the 
sound of Rusher's hoofs, but Roland had never felt less sleepy in his life.
His mind turned back a month, to the whore's room, to his father sit­ting on the 
whore's bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken—I have known 
for two years—had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland's head. He suspected 
they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.
But his father had had much more to say. About Marten. About Roland's mother, 
who was, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning. About harriers who called 
themselves patriots. And about John Farson, who had indeed been in Cressia, and 
who was gone from that place now—vanished, as he had a way of doing, like smoke 
in a high wind. Be­fore leaving, he and his men had burned Indrie, the Barony 
seat, pretty much to the ground. The slaughter had been in the hundreds, and 
perhaps it was no surprise that Cressia had since repudiated the Affiliation and 
spoken for the Good Man. The Barony Governor, the Mayor of Indrie, and the High 
Sheriff had all ended the early summer day which concluded Farson's visit with 
their heads on the wall guarding the town's entrance. That was, Steven Deschain 
had said, "pretty persuasive politics."
It was a game of Castles where both armies had come out from be­hind their 
Hillocks and the final moves had commenced, Roland's father had said, and as was 
so often the case with popular revolutions, that game was apt to be over before 
many in the Baronies of Mid-World had begun to realize that John Farson was a 
serious threat... or, if you were one of those who believed passionately in his 
vision of democracy and an end to what he called "class slavery and ancient 
fairy-tales," a serious agent of change.
His father and his father's small ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland was amazed to 
learn, cared little about Farson in either light; they looked upon him as small 
cheese. Looked upon the Affiliation itself as small cheese; come to that.
I'm going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and 
looking somberly at his only son. the one who had lived. There is no true safe 
place left in Mid- World, hut the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close 
to true safety as any place may be these days . . . so it's there you'll go, 
along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that 
laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You 'd be better off with a barking 
dog.
Roland, who on any other day in his life would have been overjoyed at the 
prospect of seeing some of the wider world, had protested hotly. If the final 
battles against the Good Man were at hand, he wanted to fight them at his 
father's side. He was a gunslinger now, after all, if only a 'prentice, and—
His father had shaken his head, slowly and emphatically. No, Roland. You don't 
understand. You shall, however; as well as possible, you shall.
Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World's last 
living city—green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons 
flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting 
on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of 
everything. His father had told him more (not everything), and he had understood 
more (far from everything—nor did his father understand everything). The Dark 
Tower had not been men­tioned by either of them, but already it hung in Roland's 
mind, a possi­bility like a storm cloud far away on the horizon.
Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with 
dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had en­chanted his mother, not 
the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia . . . but 
the Dark Tower?
He hadn't asked.
He hadn't dared ask.
Now he shifted in his bedroll and closed his eyes. He saw the girl's face at 
once; he felt her lips pressed firmly against his own again, and smelled the 
scent of her skin. He was instantly hot from the top of his head to the base of 
his spine, cold from the base of his spine to the tips of his toes. Then he 
thought of the way her legs had flashed as she slid from Rusher's back (also the 
glimmer of the undergarments beneath her briefly raised dress), and his hot half 
and cold half changed places.
The whore had taken his virginity but wouldn't kiss him; had turned her face 
aside when he tried to kiss her. She'd allowed him to do whatever else he 
wanted, but not that. At the time he'd been bitterly disappointed. Now he was 
glad.
The eye of his adolescent mind, both restless and clear, considered (he braid 
which fell down her back to her waist, the soft dimples which had formed at the 
comers of her mouth when she smiled, the lilt of her voice, her old-fashioned 
way of saying aye and nay, ye and yer and da. He thought of how her hands had 
felt on his shoulders as she stretched up to kiss him, and thought he would give 
everything he owned to feel her hands there again, so light and so firm. And her 
mouth on his. It was a mouth that knew only a little about kissing, he guessed, 
but that was a lit­tle more than he knew himself.
Be careful, Roland—don't let your feeling for this girl tip anything over. She's 
not free, anyway—she said as much. Not married, but spoken for in some other 
way.
Roland was far from the relentless creature he would eventually be­come, but the 
seeds of that relentlessness were there—small, stony things that would, in their 
time, grow into trees with deep roots . . . and bitter fruit. Now one of these 
seeds cracked open and sent up its first sharp blade.
What's been spoken for may be unspoken, and what's done may be undone. Nothing's 
sure, but . . . I want her.
Yes. That was the one thing he did know, and he knew it as well as he knew the 
face of his father: he wanted her. Not as he had wanted the whore when she lay 
naked on her bed with her legs spread and her half-lidded eyes looking up at 
him, but in the way he wanted food when he was hungry or water when he was 
thirsty. In the way, he supposed, that he wanted to drag Marten's dusty body 
behind his horse down Gilead's High Road in payment for what the wizard had done 
to his mother.
He wanted her; he wanted the girl Susan.
Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest 
was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams 
where sexual attraction and romantic love come to­gether and resonate more 
powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put 
her hands on Roland's shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, 
told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the 
first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.
 
2
 
Five miles or so from where Roland slept and dreamed his dreams, Susan Delgado 
lay in her bed and looked out her window and watched Old Star begin to grow pale 
with the approaching dawn. Sleep was no closer now than it had been when she lay 
down, and there was a throb between her legs where the old woman had touched 
her. It was distracting but no longer unpleasant, because she now associated it 
with the boy she'd met on the road and impulsively kissed by starlight. Every 
time she shifted her legs, that throb flared into a brief sweet ache.
When she'd got home, Aunt Cord (who would have been in her own bed an hour 
before on any ordinary night) had been sitting in her rocking chair by the 
fireplace—dead and cold and swept clean of ashes at this time of year—with a 
lapful of lace that looked like wave-froth against her dowdy black dress. She 
was edging it with a speed that seemed almost supernatural to Susan, and she 
hadn't looked up when the door opened and her niece came in on a swirl of 
breeze.
"I expected ye an hour ago," Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn't sound 
it: "I was worried."
"Aye?" Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she 
would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie 
to her own ears—it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life—but this 
hadn't been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like 
this. She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.
Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and 
inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn't changed since 
Susan had set out for the Coos; she had still been able to feel her aunt's eyes 
brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp 
bristles.
"What took ye so long?" Aunt Cord had asked. "Was there trouble?"
"No trouble," Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch 
had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube 
of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered 
asking Rhea if their business was done.
Mayhap there's one more little thing, the old woman had said ... or so Susan 
thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn't remember. 
And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to 
rise with Thorin's child . . . and if there could be no baby-making until 
Reap-Night, she'd not be returning to the Coos un­til late winter at the 
soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle . . .
"I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That's all."
"Then why look ye so?" Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the 
vertical line which creased her brow.
"How so?" Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and 
hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.
"Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow."
She'd almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about 
the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly how 
she felt. "Only the night air, I suppose," she had said. "I saw a meteor, Aunt. 
And heard the thinny. The sound's strong tonight."
"Aye?" her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did 
interest her. "Did it hurt?"
"A little."
"Did ye cry?"
Susan shook her head.
"Good. Better not. Always better. She likes it when they cry, I've heard. Now, 
Sue—did she give you something? Did the old pussy give you something?"
"Aye." She reached into her pocket and brought out the paper with

written upon it. She held it out and her aunt snatched it away with a greedy 
look. Cordelia had been quite the sugarplum over the last month or so, but now 
that she had what she wanted (and now that Susan had come too far and promised 
too much to have a change of heart), she'd reverted to the sour, supercilious, 
often suspicious woman Susan had grown up with; the one who'd been driven into 
almost weekly bouts of rage by her phlegmatic, life-goes-as-'twill brother. In a 
way, it was a relief. It had been nervewracking to have Aunt Cord playing 
Cybilla Good-Sprite day after day.
"Aye, aye, there's her mark, all right," her aunt had said, tracing her fingers 
over the bottom of the sheet. "A devil's hoof's what it means, some say, but 
what do we care, eh. Sue? Nasty, horrid creature that she is, she's still made 
it possible for two women to get on in the world a little longer. And ye'll only 
have to see her once more, probably around Year's End, when ye've caught 
proper."
"It will be later than that," Susan had told her. "I'm not to lie with him until 
the full of the Demon Moon. After the Reaping Fair and the bonfire."
Aunt Cord had stared, eyes wide, mouth open. "Said she so?"
Are you calling me a liar. Auntie? she had thought with a sharpness that wasn't 
much like her; usually her nature was more like her father's.
"Aye."
"But why? Why so long?" Aunt Cord was obviously upset, obviously disappointed. 
There had so far been eight pieces of silver and four of gold out of this; they 
were tucked up wherever it was that Aunt Cord squirreled her money away (and 
Susan suspected there was a fair amount of it, al­though Cordelia liked to plead 
poverty at every opportunity), and twice that much was still owed ... or would 
be, once the bloodstained sheet went to the Mayor's House laundress. That same 
amount would be paid yet again when Rhea had confirmed the baby, and the baby's 
honesty. A lot of money, all told. A great lot, for a little place like this and 
little folk like them. And now, to have the paying of it put back so far . . .
Then came a sin Susan had prayed over (although without much en­thusiasm) before 
getting into her bed: she had rather enjoyed the cheated, frustrated look on 
Aunt Cord's face—the look of the thwarted miser. 
"Why so long?" she repeated.
"I suppose you could go up the Coos and ask her."
Cordelia Delgado's lips, thin to begin with, had pressed together so tightly 
they almost disappeared. "Are you pert, missy? Are you pert with me?"
"No. I'm much too tired to be pert with anyone. I want to wash—I can still feel 
her hands on me, so I can—and go to bed."
"Then do so. Perhaps in the morning we can discuss this in more ladylike 
fashion. And we must go and see Hart, of course." She folded the paper Rhea had 
given Susan, looking pleased at the prospect of visiting Hart Thorin, and moved 
her hand toward her dress pocket.
"No," Susan said, and her voice had been unusually sharp—enough so to freeze her 
aunt's hand in midair. Cordelia had looked at her, frankly startled. Susan had 
felt a little embarrassed by that look, but she hadn't dropped her eyes, and 
when she held out her own hand, it had been steady enough.
"I'm to have the keeping of that. Aunt."
"Who tells ye to speak so?" Aunt Cord had asked, her voice almost whining with 
outrage—it was close to blasphemy, Susan supposed, but for a moment Aunt Cord's 
voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. "Who tells ye to speak so 
to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl's poor 
dead father?"
"You know who," Susan said. She still held her hand out. "I'm to keep it, and 
I'm to give it to Mayor Thorin. She said she didn't care what happened to it 
then, he could wipe his bum with it for all of her," (the flush which suffused 
her aunt's face at that had been very enjoyable) "but until then, it was to be 
in my keeping."
"I never heard of such a thing," Aunt Cordelia had huffed . . . but she had 
handed the grimy scrap of paper back. "Giving the keep of such an important 
document to a mere scrap of a girl."
Yet not too mere a scrap to be his gilly, am I? To lie under him and listen to 
his bones creak and take his seed and mayhap bear his child.
She'd dropped her eyes to her pocket as she put the paper away again, not 
wanting Aunt Cord to see the resentment in them.
"Go up," Aunt Cord had said, brushing the froth of lace off her lap and into her 
workbasket, where it lay in an unaccustomed tangle. "And when you wash, do your 
mouth with especial care. Cleanse it of its impu­dence and disrespect toward 
those who have given up much for love of its owner."
Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as 
she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.
And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the 
first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past 
slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing 
cards—and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will 
Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so 
unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For 
herself, she knew so.
I've never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of 
me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.
Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?
If it's ka, it 'll come like a wind. Like a cyclone.
She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, then at last rolled onto her 
back again. There would be no sleep for her in what remained of this night, she 
thought. She might as well walk out on the Drop and watch the sun come up.
Yet she continued to lie in bed, feeling somehow sick and well at the same time, 
looking into the shadows and listening to the first cries of the morning birds, 
thinking of how his mouth had felt against hers, the tender grain of it and the 
feeling of his teeth below his lips; the smell of his skin, the rough texture of 
his shirt under her palms.
She now put those palms against the top of her shift and cupped her breasts with 
her fingers. The nipples were hard, like little pebbles. And when she touched 
them, the heat between her legs flared suddenly and urgently.
She could sleep, she thought. She could, if she took care of that heat. If she 
knew how.
And she did. The old woman had shown her. Even a girl who's intact don't need to 
lack for a shiver now 'n then... Like a little bud o' silk, so it is.
Susan shifted in bed and slipped a hand deep beneath the sheet. She forced the 
old woman's bright eyes and hollow cheeks out of her mind— it wasn't hard to do 
at all once you set your mind to it, she discovered— and replaced it with the 
face of the boy with the big gelding and the silly flat-crowned hat. For a 
moment the vision of her mind became so clear and so sweet that it was real, and 
all the rest of her life only a drab dream. In this vision he kissed her over 
and over, their mouths widening, their tongues touching; what he breathed out, 
she breathed in.
She burned. She burned in her bed like a torch. And when the sun fi­nally came 
over the horizon some short time later, she lay deeply asleep, with a faint 
smile on her lips and her unbraided hair lying across the side of her face and 
her pillow like loose gold.
 
3
 
In the last hour before dawn, the public room of the Travellers' Rest was as 
quiet as it ever became. The gaslights which turned the chandelier into a 
brilliant jewel until two of the clock or so on most nights were now turned down 
to guttering blue points, and the long, high room was shad­owy and spectral.
In one corner lay a jumble of kindling—the remains of a couple of chairs smashed 
in a fight over a Watch Me game (the combatants were currently residing in the 
High Sheriff's drunk-cell). In another comer was a fairly large puddle of 
congealing puke. On the raised platform at the east end of the room stood a 
battered piano; propped against its bench was the ironwood club which belonged 
to Barkie, the saloon's bouncer and all-around tough man. Barkie himself, the 
naked mound of his scarred stom­ach rising above the waistband of his corduroy 
pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring. In one hand he 
held a playing card: the deuce of diamonds.
At the west end of the room were the card tables. Two drunks lay with their 
heads on one of these, snoring and drooling on the green felt, their 
outstretched hands touching. Above them, on the wall, was a picture of Arthur, 
the Great King of Eld astride his white stallion, and a sign which read (in a 
curious mixture of High and Low Speech): ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT 
IN CARDS OR LIFE.
Mounted behind the bar, which ran the length of the room, was a monstrous 
trophy: a two-headed elk with a rack of antlers like a forest grove and four 
glaring eyes. This beast was known to local habitués of the Travellers' as The 
Romp. None could have said why. Some wit had care­fully drawn a pair of 
sow-titty condoms over the prongs of two of its antlers. Lying on the bar itself 
and directly beneath The Romp's disap­proving gaze was Pettie the Trotter, one 
of the Travellers' dancers and gilly-girls . . . although Pettie's actual 
girlhood was well behind her now, and soon she would be reduced to doing her 
business on her knees behind the Travellers' rather than upstairs in one of the 
tiny cribs. Her plump legs were spread, one dangling over the bar on the inside, 
one on the outside, the filthy tangle of her skirt frothed up between. She 
breathed in long snores, occasionally twitching at the feet and fat fingers. The 
only other sounds were the hot summer wind outside and the soft, regular snap of 
cards being turned one by one.
A small table stood by itself near the batwing doors which gave upon the Hambry 
High Street; it was here that Coral Thorin, owner of the Trav­ellers' Rest (and 
the Mayor's sister), sat on the nights when she de­scended from her suite "to be 
a part of the company." When she came down, she came down early—when there were 
still more steaks than whiskey being served across the old scratched bar—and 
went back up around the time that Sheb, the piano player, sat down and began to 
pound his hideous instrument. The Mayor himself never came in lit nil, although 
it was well-known that he owned at least a half-interest in the Travellers'. 
Clan Thorin enjoyed the money the place brought in; they just didn't en­joy the 
look of it after midnight, when the sawdust spread on the floor be­gan to soak 
up the spilled beer and the spilled blood. Yet there was a hard streak in Coral, 
who had twenty years before been what was called "a wild child." She was younger 
than her political brother, not so thin, and good-looking in a large-eyed, 
weasel-headed way. No one sat at her table during the saloon's operating 
hours—Barkie would have put a stop to anyone who tried, and double-quick—but 
operating hours were over now, the drunks mostly gone or passed out upstairs, 
Sheb curled up and fast asleep in the comer behind his piano. The softheaded boy 
who cleaned the place had been gone since two o' the clock or so (chased out by 
jeers and insults and a few flying beer-glasses, as he always was; Roy Depape in 
particular had no love in his heart for that particular lad). He would be back 
around nine or so, to begin readying the old party-palace for another night of 
hilarity, but until then the man sitting at Mistress Thorin's table had the 
place to himself.
A game of Patience was laid out before him: black on red, red on black, the 
partially formed Square o' Court above all, just as it was in the affairs of 
men. In his left hand the player held the remains of the deck. As he flipped the 
cards up, one by one, the tattoo on his right hand moved. It was disconcerting 
somehow, as if the coffin were breathing. The card-player was an oldish fellow, 
not as thin as the Mayor or his sister, but thin. His long white hair straggled 
down his back. He was deeply tanned, ex­cept for his neck, where he always 
burned; the flesh there hung in scant wattles. He wore a mustache so long the 
ragged white ends hung nearly to his jaw—a sham gunslinger's mustache, many 
thought it, but no one used the word "sham" to Eldred Jonas's face. He wore a 
white silk shirt, and a black-handled revolver hung low on his hip. His large, 
red-rimmed eyes looked sad on first glance. A second, closer look showed them 
only to be watery. Of emotion they were as dead as the eyes of The Romp.
He turned up the Ace of Wands. No place for it. "Pah, you bugger," he said in an 
odd, reedy voice. It quavered, as well, like the voice of a man on the verge of 
tears. It fit perfectly with his damp and red-rimmed eyes. He swept the cards 
together.
Before he could reshuffle, a door opened and closed softly upstairs. Jonas put 
the cards aside and dropped his hand to the butt of his gun.
Then, as he recognized the sound of Reynolds's boots coming along the gallery, 
he let go of the gun and drew his tobacco-pouch from his belt in­stead. The hem 
of the cloak Reynolds always wore came into view, and then he was coming down 
the stairs, his face freshly washed and his curly red hair hanging about his 
ears. Vain of his looks was dear old Mr. Rey­nolds, and why not? He'd sent his 
cock on its exploring way up more damp and cozy cracks than Jonas had ever seen 
in his life, and Jonas was twice his age.
At the bottom of the stairs Reynolds walked along the bar, pausing to squeeze 
one of Pettie's plump thighs, and then crossed to where Jonas sat with his 
makings and his deck of cards.
"Evening, Eldred."
"Morning, Clay." Jonas opened the sack, took out a paper, and sprin­kled tobacco 
into it. His voice shook, but his hands were steady. "Like a smoke?"
"I could do with one."
Reynolds pulled out a chair, turned it around, and sat with his fore­arms 
crossed on its back. When Jonas handed him the cigarette, Reynolds danced it 
along the backs of his fingers, an old gunslinger trick. The Big Coffin Hunters 
were full of old gunslinger tricks.
"Where's Roy? With Her Nibs?" They had been in Hambry a little over a month now, 
and in that time Depape had conceived a passion for a fifteen-year-old whore 
named Deborah. Her bowlegged clumping walk and her way of squinting off into the 
distance led Jonas to suspect she was just another cowgirl from a long line of 
them, but she had high-hat ways. It was Clay who had started calling the girl 
Her Nibs, or Her Majesty, or sometimes (when drunk) "Roy's Coronation Cunt."
Reynolds now nodded. "It's like he's drunk on her."
"He'll be all right. He ain't throwing us over for some little snuggle-bunny 
with pimples on her tits. Why, she's so ignorant she can't spell cat. Not so 
much as cat, no. I asked her."
Jonas made a second cigarette, drew a sulfur match from the sack, and popped it 
alight with his thumbnail. He lit Reynolds's first, then his own.
A small yellow cur came in under the batwing doors. The men watched it in 
silence, smoking. It crossed the room, first sniffed at the curdled vomit in the 
comer, then began to eat it. Its stub of a tail wagged back and forth as it 
dined.
Reynolds nodded toward the admonition not to argue about the cards you were 
dealt. "That mutt'd understand that, I'd say."
"Not at all, not at all," Jonas demurred. "Just a dog is all he is, a 
spew-eating dog. I heard a horse twenty minutes ago. First on the come, then on 
the go. Would it have been one of our hired watchmen?"
"You don't miss a trick, do you?"
"Don't pay to, no, don't pay a bit. Was it?"
"Yep. Fellow who works for one of the small freeholders out along the east end 
of the Drop. He seen 'em come in. Three. Young. Babies." Reynolds pronounced 
this last as they did in the North'rd Baronies: bab­bies. "Nothing to worry of."
"Now, now, we don't know that," Jonas said, his quavering voice mak­ing him 
sound like a temporizing old man. "Young eyes see far, they say."
"Young eyes see what they're pointed at," Reynolds replied. The dog trotted past 
him, licking its chops. Reynolds helped it on its way with a kick the cur was 
not quite quick enough to avoid. It scuttled back out un­der the batwings, 
uttering little yike-yike sounds that made Barkie snort thickly from his place 
of rest beneath the piano bench. His hand opened and the playing card dropped 
out of it.
"Maybe so, maybe not," Jonas said. "In any case, they're Affiliation brats, sons 
of big estates off in the Green Somewhere, if Rimer and that fool he works for 
have it straight. That means we'll be very, very careful. Walk easy, like on 
eggshells. Why, we've got three more months here, at least! And those young'uns 
may be here that whole time, counting this 'n counting that and putting it all 
down on paper. Folks counting things ain't good for us right now. Not for men in 
the resupply business."
"Come on! It's make-work, that's all—a slap on the wrist for getting in trouble. 
Their daddies—"
"Their daddies know Farson's in charge of the whole Southwest Edge now, and 
sitting on high ground. The brats may know the same—that playtime's purt' near 
over for the Affiliation and all its pukesome royalty. Can't know, Clay. With 
folks like these, you can't know which way they'll jump. At the very least, they 
may try to do a half-decent job just to try and get on the good side o' their 
parents again. We'll know better when we see em, but I tell you one thing: we 
can't just put guns to the backs of their heads and drop them like broke-leg 
bosses if they see the wrong thing. Their daddies might be mad at em alive, but 
I think they'd be very tender of em dead—that's just the way daddies are. We'll 
want to be trig, Clay; as trig as we can be."
"Better leave Depape out of it, then."
"Roy will be fine," Jonas said in his quavery voice. He dropped the stub of his 
cigarette to the floor and crushed it under his bootheel. He looked up at The 
Romp's glassy eyes and squinted, as if calculating. "To­night, your friend said? 
They arrived tonight, these brats?"
"Yep."
"They'll be in to see Avery tomorrow, then, I reckon." This was Herk Avery, High 
Sheriff of Mejis and Chief Constable of Hambry, a large man who was as loose as 
a trundle of laundry.
"Reckon so," Clay Reynolds said. "To present their papers 'n all."
"Yes, sir, yes indeedy. How-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do again."
Reynolds said nothing. He often didn't understand Jonas, but he had been riding 
with him since the age of fifteen, and knew it was usually bet­ter not to ask 
for enlightenment. If you did, you were apt to end up listen­ing to a cult-manni 
lecture about the other worlds the old buzzard had visited through what he 
called "the special doors." As far as Reynolds was concerned, there were enough 
ordinary doors in the world to keep him busy.
"I'll speak to Rimer and Rimer'll talk to the Sheriff about where they should 
stay," Jonas said. "I think the bunkhouse at the old Bar K ranch. You know where 
I mean?"
Reynolds did. In a Barony like Mejis, you got to know the few land­marks in a 
hurry. The Bar K was a deserted spread of land northwest of town, not too far 
from that weird squalling canyon. They burned at the mouth of the canyon every 
fall, and once, six or seven years ago, the wind had shifted and gone back wrong 
and burned most of the Bar K to the ground—barns, stables, the home place. It 
had spared the bunkhouse, however, and that would be a good spot for three 
tenderfeet from the Inners. It was away from the Drop; it was also away from the 
oil patch.
"Ye like it, don't ye?" Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. "Aye, ye 
like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? 
'Ifye'd steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.' 
"
Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. "And those trucks? Those 
what-do-you-callums, tankers?"
"Fine where they are," Jonas said. "Not that we could move em now without 
attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and 
cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you'll do 
it."
"And where will you be while we're flexing our muscles out at Citgo?"
"By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor's House, you clod—the dinner Thorin 
will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky 
society of the smaller one." Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up 
at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap 
of tobacco. "A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man's locks ... I 
might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?"
"Don't strain yourself, Eldred."
Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir 
uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. "So Roy and I aren't invited to this 
fancy do." "You'll be invited, oh yes, you'll be invited very warmly," Jonas 
said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for 
himself. "I'll offer your excuses. I'll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong 
men may weep."
"All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those 
hulks. You're too kind, Jonas."
"I'll be asking questions, as well," Jonas said dreamily. "Drifting here and 
there . . . looking spruce, smelling of baybemes . . . and asking my little 
questions. I've known folks in our line of trade who'll go to a fat, jolly 
fellow to find out the gossip—a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery 
stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the 
courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pock­ets. As for myself. Clay, I 
find that a woman's best, and the narrower the better—one with more nose than 
tits sticking off her. I look for one who don't paint her lips and keeps her 
hair scrooped back against her head." 
"You have someone in mind?"
"Yar. Cordelia Delgado's her name." 
"Delgado?"
"You know the name, it's on the lips of everyone in this town, I reckon. Susan 
Delgado, our esteemed Mayor's soon-to-be gilly. Cor­delia's her auntie. Now 
here's a fact of human nature I've found: folk are more apt to talk to someone 
like her, who plays them close, than they are to the local jolly types who'll 
buy you a drink. And that lady plays them close. I'm going to slip in next to 
her at that dinner, and I'm going to com­pliment her on the perfume I doubt like 
hell she'll be wearing, and I'm going to keep her wineglass full. Now, how 
sounds that for a plan?"
"A plan for what? That's what I want to know."
"For the game of Castles we may have to play," Jonas said, and all the lightness 
dropped out of his voice. "We're to believe that these boys have been sent here 
more as punishment than to do any real job of work. It sounds plausible, too. 
I've known rakes in my time, and it sounds plau­sible, indeed. I believe it each 
day until about three in the morning, and then a little doubt sets in. And do 
you know what, Clay?"
Reynolds shook his head.
"I'm right to doubt. Just as I was right to go with Rimer to old man Thorin and 
convince him that Farson's glass would be better with the witch-woman, for the 
nonce. She'll keep it in a place where a gunslinger couldn't find it, let alone 
a nosy lad who's yet to have his first piece of arse. These are strange times. A 
storm's coming. And when you know the wind is going to blow, it's best to keep 
your gear battened down."
He looked at the cigarette he had made. He had been dancing it along the backs 
of his knuckles, as Reynolds had done earlier. Jonas pushed back the fall of his 
hair and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
"I don't want to smoke," he said, standing up and stretching. His back made 
small crackling sounds. "I'm crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too 
many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake."
He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie's bare leg as he went by, also as 
Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.
"I don't want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I'll smell 
quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of 
my hand. But . . .I'd like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme 
o' things."
"Give them a sore paw."
Jonas brightened. "Yessir, partner, maybe a sore paw's just what I'd like to 
give them. Make them think twice about tangling with the Big Cof­fin Hunters 
later on, when it matters. Make them swing wide around us when they see us in 
their road. Yessir, that's something to think about. It really is."
He started up the stairs, chuckling a little, his limp quite pronounced— it got 
worse late at night. It was a limp Roland's old teacher, Cort, might have 
recognized, for Cort had seen the blow which caused it. Cort's own father had 
dealt it with an ironwood club, breaking Eldred Jonas's leg in the yard behind 
the Great Hall of Gilead before taking the boy's weapon and sending him west, 
gunless, into exile.
Eventually, the man the boy had become had found a gun, of course; the exiles 
always did, if they looked hard enough. That such guns could never be quite the 
same as the big ones with the sandalwood grips might haunt them for the rest of 
their lives, but those who needed guns could still find them, even in this 
world.
Reynolds watched until he was gone, then took his seat at Coral Thorin's desk, 
shuffled the cards, and continued the game which Jonas had left half-finished.
Outside, the sun was coming up.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      V
WELCOME TO TOWN
 
1
 
Two nights after arriving in the Barony of Mejis, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain 
rode their mounts beneath an adobe arch with the words come in peace inscribed 
above it. Beyond was a cobblestone courtyard lit with torches. The resin which 
coated these had been doctored somehow so that the torches glowed different 
colors: green, orangey-red, a kind of sputtery pink that made Roland think of 
fireworks. He could hear the sound of gui­tars, the murmur of voices, the 
laughter of women. The air was redolent of those smells which would always 
remind him of Mejis: sea-salt, oil, and pine.
"I don't know if I can do this," Alain muttered. He was a big boy with a mop of 
unruly blond hair spilling out from under his stockman's hat. He had cleaned up 
well—they all had—but Alain, no social butterfly under the best of 
circumstances, looked scared to death. Cuthbert was doing bet­ter, but Roland 
guessed his old friend's patina of insouciance didn't go very deep. If there was 
to be leading done here, he would have to do it.
"You'll be fine," he told Alain. "Just—"
"Oh, he looks fine," Cuthbert said with a nervous laugh as they crossed the 
courtyard. Beyond it was Mayor's House, a sprawling, many-winged adobe hacienda 
that seemed to spill light and laughter from every window. "White as a sheet, 
ugly as a—"
"Shut up," Roland said curtly, and the teasing smile tumbled off Cuthbert's face 
at once. Roland noted this, then turned to Alain again. "Just don't drink 
anything with alcohol in it. You know what to say on that account. Remember the 
rest of our story, too. Smile. Be pleasant. Use what social graces you have. 
Remember how the Sheriff fell all over him­self to make us feel welcome."
Alain nodded at that, looking a little more confident.
"In the matter of social graces," Cuthbert said, "they won't have many 
themselves, so we should all be a step ahead."
Roland nodded, then saw that the bird's skull was back on the horn of Cuthbert's 
saddle. "And get rid of that!"
Looking guilty, Cuthbert stuffed "the lookout" hurriedly into his saddle­bag. 
Two men wearing white jackets, white pants, and sandals were com­ing forward, 
bowing and smiling.
"Keep your heads," Roland said, lowering his voice. "Both of you. Remember why 
you're here. And remember the faces of your fathers." He clapped Alain, who 
still looked doubtful, on the shoulder. Then he turned to the hostlers. 
"Goodeven, gents," he said. "May your days be long upon the earth."
They both grinned, their teeth flashing in the extravagant torchlight. The older 
one bowed. "And your own as well, young masters. Welcome to Mayor's House."
 
2
 
The High Sheriff had welcomed them the day before every bit as happily as the 
hostlers.
So far everyone had greeted them happily, even the carters they had passed on 
their way into town, and that alone made Roland feel suspi­cious and on his 
guard. He told himself he was likely being foolish—of course the locals were 
friendly and helpful, that was why they had been sent here, because Mejis was 
both out-of-the-way and loyal to the Affilia­tion—and it probably was foolish, 
but he thought it best to be on close watch, just the same. To be a trifle 
nervous. The three of them were little more than children, after all, and if 
they fell into trouble here, it was apt to be as a result of taking things at 
face value.
The combined Sheriff's office and jail o' Barony was on Hill Street, overlooking 
the bay. Roland didn't know for sure, but guessed that few if any hungover 
drunks and wife-beaters anywhere else in Mid-World woke up to such picturesque 
views: a line of many-colored boathouses to the south, the docks directly below, 
with boys and old men line-fishing while the women mended nets and sails; beyond 
them, Hambry's small fleet moving back and forth on the sparkling blue water of 
the bay, setting their nets in the morning, pulling them in the afternoon.
Most buildings on the High Street were adobe, but up here, overlook­ing Hambry's 
business section, they were as squat and bricky as any nar­row lane in Gilead’s 
Old Quarter. Well kept, too, with wrought-iron gates in front of most and 
tree-shaded paths. The roofs were orange tile, the shutters closed against the 
summer sun. It was hard to believe, riding down this street with their horses' 
hoofs clocking on the swept cobbles, that the northwestern side of the 
Affiliation—the ancient land of Eld, Arthur's kingdom—could be on fire and in 
danger of falling.
The jailhouse was just a larger version of the post office and land of­fice; a 
smaller version of the Town Gathering Hall. Except, of course, for the bars on 
the windows facing down toward the small harbor.
Sheriff Herk Avery was a big-bellied man in a lawman's khaki pants and shirt. He 
must have been watching them approach through the spy hole in the center of the 
jail's iron-banded front door, because the door was thrown open before Roland 
could even reach for the turn-bell in the center. Sheriff Avery appeared on the 
stoop, his belly preceding him as a bailiff may precede My Lord Judge into 
court. His arms were thrown wide in the most amiable of greetings.
He bowed deeply to them (Cuthbert said later he was afraid the man might 
overbalance and go rolling down the steps; perhaps go rolling all the way down 
to the harbor) and wished them repeated goodmorns, tap­ping away at the base of 
his throat like a madman the whole while. His smile was so wide it looked as if 
it might cut his head clean in two. Three deputies with a distinctly farmerish 
look about them, dressed in khaki like the Sheriff, crowded into the door behind 
Avery and gawked. That was what it was, all right, a gawk; there was just no 
other word for that sort of openly curious and totally unselfconscious stare.
Avery shook each boy by the hand, continuing to bow as he did so, and nothing 
Roland said could get him to stop until he was done. When he finally was, he 
showed them inside. The office was delightfully cool in spite of the beating 
midsummer sun. That was the advantage of brick, of course. It was big as well, 
and cleaner than any High Sheriff's office Roland had ever been in before . . . 
and he had been in at least half a dozen over the last three years, accompanying 
his father on several short trips and one longer patrol-swing.
There was a rolltop desk in the center, a notice-board to the right of the door 
(the same sheets of foolscap had been scribbled on over and over; paper was a 
rare commodity in Mid-World), and, in the far comer, two rifles in a padlocked 
case. These were such ancient blunderbusses that Roland wondered if there was 
ammunition for them. He wondered if they would fire, come to that. To the left 
of the gun-case, an open door gave on the jail itself—three cells on each side 
of a short corridor, and a smell of strong lye soap drifting out.
They've cleaned for our coming, Roland thought. He was amused, touched, and 
uneasy. Cleaned it as though we were a troop of Inner Barony horse—career 
soldiers who might want to stage a hard inspection instead of three lads serving 
punishment detail.
But was such nervous care on the part of their hosts really so strange? They 
were from New Canaan, after all, and folk in this tucked-away cor­ner of the 
world might well see them as a species of visiting royalty.
Sheriff Avery introduced his deputies. Roland shook hands with all of them, not 
trying to memorize their names. It was Cuthbert who took care of names, and it 
was a rare occasion when he dropped one. The third, a bald fellow with a monocle 
hanging around his neck on a ribbon, actually dropped to one knee before them.
"Don't do that, ye great idiot!" Avery cried, yanking him back up by the scruff 
of his neck. "What kind of a bumpkin will they think ye? Be­sides, you've 
embarrassed them, so ye have!"
"That's all right," Roland said (he was, in fact, very embarrassed, al­though 
trying not to show it). "We're really nothing at all special, you know—"
"Nothing special!" Avery said, laughing. His belly, Roland noticed, did not 
shake as one might have expected it to do; it was harder than it looked. The 
same might be true of its owner. "Nothing special, he says! Five hundred mile or 
more from the In-World they've come, our first offi­cial visitors from the 
Affiliation since a gunslinger passed through on the Great Road four year ago, 
and yet he says they're nothing special! Would ye sit, my boys? I've got graf, 
which ye won't want so early in the day— p'raps not at all, given your ages (and 
if you'll forgive me for statin so bald the obvious fact of yer youth, for 
youth's not a thing to be ashamed of, so it's not, we were all young once), and 
I also have white iced tea, which I recommend most hearty, as Dave's wife makes 
it and she's a dab hand with most any potable."
Roland looked at Cuthbert and Alain, who nodded and smiled (and tried not to 
look all at sea), then back at Sheriff Avery. White tea would go down a treat in 
a dusty throat, he said.
One of the deputies went to fetch it, chairs were produced and set in a row at 
one side of Sheriff Avery’s rolltop, and the business of the day commenced.
"You know who ye are and where ye hail from, and I know the same," Sheriff Avery 
said, sitting down in his own chair (it uttered a fee­ble groan beneath his bulk 
but held steady). "I can hear In-World in yer voices, but more important, I can 
see it in yer faces.
"Yet we hold to the old ways here in Hambry, sleepy and rural as we may be; aye, 
we hold to our course and remember the faces of our fathers as well's we can. 
So, although I'd not keep yer long from yer duties, and if ye'll forgive me for 
the impertinence, I'd like a look at any papers and documents of passage ye 
might just happen to've brought into town with ye."
They just "happened" to have brought all of their papers into town with them, as 
Roland was sure Sheriff Avery well knew they would. He went through them quite 
slowly for a man who'd promised not to hold them from their duties, tracing the 
well-folded sheets (the linen content so high that the documents were perhaps 
closer to cloth than paper) with one pudgy finger, his lips moving. Every now 
and then the finger would re­verse as he reread a line. The two other deputies 
stood behind him, look­ing sagely down over his large shoulders. Roland wondered 
if either could actually read.
William Dearborn. Drover's son.
Richard Stockworth. Rancher's son.
Arthur Heath. Stockline breeder's son.
The identification document belonging to each was signed by an at­testor—James 
Reed (of Hemphill) in the case of Dearborn, Piet Raven-head (of Pennilton) in 
the case of Stockworth, Lucas Rivers (of Gilead) in the case of Heath. All in 
order, descriptions nicely matched. The papers were handed back with profuse 
thanks. Roland next handed Avery a letter which he took from his wallet with 
some care. Avery handled it in the same fashion, his eyes growing wide as he saw 
the frank at the bottom. " 'Pon my soul, boys! 'Twas a gunslinger wrote this!"
"Aye, so it was," Cuthbert agreed in a voice of wonder. Roland kicked his 
ankle—hard—without taking his respectful eyes from Avery's face.
The letter above the frank was from one Steven Deschain of Gilead, a gunslinger 
(which was to say a knight, squire, peacemaker, and Baron . . . the last title 
having almost no meaning in the modem day, despite all John Farson's ranting) of 
the twenty-ninth generation descended from Arthur of Eld, on the side line of 
descent (the long-descended gel of one of Arthur's many gillies, in other 
words). To Mayor Hartwell Thorin, Chan­cellor Kimba Rimer, and High Sheriff 
Herkimer Avery, it sent greetings and recommended to their notice the three 
young men who delivered this document, Masters Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath. 
These had been sent on special mission from the Affiliation to serve as counters 
of all ma­terials which might serve the Affiliation in time of need (the word 
war was omitted from the document, but glowed between every line). Steven 
Deschain, on behalf of the Affiliation of Baronies, exhorted Misters Thorin, 
Rimer, and Avery to afford the Affiliation's nominated counters every help in 
their service, and to be particularly careful in the enumera­tions of all 
livestock, all supplies of food, and all forms of transport. Dear­born, 
Stockworth, and Heath would be in Mejis for at least three months, Deschain 
wrote, possibly as long as a year. The document finished by inviting any or all 
of the addressed public officials to "write us word of these young men and their 
deportment, in all detail as you shall imag­ine of interest to us." And, it 
begged, "Do not stint in this matter, if you love us."
Tell us if they behaved themselves, in other words. Tell us if they've learned 
their lesson.
The deputy with the monocle came back while the High Sheriff was perusing this 
document. He carried a tray loaded with four glasses of white tea and bent down 
with it like a butler. Roland murmured thanks and handed the glasses around. He 
took the last for himself, raised it to his lips, and saw Alain looking at him, 
his blue eyes bright in his stolid face.
Alain shook his glass slightly—just enough to make the ice tinkle— and Roland 
responded with the barest sliver of a nod. He had expected cool tea from a jug 
kept in a nearby springhouse, but there were actual chunks of ice in the 
glasses. Ice in high summer. It was interesting.
And the tea was, as promised, delicious.
Avery finished the letter and handed it back to Roland with the air of one 
passing on a holy relic. "Ye want to keep that safe about yer person, Will 
Dearborn—aye, very safe indeed!"
"Yes, sir." He tucked the letter and his identification back into his purse. His 
friends "Richard" and "Arthur" were doing the same.
"This is excellent white tea, sir," Alain said. "I've never had better."
"Aye," Avery said, sipping from his own glass. " 'Tis the honey that makes it so 
fearsome. Eh, Dave?"
The deputy with (he monocle smiled from his place by the notice-hoard. "1 
believe so, but Judy don't like to say. She had the recipe from her mother."
"Aye, we must remember the faces of our mothers, too, so we must." Sheriff Avery 
looked sentimental for a moment, but Roland had an idea that the face of his 
mother was the furthest thing from the big man's mind just then. He turned to 
Alain, and sentiment was replaced by a surprising shrewdness.
"Ye're wondering about the ice, Master Stockworth."
Alain started. "Well, I..."
"Ye expected no such amenity in a backwater like Hambry, I'll war­rant," Avery 
said, and although there was a joshing quality on top of his voice, Roland 
thought there was something else entirely underneath.
He doesn't like us. He doesn't like what he thinks of as our "city ways. " He 
hasn't known us long enough to know what kind of ways we have, if any at all, 
but already he doesn't like them. He thinks we're a trio of snotnoses; that we 
see him and everyone else here as country bumpkins.
"Not just Hambry," Alain said quietly. "Ice is as rare in the Inner Arc these 
days as anywhere else, Sheriff Avery. When I grew up, I saw it mostly as a 
special treat at birthday parties and such."
"There was always ice on Glowing Day," Cuthbert put in. He spoke with very 
un-Cuthbertian quiet. "Except for the fireworks, that's what we liked about it 
most."
"Is that so, is that so," Sheriff Avery said in an amazed, 
wonders-will-never-cease tone. Avery perhaps didn't like them riding in like 
this, didn't like having to take up what he would probably call "half the damn 
morning" with them; he didn't like their clothes, their fancy identification 
pa­pers, their accents, or their youth. Least of all their youth. Roland could 
understand all that, but wondered if it was the whole story. If there was 
something else going on here, what was it?
"There's a gas-fired refrigerator and stove in the Town Gathering Hall," Avery 
said. "Both work. There's plenty of earth-gas out at Citgo— that's the oil patch 
east of town. Yer passed it on yer way in, I wot."
They nodded.
"Stove's nobbut a curiosity these days—a history lesson for the 
schoolchildren—but the refrigerator comes in handy, so it does." Avery held up 
his glass and looked through the side. " 'Specially in summer."
He sipped some tea, smacked his lips, and smiled at Alain, "You see? No 
mystery."
"I'm surprised you haven't found use for the oil," Roland said. "No generators 
in town, Sheriff?"
"Aye, there be four or five," Avery said. "The biggest is out at Francis 
Lengyll's Rocking B ranch, and I recall when it useter run. It's HONDA. Do ye 
kennit that name, boys? HONDA?"
"I've seen it once or twice," Roland said, "on old motor-driven bicycles."
"Aye? In any case, none of the generators will run on the oil from the Citgo 
patch. Tis too thick. Tarry goo, is all. We have no refineries here."
"I see," Alain said. "In any case, ice in summer's a treat. However it comes to 
the glass." He let one of the chunks slip into his mouth, and crunched it 
between his teeth.
Avery looked at him a moment longer, as if to make sure the subject was closed, 
then switched his gaze back to Roland. His fat face was once more radiant with 
his broad, untrustworthy smile.
"Mayor Thorin has asked me to extend ye his very best greetings, and convey his 
regrets for not bein here today—very busy is our Lord Mayor, very busy indeed. 
But he's laid on a dinner-party at Mayor's House to­morrow evening—seven o' the 
clock for most folk, eight for you young fellows ... so you can make a bit of an 
entrance, I imagine, add a touch o' drama, like. And I need not tell such as 
yourselves, who've probably at­tended more such parties than I've had hot 
dinners, that it would be best to arrive pretty much on the dot."
"Is it fancy-dress?" Cuthbert asked uneasily. "Because we've come a long way, 
almost four hundred wheels, and we didn't pack formal wear and sashes, none of 
us."
Avery was chuckling—more honestly this time, Roland thought, per­haps because he 
felt "Arthur" had displayed a streak of unsophistication and insecurity. "Nay, 
young master, Thorin understands ye've come to do a job—next door to workin 
cowboys, ye be! 'Ware they don't have ye out draggin nets in the bay next!"
From the comer, Dave—the deputy with the monocle—honked unex­pected laughter. 
Perhaps it was the sort of joke you had to be local to understand, Roland 
thought.
"Wear the best ye have, and ye'll be fine. There'll be no one there in sashes, 
in any case—that's not how things are done in Hambry." Again
Roland was struck by the man's constant smiling denigration of his town ;iiul 
Barony . . . and the resentment of the outsiders which lay just be­neath it.
"In any case, ye'll find yerselves working more than playing tomor­row night, I 
imagine. Hart's invited all the large ranchers, stockliners, and livestock 
owners from this part of the Barony ... not that there's so many, you 
understand, bein as how Mejis is next door to desert once you get west o' the 
Drop. But everyone whose goods and chattel you've been sent to count will be 
there, and I think you'll find all of them loyal Affilia­tion men, ready and 
eager to help. There's Francis Lengyll of the Rocking B ... John Croydon of the 
Piano Ranch .. . Henry Wertner, who's the Barony's stockliner as well as a 
horsebreeder in his own right . .. Hash Renfrew, who owns the Lazy Susan, the 
biggest horse-ranch in Mejis (not that it's much by the standards you fellows 
are used to, I wot) . . . and there'll be others, as well. Rimer'll introduce 
you, and get you about your business right smart."
Ronald nodded and turned to Cuthbert. "You'll want to be on your mettle tomorrow 
night."
Cuthbert nodded. "Don't fear me, Will, I'll note em all."
Avery sipped more tea, eyeing them over his glass with a roguish ex­pression so 
false it made Roland want to squirm.
"Most of em's got daughters of marriageable age, and they'll bring em. You boys 
want to look out."
Roland decided he'd had enough tea and hypocrisy for one morning. He nodded, 
emptied his glass, smiled (hoping his looked more genuine than Avery's now 
looked to him), and got to his feet. Cuthbert and Alain took the cue and did 
likewise.
"Thank you for the tea, and for the welcome," Roland said. "Please send a 
message to Mayor Thorin, thanking him for his kindness and telling him that 
he'll see us tomorrow, at eight o' the clock, prompt."
"Aye. So I will."
Roland then turned to Dave. That worthy was so surprised to be no­ticed again 
that he recoiled, almost bumping his head on the notice-board. "And please thank 
your wife for the tea. It was wonderful."
"I will. Thankee-sai."
They went back outside, High Sheriff Avery herding them along like a genial, 
overweight sheepdog.
"As to where you'll locate—" he began as they descended the steps and started 
down the walk. As soon as they hit the sunshine, he began to sweat.
"Oh, land, I forgot to ask you about that," Roland said, knocking the heel of 
his hand against his forehead. "We've camped out on that long slope, lots of 
horses as you go down the turf, I'm sure you know where I mean—"
"The Drop, aye."
"—but without permission, because we don't yet know who to ask."
"That'd be John Croydon's land, and I'm sure he wouldn't begrudge ye, but we 
mean to do ye better than that. There's a spread northwest of here, the Bar K. 
Used to b'long to the Garber family, but they gave it up and moved on after a 
fire. Now it b'longs to the Horsemen's Associa­tion—that's a little local group 
of farmers and ranchers. I spoke to Francis Lengyll about you fellows—he's the 
H.A. president just current—and he said 'We'll put em out to the old Garber 
place, why not?' "
"Why not?" Cuthbert agreed in a gentle, musing voice. Roland shot him a sharp 
glance, but Cuthbert was looking down at the harbor, where the small fishing 
boats skittered to and fro like waterbugs.
"Aye, just what I said, 'Why not, indeed?' I said. The home place burned to a 
cinder, but the bunkhouse still stands; so does the stable and the cook-shack 
next door to it. On Mayor Thorin's orders, I've taken the liberty of stocking 
the larder and having the bunkhouse swept out and spruced up a little. Ye may 
see the occasional bug, but nothing that'll bite or sting . . . and no snakes, 
unless there's a few under the floor, and if there are, let em stay there's what 
I say. Hey, boys? Let em stay there!"
"Let em stay there, right under the floor where they're happy," Cuth­bert 
agreed, still gazing down at the harbor with his arms folded over his chest.
Avery gave him a brief, uncertain glance, his smile flickering a bit at the 
comers. Then he turned back to Roland, and the smile shone out strongly once 
more. "There's no holes in the roof, lad, and if it rains, ye'll be dry. What 
think ye of that? Does it sound well to ye?"
"Better than we deserve. I think that you've been very efficient and Mayor 
Thorin's been far too kind." And he did think that. The question was why. "But 
we appreciate his thoughtfulness. Don't we, boys?"
Cuthbert and Alain made vigorous assent.
"And we accept with thanks."
Avery nodded. "I'll tell him. Go safely, boys."
They had reached the hitching rail. Avery once more shook hands all around, this 
time saving his keenest looks for their horses.
"Until tomorrow night, then, young gents?"
"Tomorrow night," Roland agreed.
"Will ye be able to find the Bar K on your own, do yer think?"
Again Roland was struck by the man's unspoken contempt and un­conscious 
condescension. Yet perhaps it was to the good. If the High Sheriff thought they 
were stupid, who knew what might come of it?
"We'll find it," Cuthbert said, mounting up. Avery was looking suspi­ciously at 
the rook's skull on the horn of Cuthbert's saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but 
for once managed to keep his mouth shut. Roland was both amazed and pleased by 
this unexpected reticence. "Fare you well, Sheriff."
"And you, boy."
He stood there by the hitching post, a large man in a khaki shirt with 
sweat-stains around the armpits and black boots that looked too shiny for a 
working sheriff's feet. And where's the horse that could support him through a 
day of range-riding? Roland thought. I'd like to see the cut of that Cayuse.
Avery waved to them as they went. The other deputies came down the walk, Deputy 
Dave in the forefront. They waved, too.
 
3
 
The moment the Affiliation brats mounted on their fathers' expensive horse­flesh 
were around the comer and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and 
the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of 
slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one mar­ginally more intelligent.
"What think ye, Dave?"
Dave lifted his monocle to his mouth and began to nibble nervously at its brass 
edging, a habit about which Sheriff Avery had long since ceased to nag him. Even 
Dave's wife, Judy, had given up on that score, and Judy Hollis—Judy Wertner that 
was—was a fair engine when it came to get­ting her own way.
"Soft," Dave said. "Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken's ass."
"Mayhap," Avery said, putting his thumbs in his belt and rocking enormously back 
and forth, "but the one did most of the talking, him in the flathead hat, he 
doesn't think he's soft."
"Don't matter what he thinks," Dave said, still nibbling at his eye­glass. "He's 
in Hambry, now. He may have to change his way of thinking to our'n."
Behind him, the other deputies laughed. Even Avery smiled. They would leave the 
rich boys alone if the rich boys left them alone—those were orders, straight 
from Mayor's House—but Avery had to admit that he wouldn't mind a little dust-up 
with them, so he wouldn't. He would enjoy putting his boot into the balls of the 
one with that idiotic bird's skull on his saddle-horn—standing there and mocking 
him, he'd been, thinking all the while that Herk Avery was too country-dumb to 
know what he was up to—but the thing he'd realty enjoy would be beating the cool 
look from the eyes of the boy in the flathead preacher's hat, seeing a hotter 
ex­pression of fear rise up in them as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill real­ized 
that New Canaan was far away and his rich father couldn't help him.
"Aye," he said, clapping Dave on the shoulder. "Mayhap he'll have to change his 
way of thinking." He smiled—one very different from any of those he had shown 
the Affiliation counters. "Mayhap they all will."
 
4
 
The three boys rode in single file until they were past the Travellers' Rest (a 
young and obviously retarded man with kinky black hair looked up from scrubbing 
the brick stoop and waved to them; they waved back). Then they moved up abreast, 
Roland in the middle.
"What did you think of our new friend, the High Sheriff?" Roland asked.
"I have no opinion," Cuthbert said brightly. "No, none at all. Opinion is 
politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung 
while he's still young and pretty." He leaned forward and tapped the rook's 
skull with his knuckles. "The lookout didn't care for him, though. I'm sorry to 
say that our faithful lookout thought Sheriff Avery a fat bag of guts without a 
trustworthy bone in his body."
Roland turned to Alain. "And you, young Master Stockworth?"
Alain considered it for some time, as was his way, chewing a piece of grass he'd 
bent oversaddle to pluck from his side of the road. At last he said: "If he came 
upon us burning in the street, I don't think he'd piss on us to put us out."
Cuthbert laughed heartily at that. "And you, Will? How do you say, dear 
captain?"
"He doesn't interest me much ... but one thing he said does. Given that the 
horse-meadow they call the Drop has to be at least thirty wheels long and runs 
five or more to the dusty desert, how do you suppose Sher­iff Avery knew we were 
on the part of it that belongs to Croydon's Piano Ranch?"
They looked at him, first with surprise, then speculation. After a mo­ment 
Cuthbert leaned forward and rapped once more on the rook's skull. "We're being 
watched, and you never reported it? No supper for you, sir, and it'll be the 
stockade the next time it happens!"
But before they had gone much farther, Roland's thoughts of Sheriff Avery gave 
way to more pleasant ones of Susan Delgado. He would see her the following 
night, of that he was sure. He wondered if her hair would be down.
He couldn't wait to find out.
 
5
 
Now here they were, at Mayor's House. Let the game begin, Roland thought, not 
clear on what that meant even as the phrase went through his mind, surely not 
thinking of Castles . . . not then.
The hostlers led their mounts away, and for a moment the three of them stood at 
the foot of the steps—huddled, almost, as horses do in un­friendly weather—their 
beardless faces washed by the light of the torches. From inside, the guitars 
played and voices were raised in a fresh eddy of laughter.
"Do we knock?" Cuthbert asked. "Or just open and march in?"
Roland was spared answering. The main door of the had was thrown open and two 
women stepped out, both wearing long white-collared dresses that reminded all 
three boys of the dresses stockmen's wives wore in their own part of the world. 
Their hair was caught back in snoods that sparkled with some bright diamondy 
stuff in the light of the torches.
The plumper of the two stepped forward, smiling, and dropped them a deep 
curtsey. Her earrings, which looked like square-cut firedims, flashed and 
bobbed. "You are the young men from the Affiliation, so you are, and welcome you 
are, as well. Goodeven, sirs, and may your days be long upon the earth!"
They bowed in unison, boots forward, and thanked her in an unin­tended chorus 
that made her laugh and clap her hands. The tall woman be­side her offered them 
a smile as spare as her frame.
"I am Olive Thorin," the plump woman said, "the Mayor's wife. This is my 
sister-in-law, Coral."
Coral Thorin, still with that narrow smile (it barely creased her lips and 
touched her eyes not at all), dipped them a token curtsey. Roland, Cuthbert, and 
Alain bowed again over their outstretched legs.
"I welcome you to Seafront," Olive Thorin said, her dignity leavened and made 
pleasant by her artless smile, her obvious dazzlement at the ap­pearance of her 
young visitors from In-World. "Come to our house with joy. I say so with all my 
heart, so I do."
"And so we will, madam," Roland said, "for your greeting has made us joyful." He 
took her hand, and, with no calculation whatever, raised it to his lips and 
kissed it. Her delighted laughter made him smile. He liked Olive Thorin on 
sight, and it was perhaps well he met someone of that sort early on, for, with 
the problematic exception of Susan Delgado, he met no one else he liked, no one 
else he trusted, all that night.
 
6
 
It was warm enough even with the seabreeze, and the cloak- and coat-collector in 
the foyer looked as though he'd had little or no custom. Roland wasn't entirely 
surprised to see that it was Deputy Dave, his re­maining bits of hair slicked 
back with some sort of gleaming grease and his monocle now lying on the 
snow-white breast of a houseman's jacket. Roland gave him a nod. Dave, his hands 
clasped behind his back, returned it.
Two men—Sheriff Avery and an elderly gent as gaunt as Old Doctor Death in a 
cartoon—came toward them. Beyond, through a pair of double doors now open wide, 
a whole roomful of people stood about with crystal punch-cups in their hands, 
talking and taking little bits of food from the trays which were circulating.
Roland had time for just one narrow-eyed glance toward Cuthbert:
Everything. Every name, every face . . . every nuance. Especially those.
Cuthbert raised an eyebrow—his discreet version of a nod—and then Roland was 
pulled, willy-nilly, into the evening, his first real evening of service as a 
working gunslinger. And he had rarely worked harder.
Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin's Chancellor and Minister 
of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their 
visit). He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in 
Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. 
Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as 
cobwebs. The top of his skull was completely bald. Balanced on his whelk of a 
nose was a pince-nez.
"My boys!" he said, when the introductions had been made. He had the smooth, 
sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker. "Welcome to Mejis! To 
Hambry! And to Seafront, our humble Mayor's House!"
"If this is humble, I should wonder at the palace your folk might build," Roland 
said. It was a mild enough remark, more pleasantry than witticism (he ordinarily 
left the wit to Bert), but Chancellor Rimer laughed hard. So did Sheriff Avery.
"Come, boys!" Rimer said, when he apparently felt he had expressed enough 
amusement. "The Mayor awaits you with impatience, I'm sure."
"Aye," said a timid voice from behind them. The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had 
disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with 
her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have 
been her waist. She was still smiling her hopeful, pleasant smile. "Very eager 
to meet you, Hart is, very eager, in­deed. Shall I conduct them, Kimba, or—"
"Nay, nay, you mustn't trouble yourself with so many other guests to attend," 
Rimer said.
"I suppose you're right." She curtseyed to Roland and his compan­ions a final 
time, and although she still smiled and although the smile looked completely 
genuine to Roland, he thought: She's unhappy about something, all the same. 
Desperately so, I think.
"Gentlemen?" Rimer asked. The teeth in his smile were almost dis­concertingly 
huge. "Will ye come?"
He led them past the grinning Sheriff and into the reception hall.
 
7
 
Roland was hardly overwhelmed by it; he had, after all, been in the Great Hall 
of Gilead—the Hall of the Grandfathers, it was sometimes called—and had even 
peeped down on the great party which was held there each year, the so-called 
Dance of Easterling, which marked the end of Wide Earth and the advent of 
Sowing. There were five chandeliers in the Great Hall instead of just one, and 
lit with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps. The dress of the partygoers (many 
of them expensive young men and women who had never done a hand's turn of work 
in their lives, a fact of which John Farson spoke at every opportunity) had been 
richer, the music had been fuller, the company of older and nobler lines which 
grew closer and closer together as they stretched back toward Arthur Eld, he of 
the white horse and unifying sword.
Yet there was life here, and plenty of it. There was a robustness that had been 
missing in Gilead, and not just at Easterling, either. The texture he felt as he 
stepped into the Mayor's House reception room was the sort of thing, Roland 
reflected, that you didn't entirely miss when it was gone, because it slipped 
away quietly and painlessly. Like blood from a vein cut in a tub filled with hot 
water.
The room—almost but not quite grand enough to be a hall—was cir­cular, its 
panelled walls decorated by paintings (most quite bad) of previ­ous Mayors. On a 
raised stand to the right of the doors leading into the dining area, four 
grinning guitarists in tati jackets and sombreros were playing something that 
sounded like a waltz with pepper on it. In the cen­ter of the floor was a table 
supporting two cut-glass punchbowls, one vast and grand, the other smaller and 
plainer. The white-jacketed fellow in charge of the dipping-out operations was 
another of Avery's deputies.
Contrary to what the High Sheriff had told them the day before, sev­eral of the 
men were wearing sashes of various colors, but Roland didn't feel too out of 
place in his white silk shirt, black string tie, and one pair of stovepipe dress 
trousers. For every man wearing a sash, he saw three wearing the sort of dowdy, 
box-tailed coats that he associated with stock­men at church, and he saw several 
others (younger men, for the most part) who weren't wearing coats at all. Some 
of the women wore jewelry (though nothing so expensive as sai Thorin's firedim 
earrings), and few looked as if they'd missed many meals, but they also wore 
clothes Roland recognized: the long, round-collared dresses, usually with the 
lace fringe of a colored underskirt showing below the hem, the dark shoes with 
low heels, the snoods (most sparkling with gem-dust, as those of Olive and Coral 
Thorin had been).
And then he saw one who was very different.
It was Susan Delgado, of course, shimmering and almost too beauti­ful to look at 
in a blue silk dress with a high waist and a square-cut bodice which showed the 
tops of her breasts. Around her neck was a sapphire pendant that made Olive 
Thorin's earrings look like paste. She stood next to a man wearing a sash the 
color of coals in a hot woodfire. That deep orange-red was the Barony's color, 
and Roland supposed that the man was their host, but for the moment Roland 
barely saw him. His eye was held by Susan Delgado: the blue dress, the tanned 
skin, the triangles of color, too pale and perfect to be makeup, which ran 
lightly up her cheeks; most of all her hair, which was unbound tonight and fell 
to her waist like a shimmer of palest silk. He wanted her, suddenly and 
completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. 
Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to 
her.
She turned a little, then, and spied him. Her eyes (they were gray, he saw) 
widened the tiniest bit. He thought that the color in her cheeks deep­ened a 
little. Her lips—lips that had touched his as they stood on a dark road, he 
thought with wonder—parted a little. Then the man standing next to Thorin (also 
tall, also skinny, with a mustache and long white hair ly­ing on the dark 
shoulders of his coat) said something, and she turned back to him. A moment 
later the group around Thorin was laughing, Susan in­cluded. The man with the 
white hair didn't join them, but smiled thinly.
Roland, hoping his face did not give away the fact that his heart was pounding 
like a hammer, was led directly to this group, which stood close to the 
punchbowls. Distantly, he could feel Rimer's bony confederation of fingers 
clamped to his arm above the elbow. More clearly he could smell mingled 
perfumes, the oil from the lamps on the walls, the aroma of the ocean. And 
thought, for no reason at all, Oh, I am dying. I am dying.
Take hold of yourself, Roland of Gilead. Stop this foolishness, for your 
father's sake. Take hold!
He tried ... to some degree succeeded. . . and knew he would be lost the next 
time she looked at him. It was her eyes. The other night, in the dark, he hadn't 
been able to see those fog-colored eyes. I didn't know how lucky I was, he 
thought wryly.
"Mayor Thorin?" Rimer asked. "May I present our guests from the Inner Baronies?"
Thorin turned away from the man with the long white hair and the woman standing 
next to him, his face brightening. He was shorter than his Chancellor but just 
as thin, and his build was peculiar: a short and narrow-shouldered upper body 
over impossibly long and skinny legs, He looked, Roland thought, like the sort 
of bird you should glimpse in a marsh at dawn, bobbing for its breakfast.
"Aye, you may!" he cried in a strong, high voice. "Indeed you may, we've been 
waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, 
very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the 
fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!"
Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack be­neath his 
grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor's face, and was 
relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.
"William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, 
and may your own days be long upon the earth."
"Arthur Heath" made his manners next, then "Richard Stockworth." Thorin's smile 
widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it. 
The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female 
companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the 
room—the guests numbered per­haps fifty in all—was looking at them, but what he 
felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see 
the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at 
her more directly.
"Was your trip difficult?" Thorin was asking. "Did you have adven­tures and 
experience perils? We would hear all the details at dinner, so we would, for we 
have few guests from the Inner Arc these days." His eager, slightly fatuous 
smile faded; his tufted brows drew together. "Did ye en­counter patrols of 
Farson?"
"No, Excellency," Roland said. "We—"
"Nay, lad, nay—no Excellency, I won't have it, and the fisherfolk and 
hoss-drovers I serve wouldn't, even if I would. Just Mayor Thorin, if you 
please."
"Thank you. We saw many strange things on our journey, Mayor Thorin, but no Good 
Men."
"Good Men!" Rimer jerked out, and his upper lip lifted in a smile which made him 
look doglike. "Good Men, indeed!"
"We would hear it all, every word," Thorin said. "But before I forget my manners 
in my eagerness, young gentlemen, let me introduce you to these close around me. 
Kimba you've met; this formidable fellow to my left is Eldred Jonas, chief of my 
newly installed security staff." Thorin's smile looked momentarily embarrassed. 
"I'm not convinced that I need extra security, Sheriff Avery's always been quite 
enough to keep the peace in our comer of the world, but Kimba insists. And when 
Kimba in­sists, the Mayor must bow."
"Very wise, sir," Rimer said, and bowed himself. They all laughed, save for 
Jonas, who simply held onto his narrow smile.
Jonas nodded. "Pleased, gents, I'm sure." The voice was a reedy qua­ver. He then 
wished them long days upon the earth, all three, coming to Roland last in his 
round of handshaking. His grip was dry and firm, ut­terly untouched by the 
tremor in his voice. And now Roland noticed the queer blue shape tattooed on the 
back of the man's right hand, in the web­bing between thumb and first finger. It 
looked like a coffin.
"Long days, pleasant nights," Roland said with hardly a thought. It was a 
greeting from his childhood, and it was only later that he would realize it was 
one more apt to be associated with Gilead than with any such rural place as 
Hemphill. Just a small slip, but he was beginning to believe that their margin 
for such slips might be a good deal less than his father had thought when he had 
sent Roland here to get him out of Marten's way.
"And to you," Jonas said. His bright eyes measured Roland with a thoroughness 
that was close to insolence, still holding his hand. Then he released it and 
stepped back.
"Cordelia Delgado," Mayor Thorin said, next bowing to the woman who had been 
speaking to Jonas. As Roland also bowed in her direction, he saw the family 
resemblance . . . except that what looked generous and lovely on Susan's face 
looked pinched and folded on the face before him now. Not the girl's mother; 
Roland guessed that Cordelia Delgado was a bit too young for that.
"And our especial friend, Miss Susan Delgado," Thorin finished, sounding 
flustered (Roland supposed she would have that effect on any man, even an old 
one like the Mayor). Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, 
one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and 
Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man's age 
and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. 
Sharp as a bee's ass, Cort would have said.
Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again.
He had heard of drowning in a woman's eyes in some poem or story, and thought it 
ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly 
possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even 
fear.
Promise me that if we meet at Mayor's House, we meet for the first time.
The memory of those words had a sobering, clarifying effect, and seemed to widen 
his vision a little. Enough for him to be aware that the woman beside Jonas, the 
one who shared some of Susan's features, was looking at the girl with a mixture 
of curiosity and alarm.
He bowed low, but did little more than touch her ringless outstretched hand. 
Even so, he felt something like a spark jump between their fingers. From the 
momentary widening of those eyes, he thought that she felt it, too.
"Pleased to meet you, sai," he said. His attempt to be casual sounded tinny and 
false in his own ears. Still, he was begun, it felt like the whole world was 
watching him (them), and there was nothing to do but go on with it. He tapped 
his throat three times. "May your days be long—"
"Aye, and yours, Mr. Dearborn. Thankee-sai."
She turned to Alain with a rapidity that was almost rude, then to Cuthbert, who 
bowed, tapped, then said gravely: "Might I recline briefly at your feet, miss? 
Your beauty has loosened my knees. I'm sure a few moments spent looking up at 
your profile from below, with the back of my head on these cool tiles, would put 
me right."
They all laughed at that—even Jonas and Miss Cordelia. Susan blushed prettily 
and slapped the back of Cuthbert's hand. For once Roland blessed his friend's 
relentless sense of foolery.
Another man joined the party by the punchbowl. This newcomer was blocky and 
blessedly un-thin in his boxtail coat. His cheeks burned with high color that 
looked like windburn rather than drink, and his pale eyes lay in nets of 
wrinkles. A rancher; Roland had ridden often enough with his father to know the 
look.
"There'll be maids a-plenty to meet you boys tonight," the newcomer said with a 
friendly enough smile. "Ye'll find y'selves drunk on perfume if ye're not 
careful. But I'd like my crack at you before you meet em. Fran Lengyll, at your 
service."
His grip was strong and quick; no bowing or other nonsense went with it.
"I own the Rocking B ... or it owns me, whichever way ye want to look at it. I'm 
also boss of the Horsemen's Association, at least until they fire me. The Bar K 
was my idea. Hope it's all right."
"It's perfect, sir," Alain said. "Clean and dry and room for twenty. Thank you. 
You've been too kind."
"Nonsense," Lengyll said, looking pleased all the same as he knocked back a 
glass of punch. "We're all in this together, boy. John Farson's but one bad 
straw in a field of wrong-headedness these days. The world's moved on, folks 
say. Huh! So it has, aye, and a good piece down the road to hell is where it's 
moved on to. Our job is to hold the hay out of the fur­nace as well as we can, 
as long as we can. For the sake of our children even more than for that of our 
fathers."
"Hear, hear," Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of 
solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead. Roland no­ticed the 
scrawny old fellow was gripping one of Susan's hands (she seemed almost unaware 
of it; was looking intently at Lengyll instead), and suddenly he understood: the 
Mayor was either her uncle or perhaps a cousin of some close degree. Lengyll 
ignored both, looking at the three newcomers instead, scrutinizing each in turn 
and finishing with Roland.
"Anything us in Mejis can do to help, lad, just ask—me, John Croydon, Hash 
Renfrew, Jake White, Hank Wertner, any or all. Ye'll meet em tonight, aye, their 
wives and sons and daughters as well, and ye need only ask. We may be a good 
piece out from the hub of New Canaan here, but we're strong for the Affiliation, 
all the same. Aye, very strong."
"Well spoken," Rimer said quietly.
"And now," Lengyll said, "we'll toast your arrival proper. And ye've had to wait 
too long already for a dip of punch. It's dry as dust ye must be."
He turned to the punchbowls and reached for the ladle in the larger and more 
ornate of the two, waving off the attendant, clearly wanting to honor them by 
serving them himself.
"Mr. Lengyll," Roland said quietly. Yet there was a force of com­mand in that 
voice; Fran Lengyll heard it and turned.
"The smaller bowl is soft punch, is it not?"
Lengyll considered this, at first not understanding. Then his eyebrow went up. 
For the first time he seemed to consider Roland and the others not as living 
symbols of the Affiliation and the Inner Baronies, but as actual human beings. 
Young ones. Only boys, when you got right down to it.
"Aye?"
"Draw ours from that, if you'd be so kind." He felt all eyes upon them now. Her 
eyes particularly. He kept his own firmly fixed on the rancher, but his 
peripheral vision was good, and he was very aware that Jonas's thin smile had 
resurfaced. Jonas knew what this was about al­ready. Roland supposed Thorin and 
Rimer did, as well. These country mice knew a lot. More than they should, and he 
would need to think about that carefully later. It was the least of his concerns 
at the current moment, however.
"We have forgotten the faces of our fathers in a matter that has some bearing on 
our posting to Hambry." Roland was uncomfortably aware that he was now making a 
speech, like it or not. It wasn't the whole room he was addressing—thank the 
gods for little blessings—but the circle of listeners had grown well beyond the 
original group. Yet there was nothing for it but to finish; the boat was 
launched. "I needn't go into details—nor would you expect them, I know—but I 
should say that we promised not to indulge in spirits during our time here. As 
penance, you see."
Her gaze. He could still feel it on his skin, it seemed.
For a moment there was complete quiet in the little group around the punchbowls, 
and then Lengyll said: "Your father would be proud to hear ye speak so frank, 
Will Dearborn—aye, so he would. And what boy worth his salt didn't get up to a 
little noise 'n wind from time to time?" He clapped Roland on the shoulder, and 
although the grip of his hand was firm and his smile looked genuine, his eyes 
were hard to read, only gleams of speculation deep in those beds of wrinkles. 
"In his place, may I be proud for him?"
"Yes," Roland said, smiling in return. "And with my thanks."
"And mine," Cuthbert said.
"Mine as well," Alain said quietly, taking the offered cup of soft punch and 
bowing to Lengyll.
Lengyll filled more cups and handed them rapidly around. Those al­ready holding 
cups found them plucked away and replaced with fresh cups of the soft punch. 
When each of the immediate group had one, Lengyll turned, apparently intending 
to offer the toast himself. Rimer tapped him on the shoulder, shook his head 
slightly, and cut his eyes toward the Mayor. That worthy was looking at them 
with his eyes rather popped and his jaw slightly dropped. To Roland he looked 
like an en­thralled playgoer in a penny seat; all he needed was a lapful of 
orange-peel. Lengyll followed the Chancellor's glance and then nodded.
Rimer next caught the eye of the guitar player standing at the center of the 
musicians. He stopped playing; so did the others. The guests looked that way, 
then back to the center of the room when Thorin began speak­ing. There was 
nothing ridiculous about his voice when he put it to use as he now did—it was 
carrying and pleasant.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my friends," he said. "I would ask you to help me in 
welcoming three new friends—young men from the Inner Bar­onies, fine young men 
who have dared great distances and many perils on behalf of the Affiliation, and 
in the service of order and peace."
Susan Delgado set her punch-cup aside, retrieved her hand (with some difficulty) 
from her uncle's grip, and began to clap. Others joined in. The applause which 
swept the room was brief but warm. Eldred Jonas did not, Roland noticed, put his 
cup aside to join in.
Thorin turned to Roland, smiling. He raised his cup. "May I set you on with a 
word, Will Dearborn?"
"Aye, so you may, and with thanks," Roland said. There was laughter and fresh 
applause at his usage.
Thorin raised his cup even higher. Everyone else in the room fol­lowed suit; 
crystal gleamed like starpoints in the light of the chandelier.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you William Dearborn of Hemphill, Richard 
Stockworth of Pennilton, and Arthur Heath of Gilead."
Gasps and murmurs at that last, as if their Mayor had announced Arthur Heath of 
Heaven.
"Take of them well, give to them well, make their days in Mejis sweet, and their 
memories sweeter. Help them in their work and to ad­vance the causes which are 
so dear to all of us. May their days be long upon the earth. So says your 
Mayor."
"SO SAY WE ALL!" they thundered back.
Thorin drank; the rest followed his example. There was fresh ap­plause. Roland 
turned, helpless to stop himself, and found Susan's eyes again at once. For a 
moment she looked at him fully, and in her frank gaze he saw that she was nearly 
as shaken by his presence as he was by hers. Then the older woman who looked 
like her bent and murmured some­thing into her ear. Susan turned away, her face 
a composed mask . . . but he had seen her regard in her eyes. And thought again 
that what was done might be undone, and what was spoken might be unspoken.
 
8
 
As they passed into the dining hall, which had tonight been set with four long 
trestle tables (so close there was barely room to move between them), Cordelia 
tugged her niece's hand, pulling her back from the Mayor and Jonas, who had 
fallen into conversation with Fran Lengyll.
"Why looked you at him so, miss?" Cordelia whispered furiously. The vertical 
line had appeared on her forehead. Tonight it looked as deep as a trench. "What 
ails thy pretty, stupid head?" Thy. Just that was enough to tell Susan that her 
aunt was in a fine rage.
"Looked at who? And how?" Her tone sounded right, she thought, but oh, her 
heart—
The hand over hers clamped down, hurting. "Play no fiddle with me, Miss Oh So 
Young and Pretty! Have ye ever seen that fine-turned row of pins before? Tell me 
the truth!"
"No, how could I? Aunt, you're hurting me."
Aunt Cord smiled balefully and clamped down harder. "Better a small hurt now 
than a large one later. Curb your impudence. And curb your flirtatious eyes."
"Aunt, I don't know what you—"
"I think you do," Cordelia said grimly, pressing her niece close to the wood 
panelling to allow the guests to stream past them. When the rancher who owned 
the boathouse next to theirs said hello, Aunt Cord smiled pleasantly at him and 
wished him goodeven before turning back to Susan.
"Mind me, miss—mind me well. If I saw yer cow's eyes, ye may be sure that half 
the company saw. Well, what's done is done, but it stops now. Your time for such 
child-maid games is over. Do you understand?"
Susan was silent, her face setting in those stubborn lines Cordelia hated most 
of all; it was an expression that always made her feel like slap­ping her 
headstrong niece until her nose bled and her great gray doe's eyes gushed tears.
"Ye've made a vow and a contract. Papers have been passed, the weird-woman has 
been consulted, money has changed hands. And ye've given your promise. If that 
means nothing to such as yerself, girl, remem­ber what it'd mean to yer father."
Tears rose in Susan's eyes again, and Cordelia was glad to see them. Her brother 
had been an improvident irritation, capable of producing only this far too 
pretty womanchild ... but he had his uses, even dead.
"Now promise ye'll keep yer eyes to yourself, and that if ye see that boy 
coming, ye'll swing wide—aye, wide's you can—to stay out of his way."
"I promise. Aunt," Susan whispered. "I do."
Cordelia smiled. She was really quite pretty when she smiled. "It's well, then. 
Let's go in. We're being looked at. Hold my arm, child!"
Susan clasped her aunt's powdered arm. They entered the room side by side, their 
dresses rustling, the sapphire pendant on the swell of Su­san's breast flashing, 
and many there were who remarked upon how alike they looked, and how well 
pleased poor old Pat Delgado would have been with them.
 
9
 
Roland was seated near the head of the center table, between Hash Ren­frew (a 
rancher even bigger and blockier than Lengyll) and Thorin's rather morose 
sister, Coral. Renfrew had been handy with the punch; now, as the soup was 
brought to table, he set about proving himself equally adept with the ale.
He talked about the fishing trade ("not what it useter be, boy, al­though it's 
less muties they pull up in their nets these days, 'n that's a blessin"), the 
farming trade ("folks round here can grow most anythin, long's it's corn or 
beans"), and finally about those things clearly closest to his heart: horsin, 
coursin, and ranchin. Those businesses went on as al­ways, aye, so they did, 
although times had been hard in the grass-and-sea-coast Baronies for forty year 
or more.
Weren't the bloodlines clarifying? Roland asked. For they had begun to do so 
where he came from.
Aye, Renfrew agreed, ignoring his potato soup and gobbling barbe­cued 
beef-strips instead. These he scooped up with a bare hand and washed down with 
more ale. Aye, young master, bloodlines was clarify­ing wonderful well, indeed 
they were, three colts out of every five were threaded stock—in thoroughbred as 
well as common lines, kennit—and the fourth could be kept and worked if not 
bred. Only one in five these days born with extra legs or extra eyes or its guts 
on the outside, and that was good. But the birthrates were way down, so they 
were; the stallions had as much ram as ever in their ramrods, it seemed, but not 
as much powder and ball.
"Beggin your pardon, ma'am," Renfrew said, leaning briefly across Roland to 
Coral Thorin. She smiled her thin smile (it reminded Roland of Jonas's), trudged 
her spoon through her soup, and said nothing. Renfrew emptied his ale-cup, 
smacked his lips heartily, and held the cup out again. As it was recharged, he 
turned back to Roland.
Things weren't good, not as they once had been, but they could be worse. Would 
be worse, if that bugger Farson had his way. (This time he didn't bother 
excusing himself to sai Thorin.) They all had to pull to­gether, that was the 
ticket—rich and poor, great and small, while pulling could still do some good. 
And then he seconded Lengyll, telling Roland that whatever he and his friends 
wanted, whatever they needed, they had only to name it.
"Information should be enough," Roland said. "Numbers of things."
"Aye, can't be a counter without numbers," Renfrew agreed, and sprayed beery 
laughter. On Roland's left hand, Coral Thorin nibbled a bit of green (the 
beef-strips she had not so much as touched), smiled her nar­row smile, and went 
on boating with her spoon. Roland guessed there was nothing wrong with her ears, 
though, and that her brother might get a complete report of their conversation. 
Or possibly it would be Rimer to get the report. For, while it was too early to 
say for sure, Roland had an idea that Rimer might be the real force here. Along, 
perhaps, with sai Jonas.
"For instance," Roland said, "how many riding horses do you think we may be able 
to report back to the Affiliation?"
"Tithe or total?"
"Total."
Renfrew put his cup down and appeared to calculate. As he did, Roland looked 
across the table and saw Lengyll and Henry Wertner, the Barony's stockliner, 
exchange a quick glance. They had heard. And he saw something else as well, when 
he returned his attention to his seatmate: Hash Renfrew was drunk, but likely 
not as drunk as he wanted young Will Dearborn to believe.
"Total, ye say—not just what we owe the Affiliation, or might be able to send 
along in a pinch."
"Yes."
"Well, let's see, young sai. Fran must run a hundred'n forty head; John 
Croydon's got near a hundred. Hank Wertner's got forty on his own hook, and must 
run sixty more out along the Drop for the Barony. Gov'mint hossflesh, Mr. 
Dearborn."
Roland smiled. "I know it well. Split hoofs, low necks, no speed, bot­tomless 
bellies."
Renfrew laughed hard at that, nodding .. . but Roland found himself wondering if 
the man was really amused. In Hambry, the waters on top and the waters down 
below seemed to run in different directions.
"As for myself, I've had a bad ten or twelve year—sand-eye, brain fever, 
cabbards. At one time there was two hundred head of running horses out there on 
the Drop with the Lazy Susan brand on em; now there can't be more than eighty."
Roland nodded. "So we're speaking of four hundred and twenty head."
"Oh, more'n that," Renfrew said with a laugh. He went to pick up his ale-cup, 
struck it with the side of one work- and weather-reddened hand, knocked it over, 
cursed, picked it up, then cursed the aleboy who came slow to refill it.
"More than that?" Roland prompted, when Renfrew was finally cocked and locked 
and ready to resume action.
"Ye have to remember, Mr. Dearborn, that this is hoss-country more than it's 
fisher-country. We josh each other, we and the fishers, but there's many a 
scale-scraper got a nag put away behind his house, or in the Barony stables if 
they have no roof of their own to keep the rain off a boss's head. 'Twas her 
poor da useter keep the Barony stables."
Renfrew nodded toward Susan, who was seated across and three seats up from 
Roland himself—just a table's turn from the Mayor, who was, of course, seated at 
the head. Roland found her placement there passing pe­culiar, especially given 
the fact that the Mayor's missus had been seated almost all the way at the far 
end of the table, with Cuthbert on one side of her and some rancher to whom they 
had not yet been introduced on her other.
Roland supposed an old fellow like Thorin might like to have a pretty young 
relation near at hand to help draw attention to him, or to cheer up his own eye, 
but it still seemed odd. Almost an insult to one's wife. If he was tired of her 
conversation, why not put her at the head of another table?
They have their own customs, that's all, and the customs of the coun­try aren't 
your concern. This man's crazy horse-count is your concern.
"How many other running horses, would you say?" he asked Ren­frew. "In all?"
Renfrew gazed at him shrewdly. "An honest answer'll not come back to haunt me, 
will it, sonny? I'm an Affiliation man—so I am, Affiliation to the core, they'll 
carve Excalibur on my gravehead, like as not—but I'd not see Hambry and Mejis 
stripped of all its treasure."
"That won't happen, sai. How could we force you to give up what you don't want 
to in any case? Such forces as we have are all committed in the north and west, 
against the Good Man."
Renfrew considered this, then nodded.
"And may I not be Will to you?"
Renfrew brightened, nodded, and offered his hand a second time. He grinned 
broadly when Roland this time shook it in both of his, the over-and-under grip 
preferred by drovers and cowboys.
"These're bad times we live in, Will, and they've bred bad manners. I'd guess 
there are probably another hundred and fifty head of horse in and about Mejis. 
Good ones is what I mean."
"Big-hat stock."
Renfrew nodded, clapped Roland on the back, ingested a goodly quaff of ale. 
"Big-hats, aye."
From the top of their table there came a burst of laughter. Jonas had apparently 
said something funny. Susan laughed without reservation, her head tilted back 
and her hands clasped before the sapphire pendant. Cordelia, who sat with the 
girl on her left and Jonas on her right, was also laughing. Thorin was 
absolutely convulsed, rocking back and forth in his chair, wiping his eyes with 
a napkin.
"Yon's a lovely girl," Renfrew said. He spoke almost reverently. Roland could 
not quite swear that a small sound—a womanly hmmpf, per­haps—had come from his 
other side. He glanced in that direction and saw sai Thorin still sporting with 
her soup. He looked back toward the head of the table.
"Is the Mayor her uncle, or perhaps her cousin?" Roland asked.
What happened next had a heightened clarity in his memory, as if someone had 
turned up all the colors and sounds of the world. The velvet swags behind Susan 
suddenly seemed a brighter red; the caw of laughter which came from Coral Thorin 
was the sound of a breaking branch. It was surely loud enough to make everyone 
in the vicinity stop their conversa­tions and look at her, Roland thought . . . 
except only Renfrew and the two ranchers across the table did.
"Her uncle!" It was her first conversation of the evening. "Her uncle, that's 
good. Eh, Rennie?"
Renfrew said nothing, only pushed his ale-cup away and finally be­gan to eat his 
soup.
"I'm surprised at ye, young man, so I am. Ye may be from the In-World, but oh 
goodness, whoever tended to your education of the real world—the one outside of 
books 'n maps—stopped a mite short, I'd say. She's his—" And then a word so 
thick with dialect that Roland had no idea what it was. Seefin, it sounded, or 
perhaps sheevin.
"I beg pardon?" He was smiling, but the smile felt cold and false on his mouth. 
There was a heaviness in his belly, as if the punch and the soup and the single 
beef-strip he had eaten for politeness' sake had all lumped together in his 
stomach. Do you serve? he'd asked her, meaning did she serve at table. Mayhap 
she did serve, but likely she did it in a room rather more private than this. 
Suddenly he wanted to hear no more; had not the slightest interest in the 
meaning of the word the Mayor's sister had used.
Another burst of laughter rocked the top of the table. Susan laughed with her 
head back, her cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling. One strap of her dress had 
slipped down her arm, disclosing the tender hollow of her shoulder. As he 
watched, his heart full of fear and longing, she brushed it absently back into 
place with the palm of her hand.
"It means 'quiet little woman,' " Renfrew said, clearly uncomfort­able. "It's an 
old term, not used much these days—"
"Stop it, Rennie," said Coral Thorin. Then, to Roland: "He's just an old cowboy, 
and can't quit shovelling horseshit even when he's away from his beloved nags. 
Sheevin means side-wife. In the time of my great-grandmother, it meant whore . . 
. but one of a certain kind." She looked with a pale eye at Susan, who was now 
sipping ale, then turned back to Roland. There was a species of baleful 
amusement in her gaze, an expres­sion that Roland liked little. "The kind of 
whore you had to pay for in coin, the kind too fine for the trade of simple 
folk."
"She's his gilly?" Roland asked through lips which felt as if they had been 
iced.
"Aye," Coral said. "Not consummated, not until the Reap—and none too happy about 
that is my brother, I'll warrant—but bought and paid for just as in the old 
days. So she is." Coral paused, then said, "Her father would die of shame if he 
could see her." She spoke with a kind of melan­choly satisfaction.
"I hardly think we should judge the Mayor too harshly," Renfrew said in an 
embarrassed, pontificating voice.
Coral ignored him. She studied the line of Susan's jaw, the soft swell of her 
bosom above the silken edge of her bodice, the fall of her hair. The thin humor 
was gone from Coral Thorin's face. In it now was a somehow chilling species of 
contempt.
In spite of himself, Roland found himself imagining the Mayor's knuckle-bunchy 
hands pushing down the straps of Susan's dress, crawl­ing over her naked 
shoulders, plunging like gray crabs into the cave be­neath her hair. He looked 
away, toward the table's lower end, and what he saw there was no better. It was 
Olive Thorin that his eye found—Olive, who had been relegated to the foot of the 
table, Olive, looking up at the laughing folk who sat at its head. Looking up at 
her husband, who had re­placed her with a beautiful young girl, and gifted that 
girl with a pendant which made her own firedim earrings look dowdy by 
comparison. There was none of Coral's hatred and angry contempt on her face. 
Looking at her might have been easier if that were so. She only gazed at her 
husband with eyes that were humble, hopeful, and unhappy. Now Roland under­stood 
why he had thought her sad. She had every reason to be sad.
More laughter from the Mayor's party; Rimer had leaned over from the next table, 
where he was presiding, to contribute some witticism. It must have been a good 
one. This time even Jonas was laughing. Susan put a hand to her bosom, then took 
her napkin and raised it to wipe a tear of laughter from the comer of her eye. 
Thorin covered her other hand. She looked toward Roland and met his eyes, still 
laughing. He thought of Olive Thorin, sitting down there at the foot of the 
table, with the salt and spices, an untouched bowl of soup before her and that 
unhappy smile on her face. Seated where the girl could see her, as well. And he 
thought that, had he been wearing his guns, he might well have drawn one and put 
a bullet in Susan Delgado's cold and whoring little heart.
And thought: Who do you hope to fool?
Then one of the serving boys was there, putting a plate offish in front of him. 
Roland thought he had never felt less like eating in his life .. . but he would 
eat, just the same, just as he would turn his mind to the ques­tions raised by 
his conversation with Hash Renfrew of the Lazy Susan Ranch. He would remember 
the face of his father.
Yes, I'll remember it very well, he thought. If only I could forget the one 
above yon sapphire.

 
 
10
 
The dinner was interminable, and there was no escape afterward. The table at the 
center of the reception room had been removed, and when l lie guests came back 
that way—like a tide which has surged as high as it can and now ebbs—they formed 
two adjacent circles at the direction of a sprightly little redhaired man whom 
Cuthbert later dubbed Mayor Thorin's Minister of Fun.
The boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl circling was accomplished with much laughter 
and some difficulty (Roland guessed that about three-quarters of (lie guests 
were now fairly well shottered), and then the guitarists struck up a quesa. This 
proved to be a simple sort of reel. The circles revolved in opposite directions, 
all holding hands, until the music stopped for a mo­ment. Then the couple 
created at the place where the two circles touched danced at the center of the 
female partner's circle, while everyone else clapped and cheered.
The lead musician managed this old and clearly well-loved tradition with a keen 
eye to the ridiculous, stopping his muchachos in order to cre­ate the most 
amusing couples: tall woman-short man, fat woman-skinny man, old woman-young man 
(Cuthbert ended up side-kicking with a woman as old as his great-granddame, to 
the sai's breathless cackles and the company's general roars of approval).
Then, just when Roland was thinking this stupid dance would never end, the music 
stopped and he found himself facing Susan Delgado.
For a moment he could do nothing but stare at her, feeling that his eyes must 
burst from their sockets, feeling that he could move neither of his stupid feet. 
Then she raised her arms, the music began, the circle (this one included Mayor 
Thorin and the watchful, narrowly smiling Eldred Jonas) applauded, and he led 
her into the dance.
At first, as he spun her through a figure (his feet moved with all their usual 
grace and precision, numb or not), he felt like a man made of glass. Then he 
became aware of her body touching his, and the rustle of her dress, and he was 
all too human again.
She moved closer for just a moment, and when she spoke, her breath tickled in 
his ear. He wondered if a woman could drive you mad—literally mad. He wouldn't 
have believed so before tonight, but tonight everything had changed.
"Thank you for your discretion and your propriety," she whispered.
He pulled back from her a little and at the same time twirled her, his hand 
against the small of her back—palm resting on cool satin, fingers touching warm 
skin. Her feet followed his with never a pause or stutter; they moved with 
perfect grace, unafraid of his great and booted clod-stompers even in their 
flimsy silk slippers.
"I can be discreet, sai," he said. "As for propriety? I'm amazed you even know 
the word."
She looked up into his cold face, her smile fading. He saw anger come in to fill 
it, but before anger there was hurt, as if he had slapped her. He felt both glad 
and sorry at the same time.
"Why do you speak so?" she whispered.
The music stopped before he could answer ... although how he might have 
answered, he had no idea. She curtseyed and he bowed, while those surrounding 
them clapped and whistled. They went back to their places, to their separate 
circles, and the guitars began again. Roland felt his hands grasped on either 
side and began to turn with the circle once more.
Laughing. Kicking. Clapping on the beat. Feeling her somewhere be­hind him, 
doing the same. Wondering if she wanted as badly as he did to be out of here, to 
be in the dark, to be alone in the dark, where he could put his false face aside 
before the real one beneath could grow hot enough to set it afire.

 

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

 

 
 
CHAPTER      VII
ON THE DROP
 
1
 
Three weeks had passed since the welcoming dinner at Mayor's House and the 
incident at the Travellers' Rest. There had been no more trouble between 
Roland's ka-tet and Jonas's. In the night sky, Kissing Moon had waned and 
Peddler's Moon had made its first thin appearance. The days were bright and 
warm; even the oldtimers admitted it was one of the most beautiful summers in 
memory.
On a mid-morning as beautiful as any that summer, Susan Delgado galloped a 
two-year-old rosillo named Pylon north along the Drop. The wind dried the tears 
on her cheeks and yanked her unbound hair out be­hind her as she went. She urged 
Pylon to go faster yet, lightly thumping his sides with her spurless boots. 
Pylon turned it up a notch at once, ears flattening, tail flagging. Susan, 
dressed in jeans and the faded, oversized khaki shirt (one of her da's) that had 
caused all the trouble, leaned over the light practice saddle, holding to the 
horn with one hand and rubbing the other down the side of the horse's strong, 
silky neck.
"More!" she whispered. "More and faster! Go on, boy!"
Pylon let it out yet another notch. That he had at least one more in him she 
knew; that he had even one more beyond that she suspected.
They sped along the Drop's highest ridge, and she barely saw the magnificent 
slope of land below her, all green and gold, or the way it faded into the blue 
haze of the Clean Sea. On any other day the view and the cool, salt-smelling 
breeze would have uplifted her. Today she only wanted to hear the steady low 
thunder of Pylon's hoofs and feel the flex of his muscles beneath her; today she 
wanted to outrun her own thoughts.
And all because she had come downstairs this morning dressed for riding in one 
of her father's old shirts.
 
2
 
Aunt Cord had been at the stove, wrapped in her dressing gown and with her hair 
still netted. She dished herself up a bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the 
table. Susan had known things weren't good as soon as her aunt I timed toward 
her, bowl in hand; she could see the discontented twitch of Aunt Cord's lips, 
and the disapproving glance she shot at the orange Su­san was peeling. Her aunt 
was still rankled by the silver and gold she had expected to have in hand by 
now, coins which would be withheld yet awhile due to the witch's prankish decree 
that Susan should remain a vir­gin until autumn.
But that wasn't the main thing, and Susan knew it. Quite simply put, the two of 
them had had enough of each other. The money was only one of Aunt Cord's 
disappointed expectations; she had counted on having the house at the edge of 
the Drop to herself this summer . . . except, perhaps, (or the occasional visit 
from Mr. Eldred Jonas, with whom Cordelia seemed quite taken. Instead, here they 
still were, one woman growing toward the end of her courses, thin, disapproving 
lips in a thin, disapproving face, tiny apple-breasts under her high-necked 
dresses with their choker collars (The Neck, she frequently told Susan, is the 
First Thing to Go), her hair losing its former chestnut shine and showing 
wire-threads of gray; the other young, intelligent, agile, and rounding toward 
the peak of her physi­cal beauty. They grated against each other, each word 
seeming to produce a spark, and that was not surprising. The man who had loved 
them both enough to make them love each other was gone.
"Are ye going out on that horse?" Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and 
sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have 
allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong 
light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at 
one corner other mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.
"Aye," Susan said.
"Ye should eat more'n that, then. 'Twon't keep ye til nine o' the clock, girl."
"It'll keep me fine," Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. 
She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and 
disapproval in her aunt's eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before 
trouble could begin.
"Why not let me get ye a dish of this?" Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon 
into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse's hoof stamping down in 
mud—or shit—and her stomach clenched. "It'll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to 
ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can't be bothered with 
chores—"
"They're done." And you know they 're done, she did not add. I did em while you 
were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.
Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck—Susan had no idea how 
the woman stayed so thin, really she didn't—and watched it begin to melt. For a 
moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after 
all.
Then the shirt business had begun.
"Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you're wear­ing and put 
on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It's the least 
ye can do to show yer—"
Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger 
even if Susan hadn't interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her 
shirt, loving its texture—it was almost velvety from so many washings. "This rag 
belonged to my father!"
"Aye, Pat's." Aunt Cord sniffed. "It's too big for ye, and worn out, and not 
proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man's 
button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman's bustline ..."
The riding blouses were on hangers in the comer; they had come four days ago and 
Susan hadn't even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, 
one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all un­doubtedly worth a small fortune. 
She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: 
full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars . 
. . and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would 
see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn't, if she could 
possibly help it.
"My 'woman's bust-line,' as you call it, is of no interest to me and can't 
possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I'm out riding," Su­san said.
"Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony's drovers should see you—even 
Rennie, he's out that way all the time, as ye well know—it wouldn't hurt for him 
to mention to Hart that he saw yer wearing one of the camisas  that he so kindly 
gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have lo he such a stiffkins, girl? Why 
always so unwilling, so unfair?"
"What does it matter to ye, one way or t'other?" Susan had asked. "Ye have the 
money, don't ye? And ye'll have more yet. After he fucks me."
Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table 
and slapped her. "How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How 
dare ye?"
That was when her tears began to flow—at hearing her call it her house. "It was 
my father's house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to 
go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!"
The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her 
aunt's face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair 
tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt's shadow fell over her. 
Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek 
throbbing, her eyes burning with tears, her throat swelled and hot. At last she 
found her feet.
"Ye ungrateful girl," her aunt said. Her voice was soft and so full of venom it 
was almost caressing. "After all I have done for thee, and all Hart Thorin has 
done for thee. Why, the very nag ye mean to ride this morning was Hart's gift of 
respect to—"
"PYLON WAS OURS!" she shrieked, almost maddened with fury at this deliberate 
blurring of the truth. "ALL OF THEM WERE! THE HORSES, THE LAND—THEY WERE OURS! "
"Lower thy voice," Aunt Cord said.
Susan took a deep breath and tried to find some control. She swept her hair back 
from her face, revealing the red print of Aunt Cord's hand on her cheek. 
Cordelia flinched a little at the sight of it.
"My father never would have allowed this," Susan said. "He never would have 
allowed me to go as Hart Thorin's gilly. Whatever he might have felt about Hart 
as the Mayor ... or as his patrono ... he never would have allowed this. And ye 
know it. Thee knows it."
Aunt Cord rolled her eyes, then twirled a finger around her ear as if Susan had 
gone mad. "Thee agreed to it yerself, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Aye, so ye 
did. And if yer girlish megrims now cause ye to want to cry off what's been 
done—"
"Aye," Susan agreed. "I agreed to the bargain, so I did. After ye'd dunned me 
about it day and night, after ye'd come to me in tears—"
"I never did!" Cordelia cried, stung.
"Have ye forgotten so quick. Aunt? Aye, I suppose. As by tonight ye'll have 
forgotten slapping me at breakfast. Well, I haven't forgotten. Thee cried, all 
right, cried and told me ye feared we might be turned off the land, since we had 
no more legal right to it, that we'd be on the road, thee wept and said—"
"Stop calling me that!" Aunt Cord shouted. Nothing on earth mad­dened her so 
much as having her own thees and thous turned back at her. "Thee has no more 
right to the old tongue than thee has to thy stupid sheep's complaints! Go on! 
Get out!"
But Susan went on. Her rage was at the flood and would not be turned aside.
"Thee wept and said we'd be turned out, turned west, that we'd never see my da's 
homestead or Hambry again . . . and then, when I was fright­ened enough, ye 
talked of the cunning little baby I'd have. The land that was ours to begin with 
given back again. The horses that were ours like­wise given back. As a sign of 
the Mayor's honesty, I have a horse I myself helped to foal. And what have I 
done to deserve these things that would have been mine in any case, but for the 
loss of a single paper? What have I done so that he should give ye money? What 
have I done save promise to fuck him while his wife of forty year sleeps down 
the hall?"
"Is it the money ye want, then?" Aunt Cord asked, smiling furiously. "Do ye and 
do ye and aye? Ye shall have it, then. Take it, keep it, lose it, feed it to the 
swine, I care not!"
She turned to her purse, which hung on a post by the stove. She began to fumble 
in it, but her motions quickly lost speed and conviction. There was an oval of 
mirror mounted to the left of the kitchen doorway, and in it Susan caught sight 
other aunt's face. What she saw there—a mixture of hatred, dismay, and 
greed—made her heart sink.
"Never mind, Aunt. I see thee's loath to give it up, and I wouldn't have it, 
anyway. It's whore's money."
Aunt Cord turned back to her, face shocked, her purse conveniently forgotten. " 
'Tis not whoring, ye stupid get! Why, some of the greatest women in history have 
been gillys, and some of the greatest men have been born of gillys. 'Tis not 
whoring!"
Susan ripped the red silk blouse from where it hung and held it up. The shirt 
moulded itself to her breasts as if it had been longing all the while to touch 
them. "Then why does he send me these whore's clothes?"
"Susan!" Tears stood in Aunt Cord's eyes.
Susan flung the shirt at her as she had the orange slices. It landed on her 
shoes. "Pick it up and put it on yerself, if ye fancy. You spread yer legs for 
him, if ye fancy."
She turned and hurled herself out the door. Her aunt's half-hysterical shriek 
had followed her: "Don't thee go off thinking foolish thoughts, Su­san! Foolish 
thoughts lead to foolish deeds, and it's too late for either! Thee's agreed!"
She knew that. And however fast she rode Pylon along the Drop, she could not 
outrace her knowing. She had agreed, and no matter how horri­fied Pat Delgado 
might have been at the fix she had gotten herself into, he would have seen one 
thing clear—she had made a promise, and promises must be kept. Hell awaited 
those who would not do so.
 
3
 
She eased the rosillo back while he still had plenty of wind. She looked behind 
her, saw that she had come nearly a mile, and brought him down further—to a 
canter, a trot, a fast walk. She took a deep breath and let it out. For the 
first time that morning she registered the day's bright beauty—gulls circling in 
the hazy air off to the west, high grasses all around her, and flowers in every 
shaded cranny: cornflowers and lupin and phlox and her favorites, the delicate 
blue silkflowers. From every­where came the somnolent buzz of bees. The sound 
soothed her, and with the high surge of her emotions subsiding a little, she was 
able to admit something to herself... admit it, and then voice it aloud.
"Will Dearborn," she said, and shivered at the sound of his name on her lips, 
even though there was no one to hear it but Pylon and the bees. So she said it 
again, and when the words were out she abruptly turned her own wrist inward to 
her mouth and kissed it where the blood beat close to the surface. The action 
shocked her because she hadn't known she was going to do it, and shocked her 
more because the taste of her own skin and sweat aroused her immediately. She 
felt an urge to cool herself off as she had in her bed after meeting him. The 
way she felt, it would be short work.
Instead, she growled her father's favorite cuss—"Oh, bite it!"—and spat past her 
boot. Will Dearborn had been responsible for all too much upset in her life 
these last three weeks; Will Dearborn with his unsettling blue eyes, his dark 
tumble of hair, and his stiff-necked. judgmental atti­tude. I can be discreet, 
madam. As for propriety? I'm amazed you even know the word.
Every time she thought of that, her blood sang with anger and shame. Mostly 
anger. How dare he presume to make judgments? He who had grown up possessing 
every luxury, no doubt with servants to tend his every whim and so much gold 
that he likely didn't even need it—he would be given the things he wanted free, 
as a way of currying favor. What would a boy like that—for that was all he was, 
really, just a boy— know about the hard choices she had made? For that matter, 
how could such as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill understand that she hadn't 
really made those choices at all? That she had been carried to them the way a 
mother cat carries a wayward kitten back to the nesting-box, by the scruff of 
the neck?
Still, he wouldn't leave her mind; she knew, even if Aunt Cord didn't, that 
there had been an unseen third present at their quarrel this morning.
She knew something else as well, something that would have upset her aunt to no 
end.
Will Dearborn hadn't forgotten her, either.

 
4
 
About a week after the welcoming dinner and Dearborn's disastrous, hurtful 
remark to her, the retarded slops-fella from the Travellers' Rest— Sheemie, 
folks called him—had appeared at the house Susan and her aunt shared. In his 
hands he held a large bouquet, mostly made up of the wild-flowers that grew out 
on the Drop, but with a scattering of dusky wild roses, as well. They looked 
like pink punctuation marks. On the boy's face there had been a wide, sunny grin 
as he swung the gate open, not waiting for an invitation.
Susan had been sweeping the front walk at the time; Aunt Cord had been out back, 
in the garden. That was fortunate, but not very surprising;
these days the two of them got on best when they kept apart as much as they 
could.
Susan had watched Sheemie come up the walk, his grin beaming out from behind his 
upheld freight of flowers, with a mixture of fascination and horror.
"G'day, Susan Delgado, daughter of Pat," Sheemie said cheerfully. "I come to you 
on an errand and cry yer pardon at any troubleation I be, oh aye, for I am a 
problem for folks, and know it same as them. These be for you. Here."
He thrust them out, and she saw a small, folded envelope tucked amongst them.
"Susan?" Aunt Cord's voice, from around the side of the house . . . and getting 
closer. "Susan, did I hear the gate?"
"Yes, Aunt!" she called back. Curse the woman's sharp ears! Susan nimbly plucked 
the envelope from its place among the phlox and daisies. Into her dress pocket 
it went.
"They from my third-best friend," Sheemie said. "I got three different friends 
now. This many." He held up two fingers, frowned, added two more, and then 
grinned splendidly. "Arthur Heath my first-best friend, Dick Stockworth my 
second-best friend. My third-best friend—"
"Hush!" Susan said in a low, fierce voice that made Sheemie's smile fade. "Not a 
word about your three friends."
A funny little flush, almost like a pocket fever, raced across her skin—it 
seemed to run down her neck from her cheeks, then slip all the way to her feet. 
There had been a lot of talk in Hambry about Sheemie's new friends during the 
past week—talk about little else, it seemed. The stories she had heard were 
outlandish, but if they weren't true, why did the versions told by so many 
different witnesses sound so much alike?
Susan was still trying to get herself back under control when Aunt Cord swept 
around the comer. Sheemie fell back a step at the sight of her, puzzlement 
becoming outright dismay. Her aunt was allergic to beestings, and was presently 
swaddled from the top of her straw 'brera to the hem of her faded garden dress 
in gauzy stuff that made her look peculiar in strong light and downright eerie 
in shade. Adding a final touch to her costume, she carried a pair of 
dirt-streaked garden shears in one gloved hand.
She saw the bouquet and bore down on it, shears raised. When she reached her 
niece, she slid the scissors into a loop on her belt (almost re­luctantly, it 
seemed to the niece herself) and parted the veil on her face. "Who sent ye 
those?"
"I don't know. Aunt," Susan said, much more calmly than she felt. "This is the 
young man from the inn—"
"Inn!" Aunt Cord snorted.
"He doesn't seem to know who sent him," Susan carried on. If only she could get 
him out of here! "He's, well, I suppose you'd say he's—"
"He's a fool, yes, I know that." Aunt Cord cast Susan a brief, irritated look, 
then bent her attention on Sheemie. Talking with her gloved hands upon her 
knees, shouting directly into his face, she asked: "WHO . . . SENT . . . THESE . 
. . FLOWERS . . . YOUNG... MAN? "
The wings of her face-veil, which had been pushed aside, now fell back into 
place. Sheemie took another step backward. He looked frightened.
"WAS IT . . . PERHAPS . . . SOMEONE FROM... SEAFRONT? . . . FROM . . . MAYOR . . 
. THORIN? . . . TELL ...ME... AND . . . I'LL . . . GIVE... YOU . . . A PENNY. "
Susan's heart sank, sure he would tell—he'd not have the wit to understand he'd 
be getting her into trouble. Will, too, likely.
But Sheemie only shook his head. "Don't 'member. I got a empty head, sai, so I 
do. Stanley says I a bugwit."
His grin shone out again, a splendid thing full of white, even teeth. Aunt Cord 
answered it with a grimace. "Oh, foo! Be gone, then. Straight back to town, 
too—don't be hanging around hoping for a goose-feather. For a boy who can't 
remember deserves not so much as a penny! And don't you come back here again, no 
matter who wants you to carry flow­ers for the young sai. Do you hear me?"
Sheemie had nodded energetically. Then: "Sai?"
Aunt Cord glowered at him. The vertical line on her forehead had been very 
prominent that day.
"Why you all wropped up in cobwebbies, sai?"
"Get out of here, ye impudent cull!" Aunt Cord cried. She had a good loud voice 
when she wanted to use it, and Sheemie jumped back from her in alarm. When she 
was sure he was headed back down the High Street toward town and had no 
intention of returning to their gate and hanging about in hopes of a tip, Aunt 
Cord had turned to Susan.
"Get those in some water before they wilt, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, and 
don't go mooning about, wondering who yer secret admirer might be."
Then Aunt Cord had smiled. A real smile. What hurt Susan the most, confused her 
the most, was that her aunt was no cradle-story ogre, no witch like Rhea of the 
Coos. There was no monster here, only a maiden lady with some few social 
pretensions, a love of gold and silver, and a tear of being turned out, 
penniless, into the world.
"For folks such as us, Susie-pie," she said, speaking with a terrible heavy 
kindness, " 'tis best to stick to our housework and leave dreams to them as can 
afford them."
 
5
 
She had been sure the flowers were from Will, and she was right. His note was 
written in a hand which was clear and passing fair.

Dear Susan Delgado,
I spoke out of turn the other night, and cry your pardon. May I see you and 
speak to  you? It must be private. This is a matter of importance. If you will 
see me, get a message to the boy who brings this. He is safe.
Will Dearborn

A matter of importance. Underlined. She felt a strong desire to know what was so 
important to him, and cautioned herself against doing anything foolish. Perhaps 
he was smitten with her ... and if so, whose fault was that? Who had talked to 
him, ridden his horse, showed him her legs in a flashy carnival dismount? Who 
had put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him?
Her cheeks and forehead burned at the thought of that, and another hot ring 
seemed to go slipping down her body. She wasn't sure she regret­ted the kiss, 
but it had been a mistake, regrets or no regrets. Seeing him again now would be 
a worse one.
Yet she wanted to see him, and knew in her deepest heart that she was ready to 
set her anger at him aside. But there was the promise she had made.
The wretched promise.
That night she lay sleepless, tossing about in her bed, first thinking it would 
be better, more dignified, just to keep her silence, then composing mental notes 
anyway—some haughty, some cold, some with a lace-edge of flirtation.
When she heard the midnight bell ring, passing the old day out and calling the 
new one in, she decided enough was enough. She'd thrown herself from her bed, 
gone to her door, opened it, and thrust her head out into the hall. When she 
heard Aunt Cord's flutelike snores, she had closed her door again, crossed to 
her little desk by the window, and lit her lamp. She took one of her sheets of 
parchment paper from the top drawer, tore it in half (in Hambry, the only crime 
greater than wasting paper was wasting threaded stockline), and then wrote 
quickly, sensing that the slightest hesitation might condemn her to more hours 
of indecision. With no salu­tation and no signature, her response took only a 
breath to write:
 
I may not see you. 'Twould not be proper.
 
She had folded it small, blew out her lamp, and returned to bed with the note 
safely tucked under her pillow. She was asleep in two minutes. The following 
day, when the marketing took her to town, she had gone by the Travellers' Rest, 
which, at eleven in the morning, had all the charm of something which has died 
badly at the side of the road.
The saloon's door-yard was a beaten dirt square bisected by a long hitching rail 
with a watering trough beneath. Sheemie was trundling a wheelbarrow along the 
rail, picking up last night's horse-droppings with a shovel. He was wearing a 
comical pink sombrero, and singing "Golden Slippers." Susan doubted if many of 
the Rest's patrons would wake up feeling as well as Sheemie obviously did this 
morning ... so who, when you came right down to it, was more soft-headed?
She looked around to make sure no one was paying heed to her, then went over to 
Sheemie and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked fright­ened at first, and 
Susan didn't blame him—according to the stories she'd been hearing, Jonas's 
friend Depape had almost killed the poor kid for spilling a drink on his boots.
Then Sheemie recognized her. "Hello, Susan Delgado from out there by the edge of 
town," he said companionably. "It's a good day I wish you, sai."
He bowed—an amusing imitation of the Inner Baronies bow favored by his three new 
friends. Smiling, she dropped him a bit of curtsey (wear­ing jeans, she had to 
pretend at the skirt-holding part, but women in Mejis got used to curtseying in 
pretend skirts).
"See my flowers, sai?" he asked, and pointed toward the unpainted side of the 
Rest. What she saw touched her deeply: a line of mixed blue and white 
silkflowers growing along the base of the building. They looked both brave and 
pathetic, flurrying there in the faint morning breeze with the bald, 
turd-littered yard before them and the splintery public house be­hind them.
"Rid you grow those, Sheemie?"
"Aye, so I did. And Mr. Arthur Heath of Gilead has promised me yel­low ones."
"I've never seen yellow silkflowers."
"Noey-no, me neither, but Mr. Arthur Heath says they have them in Gilead." He 
looked at Susan solemnly, the shovel held in his hands as a soldier would hold a 
gun or spear at port arms. "Mr. Arthur Heath saved my life. I'd do anything for 
him."
"Would you, Sheemie?" she asked, touched.
"Also, he has a lookout! It's a bird's head! And when he talks to it, 
tendy-pretend, do I laugh? Aye, fit to split!"
She looked around again to make sure no one was watching (save for the carved 
totems across the street), then removed her note, folded small, from her jeans 
pocket.
"Would you give this to Mr. Dearborn for me? He's also your friend, is he not?"
"Will? Aye!" He took the note and put it carefully into his own pocket.
"And tell no one."
"Shhhhh!" he agreed, and put a finger to his lips. His eyes had been amusingly 
round beneath the ridiculous pink lady's straw he wore. "Like when I brought you 
the flowers. Hushaboo!"
"That's right, hushaboo. Fare ye well, Sheemie."
"And you, Susan Delgado."
He went back to his cleanup operations. Susan had stood watching him for a 
moment, feeling uneasy and out of sorts with herself. Now that the note was 
successfully passed, she felt an urge to ask Sheemie to give it back, to scratch 
out what she had written, and promise to meet him. If only to see his steady 
blue eyes again, looking into her face.
Then Jonas's other friend, the one with the cloak, came sauntering out of the 
mercantile. She was sure he didn't see her—his head was down and he was rolling 
a cigarette—but she had no intention of pressing her luck. Reynolds talked to 
Jonas, and Jonas talked—all too much!—to Aunt Cord. If Aunt Cord heard she had 
been passing the time of day with the boy who had brought her the flowers, there 
were apt to be questions. Ones she didn't want to answer.
 
6
 
All that's history now, Susan—water under the bridge. Best to get your thoughts 
out of the past.
She brought Pylon to a stop and looked down the length of the Drop at the horses 
that moved and grazed there. Quite a surprising number of them this morning.
It wasn't working. Her mind kept turning back to Will Dearborn.
What bad luck meeting him had been! If not for that chance encounter on her way 
back down from the Coos, she might well have made peace with her situation by 
now—she was a practical girl, after all, and a prom­ise was a promise. She 
certainly never would have expected herself to get all goosy-gushy over losing 
her maidenhead, and the prospect of carrying and bearing a child actually 
excited her.
But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged 
there, a tenant who defied eviction. His remark to her as they danced stayed 
with her like a song you can't stop humming, even though you hate it. It had 
been cruel and stupidly self-righteous, that remark ... but was there not also a 
grain of truth in it? Rhea had been right about Hart Thorin, of that much Susan 
no longer had any doubt. She supposed that witches were right about men's lusts 
even when they were wrong about everything else. Not a happy thought, but likely 
a true one.
It was Will Be Damned to You Dearborn who had made it difficult for her to 
accept what needed accepting, who had goaded her into argu­ments in which she 
could hardly recognize her own shrill and desperate voice, who came to her in 
her dreams—dreams where he put his arms around her waist and kissed her, kissed 
her, kissed her.
She dismounted and walked downhill a little way with the reins looped in her 
fist. Pylon followed willingly enough, and when she stopped to look off into the 
blue haze to the southwest, he lowered his head and began to crop again.
She thought she needed to see Will Dearborn once more, if only to give her 
innate practicality a chance to reassert itself. She needed to see him at his 
right size, instead of the one her mind had created for him in her warm thoughts 
and warmer dreams. Once that was done, she could get on with her life and do 
what needed doing. Perhaps that was why she had taken this path—the same one 
she'd ridden yesterday, and the day be­fore yesterday, and the day before that. 
He rode this part of the Drop; that much she had heard in the lower market.
She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her 
thought had called him—or her ka.
She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line 
of a woman's thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt 
a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like 
wet tea leaves.
She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the 
apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would 
be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as 
she did, a rider came over the horizon, break­ing against the sky at the place 
which looked to her like a woman's hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on 
horseback, but she knew who it was at once.
Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here! 
Quickly! Before something terrible happens . . . before it really is ka, come 
like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!
She didn't run. She stood with Pylon's reins in one hand, and mur­mured to him 
when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored 
gelding coming down the hill.
Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dis­mounted in an 
easy, liquid motion she didn't think she could have matched, for all her years 
of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat 
swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and 
serious and disquietingly adult.
They looked at each other in the Drop's big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan 
of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and 
welcomed it in equal measure.
 
7
 
"Goodmorn, Susan," he said. "I'm glad to see you again."
She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beat­ing as 
clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it 
still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to 
hear that thumping.
Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mis­trustfully. 
He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.
"I cry your pardon," he said.
"Do you?" Her voice was cool.
"What I said that night was unwarranted."
At that she felt a spark of real anger. "I care not that it was unwar­ranted; I 
care that it was unfair. That it hurt me."
A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn't all cried 
out after all, it seemed.
She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came 
into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.
"I fell in love with you," he said. "That's why I said it. It happened even 
before you kissed me, I think."
She laughed at that . . . but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her 
laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. "Mr. Dearborn—"
"Will. Please."
"Mr. Dearborn," she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, 
"the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A 
sister's kiss?" Now she was the one who was blush­ing, but she hurried on. "Such 
things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not."
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland's truth: the 
deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the 
granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, 
and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.
"I cry your pardon," he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubborn­ness in 
him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. "I 
don't ask you to return my love, that's not why I spoke. You told me your 
affairs were complicated . .." Now his eyes did leave hers, and he looked off 
toward the Drop. He even laughed a little. "I called him a bit of a fool, didn't 
I? To your face. So who's the fool, after all?"
She smiled; couldn't help it. "Ye also said ye'd heard he was fond of strong 
drink and berry-girls."
Roland hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. If his friend Arthur Heath 
had done that, she would have taken it as a deliberate, comic ges­ture. Not with 
Will. She had an idea he wasn't much for comedy.
Silence between them again, this time not so uncomfortable. The two horses, 
Rusher and Pylon, cropping contentedly, side by side. If we were horses, all 
this would be much easier, she thought, and almost giggled.
"Mr. Dearborn, ye understand that I have agreed to an arrangement?"
"Aye." He smiled when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. "It's not mockery but 
the dialect. It just. . . seeps in."
"Who told ye of my business?"
"The Mayor's sister."
"Coral." She wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn't surprised. And she 
supposed there were others who could have explained her situa­tion even more 
crudely. Eldred Jonas, for one. Rhea of the Coos, for an­other. Best to leave 
it. "So if ye understand, and if ye don't ask me to return your . . . whatever 
it is ye think ye feel . . . why are we talking? Why do ye seek me out? I think 
it makes ye passing uncomfortable—"
"Yes," he said, and then, as if stating a simple fact: "It makes me 
un­comfortable, all right. I can barely look at you and keep my head."
"Then mayhap it'd be best not to look, not to speak, not to think!" Her voice 
was both sharp and a little shaky. How could he have the courage to say such 
things, to just state them straight out and starey-eyed like that? "Why did ye 
send me the bouquet and that note? Are ye not aware of the trouble ye could've 
gotten me into? If y'knew my aunt. . . ! She's already spoken to me about ye, 
and if she knew about the note ... or saw us to­gether out here ..."
She looked around, verifying that they were still unobserved. They were, at 
least as best she could tell. He reached out, touched her shoulder. She looked 
at him, and he pulled his fingers back as if he had put them on something hot.
"I said what I did so you'd understand," he said. "That's all. I feel how I 
feel, and you're not responsible for that."
But I am, she thought. I kissed you. I think I'm more than a little re­sponsible 
for how we both feel. Will.
"What I said while we were dancing I regret with all my heart. Won't you give me 
your pardon?"
"Aye," she said, and if he had taken her in his arms at that moment, she would 
have let him, and damn the consequences. But he only took off his hat and made 
her a charming little bow, and the wind died.
"Thankee-sai."
"Don't call me that. I hate it. My name is Susan."
"Will you call me Will?"                   '
She nodded.
"Good. Susan, I want to ask you something—not as the fellow who insulted you and 
hurt you because he was jealous. This is something else entirely. May I?"
"Aye, I suppose," she said warily.
"Are you for the Affiliation?"
She looked at him, flabbergasted. It was the last question in the world she had 
expected . . . but he was looking at her seriously.
"I'd expected ye and yer friends to count cows and guns and spears and boats and 
who knows what else," she said, "but I didn't think thee would also count 
Affiliation supporters."
She saw his look of surprise, and a little smile at the comers of his mouth. 
This time the smile made him look older than he could possibly be. Susan thought 
back across what she'd just said, realized what must have struck him, and gave a 
small, embarrassed laugh. "My aunt has a way of lapsing into thee and thou. My 
father did, too. It's from a sect of the Old People who called themselves 
Friends."
"I know. We have the Friendly Folk in my part of the world still."
"Do you?"
"Yes ... or aye, if you like the sound of that better; I'm coming to. And I like 
the way the Friends talk. It has a lovely sound."
"Not when my aunt uses it," Susan said, thinking back to the argu­ment over the 
shirt. "To answer your question, aye—I'm for the Affiliation, I suppose. Because 
my da was. If ye ask am I strong for the Affiliation, I suppose not. We see and 
hear little enough of them, these days. Mostly rumors and stories carried by 
drifters and far-travelling drummers. Now that there's no railway ..." She 
shrugged.
"Most of the ordinary day-to-day folk I've spoken to seem to feel the same. And 
yet your Mayor Thorin—"
"He's not my Mayor Thorin," she said, more sharply than she had intended.
"And yet the Barony's Mayor Thorin has given us every help we've asked for, and 
some we haven't. I have only to snap my fingers, and Kimba Rimer stands before 
me."
"Then don't snap them," she said, looking around in spite of herself. She tried 
to smile and show it was a joke, but didn't make much success of it.
" The townsfolk, the fisherfolk, the farmers, the cowboys . . . they all speak 
well of the Affiliation, but distantly. Yet the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the 
members of the Horsemen's Association, Lengyll and Garber and that lot—"
"I know them," she said shortly.
"They're absolutely enthusiastic in their support. Mention the Affilia­tion to 
Sheriff Avery and he all but dances. In every ranch parlor we're offered a drink 
from an Eld commemorative cup, it seems."
"A drink of what?" she asked, a trifle roguishly. "Beer? Ale? Graf?"
"Also wine, whiskey, and pettibone," he said, not responding to her smile. "It's 
almost as if they wish us to break our vow. Does that strike you as strange?"
"Aye, a little; or just as Hambry hospitality. In these parts, when 
someone—especially a young man—says he's taken the pledge, folks tend to think 
him coy, not serious."
"And this joyful support of the Affiliation amongst the movers and the shakers? 
How does that strike you?"
"Queer."
And it did. Pat Delgado's work had brought him in almost daily con­tact with 
these landowners and horsebreeders, and so she, who had tagged after her da any 
time he would let her, had seen plenty of them. She thought them a cold bunch, 
by and large. She couldn't imagine John Croydon or Jake White waving an Arthur 
Eld stein in a sentimental toast... es­pecially not in the middle of the day, 
when there was stock to be run and sold.
Will's eyes were full upon her, as if he were reading these thoughts.
"But you probably don't see as much of the big fellas as you once did," he said. 
"Before your father passed, I mean."
"Perhaps not. . . but do bumblers learn to speak backward?"
No cautious smile this time; this time he outright grinned. It lit his whole 
face. Gods, how handsome he was! "I suppose not. No more than cats change their 
spots, as we say. And Mayor Thorin doesn't speak of such as us—me and my 
friends—to you when you two are alone? Or is that question beyond what I have a 
right to ask? I suppose it is."
"I care not about that," she said, tossing her head pertly enough to make her 
long braid swing. "I understand little of propriety, as some have been good 
enough to point out." But she didn't care as much for his down­cast look and 
flush of embarrassment as she had expected. She knew girls who liked to tease as 
well as flirt and to tease hard, some of them- but it seemed she had no taste 
for it. Certainly she had no desire to set her claws in him, and when she went 
on, she spoke gently. "I'm not alone with him, in any case."
And oh how ye do lie, she thought mournfully, remembering how Thorin had 
embraced her in the hall on the night of the party, groping at her breasts like 
a child trying to get his hand into a candy-jar; telling her that he burned for 
her. Oh ye great liar.
"In any case, Will, Hart's opinion of you and yer friends can hardly concern ye, 
can it? Ye have a job to do, that's all. If he helps ye, why not just accept and 
be grateful?"
"Because something's wrong here," he said, and the serious, almost somber 
quality of his voice frightened her a little.
"Wrong? With the Mayor? With the Horsemen's Association? What are ye talking 
about?"
He looked at her steadily, then seemed to decide something. "I'm go­ing to trust 
you, Susan."
"I'm not sure I want thy trust any more than I want thy love," she said.
He nodded. "And yet, to do the job I was sent to do, I have to trust someone. 
Can you understand that?"
She looked into his eyes, then nodded.
He stepped next to her, so close she fancied she could feel the warmth of his 
skin. "Look down there. Tell me what you see."
She looked, then shrugged. "The Drop. Same as always." She smiled a little. "And 
as beautiful. This has always been my favorite place in all the world."
"Aye, it's beautiful, all right. What else do you see?"
"Horses, of courses." She smiled to show this was a joke (an old one of her 
da's, in fact), but he didn't smile back. Fair to look at, and coura­geous, if 
the stories they were already telling about town were true— quick in both 
thought and movement, too. Really not much sense of humor, though. Well, there 
were worse failings. Grabbing a girl's bosom when she wasn't expecting it might 
be one of them.
"Horses. Yes. But does it look like the right number of them? You've been seeing 
horses on the Drop all your life, and surely no one who's not in the Horsemen's 
Association is better qualified to say."
"And ye don't trust them?"
"They’ve given us everything we've asked for, and they're as friendly as dogs 
under the dinner-table, but no—1 don't think 1 do."
"Yet ye'd trust me."
He looked at her steadily with his beautiful and frightening eyes—a darker blue 
than they would later be, not yet faded out by the suns of ten thousand drifting 
days. "I have to trust someone," he repeated.
She looked down, almost as though he had rebuked her. He reached out, put gentle 
fingers beneath her chin, and tipped her face up again. "Does it seem the right 
number? Think carefully!"
But now that he'd brought it to her attention, she hardly needed to think about 
it at all. She had been aware of the change for some time, she supposed, but it 
had been gradual, easy to overlook.
"No," she said at last. "It's not right."
"Too few or too many? Which?"
She paused for a moment. Drew in breath. Let it out in a long sigh. "Too many. 
Far too many."
Will Dearborn raised his clenched fists to shoulder-height and gave them a 
single hard shake. His blue eyes blazed like the spark-lights of which her 
grand-da had told her. "I knew it," he said. "I knew it."
 
8
 
"How many horses are down there?" he asked.
"Below us? Or on the whole Drop?"
"Just below us."
She looked carefully, making no attempt to actually count. That didn't work; it 
only confused you. She saw four good-sized groups of about twenty horses each, 
moving about on the green almost exactly as birds moved about in the blue above 
them. There were perhaps nine smaller groups, ranging from octets to quartets 
... several pairs (they reminded her of lovers, but everything did today, it 
seemed) ... a few galloping loners—young stallions, mostly . . .
"A hundred and sixty?" he asked in a low, almost hesitant voice.
She looked at him, surprised. "Aye. A hundred sixty's the number I had in mind. 
To a pin."
"And how much of the Drop are we looking at? A quarter? A third?"
"Much less." She tilted him a small smile. "As I think thee knows. A sixth of 
the total open graze, perhaps."
"If there are a hundred and sixty horses free-grazing on each sixth, that comes 
to .. ."
She waited for him to come up with nine hundred and sixty. When he did, she 
nodded. He looked down a moment longer, and grunted with surprise when Rusher 
nosed him in the small of the back. Susan put a curled hand to her mouth to 
stifle a laugh. From the impatient way he pushed the horse's muzzle away, she 
guessed he still saw little that was funny.
"How many more are stabled or training or working, do you reckon?" he asked.
"One for every three down there. At a guess."
"So we'd be talking twelve hundred head of horses. All threaded stock, no 
muties."
She looked at him with faint surprise. "Aye. There's almost no mutie stock here 
in Mejis ... in any of the Outer Baronies, for that matter."
"You true-breed more than three out of every five?"
"We breed em all! Of course every now and then we get a freak that has to be put 
down, but—"
"Not one freak out of every five livebirths? One out of five born with—" How had 
Renfrew put it? "With extra legs or its guts on the outside?"
Her shocked look was enough answer. "Who's been telling ye such?"
"Renfrew. He also told me that there was about five hundred and sev­enty head of 
threaded stock here in Mejis."
"That's just . . ." She gave a bewildered little laugh. "Just crazy! If my da 
was here—"
"But he's not," Roland said, his tone as dry as a snapping twig. "He's dead."
For a moment she seemed not to register the change in that tone. Then, as if an 
eclipse had begun to happen somewhere inside her head, her entire aspect 
darkened. "My da had an accident. Do you understand that, Will Dearborn? An 
accident. It was terribly sad, but the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. A 
horse rolled on him. Ocean Foam. Fran says Foam saw a snake in the grass."
"Fran Lengyll?"
"Aye." Her skin was pale, except for two wild roses—pink, like those in the 
bouquet he'd sent her by way of Sheemie—glowing high up on her cheekbones. "Fran 
rode many miles with my father. They weren't great friends—they were of 
different classes, for one thing—but they rode to­gether. I've a cap put away 
somewhere that Fran's first wife made for my christening. They rode the trail 
together. 1 can't believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone 
that he had ... anything to do with it."
Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da 
would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: 
whose brands were on the extras?
"It so happens Fran Lengyll and my friend Stockworth had a discus­sion about 
horses," Will said. His voice sounded almost casual, but there was nothing 
casual on his face. "Over glasses of spring water, after beer had been offered 
and refused. They spoke of them much as I did with Renfrew at Mayor Thorin's 
welcoming dinner. When Richard asked sai Lengyll to estimate riding horses, he 
said perhaps four hundred."
"Insane."
"It would seem so," Will agreed.
"Do they not kennit the horses are out here where ye can see em?"
"They know we've barely gotten started," he said, "and that we've begun with the 
fisherfolk. We'll be a month yet, I'm sure they think, be­fore we start to 
concern ourselves with the horseflesh hereabouts. And in the meantime, they have 
an attitude about us of... how shall I put it? Well, never mind how I'd put it. 
I'm not very good with words, but my friend Arthur calls it 'genial contempt.' 
They leave the horses out in front of our eyes, I think, because they don't 
believe we'll know what we're looking at. Or because they think we won't believe 
what we're seeing. I'm very glad I found you out here."
Just so I could give you a more accurate horse-count? Is that the only reason?
"But ye will get around to counting the horses. Eventually. I mean, that must 
surely be one of the Affiliation's main needs."
He gave her an odd look, as if she had missed something that should have been 
obvious. It made her feel self-conscious.
"What? What is it?"
"Perhaps they expect the extra horses to be gone by the time we get around to 
this side of the Barony's business."
"Gone where?”
"I don't know. But I don't like this. Susan, you will keep this just be­tween 
the two of us, won't you?"
She nodded. She'd be insane to tell anyone she had been with Will Dearborn, 
unchaperoned except by Rusher and Pylon, out on the Drop.
"It may all turn out to be nothing, but if it doesn't, knowing could be 
dangerous."
Which led back to her da again. Lengyll had told her and Aunt Cord that Pat had 
been thrown, and that Ocean Foam had then rolled upon him. Neither of them had 
had any reason to doubt the man's story. But Fran Lengyll had also told Will's 
friend that there were only four hundred head of riding stock in Mejis, and that 
was a bald lie.
Will turned to his horse, and she was glad.
Part of her wanted him to stay—to stand close to her while the clouds sent their 
long shadows flying across the grassland—but they had been to­gether out here 
too long already. There was no reason to think anyone would come along and see 
them, but instead of comforting her, that idea for some reason made her more 
nervous than ever.
He straightened the stirrup hanging beside the scabbarded shaft of his lance 
(Rusher whickered way back in his throat, as if to say About time we got going), 
then turned to her again. She felt actually faint as his gaze fell upon her, and 
now the idea of ka was almost too strong to deny. She tried to tell herself it 
was just the dim—that feeling of having lived a thing be­fore—but it wasn't the 
dim; it was a sense of finding a road one had been searching for all along.
"There's something else I want to say. I don't like returning to where we 
started, but I must."
"No," she said faintly. "That's closed, surely."
"I told you that I loved you, and that I was jealous," he said, and for the 
first time his voice had come unanchored a little, wavering in his throat. She 
was alarmed to see that there were tears standing in his eyes. "There was more. 
Something more."
"Will, I don't want to—" She turned blindly for her horse. He took her shoulder 
and turned her back. It wasn't a harsh touch, but there was an inexorability to 
it that was dreadful. She looked helplessly up into his face, saw that he was 
young and far from home, and suddenly understood she could not stand against him 
for long. She wanted him so badly that she ached with it. She would have given a 
year of her life just to be able to put her palms on his cheeks and feel his 
skin.
"You miss your father, Susan?"
"Aye," she whispered. "With all my heart I do."
"I miss my mother the same way." He held her by both shoulders now. One eye 
overbrimmed; one tear drew a silver line down his cheek.
"Is she dead?"
"No, but something happened. About her. To her. Shit! How can I talk about it 
when I don't even know how to think about it? In a way, she did die. For me."
"Will, that's terrible."
He nodded. "The last time I saw her, she looked at me in a way that will haunt 
me to my grave. Shame and love and hope, all of them bound up together. Shame at 
what I'd seen and knew about her, hope, maybe, that I'd understand and forgive . 
. ." He took a deep breath. "The night of the party, toward the end of the meal, 
Rimer said something funny. You all laughed—"
"If I did, it was only because it would have looked strange if I was the only 
one who didn't," Susan said. "I don't like him. I think he's a schemer and a 
conniver."
"You all laughed, and I happened to look down toward the end of the table. 
Toward Olive Thorin. And for a moment—only a moment—I thought she was my mother. 
The expression was the same, you see. The same one I saw on the morning when I 
opened the wrong door at the wrong time and came upon my mother and her—"
"Stop it!" she cried, pulling back from his hands. Inside her, every­thing was 
suddenly in motion, all the mooring-lines and buckles and clamps she'd been 
using to hold herself together seeming to melt at once. "Stop it, just stop it, 
I can't listen to you talk about her!"
She groped out for Pylon, but now the whole world was wet prisms. She began to 
sob. She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her again, and she did not 
resist them.
"I'm so ashamed," she said. ''I'm so ashamed and so frightened and I'm sorry. 
I've forgotten my father's face and . . . and ..."
And I'll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn't have 
to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let 
herself be kissed . . . and then she was kissing him back, kiss­ing him almost 
furiously. She wiped the wetness from beneath his eyes with soft little sweeps 
of her thumbs, then slipped her palms up his cheeks as she had longed to do. The 
feeling was exquisite; even the soft rasp of the stubble close to the skin was 
exquisite. She slid her arms around his neck, her open mouth on his, holding him 
and kissing him as hard as she could, kissing him there between the horses, who 
simply looked at each other and then went back to cropping grass.
 
9
 
They were the best kisses of his whole life, and never forgotten: the yield­ing 
pliancy of her lips and the strong shape of her teeth under them, ur­gent and 
not shy in the least; the fragrance of her breath, the sweet line of her body 
pressed against his. He slipped a hand up to her left breast, squeezed it 
gently, and felt her heart speeding under it. His other hand went to her hair 
and combed along the side of it, silk at her temple. He never forgot its 
texture.
Then she was standing away from him, her face flaming with blush and passion, 
one hand going to her lips, which he had kissed until they were swollen. A 
little trickle of blood ran from the comer of the lower one. Her eyes, wide on 
his. Her bosom rising and falling as if she had just run a race. And between 
them a current that was like nothing he had ever felt in his life. It ran like a 
river and shook like a fever.
"No more," she said in a trembling voice. "No more, please. If you really do 
love me, don't let me dishonor myself. I've made a promise. Anything might come 
later, after that promise was fulfilled, I suppose .. . if you still wanted me . 
. ."
"I would wait forever," he said calmly, "and do anything for you but stand away 
and watch you go with another man."
"Then if you love me, go away from me. Please, Will!"
"Another kiss."
She stepped forward at once, raising her face trustingly up to his, and he 
understood he could do whatever he wanted with her. She was, at least for the 
moment, no longer her own mistress; she might consequently be his. He could do 
to her what Marten had done to his own mother, if that was his fancy.
The thought broke his passion apart, turned it to coals that fell in a bright 
shower, winking out one by one in a dark bewilderment. His fa­ther's acceptance
(I have known for two years)
was in many ways the worst part of what had happened to him this year; how could 
he fall in love with this girl—any girl—in a world where such evils of the heart 
seemed necessary, and might even be repeated?
Yet he did love her.
Instead of the passionate kiss he wanted, he placed his lips lightly on the 
corner of her mouth where the little rill of blood flowed. He kissed, tasting 
salt like the taste of his own tears. He closed his eyes and shivered when her 
hand stroked the hair at the nape of his neck.
"I'd not hurt Olive Thorin for the world," she whispered in his ear. "No more 
than I'd hurt thee, Will. I didn't understand, and now 'tis too late to be put 
right. But thank you for not... not taking what you could. And I'll remember you 
always. How it was to be kissed by you. It's the best thing that ever happened 
to me, I think. Like heaven and earth all wrapped up together, aye."
"I'll remember, too." He watched her swing up into the saddle, and remembered 
how her bare legs had flashed in the dark on the night he had met her. And 
suddenly he couldn't let her go. He reached forward, touched her boot.
"Susan—"
"No," she said. "Please."
He stood back. Somehow.
"This is our secret," she said. "Yes?"
"Aye."
She smiled at that ... but it was a sad smile. "Stay away from me from now on, 
Will. Please. And I'll stay away from you."
He thought about it. "If we can."
"We must, Will. We must."
She rode away fast. Roland stood beside Rusher's stirrup, watching her go. And 
when she was out of sight over the horizon, still he watched.
 
10
 
Sheriff Avery, Deputy Dave, and Deputy George Riggins were sitting on the porch 
in front of the Sheriff's office and jail when Mr. Stockworth and Mr. Heath (the 
latter with that idiotic bird's skull still mounted on the horn of his saddle) 
went past at a steady walk. The bell o' noon had rung fifteen minutes before, 
and Sheriff Avery reckoned they were on their way to lunch, perhaps at The 
Millbank, or perhaps at the Rest, which put on a fair noon meal. Popkins and 
such. Avery liked something a little more filling; half a chicken or a haunch of 
beef suited him just fine.
Mr. Heath gave them a wave and a grin. "Good day, gents! Long life! Gentle 
breezes! Happy siestas!"
They waved and smiled back. When they were out of sight, Dave said: "They spent 
all mornin down there on the piers, countin nets. Nets! Do you believe it?"
"Yessir," Sheriff Avery said, lifting one massive cheek a bit out of his rocker 
and letting off a noisy pre-luncheon fart. "Yessir, I do. Aye."
George said: "If not for them facing off Jonas's boys the way they done, I'd 
think they was a pack of fools."
"Nor would they likely mind," Avery said. He looked at Dave, who was twirling 
his monocle on the end of its ribbon and looking off in the direction the boys 
had taken. There were folks in town who had begun calling the Affiliation brats 
Little Coffin Hunters. Avery wasn't sure what to make of that. He'd soothed it 
down between them and Thorin's hard boys, and had gotten both a commendation and 
a piece of gold from Rimer for his efforts, but still. . . what to make of them?
"The day they came in," he said to Dave, "ye thought they were soft. How do ye 
say now?"
"Now?" Dave twirled his monocle a final time, then popped it in his eye and 
stared at the Sheriff through it. "Now I think they might have been a little 
harder than I thought, after all."
Yes indeed, Avery thought. But hard don't mean smart, thank the gods. Aye, thank 
the gods for that.
"I'm hungry as a bull, so I am," he said, getting up. He bent, put his hands on 
his knees, and ripped off another loud fart. Dave and George looked at each 
other. George fanned a hand in front of his face. Sheriff Herkimer Avery, Barony 
Sheriff, straightened up, looking both relieved and anticipatory. "More room out 
than there is in," he said. "Come on, boys. Let's go downstreet and tuck into a 
little."
 
11
 
Not even sunset could do much to improve the view from the porch of the Bar K 
bunkhouse. The building—except for the cook-shack and the sta­ble, the only one 
still standing on what had been the home acre—was L-shaped, and the porch was 
built on the inside of the short arm. Left for them on it had been just the 
right number of seats: two splintery rockers and a wooden crate to which an 
unstable board back had been nailed.
On this evening. Alain sat in one of the rockers and Cuthbert sat on the 
box-seat, which he seemed to fancy. On the rail, peering across the beaten dirt 
of the dooryard and toward the burned-out hulk of the Garber home place, was the 
lookout.
Alain was bone-tired, and although both of them had bathed in the stream near 
the west end of the home acre, he thought he still smelled fish and seaweed on 
himself. They had spent the day counting nets. He was not averse to hard work, 
even when it was monotonous, but he didn't like pointless work. Which this was. 
Hambry came in two parts: the fishers and the horse-breeders. There was nothing 
for them among the fishers, and after three weeks all three of them knew it. 
Their answers were out on the Drop, at which they had so far done no more than 
look. At Roland's order.
The wind gusted, and for a moment they could hear the low, grum­bling, squealing 
sound of the thinny.
"I hate that sound," Alain said.
Cuthbert, unusually silent and introspective tonight, nodded and said only 
"Aye." They were all saying that now, not to mention So you do and So I am and 
So it is. Alain suspected the three of them would have Ham­bry on their tongues 
long after they had wiped its dust from their boots.
From behind them, inside the bunkhouse door, came a less unpleasant sound—the 
cooing of pigeons. And then, from around the side of the bunkhouse, a third, for 
which he and Cuthbert had unconsciously been listening as they sat watching the 
sun go down: horse's hoofs. Rusher's.
Roland came around the comer, riding easy, and as he did, something happened 
that struck Alain as oddly portentous ... a kind of omen. There was a 
flurry-flutter of wings, a dark shape in the air, and suddenly a bird was 
roosting on Roland's shoulder.
He didn't jump; barely looked around. He rode up to the hitching rail and sat 
there, holding out his hand. "Hile," he said softly, and the pigeon stepped into 
his palm. Bound to one of its legs was a capsule. Roland re­moved it, opened it, 
and took out a tiny strip of paper, which had been rolled tight. In his other 
hand he held the pigeon out.
"Hile," Alain said, holding out his own hand. The pigeon flew to it. As Roland 
dismounted, Alain took the pigeon into the bunkhouse, where the cages had been 
placed beneath an open window. He ungated the cen­ter one and held out his hand. 
The pigeon which had just arrived hopped in; the pigeon in the cage hopped out 
and into his palm. Alain shut the cage door, latched it, crossed the room, and 
turned up the pillow of Bert's bunk. Beneath it was a linen envelope containing 
a number of blank paper strips and a tiny storage-pen. He took one of the strips 
and the pen, which held its own small reservoir of ink and did not have to be 
dipped. He went back out on the porch. Roland and Cuthbert were studying the 
unrolled strip of paper the pigeon had delivered from Gilead. On it was a line 
of tiny geometric shapes:

"What does it say?" Alain asked. The code was simple enough, but he could not 
get it by heart or read it on sight, as Roland and Bert had been able to, almost 
immediately. Alain's talents—his ability to track, his easy access to the 
touch—lay in other directions.
" 'Farson moves east,' " Cuthbert read. " 'Forces split, one big, one small. Do 
you see anything unusual.' " He looked at Roland, almost of­fended. "Anything 
unusual, what does that mean?"
Roland shook his head. He didn't know. He doubted if the men who had sent the 
message—of whom his own father was almost surely one— did, either.
Alain handed Cuthbert the strip and the pen. With one finger Bert stroked the 
head of the softly cooing pigeon. It ruffled its wings as if al­ready anxious to 
be off to the west.
"What shall I write?" Cuthbert asked. "The same?"
Roland nodded.
"But we have seen things that are unusual!" Alain said. "And we know things are 
wrong here! The horses ... and at that small ranch way south ... I can't 
remember the name . . ."
Cuthbert could. "The Rocking H."
"Aye, the Rocking H. There are oxen there. Oxen! My gods, I've never seen them, 
except for pictures in a book!"
Roland looked alarmed. "Does anyone know you saw?"
Alain shrugged impatiently. "I don't think so. There were drovers about—three, 
maybe four—"
"Four, aye," Cuthbert said quietly.
"—but they paid no attention to us. Even when we see things, they think we 
don't."
"And that's the way it must stay." Roland's eyes swept them, but there was a 
kind of absence in his face, as if his thoughts were far away. He turned to look 
toward the sunset, and Alain saw something on the col­lar of his shirt. He 
plucked it, a move made so quickly and nimbly that not even Roland felt it. Bert 
couldn't have done that, Alain thought with some pride.
"Aye, but—"
"Same message," Roland said. He sat down on the top step and looked off toward 
the evening redness in the west. "Patience, Mr. Richard Stock-worth and Mr. 
Arthur Heath. We know certain things and we believe cer­tain other things. But 
would John Farson come all this way simply to resupply horses? I don't think so. 
I'm not sure, horses are valuable, aye, so they are . . . but I'm not sure. So 
we wait."
"All right, all right, same message." Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat 
on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read 
this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to 
Hambry. "Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time."
The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon's leg. Alain went 
down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), 
and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. "Hile!"
It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark 
shape against the deepening sky.
Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain 
found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He 
had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.
"Roland?"
"Hmmm?" Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.
"I'll unsaddle him, if you want." He nodded at Rusher. "And rub him down."
No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, "No. 
I'll do it. In a minute or two." And went back to looking at the sunset.
Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his 
place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain 
with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.
Alain passed over what he had plucked from Roland's collar. Al­though it was 
almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert’s eyes were gunslinger's 
eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.
It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert's, 
face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, 
they'd met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys' eyes met. In 
Bert's Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.
Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the 
trigger.
Alain nodded.
Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying 
sunset with dreaming eyes.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      VIII
BENEATH THE
PEDDLER’S MOON
 
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 than Ritzy. 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.

 

 
 
CHAPTER IX
citgo
 
1
 
The Peddler's Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the 
summer with it when it went. On an afternoon four days past the full, the old 
mozo from Mayor's House (Miguel had been there long be­fore Hart Thorin's time 
and would likely be there long after Thorin had gone back to his ranch) showed 
up at the house Susan shared with her aunt. He was leading a beautiful chestnut 
mare by a hack'. It was the sec­ond of the three promised horses, and Susan 
recognized Felicia at once. The mare had been one other childhood's favorites.
Susan embraced Miguel and covered his bearded cheeks with kisses. The old man's 
wide grin would have showed every tooth in his head, if he'd had any left to 
show. "Gracias, gracias, a thousand thanks, old fa­ther," she told him.
"Da nada, " he replied, and handed her the bridle. "It is the Mayor's earnest 
gift."
She watched him away, the smile slowly fading from her lips. Felicia stood 
docilely beside her, her dark brown coat shining like a dream in the summer 
sunlight. But this was no dream. It had seemed like one at first— that sense of 
unreality had been another inducement to walk into the trap, she now 
understood—but it was no dream. She had been proved honest; now she found 
herself the recipient of "earnest gifts" from a rich man. The phrase was a sop 
to conventionality, of course ... or a bitter joke, depend­ing on one's mood and 
outlook. Felicia was no more a gift than Pylon had been—they were step-by-step 
fulfillments of the contract into which she had entered. Aunt Cord could express 
shock, but Susan knew the truth: what lay directly ahead was whoring, pure and 
simple.
Aunt Cord was in the kitchen window as Susan walked her gift (which was really 
just returned property, in her view) to the stable. She called out something 
passing cheery about how the horse was a good thing, that caring for it would 
give Susan less time for her megrims. Susan felt a hot reply rise to her lips 
and held it back. There had been a wary truce between the two of them since the 
shouting match about the shirts, and Susan didn't want to be the one to break 
it. There was too much on her mind and heart. She thought that one more argument 
with her aunt and she might simply snap like a dry twig under a boot. Because 
often silence is best, her father had told her when, at age ten or so, she had 
asked him why he was always so quiet. The answer had puzzled her then, but now 
she understood better.
She stabled Felicia next to Pylon, rubbed her down, fed her. While the mare 
munched oats, Susan examined her hooves. She didn't care much for the look of 
the iron the mare was wearing—that was Seafront for you—and so she took her 
father's shoebag from its nail beside the sta­ble door, slung the strap over her 
head and shoulder so the bag hung on her hip, and walked the two miles to 
Hockey's Stable and Fancy Livery. Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip 
brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again 
and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her 
current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will 
Dearborn, of that she was sure—liked him and approved of him for her. It was the 
final mis­erable touch.
 
2
 
She had known how to shoe most of her life, and even enjoyed it, when her mood 
was right; it was dusty, elemental work, with always the possi­bility of a 
healthy kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to 
reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made 
them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, how­ever; Susan easily picked 
out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh 
hay as she did. Fresh paint, too. Hockey's Stable & Smithy looked very well, 
indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. 
Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.
He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith's apron and 
squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Su­san began to speak 
haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she'd settle her 
accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. 'Sides, they weren't any of 
them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her 
through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have 
treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a 
year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin's good friend, and things had changed.
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey's barn, and she 
was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag 
bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly in­side. She had just a moment 
to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard 
enough to rattle her teeth and make Fe­licia's new shoes clang. She would have 
fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. 
By then her eyes were ad­justing and she saw with dismay and amusement that the 
young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will's 
friends— Richard Stockworth.
"Oh, sai, your pardon!" he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had 
knocked her over. "Are you well? Are you quite well?"
"Quite well," she said, smiling. "Please don't apologize." She felt a sudden 
wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will 
and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where 
that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smack­ing Will full 
on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She be­gan to giggle. She put 
her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her . 
. . tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I'm mad . . . and I am! I am!
"Good day, Mr. Stockworth," she said, and passed on before she could embarrass 
herself further.
"Good day, Susan Delgado," he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but 
he was already gone. Not into Hockey's, though; of that she was quite sure. She 
wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da's shoebag, she found 
out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even 
before she unfolded it, she understood that her colli­sion with Mr. Stockworth 
hadn't been an accident.
She recognized Will's handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
 
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has 
to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
 
P.S. Best you bum this note.
 
She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die 
down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the 
hardest: Please.
 
3
 
She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal—bread and soup— and when it 
was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She 
would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to 
impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?
Why Citgo?
Has to do with what we discussed before.
Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder 
if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see 
her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch could 
have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but 
there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous. They might 
start off talking but would likely end up kissing ... and kissing would just be 
the start. Knowing didn't change feeling, though; she wanted to see him. Needed 
to see him.
So she sat astride her new horse—another of Hart Thorin's payments-in-advance on 
her virginity—and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened 
to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years 
was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of 
honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around 
an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one's honor 
for that reason was so easy, wasn't it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking 
all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.
Susan felt as blind as she'd been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey's 
bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in 
frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to 
think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his 
hand cupping her breast.
She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of 
Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point 
of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer 
came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn't know.
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it al­ways 
does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the mean­time, Susan, 
there's no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your 
promise, hard as that may be.
"All right," she said. In her current state she discovered that any 
deci­sion—even one that would cost her another chance to see Will—was a re­lief. 
"I'll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself."
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
 
4
 
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys' day of rest. Roland's little 
band took this day off as well. "It's fair enough that we should," Cuthbert 
said, "since we don't know what the hell we're doing in the first place."
On this particular Sanday—their sixth since coming to Hambry— Cuthbert was in 
the upper market (lower market was cheaper, by and large, but too fishy-smelling 
for his liking), looking at brightly colored scrapes and trying not to cry. For 
his mother had a serape, it was a great favorite others, and thinking of how she 
would ride out sometimes with it flowing back from her shoulders had filled him 
with homesickness so strong it was savage. "Arthur Heath," Roland's ka-mai, 
missing his mama so badly his eyes were wet! It was a joke worthy of... well, 
worthy of Cuthbert Allgood.
As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets 
with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and 
blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder. He 
turned, and there was the girl with the blonde hair.
Cuthbert wasn't surprised that Roland was smitten with her. She was nothing 
short of breathtaking, even dressed in jeans and a farmshirt. Her hair was tied 
back with a series of rough rawhide hanks, and she had eyes of the brightest 
gray Cuthbert had ever seen. Cuthbert thought it was a wonder that Roland had 
been able to continue with any other aspect of his life at all, even down to the 
washing of his teeth. Certainly she came with a cure for Cuthbert; sentimental 
thoughts of his mother disappeared in an instant.
"Sai," he said. It was all he could manage, at least to start with.
She nodded and held out what the folk of Mejis called a corvette— "little 
packet" was the literal definition; "little purse" was the practical one. These 
small leather accessories, big enough for a few coins but not much more, were 
more often carried by ladies than gentlemen, although that was not a 
hard-and-fast rule of fashion.
"Ye dropped this, cully," she said.
"Nay, thankee-sai." This one well might have been the property of a man—plain 
black leather, and unadorned by foofraws—but he had never seen it before. Never 
carried a corvette, for that matter.
"It's yours," she said, and her eyes were now so intense that her gaze felt hot 
on his skin. He should have understood at once, but he had been blinded by her 
unexpected appearance. Also, he admitted, by her clever­ness. You somehow didn't 
expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a 
rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to 
do was wake up in the morning. "It is."
"Oh, aye," he said, almost snatching the little purse from her. He could feel a 
foolish grin overspreading his face. "Now that you mention it, sai—"
"Susan." Her eyes were grave and watchful above her smile. "Let me be Susan to 
you, I pray."
"With pleasure. I cry your pardon, Susan, it's just that my mind and memory, 
realizing it's Sanday, have joined hands and gone off on holiday 
together—eloped, you might say—and left me temporarily without a brain in my 
head."
He might well have rattled on like that for another hour (he had be­fore; to 
that both Roland and Alain could testify), but she stopped him with the easy 
briskness of an older sister. "I can easily believe ye have no control over yer 
mind, Mr. Heath—or the tongue hung below it- but per­haps ye'll take better care 
of yer purse in the future. Good day." She was gone before he could get another 
word out.
 
5
 
Bert found Roland where he so often was these days: out on the part of the Drop 
that was called Town Lookout by many of the locals. It gave a fair view of 
Hambry, dreaming away its Sanday afternoon in a blue haze, but Cuthbert rather 
doubted the Hambry view was what drew his oldest friend back here time after 
time. He thought that its view of the Delgado house was the more likely reason.
This day Roland was with Alain, neither of them saying a word. Cuthbert had no 
trouble accepting the idea that some people could go long periods of time 
without talking to each other, but he did not think he would ever understand it.
He came riding up to them at a gallop, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out 
the corvette. "From Susan Delgado. She gave it to me in the upper market. She's 
beautiful, and she's also as wily as a snake. I say that with utmost 
admiration."
Roland's face filled with light and life. When Cuthbert tossed him the corvette, 
he caught it one-handed and pulled the lace-tie with his teeth. In­side, where a 
travelling man would have kept his few scraps of money, there was a single 
folded piece of paper. Roland read this quickly, the light going out of his 
eyes, the smile fading off his mouth.
"What does it say?" Alain asked.
Roland handed it to him and then went back to looking out at the Drop. It wasn't 
until he saw the very real desolation in his friend's eyes that Cuthbert fully 
realized how far into Roland's life—and hence into all their lives—Susan Delgado 
had come.
Alain handed him the note. It was only a single line, two sentences:
It's best we don't meet. I'm sorry.
Cuthbert read it twice, as if rereading might change it, then handed it back to 
Roland. Roland put the note back into the corvette, tied the lace, and then 
tucked the little purse into his own shirt.
Cuthbert hated silence worse than danger (it was danger, to his mind), but every 
conversational opening he tried in his mind seemed callow and unfeeling, given 
the look on his friend's face. It was as if Roland had been poisoned. Cuthbert 
was disgusted at the thought of that lovely young girl bumping hips with the 
long and bony Mayor of Hambry, but the look on Roland's face now called up 
stronger emotions. For that he could hate her.
At last Alain spoke up, almost timidly. "And now, Roland? Shall we have a hunt 
out there at the oilpatch without her?"
Cuthbert admired that. Upon first meeting him, many people dis­missed Alain 
Johns as something of a dullard. That was very far from the truth. Now, in a 
diplomatic way Cuthbert could never have matched, he had pointed out that 
Roland's unhappy first experience with love did not change their 
responsibilities.
And Roland responded, raising himself off the saddle-horn and sitting up 
straight. The strong golden light of that summer's afternoon lit his face in 
harsh contrasts, and for a moment that face was haunted by the ghost of the man 
he would become. Cuthbert saw that ghost and shivered—not knowing what he saw, 
only knowing that it was awful.
"The Big Coffin Hunters," he said. "Did you see them in town?"
"Jonas and Reynolds," Cuthbert answered. "Still no sign of Depape. I think Jonas 
must have choked him and thrown him over the sea cliffs in a fit of pique after 
that night in the bar."
Roland shook his head. "Jonas needs the men he trusts too much to waste 
them—he's as far out on thin ice as we are. No, Depape's just been sent off for 
awhile."
"Sent where?" Alain asked.
"Where he'll have to shit in the bushes and sleep in the rain if the weather's 
bad." Roland laughed shortly, without much humor. "Jonas has got Depape running 
our backtrail, more likely than not."
Alain grunted softly, in surprise that wasn't really surprise. Roland sat easily 
astride Rusher, looking out over the dreamy depths of land, at the grazing 
horses. With one hand he unconsciously rubbed the corvette he had tucked into 
his shirt. At last he looked around at them again.
"We'll wait a bit longer," he said. "Perhaps she'll change her mind."
"Roland—" Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.
Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. "Doubt me not, Alain—I speak 
as my father's son."
"All right." Alain reached out and briefly gripped Roland's shoulder. As for 
Cuthbert, he reserved judgment. Roland might or might not be acting as his 
father's son; Cuthbert guessed that at this point Roland hardly knew his own 
mind at all.
"Do you remember what Cort used to say was the primary weakness of maggots such 
as us?" Roland asked with a trace of a smile.
" 'You run without consideration and fall in a hole,' " Alain quoted in a gruff 
imitation that made Cuthbert laugh aloud.
Roland's smile broadened a touch. "Aye. They're words I mean to re­member, boys. 
I'll not upset this cart in order to see what's in it ... not unless there's no 
other choice. Susan may come around yet, given time to think. I believe she 
would have agreed to meet me already, if not for ... other matters between us."
He paused, and for a little while there was quiet among them.
"I wish our fathers hadn't sent us," Alain said at last... although it was 
Roland's father who had sent them, and all three knew it. "We're too young for 
matters such as these. Too young by years."
"We did all right that night in the Rest," Cuthbert said.
"That was training, not guile—and they didn't take us seriously. That won't 
happen again."
"They wouldn't have sent us—not my father, not yours—if they'd known what we'd 
find," Roland said. "But now we've found it, and now we're for it. Yes?"
Alain and Cuthbert nodded. They were for it, all right—there no longer seemed 
any doubt of that.
"In any case, it's too late to worry about it now. We'll wait and hope for 
Susan. I'd rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the 
lay of the place ... but if Depape comes back, we'll have to take our chance. 
God knows what he may find out, or what stories he may invent to please Jonas, 
or what Jonas may do after they palaver. There may be shooting."
"After all this creeping around, I'd almost welcome it," Cuthbert said.
"Will you send her another note, Will Dearborn?" Alain asked.
Roland thought about it. Cuthbert laid an interior bet with himself on which way 
Roland would go. And lost.
"No," he said at last. "We'll have to give her time, hard as that is. And hope 
her curiosity will bring her around."
With that he turned Rusher toward the abandoned bunkhouse which now served them 
as home. Cuthbert and Alain followed.
 
6
 
Susan, worked herself hard the rest of that Sanday, mucking out the sta­bles, 
carrying water, washing down all the steps. Aunt Cord watched all this in 
silence, her expression one of mingled doubt and amazement. Su­san cared not a 
bit for how her aunt looked—she wanted only to exhaust herself and avoid another 
sleepless night. It was over. Will would know it as well now, and that was to 
the good. Let done be done.
"Are ye daft, girl?" was all Aunt Cord asked her as Susan dumped her last pail 
of dirty rinse-water behind the kitchen. "It's Sanday!"
"Not daft a bit," she replied shortly, without looking around.
She accomplished the first half of her aim, going to bed just after moonrise 
with tired arms, aching legs, and a throbbing back—but sleep still did not come. 
She lay in bed wide-eyed and unhappy. The hours passed, the moon set, and still 
Susan couldn't sleep. She looked into the dark and wondered if there was any 
possibility, even the slightest, that her father had been murdered. To stop his 
mouth, to close his eyes.
Finally she reached the conclusion Roland had already come to: if there had been 
no attraction for her in those eyes of his, or the touch of his hands and lips, 
she would have agreed in a flash to the meeting he wanted. If only to set her 
troubled mind to rest.
At this realization, relief overspread her and she was able to sleep.
 
7
 
Late the next afternoon, while Roland and his friends were at fives in the 
Travellers' Rest (cold beef sandwiches and gallons of white iced tea—not as good 
as that made by Deputy Dave's wife, but not bad), Sheemie came in from outside, 
where he had been watering his flowers. He was wearing his pink sombrero and a 
wide grin. In one hand he held a little packet.
"Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!" he cried cheerfully, and made a bow 
which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly 
enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. "How be you? Well, I'm 
hoping, so I do!"
"Right as rainbarrels," Cuthbert said, "but none of us enjoys being called 
Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?"
"Aye," Sheemie said, as cheerful as ever. "Aye, Mr. Arthur Heath, good fella who 
saved my life!" He paused and looked puzzled for a mo­ment, as if unable to 
remember why he had approached them in the first place. Then his eyes cleared, 
his grin shone out, and he held the packet out to Roland. "For you, Will 
Dearborn!"
"Really? What is it?"
"Seeds! So they are!"
"From you, Sheemie?"
"Oh, no."
Roland took the packet—just an envelope which had been folded over and sealed. 
There was nothing written on the front or back, and the tips of his fingers felt 
no seeds within.
"Who from, then?"
"Can't remember," said Sheemie, who then cast his eyes aside. His brains had 
been stirred just enough, Roland reflected, so that he would never be unhappy 
for long, and would never be able to lie at all. Then his eyes, hopeful and 
timid, came back to Roland's. "I remember what I was supposed to say to you, 
though."
"Aye? Then say it, Sheemie."
Speaking as one who recites a painfully memorized line, both proud and nervous, 
he said: "These are the seeds you scattered on the Drop."
Roland's eyes blazed so fiercely that Sheemie stumbled back a step. He gave his 
sombrero a quick tug, turned, and hurried back to the safety of his flowers. He 
liked Will Dearborn and Will's friends (especially Mr. Arthur Heath, who 
sometimes said things that made Sheemie laugh fit to split), but in that moment 
he saw something in Will-sai's eyes that fright­ened him badly. In that instant 
he understood that Will was as much a killer as the one in the cloak, or the one 
who had wanted Sheemie to lick his boots clean, or old white-haired Jonas with 
the trembly voice.
As bad as them, or even worse.
 
8
 
Roland slipped the "seed-packet" into his shirt and didn't open it until the 
three of them were back on the porch of the Bar K. In the distance, the thinny 
grumbled, making their horses twitch their ears nervously.
"Well?" Cuthbert asked at last, unable to restrain himself any longer. Roland 
took the envelope from inside his shirt, and tore it open. As he did, he 
reflected that Susan had known exactly what to say. To a nicety.
The others bent in, Alain (mm his left and Cuthbert from his right, as he 
unfolded the single scrap of paper. Again he saw her simple, neatly made 
writing, the message not much longer than the previous one. Very different in 
content, however.
 
There is an orange grove a mile off the road on the town side of Citgo. Meet me 
there at moonrise. Come alone. S.
 
And below that, printed in emphatic little letters: burn this. 
"We'll keep a lookout," Alain said. 
Roland nodded. "Aye. But from a distance." 
Then he burned the note.
 
9
 
The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows at the end of 
a partly overgrown cart-track. Roland arrived there after dark but still a good 
half hour before the rapidly thinning Peddler would haul him­self over the 
horizon once more.
As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal 
sounds from the oilpatch to the north (squealing pistons, grinding gears, 
thudding driveshafts), he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile 
fragrance of orange-blossoms—a bright runner laid over the darker stench of 
oil—that brought it on. This toy grove was nothing like the great apple orchards 
of New Canaan . . . except somehow it was. There was the same feeling of dignity 
and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary. 
And in this case, he sus­pected, not very useful, either. Oranges grown this far 
north of the warm latitudes were probably almost as sour as lemons. Still, when 
the breeze stirred the trees, the smell made him think of Gilead with bitter 
longing, and for the first time he considered the possibility that he might 
never see home again—that he had become as much a wanderer as old Peddler Moon 
in the sky.
He heard her, but not until she was almost on top of him—if she'd been an enemy 
instead of a friend, he might still have had time to draw and fire, but it would 
have been close. He was filled with admiration, and as he saw her face in the 
starlight, he felt his heart gladden.
She halted when he turned and merely looked at him, her hands linked before her 
at her waist in a way that was sweetly and unconsciously childlike. He took a 
step toward her and they came up in what he took for alarm. He stopped, 
confused. But he had misread her gesture in the chancy light. She could have 
stopped then, but chose not to. She stepped toward him deliberately, a tall 
young woman in a split riding skirt and plain black boots. Her sombrero hung 
down on her back, against the bound rope of her hair.
"Will Dearborn, we are met both fair and ill," she said in a trembling voice, 
and then he was kissing her; they burned against one another as the Peddler rose 
in the famine of its last quarter.
 
10
 
Inside her lonely hut high on the Coos, Rhea sat at her kitchen table, bent over 
the glass the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a month and a half ago. Her 
face was bathed in its pink glow, and no one would have mis­taken it for the 
face of a girl any longer. She had extraordinary vitality, and it had carried 
her for many years (only the longest-lived residents of Hambry had any idea of 
how old Rhea of the Coos actually was, and they only the vaguest), but the glass 
was finally sapping it—sucking it out of her as a vampire sucks blood. Behind 
her, the hut's larger room was even dingier and more cluttered than usual. These 
days she had no time for even a pretense of cleaning; the glass ball took up all 
her time. When she wasn't looking into it, she was thinking of looking into it 
... and, oh! Such things she had seen!
Ermot twined around one of her scrawny legs, hissing with agitation, but she 
barely noticed him. Instead she bent even closer into the ball's poison pink 
glow, enchanted by what she saw there.
It was the girl who had come to her to be proved honest, and the young man she 
had seen the first time she'd looked into the ball. The one she had mistaken for 
a gunslinger, until she had realized his youth.
The foolish girl, who had come to Rhea singing and left in a more proper 
silence, had proved honest, and might well be honest yet (certainly she kissed 
and touched the boy with a virgin's mingled greed and ti­midity), but she 
wouldn't be honest much longer if they kept on the way they were going. And 
wouldn't Hart Thorin be in for a surprise when he took his supposedly pure young 
gilly to bed? There were ways to fool men about that (men practically begged to 
be fooled about that), a thimble of pig's blood would serve nicely, but she 
wouldn't know that. Oh, this was too good! And to think she could watch Miss 
Haughty brought low, right here, in this wonderful glass! Oh, it was too good! 
Too wonderful!
She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. 
Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled 
disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from 
him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the 
firestruck wall.
 
11
 
Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from 
her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed—he 
could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were 
throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.
She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her sombrero had gone askew 
on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped 
his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, 
which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood 
again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his 
hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward 
him, eyes rueful.
"What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?"
"The best we can," he said. "As we both always have. As our fathers taught us."
"This is mad."
Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life—even the deep ache in 
his groin felt sane and right—said nothing.
"Do ye know how dangerous 'tis?" she asked, and went on before he could reply. 
"Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, 'twould be 
serious. To be seen as we just were—"
She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. "Best ye don't, Will. If 
ye do, won't be nothing done between us but spooning. Un­less that was your 
intention?"
"You know it wasn't."
She nodded. "Have ye set your friends to watch?"
"Aye," he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so 
well. "But not where they can watch us."
"Thank the gods for that," she said. and laughed rather distractedly. Then she 
stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms 
again. She looked curiously up into his face. "Who are you, really. Will?"
"Almost who I say I am. That's the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren't 
sent here because we were drunk and belling, but we weren't sent here to uncover 
any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of 
the way in a time of danger. All that's hap­pened since—" He shook his head to 
show how helpless he felt, and Su­san thought again of her father saying ka was 
like a wind—when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your bam. Even 
your life.
"And is Will Dearborn your real name?"
He shrugged. "One name's as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to 
it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor's House today, for my friend Richard saw 
you ride up—"
"Aye, fittings," she said. "For I am to be this year's Reaping Girl— it's Hart's 
choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of 
foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant."
"You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was," he said, and the 
clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm 
again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon 
feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead 
there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn't know how lucky she was), 
and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. 
(This year's Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart 
Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even 
more happily would she have worn the sixth—a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps 
and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, 
her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the 
one she would be wearing when she went to the old man's couch as his gilly, 
after the feast was over.
"When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin 
Hunters?"
"I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and 
talking," she said. "Not Depape? The redhead?" She shook her head.
"Do you know the game Castles. Susan?"
"Aye. My father showed me when I was small."
"Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at 
the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, 
setting screens for cover. What's going on here in Ham-Dry is very like that. 
And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. 
Do you understand?"
She nodded at once. "In the game, the first one around his Hillock is 
vulnerable."
"In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My 
friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest—"
"The horses on the Drop, for instance."
"Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know 
about—"
Her eyebrows shot up. "There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about 
that."
"No mistake."
"Where?"
"The Rocking H."
Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. "That's 
Laslo Rimer's place."
"Aye—Kimba's brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry 
these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to 
members of the Horsemen's Association, extra caches of feed—"
"Will, no!"
"Yes. All that and more. But to count them—to be seen counting them—is to break 
cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish—we 
try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, 
where most of the danger lies. It's harder and harder to do. Then we received a 
message—"
"A message? How? From whom?"
"Best you not know those things, I think. But it's led us to believe that some 
of the answers we're looking for may be at Citgo."
"Will, d'ye think that what's out here may help me to know more about what 
happened to my da?"
"I don't know. It's possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is 
that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen 
doing it." His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; 
Susan's had cooled enough for her to take it in good confi­dence. She had put 
her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.
"Come on," she said. "I know a path."
 
12
 
In the moon's pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward 
the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland's back prickle; 
made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunk-house floorboards back 
at the Bar K.
"Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn't mean I'll be much help to ye," she said 
in a voice just a notch above a whisper. "I've been within hearing distance of 
Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I've actually been in 
it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on 
dares from my friends."
"And then?"
"With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord 
always said he'd come to a bad end, meddling in their leav­ings." She swallowed 
hard. "And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People 
responsible. Poor Da."
They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells 
stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she 
said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly—the 
sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that 
kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.
He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the 
same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders 
marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.
"You understand what these are? Were?" he asked Susan, tapping one of the 
cylinders.
"Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here." She paused, then 
added shyly: "It's how I feel when you touch me."
He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly 
against his check before drawing away. "I hope your friends will watch well." 
"They will." "Is there a signal?"
"The whistle of the nighthawk. Let's hope we don't hear it." "Aye, be it so." 
She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.
 
13
 
The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his 
breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn't heard since her father died) and 
dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.
"Be easy! It's only the candle! The gas-pipe!"
He relaxed slowly. "That they use, don't they?"
"Aye. To run a few machines—little more than toys, they are. To make ice, 
mostly."
"I had some the day we met the Sheriff."
When the flare licked out again—bright yellow with a bluish core— he didn't 
jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called 
"the candle" without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in 
which the gas could be bottled and carried.
"You've seen such before?" she asked.
He nodded.
"The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful," Susan said. •
"I'm beginning to think they're no stranger than those of the Outer Arc," he 
said, turning slowly. He pointed. "What's yon building down there? Left over 
from the Old People?"
"Aye."
To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope 
with a lane cut through the middle of it—this lane was as clear in the moonlight 
as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building 
surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen 
smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. 
Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.
"There were useful things in there when my da was a child," she said.
"Paper and such—even a few ink-writers that would still work ... for a little 
while, at least. If you shook them hard." She pointed to the left of the 
building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting 
hulks that had been the Old People's weird, horseless mode of travel. "Once 
there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, 
much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn't rust like those that 
are left. I can't think what became of them, un­less someone hauled them off for 
water storage. I never would. 'Twould be unlucky, even if they weren't 
contaminated."
She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.
"Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you."
"What a pity for both of us," he said, and then passed between them one of those 
long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at 
last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.
She couldn't decide which frightened her more—the few derricks that were still 
pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was 
that no power on the face of the earth could have got­ten her within the fence 
of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now 
and then a cylinder screamed like some­one being stabbed; at periodic intervals 
"the candle" would fire off with a sound like dragon's breath, throwing their 
shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the 
nighthawk's piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.
They came to a wide lane—what had once undoubtedly been a main­tenance road—that 
split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting 
joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty 
circumference protruding above ground level.
"What's this?" he asked.
"The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, 'tis 
been dry for years."
He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space be­tween the 
concrete sleeve and the pipe's rusty side. She watched him ner­vously, biting 
her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out 
sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the 
forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?
Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. 
It was slick and black with oil.
"Dry for years?" he asked with a little smile. 
She could only shake her head, bewildered.
 
14
 
They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The 
pipe (she could now see oil bleeding out of its old joints, even in the weak 
moonlight) ducked under the gate; they went over it. She thought his hands 
rather too intimate for polite company in their helping, and rejoiced at each 
touch. If he doesn't stop, the top of my head will ex­plode like "the candle, " 
she thought, and laughed.
"Susan?"
" 'Tis nothing, Will, only nerves."
Another of those long glances passed between them as they stood on the far side 
of the gate, and then they went down the hill together. As they walked, she 
noticed an odd thing: many of the pines had been stripped of their lower 
branches. The hatchet marks and scabs of pine resin were clear in the moonlight, 
and looked new. She pointed this out to Will, who nodded but said nothing.
At the bottom of the hill, the pipe rose out of the ground and, sup­ported on a 
series of rusty steel cradles, ran about seventy yards toward the abandoned 
building before stopping with the ragged suddenness of a battlefield amputation. 
Below this stopping point was what looked like a shallow lake of drying, tacky 
oil. That it had been there for awhile Susan could tell from the numerous 
corpses of birds she could see scattered across it—they had come down to 
investigate, become stuck, and stayed to die in what must have been an 
unpleasantly leisurely fashion.
She stared at this with wide, uncomprehending eyes until Will tapped her on the 
leg. He had hunkered down. She joined him knee-to-knee and followed the sweeping 
movement of his finger with growing disbelief and confusion. There were tracks 
here. Very big ones. Only one thing could have made them.
"Oxen," she said.
"Aye. They came from there." He pointed at the place where the pipe ended. "And 
they go—" He turned on the soles of his boots, still hun­kered, and pointed back 
toward the slope where the woods started. Now that he pointed them out, she 
easily saw what she should have seen at once, horseman's daughter that she was. 
A perfunctory effort had been made to hide the tracks and the churned-up ground 
where something heavy had been dragged or rolled. Time had smoothed away more of 
the mess, but the marks were still clear. She even thought she knew what the 
oxen had been dragging, and she could see that Will knew, as well.
The tracks split off from the end of the pipe in two arcs. Susan and "Will 
Dearborn" followed the right-hand one. She wasn't surprised to see ruts mingled 
in with the tracks of the oxen. They were shallow—it had been a dry summer, by 
and large, and the ground was nearly as hard as concrete—but they were there. To 
still be able to see them at all meant that some goodly amount of weight had 
been moved. And aye, of course; why else would oxen be needed?
"Look," Will said as they neared the hem of forest at the foot of the slope. She 
finally saw what had caught his attention, but she had to get down on her hands 
and knees to do it—how sharp his eyes were! Almost supernaturally so. There were 
boot-tracks here. Not fresh, but they were a lot newer than the tracks of the 
oxen and the wheelruts.
"This was the one with the cape," he said, indicating a clear pair of tracks. 
"Reynolds."
"Will! Thee can't know it!"
He looked surprised, then laughed. "Sure I can. He walks with one foot turned in 
a little—the left foot. And here it is." He stirred the air over the tracks with 
the tip of his finger, then laughed again at the way she was look­ing at him. " 
'Tisn't sorcery, Susan daughter of Patrick; only trailcraft."
"How do ye know so much, so young?" she asked. "Who are ye, Will?"
He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He didn't have to look far; she was 
tall for a girl. "My name's not Will but Roland," he said. "And now I've put my 
life in your hands. That I don't mind, but mayhap I've put your own life at 
risk, as well. You must keep it a dead secret."
"Roland," she said wonderingly. Tasting it.
"Aye. Which do you like better?"
"Your real one," she said at once. " 'Tis a noble name, so it is."
He grinned, relieved, and this was the grin that made him look young again.
She raised herself on her toes and put her lips on his. The kiss, which was 
chaste and close-mouthed to begin with, bloomed like a flower: became open and 
slow and humid. She felt his tongue touch her lower lip and met it, shyly at 
first, with her own. His hands covered her back, then slipped around to her 
front. He touched her breasts, also shy to begin with, then slid his palms up 
their lower slopes to their tips. He uttered a small, moaning sigh directly into 
her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, 
she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm 
length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place; those two 
places were meant for each other, as she was for him and he for her. It was ka, 
after all—ka like the wind, and she would go with it willingly, leaving all 
honor and promises behind.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly per­suasive 
sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridicu­lous, but it was 
there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, 
her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. "Get out, ye 
old bitch," she breathed. "If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, 
get thee gone!”
 
15
 
On the hill of the Coos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a 
voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn't know what 
Susan had said—no sound came through the glass, only sight—but she knew that the 
girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out. The glass 
had flashed a brilliant pink, then had gone dark, and none of the passes she 
made over it would serve to brighten it again.
"Aye, fine, let it be so," she said at last, giving up. She remembered the 
wretched, prissy girl (not so prissy with the young man, though, was she?) 
standing hypnotized in her doorway, remembered what she had told the girl to do 
after she had lost her maidenhead, and began to grin, all her good humor 
restored. For if she lost her maidenhead to this wandering boy instead of to 
Hart Thorin, Lord High Mayor of Mejis, the comedy would be even greater, would 
it not?
Rhea sat in the shadows of her stinking hut and began to cackle.
 
16
 
Roland stared at her, wide-eyed, and as Susan explained about Rhea a lit­tle 
more fully (she left out the humiliating final examinations which lay at the 
heart of "proving honesty"), his desire cooled just enough for him to reassert 
control. It had nothing to do with jeopardizing the position he and his friends 
were trying to maintain in Hambry (or so he told himself) and everything to do 
with maintaining Susan's—her position was important, her honor even more so.
"I imagine it was your imagination," he said when she had finished.
"I think not." With a touch of coolness.
"Or conscience, even?"
At that she lowered her eyes and said nothing.
"Susan, I would not hurt you for the world."
"And ye love me?" Still without looking up.
"Aye, I do."
"Then it's best you kiss and touch me no more—not tonight. I can't stand it if 
ye do."
He nodded without speaking and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked 
on in the direction they had been going when they had been so sweetly 
distracted.
While they were still ten yards from the hem of the forest, both saw the glimmer 
of metal despite the dense foliage—too dense, she thought. Too dense by far.
It was the pine-boughs, of course; the ones which had been whacked from the 
trees on the slope. What they had been interlaced to camouflage were the big 
silver cans now missing from the paved area. The silver stor­age containers had 
been dragged over here—by the oxen, presumably— and then concealed. But why?
Roland inspected along the line of tangled pine branches, then stopped and 
plucked several aside. This created an opening like a door­way, and he gestured 
her to go through. "Be sharp in your looks," he said. "I doubt if they've 
bothered to set traps or tripwires, but 'tis always best to be careful."
Behind the camouflaging boughs, the tankers had been as neatly lined up as toy 
soldiers at the end of the day, and Susan at once saw one reason why they had 
been hidden: they had been re-equipped with wheels, well-made ones of solid oak 
which came as high as her chest. Each had been rimmed with a thin iron strip. 
The wheels were new, so were the strips, and the hubs had been custom-made. 
Susan knew only one blacksmith in Barony capable of such fine work: Brian 
Hookey, to whom she had gone for Felicia's new shoes. Brian Hookey, who had 
smiled and clapped her on the shoulder like a compadre when she had come in with 
her da's shoebag hanging on her hip. Brian Hookey, who had been one of Pat 
Delgado's best friends.
She recalled looking around and thinking that times had been good for sai 
Hookey, and of course she had been right. Work in the blacksmithing line had 
been plentiful. Hookey had been making lots of wheels and rims, for one thing, 
and someone must have been paying him to do it. Eldred Jonas was one 
possibility; Kimba Rimer an even better one. Hart? She simply couldn't believe 
that. Hart had his mind—what little there was of it—fixed on other matters this 
summer.
There was a kind of rough path behind the tankers. Roland walked slowly along 
it, pacing like a preacher with his hands clasped at the small of his back, 
reading the incomprehensible words writ upon the tankers' rear decks: citgo. 
sunoco. exxon. conoco. He paused once and read aloud, haltingly: "Cleaner fuel 
for a better tomorrow." He snorted softly. "Rot! This is tomorrow."
"Roland—Will, I mean—what are they for? "
He didn't answer at first, but turned and walked back down the line of bright 
steel cans. Fourteen on this side of the mysteriously reactivated oil-supply 
pipe, and, she assumed, a like number on the other. As he walked, he rapped his 
fist on the side of each. The sound was dull and clunky. They were full of oil 
from the Citgo oilpatch.
"They were trigged quite some time ago, I imagine," he said. "I doubt if the Big 
Coffin Hunters did it all themselves, but they no doubt oversaw it ... first the 
fitting of the new wheels to replace the old rotten rubber ones, then the 
filling. They used the oxen to line them up here, at the base of the hill, 
because it was convenient. As it's convenient to let the extra horses run free 
out on the Drop. Then, when we came, it seemed prudent to take the precaution of 
covering these up. Stupid babies we might be, but perhaps smart enough to wonder 
about twenty-eight loaded oil-carts with new wheels. So they came out here and 
covered them."
"Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape."
"Aye."
"But why?" She took him by the arm and asked her question again. "What are they 
for? "
"For Parson," Roland said with a calm he didn't feel. "For the Good Man. The 
Affiliation knows he's found a number of war-machines; they come either from the 
Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affilia­tion fears them not, 
because they don't work. They're silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put 
his trust in such broken things, but..."
"But mayhap they're not broken. Mayhap they only need this stuff. And mayhap 
Farson knows it."
Roland nodded.
She touched the side of one of the tankers. Her fingers came away oily. She 
rubbed the tips together, smelled them, then bent and picked up a swatch of 
grass to wipe her hands. "This doesn't work in our machines. It's been tried. It 
clogs them."
Roland nodded again. "My fa—my folk in the Inner Crescent know that as well. And 
count on it. But if Farson has gone to this trouble—and split aside a troop of 
men to come and get these tankers, as we have word he has done—he either knows a 
way to thin it to usefulness, or he thinks he does. If he's able to lure the 
forces of the Affiliation into a battle in some close location where rapid 
retreat is impossible, and if he can use machine-weapons like the ones that go 
on treads, he could win more than a battle. He could slaughter ten thousand 
horse-mounted fighting men and win the war."
"But surely yer fathers know this .. . ?"
Roland shook his head in frustration. How much their fathers knew was one 
question. What they made of what they knew was another. What forces drove 
them—necessity, fear, the fantastic pride which had also been handed down, 
father to son, along the line of Arthur Eld—was yet a third. He could only tell 
her his clearest surmise.
"I think they daren't wait much longer to strike Farson a mortal blow. If they 
do, the Affiliation will simply rot out from the inside. And if that happens, a 
good deal of Mid-World will go with it."
"But . . ." She paused, biting her lip, shaking her head. "Surely even Farson 
must know . .. understand ..." She looked up at him with wide eyes. "The ways of 
the Old People are the ways of death. Everyone knows that, so they do."
Roland of Gilead found himself remembering a cook named Hax, dangling at the end 
of a rope while the rooks pecked up scattered bread­crumbs from beneath the dead 
man's feet. Hax had died for Farson. But before that, he had poisoned children 
for Farson.
"Death," he said, "is what John Parson's all about."
 
17
 
In the orchard again.
It seemed to the lovers (for so they now were, in all but the most physical 
sense) that hours had passed, but it had been no more than forty-live minutes. 
Summer's last moon, diminished but still bright, continued to shine above them.
She led him down one of the lanes to where she had tied her horse. Pylon nodded 
his head and whickered softly at Roland. He saw the horse had been rigged for 
silence—every buckle padded, and the stirrups them­selves wrapped in felt.
Then he turned to Susan.
Who can remember the pangs and sweetness of those early years? We remember our 
first real love no more clearly than the illusions that caused us to rave during 
a high fever. On that night and beneath that fading moon, Roland Deschain and 
Susan Delgado were nearly torn apart by their desire for each other; they 
floundered for what was right and ached with feelings that were both desperate 
and deep.
All of which is to say that they stepped toward each other, stepped back, looked 
into each other's eyes with a kind of helpless fascination, stepped forward 
again, and stopped. She remembered what he had said with a kind of horror: that 
he would do anything for her but share her with another man. She would 
not—perhaps could not—break her promise to Mayor Thorin, and it seemed that 
Roland would not (or could not) break it for her. And here was the most horrible 
thing of all: strong as the wind of ka might be, it appeared that honor and the 
promises they had made would prove stronger.
"What will ye do now?" she asked through dry lips.
"I don't know. I must think, and I must speak with my friends. Will you have 
trouble with your aunt when you go home? Will she want to know where you've been 
and what you've been doing?"
"Is it me you're concerned about or yourself and yer plans, Willy?"
He didn't respond, only looked at her. After a moment, Susan dropped her eyes.
"I'm sorry, that was cruel. No, she'll not tax me. I often ride at night, 
although not often so far from the house."
"She won't know how far you've ridden?"
"Nay. And these days we tread carefully around each other. It's like having two 
powder magazines in the same house." She reached out her hands. She had tucked 
her gloves into her belt, and the fingers which grasped his fingers were cold. 
"This'll have no good end," she said in a whisper.
"Don't say that, Susan."
"Aye, I do. I must. But whatever comes, I love thee, Roland."
He took her in his arms and kissed her. When he released her lips, she put them 
to his ear and whispered, "If you love me, then love me. Make me break my 
promise."
For a long moment when her heart didn't beat, there was no response from him, 
and she allowed herself to hope. Then he shook his head—only the one time, but 
firmly. "Susan, I cannot."
"Is yer honor so much greater than yer professed love for me, then? Aye? Then 
let it be so." She pulled out of his arms, beginning to cry, ig­noring his hand 
on her boot as she swung up into the saddle—his low call to wait, as well. She 
yanked free the slipknot with which Pylon had been tethered and turned him with 
one spurless foot. Roland was still calling to her, louder now, but she flung 
Pylon into a gallop and away from him be­fore her brief flare of rage could go 
out. He would not take her used, and her promise to Thorin had been made before 
she knew Roland walked the face of the earth. That being so, how dare he insist 
that the loss of honor and consequent shame be hers alone? Later, lying in her 
sleepless bed, she would realize he had insisted nothing. And she was not even 
clear of the orange grove before raising her left hand to the side of her face, 
feel­ing the wetness there, and realizing that he had been crying, too.

 
18
 
Roland rode the lanes outside town until well past moonset, trying to get his 
roaring emotions under some kind of control. He would wonder for awhile what he 
was going to do about their discovery at Citgo, and then his thoughts would 
shift to Susan again. Was he a fool for not taking her when she wanted to be 
taken? For not sharing what she wanted to share? If you love me, then love me. 
Those words had nearly torn him open. Yet in the deep rooms of his heart rooms 
where the clearest voice was that of his father he felt he had not been wrong. 
Nor was it just a matter of honor, whatever she might think. But let her think 
that if she would; better she should hate him a little, perhaps, than realize 
how deep the danger was for both of them.
Around three o' the clock, as he was about to turn for the Bar K, he heard the 
rapid drumming of hoofbeats on the main road, approaching from the west. Without 
thinking about why it seemed so important to do so, Roland swung back in that 
direction, then brought Rusher to a stop be­hind a high line of run-to-riot 
hedges. For nearly ten minutes the sound of the hoofbeats continued to 
swell—sound carried far in the deep quiet of early morning—and that was quite 
enough time for Roland to feel he knew who was riding toward Hambry 
hell-for-leather just two hours be­fore dawn. Nor was he mistaken. The moon was 
down, but he had no trouble, even through the brambly interstices of the hedge, 
recognizing Roy Depape. By dawn the Big Coffin Hunters would be three again.
Roland turned Rusher back the way he had been heading, and rode to rejoin his 
own friends.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      X
BIRD AND BEAR AND 
HARE AND FISH
 
1
 
The most important day of Susan Delgado's life—the day upon which her life 
turned like a stone upon a pivot—came about two weeks after her moonlit tour of 
the oilpatch with Roland. Since then she had seen him only half a dozen times, 
always at a distance, and they had raised their hands as passing acquaintances 
do when their errands bring them briefly into sight of one another. Each time 
this happened, she felt a pain as sharp as a knife twisting in her ... and 
though it was no doubt cruel, she hoped he felt the same twist of the knife. If 
there was anything good about those two miserable weeks, it was only that her 
great fear—that gossip might begin about herself and the young man who called 
himself Will Dear­born—subsided, and she found herself actually sorry to feel it 
ebb. Gos­sip? There was nothing to gossip about.
Then, on a day between the passing of the Peddler's Moon and the rise of the 
Huntress, ka finally came and blew her away—house and barn and all. It began 
with someone at the door.
 
2
 
She had been finishing the washing—a light enough chore with only two women to 
do it for—when the knock came.
"If it's the ragman, send him away, ye mind!" Aunt Cord called from the other 
room, where she was turning bed linen.
But it wasn't the ragman. It was Maria, her maid from Seafront, look­ing woeful. 
The second dress Susan was to wear on Reaping Day—the silk meant for luncheon at 
Mayor's House and the Conversational after-ward—was ruined, Maria said, and she 
was in hack because of it. Would be sent back to Onnie's Ford if she wasn't 
lucky, and she the only support of her mother and father— oh, it was hard, much 
too hard, so it was. Could Susan come? Please?
Susan was happy to come—was always happy to get out of the house these days, and 
away from her aunt's shrewish, nagging voice. The closer Reaping came, the less 
she and Aunt Cord could abide each other, it seemed.
They took Pylon, who was happy enough to carry two girls riding double through 
the morning cool, and Maria's story was quickly told. Su­san understood almost 
at once that Maria's position at Seafront wasn't really in much jeopardy; the 
little dark-haired maid had simply been using her innate (and rather charming) 
penchant for creating drama out of what was really not very dramatic at all.
The second Reaping dress (which Susan thought of as Blue Dress With Beads; the 
first, her breakfast dress, was White Dress With High Waist and Puffed Sleeves) 
had been kept apart from the others—it needed a bit of work yet—and something 
had gotten into the first-floor sewing room and gnawed it pretty much to rags. 
If this had been the costume she was to wear to the bonfire lighting, or the one 
she was to wear to the ball­room dance after the bonfire had been lit, the 
matter would indeed have been serious. But Blue Dress With Beads was essentially 
just a fancified day receiving dress, and could easily be replaced in the two 
months be­tween now and the Reap. Only two! Once—on the night the old witch had 
granted her her reprieve—it had seemed like eons before she would have to begin 
her bed-service to Mayor Thorin. And now it was only two months! She twisted in 
a kind of involuntary protest at the thought.
"Mum?" Maria asked. Susan wouldn't allow the girl to call her sai, and Maria, 
who seemed incapable of calling her mistress by her given name, had settled on 
this compromise. Susan found the term amusing, given the fact that she was only 
sixteen, and Maria herself probably just two or three years older. "Mum, are you 
all right?"
"Just a crick in my back, Maria, that's all."
"Aye, I get those. Fair bad, they are. I've had three aunts who've died of the 
wasting disease, and when I get those twinges, I'm always afeard that—"
"What kind of animal chewed up Blue Dress? Do ye know?"
Maria leaned forward so she could speak confidentially into her mis­tress's ear, 
as if they were in a crowded marketplace alley instead of on the road to 
Seafront. "It's put about that a raccoon got in through a window that 'us opened 
during the heat of the day and was then forgot at day's end, but I had a good 
sniff of that room, and Kimba Rimer did, too, when he came down to inspect. Just 
before he sent me after you, that was."
"What did you smell?"
Maria leaned close again, and this time she actually whispered, al­though there 
was no one on the road to overhear: "Dog farts."
There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Susan began to laugh. She 
laughed until her stomach hurt and tears went streaming down her cheeks.
"Are ye saying that W-W-Wolf... the Mayor's own d-d-dog ... got into the 
downstairs seamstress's closet and chewed up my Conversational d-d—" But she 
couldn't finish. She was simply laughing too hard.
"Aye," Maria said stoutly. She seemed to find nothing unusual about Susan's 
laughter . . . which was one of the things Susan loved about her. "But he's not 
to be blamed, so I say, for a dog will follow his natural in­stincts, if the way 
is open for him to do so. The downstairs maids—" She broke off. "You'd not tell 
the Mayor or Kimba Rimer this, I suppose, Mum?"
"Maria, I'm shocked at you—ye play me cheap."
"No, Mum, I play ye dear, so I do, but it's always best to be safe. All I meant 
to say was that, on hot days, the downstairs maids sometimes go into that sewing 
closet for their fives. It lies directly in the shadow of the watchtower, ye 
know, and is the coolest room in the house—even cooler than the main receiving 
rooms."
"I'll remember that," Susan said. She thought of holding the Lun­cheon and 
Conversational in the seamstress's beck beyond the kitchen when the great day 
came, and began to giggle again. "Go on."
"No more to say, Mum," Maria told her, as if all else were too obvi­ous for 
conversation. "The maids eat their cakes and leave the crumbs. I reckon Wolf 
smelled em and this time the door was left open. When the crumbs was gone, he 
tried the dress. For a second course, like."
This time they laughed together.
 
3
 
But she wasn't laughing when she came home.
Cordelia Delgado, who thought the happiest day of her life would be the one when 
she finally saw her troublesome niece out the door and the annoying business 
other defloration finally over, bolted out other chair and hurried to the 
kitchen window when she heard the gallop of ap­proaching hoofs about two hours 
after Susan had left with that little scrap of a maid to have one of her dresses 
refitted. She never doubted that it was Susan returning, and she never doubted 
it was trouble. In ordinary cir­cumstances, the silly twist would never gallop 
one of her beloved horses on a hot day.
She watched, nervously dry-washing her hands, as Susan pulled Py­lon up in a 
very unDelgado-like scrunch, then dismounted in an unlady­like leap. Her braid 
had come half undone, spraying that damned blonde hair that was her vanity (and 
her curse) in all directions. Her skin was pale, except for twin patches of 
color flaring high on her cheekbones. Cordelia didn't like the look of those at 
all. Pat had always flared in that same place when he was scared or angry.
She stood at the sink, now biting her lips as well as working her hands. Oh, 
'twould be so good to see the back of that troublesome she. "Ye haven't made 
trouble, have ye?" she whispered as Susan pulled the saddle from Pylon's back 
and then led him toward the barn. "You better not have, Miss Oh So Young and 
Pretty. Not at this late date. You better not have."
 
4
 
When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt's strain 
and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a danger­ous weapon—a 
gun, say—on a high closet shelf. She was back in her rocker, knitting, and the 
face she turned to Susan's entry had a surface se­renity. She watched the girl 
go to the sink, pump cold water into the basin, and then splash it on her face. 
Instead of reaching for a towel to pat her­self dry, Susan only looked out the 
window with an expression that fright­ened Cordelia badly. The girl no doubt 
fancied that look haunted and desperate; to Cordelia, it looked only childishly 
willful.
"All right, Susan," she said in a calm, modulated voice. The girl would never 
know what a strain it was to achieve that tone, let alone maintain it. Unless 
she was faced with a willful teenager of her own one day, that was. "What's 
fashed thee so?"
Susan turned to her—Cordelia Delgado, just sitting there in her rocker, calm as 
a stone. In that moment Susan felt she could fly at her aunt and claw her thin, 
self-righteous face to strings, screaming This is your fault! Yours! All yours! 
She felt soiled—no, that wasn't strong enough; she felt filthy, and nothing had 
really happened. In a way, that was the horror of it. Nothing had really 
happened yet.
"It shows?" was all she said.
"Of course it does," Cordelia replied. "Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?"
"Yes ... no ... no."
Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, wait­ing for 
more.
At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly 
flat—a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began 
to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it 
came down to, after all!
The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn't been finished off; there 
was too much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced 
Conchetta Morgenstem, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the 
downstairs sewing room without saying anything—if saved words were gold, Susan 
had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor's sister was 
reputed to be.
Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker's dummy crouched 
beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and 
one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had 
been expecting.
"Can it not be saved?" she asked, rather timidly.
"No," Conchetta said curtly. "Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too."
Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her 
arms crossed over her bosom .. . not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest 
interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.
Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Ap­plique, it 
seemed. Susan stepped into it, raised the straps, and stood pa­tiently while 
Conchetta bent and measured and muttered, sometimes using a bit of chalk to 
write numbers on a wall-stone, sometimes grabbing a swag of material and pulling 
it tighter against Susan's hip or waist, checking the look in the full-length 
mirror on the far wall. As always dur­ing this process, Susan slipped away 
mentally, allowing her mind to go where it wanted. Where it wanted to go most 
frequently these days was into a daydream of riding along the Drop with Roland, 
the two of them side by side, finally stopping in a willow grove she knew that 
overlooked Hambry Creek.
"Stand there still as you can," Conchetta said curtly. "I be back."
Susan was hardly aware she was gone; was hardly aware she was in Mayor's House 
at all. The part of her that really mattered wasn't there. That part was in the 
willow grove with Roland. She could smell the faint half-sweet, half-acrid 
perfume of the trees and hear the quiet gossip of the stream as they lay down 
together forehead to forehead. He traced the shape of her face with the palm of 
his hand before taking her in his arms .. .
This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which 
curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her 
stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, 
snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and under­stood what was happening. 
Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin's long and skinny fingers. She 
looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus. 
His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of 
the room's cool­ness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a 
hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried 
to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His 
knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center 
of him.
At times over the last few weeks, Susan had allowed herself to hope that, when 
the time came, Thorin would be incapable—that he would be able to make no iron 
at the forge. She had heard this often happened to men when they got older. The 
hard, throbbing column which lay against her bottom disabused her of that 
wistful notion in a hurry.
She had managed at least a degree of diplomacy by simply putting her hands over 
his and attempting to draw them off her breasts instead of pulling away from him 
again (Cordelia, impassive, not showing the great relief she felt at this).
"Mayor Thorin—Hart—you mustn't—this is hardly the place and not yet the 
time—Rhea said—"
"Balls to her and all witches!" His cultured politician's tones had been 
replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand 
from Onnie's Ford. "I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to 
the witch, I say! Owlshit to 'er!" The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her 
head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. "Just 
stand still, girl. Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!"
Somehow she did. There was even some distant part of her mind, a part totally 
dedicated to self-preservation, that hoped he would mistake her shudders of 
revulsion for maidenly excitement. He had drawn her tight against him, hands 
working energetically on her breasts, his respira­tion a stinky steam-engine in 
her ear. She stood back to him, her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from 
beneath the lids and through the fringes of her lashes.
It didn't take him long. He rocked back and forth against her, moan­ing like a 
man with stomach cramps. At one point he licked the lobe of her ear, and Susan 
thought her skin would crawl right off her body in its revulsion. Finally, 
thankfully, she felt him begin to spasm against her.
"Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!" he said in a voice that was almost a 
squeal. He pushed so hard she had to brace her hands against the wall to keep 
from being driven face-first into it. Then he at last stepped back.
For a moment Susan only stood as she was, with her palms against the rough cold 
stone of the sewing room wall. She could see Thorin in the mirror, and in his 
image she saw the ordinary doom that was rushing at her, the ordinary doom of 
which this was but a foretaste: the end of girl­hood, the end of romance, the 
end of dreams where she and Roland lay to­gether in the willow grove with their 
foreheads touching. The man in the mirror looked oddly like a boy himself, one 
who's been up to something he wouldn't tell his mother about. Just a tall and 
gangly lad with strange gray hair and narrow twitching shoulders and a wet spot 
on the front of his trousers. Hart Thorin looked as if he didn't quite know 
where he was. In that moment the lust was flushed out of his face, but what 
replaced it was no better—that vacant confusion. It was as if he were a bucket 
with a hole in the bottom: no matter what you put in it, or how much, it always 
ran out before long.
He 'II do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. 
Now that he's done it once, he 'II do it every chance he gets, likely. From now 
on coming up here is going to be like . . . well . . .
Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.
Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled 
the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him 
like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his 
excitement. He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of 
one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some 
expression at last came into them, and without an­other word he turned and left 
the room.
There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out 
there. Susan heard him mutter "Sorry! Sorry!" under his breath (it was more 
apology than he'd given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back 
into the room. The swatch of cloth she'd gone af­ter was draped around her 
shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan's pale face and tearstained cheeks at 
once. She'll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them 
will lift a finger to help me off this stick I've run myself on. "Ye sharpened 
it yourself, gilly," they'd say if I called for help, and that'll be their 
excuse for leaving me to wriggle.
But Conchetta had surprised her. "Life's hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to 
it."
 
5
 
Susan's voice—dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion—at last ceased. Aunt 
Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.
"Ye dramatize, Susan." She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and 
wise, and succeeded at neither. "It's a trait ye get from your Manchester 
side—half of them fancied themselves poets, t'other half fan­cied themselves 
painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tapdance. He 
grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that's all. Nothing to be so upset 
over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over."
"How would you know?" Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond 
caring. She thought she'd reached a point where she could bear anything from her 
aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh 
scrape.
Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. "How ye do love to throw 
that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord 
the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, 
but I had a lover or two back when I was young . . . before the world moved on, 
ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll."
And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt's senior by at least 
fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.
"I've felt old Tom's goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my 
frontside as well."
"And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked 
when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through 
the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?"
The rage she expected did not come. What did was worse—an ex­pression close to 
the look of emptiness she had seen on Thorin's face in the mirror. "Deed's done, 
Susan." A smile, short-lived and awful, nick­ered like an eyelid on her aunt's 
narrow face. "Deed's done, aye."
In a kind of terror Susan cried: "My father would have hated this! Hated it! And 
hated you for allowing it to happen! For encouraging it to happen!"
"Mayhap," Aunt Cord said, and the awful smile winked at her again. "Mayhap so. 
And the only thing he'd hate more? The dishonor of a bro­ken promise, the shame 
of a faithless child. He would want thee to go on with it, Susan. If thee would 
remember his face, thee must go on with it."
Susan looked at her, mouth drawn down in a trembling arc, eyes fill­ing with 
tears again. I've met someone I love! That was what she would have told her if 
she could. Don't you understand how that changes things? I've met someone I 
love! But if Aunt Cord had been the sort of person to whom she could have said 
such a thing, Susan would likely never have been impaled on this stick to begin 
with. So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her 
streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful 
color.
 
6
 
She rode with no conscious idea of where she was going, yet some part of her 
must have had a very specific destination in mind, because forty min­utes after 
leaving her house, she found herself approaching the very grove of willows she 
had been daydreaming about when Thorin had crept up be­hind her like some bad 
elf out of a gammer's story.
It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden 
out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which 
lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the 
springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was 
where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered 
the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and 
time again, in the nearly endless days af­ter her father's death, when it had 
seemed to her that the very world—her version of it, at least—had ended with Pat 
Delgado. It was only this clear­ing that had heard the full and painful measure 
of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it 
away.
Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and 
sobbed—loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment 
she thought she would have given anything—everything— to have her father back 
for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.
She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snap­ping branch, 
she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was 
her secret place and she didn't want to be found here, especially not when she 
was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch 
snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst 
possible time.
"Go away!" she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recog­nized. "Go 
away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!"
But the figure—she could now see it—kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at 
first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) 
must be a figment of her overstrained imagina­tion. She wasn't entirely sure he 
was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with 
panicky tightness. "How did you know I was—"
"Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, 
and I saw you. I wouldn't have followed, except I saw that you were riding 
bareback. I thought something might be wrong."
"Everything's wrong."
Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. 
He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he 
was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoul­ders and held her back 
from him so he could look into her eyes.
"Say it again and I will, Susan. I don't know if that's a promise or a warning 
or both at the same time, but... say it again and I will."
There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move 
beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her 
life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the 
earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.
"Roland!"
"Yes, Susan."
She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes 
never leaving his.
"If you love me, then love me."
"Aye, lady. I will."
He unbuttoned his shirt, made in a part of Mid-World she would never see, and 
took her in his arms.
 
7
 
Ka:
They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other's arms 
on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads 
touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain 
melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once 
in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the 
sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and 
rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow 
grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken without so much as a look 
back, and at the end of it Susan discovered there was more than sweetness; there 
was a kind of delirious clinching of the nerves that began in the part of her 
that had opened before him like a flower; it began there and then filled her 
entire body. She cried out again and again, thinking there could not be so much 
pleasure in the mortal world; she would die of it. Roland added his voice to 
hers, and the sound of water rushing over stones wrapped around both. As she 
pulled him closer to her, locking her ankles together behind his knees and 
covering his face with fierce kisses, his going out rushed after hers as if 
trying to catch up. So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end 
of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs 
joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so 
were they doomed.
Ka.
 
8
 
They lay together in each other's arms, sharing afterglow kisses beneath 
Felicia's mild gaze, and Roland felt himself drowsing. This was 
under­standable—the strain on him that summer had been enormous, and he had been 
sleeping badly. Although he didn't know it then, he would sleep badly for the 
rest of his life.
"Roland?" Her voice, distant. Sweet, as well.
“Yes?"
"Will thee take care of me?"
"Yes."
"I can't go to him when the time comes. I can bear his touching, and his little 
thefts—if I have you, I can—but I can't go to him on Reap Night. I don't know if 
I've forgotten the face of my father or not, but I cannot go lo Hart Thorin's 
bed. There are ways the loss of a girl's virginity can be concealed, I think, 
but I won't use them. I simply cannot go to his bed."
"All right," he said, "good." And then, as her eyes widened in startlement, he 
looked around. No one was there. He looked back at Susan, fully awake now. 
"What? What is it?"
"I might already be carrying your child," she said. "Has thee thought of that?"
He hadn't. Now he did. A child. Another link in the chain stretching hack into 
the dimness where Arthur Eld had led his gunslingers into battle with the great 
sword Excalibur raised above his head and the crown of All-World on his brow. 
But never mind that; what would his father think? Ur Gabrielle, to know she had 
become a grandmother?
A little smile had formed at the comers of his mouth, but the thought of his 
mother drove it away. He thought of the mark on her neck. When his mother came 
to his mind these days, he always thought of the mark he'd seen on her neck when 
he came unexpected into her apartment. And the small, rueful smile on her face.
"If you carry my child, such is my good fortune," he said.
"And mine." It was her turn to smile, but it had a sad look to it all the same, 
that smile. "We're too young, I suppose. Little more than kiddies ourselves."
He rolled onto his back and looked up at the blue sky. What she said might be 
true, but it didn't matter. Truth was sometimes not the same as reality—this was 
one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of 
his divided nature. That he could rise above both and willingly embrace the 
insanity of romance was a gift from his mother. All else in his nature was 
humorless . . . and, perhaps more important, without metaphor. That they were 
too young to be parents? What of that? If he had planted a seed, it would grow.
"Whatever comes, we'll do as we must. And I'll always love you, no matter what 
comes."
She smiled. He said it as a man would state any dry fact: sky is up, earth is 
down, water flows south.
"Roland, how old are you?" She was sometimes troubled by the idea that, young as 
she herself was, Roland was even younger. When he was concentrating on 
something, he could look so hard he frightened her. When he smiled, he looked 
not like a lover but a kid brother.
"Older than I was when I came here," he said. "Older by far. And if I have to 
stay in sight of Jonas and his men another six months, I'll be hob­bling and 
needing a boost in the arse to get aboard my horse."
She grinned at that, and he kissed her nose.
"And thee'll take care of me?"
"Aye," he said, and grinned back at her. Susan nodded, then also turned on her 
back. They lay that way, hip to hip, looking up at the sky. She took his hand 
and placed it on her breast. As he stroked the nipple with his thumb, it raised 
its head, grew hard, and began to tingle. This sensation slipped quickly down 
her body to the place that was still throb­bing between her legs. She squeezed 
her thighs together and was both de­lighted and dismayed to find that doing so 
only made matters worse.
"Ye must take care of me," she said in a low voice. "I've pinned everything on 
you. All else is cast aside."
"I'll do my best," he said. "Never doubt it. But for now, Susan, you must go on 
as you have been. There's more time yet to pass; I know that because Depape is 
back and will have told his tale, but they still haven't moved in any way 
against us. Whatever he found out, Jonas still thinks it's in his interest to 
wait. That's apt to make him more dangerous when he does move, but for now it's 
still Castles."
"But after the Reaping Bonfire—Thorin—"
"You'll never go to his bed. That you can count on. I set my warrant on it."
A little shocked at her own boldness, she reached below his waist. "Here's a 
warrant ye can set on me, if ye would," she said.
He would. Could. And did.
When it was over (for Roland it had been even sweeter than the first time, if 
that was possible), he asked her: "That feeling you had out at Citgo, Susan—of 
being watched. Did you have it this time?"
She looked at him long and thoughtfully. "I don't know. My mind was in other 
places, ye ken." She touched him gently, then laughed as he jumped—the nerves in 
the half-hard, half-soft place where her palm stroked were still very lively, it 
seemed.
She took her hand away and looked up at the circle of sky above the grove. "So 
beautiful here," she murmured, and her eyes drifted closed.
Roland also felt himself drifting. It was ironic, he thought. This time she 
hadn't had that sensation of being watched ... but the second time, he had. Yet 
he would have sworn there was no one near this grove.
No matter. The feeling, megrim or reality, was gone now. He took Susan's hand, 
and felt her fingers slip naturally through his, entwining.
He closed his eyes.
 
9
 
All of this Rhea saw in the glass, and wery interesting viewing it made, aye, 
wery interesting, indeed. But she'd seen shagging before—sometimes with three or 
four or even more doing it all at the same time (sometimes with part­ners who 
were not precisely alive)—and the hokey-pokey wasn't very inter­esting to her at 
her advanced age. What she was interested in was what would come after the 
hokey-pokey.
Is our business done? the girl had asked.
Mayhap there's one more little thing, Rhea had responded, and then she told the 
impudent trull what to do.
Aye, she'd given the girl very clear instructions as the two of them stood in 
the hut doorway, the Kissing Moon shining down on them as Susan Delgado slept 
the strange sleep and Rhea stroked her braid and whispered instructions in her 
ear. Now would come the fulfillment of that interlude . . . and that was what 
she wanted to see, not two babbies shagging each other like they were the first 
two on earth to discover how 'twas done.
Twice they did it with hardly a pause to natter in between (she would have given 
a good deal to hear that natter, too). Rhea wasn't surprised; at his young age, 
she supposed the brat had enough spunkum in his sack to give her a week's worth 
of doubles, and from the way the little slut acted, that might be to her taste. 
Some of them discovered it and never wanted aught else; this was one, Rhea 
thought.
But let's see how sexy you feel in a few minutes, you snippy bitch, she thought, 
and leaned deeper into the pulsing pink light thrown from the glass. She could 
sometimes feel that light aching in the very bones of her face . . . but it was 
a good ache. Aye, wery good indeed.
They were at last done ... for the time being, at least. They clasped hands and 
drifted off to sleep.
"Now," Rhea murmured. "Now, my little one. Be a good girl and do as ye were 
told."
As if hearing her, Susan's eyes opened—but there was nothing in them. They woke 
and slept at the same time. Rhea saw her gently pull her hand free of the boy's. 
She sat up, bare breasts against bare thighs, and looked around. She got to her 
feet—
That was when Musty, the six-legged cat, jumped into Rhea's lap, waowing for 
either food or affection. The old woman shrieked with sur­prise, and the 
wizard's glass at once went dark—puffed out like a candle-flame in a gust of 
wind.
Rhea shrieked again, this time with rage, and seized the cat before it could 
flee. She hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. That was as dead a hole 
as only a summer fireplace can be, but when Rhea cast a bony, misshapen hand at 
it, a yellow gust of flame rose from the single half-charred log lying in there. 
Musty screamed and fled from the hearth with his eyes wide and his split tail 
smoking like an indifferently butted cigar.
"Run, aye!" Rhea spat after him. "Begone, ye vile cusk!"
She turned back to the glass and spread her hands over it, thumb to thumb. But 
although she concentrated with all her might, willed until her heart was beating 
with a sick fury in her chest, she could do no more than bring back the ball's 
natural pink glow. No images appeared. This was bitterly disappointing, but 
there was nothing to be done. And in time she would be able to see the results 
with her own two natural eyes, if she cared to go to town and do so.
Everybody would be able to see.
Her good humor restored, Rhea returned the ball to its hiding place.
 
10
 
Only moments before he would have sunk too deep in sleep to have heard it, a 
warning bell went off in Roland's mind. Perhaps it was the faint realization 
that her hand was no longer entwined with his; perhaps it was raw intuition. He 
could have ignored that faint bell, and almost did, but in the end his training 
was too strong. He came up from the threshold of real sleep, fighting his way 
back to clarity as a diver kicks for the surface of a quarry. It was hard at 
first, but became easier; as he neared wakefulness, his alarm grew.
He opened his eyes and looked to his left. Susan was no longer there. He sat up, 
looked to his right, and saw nothing above the cut of the stream ... yet he felt 
that she was in that direction, all the same.
"Susan?"
No response. He got up, looked at his pants, and Cort—a visitor he never would 
have expected in such a romantic bower as this—spoke up gruffly in his mind. No 
time, maggot.
He walked naked to the bank and looked down. Susan was there, all right, also 
naked, her back to him. She had unbraided her hair. It hung, loose gold, almost 
all the way to the lyre other hips. The chill air rising from the surface of the 
stream shivered the tips of it like mist.
She was down on one knee at the edge of the running water. One arm was plunged 
into it almost to the elbow; she searched for something, it seemed.
"Susan!"
No answer. And now a cold thought came to him: She's been infested by a demon. 
While I slept, heedless, beside her, she's been infested by a demon. Yet he did 
not think he really believed that. If there had been a de­mon near this 
clearing, he would have felt it. Likely both of them would have felt it; the 
horses, too. But something was wrong with her.
She brought an object up from the streambed and held it before her eyes in her 
dripping hand. A stone. She examined it, then tossed it back— plunk. She reached 
in again, head bent, two sheafs of her hair now actu­ally floating on the water, 
the stream prankishly tugging them in the direction it flowed. "Susan!"
No response. She plucked another stone out of the stream. This one was a 
triangular white quartz, shattered into a shape that was almost like the head of 
a spear. Susan tilted her head to the left and took a sheaf of her hair in her 
hand, like a woman who means to comb out a nest of tangles. But there was no 
comb, only the rock with its sharp edge, and for a mo­ment longer Roland 
remained on the bank, frozen with horror, sure that she meant to cut her own 
throat out of shame and guilt over what they'd done. In the weeks to come, he 
was haunted by a clear knowledge: if it had been her throat she'd intended, he 
wouldn't have been in time to stop her.
Then the paralysis broke and he hurled himself down the bank, un­mindful of the 
sharp stones that gouged the soles of his feet. Before he reached her, she had 
already used the edge of the quartz to cut off part of the golden tress she 
held.
Roland seized her wrist and pulled it back. He could see her face clearly now. 
What could have been mistaken for serenity from the top of the bank now looked 
like what it really was: vacuity, emptiness.
When he took hold of her, the smoothness of her face was replaced by a dim and 
fretful smile; her mouth quivered as if she felt distant pain, and an almost 
formless sound of negation came from her mouth:
"Nnnnnnnnn—"
Some of the hair she had cut off lay on her thigh like gold wire; most had 
fallen into the stream and been carried away. Susan pulled against Roland's 
hand, trying to get the sharp edge back to her hair, wanting to con­tinue her 
mad barbering. The two of them strove together like arm-wrestlers in a barroom 
contest. And Susan was winning. He was physically the stronger, but not stronger 
than the enchantment which held her. Little by lit­tle the white triangle of 
quartz moved back toward her hanging hair. That frightening 
sound—Nnnnnnnnnn—kept drifting from her mouth.
"Susan! Stop it! Wake up!"
"Nnnnnnnn— "
Her bare arm quivering visibly in the air, the muscles bunched like hard little 
rocks. And the quartz moving closer and closer to her hair, her cheek, the 
socket of her eye.
Without thinking about it—it was the way he always acted most 
suc­cessfully—Roland moved his face close to the side others, giving up an­other 
four inches to the fist holding the stone in order to do it. He put his lips 
against the cup of her ear and then clucked his tongue against the roof of his 
mouth. Clucked sidemouth, in fact.
Susan jerked back from that sound, which must have gone through  her head like a 
spear. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly, and the pressure she was exerting against 
Roland's grip eased a little. He took the chance and twisted her wrist.
"Ow!Owwww!"
The stone flew out of her opening hand and splashed into the water. Susan gazed 
at him, now fully awake, her eyes filled with tears and bewil­derment. She was 
rubbing her wrist. . . which, Roland thought, was likely to swell.
"Ye hurt me, Roland! Why did ye hurt m ..."
She trailed off, looking around. Now not just her face but the whole set other 
body expressed bewilderment. She moved to cover herself with her hands, then 
realized they were still alone and dropped them to her sides. She glanced over 
her shoulder at the footprints—all of them bare— leading down the bank.
"How did I get down here?" she asked. "Did thee carry me, after I fell asleep? 
And why did thee hurt me? Oh, Roland, I love thee—why did ye hurt me?"
He picked up the strands of hair that still lay on her thigh and held them in 
front of her. "You had a stone with a sharp edge. You were trying to cut 
yourself with it, and you didn't want to stop. I hurt you because I was scared. 
I'm just glad I didn't break your wrist ... at least, I don't think I did."
Roland took it and rotated it gently in either direction, listening for the 
grate of small bones.
He heard nothing, and the wrist turned freely. As Susan watched, stunned and 
confused, he raised it to his lips and kissed the inner part, above the delicate 
tracery of veins.
 
11
 
Roland had tied Rusher just far enough into the willows so the big geld­ing 
could not be seen by anyone who happened to come riding along the Drop.
"Be easy," Roland said, approaching. "Be easy a little longer, good-heart."
Rusher stamped and whickered, as if to say he could be easy until the end of the 
age, if that was what were required.
Roland nipped open his saddlebag and took out the steel utensil that served as 
either a pot or a frypan, depending on his needs. He started away, then turned 
back. His bedroll was tied behind Pusher's saddle he had planned to spend the 
night camped out on the Drop, thinking. There had been a lot to think about, and 
now there was even more.
He pulled one of the rawhide ties, reached inside the blankets, and pulled out a 
small metal box. This he opened with a tiny key he drew from around his neck. 
Inside the box was a small square locket on a fine silver chain (inside the 
locket was a line-drawing of his mother), and a handful of extra shells—not 
quite a dozen. He took one, closed it in his fist, and went back to Susan. She 
looked at him with wide, frightened eyes.
"I don't remember anything after we made love the second time," she said. "Only 
looking up at the sky and thinking how good I felt and going to sleep. Oh, 
Roland, how bad does it look?"
"Not bad, I should think, but you'll know better than I. Here."
He dipped his cooker full of water and set it on the bank. Susan bent over it 
apprehensively, laying the hair on the left side of her head across her forearm, 
then moving the arm slowly outward, extending the tress in a band of bright 
gold. She saw the ragged cut at once. She examined it care­fully, then let it 
drop with a sigh more relieved than rueful.
"I can hide it," she said. "When it's braided, no one will know. And after all, 
'tis only hair—no more than woman's vanity. My aunt has told me so often enough, 
certainly. But Roland, why? Why did I do it?"
Roland had an idea. If hair was a woman's vanity, then hair-chopping would 
likely be a woman's bit of nastiness—a man would hardly think of it at all. The 
Mayor's wife, had it been her? He thought not. It seemed more likely that Rhea, 
up there on her height of land looking north toward the Bad Grass, Hanging Rock, 
and Eyebolt Canyon, had set this ugly trap. Mayor Thorin had been meant to wake 
up on the morning after the Reap with a hangover and a bald-headed gilly.
"Susan, can I try something?"
She gave him a smile. "Something ye didn't try already up yonder? Aye, what ye 
will."
"Nothing like that." He opened the hand he had held closed, showing the shell. 
"I want to try and find out who did this to you, and why." And other things, 
too. He just didn't know what they were yet.
She looked at the shell. Roland began to move it along the back of his hand, 
dancing it back and forth in a dexterous weaving. His knuckles rose and fell 
like the heddles of a loom. She watched this with a child's fasci­nated delight. 
"Where did ye learn that?"
"At home. It doesn't matter."
"Ye'd hypnotize me?"
"Aye ... and I don't think it would be for the first time." He made the shell 
dance a bit faster—now east along his rippling knuckles, now west. "May I?"
"Aye," she said. "If you can."
 
12
 
He could, all right; the speed with which she went under confirmed that this had 
happened to Susan before, and recently. Yet he couldn't get what lie wanted from 
her. She was perfectly cooperative (some sleep eager, fort would have said), but 
beyond a certain point she would not go. It wasn't decorum or modesty, either—as 
she slept open-eyed before the stream, she told him in a far-off but calm voice 
about the old woman's examination, and the way Rhea had tried to "fiddle her 
up." (At this Poland's fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms.) 
But there came a point where she could no longer remember.
She and Rhea had gone to the door of the hut, Susan said, and there they had 
stood with the Kissing Moon shining down on their faces. The old woman had been 
touching her hair, Susan remembered that much. The touch revolted her, 
especially after the witch's previous touches, but Susan had been unable to do 
anything about it. Arms too heavy to raise; tongue too heavy to speak. She could 
only stand there while the witch whispered in her ear.
"What?" Roland asked. "What did she whisper?"
"I don't know," Susan said. "The rest is pink."
"Pink? What do you mean?"
"Pink," she repeated. She sounded almost amused, as if she believed Roland was 
being deliberately dense. "She says, 'Aye, lovely, just so, it's a good girl 
y'are,' then everything's pink. Pink and bright."
"Bright."
"Aye, like the moon. And then . . ." She paused. "Then I think it be­comes the 
moon. The Kissing Moon, mayhap. A bright pink Kissing Moon, as round and full as 
a grapefruit."
He tried other ways into her memory with no success—every path he tried ended in 
that bright pinkness, first obscuring her recollection and then coalescing into 
a full moon. It meant nothing to Roland; he'd heard of blue moons, but never 
pink ones. The only thing of which he was sure was that the old woman had given 
Susan a powerful command to forget.
He considered taking her deeper—she would go—but didn't dare. Most of his 
experience came from hypnotizing his friends—classroom exercises that were larky 
and occasionally spooky. Always there had been Cort or Vannay present to make 
things right if they went off-track. Now there were no teachers to step in; for 
better or worse, the students had been left in charge of the school. What if he 
took her deep and couldn't get her back up again? And he had been told there 
were demons in the below-mind as well. If you went down to where they were, they 
some­times swam out of their caves to meet you . . .
All other considerations aside, it was getting late. It wouldn't be pru­dent to 
stay here much longer.
"Susan, do you hear me?"
"Aye, Roland, I hear you very well."
"Good. I'm going to say a rhyme. You'll wake up as I say it. When I'm done, 
you'll be wide awake and remember everything we've said. Do you understand?"
"Aye."
"Listen: Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fond­est wish."
Her smile as she rose to consciousness was one of the most beautiful things he 
had ever seen. She stretched, then put her arms around his neck and covered his 
face with kisses. "You, you, you, you," she said. "You're my fondest wish, 
Roland. You're my only wish. You and you, forever and ever."
They made love again there on the bank, beside the babbling stream, holding each 
other as tightly as they could, breathing into each other's mouths and living on 
each other's breath. You, you, you, you.
 
13
 
Twenty minutes later, he boosted her onto Felicia's back. Susan leaned down, 
took his face in her hands, and kissed him soundly.
"When will I see ye again?" she asked.
"Soon. But we must be careful."
"Aye. Careful as two lovers ever were, I think. Thank God thee's clever."
"We can use Sheemie, if we don't use him too often."
"Aye. And, Roland—do ye know the pavilion in Green Heart? Close to where they 
serve tea and cakes and things when the weather's fair?"
Roland did. Fifty yards or so up Hill Street from the jail and the Town 
Gathering Hall, Green Heart was one of the most pleasant places in town, with 
its quaint paths, umbrella-shaded tables, grassy dancing pavilion, and 
menagerie.
"There's a rock wall at the back," she said. "Between the pavilion and the 
menagerie. If you need me badly—"
"I'll always need you badly," he said.
She smiled at his gravity. "There's a stone on one of the lower courses—a 
reddish one. You'll see it. My friend Amy and I used to leave messages there for 
each other when we were little girls. I'll look there when I can. Ye do the 
same."
"Aye." Sheemie would work for awhile, if they were careful. The red rock might 
also work for awhile, if they were careful. But no matter how careful they were, 
they would slip eventually, because the Big Coffin Hunters now probably knew 
more about Roland and his friends than Roland ever would have wished. But he had 
to see her, no matter what the risks. If he didn't, he felt he might die. And he 
only had to look at her to know she felt the same.
"Watch special for Jonas and the other two," he said.
"I will. Another kiss, if ye favor?"
He kissed her gladly, and would just as gladly have pulled her off the mare's 
back for a fourth go-round . .. but it was time to stop being deliri­ous and 
start being careful.
"Fare you well, Susan. I love y—" He paused, then smiled. "I love thee."
"And I thee, Roland. What heart I have is yours."
She had a great heart, he thought as she slipped through the willows, and 
already he felt its burden on his own. He waited until he felt sure she must be 
well away. Then he went to Rusher and rode off in the opposite direction, 
knowing that a new and dangerous phase of the game had begun.
 
14
 
Not too long after Susan and Roland had parted, Cordelia Delgado stepped out of 
the Hambry Mercantile with a box of groceries and a troubled mind. The troubled 
mind was caused by Susan, of course, always Susan, and Cordelia's fear that the 
girl would do something stupid before Reaping finally came around.
These thoughts were snatched out of her mind just as hands—strong ones—snatched 
the box of groceries from her arms. Cordelia cawed in surprise, shaded her eyes 
against the sun, and saw Eldred Jonas standing there between the Bear and Turtle 
totems, smiling at her. His hair, long and white (and beautiful, in her 
opinion), lay over his shoulders. Cordelia felt her heart beat a little faster. 
She had always been partial to men like Jonas, who could smile and banter their 
way to the edge of risqueness . . . but who carried their bodies like blades.
"I startled you. I cry your pardon, Cordelia."
"Nay," she said, sounding a little breathless to her own ears. "It's just the 
sun—so bright at this time of day—"
"I'd help you a bit on your way, if you give me leave. I'm only going up High as 
far as the comer, then I turn up the Hill, but may I help you that far?"
"With thanks," she said. They walked down the steps and up the board sidewalk, 
Cordelia looking around in little pecking glances to see who was observing 
them—she beside the handsome sai Jonas, who just happened to be carrying her 
goods. There was a satisfying number of on­lookers. She saw Millicent Ortega, 
for one, looking out of Ann's Dresses with a satisfying 0 of surprise on her 
stupid cow's puss.
"I hope you don't mind me calling you Cordelia." Jonas shifted the box, which 
she'd needed two hands to carry, casually under one arm. "I feel, since the 
welcoming dinner at Mayor Thorin's house, that I know you."
"Cordelia's fine."
"And may I be Eldred to you?"
"I think 'Mr. Jonas' will do a bit longer," she said, then favored him with what 
she hoped was a coquettish smile. Her heart beat faster yet. (It did not occur 
to her that perhaps Susan was not the only silly goose in the Delgado family.)
"So be it," Jonas said, with a look of disappointment so comic that she laughed. 
"And your niece? Is she well?"
"Quite well, thank ye for asking. A bit of a trial, sometimes—"
"Was there ever a girl of sixteen who wasn't?"
"I suppose not."
"Yet you have additional burdens regarding her this fall. I doubt if \he 
realizes that, though."
Cordelia said nothing—'twouldn't be discreet—but gave him a meaningful look that 
said much.
"Give her my best, please."
"I will." But she wouldn't. Susan had conceived a great (and irra­tional, in 
Cordelia's view) dislike for Mayor Thorin's regulators. Trying to talk her out 
of these feelings would likely do no good; young girls thought they knew 
everything. She glanced at the star peeking unobtru­sively out from beneath the 
flap of Jonas's vest. "I understand ye've taken on an additional responsibility 
in our undeserving town, sai Jonas."
"Aye, I'm helping out Sheriff Avery," he agreed. His voice had a reedy little 
tremble which Cordelia found quite endearing, somehow. "One of his 
deputies—Claypool, his name is—"
"Frank Claypool, aye."
"—fell out of his boat and broke his leg. How do you fall out of a boat and 
break your leg, Cordelia?"
She laughed merrily (the idea that everyone in Hambry was watching them was 
surely wrong ... but it felt that way, and the feeling was not un­pleasant) and 
said she didn't know.
He stopped on the comer of High and Camino Vega, looking regret­ful. "Here's 
where I turn." He handed the box back to her. "Are you sure you can carry that? 
I suppose I could go on with you to your house—"
"No need, no need. Thank you. Thank you, Eldred." The blush which crept up her 
neck and cheeks felt as hot as fire, but his smile was worth every degree of 
heat. He tipped her a little salute with two fingers and sauntered up the hill 
toward the Sheriff's office.
Cordelia walked on home. The box, which had seemed such a burden when she 
stepped out of the mercantile, now seemed to weigh next to nothing. This feeling 
lasted for half a mile or so, but by the time her house came into view, she was 
once again aware of the sweat trickling down her sides, and the ache in her 
arms. Thank the gods summer was almost over ... and wasn't that Susan, just 
leading her mare in through the gate?
"Susan!" she called, now enough returned to earth for her former irritation with 
the girl to sound clear in her voice. "Come and help me, 'fore I drop this and 
break the eggs!"
Susan came, leaving Felicia to crop grass in the front yard. Ten min­utes 
earlier, Cordelia would have noticed nothing of how the girl looked— her 
thoughts had been too wrapped up in Eldred Jonas to admit of much else. But the 
hot sun had taken some of the romance out of her head and returned her feet to 
earth. And as Susan took the box from her (handling it almost as easily as Jonas 
had done), Cordelia thought she didn't much care for the girl's appearance. Her 
temper had changed, for one thing— from the half-hysterical confusion in which 
she'd left to a pleasant and happy-eyed calmness. That was the Susan of previous 
years to the sleeve and seam . . . but not this year's moaning, moody 
breast-beater. There was nothing else Cordelia could put her finger on, except—
But there was, actually. One thing. She reached out and grasped the girl's 
braid, which looked uncharacteristically sloppy this afternoon. Of course Susan 
had been riding; that could explain the mess. But it didn't explain how dark her 
hair was, as if that bright mass of gold had begun to tarnish. And she jumped, 
almost guiltily, when she felt Cordelia's touch. Why, pray tell, was that?
"Yer hair's damp, Susan," she said. "Have ye been swimming some­where?"
"Nay! I stopped and ducked my head at the pump outside Hockey's barn. He doesn't 
mind—'tis a deep well he has. It's so hot. Perhaps there'll be a shower later. I 
hope so. I gave Felicia to drink as well."
The girl's eyes were as direct and as candid as ever, but Cordelia thought there 
was something off in them, just the same. She couldn't say what. The idea that 
Susan might be hiding something large and serious did not immediately cross 
Cordelia's mind; she would have said her niece was incapable of keeping a secret 
any greater than a birthday present or a surprise party . . . and not even such 
secrets as those for more than a day or two. And yet something was off here. 
Cordelia dropped her fingers to the collar of the girl's riding shirt.
"Yet this is dry."
"I was careful," she said, looking at her aunt with a puzzled eye. "Dirt sticks 
worse to a wet shirt. You taught me that, Aunt."
"Ye flinched when I touched yer hair, Susan."
"Aye," Susan said, "so I did. The weird-woman touched it just that same way. I 
haven't liked it since. Now may I take these groceries in and get my horse out 
of the hot sun?"
"Don't be pert, Susan." Yet the edginess in her niece's voice actually eased her 
in some strange way. That feeling that Susan had changed, somehow—that feeling 
of offness—began to subside.
"Then don't be tiresome."
"Susan! Apologize to me!"
Susan took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. "Yes, Aunt. I do. But it's 
hot."
"Aye. Put those in the pantry. And thankee."
Susan went on toward the house with the box in her arms. When the girl had 
enough of a lead so they wouldn't have to walk together, Cordelia followed. It 
was all foolishness on her part, no doubt—suspicions brought on by her 
flirtation with Eldred—but the girl was at a dangerous age, and much depended on 
her good behavior over the next seven weeks. After that she would be Thorin's 
problem, but until then she was Cordelia's. Cordelia thought that, in the end, 
Susan would be true to her promise, but until Reaping Fair she would bear close 
watching. About such matters as a girl's virginity, it was best to be vigilant.

 

 
 
INTERLUDE
KANSAS, 
SOMEWHERE, 
SOMEWHEN
 
Eddie stirred. Around them the thinny still whined like an unpleasant 
mother-in-law; above them the stars gleamed as bright as new hopes . . . or bad 
intentions. He looked at Susannah, sitting with the stumps of her legs curled 
beneath her; he looked at Jake, who was eating a burrito; he looked at Oy, whose 
snout rested on Jake's ankle and who was looking up at the boy with an 
expression of calm adoration.
The fire was low, but still it burned. The same was true of Demon Moon, far in 
the west.
"Roland." His voice sounded old and rusty to his own ears.
The gunslinger, who had paused for a sip of water, looked at him with his 
eyebrows raised.
"How can you know every comer of this story?"
Roland seemed amused. "I don't think that's what you really want to know, 
Eddie."
He was right about that—old long, tall, and ugly made a habit of be­ing right. 
It was, as far as Eddie was concerned, one of his most irritating 
characteristics. "All right. How long have you been talking? That's what I 
really want to know."
"Are you uncomfortable? Want to go to bed?"
He's making fun of me, Eddie thought . . . but even as the idea oc­curred to 
him, he knew it wasn't true. And no, he wasn't uncomfortable. There was no 
stiffness in his joints, although he had been sitting cross-legged ever since 
Roland had begun by telling them about Rhea and the glass ball, and he didn't 
need to go to the toilet. Nor was he hungry. Jake was munching the single 
leftover burrito, but probably for the same rea­son folks climbed Mount Everest 
... because it was there. And why should he be hungry or sleepy or stiff? Why, 
when the fire still burned and the moon was not yet down?
He looked at Roland's amused eyes and saw the gunslinger was read­ing his 
thoughts.
"No, I don't want to go to bed. You know I don't. But, Roland . . . you've been 
talking a long time." He paused, looked down at his hands, then looked up again, 
smiling uneasily. "Days, I would have said."
"But time is different here. I've told you that; now you see for your­self. Not 
all nights are the same length just recently. Days, either . . . but we notice 
time more at night, don't we? Yes, I think we do."
"Is the thinny stretching time?" And now that he had mentioned it, Eddie could 
hear it in all its creepy glory—a sound like vibrating metal, or maybe the 
world's biggest mosquito.
"It might be helping, but mostly it's just how things are in my world."
Susannah stirred like a woman who rises partway from a dream that holds her like 
sweet quicksand. She gave Eddie a look that was both dis­tant and impatient. 
"Let the man talk, Eddie."
"Yeah," Jake said. "Let the man talk."
And Oy, without raising his snout from Jake's ankle: "An. Awk."
"All right," Eddie said. "No problem."
Roland swept them with his eyes. "Are you sure? The rest is . . ." He didn't 
seem able to finish, and Eddie realized that Roland was scared.
"Go on," Eddie told him quietly. "Let the rest be what it is. What it was." He 
looked around. Kansas, they were in Kansas. Somewhere, somewhen. Except he felt 
that Mejis and those people he had never seen— Cordelia and Jonas and Brian 
Hookey and Sheemie and Pettie the Trotter and Cuthbert Allgood—were very close 
now. That Roland's lost Susan was very close now. Because reality was thin 
here—as thin as the seat in an old pair of blue jeans—and the dark would hold 
for as long as Roland needed it to hold. Eddie doubted if Roland even noticed 
the dark, particu­larly. Why would he? Eddie thought it had been night inside of 
Roland's mind for a long, long time . . . and dawn was still nowhere near.
He reached out and touched one of those callused killer's hands. Gen­tly he 
touched it, and with love.
"Go on, Roland. Tell your tale. All the way to the end."
"All the way to the end," Susannah said dreamily. "Cut the vein." Her eyes were 
full of moonlight.
"All the way to the end," Jake said.
"End," Oy whispered.
Roland held Eddie's hand for a moment, then let it go. He looked into the 
guttering fire without immediately speaking, and Eddie sensed him trying to find 
the way. Trying doors, one after another, until he found one that opened. What 
he saw behind it made him smile and look up at Eddie.
"True love is boring," he said.
"Say what?”
"True love is boring," Roland repeated. "As boring as any other strong and 
addicting drug. And, as with any other strong drug . . ."

 

 
 
PART THREE
COME, REAP

 
CHAPTER    1
BENEATH THE 
huntress moon
 
1
 
True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of 
encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and ca­resses 
tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and 
take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and 
brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really 
only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is 
dangerous.
 
2
 
Some called Huntress the last moon of summer; some called it the first of fall. 
Whichever it was, it signaled a change in the life of the Barony. Men put out 
into the bay wearing sweaters beneath their oilskins as the winds began to turn 
more and more firmly into autumn's east-west alley, and to sharpen as they 
turned. In the great Barony orchards north of Hambry (and in smaller orchards 
owned by John Croydon, Henry Wertner, Jake White, and the morose but wealthy 
Coral Thorin), the pickers began to appear in the rows, carrying their odd, 
off-kilter ladders; they were fol­lowed by horse-drawn carts full of empty 
barrels. Downwind of the cider-houses—especially downwind of the great Barony 
cider-mansion a mile north of Seafront—the breezy air was filled with the sweet 
tang of blems being pressed by the basketload. Away from the shore of the Clean 
Sea, the days remained warm as the Huntress waxed, skies were clear day and 
night, but summer's real heat had departed with the Peddler. The last cut­ting 
of hay began and was finished in the run of a week—that last one was always 
scant, and ranchers and freeholders alike would curse it, scratching their heads 
and asking themselves why they even bothered ... but come rainy, blowsy old 
March, with the bam lofts and bins rapidly emptying, they always knew. In the 
Barony's gardens—the great ones of the ranch­ers, the smaller ones of the 
freeholders, and the tiny backyard plots of the townsfolk—men and women and 
children appeared in their old clothes and boots, their sombreros and sombreros. 
They came with the legs of their pants tied down firmly at the ankles, for in 
the time of the Huntress, snakes and scorpions in plentiful numbers wandered 
east from the desert. By the time old Demon Moon began to fatten, a line of 
rattlers would hang from the hitching posts of both the Travellers' Rest and the 
mercan­tile across the street. Other businesses would similarly decorate their 
hitching posts, but when the prize for the most skins was given on Reap­ing Day, 
it was always the inn or the market that won it. In the fields and gardens, 
baskets to pick into were cast along the rows by women with their hair tied up 
in kerchiefs and reap-charms hidden in their bosoms. The last of the tomatoes 
were picked, the last of the cucumbers, the last of the corn, the last of the 
parey and mingo. Waiting behind them, as the days sharpened and the autumn 
storms began to near, would come squash, sharproot, pumpkins, and potatoes. In 
Mejis the time of reaping had be­gun, while overhead, clearer and clearer on 
each starry night, the Huntress pulled her bow and looked east over those 
strange, watery leagues no man or woman of Mid-World had ever seen.
 
3
 
Those in the grip of a strong drug—heroin, devil grass, true love—often find 
themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy 
as they walk the tightrope of their lives. Keeping one's bal­ance on a tightrope 
is difficult under the soberest circumstances; doing so while in a state of 
delirium is all but impossible. Completely impossible, in the long run.
Roland and Susan were delirious, but at least had the thin advantage of knowing 
it. And the secret would not have to be kept forever, but only until Reaping Day 
Fair, at the very longest. Things might end even sooner than that, if the Big 
Coffin Hunters broke cover. The actual first move might be made by one of the 
other players, Roland thought, but no matter who moved first, Jonas and his men 
would be there, a part of it. The part apt to be most dangerous to the three 
boys.
Roland and Susan were careful—as careful as delirious people could be, at any 
rate. They never met in the same place twice in a row, they never met at the 
same time twice in a row, they never skulked on their way to their trysts. In 
Hambry, riders were common but skulkers were no­ticed. Susan never tried to 
cover her "riding out" by enlisting the help of a friend (although she had 
friends who would have done her this service); people who needed alibis were 
people keeping secrets. She had a sense that Aunt Cord was growing increasingly 
uneasy about her rides— particularly the ones she took in the early evenings—but 
so far she accepted Susan's oft-repeated reason for them: she needed time to be 
solitary, to meditate on her promise and to accept her responsibility. 
Ironically, these suggestions had originally come from the witch of the Coos.
They met in the willow grove, in several of the abandoned boathouses which stood 
crumbling at the northern hook of the bay, in a herder's hut far out in the 
desolation of the Coos, in an abandoned squatter's shack hidden in the Bad 
Grass. The settings were, by and large, as sordid as any of those in which 
addicts come together to practice their vice, but Susan and Roland didn't see 
the rotting walls of the shack or the holes in the roof of the hut or smell the 
mouldering nets in the comers of the old soaked boathouses. They were drugged, 
stone in love, and to them, every scar on the face of the world was a 
beauty-mark.
Twice, early on in those delirious weeks, they used the red rock in the wall at 
the back of the pavilion to arrange meetings, and then some deep voice spoke 
inside Roland's head, telling him there must be no more of it—the rock might 
have been just the thing for children playing at secrets, but he and his love 
were no longer children; if they were discovered, ban­ishment would be the 
luckiest punishment they could hope for. The red rock was too conspicuous, and 
writing things down—even messages that were unsigned and deliberately vague—was 
horribly dangerous.
Using Sheemie felt safer to both of them. Beneath his smiling light-mindedness 
there was a surprising depth of ... well, discretion. Roland had thought long 
and hard before settling on that word, and it was the right word: an ability to 
keep silent that was more dignified than mere cunning. Cunning was out of 
Sheemie's reach in any case, and always would be—a man who couldn't tell a lie 
without shifting his eyes away from yours was a man who would never be 
considered cunning.
They used Sheemie half a dozen times over the five weeks when their physical 
love burned at its hottest—three of those times were to make meetings, two were 
to change meeting-places, and one was to cancel a tryst when Susan spied riders 
from the Piano Ranch sweeping for strays near the shack in the Bad Grass.
That deep, warning voice never spoke to Roland about Sheemie as it had about the 
dangers of the red rock . . . but his conscience spoke to him, and when he 
finally mentioned this to Susan (the two of them wrapped in a saddle-blanket and 
lying naked in each other's arms), he found that her conscience had been 
troubling her, as well. It wasn't fair to put the boy in the way of their 
possible trouble. After coming to that conclusion, Roland and Susan arranged 
their meetings strictly between the two of them. If she could not meet him, 
Susan said, she would hang a red shirt over the sill of her window, as if to 
dry. If he could not meet her, he was to leave a white stone in the northeast 
comer of the yard, diagonally across the road from Hockey's Livery, where the 
town pump stood. As a last resort, they would use the red rock in the pavilion, 
risky or not, rather than bringing Sheemie into their affairs—their 
affair—again.
Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland's descent into addiction first with disbelief, 
envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent hor­ror. They had been 
sent to what was supposed to have been safety and had discovered a place of 
conspiracy, instead; they had come to take census in a Barony where most of the 
aristocracy had apparently switched its al­legiance to the Affiliation's 
bitterest enemy; they had made personal ene­mies of three hard men who had 
probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard. Yet they had 
felt equal to the situation, because they had come here under the leadership of 
their friend, who had at­tained near-mythic status in their minds by besting 
Cort—with a hawk as his weapon!—and becoming a gunslinger at the unheard-of age 
of fourteen. That they had been given guns themselves for this mission had meant 
a great deal to them when they set out from Gilead, and nothing at all by the 
time they began to realize the scope of what was going on in Hambry-town and the 
Barony of which it was a part. When that realization came, Roland was the weapon 
they counted on. And now—
"He's like a revolver cast into water!" Cuthbert exclaimed one eve­ning, not 
long after Roland had ridden away to meet Susan. Beyond the bunkhouse porch, 
Huntress rose in her first quarter. "Gods know if it'll ever fire again, even if 
it's fished out and dried off."
"Hush, wait," Alain said, and looked toward the porch rail. Hoping to jolly 
Cuthbert out of his bad temper (a task that was quite easy under ordinary 
circumstances), Alain said: "Where's the lookout? Gone to bed early for once, 
has he?"
This only irritated Cuthbert more. He hadn't seen the rook's skull in days—he 
couldn't exactly say how many—and he took its loss as an ill omen. "Gone, but 
not to bed," he replied, then looked balefully to the west, where Roland had 
disappeared aboard his big old galoot of a horse. "Lost, I reckon. Like a 
certain fellow's mind and heart and good sense."
"He'll be all right," Alain said awkwardly. "You know him as well as I do, 
Bert—known him our whole lives, we have. He'll be all right."
Quietly, without even a trace of his normal good humor, Cuthbert said: "I don't 
feel I know him now."
They had both tried to talk to Roland in their different ways; both re­ceived a 
similar response, which was no real response at all. The dreamy (and perhaps 
slightly troubled) look of abstraction in Roland's eyes dur­ing these one-sided 
discussions would have been familiar to anyone who has ever tried to talk sense 
to a drug addict. It was a look that said Ro­land's mind was occupied by the 
shape of Susan's face, the smell of Su­san'-s skin, the feel of Susan's body. 
And occupied was a silly word for it, one that fell short. It wasn't an 
occupation but an obsession.
"I hate her a little for what she's done," Cuthbert said, and there was a note 
in his voice Alain had never heard before—a mixture of jealousy, frustration, 
and fear. "Perhaps more than a little."
"You mustn't!" Alain tried not to sound shocked, but couldn't help it. "She 
isn't responsible for—"
"Is she not? She went out to Citgo with him. She saw what he saw. God knows how 
much else he's told her after they've finished making the beast with two backs. 
And she's all the way around the world from stupid. Just the way she's managed 
her side of their affair shows that." Bert was thinking, Alain guessed, of her 
tidy little trick with the corvette. "She must know she's become part of the 
problem herself. She must know that!"
Now his bitterness was fiighteningly clear. He's jealous of her for stealing his 
best friend, Alain thought, but it doesn't stop there. He's jeal­ous of his best 
friend, as well, because his best friend has won the most beautiful girl any of 
us have ever seen.
Alain leaned over and grasped Cuthbert's shoulder. When Bert turned away from 
his morose examination of the dooryard to look at his friend, he was startled by 
the grimness on Alain's face. "It's ka," Alain said.
Cuthbert almost sneered. "If I had a hot dinner for every time some­one blamed 
theft or lust or some other stupidity on ka—"
Alain's grip tightened until it became painful. Cuthbert could have pulled away 
but didn't. He watched Alain closely. The joker was, tem­porarily, at least, 
gone. "Blame is exactly what we two can't afford," Alain said. "Don't you see 
that? And if it's ka that's swept them away, we needn't blame. We can't blame. 
We must rise above it. We need him. And we may need her, too."
Cuthbert looked into Alain's eyes for what seemed to be a very long time. Alain 
saw Bert's anger at war with his good sense. At last (and per­haps only for the 
time being), good sense won out.
"All right, fine. It's ka, everybody's favorite whipping-boy. That's what the 
great unseen world's for, after all, isn't it? So we don't have to take the 
blame for our acts of stupidity? Now let go of me, Al, before you break my 
shoulder."
Alain let go and sat back in his chair, relieved. "Now if we only knew what to 
do about the Drop. If we don't start counting there soon—"
"I've had an idea about that, actually," Cuthbert said. "It just needs a little 
working out. I'm sure Roland could help ... if either of us can get his 
attention for a few minutes, that is."
They sat for awhile without speaking, looking out at the dooryard. In­side the 
bunkhouse, the pigeons—another bone of contention between Roland and Bert these 
days—cooed. Alain rolled himself a smoke. It was slow work, and the finished 
product looked rather comical, but it held together when he lit it.
"Your father would stripe you raw if he saw that in your hand," Cuth­bert 
remarked, but he spoke with a certain admiration. By the time the following 
year's Huntress came around, all three of them would be con­firmed smokers, 
tanned young men with most of the boyhood slapped out of their eyes.
Alain nodded. The strong Outer Crescent tobacco made him swimmy in the head and 
raw in the throat, but a cigarette had a way of calming his nerves, and right 
now his nerves could use some calming. He didn't know about Bert, but these days 
he smelled blood on the wind. Possibly some of it would be their own. He wasn't 
exactly frightened—not yet, at least— but he was very, very worried.
 
4
 
Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, 
Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their 
age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as 
planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were 
doing. Roland knew better, even in his love-sickness, but his friends had 
forgotten that in the game of Castles, both sides wear the blindfold. They would 
have been surprised to find that at least two of the Big Coffin Hunters had 
grown extremely nervous about the three young men from In-World, and extremely 
tired of the waiting game both sides had been playing.
One early morning, as the Huntress neared the half, Reynolds and Depape came 
downstairs together from the second floor of the Travellers' Rest. The main 
public room was silent except for various snores and phlegmy wheezings. In 
Hambry's busiest bar, the party was over for an­other night.
Jonas, accompanied by a silent guest, sat playing Chancellors' Pa­tience at 
Coral's table to the left of the batwing doors. Tonight he was wearing his 
duster, and his breath smoked faintly as he bent over his cards. It wasn't cold 
enough to frost—not quite yet—but the frost would come soon. The chill in the 
air left no doubt of that.
The breath of his guest also smoked. Kimba Rimer's skeletal frame was all but 
buried in a gray serape lit with faint bands of orange. The two of them had been 
on the edge of getting down to business when Roy and Clay (Pinch and Jilly, 
Rimer thought) showed up, their plowing and planting in the second-floor cribs 
also apparently over for another night.
"Eldred," Reynolds said, and then: "Sai Rimer."
Rimer nodded back, looking from Reynolds to Depape with thin dis­taste. "Long 
days and pleasant nights, gentlemen." Of course the world had moved on, he 
thought. To find such low culls as these two in posi­tions of importance proved 
it. Jonas himself was only a little better.
"Might we have a word with you, Eldred?" Clay Reynolds asked. "We've been 
talking, Roy and I—"
"Unwise," Jonas remarked in his wavery voice. Rimer wouldn't be surprised to 
find, at the end of his life, that the Death Angel had such a voice. "Talking 
can lead to thinking, and thinking's dangerous for such as you boys. Like 
picking your nose with bullet-heads."
Depape donkeyed his damned hee-haw laughter, as if he didn't real­ize the joke 
was on him.
"Jonas, listen," Reynolds began, and then looked uncertainly at Rimer.
"You can talk in front of sai Rimer," Jonas said, laying out a fresh line of 
cards. "He is, after all, our chief employer. I play at Chancellors' Patience in 
his honor, so I do."
Reynolds looked surprised. "I thought . . . that is to say, I believed that 
Mayor Thorin was ..."
"Hart Thorin wants to know none of the details of our arrangement with the Good 
Man," Rimer said. "A share of the profits is all he requires in that line, Mr. 
Reynolds. The Mayor's chief concern right now is that the Reaping Day Fair go 
smoothly, and that his arrangements with the young lady be ... smoothly 
consummated."
"Aye, that's a diplomatic turn o' speech for ye," Jonas said in a broad Mejis 
accent. "But since Roy looks a little perplexed, I'll translate. Mayor Thorin 
spends most of his time in the jakes these days, yanking his willy-pink and 
dreaming his fist is Susan Delgado's box. I'm betting that when the shell's 
finally opened and her pearl lies before him, he'll never pluck it—his heart'll 
explode from excitement, and he'll drop dead atop her, so he will. Yar!"
More donkey laughter from Depape. He elbowed Reynolds. "He's got it down, don't 
he, Clay? Sounds just like em!"
Reynolds grinned, but his eyes were still worried. Rimer managed a smile as thin 
as a scum of November ice, and pointed at the seven which had just popped out of 
the pack. "Red on black, my dear Jonas."
"I ain't your dear anything," Jonas said, putting the seven of dia­monds on an 
eight of shadows, "and you'd do well to remember that." Then, to Reynolds and 
Depape: "Now what do you boys want? Rimer 'n me was just going to have us a 
little palaver."
"Perhaps we could all put our heads together," Reynolds said, putting a hand on 
the back of a chair. "Kind of see if our thinking matches up."
"I think not," Jonas said, sweeping his cards together. He looked irri­tated, 
and Clay Reynolds took his hand off the back of the chair in a hurry. "Say your 
say and be done with it. It's late."
"We was thinking it's time to go on out there to the Bar K," Depape said. "Have 
a look around. See if there's anything to back up what the old fella in Ritzy 
said."
"And see what else they've got out there," Reynolds put in. "It's getting close 
now, Eldred, and we can't afford to take chances. They might have—"
"Aye? Guns? Electric lights? Fairy-women in bottles? Who knows? I'll think about 
it. Clay."
"But—"
"I said I'll think about it. Now go on upstairs, the both of you, back to your 
own fairy-women."
Reynolds and Depape looked at him, looked at each other, then backed away from 
the table. Rimer watched them with his thin smile.
At the foot of the stairs, Reynolds turned back. Jonas paused in the act of 
shuffling his cards and looked at him, tufted eyebrows raised.
"We underestimated em once and they made us look like monkeys. I don't want it 
to happen again. That's all."
"Your ass is still sore over that, isn't it? Well, so is mine. And I tell you 
again, they'll pay for what they did. I have the bill ready, and when the time 
comes, I'll present it to them, with all interest duly noted. In the meantime, 
they aren't going to spook me into making the first move. Time is on our side, 
not theirs. Do you understand that?"
"Yes."
"Will you try to remember it?"
"Yes," Reynolds repeated. He seemed satisfied.
"Roy? Do you trust me?"
"Aye, Eldred. To the end." Jonas had praised him for the work he had done in 
Ritzy, and Depape had rolled in it the way a male dog rolls in the scent of a 
bitch.
"Then go on up, the both of you, and let me palaver with the boss and be done 
with it. I'm too old for these late nights."
When they were gone, Jonas dealt out a fresh line of cards, then looked around 
the room. There were perhaps a dozen folks, including Sheb the piano-player and 
Barkie the bouncer, sleeping it off. No one was close enough to listen to the 
low-voiced conversation of the two men by the door, even if one of the snoring 
drunkards was for some reason only shamming sleep. Jonas put a red queen on a 
black knight, then looked up at Rimer. "Say your say."
"Those two said it for me, actually. Sai Depape will never be embar­rassed by a 
surplus of brains, but Reynolds is fairly smart for a gunny, isn't he?"
"Clay's trig when the moon's right and he's had a shave," Jonas agreed. "Are you 
saying you came all the way from Seafront to tell me those three babbies need a 
closer looking at?"
Rimer shrugged.
"Perhaps they do, and I'm the man to do it, if so—right enough. But what's there 
to find?"
"That's to be seen," Rimer said, and tapped one of Jonas's cards. "There's a 
Chancellor."
"Aye. Near as ugly as the one I'm sitting with." Jonas put the Chan­cellor—it 
was Paul—above his run of cards. The next draw uncovered Luke, whom he put next 
to Paul. That left Peter and Matthew still lurking in the bush. Jonas looked at 
Rimer shrewdly. "You hide it better than my pals, but you're as nervous as they 
are, underneath. You want to know what's out at that bunkhouse? I'll tell you: 
extra boots, pictures of their mommies, socks that stink to high heaven, stiff 
sheets from boys who've been taught it's low-class to chase after the sheep . . 
. and guns hidden somewhere. Under the floorboards, like enough."
"You really think they have guns?"
"Aye, Roy got the straight of that, all right. They're from Gilead, they're 
likely from the line of Eld or from folk who like to think they're from it, and 
they're likely 'prentices to the trade who've been sent on with guns they 
haven't earned yet. I wonder a bit about the tall one with the 
I-don't-give-a-shit look in his eyes—he might already be a gunslinger, I 
suppose—but is it likely? I don't think so. Even if he is, I could take him in a 
fair go. I know it, and he does, too."
"Then why have they been sent here?"
"Not because those from the Inner Baronies suspect your treason, sai Rimer—be 
easy on that score."
Rimer's head poked out of his serape as he sat up straight, and his face 
stiffened. "How dare you call me a traitor? How dare you?"
Eldred Jonas favored Hambry's Minister of Inventory with an un­pleasant smile. 
It made the white-haired man look like a wolverine. "I've called things by their 
right names my whole life, and I won't stop now. All that needs matter to you is 
that I've never double-crossed an employer."
"If I didn't believe in the cause of—"
"To hell with what you believe! It's late and I want to go to bed. The folk in 
New Canaan and Gilead haven't the foggiest idea of what does or doesn't go on 
out here on the Crescent; there aren't many of em who've ever been here, I'd 
wager. Them are too busy trying to keep everything from falling down around 
their ears to do much travelling these days. No, what they know is all from the 
picturebooks they was read out of when they 'us babbies themselves: happy 
cowboys galloping after stock, happy fishermen pulling whoppers into their 
boats, folks clogging at bam-raisings and drinking big pots o' graf in Green 
Heart pavilion. For the sake of the Man Jesus, Rimer, don't go dense on me—I 
deal with that day in and day out."
"They see Mejis as a place of quiet and safety."
"Aye, bucolic splendor, just so, no doubt about it. They know that their whole 
way o' life—all that nobility and chivalry and ancestor-worship—is on fire. The 
final battle may take place as much as two hundred wheels northwest of their 
borders, but when Farson uses his fire-carriages and robots to wipe out their 
army, trouble will come south fast. There are those from the Inner Baronies 
who've smelled this coming for twenty years or more. They didn't send these 
brats here to discover your secrets, Rimer; folks such as these don't send their 
babbies into danger on pur­pose. They sent em here to get em out of the way, 
that's all. That doesn't make em blind or stupid, but for the sake of the gods, 
let's be sane. They're kiddies;'
"What else might you find, should you go out there?"
"Some way of sending messages, mayhap. A heliograph's the most likely. And out 
beyond Eyebolt, a shepherd or maybe a freeholder suscep­tible to a bribe—someone 
they've trained to catch the message and either flash it on or carry it afoot. 
But before long it'll be too late for messages to do any good, won't it?"
"Perhaps, but it's not too late yet. And you're right. Kiddies or not, they 
worry me."
"You've no cause, I tell you. Soon enough, I'll be wealthy and you'll be 
downright rich. Mayor yourself, if you want. Who'd stand to stop you? Thorin? 
He's a joke. Coral? She'd help you string him up, I wot. Or per­haps you'd like 
to be a Baron, if such offices be revived?" He saw a mo­mentary gleam in Rimer's 
eyes and laughed. Matthew came out of the deck, and Jonas put him up with the 
other Chancellors. "Yar, I see that's what you've got your heart set on. Gems is 
nice, and for gold that goes twice, but there's nothing like having folk bow and 
scrape before ye, is there?"
Rimer said, "They should have been on the cowboy side by now."
Jonas's hands stopped above the layout of cards. It was a thought that had 
crossed his own mind more than once, especially over the last two weeks or so.
"How long do you think it takes to count our nets and boats and chart out the 
fish-hauls?" Rimer asked. "They should be over on the Drop, count­ing cows and 
horses, looking through barns, studying the foal-charts. They should have been 
there two weeks ago, in fact. Unless they already know what they'd find."
Jonas understood what Rimer was implying, but couldn't believe it. Wouldn't 
believe it. Not such a depth of slyness from boys who only had to shave once a 
week.
"No," he said. "That's your own guilty heart talking to you. They're just so 
determined to do it right that they're creeping along like old folks with bad 
eyes. They'll be over on the Drop soon enough, and counting their little hearts 
out."
"And if they're not?"
A good question. Get rid of them somehow, Jonas supposed. An am­bush, perhaps. 
Three shots from cover, no more babbies. There'd be ill feeling afterward—the 
boys were well liked in town—but Rimer could handle that until Fair Day, and 
after the Reap it wouldn't matter. Still—
"I'll have a look around out at the Bar K," Jonas said at last. "By my­self—I 
won't have Clay and Roy tramping along behind me."
"That sounds fine."
"Perhaps you'd like to come and lend a hand."
Kimba Rimer smiled his icy smile. "I think not."
Jonas nodded, and began to deal again. Going out to the Bar K would be a bit 
risky, but he didn't expect any real problem—especially if he went alone. They 
were only boys, after all, and gone for much of each day.
"When may I expect a report, sai Jonas?"
"When I'm ready to make it. Don't crowd me."
Rimer lifted his thin hands and held them, palms out, to Jonas. "Cry your 
pardon, sai," he said.
Jonas nodded, slightly mollified. He flipped up another card. It was Peter, 
Chancellor of Keys. He put the card in the top row and then stared at it, 
combing his fingers through his long white hair as he did. He looked from the 
card to Rimer, who looked back, eyebrows raised.
"You smile," Rimer said.
"Yar!" Jonas said, and began to deal again. "I'm happy! All the Chan­cellors are 
out. 1 think I'm going to win this game."
 
5
 
For Rhea, the time of the Huntress had been a time of frustration and 
unsatisfied craving. Her plans had gone awry, and thanks to her cat's hideously 
mistimed leap, she didn't know how or why. The young cull who'd taken Susan 
Delgado's cherry had likely stopped her from chop­ping her scurf. . . but how? 
And who was he really? She wondered that more and more, but her curiosity was 
secondary to her fury. Rhea of the Coos wasn't used to being balked.
She looked across the room to where Musty crouched and watched her carefully. 
Ordinarily he would have relaxed in the fireplace (he seemed to like the cool 
drafts that swirled down the chimney), but since she had singed his fur. Musty 
preferred the woodpile. Given Rhea's mood, that was probably wise. "You're lucky 
I let ye live, ye warlock," the old woman grumbled.
She turned back to the ball and began to make passes above it, but the glass 
only continued to swirl with bright pink light—not a single image appeared. Rhea 
got up at last, went to the door, threw it open, and looked out on the night 
sky. Now the moon had waxed a little past the half, and the Huntress was coming 
clear on its bright face. Rhea directed the stream of foul language she didn't 
quite dare to direct at the glass (who knew what entity might lurk inside it, 
waiting to take offense at such talk?) up at the woman in the moon. Twice she 
slammed her bony old fist into the door-lintel as she cursed, dredging up every 
dirty word she could think of, even the potty-mouth words children throw at each 
other in the dust of the play yard. Never had she been so angry. She had given 
the girl a com­mand, and the girl, for whatever reasons, had disobeyed. For 
standing against Rhea of the Coos, the bitch deserved to die.
"But not right away," the old woman whispered. "First she should be rolled in 
the dirt, then pissed on until the dirt's mud and her fine blonde hair's full of 
it. Humiliated ... hurt . . . spat on . . ."
She slammed her fist against the door's side again, and this time blood flew 
from the knuckles. It wasn't just the girl's failure to obey the hypnotic 
command. There was another matter, related but much more se­rious: Rhea herself 
was now too upset to use the glass, except for brief and unpredictable periods 
of time. The hand-passes she made over it and the incantations she muttered to 
it were, she knew, useless; the words and gestures were just the way she focused 
her will. That was what the glass responded to—will and concentrated thought. 
Now, thanks to the trollop of a girl and her boy lover, Rhea was too angry to 
summon the smooth concentration needed to part the pink fog which swirled inside 
the ball. She was, in fact, too angry to see.
"How can I make it like it was?" Rhea asked the half-glimpsed woman in the moon. 
"Tell me! Tell me!" But the Huntress told her noth­ing, and at last Rhea went 
back inside, sucking at her bleeding knuckles.
Musty saw her coming and squeezed into the cobwebby space be­tween the woodpile 
and the chimney.

 

 
 
CHAPTER II
THE GIRL AT 
THE WINDOW
 
1
 
Now the Huntress "filled her belly," as the old-timers said—even at noon she 
could be glimpsed in the sky, a pallid vampire woman caught in bright autumn 
sunlight. In front of businesses such as the Travellers' Rest and on the porches 
of such large ranch houses as Lengyll's Rocking B and Renfrew's Lazy Susan, 
stuffy-guys with heads full of straw above their old overalls began to appear. 
Each wore his sombrero; each held a basket of produce cradled in his arms; each 
looked out at the emptying world with stitched white-cross eyes.
Wagons filled with squashes clogged the roads; bright orange drifts of pumpkins 
and bright magenta drifts of sharproot lay against the sides of barns. In the 
fields, the potato-carts rolled and the pickers followed be­hind. In front of 
the Hambry Mercantile, reap-charms appeared like magic, hanging from the carved 
Guardians like wind-chimes.
All over Mejis, girls sewed their Reaping Night costumes (and some­times wept 
over them, if the work went badly) as they dreamed of the boys they would dance 
with in the Green Heart pavilion. Their little brothers began to have trouble 
sleeping as they thought of the rides and the games and the prizes they might 
win at the carnival. Even their elders sometimes lay awake in spite of their 
sore hands and aching backs, think­ing about the pleasures of the Reap.
Summer had slipped away with a final flirt of her greengown; harvest-time had 
arrived.
 
2
 
Rhea cared not a fig for Reaping dances or carnival games, but she could no more 
sleep than those who did. Most nights she lay on her stinking pallet until dawn, 
her skull thudding with rage. On a night not long after Jonas's conversation 
with Chancellor Rimer, she determined to drink her­self into oblivion. Her mood 
was not improved when she found that her graf barrel was almost empty; she 
blistered the air with her curses.
She was drawing in breath for a fresh string of them when an idea struck her. A 
wonderful idea. A brilliant idea. She had wanted Susan Delgado to cut off her 
hair. That hadn't worked, and she didn't know why. . . but she did know 
something about the girl, didn't she? Something inter­esting, aye, so it was, 
wery interesting, indeed.
Rhea had no desire to go to Thorin with what she knew; she had a fond (and 
foolish, likely) hope that the Mayor had forgotten about his wonderful glass 
ball. But the girl's aunt, now . . . suppose Cordelia Delgado were to discover 
that not only was her niece's virginity lost, the girl was well on her way to 
becoming a practiced trollop? Rhea didn't think Cordelia would go to the Mayor, 
either—the woman was a prig but not a fool—yet it would set the cat among the 
pigeons just the same, wouldn't it?
"Waow!"
Thinking of cats, there was Musty, standing on the stoop in the moon­light, 
looking at her with a mixture of hope and mistrust. Rhea, grinning hideously, 
opened her arms. "Come to me, my precious! Come, my sweet one!"
Musty, understanding all was forgiven, rushed into his mistress's arms and began 
to purr loudly as Rhea licked along his sides with her old and yellowing tongue. 
That night the Coos slept soundly for the first time in a week, and when she 
took the glass ball into her arms the following morning, its mists cleared for 
her at once. She spent the day in thrall to it, spying on people she detested, 
drinking little and eating nothing. Around sunset, she came out of her trance 
enough to realize she had as yet done nothing about the saucy little jade. But 
that was all right; she saw how it could be done . .. and she could watch all 
the results in the glass! All the protests, all the shouting and recriminations! 
She would see Susan's tears. That would be the best, to see her tears.
"A little harvest of my own," she said to Ermot, who now came slith­ering up her 
leg toward the place where she liked him best. There weren't many men who could 
do you like Ermot could do you, no indeed. Sitting there with a lapful of snake, 
Rhea began to laugh.
 
3
 
"Remember your promise," Alain said nervously as they heard the ap­proaching 
beat of Rusher's hoofs. "Keep your temper."
"I will," Cuthbert said, but he had his doubts. As Roland rode around the long 
wing of the bunkhouse and into the yard, his shadow trailing out in the sunset 
light, Cuthbert clenched his hands nervously. He willed them to open, and they 
did. Then, as he watched Roland dismount, they rolled themselves closed again, 
the nails digging into his palms.
Another go-round, Cuthbert thought. Gods, but I'm sick of them. Sick to death.
Last night's had been about the pigeons—again. Cuthbert wanted to use one to 
send a message back west about the oil tankers; Roland still did not. So they 
had argued. Except (here was another thing which infuriated him, that rubbed 
against his nerves like the sound of the thinny) Roland did not argue. These 
days Roland did not deign to argue. His eyes always kept that distant look, as 
if only his body was here. The rest of him— mind, soul, spirit, ka—was with 
Susan Delgado.
"No," he had said simply. "It's too late for such."
"You can't know that," Cuthbert had argued. "And even if it's too late for help 
to come from Gilead, it's not too late for advice to come from Gilead. Are you 
so blind you can't see that?"
"What advice can they send us?" Roland hadn't seemed to hear the rawness in 
Cuthbert's voice. His own voice was calm. Reasonable. And utterly disconnected, 
Cuthbert thought, from the urgency of the situation.
"If we knew that," he had replied, "we wouldn't have to ask, Roland, would we?"
"We can only wait and stop them when they make their move. It's comfort you're 
looking for, Cuthbert, not advice."
You mean wait while you fuck her in as many ways and in as many places as you 
can imagine, Cuthbert thought. Inside, outside, rightside up and upside down.
"You're not thinking clearly about this," Cuthbert had said coldly. He'd heard 
Alain's gasp. Neither of them had ever said such a thing to Roland in their 
lives, and once it was out, he'd waited uneasily for what­ever explosion might 
follow.
None did. "Yes," Roland replied, "I am." And he had gone into the bunkhouse 
without another word.
Now, watching Roland uncinch Rusher's girths and pull the saddle from his back, 
Cuthbert thought: You 're not, you know. But you better think clearly about 
this. By all the gods, you 'd better.
"Hile," he said as Roland carried the saddle over to the porch and set it on the 
step. "Busy afternoon?" He felt Alain kick his ankle and ig­nored it.
"I've been with Susan," Roland said. No defense, no demur, no ex­cuse. And for a 
moment Cuthbert had a vision of shocking clarity: he saw the two of them in a 
hut somewhere, the late afternoon sun shining through holes in the roof and 
dappling their bodies. She was on top, riding him. Cuthbert saw her knees on the 
old, spongy boards, and the tension in her long thighs. He saw how tanned her 
arms were, how white her belly. He saw how Roland's hands cupped the globes of 
her breasts, squeezing them as she rocked back and forth above him, and he saw 
how the sun lit her hair, turning it into a fine-spun net.
Why do you always have to be first? he cried at Roland in his mind. Why does it 
always have to be you? Gods damn you, Roland! Gods damn you!
"We were on the docks," Cuthbert said, his tone a thin imitation of his usual 
brightness. "Counting boots and marine tools and what are called clam-drags. 
What an amusing time of it we've had, eh, Al?"
"Did you need me to help you do that?" Roland asked. He went back to Rusher, and 
took off the saddle-blanket. "Is that why you sound angry?"
"If I sound angry, it's because most of the fishermen are laughing at us behind 
our backs. We keep coming back and coming back. Roland, they think we're fools."
Roland nodded. "All to the good," he said.
"Perhaps," Alain said quietly, "but Rimer doesn't think we're fools— it's in the 
way he looks at us when we pass. Nor does Jonas. And if they don't think we're 
fools, Roland, what do they think?"
Roland stood on the second step, the saddle-blanket hanging forgot­ten over his 
arm. For once they actually seemed to have his attention, Cuthbert thought. 
Glory be and will wonders never cease.
"They think we're avoiding the Drop because we already know what's there," 
Roland said. "And if they don't think it, they soon will."
"Cuthbert has a plan."
Roland's gaze—mild, interested, already starting to be not there again—shifted 
to Cuthbert. Cuthbert the joker. Cuthbert the 'prentice, who had in no way 
earned the gun he'd carried east to the Outer Crescent. Cuthbert the virgin and 
eternal second. Gods, I don't want to hate him. I don't, but now it's so easy.
"We two should go and see Sheriff Avery tomorrow," Cuthbert said. "We will 
present it as a courtesy visit. We have already established our­selves as three 
courteous, if slightly stupid, young fellows, have we not?"
"To a fault," Roland agreed, smiling.
"We'll say that we've finally finished with the seacoast side of Hambry, and we 
hope to be every bit as meticulous on the farm and cowboy side. But we certainly 
don't want to cause trouble or be in anyone's way. It is, after all, the busiest 
time of year—for ranchers as well as farmers— and even citified fools such as 
ourselves will be aware of that. So we'll give the good Sheriff a list—"
Roland's eyes lit up. He tossed the blanket over the porch rail, grabbed 
Cuthbert around the shoulders, and gave him a rough hug. Cuth­bert could smell a 
lilac scent around Roland's collar and felt an insane but powerful urge to clamp 
his hands around Roland's throat and try to stran­gle him. Instead, he gave him 
a perfunctory clap on the back in return.
Roland drew away, grinning widely. "A list of the ranches we'll be visiting," he 
said. "Aye! And with forewarning, they can move any stock they'd like us not to 
see on to the next ranch, or the last one. The same for tack, feed, equipment. . 
. it's masterful, Cuthbert! You're a genius!"
"Far from that," Cuthbert said. "I've just spared a little time to think about a 
problem that concerns us all. That concerns the entire Affiliation, mayhap. We 
need to think. Wouldn't you say?"
Alain winced, but Roland didn't seem to notice. He was still grinning. Even at 
fourteen, such an expression on his face was troubling. The truth was that when 
Roland grinned, he looked slightly mad. "Do you know, they may even move in a 
fair number of muties for us to look at, just so we'll continue to believe the 
lies they've already told about the impurity of their stocklines." He paused, 
seeming to think, and then said: "Why don't you and Alain go and see the 
Sheriff, Bert? That would do very well, I think."
At this point Cuthbert nearly threw himself at Roland, wanting to scream Yes, 
why not? Then you could spend tomorrow morning pronging her as well as tomorrow 
afternoon! You idiot! You thoughtless lovestruck idiot!
It was Al who saved him—saved them all, perhaps.
"Don't be a fool," he said sharply, and Roland wheeled toward him, looking 
surprised. He wasn't used to sharpness from that quarter. "You're our leader, 
Roland—seen that way by Thorin, by Avery, by the towns­folk. Seen that way by us 
as well."
"No one appointed me—"
"No one needed to!" Cuthbert shouted. "You won your guns! These folk would 
hardly believe it—I hardly believe it myself just lately—but you are a 
gunslinger. You have to go! Plain as the nose on your face! It doesn't matter 
which of us accompanies you, but you have to go!" He could say more, much more, 
but if he did, where would it end? With their fellowship broken beyond repair, 
likely. So he clamped his mouth shut— no need for Alain to kick him this 
time—and once again waited for the explosion. Once again, none came.
"All right," Roland said in his new way—that mild it-doesn't-much-matter way 
that made Cuthbert feel like biting him to wake him up. "To­morrow morning. You 
and I, Bert. Will eight suit you?"
"Down to the ground," Cuthbert said. Now that the discussion was over and the 
decision made, Bert's heart was beating wildly and the muscles in his upper 
thighs felt like rubber. It was the way he'd felt after their confrontation with 
the Big Coffin Hunters.
"We'll be at our prettiest," Roland said. "Nice boys from the Inners with good 
intentions but not many brains. Fine." And he went inside, no longer grinning 
(which was a relief) but smiling gently.
Cuthbert and Alain looked at each other and let out their breath in a mutual 
rush. Cuthbert cocked his head toward the yard, and went down the steps. Alain 
followed, and the two boys stood in the center of the dirt rectangle with the 
bunkhouse at their backs. To the east, the rising full moon was hidden behind a 
scrim of clouds.                   '
"She's tranced him," Cuthbert said. "Whether she means to or not, she'll kill us 
all in the end. Wait and see if she don't."
"You shouldn't say such, even in jest."
"All right, she'll crown us with the jewels of Eld and we'll live forever."
"You have to stop being angry at him, Bert. You have to."
Cuthbert looked at him bleakly. "I can't."
 
4
 
The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant, but the 
fol­lowing morning dawned drizzly and gray. Roland and Cuthbert wrapped 
themselves in scrapes and headed for town, leaving Alain to the few home place 
chores. Tucked in Roland's belt was the schedule of farms and ranches—beginning 
with the three small spreads owned by the Barony—the three of them had worked 
out the previous evening. The pace this schedule suggested was almost 
ludicrously slow—it would keep them on the Drop and in the orchards almost until 
Year's End Fair—but it conformed to the pace they had already set on the docks.
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. 
Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan 
sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. 
His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would 
remember her most clearly forever after—lovely Su­san, the girl at the window. 
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit 
undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the 
comers of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting 
there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we 
have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading 
in our footsteps and catch­ing up, little by little.
Roland raised a hand to her. It went toward his mouth at first, wanting to send 
her a kiss, but that would be madness. He lifted the hand before it could touch 
his lips and ticked a finger off his forehead instead, offering a saucy little 
salute.
Susan smiled and returned it in kind. None saw Cordelia, who had gone out in the 
drizzle to check on the last of her squash and sharproot. That lady stood where 
she was, a sombrero yanked down on her head al­most to the eyeline, half-hidden 
by the stuffy-guy guarding the pumpkin patch. She watched Roland and Cuthbert 
pass (Cuthbert she barely saw; her interest was in the other one). From the boy 
on horseback she looked up to Susan, sitting there in her window, humming as 
blithely as a bird in a gilded cage.
A sharp splinter of suspicion whispered its way into Cordelia's heart. Susan's 
change of temperament—from alternating bouts of sorrow and fearful anger to a 
kind of dazed but mainly cheerful acceptance—had been so sudden. Mayhap it 
wasn't acceptance at all.
"Ye're mad," she whispered to herself, but her hand remained tight on the haft 
of the machete she held. She dropped to her knees in the muddy garden and 
abruptly began chopping sharproot vines, tossing the roots themselves toward the 
side of the house with quick, accurate throws. "There's nothing between em. I'd 
know. Children of such an age have no more discretion than . . . than the drunks 
in the Rest."
But the way they had smiled. The way they had smiled at each other.
"Perfectly normal," she whispered, chopping and throwing. She cut a sharproot 
nearly in half, ruining it, not noticing. The whispering was a habit she'd 
picked up only recently, as Reap Day neared and the stresses of coping with her 
brother's troublesome daughter mounted. "Folks smile at each other, that's all."
The same for the salute and Susan's returning wave. Below, the hand­some 
cavalier, acknowledging the pretty maid; above, the maid herself, pleased to be 
acknowledged by such as he. It was youth calling to youth, that was all. And 
yet...
The look in his eyes . . . and the look in hers.
Nonsense, of course. But—
But you saw something else.
Yes, perhaps. For a moment it had seemed to her that the young man was going to 
blow Susan a kiss . . . then had remembered himself at the last moment and 
turned it into a salute, instead.
Even if ye did see such a thing, it means nothing. Young cavaliers are saucy, 
especially when out from beneath the gaze of their fathers. And these three 
already have a history, as ye well know.
All true enough, but none of it removed that chilly splinter from her heart.
 
5
 
Jonas answered Roland's knock and let the two boys into the Sheriff's of­fice. 
He was wearing a Deputy's star on his shirt, and looked at them with 
expressionless eyes. "Boys," he said. "Come in out of the wet."
He stepped back to allow them entrance. His limp was more pro­nounced than 
Roland had ever seen it; the wet weather was playing it up, he supposed.
Roland and Cuthbert stepped in. There was a gas heater in the cor­ner—tilled 
from "the candle" at Citgo, no doubt—and the big room, which had been cool on 
the day they had first come here, was stuporously hot. The three cells held five 
woeful-looking drunks, two pairs of men and a woman in the center cell by 
herself, sitting on the bunk with her legs spread wide, displaying a broad 
expanse of red drawers. Roland feared that if she got her finger any farther up 
her nose, she might never retrieve it. Clay Reynolds was leaning against the 
notice-board, picking his teeth with a broomstraw. Sitting at the rolltop desk 
was Deputy Dave, stroking his chin and frowning through his monocle at the board 
which had been set up there. Roland wasn't at all surprised to see that he and 
Bert had in­terrupted a game of Castles.
"Well, look here, Eldred!" Reynolds said. "It's two of the In-World boys! Do 
your mommies know you're out, fellas?"
"They do," Cuthbert said brightly. "And you're looking very well, sai Reynolds. 
The wet weather's soothed your pox, has it?"
Without looking at Bert or losing his pleasant little smile, Roland shot an 
elbow into his friend's shoulder. "Pardon my friend, sai. His humor regularly 
transgresses the bounds of good taste; he doesn't seem able to help it. There's 
no need for us to scratch at one another—we've agreed to let bygones be bygones, 
haven't we?"
"Aye, certainly, all a misunderstanding," Jonas said. He limped back across to 
the desk and the game-board. As he sat down on his side of it, his smile turned 
to a sour little grimace. "I'm worse than an old dog," he said. "Someone ought 
to put me down, so they should. Earth's cold but painless, eh, boys?"
He looked back at the board and moved a man around to the side of his Hillock. 
He had begun to Castle, and was thus vulnerable . . . although not very, in this 
case, Roland thought; Deputy Dave didn't look like much in the way of 
competition.
"I see you're working for the Barony salt now," Roland said, nodding at the star 
on Jonas's shirt.
"Salt's what it amounts to," Jonas said, companionably enough. "A fellow went 
leg-broke. I'm helping out, that's all."
"And sai Reynolds? Sai Depape? Are they helping out as well?"
"Yar, I reckon," Jonas said. "How goes your work among the fisher-folk? Slow, I 
hear."
"Done at last. The work wasn't so slow as we were. But coming here in disgrace 
was enough for us—we have no intention of leaving that way. Slow and steady wins 
the race, they say."
"So they do," Jonas agreed. "Whoever 'they' are."
From somewhere deeper in the building there came the whoosh of a water-stool 
flushing. All the comforts of home in the Hambry Sheriff's, Roland thought. The 
flush was soon followed by heavy footsteps de­scending a staircase, and a few 
moments later, Herk Avery appeared. With one hand he was buckling his belt; with 
the other he mopped his broad and sweaty forehead. Roland admired the man's 
dexterity.
"Whew!" the Sheriff exclaimed. "Them beans I ate last night took the shortcut, I 
tell ye." He looked from Roland to Cuthbert and then back to Roland. "Why, boys! 
Too wet for net-counting, is it?"
"Sai Dearborn was just saying that their net-counting days are at an end," Jonas 
said. He combed back his long hair with the tips of his fin­gers. Beyond him, 
Clay Reynolds had resumed his slouch against the notice-board, looking at Roland 
and Cuthbert with open dislike.
"Aye? Well, that's fine, that's fine. What's next, youngsters? And is there any 
way we here can help ye? For that's what we like to do best, lend a hand where a 
hand's needed. So it is."
"Actually, you could help us," Roland said. He reached into his belt and pulled 
out the list. "We have to move on to the Drop, but we don't want to 
inconvenience anyone."
Grinning hugely, Deputy Dave slid his Squire all the way around his own Hillock. 
Jonas Castled at once, ripping open Dave's entire left flank. The grin faded 
from Dave's face, leaving a puzzled emptiness. "How'd ye manage that?"
"Easy." Jonas smiled, then pushed back from the desk to include the others in 
his regard. "You want to remember, Dave, that I play to win. I can't help it; 
it's just my nature." He turned his full attention to Roland. His smile 
broadened. "Like the scorpion said to the maiden as she lay dy­ing, 'You knowed 
I was poison when you picked me up.' "
 
6
 
When Susan came in from feeding the livestock, she went directly to the 
cold-pantry for the juice, which was her habit. She didn't see her aunt standing 
in the chimney comer and watching her, and when Cordelia spoke, Susan was 
startled badly. It wasn't just the unexpectedness of the voice; it was the 
coldness of it.
"Do ye know him?"
The juice-jug slipped in her fingers, and Susan put a steadying hand beneath it. 
Orange juice was too precious to waste, especially this late in the year. She 
turned and saw her aunt by the woodbox. Cordelia had hung her sombrero on a hook 
in the entryway, but she still wore her serape and muddy boots. Her cuchillo lay 
on top of the stacked wood, with green strands of sharproot vine still trailing 
from its edge. Her tone was cold, but her eyes were hot with suspicion.
A sudden clarity filled Susan's mind and all of her senses. If you say "No, " 
you're damned, she thought. If you even ask who, you may be damned. You must 
say—
"I know them both," she replied in offhand fashion. "I met them at the party. So 
did you. Ye frightened me, Aunt."
"Why did he salute ye so?"
"How can I know? Perhaps he just felt like it."
Her aunt bolted forward, slipped in her muddy boots, regained her balance, and 
seized Susan by the arms. Now her eyes were blazing. "Be'n't insolent with me, 
girl! Be'n't haughty with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, or I'll—"
Susan pulled backward so hard that Cordelia staggered and might have fallen 
again, if the table had not been handy to grab. Behind her, muddy foot-tracks 
stood out on the clean kitchen floor like accusations. "Call me that again and 
I'll . . . I'll slap thee!" Susan cried. "So I will!"
Cordelia's lips drew back from her teeth in a dry, ferocious smile. "Ye'd slap 
your father's only living blood kin? Would ye be so bad?"
"Why not? Do ye not slap me, Aunt?"
Some of the heat went out of her aunt's eyes, and the smile left her mouth. 
"Susan! Hardly ever! Not half a dozen times since ye were a tod­dler who would 
grab anything her hands could reach, even a pot of boil­ing water on the—"
"It's with thy mouth thee mostly hits nowadays," Susan said. "I've put up with 
it—more fool me—but am done with it now. I'll have no more. If I'm old enough to 
be sent to a man's bed for money, I'm old enough for ye to keep a civil tongue 
when ye speak to me."
Cordelia opened her mouth to defend herself—the girl's anger had startled her, 
and so had her accusations—and then she realized how clev­erly she was being led 
away from the subject of the boys. Of the boy.
"Ye only know him from the party, Susan? It's Dearborn I mean." As I think ye 
well know.
"I've seen him about town," Susan said. She met her aunt's eyes steadily, 
although it cost her an effort; lies would follow half-truths as dark followed 
dusk. "I've seen all three of them about town. Are ye satisfied?" No, Susan saw 
with mounting dismay, she was not. "Do ye swear to me, Susan—on your father's 
name—that ye've not been meeting this boy Dearborn?"
All the rides in the late afternoon, Susan thought. All the excuses. All the 
care that no one should see us. And it all comes down to a careless wave on a 
rainy morning. That easily all's put at risk. Did we think it could be 
otherwise? Were we that foolish?
Yes ... and no. The truth was they had been mad. And still were. Susan kept 
remembering the look of her father's eyes on the few oc­casions when he had 
caught her in a fib. That look of half-curious disap­pointment. The sense that 
her fibs, innocuous as they might be, had hurt him like the scratch of a thorn.
"I will swear to nothing," she said. "Ye've no right to ask it of me." "Swear!" 
Cordelia cried shrilly. She groped out for the table again and grasped it, as if 
for balance. "Swear it! Swear it! This is no game of jacks or tag or 
Johnny-jump-my-pony! Thee's not a child any longer! Swear to me! Swear that 
thee're still pure!"
"No," Susan said, and turned to leave. Her heart was beating madly, but still 
that awful clarity informed the world. Roland would have known it for what it 
was: she was seeing with gunslinger's eyes. There was a glass window in the 
kitchen, looking out toward the Drop, and in it she saw the ghostly reflection 
of Aunt Cord coming toward her, one arm raised, the hand at the end of it 
knotted into a fist. Without turning, Susan put up her own hand in a halting 
gesture. "Raise that not to me," she said. "Raise it not, ye bitch."
She saw the reflection's ghost-eyes widen in shock and dismay. She saw the 
ghost-fist relax, become a hand again, fall to the ghost-woman's side.
"Susan," Cordelia said in a small, hurt voice. "How can ye call me so? What's so 
coarsened your tongue and your regard for me?"
Susan went out without replying. She crossed the yard and entered the bam. Here 
the smells she had known since childhood—horses, lum­ber, hay—filled her head 
and drove the awful clarity away. She was tumbled back into childhood, lost in 
the shadows of her confusion again. Pylon turned to look at her and whickered. 
Susan put her head against his neck and cried.
 
7
 
"There!" Sheriff Avery said when sais Dearborn and Heath were gone. "It's as ye 
said—just slow is all they are; just creeping careful." He held the meticulously 
printed list up, studied it a moment, then cackled hap­pily. "And look at this! 
What a beauty! Har! We can move anything we don't want em to see days in 
advance, so we can."
"They're fools," Reynolds said . . . but he pined for another chance at them, 
just the same. If Dearborn really thought bygones were bygones over that little 
business in the Travellers' Rest, he was way past foolish­ness and dwelling in 
the land of idiocy.
Deputy Dave said nothing. He was looking disconsolately through his monocle at 
the Castles board, where his white army had been laid waste in six quick moves. 
Jonas's forces had poured around Red Hillock like water, and Dave's hopes had 
been swept away in the flood.
"I'm tempted to wrap myself up dry and go over to Seafront with this," Avery 
said. He was still gloating over the paper, with its neat list of farms and 
ranches and proposed dates of inspection. Up to Year's End and beyond it ran. 
Gods!
"Why don't ye do that?" Jonas said, and got to his feet. Pain ran up his leg 
like bitter lightning.
"Another game, sai Jonas?" Dave asked, beginning to reset the pieces.
"I'd rather play a weed-eating dog," Jonas said, and took malicious pleasure at 
the flush that crept up Dave's neck and stained his guileless fool's face. He 
limped across to the door, opened it, and went out on the porch. The drizzle had 
become a soft, steady rain. Hill Street was de­serted, the cobbles gleaming 
wetly.
Reynolds had followed him out. "Eldred—"
"Get away," Jonas said without turning.
Clay hesitated a moment, then went back inside and closed the door.
What the hell's wrong with you? Jonas asked himself.
He should have been pleased at the two young pups and their list—as pleased as 
Avery was, as pleased as Rimer would be when he heard about this morning's 
visit. After all, hadn't he told Rimer not three days ago that the boys would 
soon be over on the Drop, counting their little hearts out? Yes. So why did he 
feel so unsettled? So fucking jittery? Because there      ^Bt still hadn't been 
any contact from Parson's man, Latigo? Because Rey­nolds came back empty from 
Hanging Rock on one day and Depape came back empty the next? Surely not. Latigo 
would come, along with a goodly troop of men, but it was still too soon for 
them, and Jonas knew it. Reap­ing was still almost a month away.
So is it just the bad weather working on your leg, stirring up that old wound 
and making you ugly?
No. The pain was bad, but it had been worse before. The trouble was his head. 
Jonas leaned against a post beneath the overhang, listened to the rain plinking 
on the tiles, and thought how, sometimes in a game of Cas­tles, a clever player 
would peek around his Hillock for just a moment, then duck back. That was what 
this felt like—it was so right it smelled wrong. Crazy idea, but somehow not 
crazy at all.
"Are you trying to play Castles with me, sprat?" Jonas murmured. "If so, you'll 
soon wish you'd stayed home with your mommy. So you will."
 
8
 
Roland and Cuthbert headed back to the Bar K along the Drop—there would be no 
counting done today. At first, in spite of the rain and the gray skies, 
Cuthbert's good humor was almost entirely restored.
"Did you see them?" he asked with a laugh. "Did you see them, Roland . . . Will, 
I mean? They bought it, didn't they? Swallowed that honey whole, they did!"
"Yes."
"What do we do next? What's our next move?"
Roland looked at him blankly for a moment, as if startled out of a doze. "The 
next move is theirs. We count. And we wait."
Cuthbert's good cheer collapsed in a puff, and he once more found himself having 
to restrain a flood of recrimination, all whirling around two basic ideas: that 
Roland was shirking his duty so he could continue to wallow in the undeniable 
charms of a certain young lady, and—more im­portant—that Roland had lost his 
wits when all of Mid-World needed them the most.
Except what duty was Roland shirking? And what made him so sure Roland was 
wrong? Logic? Intuition? Or just shitty old catbox jealousy? Cuthbert found 
himself thinking of the effortless way Jonas had ripped up Deputy Dave's army 
when Deputy Dave had moved too soon. But life was not like Castles ... was it? 
He didn't know. But he thought he had at least one valid intuition: Roland was 
heading for disaster. And so they all were.
Wake up, Cuthbert thought. Please, Roland, wake up before it's too late.

 

 

CHAPTER III
playing castles
 
1
 
There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back 
into bed after lunch, take long naps, and wake feeling stupid and dis­oriented. 
It was far from flood-weather, but it made the final phase of the apple-picking 
dangerous (there were several broken legs, and in Seven-Mile Orchard a young 
woman fell from the top of her ladder, breaking her back), and the potato-fields 
became difficult to work; almost as much time was spent freeing wagons stuck in 
the gluey rows as was spent actually picking. In Green Heart, what decorations 
had been done for the Reaping Fair grew sodden and had to be pulled down. The 
work volunteers waited with increasing nervousness for the weather to break so 
they could begin again.
It was bad weather for young men whose job it was to take inventory, although 
they were at least able to begin visiting barns and counting stock. It was good 
weather for a young man and young woman who had discovered the joys of physical 
love, you would have said, but Roland and Susan met only twice during the run of 
gray weather. The danger of what they were doing was now almost palpable.
The first time was in an abandoned boathouse on the Seacoast Road. The second 
was in the far end of the crumbling building below and to the east of Citgo—they 
made love with furious intensity on one of Roland's saddle-blankets, which was 
spread on the floor of what had once been the oil refinery's cafeteria. As Susan 
climaxed, she shrieked his name over and over. Startled pigeons filled the old, 
shadowy rooms and crumbling hallways with their soft thunder.
 
2
 
Just as it seemed that the drizzle would never end and the grinding sound of the 
thinny in the still air would drive everyone in Hambry insane, a strong 
wind—almost a gale—blew in off the ocean and puffed the clouds away. The town 
awoke one day to a sky as bright as blue steel and a sun that turned the bay to 
gold in the morning and white fire in the afternoon. That sense of lethargy was 
gone. In the potato fields the carts rolled with new vigor. In Green Heart an 
army of women began once more to bedeck with flowers the podium where Jamie 
McCann and Susan Delgado would he acclaimed this year's Reaping Lad and Girl.
Out on the part of the Drop closest to Mayor's House, Roland, Cuthbert, and 
Alain rode with renewed purpose, counting the horses which ran with the Barony 
brand on their flanks. The bright skies and brisk winds filled them with energy 
and good cheer, and for a course of days—three, or perhaps four—they galloped 
together in a whooping, shouting, laugh­ing line, their old good fellowship 
restored.
On one of these brisk and sunny days, Eldred Jonas stepped out of the Sheriff's 
office and walked up Hill Street toward Green Heart. He was free of both Depape 
and Reynolds this morning—they had ridden out to Hanging Rock together, looking 
for Latigo's outriders, who must come soon, now—and Jonas's plan was simple: to 
have a glass of beer in the pavilion, and watch the preparations that were going 
on there: the dig­ging of the roasting-pits, the laying of faggots for the 
bonfire, the argu­ments over how to set the mortars that would shoot off the 
fireworks, the ladies flowering the stage where this year's Lad and Girl would 
be offered for the town's adulation. Perhaps, Jonas thought, he might take a 
likely-looking flower-girl off for an hour or two of recreation. The maintenance 
of the saloon whores he left strictly to Roy and Clay, but a fresh young 
flower-girl of seventeen or so was a different matter.
The pain in his hip had faded with the damp weather; the painful, lurching 
stride with which he had moved for the last week or so had be­come a mere limp 
again. Perhaps just a beer or two in the open air would be enough, but the 
thought of a girl wouldn't quite leave his head. Young, clear-skinned, 
high-breasted. Fresh, sweet breath. Fresh, sweet lips—
"Mr. Jonas? Eldred?"
He turned, smiling, to the owner of the voice. No dewy-complexioned flower-girl 
with wide eyes and moist, parted lips stood there, but a skinny woman edging 
into late middle age—flat chest, flat bum, tight pale lips, hair scrooped so 
tight against her skull that it fair screamed. Only the wide eyes corresponded 
with his daydream. I believe I've made a con­quest, Jonas thought sardonically.
"Why, Cordelia!" he said, reaching out and taking one of her hands in both of 
his. "How lovely you look this morning!"
Thin color came up in her cheeks and she laughed a little. For a mo­ment she 
looked forty-five instead of sixty. And she's not sixty, Jonas thought. The 
lines around her mouth and the shadows under her eyes . . . those are new.
"You're very kind," she said, "but I know better. I haven't been sleep­ing, and 
when women my age don't sleep, they grow old rapidly."
"I'm sorry to hear you're sleeping badly," he said. "But now that the weather's 
changed, perhaps—"
"It's not the weather. Might I speak to you, Eldred? I've thought and thought, 
and you're the only one I dare turn to for advice."
His smile widened. He placed her hand through his arm, then covered it with his 
own. Now her blush was like fire. With all that blood in her head, she might 
talk for hours. And Jonas had an idea that every word would be interesting.
 
3
 
With women of a certain age and temperament, tea was more effective than wine 
when it came to loosening the tongue. Jonas gave up his plans for a lager (and, 
perhaps, a flower-girl) without so much as a second thought. He seated sai 
Delgado in a sunny comer of the Green Heart pavilion (it was not far from a red 
rock Roland and Susan knew well), and ordered a large pot of tea; cakes, too. 
They watched the Reaping Fair preparations go forward as they waited for the 
food and drink. The sunswept park was full of hammering and sawing and shouts 
and bursts of laughter.
"All Fair-Days are pleasant, but Reaping turns us all into children again, don't 
you find?" Cordelia asked.
"Yes, indeed," said Jonas, who hadn't felt like a child even when he had been 
one.
"What I still like best is the bonfire," she said, looking toward the great pile 
of sticks and boards that was being constructed at the far end of the park, 
eater-corner from the stage. It looked like a large wooden tepee. "I love it 
when the townsfolk bring their stuffy-guys and throw them on. Barbaric, but it 
always gives me such a pleasant shiver."
"Aye," Jonas said, and wondered if it would give her a pleasant shiver to know 
that three of the stuffy-guys thrown onto the Reap Night bonfire this year were 
apt to smell like pork and scream like harpies as they burned. If his luck was 
in, the one that screamed the longest would be the one with the pale blue eyes.
The tea and cakes came, and Jonas didn't so much as glance at the girl's full 
bosom when she bent to serve. He had eyes only for the fasci­nating sai Delgado, 
with her nervous little shifting movements and odd, desperate look.
When the girl was gone, he poured out, put the teapot back on its trivet, then 
covered her hand with his. "Now, Cordelia," he said in his warmest tone. "I can 
see something troubles you. Out with it. Confide in your friend Eldred."
Her lips pressed so tightly together that they almost disappeared, but not even 
that effort could stop their trembling. Her eyes filled with tears; swam with 
them; overspilled. He took his napkin and, leaning across the table, wiped the 
tears away.
"Tell me," he said tenderly.
"I will. I must tell somebody or go mad. But you must make one promise, Eldred."
"Of course, molly." He saw her blush more furiously than ever at this harmless 
endearment, and squeezed her hand. "Anything."
"You mustn't tell Hart. That disgusting spider of a Chancellor, either, but 
especially not the Mayor. If I'm right in what I suspect and he found out, he 
could send her west!" She almost moaned this, as if comprehend­ing it as a real 
fact for the first time. "He could send us both west!"
Maintaining his sympathetic smile, he said: "Not a word to Mayor Thorin, not a 
word to Kimba Rimer. Promise."
For a moment he thought that she wouldn't take the plunge ... or per­haps 
couldn't. Then, in a low, gaspy voice that sounded like ripping cloth, she said 
a single word. "Dearborn."
He felt his heart take a bump as the name that had been so much in his mind now 
passed her lips, and although he continued to smile, he could not forbear a 
single hard squeeze of her fingers that made her wince.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that you startled me a little. Dearborn ... a 
well-spoken enough lad, but 1 wonder if he's entirely trustworthy."
"I fear he's been with my Susan." Now it was her turn to squeeze, but Jonas 
didn't mind. He hardly felt it, in fact. He continued to smile, hoping he did 
not look as flabbergasted as he felt. "I fear he's been with her... as a man is 
with a woman. Oh, how horrible this is!"
She wept with a silent bitterness, taking little pecking peeks around as she did 
to make sure they were not being observed. Jonas had seen coy­otes and wild dogs 
look around from their stinking dinners in just that fashion. He let her get as 
much of it out of her system as he could—he wanted her calm; incoherencies 
wouldn't help him—and when he saw her tears slackening, he held out a cup of 
tea. "Drink this."
"Yes. Thank you." The tea was still hot enough to steam, but she drank it down 
greedily. Her old throat must be lined with slate, Jonas thought. She set the 
cup down, and while he poured out fresh, she used her frilly panuelo to scrub 
the tears almost viciously from her face.
"I don't like him," she said. "Don't like him, don't trust him, none of those 
three with their fancy In-World bows and insolent eyes and strange ways of 
talking, but him in particular. Yet if anything's gone on betwixt the two of em 
(and I'm so afraid it has), it comes back to her, doesn't it? It's the woman, 
after all, who must refuse the bestial impulses."
He leaned over the table, looking at her with warm sympathy. "Tell me 
everything, Cordelia."
She did.
 
4
 
Rhea loved everything about the glass ball, but what she especially loved was 
the way it unfailingly showed her people at their vilest. Never in its pink 
reaches did she see one child comforting another after a fall at play, or a 
tired husband with his head in his wife's lap, or old people supping peacefully 
together at the end of the day; these things held no more inter­est for the 
glass, it seemed, than they did for her.
Instead she had seen acts of incest, mothers beating children, hus­bands beating 
wives. She had seen a gang of boys out west'rds of town (it would have amused 
Rhea to know these swaggering eight-year-olds called themselves the Big Coffin 
Hunters) go about enticing stray dogs with a bone and then cutting off their 
tails for a lark. She had seen rob­beries, and at least one murder: a wandering 
man who had stabbed his companion with a pitchfork after some sort of trivial 
argument. That had been on the first drizzly night. The body still lay 
mouldering in a ditch be­side the Great Road West, covered with a layer of straw 
and weeds. It might be discovered before the autumn storms came to drown another 
year; it might not.
She also glimpsed Cordelia Delgado and that hard gun, Jonas, sitting in Green 
Heart at one of the outside tables and talking about . . . well, of course she 
didn't know, did she? But she could see the look in the spinster bitch's eyes. 
Infatuated with him, she was, all pink in the face. Gone all hot and sweet over 
a backshooter and failed gunslinger. It was comical, aye, and Rhea thought she 
would keep an eye on them, from time to time. Wery entertaining, it would likely 
be.
After showing her Cordelia and Jonas, the glass veiled itself once more. Rhea 
put it back in the box with the eye on the lock. Seeing Cordelia in the glass 
had reminded the old woman that she had unfinished business regarding Cordelia's 
sluttish niece. That Rhea still hadn't done that business was ironic but 
understandable—as soon as she had seen how to fix the young sai's wagon, Rhea's 
mind and emotions had settled again, the images in the ball had reappeared, and 
in her fascination with them Rhea had temporarily forgotten that Susan Delgado 
was alive. Now, how­ever, she remembered her plan. Set the cat among the 
pigeons. And speak­ing of cats—
"Musty! Yoo-hoo, Musty, where are ye?"
The cat came oiling out of the woodpile, eyes glowing in the dirty dimness of 
the hut (when the weather turned fine again, Rhea had pulled her shutters to), 
forked tail waving. He jumped into her lap.
"I've an errand for ye," she said, bending over to lick the cat. The en­trancing 
taste of Musty's fur filled her mouth and throat.
Musty purred and arched his back against her lips. For a six-legged mutie cat, 
life was good.
 
5
 
Jonas got rid of Cordelia as soon as he could—although not as soon as he would 
have liked, because he had to keep the scrawny bint sweetened up. She might come 
in handy another time. In the end he had kissed her on the comer of her mouth 
(which caused her to turn so violently red he feared she might have a 
brain-storm) and told her that he would check into the matter which so concerned 
her.
"But discreetly!" she said, alarmed.
Yes, he said, walking her home, he would be discreet; discretion was his middle 
name. He knew Cordelia wouldn't—couldn't—be eased until she knew for sure, but 
he guessed it would turn out to be nothing but va­por. Teenagers loved to 
dramatize, didn't they? And if the young lass saw that her aunt was afraid of 
something, she might well feed auntie's fears instead of allaying them.
Cordelia had stopped by the white picket fence that divided her garden-plot from 
the road, an expression of sublime relief coming over her face. Jonas thought 
she looked like a mule having its back scratched with a stiff brush.
"Why, I never thought of that... yet it's likely, isn't it?"
"Likely enough," Jonas had said, "but I'll still check into it most care­fully. 
Better safe than sorry." He kissed the comer of her mouth again. "And not a word 
to the fellows at Seafront. Not a hint."
"Thank'ee, Eldred! Oh, thank'ee!" And she had hugged him before hurrying in, her 
tiny breasts pressing like stones against the front of his shirt. "Mayhap I'll 
sleep tonight, after all!"
She might, but Jonas wondered if he would.
He walked toward Hockey's stable, where he kept his horse, with his head down 
and his hands locked behind his back. A gaggle of boys came racing up the other 
side of the street; two of them were waving severed dog's tails with blood 
clotted at the ends.
"Coffin Hunters! We're Big Coffin Hunters just like you!" one called impudently 
across to him.
Jonas drew his gun and pointed it at them—it was done in a flash, and for a 
moment the terrified boys saw him as he really was: with his eyes blazing and 
his lips peeled back from his teeth, Jonas looked like a white-haired wolf in 
man's clothes.
"Get on, you little bastards!" he snarled. "Get on before I blow you loose of 
your shoes and give your fathers cause to celebrate!"
For a moment they were frozen, and then they fled in a howling pack. One had 
left his trophy behind; the dog's tail lay on the board sidewalk like a grisly 
fan. Jonas grimaced at the sight of it, bolstered his gun, locked his hands 
behind him again, and walked on, looking like a parson meditating on the nature 
of the gods. And what in gods' name was he doing, pulling iron on a bunch of 
young hellions like that?
Being upset, he thought. Being worried.
He was worried, all right. The titless old biddy's suspicions had upset him 
greatly. Not on Thorin's account—as far as Jonas was concerned, Dearborn could 
fuck the girl in the town square at high noon of Reaping Fair Day—but because it 
suggested that Dearborn might have fooled him about other things.
Crept up behind you once, he did, and you swore it 'd never happen again. But if 
he's been diddling that girl, it has happened again. Hasn't it?
Aye, as they said in these parts. If the boy had had the impertinence to begin 
an affair with the Mayor's gilly-in-waiting, and the incredible sly-ness to get 
away with it, what did that do to Jonas's picture of three In-World brats who 
could barely find their own behinds with both hands and a candle?
We underestimated em once and they made us look like monkeys, Clay had said. I 
don't want it to happen again.
Had it happened again? How much, really, did Dearborn and his friends know? How 
much had they found out? And who had they told? If Dearborn had been able to get 
away with pronging the Mayor's chosen ... to put something that large over on 
Eldred Jonas ... on everyone . . .
"Good day, sai Jonas," Brian Hookey said. He was grinning widely, all but 
kowtowing before Jonas with his sombrero crushed against his broad blacksmith's 
chest. "Would ye care for fresh graf, sai? I've just gotten the new pressing, 
and—"
"All I want is my horse," Jonas said curtly. "Bring it quick and stop your 
quacking."
"Aye, so I will, happy to oblige, thankee-sai." He hurried off on the errand, 
taking one nervous, grinning look back over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't 
going to be shot out of hand.
Ten minutes later Jonas was headed west on the Great Road. He felt a ridiculous 
but nevertheless strong desire to simply kick his horse into a gallop and leave 
all this foolishness behind him: Thorin the graying goat-boy, Roland and Susan 
with their no-doubt mawkish teenage love, Roy and Clay with their fast hands and 
slow wits. Rimer with his ambitions, Cordelia Delgado with her ghastly visions 
of the two of them in some bosky dell, him likely reciting poetry while she wove 
a garland of flowers for his brow.
He had ridden away from things before, when intuition whispered; plenty of 
things. But there would be no riding away this time. He had vowed vengeance on 
the brats, and while he had broken a bushel of promises made to others, he'd 
never broken one made to himself.
And there was John Farson to consider. Jonas had never spoken to the Good Man 
himself (and never wanted to; Farson was reputed to be whim­sically, dangerously 
insane), but he had had dealings with George Latigo, who would probably be 
leading the troop of Farson's men that would ar­rive any day now. It was Latigo 
who had hired the Big Coffin Hunters in the first place, paying a huge cash 
advance (which Jonas hadn't yet shared with Reynolds and Depape) and promising 
an even larger piece of war-spoil if the Affiliation's major forces were wiped 
out in or around the Shaved Mountains.
Latigo was a good-sized bug, all right, but nothing to the size of the bug 
trundling along behind him. And besides, no large reward was ever achieved 
without risk. If they delivered the horses, oxen, wagons of fresh vegetables, 
the tack, the oil, the glass—most of all the wizard's glass—all would be well. 
If they failed, it was very likely that their heads would end up being whacked 
about by Farson and his aides in their nightly polo games. It could happen, and 
Jonas knew it. No doubt someday it would happen. But when his head finally 
parted company from his shoulders, the divorce wouldn't be caused by any such 
smarms as Dearborn and his friends, no matter whose bloodline they had descended 
from.
But if he's been having an affair with Thorin 's autumn treat . . . if he's been 
able to keep such a secret as that, what others has he been keeping? Perhaps he 
is playing Castles with you.
If so, he wouldn't play for long. The first time young Mr. Dearborn poked his 
nose around his Hillock, Jonas would be there to shoot it off for him.
The question for the present was where to go first. Out to the Bar K, to take a 
long overdue look at the boys' living quarters? He could; they would be counting 
Barony horses on the Drop, all three of them. But it wasn't over horses that he 
might lose his head, was it? No, the horses were just a small added attraction, 
as far as the Good Man was concerned.
Jonas rode for Citgo instead.
 
6
 
First he checked the tankers. They were just as had been and should be— lined up 
in a neat row with their new wheels ready to roll when the time came, and hidden 
behind their new camouflage. Some of the screening pine branches were turning 
yellow at the tips, but the recent spell of rain had kept most admirably fresh. 
There had been no tampering that Jonas could see.
Next he climbed the hill, walking beside the pipeline and pausing more and more 
frequently to rest; by the time he reached the rotting gate between the slope 
and the oilpatch, his bad leg was paining him severely. He studied the gate, 
frowning over the smudges he saw on the top rung. They might mean nothing, but 
Jonas thought someone might have climbed over the gate rather than risk opening 
it and having it fall off its hinges.
He spent the next hour strolling around the derricks, paying espe­cially close 
attention to those that still worked, looking for sign. He found plenty of 
tracks, but it was impossible (especially after a week of wet weather) to read 
them with any degree of accuracy. The In-World boys might have been out here; 
that ugly little band of brats from town might have been out here; Arthur Eld 
and the whole company of his knights might have been out here. The ambiguity put 
Jonas in a foul temper, as ambiguity (other than on a Castles board) always did.
He started back the way he'd come, meaning to descend the slope to his horse and 
ride back to town. His leg was aching like fury, and he wanted a stiff drink to 
quiet it down. The bunkhouse at the Bar K could wait another day.
He got halfway to the gate, saw the weedy spur track tying Citgo to the Great 
Road, and sighed. There would be nothing on that little strip of road to see, 
but now that he'd come all the way out here, he supposed he should finish the 
job.
Bugger finishing the job, I want a damned drink.
But Roland wasn't the only one who sometimes found his wishes overruled by 
training. Jonas sighed, rubbed at his leg, then walked back to the weedy twin 
ruts. Where, it seemed, there was something to find af­ter all.
It lay in the grassy ditch less than a dozen paces from the place where the old 
road joined the Great Road. At first he saw only a smooth white shape in the 
weeds and thought it was a stone. Then he saw a black round-ness that could only 
be an eyehole. Not a stone, then; a skull.
Grunting, Jonas knelt and fished it out while the few living derricks continued 
to squeal and thump behind him. A rook's skull. He had seen it before. Hell, he 
suspected most of the town had. It belonged to the showoff, Arthur Heath ... 
who, like all showoffs, needed his little props.
"He called it the lookout," Jonas murmured. "Put it on the horn of his saddle 
sometimes, didn't he? And sometimes wore it around his neck like a pendant." 
Yes. The youngster had been wearing it so that night in the Travellers' Rest, 
when—
Jonas turned the bird's skull. Something rattled inside like a last lonely 
thought. Jonas tilted it, shook it over his open palm, and a fragment of gold 
chain dropped out. That was how the boy had been wearing it. At some point the 
chain had broken, the skull had fallen in the ditch, and sai Heath had never 
troubled to go looking for it. The thought that someone might find it had 
probably never crossed his mind. Boys were careless. It was a wonder any ever 
grew up to be men.
Jonas's face remained calm as he knelt there examining the bird's skull, but 
behind the unlined brow he was as furious as he had ever been in his life. They 
had been out here, all right—it was another thing he would have scoffed at just 
yesterday. He had to assume they had seen the tankers, camouflage or no 
camouflage, and if not for the chance of finding this skull, he never would have 
known for sure, one way or the other.
"When I finish with em, their eyesockets'll be as empty as yours. Sir Rook. I'll 
gouge em clean myself."
He started to throw the skull away, then changed his mind. It might come in 
handy. Carrying it in one hand, he started back to where he'd left his horse.
 
7
 
Coral Thorin walked down High Street toward the Travellers' Rest, her head 
thumping rustily and her heart sour in her breast. She had been up only an hour, 
but her hangover was so miserable it felt like a day already. She was drinking 
too much of late and she knew it—almost every night now—but she was very careful 
not to take more than one or two (and al­ways light ones) where folks could see. 
So far, she thought no one sus­pected. And as long as no one suspected, she 
supposed she would keep on. How else to bear her idiotic brother? This idiotic 
town? And, of course, the knowledge that all of the ranchers in the Horsemen's 
Associa­tion and at least half of the large landowners were traitors? "Fuck the 
Af­filiation," she whispered. "Better a bird in the hand."
But did she really have a bird in the hand? Did any of them? Would 1-arson keep 
his promises—promises made by a man named Latigo and passed on by their own 
inimitable Kimba Rimer? Coral had her doubts; despots had such a convenient way 
of forgetting their promises, and birds in the hand such an irritating way of 
pecking your fingers, shitting in your palm, and then flying away. Not that it 
mattered now; she had made her bed. Besides, folks would always want to drink 
and gamble and rut, re­gardless of who they bowed their knees to or in whose 
name their taxes were collected.
Still, when the voice of old demon conscience whispered, a few drinks helped to 
still its lips.
She paused outside Craven's Undertaking Parlor, looking upstreet at the laughing 
boys on their ladders, hanging paper lanterns from high poles and building 
eaves. These gay lamps would be lit on the night of the Reap Fair, filling 
Hambry's main street with a hundred shades of soft, conflicting light.
For a moment Coral remembered the child she had been, looking at the colored 
paper lanterns with wonder, listening to the shouts and the rattle of fireworks, 
listening to the dance-music coming from Green Heart as her father held her hand 
. . . and, on his other side, her big brother Hart's hand. In this memory, Hart 
was proudly wearing his first pair of long trousers.
Nostalgia swept her, sweet at first, then bitter. The child had grown into a 
sallow woman who owned a saloon and whorehouse (not to men­tion a great deal of 
land along the Drop), a woman whose only sexual partner of late was her 
brother's Chancellor, a woman whose chief goal upon arising these days was 
getting to the hair of the dog that bit her as soon as possible. How, exactly, 
had things turned out so? This woman whose eyes she used was the last woman the 
child she had been would have expected to become.
"Where did I go wrong?" she asked herself, and laughed. "Oh dear Man Jesus, 
where did this straying sinner-child go wrong? Can you say hallelujah." She 
sounded so much like the wandering preacher-woman that had come through town the 
year before—Pittston, her name had been, Sylvia Pittston—that she laughed again, 
this time almost naturally. She walked on toward the Rest with a better will.
Sheemie was outside, tending to the remains of his silkflowers. He waved to her 
and called a greeting. She waved back and called something in return. A good 
enough lad, Sheemie, and although she could have found an­other easily enough, 
she supposed she was glad Depape hadn't killed him.
The bar was almost empty but brilliantly lit, all the gas-jets flaring. It was 
clean, as well. Sheemie would have emptied the spittoons, but Coral guessed it 
was the plump woman behind the bar who had done all the rest. The makeup 
couldn't hide the sallowness of that woman's cheeks, the hollow-ness of her 
eyes, or the way her neck had started to go all crepey (seeing that sort of 
lizardy skin on a woman's neck always made Coral shiver inside).
It was Pettie the Trotter tending bar beneath The Romp's stem glass gaze, and if 
allowed to do so, she would continue until Stanley appeared and banished her. 
Pettie had said nothing out loud to Coral—she knew better—but had made her wants 
clear enough just the same. Her whoring days were almost at an end. She 
desperately desired to go to work tending bar. There was precedent for it, Coral 
knew—a female bartender at Forest Trees in Pass o' the River, and there had been 
another at Glencove, up the coast in Tavares, until she had died of the pox. 
What Pettie refused to see was that Stanley Ruiz was younger by fifteen years 
and in far better health. He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after 
Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper's grave.
"Good even, sai Thorin," Pettie said. And before Coral could so much as open her 
mouth, the whore had put a shot glass on the bar and filled it full of whiskey. 
Coral looked at it with dismay. Did they all know, then?
"I don't want that," she snapped. "Why in Eld's name would I? Sun isn't even 
down! Pour it back into the bottle, for yer father's sake, and then get the hell 
out of here. Who d'ye think yer serving at five o' the clock, anyway? Ghosts?"
Pettie's face fell a foot; the heavy coat other makeup actually seemed to crack 
apart. She took the funnel from under the bar, stuck it in the neck of the 
bottle, and poured the shot of whiskey back in. Some went onto the bar in spite 
of the funnel; her plump hands (now ringless; her rings had been traded for food 
at the mercantile across the street long since) were shaking. "I'm sorry, sai. 
So I am. I was only—"
"I don't care what ye was only," Coral said, then turned a bloodshot eye on 
Sheb, who had been sitting on his piano-bench and leafing through old 
sheet-music. Now he was staring toward the bar with his mouth hung open. "And 
what are you looking at, ye frog?"
"Nothing, sai Thorin. I—"
"Then go look at it somewhere else. Take this pig with'ee. Give her a bounce, 
why don't ye? It'll be good for her skin. It might even be good for yer own."
"I-"
"Get out! Are ye deaf? Both of ye!"
Pettie and Sheb went away toward the kitchen instead of the cribs up­stairs, but 
it was all the same to Coral. They could go to hell as far as she was concerned. 
Anywhere, as long as they were out of her aching face.
She went behind the bar and looked around. Two men playing cards over in the far 
comer. That hardcase Reynolds was watching them and sipping a beer. There was 
another man at the far end of the bar, but he was staring off into space, lost 
in his own world. No one was paying any espe­cial attention to sai Coral Thorin, 
and what did it matter if they were? If Pettie knew, they all knew.
She ran her finger through the puddle of whiskey on the bar, sucked it, ran it 
through again, sucked it again. She grasped the bottle, but before she could 
pour, a spidery monstrosity with gray-green eyes leaped, hiss­ing, onto the bar. 
Coral shrieked and stepped back, dropping the whiskey bottle between her feet . 
. . where, for a wonder, it didn't break. For a mo­ment she thought her head 
would break, instead—that her swelling, throbbing brain would simply split her 
skull like a rotten eggshell. There was a crash as the card-players overturned 
their table getting up. Rey­nolds had drawn his gun.
"Nay," she said in a quavering voice she could hardly recognize. Her eyeballs 
were pulsing and her heart was racing. People could die of fright, she realized 
that now. "Nay, gentlemen, all's well."
The six-legged freak standing on the bar opened its mouth, bared its needle 
fangs, and hissed again.
Coral bent down (and as her head passed below the level of her waist, she was 
once more sure it was going to explode), picked up the bottle, saw that it was 
still a quarter full, and drank directly from the neck, no longer caring who saw 
her do it or what they thought.
As if hearing her thought, Musty hissed again. He was wearing a red collar this 
afternoon—on him it looked baleful rather than jaunty. Be­neath it was tucked a 
white scrap of paper.
"Want me to shoot it?" a voice drawled. "I will if you like. One slug and won't 
be nothing left but claws." It was Jonas, standing just inside the batwings, and 
although he looked not a whole lot better than she felt, Coral had no doubt he 
could do it.
"Nay. The old bitch'll turn us all into locusts, or something like, if ye kill 
her familiar."
"What bitch?" Jonas asked, crossing the room.
"Rhea Dubativo. Rhea of the Coos, she's called."
"Ah! Not the bitch but the witch."
"She's both."
Jonas stroked the cat's back. It allowed itself to be petted, even arch­ing 
against his hand, but he only gave it the single caress. Its fur had an 
unpleasant damp feel.
"Would you consider sharing that?" he asked, nodding toward the bottle. "It's 
early, but my leg hurts like a devil sick of sin."
"Your leg, my head, early or late. On the house."
Jonas raised his white eyebrows.
"Count yer blessings and have at it, cully."
She reached toward Musty. He hissed again, but allowed her to draw the note out 
from under his collar. She opened it and read the five words that were printed 
there:

"Might I see?" Jonas asked. With the first drink down and warming his belly, the 
world looked better.
"Why not?" She handed him the note. Jonas looked, then handed it back. He had 
almost forgotten Rhea, and that wouldn't have done at all. Ah, but it was hard 
to remember everything, wasn't it? Just lately Jonas felt less like a hired gun 
than a cook trying to make all nine courses of a state dinner come out at the 
same time. Luckily, the old hag had reminded him of her presence herself. Gods 
bless her thirst. And his own, since it had landed him here at the right time.
"Sheemie!" Coral bawled. She could also feel the whiskey working; she felt 
almost human again. She even wondered if Eldred Jonas might be interested in a 
dirty evening with the Mayor's sister ... who knew what might speed the hours?
Sheemie came in through the batwings, hands grimy, pink sombrera bouncing on his 
back at the end of its cuerda. "Aye, Coral Thorin! Here I be!"
She looked past him, calculating the sky. Not tonight, not even for Rhea; she 
wouldn't send Sheemie up there after dark, and that was the end of it.
"Nothing," she said in a voice that was gentler than usual. "Go back to yer 
flowers, and see that ye cover them well. It bids frosty."
She turned over Rhea's note and scrawled a single word on it:
 
tomorrow
 
This she folded and handed to Jonas. "Stick it under that stink's collar for me, 
will ye? I don't want to touch him."
Jonas did as he was asked. The cat favored them with a final wild green look, 
then leaped from the bar and vanished beneath the batwings.
"Time is short," Coral said. She hadn't the slightest idea what she meant, but 
Jonas nodded in what appeared to be perfect understanding. "Would you care to go 
upstairs with a closet drunk? I'm not much in the looks department, but I can 
still spread em all the way to the edge of the bed, and I don't just lie there."
He considered, then nodded. His eyes were gleaming. This one was as thin as 
Cordelia Delgado ... but what a difference, eh? What a differ­ence! "All right."
"I've been known to say some nasty things—fair warning."
"Dear lady, I shall be all ears."
She smiled. Her headache was gone. "Aye. I'll just bet ye will."
"Give me a minute. Don't move a step." He walked across to where Reynolds sat.
"Drag up a chair, Eldred."
"I think not. There's a lady waiting."
Reynolds's gaze flicked briefly toward the bar. "You're joking."
"I never joke about women, Clay. Now mark me."
Reynolds sat forward, eyes intent. Jonas was grateful this wasn't Depape. Roy 
would do what you asked, and usually well enough, but only after you'd explained 
it to him half a dozen times.
"Go to Lengyll," he said. "Tell him we want to put about a dozen men—no less 
than ten—out at yon oilpatch. Good men who can get their heads down and keep 
them down and not snap the trap too soon on an ambush, if ambushing's required. 
Tell him Brian Hockey's to be in charge.He's got a level head, which is more 
than can be said for most of these poor things."
Reynolds's eyes were hot and happy. "You expect the brats?"
"They've been out there once, mayhap they'll be out again. If so, they're to be 
crossfired and knocked down dead. At once and with no warning. You understand?"
"Yar! And the tale after?"
"Why, that the oil and the tankers must have been their business," Jonas said 
with a crooked smile. "To be taken to Farson, at their com­mand and by 
confederates unknown. We'll be carried through the streets on the town's 
shoulders, come Reap. Hailed as the men who rooted out the traitors. Where's 
Roy?"
"Gone back to Hanging Rock. I saw him at noon. He says they're coming, Eldred; 
says when the wind swings into the east, he can hear ap­proaching horse."
"Maybe he only hears what he wants to hear." But he suspected Depape was right. 
Jonas's mood, at rock bottom when he stepped into the Travellers' Rest, was now 
very much on the rebound.
"We'll start moving the tankers soon, whether the brats come or not. At night, 
and two by two, like the animals going on board Old Pa's Ark." He laughed at 
this. "But we'll leave some, eh? Like cheese in a trap."
"Suppose the mice don't come?"
Jonas shrugged. "If not one way, another. I intend to press them a lit­tle more 
tomorrow. I want them angry, and I want them confused. Now go on about your 
business. I have yon lady waiting."
"Better you than me, Eldred."
Jonas nodded. He guessed that half an hour from now, he would have forgotten all 
about his aching leg. "That's right," he said. "You she'd eat like fudge."
He walked back to the bar, where Coral stood with her arms folded. Now she 
unfolded them and took his hands. The right she put on her left breast. The 
nipple was hard and erect under his fingers. The forefinger of his left hand she 
put in her mouth, and bit down lightly.
"Shall we bring the bottle?" Jonas asked.
"Why not?" said Coral Thorin.
 
8
 
If she'd gone to sleep as drunk as had been her habit over the last few months, 
the creak of the bedsprings wouldn't have awakened her—a bomb-blast wouldn't 
have awakened her. But although they'd brought the bot­tle, it still stood on 
the night-table of the bedroom she maintained at the Rest (it was as big as any 
three of the whores' cribs put together), the level of the whiskey unchanged. 
She felt sore all over her body, but her head was clear; sex was good for that 
much, anyway.
Jonas was at the window, looking out at the first gray traces of day­light and 
pulling his pants up. His bare back was covered with criss­crossed scars. She 
thought to ask him who had administered such a savage flogging and how he'd 
survived it, then decided she'd do better to keep quiet.
"Where are ye off to?" she asked.
"I believe I'm going to start by finding some paint—any shade will do—and a 
street-mutt still in possession of its tail. After that, sai, I don't think you 
want to know."
"Very well." She lay down and pulled the covers up to her chin. She felt she 
could sleep for a week.
Jonas yanked on his boots and went to the door, buckling his gunbelt. He paused 
with his hand on the knob. She looked at him, grayish eyes al­ready half-filled 
with sleep again.
"I've never had better," Jonas said.
Coral smiled. "No, cully," she said. "Nor I."

 

 
 
CHAPTER IV
Roland AND Cuthbert
 
1
 
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."
 
2
 
"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."
 
3
 
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.
 
4
 
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.
 
5
 
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
 
and

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.
 
6
 
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 of 
graf, 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.
 
7
 
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."
 
8
 
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.

 
9
 
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.
 
10
 
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.
 
11
 
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.
 
12
 
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."
 
13
 
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."
 
14
 
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.
 
15
 
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. I have to get up, Roland thought. I 
have 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.
 
16
 
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."
 
17
 
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."
 
18
 
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."
 
19
 
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.

 

 

CHAPTER V
wizard's rainbow
 
1
 
On an afternoon three days after Roland's and Cuthbert's visit to the Coos, Roy 
Depape and Clay Reynolds walked along the upstairs hallway of the Travellers' 
Rest to the spacious bedroom Coral Thorin kept there. Clay knocked. Jonas called 
for them to come in, it was open.
The first thing Depape saw upon entering was sai Thorin herself, in a rocker by 
the window. She wore a foamy nightdress of white silk and a red bufanda on her 
head. She had a lapful of knitting. Depape looked at her in surprise. She 
offered him and Reynolds an enigmatic smile, said "Hello, gents," and returned 
to her needlework. Outside there was a rattle of firecrackers (young folks could 
never wait until the big day; if they had crackers in their hands, they had to 
set match to them), the nervous whinny of a horse, and the raucous laughter of 
boys.
Depape turned to Reynolds, who shrugged and then crossed his arms to hold the 
sides of his cloak. In this way he expressed doubt or disap­proval or both.
"Problem?"
Jonas was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, wiping shaving soap from his 
face with the end of the towel laid over his shoulder. He was bare to the waist. 
Depape had seen him that way plenty of times, but the old white crisscrossings 
of scars always made him feel a little sick to his stomach.
"Well... I knew we was using the lady's room, I just didn't know the lady came 
with it."
"She does." Jonas tossed the towel into the bathroom, crossed to the bed, and 
took his shirt from where it hung on one of the footposts. Be­yond him, Coral 
glanced up, gave his naked back a single greedy look, then went back to her work 
once more. Jonas slipped into his shirt. "How arc things at Citgo, Clay?"
"Quiet. But it'll get noisy if certain young vagabundos poke their nosy noses 
in."
"How many are out there, and how do they set?" "Ten in the days. A dozen at 
night. Roy or I are out once every shift, but like I say, it's been quiet."
Jonas nodded, but he wasn't happy. He'd hoped to draw the boys out to Citgo 
before now, just as he'd hoped to draw them into a confrontation by vandalizing 
their place and killing their pigeons. Yet so far they still hid behind their 
damned Hillock. He felt like a man in a field with three young bulls. He's got a 
red rag, this would-be torero, and he's napping it for all he's worth, and still 
the toros refuse to charge. Why? "The moving operation? How goes that?"
"Like clockwork," Reynolds said. "Four tankers a night, in pairs, the last four 
nights. Renfrew's in charge, him of the Lazy Susan. Do you still want to leave 
half a dozen as bait?"
"Yar," Jonas said, and there was a knock at the door. Depape jumped. "Is that—"
"No," Jonas said. "Our friend in the black robe has decamped. Per­haps he goes 
to offer comfort to the Good Man's troops before battle."
Depape barked laughter at that. By the window, the woman in the nightgown looked 
down at her knitting and said nothing. "It's open!" Jonas called.
The man who stepped in was wearing the sombrero, scrape, and sandalias of a 
farmer or vaquero, but the face was pale and the lock of hair peeking out from 
beneath the sombrero's brim was blond. It was Latigo. A hard man and no mistake, 
but a great improvement over the laughing man in the black robe, just the same.
"Good to see you, gentlemen," he said, coming in and closing the door. His 
face—dour, frowning—was that of a man who hasn't seen any­thing good in years. 
Maybe since birth. "Jonas? Are you well? Do things march?"
"I am and they do," Jonas said. He offered his hand. Latigo gave it a quick, dry 
shake. He didn't do the same for Depape or Reynolds, but glanced at Coral 
instead.
"Long days and pleasant nights, lady."
"And may you have twice the number, sai Latigo," she said without looking up 
from her knitting.
Latigo sat on the end of the bed, produced a sack of tobacco from be­neath his 
scrape, and began rolling a cigarette.
"I won't stay long," he said. He spoke in the abrupt, clipped tones of northern 
In-World, where—or so Depape had heard—reindeer-fucking was still considered the 
chief sport. If you ran slower than your sister, that was. "It wouldn't be wise. 
I don't quite fit in, if one looks closely."
"No," Reynolds said, sounding amused. "You don't."
Latigo gave him a sharp glance, then returned his attention to Jonas. "Most of 
my party is camped thirty wheels from here, in the forest west of Eyebolt Canyon 
. . . what is that wretched noise inside the canyon, by the way? It frightens 
the horses."
"A thinny," Jonas said.
"It scares the men, too, if they get too close," Reynolds said. "Best to stay 
away, cap'n."
"How many are you?" Jonas asked.
"A hundred. And well armed."
"So, it's said, were Lord Perth's men."
"Don't be an ass."
"Have they seen any fighting?"
"Enough to know what it is," Latigo said, and Jonas knew he was ly­ing. Farson 
had kept his veterans in their mountain boltholes. Here was a little 
expeditionary force where no doubt only the sergeants were able to do more with 
their cocks than run water through them.
"There are a dozen at Hanging Rock, guarding the tankers your men have brought 
so far," Latigo said.
"More than needed, likely."
"I didn't risk coming into this godforsaken shitsplat of a town in order to 
discuss my arrangements with you, Jonas."
"Cry your pardon, sai," Jonas replied, but perfunctorily. He sat on the floor 
next to Coral's rocker and began to roll a smoke of his own. She put her 
knitting aside and began to stroke his hair. Depape didn't know what there was 
about her that Eldred found so fascinating—when he himself looked he saw only an 
ugly bitch with a big nose and mosquito-bump tittles.
"As to the three young men," Latigo said with the air of a fellow go­ing 
directly to the heart of the matter. "The Good Man was extremely disturbed to 
learn there were visitors from In-World in Mejis. And now you tell me they 
aren't what they claim to be. So, just what are they?"
Jonas brushed Coral's hand away from his hair as though it were ii troublesome 
insect. Undisturbed, she returned to her knitting. "They're not young men but 
mere boys, and if their coming here is ka—about which I know Farson concerns 
himself deeply—then it may be our ka rather than the Affiliation's."
"Unfortunately, we'll have to forgo enlightening the Good Man with your 
theological conclusions," Latigo said. "We've brought radios, but they're either 
broken or can't work at this distance. No one knows which. I hate all such toys, 
anyway. The gods laugh at them. We're on our own, my friend. For good or ill."
"No need for Farson to worry unnecessarily," Jonas said. "The Good Man wants 
these lads treated as a threat to his plans. I ex­pect Walter told you the same 
thing."
"Aye. And I haven't forgotten a word. Sai Walter is an unforgettable sort of 
man."
"Yes," Latigo agreed. "He's the Good Man's underliner. The chief reason he came 
to you was to underline these boys."
"And so he did. Roy, tell sai Latigo about your visit to the Sheriff day before 
yesterday."
Depape cleared his throat nervously. "The sheriff . . . Avery—"
"I know him, fat as a pig in Full Earth, he is," Latigo said. "Go on." "One of 
Avery's deputies carried a message to the three boys as they counted horse on 
the Drop." "What message?"
"Stay out of town on Reaping Day; stay off the Drop on Reaping Day; best to stay 
close to your quarters on Reaping Day, as Barony folk don't enjoy seeing 
outlanders, even those they like, when they keep their festivals."
"And how did they take it?"
"They agreed straight away to keep to themselves on Reaping," De­pape said. 
"That's been their habit all along, to be just as agreeable as pie when 
something's asked of em. They know better, course they do—there's no more a 
custom here against outlanders on Reaping than there is any­place else. In fact, 
it's quite usual to make strangers a part of the merry­making, as I'm sure the 
boys know. The idea—"
"—is to make them believe we plan to move on Fair-Day itself, yes, yes," Latigo 
finished impatiently. "What I want to know is are they con­vinced? Can you take 
them on the day before Reaping, as you've promised, or will they be waiting?"
Depape and Reynolds looked at Jonas. Jonas reached behind him and put his hand 
on Coral's narrow but not uninteresting thigh. Here it was, he thought. He would 
be held to what he said next, and without grace. If he was right, the Big Coffin 
Hunters would be thanked and paid ... perhaps bonused, as well. If he was wrong, 
they would likely be hung so high and hard that their heads would pop off when 
they hit the end of the rope.
"We'll take them easy as birds on the ground," Jonas said. "Treason the charge. 
Three young men, all high-bom, in the pay of John Parson. Shocking stuff. What 
could be more indicative of the evil days we live in?"
"One cry of treason and the mob appears?"
Jonas favored Latigo with a wintry smile. "As a concept, treason might be a bit 
of a reach for the common folk, even when the mob's drunk and the core's been 
bought and paid for by the Horsemen's Association. Murder, though .. . 
especially that of a much loved Mayor—"
Depape's startled eyes flew to the Mayor's sister.
"What a pity it will be," that lady said, and sighed. "I may be moved to lead 
the rabble myself."
Depape thought he finally understood Eldred's attraction: here was a woman every 
bit as cold-blooded as Jonas himself.
"One other matter," Latigo said. "A piece of the Good Man's prop­erty was sent 
with you for safekeeping. A certain glass ball?"
Jonas nodded. "Yes, indeed. A pretty trifle."
"I understand you left it with the local bruja."
"Yes."
"You should take it back. Soon."
"Don't teach your grandpa to suck eggs," Jonas said, a bit testily. "I'm waiting 
until the brats are jugged."
Reynolds murmured curiously, "Have you seen it yourself, sai Latigo?"
"Not close up, but I've seen men who have." Latigo paused. "One such ran mad and 
had to be shot. The only other time I saw anyone in such condition was thirty 
years ago, on the edge of the big desert. 'Twas a hut-dweller who'd been bitten 
by a rabid coyote."
"Bless the Turtle," Reynolds muttered, and tapped his throat three times. He was 
terrified of rabies.
"You won't bless anything if the Wizard's Rainbow gets hold of you," Latigo said 
grimly, and swung his attention back to Jonas. "You'll want to be even more 
careful taking it back than you were in giving it over. The old witch-woman's 
likely under its glam by now."
"I intend to send Rimer and Avery. Avery ain't much of a shake, but Rimer's a 
trig boy."
"I'm afraid that won't do," Latigo said.
"Won't it?" Jonas said. His hand tightened on Coral's leg and he smiled 
unpleasantly at Latigo. "Perhaps you could tell your 'umble ser­vant why it 
won't do?"
It was Coral who answered. "Because," said she, "when the piece of the Wizard's 
Rainbow Rhea holds is taken back into custody, the Chan­cellor will be busy 
accompanying my brother to his final resting place."
"What's she talking about, Eldred?" Depape asked.
"That Rimer dies, too," Jonas said. He began to grin. "Another foul crime to lay 
at the feet of John Farson's filthy spyboys."
Coral smiled in sweet agreement, put her hands over Jonas's, moved it higher on 
her thigh, and then picked up her knitting again.
 
2
 
The girl, although young, was married.
The boy, although fair, was unstable.
She met him one night in a remote place to tell him their affair, sweet as it 
had been, must end. He replied that it would never end, it was written in the 
stars. She told him that might be, but at some point the constella­tions had 
changed. Perhaps he began to weep. Perhaps she laughed—out of nervousness, very 
likely. Whatever the cause, such laughter was disas­trously timed. He picked up 
a stone and dashed out her brains with it. Then, coming to his senses and 
realizing what he had done, he sat down with his back against a granite slab, 
drew her poor battered head into his lap, and cut his own throat as an owl 
looked on from a nearby tree. He died covering her face with kisses, and when 
they were found, their lips were sealed together with his life's blood and with 
hers.
An old story. Every town has its version. The site is usually the local lovers' 
lane, or a secluded stretch of riverbank, or the town graveyard. Once the 
details of what actually happened have been distorted enough to please the 
morbidly romantic, songs are made. These are usually sung by yearning virgins 
who play guitar or mando badly and cannot quite stay on key. Choruses tend to 
include such lachrymose refrains as My-di-I-de-I-de-o, There they died 
together-o.
The Hambry version of this quaint tale featured lovers named Robert and 
Francesca, and had happened in the old days, before the world had moved on. The 
site of the supposed murder-suicide was the Hambry cemetery, the stone with 
which Francesca's brains had been dashed out was a slate marker, and the granite 
wall against which Robert had been leaning when he clipped his blowpipe had been 
the Thorin mausoleum. (It was doubtful there had been any Thorins in Hambry or 
Mejis five genera­tions back, but folk-tales are, at best, generally no more 
than lies set in rhyme.)
True or untrue, the graveyard was considered haunted by the ghosts of the 
lovers, who could be seen (it was said) walking hand-in-hand among the markers, 
covered with blood and looking wistful. It was thus seldom visited at night, and 
was a logical spot for Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Susan to meet.
By the time the meeting took place, Roland had begun to feel increas­ingly 
worried . . . even desperate. Susan was the problem—or, more prop­erly put, 
Susan's aunt. Even without Rhea's poisonous letter to help the process along, 
Cordelia's suspicions of Susan and Roland had hardened into a near certainty. On 
a day less than a week before the meeting in the cemetery, Cordelia had begun 
shrieking at Susan almost as soon as she stepped through the house door with her 
basket over her arm.
"Ye've been with him! Ye have, ye bad girl, it's written all over yer face!"
Susan, who had that day been nowhere near Roland, could at first only gape at 
her aunt. "Been with who?"
"Oh, be not coy with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty! Be not coy, I pray! Who 
does all but wiggle his tongue at ye when he passes our door? Dearborn, that's 
who! Dearborn! Dearborn! I'll say it a thousand times! Oh, shame on ye! Shame! 
Look at yer trousers! Green from the grass the two of ye have been rolling in, 
they are! I'm surprised they're not torn open at the crutch as well!" By then 
Aunt Cord had been nearly shrieking. The veins in her neck stood out like rope.
Susan, bemused, had looked down at the old khaki pants she was wearing.
"Aunt, it's paint—don't you see it is? Chetta and I've been making Fair-Day 
decorations up at Mayor's House. What's on my bottom got there when Hart Thorin- 
not Dearborn but Thorin—came upon me in the shed where the decorations and 
fireworks are stored. He decided it was as good a time and place as any to have 
another little wrestle. He got on top of me, shot his squirt into his pants 
again, and went off happy. Humming, he was." She wrinkled her nose, although the 
most she felt for Thorin these days was a kind of sad distaste. Her fear of him 
had passed.
Aunt Cord, meanwhile, had been looking at her with glittery eyes. For the first 
time, Susan found herself wondering consciously about Cor­delia's sanity.
"A likely story," Cordelia whispered at last. There were little beads of 
perspiration above her eyebrows, and the nestles of blue veins at her temples 
ticked like clocks. She even had a smell, these days, no matter if she bathed or 
not—a rancid, acrid one. "Did ye work it out together as ye cuddled afterward, 
thee and him?"
Susan had stepped forward, grabbed her aunt's bony wrist, and clapped it to the 
stain on one of her knees. Cordelia cried out and tried to pull away, but Susan 
held fast. She then raised the hand to her aunt's face, holding it there until 
she knew Cordelia had smelled what was on her palm.
"Does thee smell it. Aunt? Paint! We used it on rice-paper for colored 
lanterns!"
The tension had slowly gone out of the wrist in Susan's hand. The eyes looking 
into hers regained a measure of clarity. "Aye," she had said at last. "Paint." A 
pause. "This time."
Since then, Susan had all too often turned her head to see a narrow-hipped 
figure gliding after her in the street, or one of her aunt's many friends 
marking her course with suspicious eyes. When she rode on the Drop, she now 
always had the sensation of being watched. Twice before the four of them came 
together in the graveyard, she had agreed to meet Roland and his friends. Both 
times she had been forced to break off, the second at the very last moment. On 
that occasion she had seen Brian Hockey's eldest son watching her in an odd, 
intent way. It had only been intuition ... but strong intuition.
What made matters worse for her was that she was as frantic for a meeting as 
Roland himself, and not just for palaver. She needed to see his face, and to 
clasp one of his hands between both of hers. The rest, sweet as it was, could 
wait, but she needed to see him and touch him; needed to make sure he wasn't 
Just a dream spun by a lonely, frightened girl to com­fort herself.
In the end, Maria had helped her—gods bless the little maid, who per­haps 
understood more than Susan could ever guess. It was Maria who had gone to 
Cordelia with a note saying that Susan would be spending the night in the guest 
wing at Seafront. The note was from Olive Thorin, and in spite of all her 
suspicions, Cordelia could not quite believe it a forgery. As it was not. Olive 
had written it, listlessly and without questions, when Susan asked.
"What's wrong with my niece?" Cordelia had snapped. "She tired, sai. And with 
the dolor de garganta."
"Sore throat? So close before Fair-Day? Ridiculous! I don't believe it! Susan's 
never sick!"
"Dolor de garganta," Maria repeated, impassive as only a peasant woman can be in 
the face of disbelief, and with that Cordelia had to be satisfied. Maria herself 
had no idea what Susan was up to, and that was just the way Susan liked it.
She'd gone over the balcony, moving nimbly down the fifteen feet of tangled 
vines growing up the north side of the building, and through the rear servants' 
door in the wall. There Roland had been waiting, and after two warm minutes with 
which we need not concern ourselves, they rode double on Rusher to the 
graveyard, where Cuthbert and Alain waited, full of expectation and nervous 
hope.
 
3
 
Susan looked first at the placid blond one with the round face, whose name was 
not Richard Stockworth but Alain Johns. Then at the other one—he from whom she 
had sensed such doubt of her and perhaps even anger at her. Cuthbert Allgood was 
his name.
They sat side by side on a fallen gravestone which had been overrun with ivy, 
their feet in a little brook of mist. Susan slid from Rusher's back and 
approached them slowly. They stood up. Alain made an In-World bow, leg out, knee 
locked, heel stiffly planted. "Lady," he said. "Long days—"
Now the other was beside him—thin and dark, with a face that would have been 
handsome had it not seemed so restless. His dark eyes were really quite 
beautiful.
"- and pleasant nights," Cuthbert finished, doubling Alain's bow. I he two of 
them looked so like comic courtiers in a Fair-Day sketch that Susan laughed. She 
couldn't help herself. Then she curtseyed to them deeply, spreading her arms to 
mime the skirts she wasn't wearing. "And may you have twice the number, 
gentlemen."
Then they simply looked at each other, three young people who were uncertain 
exactly how to proceed. Roland didn't help; he sat astride K usher and only 
watched carefully.
Susan took a tentative step forward, not laughing now. There were still dimples 
at the comers of her lips, but her eyes were anxious.
"I hope you don't hate me," she said. "I'd understand it if you did— I've come 
into your plans ... and between the three of you, as well—but I couldn't help 
it." Her hands were still out at her sides. Now she raised them to Alain and 
Cuthbert, palms up. "I love him."
"We don't hate you," Alain said. "Do we, Bert?"
For a terrible moment Cuthbert was silent, looking over Susan's shoulder, 
seeming to study the waxing Demon Moon. She felt her heart stop. Then his gaze 
returned to her and he gave a smile of such sweetness that a confused but 
brilliant thought (If I'd met this one first—, it began) shot through her mind 
like a comet.
"Roland's love is my love," Cuthbert said. He reached out, took her hands, and 
drew her forward so she stood between him and Alain like a sister with her two 
brothers. "For we have been friends since we wore cradle-clothes, and we'll 
continue as friends until one of us leaves the path and enters the clearing." 
Then he grinned like a kid. "Mayhap we'll all find the end of the path together, 
the way things are going."
"And soon," Alain added.
"Just so long," Susan Delgado finished, "as my Aunt Cordelia doesn't come along 
as our chaperone."
 
4
 
"We are ka-tet," Roland said. "We are one from many."
He looked at each in turn, and saw no disagreement in their eyes. They had 
repaired to the mausoleum, and their breath smoked from their mouths and noses. 
Roland squatted on his hunkers, looking at the other three, who sat in a line on 
a stone meditation bench flanked by skeletal bouquets in stone pots. The floor 
was scattered with the petals of dead roses. Cuthbert and Alain, on either side 
of Susan, had their arms around her in quite unselfconscious fashion. Again 
Roland thought of one sister and two protective brothers.
"We're greater than we were," Alain said. "I feel that very strongly."
"I do, too," Cuthbert said. He looked around. "And a fine meeting-place, as 
well. Especially for such a ka-tet as ours."
Roland didn't smile; repartee had never been his strong suit. "Let's talk about 
what's going on in Hambry," he said, "and then we'll talk about the immediate 
future."
"We weren't sent here on a mission, you know," Alain said to Susan. "We were 
sent by our fathers to get us out of the way, that's all. Roland excited the 
enmity of a man who is likely a cohort of John Parson's—"
" 'Excited the enmity of,' " Cuthbert said. "That's a good phrase. Round. I 
intend to remember it and use it at every opportunity."
"Control yourself," Roland said. "I've no desire to be here all night."
"Cry your pardon, O great one," Cuthbert said, but his eyes danced in a 
decidedly unrepentant way.
"We came with carrier pigeons for the sending and receiving of mes­sages," Alain 
went on, "but I think the pigeons were laid on so our parents could be sure we 
were all right."
"Yes," Cuthbert said. "What Alain's trying to say is that we've been caught by 
surprise. Roland and I have had ... disagreements ... about how to go on. He 
wanted to wait. I didn't. I now believe he was right."
"But for the wrong reasons," Roland said in a dry tone. "In any case, we've 
settled our differences."
Susan was looking back and forth between them with something like alarm. What 
her gaze settled upon was the bruise on Roland's lower left jaw, clearly visible 
even in the faint light which crept through the half-open sepultura door. 
"Settled them how?"
"It doesn't matter," Roland said. "Farson intends a battle, or perhaps a series 
of them, in the Shaved Mountains, to the northwest of Gilead. To the forces of 
the Affiliation moving toward him, he will seem trapped. In a more ordinary 
course of things, that might even have been true. Farson intends to engage them, 
trap them, and destroy them with the weapons of the Old People. These he will 
drive with oil from Citgo. The oil in the tankers we saw, Susan."
"Where will it be refined so Farson can use it?"
"Someplace west of here along his route," Cuthbert said. "We think very likely 
the Vi Castis. Do you know it? It's mining country."
"I've heard of it, but I've never actually been out of Hambry in my life." She 
looked levelly at Roland. "I think that's to change soon."
"There's a good deal of machinery left over from the days of the Old People in 
those mountains," Alain said. "Most is up in the draws and canyons, they say. 
Robots and killer lights—razor-beams, such are called, because they'll cut you 
clean in half if you run into them. The gods know what else. Some of it's 
undoubtedly just legend, but where there's smoke, there's often fire. In any 
case, it seems the most likely spot for refining."
"And then they'd take it on to where Farson's waiting," Cuthbert said. "Not that 
that part matters to us; we've got all we can handle right here in Mejis."
"I've been waiting in order to get it all," Roland said. "Every bit of their 
damned plunder."
"In case you haven't noticed, our friend is just a wee nubbin ambi­tious," 
Cuthbert said, and winked.
Roland paid no attention. He was looking in the direction of Eyebolt Canyon. 
There was no noise from there this night; the wind had shifted onto its autumn 
course and away from town. "If we can fire the oil, the rest will go up with 
it... and the oil is the most important thing, anyway. I want to destroy it, 
then I want to get the hell out of here. The four of us."
"They mean to move on Reaping Day, don't they?" Susan asked.
"Oh yes, it seems so," Cuthbert said, then laughed. It was a rich, in­fectious 
sound—the laughter of a child—and as he did it, he rocked back and forth and 
held his stomach as a child would.
Susan looked puzzled. "What? What is it?"
"I can't tell," he said, chortling. "It's too rich for me. I'll laugh all the 
way through it, and Roland will be annoyed. You do it, Al. Tell Susan about our 
visit from Deputy Dave."
"He came out to see us at the Bar K," Alain said, smiling himself. "Talked to us 
like an uncle. Told us Hambry-folk don't care for outsiders at their Fairs, and 
we'd best keep right to our place on the day of the full moon."
"That's insane!" Susan spoke indignantly, as one is apt to when one hears one's 
hometown unjustly maligned. "We welcome strangers to our fairs, so we do, and 
always have! We're not a bunch of... of savages!"
"Soft, soft," Cuthbert said, giggling. "We know that, but Deputy Dave don't know 
we know, do he? He knows his wife makes the best white tea for miles around, and 
after that Dave's pretty much at sea. Sher­iff Herk knows a leetle more, I sh'd 
judge, but not much."
"The pains they've taken to warn us off means two things," Roland said. "The 
first is that they intend to move on Reaping Fair-Day, just as you said, Susan. 
The second is that they think they can steal Parson's goods right out from under 
our noses."
"And then perhaps blame us for it afterward," Alain said.
She looked curiously from one to the other, then said: "What have you planned, 
then?"
"To destroy what they've left at Citgo as bait of our own and then to strike 
them where they gather," Roland said quietly. "That's Hanging Rock. At least 
half the tankers they mean to take west are there already. They'll have a force 
of men. As many as two hundred, perhaps, although I think it will turn out to be 
less. I intend that all these men should die."
"If they don't, we will," Alain said.
"How can the four of us kill two hundred soldiers?"
"We can't. But if we can start one or two of the clustered tankers burning, we 
think there'll be an explosion—mayhap a fearful one. The surviving soldiers will 
be terrified, and the surviving leaders infuriated. They'll see us, because 
we'll let ourselves be seen ..."
Alain and Cuthbert were watching him breathlessly. The rest they had either been 
told or had guessed, but this part was the counsel Roland had, until now, kept 
to himself.
"What then?" she asked, frightened. "What then? "
"I think we can lead them into Eyebolt Canyon," Roland said. "I think we can 
lead them into the thinny."
 
5
 
Thunderstruck silence greeted this. Then, not without respect, Susan said:
"You're mad."
"No," Cuthbert said thoughtfully. "He's not. You're thinking about that little 
cut in the canyon wall, aren't you, Roland? The one just before the jog in the 
canyon floor."
Roland nodded. "Four could scramble up that way without too much trouble. At the 
top, we'll pile a fair amount of rock. Enough to start a landslide down on any 
that should try following us."
"That's horrible," Susan said.
"It's survival," Alain replied. "If they're allowed to have the oil and put it 
to use, they'll slaughter every Affiliation man that gets in range of their 
weapons. The Good Man takes no prisoners."
"I didn't say wrong, only horrible."
They were silent for a moment, four children contemplating the mur­ders of two 
hundred men. Except they wouldn't all be men; many (per­haps even most) would be 
boys roughly their own ages.
At last she said, "Those not caught in your rockslide will only ride back out of 
the canyon again."
"No, they won't." Alain had seen the lay of the land and now under­stood the 
matter almost completely. Roland was nodding, and there was a trace of a smile 
on his mouth.
"Why not?"
"The brush at the front of the canyon. We're going to set it on fire, aren't we, 
Roland? And if the prevailing winds are prevailing that day ... the smoke ..."
"It'll drive them the rest of the way in," Roland agreed. "Into the thinny."
"How will you set the brush-pile alight?" Susan asked. "I know it's dry, but 
surely you won't have time to use a sulfur match or your flint and steel."
"You can help us there," Roland said, "just as you can help us set the tankers 
alight. We can't count on touching off the oil with just our guns, you know; 
crude oil is a lot less volatile than people might think. And Sheemie's going to 
help you, I hope."
"Tell me what you want."
 
6
 
They talked another twenty minutes, refining the plan surprisingly little— all 
of them seemed to understand that if they planned too much and things changed 
suddenly, they might freeze. Ka had swept them into this; it was perhaps best 
that they count on ka—and their own courage—to sweep them back out again.
Cuthbert was reluctant to involve Sheemie, but finally went along— the boy's 
part would be minimal, if not exactly low-risk, and Roland agreed that they 
could take him with them when they left Mejis for good. A party of rive was as 
fine as a party of four, he said.
"All right," Cuthbert said at last, then turned to Susan. "It ought to be you or 
me who talks to him."
"I will."
"Make sure he understands not to tell Coral Thorin so much as a word," Cuthbert 
said. "It isn't that the Mayor's her brother; I just don't trust that bitch."
"I can give ye a better reason than Hart not to trust her," Susan said. "My aunt 
says she's taken up with Eldred Jonas. Poor Aunt Cord! She's had the worst 
summer of her life. Nor will the fall be much better, I wot. Folk will call her 
the aunt of a traitor."
"Some will know better," Alain said. "Some always do."
"Mayhap, but my Aunt Cordelia's the sort of woman who never hears good gossip. 
No more does she speak it. She fancied Jonas herself, ye ken."
Cuthbert was thunderstruck. "Fancied Jonas! By all the fiddling gods! Can you 
imagine it! Why, if they hung folk for bad taste in love, your auntie would go 
early, wouldn't she?"
Susan giggled, hugged her knees, and nodded.
"It's time we left," Roland said. "If something chances that Susan needs to know 
right away, we'll use the red stone in the rock wall at Green Heart."
"Good," Cuthbert said. "Let's get out of here. The cold in this place eats into 
the bones."
Roland stirred, stretching life back into his legs. "The important thing is that 
they've decided to leave us free while they round up and run. That's our edge, 
and it's a good one. And now—"
Alain's quiet voice stopped him. "There's another matter. Very important."
Roland sank back down on his hunkers, looking at Alain curiously.
"The witch."
Susan started, but Roland only barked an impatient laugh. "She doesn't figure in 
our business, Al—I can't see how she could. I don't believe she's a part of 
Jonas's conspiracy—"
"Neither do I," Alain said.
"—and Cuthbert and I persuaded her to keep her mouth shut about Susan and me. If 
we hadn't, her aunt would have raised the roof by now."
"But don't you see?" Alain asked. "Who Rhea might have told isn't really the 
question. The question is how she knew in the first place."
"It's pink," Susan said abruptly. Her hand was on her hair, fingers touching the 
place where the cut ends had begun to grow out.
"What's pink?" Alain asked.
"The moon," she said, and then shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know what 
I'm talking about. Brainless as Pinch and Jilly, I am ... Roland? What's wrong? 
What ails thee?"
For Roland was no longer hunkering; he had collapsed into a loose sitting 
position on the petal-strewn stone floor. He looked like a young man trying not 
to faint. Outside the mausoleum there was a bony rattle of fall leaves and the 
cry of a nightjar.
"Dear gods," he said in a low voice. "It can't be. It can't be true." His eyes 
met Cuthbert's.
All the humor had washed out of the latter young man's face, leaving a ruthless 
and calculating bedrock his own mother might not have recog­nized ... or might 
not have wanted to.
"Pink," Cuthbert said. "Isn't that interesting—the same word your father 
happened to mention just before we left, Roland, wasn't it? He warned us about 
the pink one. We thought it was a joke. Almost."
"Oh!" Alain's eyes flew wide open. "Oh, fuck!" he blurted. He real­ized what he 
had said while sitting leg-to-leg with his best friend's lover and clapped his 
hands over his mouth. His cheeks flamed red.
Susan barely noticed. She was staring at Roland in growing fear and confusion. 
"What?" she asked. "What is it ye know? Tell me! Tell me!"
"I'd like to hypnotize you again, as I did that day in the willow grove," Roland 
said. "I want to do it right now, before we talk of this more and drag mud 
across what you remember."
Roland had reached into his pocket while she was speaking. Now he took out a 
shell, and it began to dance across the back of his hand once more. Her eyes 
went to it at once, like steel drawn to a magnet.
"May I?" he asked. "By your leave, dear."
"Aye, as ye will." Her eyes were widening and growing glassy. "I don't know why 
ye think this time should be any different, but. . ." She stopped talking, her 
eyes continuing to follow the dance of the shell across Roland's hand. When he 
stopped moving it and clasped it in his fist, her eyes closed. Her breath was 
soft and regular.
"Gods, she went like a stone," Cuthbert whispered, amazed. "She's been 
hypnotized before. By Rhea, I think." Roland paused. Then: "Susan, do you hear 
me?"
"Aye, Roland, I hear ye very well." "I want you to hear another voice, too." 
"Whose?"
Roland beckoned to Alain. If anyone could break through the block in Susan's 
mind (or find a way around it), it would be him.
"Mine, Susan," Alain said, coming to Roland's side. "Do you know it?" She smiled 
with her eyes closed. "Aye, you're Alain. Richard Stock-worth that was."
"That's right." He looked at Roland with nervous, questioning eyes— What shall I 
ask her?—but for a moment Roland didn't reply. He was in two other places, both 
at the same time, and hearing two different voices.
Susan, by the stream in the willow grove: She says, "Aye, lovely, just so, it's 
a good girl y'are, " then everything's pink.
His father, in the yard behind the Great Hall: It's the grapefruit. By which I 
mean it's the pink one. 
The pink one.
 
7
 
Their horses were saddled and loaded; the three boys stood before them, 
outwardly stolid, inwardly feverish to be gone. The road, and the myster­ies 
that lie along it, calls out to none as it calls to the young.
They were in the courtyard which lay east of the Great Hall, not far from where 
Roland had bested Cort, setting all these things in motion. It was early 
morning, the sun not yet risen, the mist lying over the green fields in gray 
ribbons. At a distance of about twenty paces, Cuthbert's and Alain's fathers 
stood sentry with their legs apart and their hands on the butts of their guns. 
It was unlikely that Marten (who had for the time be­ing absented himself from 
the palace, and, so far as any knew, from Gilead itself) would mount any sort of 
attack on them—not here—but it wasn't entirely out of the question, either.
So it was that only Roland's father spoke to them as they mounted up to begin 
their ride east to Mejis and the Outer Arc.
"One last thing," he said as they adjusted their saddle girths. "I doubt you'll 
see anything that (ouches on our interests—not in Mejis—but I'd have you keep an 
eye out for a color of the rainbow. The Wizard's Rain-how, that is." He 
chuckled, then added: "It's the grapefruit. By which I mean it's the pink one."
"Wizard's Rainbow is just a fairy-tale," Cuthbert said, smiling in response to 
Steven's smile. Then—perhaps it was something in Steven Deschain's 
eyes—Cuthbert's smile faltered. "Isn't it?"
"Not all the old stories are true, but I think that of Maerlyn's Rainbow is," 
Steven replied. "It's said that once there were thirteen glass balls in it—one 
for each of the Twelve Guardians, and one representing the nexus-point of the 
Beams."
"One for the Tower," Roland said in a low voice, feeling gooseflesh. "One for 
the Dark Tower."
"Aye, Thirteen it was called when I was a boy. We'd tell stories about the black 
ball around the fire sometimes, and scare ourselves silly . . . un­less our 
fathers caught us at it. My own da said it wasn't wise to talk about Thirteen, 
for it might hear its name called and roll your way. But Black Thirteen doesn't 
matter to you three ... not now, at least. No, it's the pink one. Maerlyn's 
Grapefruit."
It was impossible to tell how serious he was ... or if he was serious at all.
"If the other balls in the Wizard's Rainbow did exist, most are broken now. Such 
things never stay in one place or one pair of hands for long, you know, and even 
enchanted glass has a way of breaking. Yet at least three or four bends o' the 
Rainbow may still be rolling around this sad world of ours. The blue, almost 
certainly. A desert tribe of slow mu­tants—the Total Hogs, they called 
themselves—had that one less than fifty years ago, although it's slipped from 
sight again since. The green and the orange are reputed to be in Lud and Dis, 
respectively. And, just maybe, the pink one."
"What exactly do they do?" Roland asked. "What are they good for?"
"For seeing. Some colors of the Wizard's Rainbow are reputed to look into the 
future. Others look into the other worlds—those where the demons live, those 
where the Old People are supposed to have gone when they left our world. These 
may also show the location of the secret doors which pass between the worlds. 
Other colors, they say, can look far in our own world, and see things people 
would as soon keep secret. They never see the good; only the ill. How much of 
this is true and how much is myth no one knows for sure."
He looked at them, his smile fading.
"But this we do know: John Farson is said to have a talisman, some­thing that 
glows in his tent late at night ... sometimes before battles, sometimes before 
large movements of troop and horse, sometimes before momentous decisions are 
announced. And it glows pink."
"Maybe he has an electric light and puts a pink scarf over it when he prays," 
Cuthbert said. He looked around at his friends, a little defensively. "I'm not 
joking; there are people who do that."
"Perhaps," Roland's father said. "Perhaps that's all it is, or something like. 
But perhaps it's a good deal more. All I can say of my own knowl­edge is that he 
keeps beating us, he keeps slipping away from us, and he keeps turning up where 
he's least expected. If the magic is in him and not in some talisman he owns, 
gods help the Affiliation."
"We'll keep an eye out, if you like," Roland said, "but Parson's in the north or 
west. We're going east." As if his father did not know this.
"If it's a bend o' the Rainbow," Steven replied, "it could be any­where—east or 
south's as likely as west. He can't keep it with him all the time, you see. No 
matter how much it would ease his mind and heart to do so. No one can."
"Why not?"
"Because they're alive, and hungry," Steven said. "One begins using em; one ends 
being used by em. If Farson has a piece of the Rainbow, he'll send it away and 
call it back only when he needs it. He understands the risk of losing it, but he 
also understands the risk of keeping it too long."
There was a question which the other two, constrained by politeness, couldn't 
ask. Roland could, and did. "You are serious about this. Dad? It's not just a 
leg-pull, is it?"
"I'm sending you away at an age when many boys still don't sleep well if their 
mothers don't kiss them goodnight," Steven said. "I expect to see all three of 
you again, alive and well—Mejis is a lovely, quiet place, or was when I was a 
boy—but I can't be sure of it. As things are these days, no one can be sure of 
anything. I wouldn't send you away with a joke and a laugh. I'm surprised you 
think it."
"Cry your pardon," Roland said. An uneasy peace had descended between him and 
his father, and he would not rupture it. Still, he was wild to be off. Pusher 
jigged beneath him, as if seconding that.
"I don't expect you boys to see Maerlyn's glass . . . but I didn't expect to be 
seeing you off at fourteen with revolvers tucked in your bed­rolls, either. Ka's 
at work here, and where ka works, anything is possible."
Slowly, slowly, Steven took off his hat, stepped back, and swept them a bow. "Go 
in peace, boys. And return in health."
"Long days and pleasant nights, sai," Alain said.
"Good fortune," Cuthbert said.
"I love you," Roland said.
Steven nodded. "Thankee-sai—I love you, too. My blessings, boys." He said this 
last in a loud voice, and the other two men—Robert Allgood and Christopher 
Johns, who had been known in the days of his savage youth as Burning Chris—added 
their own blessings.
So the three of them rode toward their end of the Great Road, while summer lay 
all about them, breathless as a gasp. Roland looked up and saw something that 
made him forget all about the Wizard's Rainbow. It was his mother, leaning out 
of her apartment's bedroom window: the oval of her face surrounded by the 
timeless gray stone of the castle's west wing. There were tears coursing down 
her cheeks, but she smiled and lifted one hand in a wide wave. Of the three of 
them, only Roland saw her.
He didn't wave back.
 
8
 
"Roland!" An elbow struck him in the ribs, hard enough to dispel these memories, 
brilliant as they were, and return him to the present. It was Cuthbert. "Do 
something, if you mean to! Get us out of this deadhouse before I shiver the skin 
right off my bones!"
Roland put his mouth close by Alain's ear. "Be ready to help me."
Alain nodded.
Roland turned to Susan. "After the first time we were together an-tet, you went 
to the stream in the grove."
"Aye."
"You cut some of your hair."
"Aye." That same dreaming voice. "So I did."
"Would you have cut it all?"
"Aye, every lick and lock."
"Do you know who told you to cut it?"
A long pause. Roland was about to turn to Alain when she said, "Rhea." Another 
pause. "She wanted to fiddle me up."
"Yes, but what happened later? What happened while you stood in the doorway?"
"Oh, and something else happened before."
"What?"
"I fetched her wood," said she, and said no more.
Roland looked at Cuthbert, who shrugged. Alain spread his hands. Roland thought 
of asking the latter boy to step forward, and judged it still wasn't quite time.
"Never mind the wood for now," he said, "or all that came before. We'll talk of 
that later, mayhap, but not just yet. What happened as you were leaving? What 
did she say to you about your hair?"
"Whispered in my ear. And she had a Jesus-man."
"Whispered what?"
"I don't know. That part is pink."
Here it was. He nodded to Alain. Alain bit his lip and stepped for­ward. He 
looked frightened, but as he took Susan's hands in his own and spoke to her, his 
voice was calm and soothing.
"Susan? It's Alain Johns. Do you know me?"
"Aye—Richard Stockworth that was."
"What did Rhea whisper in your ear?"
A frown, faint as a shadow on an overcast day, creased her brow. "I can't see. 
It's pink."
"You don't need to see," Alain said. "Seeing's not what we want right now. Close 
your eyes so you can't do it at all."
"They are closed," she said, a trifle pettishly. She's frightened, Roland 
thought. He felt an urge to tell Alain to stop, to wake her up, and restrained 
it.
"The ones inside," Alain said. "The ones that look out from memory. Close those, 
Susan. Close them for your father's sake, and tell me not what you see but what 
you hear. Tell me what she said."
Chillingly, unexpectedly, the eyes in her face opened as she closed those in her 
mind. She stared at Roland, and through him, with the eyes of an ancient statue. 
Roland bit back a scream.
"You were in the doorway, Susan?" Alain asked.
"Aye. So we both were."
"Be there again."
"Aye." A dreaming voice. Faint but clear. "Even with my eyes closed I can 
see-the moon's light. 'Tis as big as a grapefruit."
It's the grapefruit, Roland thought. By which I mean, it's the pink one.
"And what do you hear? What does she say?"
"No, I say." The faintly petulant voice of a little girl. "First I say, Alain. I 
say 'And is our business done?' and she says 'Mayhap there's one more little 
thing,' and then ... then..."
Alain squeezed gently down on her hands, using whatever it was he had in his 
own, his touch, sending it into her. She tried feebly to pull back, but he 
wouldn't let her. "Then what? What next?"
"She has a little silver medal."
"Yes?"
"She leans close and asks if I hear her. I can smell her breath. It reeks o' 
garlic. And other things, even worse." Susan's face wrinkled in dis­taste. "I 
say I hear her. Now I can see. I see the medal she has."
"Very well, Susan," Alain said. "What else do you see?"
"Rhea. She looks like a skull in the moonlight. A skull with hair."
"Gods," Cuthbert muttered, and crossed his arms over his chest.
"She says I should listen. I say I will listen. She says I should obey. I say I 
will obey. She says 'Aye, lovely, just so, it's a good girl y'are.' She's 
stroking my hair. All the time. My braid." Susan raised a dreaming, drowning 
hand, pale in the shadows of the crypt, to her blonde hair. "And then she says 
there's something I'm to do when my virginity's over. 'Wait,' she says, 'until 
he's asleep beside ye, then cut yer hair off yer head. Every strand. Right down 
to yer very skull.' "
The boys looked at her in mounting horror as her voice became Rhea's—the 
growling, whining cadences of the old woman of the Coos. Even the face—except 
for the coldly dreaming eyes—had become a hag's face.
" 'Cut it all, girl, every whore's strand of it, aye, and go back to him as bald 
as ye came from yer mother! See how he likes ye then!' "
She fell silent. Alain turned his pallid face to Roland. His lips were 
trembling, but still he held her hands.
"Why is the moon pink?" Roland asked. "Why is the moon pink when you try to 
remember?"
"It's her glam." Susan seemed almost surprised, almost gay. Confid­ing. "She 
keeps it under her bed, so she does. She doesn't know I saw it."
"Are you sure?"
"Aye," Susan said, then added simply: "She would have killed me if she knew." 
She giggled, shocking them all. "Rhea has the moon in a box under her bed." She 
lilted this in the singsong voice of a small child.
"A pink moon," Roland said.
"Aye."
"Under her bed."
"Aye." This time she did pull her hands free of Alain's. She made a circle with 
them in the air, and as she looked up at it, a dreadful expres­sion of greed 
passed over her face like a cramp. "I should like to have it, Roland. So I 
should. Lovely moon! I saw it when she sent me for the wood. Through her window. 
She looked ... young." Then, once again: "I sh'd like to have such a thing."
"No—you wouldn't. But it's under her bed?"
"Aye, in a magic place she makes with passes."
"She has a piece of Maerlyn's Rainbow," Cuthbert said in a wonder­ing voice. 
"The old bitch has what your da told us about—no wonder she knows all she does!"
"Is there more we need?" Alain asked. "Her hands have gotten very cold. I don't 
like having her this deep. She's done well, but. . ."
"I think we're done."
"Shall I tell her to forget?"
Roland shook his head at once—they were ka-tet, for good or ill. He took hold of 
her fingers, and yes, they were cold.
"Susan?"
"Aye, dear."
"I'm going to say a rhyme. When I finish, you'll remember every­thing, as you 
did before. All right?"
She smiled and closed her eyes again. "Bird and bear and hare and fish. .."
Smiling, Roland finished, "Give my love her fondest wish."
Her eyes opened. She smiled. "You," she said again, and kissed him. "Still you, 
Roland. Still you, my love."
Unable to help himself, Roland put his arms around her.
Cuthbert looked away. Alain looked down at his boots and cleared his throat.
 
9
 
As they rode back toward Seafront, Susan with her arms around Roland's waist, 
she asked: "Will you take the glass from her?"
"Best leave it where it is for now. It was left in her safekeeping by Jonas, on 
behalf of Parson, I have no doubt. It's to be sent west with the rest of the 
plunder; I've no doubt of that, either. We'll deal with it when we deal with the 
tankers and Parson's men."
"Ye'd take it with us?"
"Take it or break it. I suppose I'd rather take it back to my father, but that 
has its own risks. We'll have to be careful. It's a powerful glam."
"Suppose she sees our plans? Suppose she warns Jonas or Kimba Rimer?"
"If she doesn't see us coming to take away her precious toy, I don't think 
she'll mind our plans one way or the other. I think we've put a scare into her, 
and if the ball has really gotten a hold on her, watching in it's what she'll 
mostly want to do with her time now."
"And hold onto it. She'll want to do that, too."
"Aye."
Rusher was walking along a path through the seacliff woods. Through the thinning 
branches they could glimpse the ivied gray wall surrounding Mayor's House and 
hear the rhythmic roar of waves breaking on the shingle below.
"You can get in safe, Susan?"
"No fear."
"And you know what you and Sheemie are to do?"
"Aye. I feel better than I have in ages. It's as if my mind is finally clear of 
some old shadow."
"If so, it's Alain you have to thank. I couldn't have done it on my own."
"There's magic in his hands."
"Yes." They had reached the servants' door. Susan dismounted with fluid ease. He 
stepped down himself and stood beside her with an arm around her waist. She was 
looking up at the moon.
"Look, it's fattened enough so you can see the beginning of the De­mon's face. 
Does thee see it?"
A blade of nose, a bone of grin. No eye yet, but yes, he saw it.
"It used to terrify me when I was little." Susan was whispering now, mindful of 
the house behind the wall. "I'd pull the blind when the Demon was full. I was 
afraid that if he could see me, he'd reach down and take me up to where he was 
and eat me." Her lips were trembling. "Children are silly, aren't they?"
"Sometimes." He hadn't been afraid of Demon Moon himself as a small child, but 
he was afraid of this one. The future seemed so dark, and the way through to the 
light so slim. "I love thee, Susan. With all my heart, I do."
"I know. And I love thee." She kissed his mouth with gentle open lips. Put his 
hand on her breast for a moment, then kissed the warm palm. He held her, and she 
looked past him at the ripening moon.
"A week until the Reap," she said. "Fin de ano is what the vaqueros and 
labradoros call it. Do they call it so in your land?"
"Near enough," Roland said. "It's called closing the year. Women go about giving 
preserves and kisses."
She laughed softly against his shoulder. "Perhaps I'll not find things so 
different, after all."
"You must save all your best kisses for me."
"I will."
"Whatever comes, we'll be together," he said, but above them, De­mon Moon 
grinned into the starry dark above the Clean Sea, as if he knew a different 
future.

 

 
 
CHAPTER VI
CLOSING THE YEAR
 
1
 
So now comes to Mejis fin de ano, known in toward the center of Mid-World as 
closing the year. It comes as it has a thousand times before ... or ten 
thousand, or a hundred thousand. No one can tell for sure; the world has moved 
on and time has grown strange. In Mejis their saying is "Time is a face on the 
water."
In the fields, the last of the potatoes are being picked by men and women who 
wear gloves and their heaviest scrapes, for now the wind has turned firmly, 
blowing east to west, blowing hard, and always there's the smell of salt in the 
chilly air—a smell like tears. Los campesinos harvest the final rows cheerfully 
enough, talking of the things they'll do and the capers they'll cut at Reaping 
Fair, but they feel all of autumn's old sad­ness in the wind; the going of the 
year. It runs away from them like water in a stream, and although none speak of 
it, all know it very well.
In the orchards, the last and highest of the apples are picked by laugh­ing 
young men (in these not-quite-gales, the final days of picking belong only to 
them) who bob up and down like crow's nest lookouts. Above them, in skies which 
hold a brilliant, cloudless blue, squadrons of geese fly south, calling their 
rusty adieux.
The small fishing boats are pulled from the water; their hulls are scraped and 
painted by singing owners who mostly work stripped to the waist in spite of the 
chill in the air. They sing the old songs as they work—
 
I am a man of the bright blue sea,
All I see, all I see,
I am a man of the Barony,
All I see is mine-o!
 
I am a man of the bright blue hay,
All I say, all I say,
Until my nets are full I stay
All I say is fine-o!
 
—and sometimes a little cask of graf is tossed from dock to dock. On the bay 
itself only the large boats now remain, pacing about the big circles which mark 
their dropped nets as a working dog may pace around a flock of sheep. At noon 
the bay is a rippling sheet of autumn fire and the men on the boats sit 
cross-legged, eating their lunches, and know that all they see is theirs-o ... 
at least until the gray gales of autumn come swarming over the horizon, coughing 
out their gusts of sleet and snow.
Closing, closing the year.
Along the streets of Hambry, the Reap-lights now bum at night, and the hands of 
the stuffy-guys are painted red. Reap-charms hang every­where, and although 
women often kiss and are kissed in the streets and in both marketplaces—often by 
men they do not know—sexual intercourse has come to an almost complete halt. It 
will resume (with a bang, you might say) on Reap-Night. There will be the usual 
crop of Full Earth ba­bies the following year as a result.
On the Drop, the horses gallop wildly, as if understanding (very likely they do) 
that their time of freedom is coming to an end. They swoop and then stand with 
their faces pointing west when the wind gusts, show­ing their asses to winter. 
On the ranches, porch-nets are taken down and shutters rehung. In the huge ranch 
kitchens and smaller farmhouse kitchens, no one is stealing Reap-kisses, and no 
one is even thinking about sex. This is the time of putting up and laying by, 
and the kitchens fume with steam and pulse with heat from before dawn until long 
after dark. There is the smell of apples and beets and beans and sharproot and 
curing strips of meat. Women work ceaselessly all day and then sleep­walk to 
bed, where they lie like corpses until the next dark morning calls them back to 
their kitchens.
Leaves are burned in town yards, and as the week goes on and Old Demon's face 
shows ever more clearly, red-handed stuffy-guys are thrown on the pyres more and 
more frequently. In the fields, cornshucks flare like torches, and often 
stuffies bum with them, their red hands and white-cross eyes rippling in the 
heat. Men stand around these fires, not speaking, their faces solemn. No one 
will say what terrible old ways and unspeakable old gods are being propitiated 
by the burning of the stuffy-guys, but they all know well enough. From time to 
time one of these men will whisper two words under his breath: charyou tree.
They are closing, closing, closing the year.
The streets rattle with firecrackers-—and sometimes with a heftier "big-hang" 
that makes even placid carthorses rear in their traces—and echo with the 
laughter of children. On the porch of the mercantile and across the street at 
the Travellers' Rest, kisses—sometimes humidly open and with much sweet lashing 
of tongues—are exchanged, but Coral Thorin's whores ("cotton-gillies" is what 
the airy-fairy ones like Gert Moggins like to call themselves) are bored. They 
will have little custom this week.
This is not Year's End, when the winterlogs will bum and Mejis will be 
bam-dances from one end to the other . . . and yet it is. This is the real 
year's end, charyou tree, and everyone, from Stanley Ruiz standing at the bar 
beneath The Romp to the farthest of Fran Lengyll's vaqueros out on the edge of 
the Bad Grass, knows it. There is a kind of echo in the bright air, a yearning 
for other places in the blood, a loneliness in the heart that sings like the 
wind.
But this year there's something else, as well: a sense of wrongness that no one 
can quite voice. Folks who never had a nightmare in their lives will awake 
screaming with them during the week of fin de ano; men who consider themselves 
peaceful will find themselves not only in fist-fights but instigating them; 
discontented boys who would only have dreamed of running away in other years 
will this year actually do it, and most will not come back after the first night 
spent sleeping raw.
There is a sense—inarticulate but very much there—that things have gone amiss 
this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. 
For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World's last 
great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to 
flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It 
starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast's 
voice. Time is a face on the water.
 
2
 
Coral Thorin was coming down the High Street from the Bayview Hotel when she 
spied Sheemie, leading Caprichoso and heading in the opposite direction. The boy 
was singing "Careless Love" in a voice both high and sweet. His progress was 
slow; the barrels slung over Capi's back were half again as large as the ones he 
had carried up to the Coos not long before.
Coral hailed her boy-of-all-work cheerily enough. She had reason to be cheery; 
Eldred Jonas had no use for fin de ano abstinence. And for a man with a bad leg, 
he could be very inventive.
"Sheemie!" she called. "Where go ye? Seafront?"
"Aye," Sheemie said. "I've got the graf them asked for. All parties come Reaping 
Fair, aye, tons of em. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, drink graf to cool off a lot! 
How pretty you look, sai Thorin, cheeks all pinky-pink, so they are."
"Oh, law! How kind of you to say, Sheemie!" She favored him with a dazzling 
smile. "Go on, now, you flatterer—don't linger."
"Noey-no, off I go."
Coral stood watching after him and smiling. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, Sheemie 
had said. About the dancing Coral didn't know, but she was sure this year's 
Reaping would be hot, all right. Very hot indeed.
 
3
 
Miguel met Sheemie at Seafront's archway, gave him the look of lofty contempt he 
reserved for the lower orders, then pulled the cork from first one barrel and 
then the other. With the first, he only sniffed from the bung; at the second, he 
stuck his thumb in and then sucked it thoughtfully. With his wrinkled cheeks 
hollowed inward and his toothless old mouth working, he looked like an ancient 
bearded baby.
"Tasty, ain't it?" Sheemie asked. "Tasty as a pasty, ain't it, good old Miguel, 
been here a thousand years?"
Miguel, still sucking his thumb, favored Sheemie with a sour look. "Andale. 
Andale, simplon. "
Sheemie led his mule around the house to the kitchen. Here the breeze off the 
ocean was sharp and shiversome. He waved to the women in the kitchen, but not a 
one waved back; likely they didn't even see him. A pot boiled on every trink of 
the enormous stove, and the women— working in loose long-sleeved cotton garments 
like shifts and wearing their hair tied up in brightly colored clouts—moved 
about like phantoms glimpsed in fog.
Sheemie took first one barrel from Capi's back, then the other. Grunt­ing, he 
carried them to the huge oak tank by the back door. He opened the tank's lid, 
bent over it, and then backed away from the eye-wateringly strong smell of 
elderly graf.
"Whew!" he said, hoisting the first barrel. "Ye could get drunk just on
the smell o' that lot!"
He emptied in the fresh graf, careful not to spill. When he was fin­ished, the 
tank was pretty well topped up. That was good, for on Reaping Night, apple-beer 
would flow out of the kitchen taps like water.
He slipped the empty barrels into their carriers, looked into the kitchen once 
more to be sure he wasn't being observed (he wasn't; Coral's simple-minded 
tavern-boy was the last thing on anyone's minds that morning), and then led Capi 
not back the way they'd come but along a path which led to Seafront's storage 
sheds.
There were three of them in a row, each with its own red-handed stuffy-guy 
sitting in front. The guys appeared to be watching Sheemie, and that gave him 
the shivers. Then he remembered his trip to crazy old bitch-lady Rhea's house. 
She had been scary. These were just old duds stuffed full of straw.
"Susan?" he called, low. "Are ye here?"
The door of the center shed was ajar. Now it trundled open a little. "Come in!" 
she called, also low. "Bring the mule! Hurry!"
He led Capi into a shed which smelled of straw and beans and tack ... and 
something else. Something sharper. Fireworks, he thought. Shooting-powder, too.
Susan, who had spent the morning enduring final fittings, was dressed in a thin 
silk wrapper and large leather boots. Her hair was done up in curling papers of 
bright blue and red.
Sheemie tittered. "You look quite amusing, Susan, daughter of Pat. Quite a 
chuckle for me, I think."
"Yes, I'm a picture for an artist to paint, all right," Susan said, look­ing 
distracted. "We have to hurry. I have twenty minutes before I'm missed. I'll be 
missed before, if that randy old goat is looking for me ...let's be quick!"
They lifted the barrels from Capi's back. Susan took a broken horse-bit from the 
pocket of her wrapper and used the sharp end to pry off one of the tops. She 
tossed the bit to Sheemie, who pried off the other. The apple-tart smell of graf 
filled the shed.
"Here!" She tossed Sheemie a soft cloth. "Dry it out as well as you can. Doesn't 
have to be perfect, they're wrapped, but it's best to be safe."
They wiped the insides of the barrels, Susan stealing nervous glances at the 
door every few seconds. "All right," she said. "Good. Now ... there's two kinds. 
I'm sure they won't be missed; there's enough stuff back there to blow up half 
the world." She hurried back into the dimness of the shed, holding the hem of 
her wrapper up with one hand, her boots clomping. When she came back, her arms 
were full of wrapped packages.
"These are the bigger ones," she said.
He stored them in one of the casks. There were a dozen packages in all, and 
Sheemie could feel round things inside, each about the size of a child's fist. 
Big-bangers. By the time he had finished packing and putting the top back on the 
barrel, she had returned with an armload of smaller packages. These he stored in 
the other barrel. They were the little 'uns, from the feel, the ones that not 
only banged but flashed colored fire.
She helped him resling the barrels on Capi's back, still shooting those little 
glances at the shed door. When the barrels were secured to Caprichoso's sides, 
Susan sighed with relief and brushed her sweaty forehead with the backs of her 
hands. "Thank the gods that part's over," she said. "Now ye know where ye're to 
take them?"
"Aye, Susan daughter of Pat. To the Bar K. My friend Arthur Heath will put em 
safe."
"And if anyone asks what ye're doing out that way?" "Taking sweet graf to the 
In-World boys, 'cause they've decided not to come to town for the Fair . . . why 
won't they, Susan? Don't they like Fairs?"
"Ye'll know soon enough. Don't mind it now, Sheemie. Go on—best be on your way."
Yet he lingered.
"What?" she asked, trying not to be impatient. "Sheemie, what is it?"
"I'd like to take a fin de ano kiss from ye, so I would." Sheemie's face had 
gone an alarming shade of red.
Susan laughed in spite of herself, then stood on her toes and kissed the comer 
of his mouth. With that, Sheemie floated out to the Bar K with his load of fire.
 
4
 
Reynolds rode out to Citgo the following day, galloping with a scarf wrapped 
around his face so only his eyes peered out. He would be very glad to get out of 
this damned place that couldn't decide if it was ranch-land or seacoast. The 
temperature wasn't all that low, but after coming in over the water, the wind 
cut like a razor. Nor was that all—there was a brooding quality to Hambry and 
all of Mejis as the days wound down toward the Reap; a haunted feeling he didn't 
care for a bit. Roy felt it, too. Reynolds could see it in his eyes.
No, he'd be glad to have those three baby knights so much ash in the wind and 
this place just a memory.
He dismounted in the crumbling refinery parking lot, tied his horse to the 
bumper of a rusty old hulk with the mystery-word chevrolet barely readable on 
its tailboard, then walked toward the oilpatch. The wind blew hard, chilling him 
even through the ranch-style sheepskin coat he wore, and twice he had to yank 
his hat down around his ears to keep it from blowing off. On the whole, he was 
glad he couldn't see himself; he proba­bly looked like a fucking farmer.
The place seemed fine, though . . . which was to say, deserted. The wind made a 
lonely soughing sound as it combed through the firs on ei­ther side of the pipe. 
You'd never guess that there were a dozen pairs of eyes looking out at you as 
you strolled.
"Hai!" he called. "Come on out here, pard, and let's have some palaver."
For a moment there was no response; then Hiram Quint of the Piano Ranch and 
Barkie Callahan of the Travellers' Rest came ducking their way out through the 
trees. Holy shit, Reynolds thought, somewhere be­tween awe and amusement. There 
ain't that much beef in a butcher shop.
There was a wretched old musketoon stuck into the waistband of Quint's pants; 
Reynolds hadn't seen one in years. He thought that if Quint was lucky, it would 
only misfire when he pulled the trigger. If he was un­lucky, it would blow up in 
his face and blind him.
"All quiet?" he asked.
Quint replied in Mejis bibble-babble. Barkie listened, then said: "All well, 
sai. He say he and his men grow impatient." Smiling cheerfully, his face giving 
no indication of what he was saying, Barkie added: "If brains was blackpowder, 
this ijit couldn't blow his nose."
"But he's a trustworthy idiot?"
Barkie shrugged. It might have been assent.
They went through the trees. Where Roland and Susan had seen al­most thirty 
tankers, there were now only half a dozen, and of those six, only two actually 
had oil in them. Men sat on the ground or snoozed with their sombreros over 
their faces. Most had guns that looked about as trust­worthy as the one in 
Quint's waistband. A few of the poorer vaqs had bolas. On the whole, Reynolds 
guessed they would be more effective.
"Tell Lord Perth here that if the boys come, it's got to be an ambush, and 
they'll only have one chance to do the job right," Reynolds said to Barkie.
Barkie spoke to Quint. Quint's lips parted in a grin, revealing a scari­fying 
picket of black and yellow fangs. He spoke briefly, then put his hands out in 
front of them and closed them into huge, scarred fists, one above the other, as 
if wringing the neck of an invisible enemy. When Barkie began to translate, Clay 
Reynolds waved it away. He had caught only one word, but it was enough: muerto.
 
5
 
All that pre-Fair week, Rhea sat in front of the glass, peering into its depths. 
She had taken time to sew Ermot's head back onto his body with clumsy stitches 
of black thread, and she sat with the decaying snake around her neck as she 
watched and dreamed, not noticing the stench that began to arise from the 
reptile as time passed. Twice Musty came nigh, mewing for food, and each time 
Rhea batted the troublesome thing away without so much as a glance. She herself 
grew more and more gaunt, her eyes now looking like the sockets of the skulls 
stored in the net by the door to her bedroom. She dozed occasionally as she sat 
with the ball in her lap and the stinking snakeskin looped about her throat, her 
head down, the sharp point of her chin digging at her chest, runners of drool 
hanging from the loose puckers of her lips, but she never really slept. There 
was too much to see, far too much to see.
And it was hers for the seeing. These days she didn't even have to pass her 
hands above the glass to open its pink mists. All the Barony's meanness, all its 
petty (and not so petty) cruelties, all its cozening and ly­ing lay before her. 
Most of what she saw was small and demeaning stuff—masturbating boys peeking 
through knotholes at their undressed sisters, wives going through husbands' 
pockets, looking for extra money or tobacco, Sheb the piano-player licking the 
seat of the chair where his favorite whore had sat for awhile, a maid at 
Seafront spitting into Kimba Rimer's pillowcase after the Chancellor had kicked 
her for being slow in getting out of his way.
These were all things which confirmed her opinion of the society she had left 
behind. Sometimes she laughed wildly; sometimes she spoke to the people she saw 
in the glass ball, as if they could hear her. By the third day of the week 
before Reaping, she had ceased her trips to the privy, even though she could 
carry the ball with her when she went, and the sour stench of urine began to 
rise from her.
By the fourth day, Musty had ceased coming near her. Rhea dreamed in the ball 
and lost herself in her dreams, as others had done before her; deep in the petty 
pleasures of far seeing, she was un­aware that the pink ball was stealing the 
wrinkled remains of her anima. She likely would have considered it a fair trade 
if she had known. She saw all the things people did in the shadows, and they 
were the only things she cared for, and for them she almost certainly would have 
considered her life's force a fair trade.
 
6
 
"Here," the boy said, "let me light it, gods damn you." Jonas would have 
recognized the speaker; he was the lad who had waved a severed dog's tail across 
the street at Jonas and called, We're Big Coffin Hunters just like you!
The boy to whom this charming child had spoken tried to hold onto the piece of 
liver they had copped from the knacker's behind the Low Market. The first boy 
seized his ear and twisted. The second boy howled and held the chunk of liver 
out, dark blood running down his grimy knuckles as he did.
"That's better," the first boy said, taking it. "You want to remember who the 
capataz is, round here."
They were behind a bakery stall in the Low Market. Nearby, drawn by the smell of 
hot fresh bread, was a mangy mutt with one blind eye. He stared at them with 
hungry hope.
There was a slit in the chunk of raw meat. Poking out of it was a green big-bang 
fuse. Below the fuse, the liver bulged like the stomach of a pregnant woman. The 
first boy took a sulfur match, stuck it between his protruding front teeth, and 
lit it.
"He won't never!" said a third boy, in an agony of hope and anticipation.
"Thin as he is?" the first boy said. "Oh yes he will. Bet ye my deck of cards 
against yer hosstail."
The third boy thought it over and shook his head.
The first boy grinned. "It's a wise child ye are," he said, and lit the 
big-bang's fuse. "Hey, cully!" he called to the dog. "Want a bite o' sumpin 
good? Here ye go!"
He threw the chunk of raw liver. The scrawny dog never hesitated at the hissing 
fuse, but lunged forward with its one good eye fixed on the first decent food it 
had seen in days. As it snatched the liver out of the air, the big-bang the boys 
had slipped into it went off. There was a roar and a flash. The dog's head 
disintegrated from the jaws down. For a moment it continued to stand there, 
dripping, staring at them with its one good eye, and then it collapsed.
"Toadjer!" the first boy jeered. "Toadjer he'd take it! Happy Reap to us, eh?"
"What are you boys doing?" a woman's voice called sharply. "Get out of there, ye 
ravens!"
The boys fled, cackling, into the bright afternoon. They did sound like ravens.
 
7
 
Cuthbert and Alain sat their horses at the mouth of Eyebolt. Even with the wind 
blowing the sound of the thinny away from them, it got inside your head and 
buzzed there, rattling your teeth.
"I hate it," Cuthbert said through clenched teeth. "Gods, let's be quick."
"Aye," Alain said. They dismounted, bulky in their ranch-coats, and tied their 
horses to the brush which lay across the front of the canyon. Or­dinarily, 
tethering wouldn't have been necessary, but both boys could see the horses hated 
the whining, grinding sound as much as they did. Cuth­bert seemed to hear the 
thinny in his mind, speaking words of invitation in a groaning, horribly 
persuasive voice.
Come on, Bert. Leave all this foolishness behind: the drums, the pride, the fear 
of death, the loneliness you laugh at because laughing's all you can think to 
do. And the girl, leave her, too. You love her, don't you? And even if you 
don't, you want her. It's sad that she loves your friend in­stead of you, but if 
you come to me, all that will stop bothering you very soon. So come on. What are 
you waiting for?
"What am I waiting for?" he muttered.
"Huh?"
"I said, what are we waiting for? Let's get this done and get the holy hell out 
of here."
From their saddlebags they each took a small cotton bag. These con­tained 
gunpowder extracted from the smaller firecrackers Sheemie had brought them two 
days before. Alain dropped to his knees, pulled his knife, and began to crawl 
backward, digging a trench as far under the roll of brush as he could.
"Dig it deep," Cuthbert said. "We don't want the wind to blow it away."
Alain gave him a look which was remarkably hot. "Do you want to do it? Just so 
you can make sure it's done right?"
It's the thinny, Cuthbert thought. It's working on him, too.
"No, Al," he said humbly. "You're doing fine for someone who's both blind and 
soft in the head. Go on."
Alain looked at him fiercely a moment longer, then grinned and re­sumed the 
trench under the brush. "You'll die young, Bert."
"Aye, likely." Cuthbert dropped to his own knees and began to crawl after Alain, 
sprinkling gunpowder into the trench and trying to ignore the buzzy, cajoling 
voice of the thinny. No, the gunpowder probably wouldn't blow away, not unless 
there was a full gale. But if it rained, even the rolls of brush wouldn't be 
much protection. If it rained—
Don't think of that, he told himself. That's ka.
They finished loading gunpowder trenches under both sides of the brush barrier 
in only ten minutes, but it felt longer. To the horses as well, it seemed; they 
were stamping impatiently at the far end of their tethers, their ears laid back 
and their eyes rolling. Cuthbert and Alain untied them and mounted up. 
Cuthbert's horse actually bucked twice . . . except it felt more to Cuthbert as 
if the poor old thing were shuddering.
In the middle distance, bright sunshine twanged of bright steel. The tankers at 
Hanging Rock. They had been pulled in as light to the sandstone outcrop as 
possible, but when the sun was high, most of the shadow disap­peared, and 
concealment disappeared with it.
"I really can't believe it," Alain said as they started back. It would be a long 
ride, including a wide swing around Hanging Rock to make sure they weren't seen. 
"They must think we're blind."
"It's stupid they think we are," Cuthbert said, "but I suppose it comes to the 
same." Now that Eyebolt Canyon was falling behind them, he felt almost giddy 
with relief. Were they going in there a few days from now? Actually going in, 
riding to within mere yards of where that cursed puddle started? He couldn't 
believe it ... and he made himself stop thinking about it before he could start 
believing it.
"More riders heading out to Hanging Rock," Alain said, pointing back toward the 
woods beyond the canyon. "Do you see them?"
They were small as ants from this distance, but Bert saw them very well. 
"Changing the guard. The important thing is that they don't see us— you don't 
think they can, do you?"
"Over here? Not likely."
Cuthbert didn't think so, either.
"They'll all be down come Reap, won't they?" Alain asked. "It won't do us much 
good to only catch a few."
"Yes—I'm pretty sure they all will."
"Jonas and his pals?"
"Them, too."
Ahead of them, the Bad Grass grew closer. The wind blew hard in their faces, 
making their eyes water, but Cuthbert didn't mind. The sound of the thinny was 
down to a faint drone behind him, and would soon be gone completely. Right now 
that was all he needed to make him happy.
"Do you think we'll get away with it, Bert?"
"Dunno," Cuthbert said. Then he thought of the gunpowder trenches lying beneath 
the dry rolls of brush, and grinned. "But I'll tell you one thing, Al: they'll 
know we were here."
 
8
 
In Mejis, as in every other Barony of Mid-World, the week before a Fair-Day was 
a political week. Important people came in from the farther cor­ners of the 
Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main 
Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expected to be present at these—mostly 
as a decorative testimony to the Mayor's con­tinuing puissance. Olive was also 
present, and, in a cruelly comic dumb-show that only the women truly 
appreciated, they sat on either side of the aging cockatoo, Susan pouring the 
coffee, Olive passing the cake, both of them gracefully accepting compliments on 
food and drink they'd had no hand in preparing.
Susan found it almost impossible to look at Olive's smiling, unhappy face. Her 
husband would never lie with Pat Delgado's daughter . . . but sai Thorin didn't 
know that, and Susan couldn't tell her. She had only to glimpse the Mayor's wife 
from the comer other eye to remember what Roland had said that day on the Drop: 
For a moment I thought she was my mother. But that was the problem, wasn't it? 
Olive Thorin was nobody's mother. That was what had opened the door to this 
horrible situation in the first place.
There had been something much on Susan's mind to do, but with the round of 
activities at Mayor's House, it was but three days to Reaping be­fore she got 
the chance. Finally, following this latest Conversational, she was able to slip 
out of Pink Dress with Applique (how she hated it! how she hated them all!) and 
jump back into jeans, a plain riding shirt, and a ranch-coat. There was no time 
to braid her hair, as she was expected back for Mayor's Tea, but Maria tied it 
back for her and off she had gone to the house she would shortly be leaving 
forever.
Her business was in the back room of the stable—the room her father had used as 
an office—but she went into the house first and heard what she'd hoped to hear: 
her aunt's ladylike, whistling snores. Lovely.
Susan got a slice of bread and honey and took it out to the barn-stable, 
protecting it as best she could from the clouds of dust that blew across the 
yard in the wind. Her aunt's stuffy-guy rattled on his post in the garden.
She ducked into the sweet-smelling shadows of the barn. Pylon and Felicia 
nickered hello, and she divided what she hadn't eaten between them. They seemed 
pleased enough to get it. She made especially of Feli­cia, whom she would soon 
be leaving behind.
She had avoided the little office since her father died, afraid of exactly the 
sort of pang that struck her when she lifted the latch and went in. The narrow 
windows were now covered with cobwebs, but they still let in autumn's bright 
light, more than enough for her to be able to see the pipe in the ashtray—the 
red one, his favorite, the one he called his thinking-pipe— and a bit of tack 
laid over the back of his desk chair. He had probably been mending it by 
gaslight, had put it by thinking to finish the next day ... then the snake had 
done its dance under Foam's hoofs and there had never been a next day. Not for 
Pat Delgado.
"Oh, Da," she said in a small and broken voice. "How I do miss thee."
She crossed to the desk and ran her fingers along its surface, leaving trails of 
dust. She sat down in his chair, listened to it creak under her as it had always 
creaked under him, and that pushed her over the edge. For the next five minutes 
she sat there and wept, screwing her fists into her eyes as she had as a wee 
shim. Only now, of course, there was no Big Pat to come upon her and jolly her 
out of it, taking her on his lap and kissing her in that sensitive place under 
her chin (especially sensitive to the bristles on his upper lip, it had been) 
until her tears turned to giggles. Time was a face on the water, and this time 
it was the face of her father.
At last her tears tapered to sniffles. She opened the desk drawers, one after 
another, finding more pipes (many rendered useless by his constant 
stem-chewing), a hat, one of her own dolls (it had a broken arm Pat had 
apparently never gotten around to putting right), quill-pens, a little flask— 
empty but with a faint smell of whiskey still present around its neck. The only 
item of interest was in the bottom drawer: a pair of spurs. One still had its 
star rowel, but the other had been broken off. These were, she was almost 
positive, the spurs he had been wearing on the day he died.
If my da was here, she had begun that day on the Drop. But he's not, Roland had 
said. He's dead.
A pair of spurs, a broken-off rowel.
She bounced them in her hand, in her mind's eye seeing Ocean Foam rear, spilling 
her father (one spur catches in a stirrup; the rowel breaks free), then 
stumbling sideways and falling atop him. She saw this clearly, but she didn't 
see the snake Fran Lengyll had told them about. That she didn't see at all.
She put the spurs back where she had found them, got up, and looked at the shelf 
to the right of the desk, handy to Pat Delgado's smart hand. Here was a line of 
leather-bound ledgers, a priceless trove of books in a society that had 
forgotten how to make paper. Her father had been the man in charge of the 
Barony's horse for almost thirty years, and here were his stockline books to 
prove it.
Susan took down the last one and began to page through it. This time she almost 
welcomed the pang that struck her as she saw her father's fa­miliar hand—the 
labored script, the steep and somehow more confident numbers.
 
Born of HENRIETTA, (2) foals both well
Stillborn of DELIA, a roan (MUTANT)
Born of YOLANDA, a THOROUGHBRED, a GOOD MALE COLT
 
And, following each, the date. So neat, he had been. So thorough. So ...
She stopped suddenly, aware that she had found what she was look­ing for even 
without any clear knowledge of what she was doing in here. I he last dozen pages 
of her da's final stockline book had been torn out.
Who had done it? Not her father; a largely self-taught man, he revered paper the 
way some people revered gods or gold.
And why had it been done?
That she thought she knew: horses, of courses. There were too many on the Drop. 
And the ranchers—Lengyll, Croydon, Renfrew—were lying about the threaded quality 
of the stockline. So was Henry Wertner, the man who had succeeded to her 
father's job.
If my da was here—
But he's not. He's dead.
She had told Roland she couldn't believe Fran Lengyll would lie about her 
father's death . . . but she could believe it now.
Gods help her, she could believe it now.
"What are ye doing in here?"
She gave a little scream, dropped the book, and whirled around. Cordelia stood 
there in one of her rusty black dresses. The top three but­tons were undone, and 
Susan could see her aunt's collarbones sticking out above the plain white cotton 
of her shift. It was only on seeing those pro­truding bones that Susan realized 
how much weight Aunt Cord had lost over the last three months or so. She could 
see the red imprint of the pil­low on her aunt's left cheek, like the mark of a 
slap. Her eyes glittered from dark, bruised-looking hollows of flesh.
"Aunt Cord! You startled me! You—"
"What are ye doing in here?" Aunt Cord repeated.
Susan bent and picked up the book. "I came to remember my father," she said, and 
put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? 
She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her 
right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. 
Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the 
coin into her money-box, after first bit­ing its edge to make sure it was true.
"Remember him? It's ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye've forgotten his 
face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue."
Susan only looked at her.
"Have ye been with him today?" Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her 
hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rub­bing it. She had 
been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had be­come ever so much worse 
since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. "Have ye been with 
sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for 
myself!"
Her aunt glided forward—spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her 
slippered feet peeping—and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she 
pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.
"Ye should ask forgiveness yerself," Susan said. "To speak to his daughter so in 
this place. In this place." She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then 
return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia 
Delgado's face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn't been a 
party to her brother's murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known 
something of it. Yes, something.
"Ye faithless bitch," Cordelia whispered.
"No," Susan said, "I have been true."
And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her 
shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back 
to her aunt. "I've slept my last night here," she said. "I'll not listen to more 
such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the 
love I've kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my 
ma."
Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.
"Get out, then!" she screamed. "Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls 
with that boy! If I never see thy trollop's face again, I'll count my life 
good!"
Susan led Pylon from the stable. When she got him into the yard, she was sobbing 
almost too hard to mount up. Yet mount she did, and she couldn't deny that there 
was relief in her heart as well as sorrow. When she turned onto the High Street 
and booted Pylon into a gallop, she didn't look back.
 
9
 
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where 
she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband. 
The floor was cold under her bare feet and she was shivering by the time she 
reached the bed ... but the chilly floor wasn't the only reason she was 
shivering. She slid in beside the gaunt, snoring man in the nightcap, and when 
he turned away from her (his knees and back crackling loudly as he did), she 
pressed against him and hugged him tightly. There was no passion in this, but 
only a need to share a bit of his warmth. His chest—narrow but almost as 
well-known to her as her own plump one—rose and fell under her hands, and she 
began to quiet a little. He stirred, and she thought for a moment he would wake 
and find her sharing his bed for the first time in gods knew how long.
Yes, wake, she thought, do. She didn't dare wake him of her own—all her courage 
had been exhausted just getting here, creeping through the dark following one of 
the worst dreams she had ever had in her life—but if he woke, she would take it 
as a sign and tell him she had dreamed of a vast bird, a cruel golden-eyed roc 
that flew above the Barony on wings that dripped blood.
Wherever its shadow fell, there was blood, she would tell him, and its shadow 
fell everywhere. The Barony ran with it, from Hambry all the way out to Eyebolt. 
And I swelled big fire in the wind. I ran to tell you and you were dead in your 
study, sitting by the hearth with your eyes gouged out and a skull in your lap.
But instead of waking, in his sleep he took her hand, as he had used to, do 
before he had begun to look at the young girls-—even the serving-wenches—when 
they passed, and Olive decided she would only lie here, and be still and let him 
hold her hand. Let it be like the old days for a bit, when everything had been 
right between them.
She slept a little herself. When she woke, dawn's first gray light was creeping 
in through the windows. He had dropped her hand- had, in fact, scooted away from 
her entirely, to his edge of the bed. It wouldn't do for him to wake and find 
her here, she decided, and the urgency of her night­mare was gone. She turned 
back the covers, swung her feet out, then looked at him once more. His nightcap 
had come askew. She put it right, her hands smoothing the cloth and the bony 
brow beneath. He stirred again. Olive waited until he had quieted, then got up. 
She slipped back to her own room like a phantom.
 
10
 
The midway booths opened in Green Heart two days before Reaping-Fair, and the 
first folks came to try their luck at the spinning wheel and the bottle-toss and 
the basket-ring. There was also a pony-train—a cart filled with laughing 
children, pulled along a figure eight of narrow-gauge rails.
("Was the pony named Charlie?" Eddie Dean asked Roland.
("I think not," Roland said. "We have a rather unpleasant word that sounds like 
that in the High Speech."
("What word?" Jake asked.
("The one," said the gunslinger, "that means death.")
Roy Depape stood watching the pony plod its appointed rounds for a couple of 
turns, remembering with some nostalgia his own rides in such a cart as a child. 
Of course, most of his had been stolen.
When he had looked his fill, Depape sauntered on down to the Sher­iff's office 
and went in. Herk Avery, Dave, and Frank Claypool were cleaning an odd and 
fantastical assortment of guns. Avery nodded at De­pape and went back to what he 
was doing. There was something strange about the man, and after a moment or two 
Depape realized what it was: the Sheriff wasn't eating. It was the first time 
he'd ever come in here that the Sheriff didn't have a plate of grub close at 
hand.
"All ready for tomorrow?" Depape asked.
Avery gave him a half-irritated, half-smiling look. "What the hell kind of 
question is that?"
"One that Jonas sent me to ask," Depape said, and at that Avery's queer, nervy 
smile faltered a little.
"Aye, we're ready." Avery swept a meaty arm over the guns. "Don't ye see we 
are?"
Depape could have quoted the old saying about how the proof of the pudding was 
in the eating, but what was the point? Things would work out if the three boys 
were as fooled as Jonas thought they were; if they weren't fooled, they would 
likely carve Herk Avery's fat butt off the top of his legs and feed it to the 
handiest pack of wolverines. It didn't make much never mind to Roy Depape one 
way or the other.
"Jonas also ast me to remind you it's early."
"Aye, aye, we'll be there early," Avery agreed. "These two and six more good 
men. Fran Lengyll's asked to go along, and he's got a machine-gun." Avery spoke 
this last with ringing pride, as if he himself had in­vented the machine-gun. 
Then he looked at Depape slyly. "What about you, coffin-hand? Want to go along? 
Won't take me more'n an eyeblink to deputize ye."
"I have another chore. Reynolds, too." Depape smiled. "There's plenty of work 
for all of us. Sheriff—after all, it's Reaping."
 
11
 
That afternoon, Susan and Roland met at the hut in the Bad Grass. She told him 
about the book with the torn-out pages, and Roland showed her what he'd left in 
the hut's north corner, secreted beneath a mouldering pile of skins.
She looked first at this, then at him with wide and frightened eyes. "What's 
wrong? What does thee suspect is wrong?"
He shook his head. Nothing was wrong ... not that he could tell, any­way. And 
yet he had felt a strong need to do what he'd done, to leave what he'd left. It 
wasn't the touch, nothing like it, but only intuition.
"I think everything is all right ... or as right as things can be when the odds 
may turn out fifty of them for each of us. Susan, our only chance is to take 
them by surprise. You're not going to risk that, are you? Not planning to go to 
Lengyll, waving your father's stockline book around?"
She shook her head. If Lengyll had done what she now suspected, he'd get his 
payback two days from now. There would be reaping, all right. Reaping aplenty. 
But this ... this frightened her, and she said so.
"Listen." Roland took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. "I'm only 
trying to be careful. If things go badly—and they could— you're the one most 
likely to get away clean. You and Sheemie. If that happens, Susan, you—thee—must 
come here and take my guns. Take them west to Gilead. Find my father. He'll know 
thee are who thee says by what thee shows. Tell him what happened here. That's 
all."
"If anything happens to thee, Roland, I won't be able to do anything. Except 
die."
His hands were still on her face. Now he used them to make her head shake 
slowly, from side to side. "You won't die," he said. There was a coldness in his 
voice and eyes that struck her not with fear but awe. She thought of his 
blood—of how old it must be, and how cold it must some­times flow. "Not with 
this job undone. Promise me."
"I... I promise, Roland. I do."
"Tell me aloud what you promise."
"I'll come here. Get yer guns. Take them to yer da. Tell him what happened."
He nodded and let go of her face. The shapes of his hands were printed faintly 
on her cheeks.
"Ye frightened me," Susan said, and then shook her head. That wasn't right. "Ye 
do frighten me."
"I can't help what I am."
"And I wouldn't change it." She kissed his left cheek, his right cheek, his 
mouth. She put her hand inside his shirt and caressed his nipple. It grew 
instantly hard beneath the tip of her finger. "Bird and bear and hare and fish," 
she said, now making soft butterfly kisses all over his face. "Give your love 
her fondest wish."
After, they lay beneath a bearskin Roland had brought along and lis­tened to the 
wind sough through the grass.
"I love that sound," she said. "It always makes me wish I could be part of the 
wind ... go where it goes, see what it sees."
"This year, if ka allows, you will."
"Aye. And with thee." She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the 
ruined roof and dappled her face. "Roland, I love thee." She kissed him . . . 
and then began to cry.
He held her, concerned. "What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?"
"I don't know," she said, crying harder. "All I know is that there's a shadow on 
my heart." She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. "Thee'd not 
leave me, would ye, dear? Thee'd not go without Sue, would ye?"
"No."
"For I've given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity's the very least 
of it, thee knows."
"I'd never leave you." But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind 
outside—so comforting a moment ago—sounded like beast's breath. "Never, I 
swear."
"I'm frightened, though. Indeed I am."
"You needn't be," he said, speaking slowly and carefully ... for sud­denly all 
the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We 'II leave this, 
Susan—not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we'll 
go crosswise to the wind; it's south we'll ride and never look back. We'll be—
—haunted.
That's what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted 
by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shaved Mountains, massacred by 
weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted 
most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not 
even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.
"All you need do day after tomorrow is claim indisposition at lunch." They had 
gone over all this before, but now, in his sudden, pointless fright, it was all 
he could think of to say. "Go to your room, then leave as you did on the night 
we met in the graveyard. Hide up a little. Then, when it's three o' the clock, 
ride here, and look under the skins in yon comer. If my guns are gone—and they 
will be, I swear they will—then everything's all right. You'll ride to meet us. 
Come to the place above the canyon, the one we told you of. We'll—"
"Aye, I know all that, but something's wrong." She looked at him, touched the 
side of his face. "I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why."
"All will work out," he said. "Ka—"
"Speak not to me of ka!" she cried. "Oh please don't! Ka like a wind, my father 
said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old 
ka, how I hate it!”
"Susan—"
"No, say no more." She lay back and pushed the bearskin down to her knees, 
exposing a body that far greater men than Hart Thorin might have given away 
kingdoms for. Beads of sunlight ran over her bare skin like rain. She held her 
arms out to him. Never had she looked more beautiful to Roland than she did 
then, with her hair spread about her and that haunted look on her face. He would 
think later: She knew. Some part of her knew.
"No more talking," she said. "Talking's done. If you love me, then love me."
And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath 
to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.

 
12
 
That evening, as the grinning Demon rose in the sky, Cordelia left her house and 
walked slowly across the lawn to her garden, detouring around the pile of leaves 
she had raked that afternoon. In her arms was a bundle of clothes. She dropped 
them in front of the pole to which her stuffy-guy was bound, then looked raptly 
up at the rising moon: the knowing wink of the eye, the ghoul's grin; silver as 
bone was that moon, a white button against violet silk.
It grinned at Cordelia; Cordelia grinned back. Finally, with the air of a woman 
awakening from a trance, she stepped forward and pulled the stuffy-guy off its 
pole. His head lolled limply against her shoulder, like the head of a man who 
has found himself too drunk to dance. His red hands dangled.
She stripped off the guy's clothes, uncovering a bulging, vaguely humanoid shape 
in a pair of her dead brother's longhandles. She took one of the things she had 
brought from the house and held it up to the moonlight. A red silk riding shirt, 
one of Mayor Thorin's presents to Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. One of those she 
wouldn't wear. Whore's clothes, she had called them. And what did that make 
Cordelia Delgado, who had taken care of her even after her bullheaded da had 
decided he must stand against the likes of Fran Lengyll and John Croydon? It 
made her a whore­house madam, she supposed.
This thought led to an image of Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin, naked and 
striving while a honky-tonk piano planked out "Red Dirt Boogie" be­low them, and 
Cordelia moaned like a dog.
She yanked the silk shirt over the stuffy's head. Next came one of Susan's split 
riding skirts. After the skirt, a pair of her slippers. And last, replacing the 
sombrero, one of Susan's spring bonnets.
Presto! The stuffy-guy was now a stuffy-gal.
"And caught red-handed ye are," she whispered. "I know. Oh yes, I know. I wasn't 
born yesterday."
She carried the stuffy from the garden to the pile of leaves on the lawn. She 
laid it close by the leaves, then scooped some up and pushed them into the 
bodice of the riding shirt, making rudimentary breasts. That done, she took a 
match from her pocket and struck it alight.
The wind, as if eager to cooperate, dropped. Cordelia touched the match to the 
dry leaves. Soon the whole pile was blazing. She picked the stuffy-gal up in her 
arms and stood with it in front of the fire. She didn't hear the rattling 
firecrackers from town, or the wheeze of the steam-organ in Green Heart, or the 
mariachi band playing in the Low Market; when a burning leaf rose and swirled 
past her hair, threatening to set it alight, she didn't seem to notice. Her eyes 
were wide and blank.
When the fire was at its height, she stepped to its edge and threw the stuffy 
on. Flame whumped up around it in bright orange gusts; sparks and burning leaves 
swirled skyward in a funnel.
"So let it be done!" Cordelia cried. The firelight on her face turned her tears 
to blood. "Charyou tree! Aye, just so!"
The thing in the riding clothes caught fire, its face charring, its red hands 
blazing, its white-cross eyes turning black. Its bonnet flared; the face began 
to bum.
Cordelia stood and watched, fists clenching and unclenching, heed­less of the 
sparks that lit on her skin, heedless of the blazing leaves that swirled toward 
the house. Had the house caught tire, she would likely have ignored that as 
well.
She watched until the stuffy dressed in her niece's clothes was noth­ing but 
ashes lying atop more ashes. Then, as slowly as a robot with rust in its works, 
she walked back to the house, lay down on the sofa, and slept like the dead.
 
13
 
It was three-thirty in the morning of the day before Reaping, and Stanley Ruiz 
thought he was finally done for the night. The last music had quit twenty 
minutes ago—Sheb had outlasted the mariachis by an hour or so, and now lay 
snoring with his face in the sawdust. Sai Thorin was upstairs, and there had 
been no sign of the Big Coffin Hunters; Stanley had an idea those were up to 
Seafront tonight. He also had an idea there was black work on offer, although he 
didn't know that for sure. He looked up at the glassy, two-headed gaze of The 
Romp. "Nor want to, old pal," he said. "All I want is about nine hours of 
sleep—tomorrow comes the real party, and they won't leave till dawn. So—"
A shrill scream rose from somewhere behind the building. Stanley jerked 
backward, thumping into the bar. Beside the piano, Sheb raised his head briefly, 
muttered "Wuzzat?" and dropped it back with a thump.
Stanley had absolutely no urge to investigate the source of the scream, but he 
supposed he would, just the same. It had sounded like that sad old bitch Pettie 
the Trotter. "I'd like to trot your saggy old ass right out of town," he 
muttered, then bent down to look under the bar. There were two stout ashwood 
clubs here, The Calmer and The Killer. The Calmer was smooth buried wood, 
guaranteed to put out the lights for two hours any time you tapped some 
boisterous cull's head in the right place with it.
Stanley consulted his feelings and took the other club. It was shorter than The 
Calmer, wider at the top. And the business end of The Killer was studded with 
nails.
Stanley went down to the end of the bar, through the door, and across a dim 
supply-room stacked with barrels smelling of graf and whiskey. At the rear was a 
door giving on the back yard. Stanley approached it, took a deep breath, and 
unlocked it. He kept expecting Pettie to voice an­other head-bursting scream, 
but none came. There was only the sound of the wind.
Maybe you got lucky and she's kilt, Stanley thought. He opened the door, 
stepping back and raising the nail-studded club at the same time.
Pettie wasn't kilt. Dressed in a stained shift (a Pettie-skirt, one might say), 
the whore was standing on the path which led to the back privy, her hands 
clutched together above the swell of her bosom and below the drooping 
turkey-wattles of her neck. She was looking up at the sky.
"What is it?" Stanley asked, hurrying down to her. "Near scared ten years off my 
life, ye did."
"The moon, Stanley!" she whispered. "Oh, look at the moon, would ye!"
He looked up, and what he saw set his heart thumping, but he tried to speak 
reasonably and calmly. "Come now, Pettie, it's dust, that's all. Be reasonable, 
dear, ye know how the wind's blown these last few days, and no rain to knock 
down what it carries; it's dust, that's all."
Yet it didn't look like dust.
"I know what I see," whispered Pettie.
Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a 
shifting scrim of blood.

 

 
 
CHAPTER VII
TAKING THE BALL
 
1
 
While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody 
moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.
Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next 
two days, I'll be lucky if it doesn't turn into—
Something fluffed the end of his nose, and he sneezed again. Coming out of his 
narrow chest and dry slot of a mouth, it sounded like a small-caliber 
pistol-shot in the black room.
"Who's there?" he cried.
No answer. Rimer suddenly imagined a bird, something nasty and bad-tempered, 
that had gotten in here in daylight and was now flying around in the dark, 
fluttering against his face as he slept. His skin crawled—birds, bugs, bats, he 
hated them all—and he fumbled so ener­getically for the gas-lamp on the table by 
his bed that he almost knocked it off onto the floor.
As he drew it toward him, that flutter came again. This time puffing at his 
cheek. Rimer screamed and recoiled against the pillows, clutching the lamp to 
his chest. He turned the switch on the side, heard the hiss of gas, then pushed 
the spark. The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a 
fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed. In one hand 
Reynolds held the feather with which he had been tick­ling Mejia’s Chancellor. 
His other was hidden in his cloak, which lay in his lap.
Reynolds had disliked Rimer from their first meeting in the woods far west of 
town—those same woods, beyond Eyebolt Canyon, where Far-son's man Latigo now 
quartered the main contingent of his troops. It had been a windy night, and as 
he and the other Coffin Hunters entered the lit­tle glade where Rimer, 
accompanied by Lengyll and Croydon, were sit­ting by a small fire, Reynolds’s 
cloak swirled around him. "Sai Manto," Rimer had said, and the other two had 
laughed. It had been meant as a harmless joke, but it hadn't seemed harmless to 
Reynolds. In many of the lands where he had travelled, manto meant not "cloak" 
but "leaner" or "bender." It was, in fact, a slang term for homosexual. That 
Rimer (a provincial man under his veneer of cynical sophistication) didn't know 
this never crossed Reynolds's mind. He knew when people were making small of 
him, and if he could make such a person pay, he did so.
For Kimba Rimer, payday had come.
"Reynolds? What are you doing? How did you get in h—"
"You got to be thinking of the wrong cowboy," the man sitting on the bed 
replied. "No Reynolds here. Just Senor Manto." He took out the hand which had 
been under his cloak. In it was a keenly honed cuchillo. Reynolds had purchased 
it in Low Market with this chore in mind. He raised it now and drove the 
twelve-inch blade into Rimer's chest. It went all the way through, pinning him 
like a bug. A bedbug, Reynolds thought.
The lamp fell out of Rimer's hands and rolled off the bed. It landed on the 
foot-runner, but did not break. On the far wall was Kimba Rimer's distorted, 
struggling shadow. The shadow of the other man bent over it like a hungry 
vulture.
Reynolds lifted the hand which had held the knife. He turned it so the small 
blue tattooed coffin between thumb and forefinger was in front of Rimer's eyes. 
He wanted it to be the last thing Rimer saw on this side of the clearing.
"Let's hear you make fun of me now," Reynolds said. He smiled. "Come on. Let's 
just hear you."
 
2
 
Shortly before five o'clock, Mayor Thorin woke from a terrible dream. In it, a 
bird with pink eyes had been cruising slowly back and forth above the Barony. 
Wherever its shadow fell, the grass turned yellow, the leaves fell shocked from 
the trees, and the crops died. The shadow was turning his green and pleasant 
Barony into a waste land. It may be my Barony, but it's my bird, too, he thought 
just before awakening, huddled into a shuddery ball on one side of his bed. My 
bird, I brought it here, I let it out of its cage.                               
                          There would be no more sleep for him this night, and 
Thorin knew it. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it, then walked into 
his study, absently picking his nightgown from the cleft of his bony old ass as 
he went. The puff on the end of his nightcap bobbed between his shoulder blades; 
his knees cracked at every step.
As for the guilty feelings expressed by the dream . . . well, what was done was 
done. Jonas and his friends would have what they'd come for (and paid so 
handsomely for) in another day; a day after that, they'd be gone. Fly away, bird 
with the pink eyes and pestilent shadow; fly away to wherever you came from and 
take the Big Coffin Boys with you. He had an idea that by Year's End he'd be too 
busy dipping his wick to think much about such things. Or to dream such dreams.
Besides, dreams without visible sign were just dreams, not omens.
The visible sign might have been the boots beneath the study drapes— just the 
scuffed tips of them showing—but Thorin never looked in that direction. His eyes 
were fixed on the bottle beside his favorite chair. Drinking claret at five in 
the morning was no sort of habit to get into, but this once wouldn't hurt. He'd 
had a terrible dream, for gods' sake, and after all—
"Tomorrow's Reaping," he said, sitting in the wing-chair on the edge of the 
hearth. "I guess a man can jump a fence or two, come Reap."
He poured himself a drink, the last he'd ever take in this world, and coughed as 
the fire hit his belly and then climbed back up his throat, warming it. Better, 
aye, much. No giant birds now, no plaguey shadows. He stretched out his arms, 
laced his long and bony fingers together, and cracked them viciously.
"I hate it when you do that, you scrawny git," spoke a voice directly into 
Thorin's left ear.
Thorin jumped. His heart took its own tremendous leap in his chest. The empty 
glass flew from his hand, and there was no foot-runner to cushion its landing. 
It smashed on the hearth.
Before Thorin could scream, Roy Depape brushed off the mayoral nightcap, seized 
the gauzy remains of the mayoral mane, and yanked the mayoral head back. The 
knife Depape held in his other hand was much humbler than the one Reynolds had 
used, but it cut the old man's throat efficiently enough. Blood sprayed scarlet 
in the dim room. Depape let go of Thorin's hair, went back to the drapes he had 
been hiding behind, and picked something up off the floor. It was Cuthbert's 
lookout. Depape brought it back to the chair and put it in the dying Mayor's 
lap.
"Bird . .." Thorin gargled through a mouthful of blood. "Bird!"
"Yar, old fella, and trig o' you to notice at a time like this, I will say." 
Depape pulled Thorin's head back again and took the old man's eyes out with two 
quick flips of his knife. One went into the dead fireplace; the other hit the 
wall and slid down behind the fire-tools. Thorin's right foot trembled briefly 
and was still.
One more job to do.
Depape looked around, saw Thorin's nightcap, and decided the ball on the end 
would serve. He picked it up, dipped it in the puddle of blood in the Mayor's 
lap, and drew the Good Man's sigul—

—on the wall.
"There," he murmured, standing back. "If that don't finish em, noth­ing on earth 
will."
True enough. The only question left unanswered was whether or not Roland's 
ka-tet could be taken alive.
 
3
 
Jonas had told Fran Lengyll exactly where to place his men, two inside the 
stable and six more out, three of these latter gents hidden behind rusty old 
implements, two hidden in the burnt-out remains of the home place, one—Dave 
Hollis—crouched on top of the stable itself, spying over the roofpeak. Lengyll 
was glad to see that the men in the posse took their job seriously. They were 
only boys, it was true, but boys who had on one oc­casion come off ahead of the 
Big Coffin Hunters.
Sheriff Avery gave a fair impression of being in charge of things until they got 
within a good shout of the Bar K. Then Lengyll, machine-gun slung over one 
shoulder (and as straight-hacked in the saddle as he had been at twenty), took 
command. Avery, who looked nervous and sounded out of breath, seemed relieved 
rather than offended.
"I'll tell ye where to go as was (old to me, for it's a good plan, and I've no 
quarrel with it," Lengyll had told his posse. In the dark, their faces were 
little more than dim blurs. "Only one thing I'll say to ye on my own hook. We 
don't need em alive, but it's best we have em so—it's the Barony we want to put 
paid to em, the common folk, and so put paid to this whole business, as well. 
Shut the door on it, if ye will. So I say this: if there's cause to shoot, 
shoot. But I'll flay the skin off the face of any man who shoots without cause. 
Do ye understand?"
No response. It seemed they did.
"All right," Lengyll had said. His face was stony. "I'll give ye a minute to 
make sure your gear's muffled, and then on we go. Not another' word from here on 
out."
 
4
 
Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain came out of the bunkhouse at quarter past six that 
morning, and stood a-row on the porch. Alain was finishing his coffee. Cuthbert 
was yawning and stretching. Roland was buttoning his shirt and looking 
southwest, toward the Bad Grass. He was thinking not of ambushes but of Susan. 
Her tears. Greedy old ka, how I hate it, she had said.
His instincts did not awake; Alain's touch, which had sensed Jonas on the day 
Jonas had killed the pigeons, did not so much as quiver. As for Cuthbert—
"One more day of quiet!" that worthy exclaimed to the dawning sky. "One more day 
of grace! One more day of silence, broken only by the lover's sigh and the 
tattoo of horses' hoofs!"
"One more day of your bullshit," Alain said. "Come on."
They set off across the dooryard, sensing the eight pairs of eyes on them not at 
all. They walked into the stable past the two men flanking the door, one hidden 
behind an ancient harrow, the other tucked behind an untidy stack of hay, both 
with guns drawn.
Only Rusher sensed something was wrong. He stamped his feet, rolled his eyes, 
and, as Roland backed him out of his stall, tried to rear.
"Hey, boy," he said, and looked around. "Spiders, I reckon. He hates them."
Outside, Lengyll stood up and waved both hands forward. Men moved silently 
toward the front of the stable. On the roof, Dave Hollis stood with his gun 
drawn. His monocle was tucked away in his vest pocket, so it should blink no 
badly timed reflection.
Cuthbert led his mount out of the stable. Alain followed. Roland came last, 
short-leading the nervous, prancy gelding.
"Look," Cuthbert said cheerily, still unaware of the men standing di­rectly 
behind him and his friends. He was pointing north. "A cloud in the shape of a 
bear! Good luck for—"
"Don't move, cullies," Fran Lengyll called. "Don't so much as shuf­fle yer 
god-pounding feet."
Alain did begin to turn—in startlement more than anything else—and there was a 
ripple of small clicking sounds, like many dry twigs all snap­ping at once. The 
sound of cocking pistols and musketoons.
"No, Al!" Roland said. "Don't move! Don't!" In his throat despair rose like 
poison, and tears of rage stung at the comers of his eyes ... yet he stood 
quiet. Cuthbert and Alain must stand quiet, too. If they moved, they'd be 
killed. "Don't move!" he called again. "Either of you!"
"Wise, cully." Lengyll's voice was closer now, and accompanied by several pairs 
of footfalls. "Put yer hands behind ye."
Two shadows flanked Roland, long in the first light. Judging by the bulk of the 
one on his left, he guessed it was being thrown by Sheriff Avery. He probably 
wouldn't be offering them any white tea this day. Lengyll would belong to the 
other shadow.
"Hurry up, Dearborn, or whatever yer name may be. Get em behind ye. Small of yer 
back. There's guns pointed at your pards, and if we end up taking in only two of 
yer instead of three, life'll go on."
Not taking any chances with us, Roland thought, and felt a moment of perverse 
pride. With it came a taste of something that was almost amuse­ment. Bitter, 
though; that taste continued very bitter.
"Roland!" It was Cuthbert, and there was agony in his voice. "Ro­land, don't!"
But there was no choice. Roland put his hands behind his back. Rusher uttered a 
small, reproving whinny as if to say all this was highly improper—and trotted 
away to stand beside the bunkhouse porch.
"You're going to feel metal on your wrists," Lengyll said. "Esposas. "
Two cold circles slipped over Roland's hands. I here was a click and suddenly 
the arcs of the handcuffs were tight against his wrists.
"All right," said another voice. "Now you, son,"
"Be damned if I will!" Cuthbert's voice wavered on the edge of hysteria
There was a thud and a muffled cry of pain. Roland turned around and saw Alain 
down on one knee, the heel of his left hand pressed against his forehead. Blood 
ran down his face.
"Ye want me to deal him another 'un?" Jake White asked. He had an old pistol in 
his hand, reversed so the butt was forward. "I can, you know; my arm is feeling 
wery limber for this early in the day."
"No!" Cuthbert was twitching with horror and something like grief. Ranged behind 
him were three armed men, looking on with nervous avidity.
"Then be a good boy an' get yer hands behind yer."
Cuthbert, still fighting tears, did as he was told. Esposas were put on him by 
Deputy Bridger. The other two men yanked Alain to his feet. He reeled a little, 
then stood firm as he was handcuffed. His eyes met Ro­land's, and Al tried to 
smile. In some ways it was the worst moment of that terrible ambush morning. 
Roland nodded back and made himself a promise: he would never be taken like this 
again, not if he lived to be a thousand years old.
Lengyll was wearing a trailscarf instead of a string tie this morning, but 
Roland thought he was inside the same box-tail coat he'd worn to the Mayor's 
welcoming party, all those weeks ago. Standing beside him, puff­ing with 
excitement, anxiety, and self-importance, was Sheriff Avery.
"Boys," the Sheriff said, "ye're arrested for transgressing the Barony. The 
specific charges are treason and murder."
"Who did we murder?" Alain asked mildly, and one of the posse ut­tered a laugh 
either shocked or cynical, Roland couldn't tell which.
"The Mayor and his Chancellor, as ye know quite well," Avery said. "Now—"
"How can you do this?" Roland asked curiously. It was Lengyll to whom he spoke. 
"Mejis is your home place; I've seen the line of your fa­thers in the town 
cemetery. How can you do this to your home place, sai Lengyll?"
"I've no intention of standing out here and making palaver with ye," Lengyll 
said. He glanced over Roland's shoulder. "Alvarez! Get his horse! Boys as trig 
as this bunch should have no problem riding with their hands behind their—"
"No, tell me," Roland interposed. "Don't hold back, sai Lengyll— these are your 
friends you've come with, and not a one who isn't inside your circle. How can 
you do it? Would you rape your own mother if you came upon her sleeping with her 
dress up?"
Lengyll's mouth twitched—not with shame or embarrassment but momentary prudish 
distaste, and then the old rancher looked at Avery. "They teach em to talk 
pretty in Gilead, don't they?"
Avery had a rifle. Now he stepped toward the handcuffed gunslinger with the butt 
raised. "I'll teach 'im how to talk proper to a man of the gen­try, so I will! 
Knock the teef straight out of his head, if you say aye, Fran!"
Lengyll held him back, looking tired. "Don't be a fool. I don't want to bring 
him back laying over a saddle unless he's dead."
Avery lowered his gun. Lengyll turned to Roland.
"Ye're not going to live long enough to profit from advice, Dear­born," he said, 
"but I'll give'ee some, anyway: stick with the winners in this world. And know 
how the wind blows, so ye can tell when it changes direction."
"You've forgotten the face of your father, you scurrying little mag­got," 
Cuthbert said clearly.
This got to Lengyll in a way Roland's remark about his mother had not—it showed 
in the sudden bloom of color in his weathered cheeks.
"Get em mounted!" he said. "I want em locked up tight within the hour!"
 
5
 
Roland was boosted into Rusher's saddle so hard he almost flew off on the other 
side—would have, if Dave Hollis had not been there to steady him and then to 
wedge Roland's boot into the stirrup. Dave offered the gunslinger a nervous, 
half-embarrassed smile.
"I'm sorry to see you here," Roland said gravely.
"It's sorry I am to be here," the deputy said. "If murder was your busi­ness, I 
wish you'd gotten to it sooner. And your friend shouldn't have been so arrogant 
as to leave his calling-card." He nodded toward Cuthbert.
Roland hadn't the slightest idea what Deputy Dave was referring to, but it 
didn't matter. It was just part of the frame, and none of these men believed 
much of it, Dave likely included. Although, Roland supposed, they would come to 
believe it in later years and tell it to their children and grandchildren as 
gospel. The glorious day they'd ridden with the posse and taken down the 
traitors.
The gunslinger used his knees to turn Rusher . . . and there, standing by the 
gate between the Bar K's dooryard and the lane leading to the Great Road, was 
Jonas himself. He sat astride a deep-chested bay, wear­ing a green felt drover's 
hat and an old gray duster. There was a rifle in the scabbard beside his right 
knee. The left side of the duster was pulled back to expose the butt of his 
revolver. Jonas's white hair, untied today, lay over his shoulders.
He doffed his hat and held it out to Roland in courtly greeting. "A good game," 
he said. "You played very well for someone who was taking his milk out of a tit 
not so long ago."
"Old man," Roland said, "you've lived too long."
Jonas smiled. "You'd remedy that if you could, wouldn't you? Yar, I reckon." He 
flicked his eyes at Lengyll. "Get their toys, Fran. Look spe­cially sharp for 
knives. They've got guns, but not with em. Yet I know a bit more about those 
shooting irons than they might think. And funny boy's slingshot. Don't forget 
that, for gods' sake. He like to take Roy's head off with it not so long ago."
"Are you talking about the carrot-top?" Cuthbert asked. His horse was dancing 
under him; Bert swayed back and forth and from side to side like a circus rider 
to keep from tumbling off. "He never would have missed his head. His balls, 
maybe, but not his head."
"Probably true," Jonas agreed, watching as the spears and Roland's shortbow were 
taken into custody. The slingshot was on the back of Cuth­bert's belt, tucked 
into a holster he had made for it himself. It was very well for Roy Depape that 
he hadn't tried Bert, Roland knew—Bert could take a bird on the wing at sixty 
yards. A pouch holding steel shot hung at the boy's left side. Bridger took it, 
as well.
While this was going on, Jonas fixed Roland with an amiable smile. "What's your 
real name, brat? Fess up—no harm in telling now; you're going to ride the 
handsome, and we both know it."
Roland said nothing. Lengyll looked at Jonas, eyebrows raised. Jonas shrugged, 
then jerked his head in the direction of town. Lengyll nod­ded and poked Roland 
with one hard, chapped finger. "Come on, boy. Let's ride."
Roland squeezed Rusher's sides; the horse trotted toward Jonas. And suddenly 
Roland knew something. As with all his best and truest intu­itions, it came from 
nowhere and everywhere—absent at one second, all there and fully dressed at the 
next.
"Who sent you west, maggot?" he asked as he passed Jonas. "Couldn't have been 
Cort—you're too old. Was it his father?"
The look of slightly bored amusement left Jonas's face—flew from his face, as if 
slapped away. For one amazing moment the man with the white hair was a child 
again: shocked, shamed, and hurt.
"Yes, Cort's da—I see it in your eyes. And now you're here, on the Clean Sea ... 
except you're really in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave 
the west."
Jonas's gun was out and cocked in his hand with such speed that only Roland's 
extraordinary eyes were capable of marking the movement. There was a murmur from 
the men behind them—partly shock, mostly awe.
"Jonas, don't be a fool!" Lengyll snarled. "You ain't killin em after we took 
the time and risk to hood em and tie their hooks, are ye?"
Jonas seemed to take no notice. His eyes were wide; the comers of his seamed 
mouth were trembling. "Watch your words, Will Dearborn," he said in a low, 
hoarse voice. "You want to watch em ever so close. I got two pounds of pressure 
on a three-pound trigger right this second."
"Fine, shoot me," Roland said. He lifted his head and looked down at Jonas. 
"Shoot, exile. Shoot, worm. Shoot, you failure. You'll still live in exile and 
die as you lived."
For a moment he was sure Jonas would shoot, and in that moment Roland felt death 
would be enough, an acceptable end after the shame of being caught so easily. In 
that moment Susan was absent from his mind. Nothing breathed in that moment, 
nothing called, nothing moved. The shadows of the men watching this 
confrontation, both on foot and on horseback, were printed depthless on the 
dirt.
Then Jonas dropped the hammer of his gun and slipped it back into its holster.
"Take em to town and jug em," he said to Lengyll. "And when I show up, I don't 
want to see one hair harmed on one head. If I could keep from killing this one, 
you can keep from hurting the rest. Now go on."
"Move," Lengyll said. His voice had lost some of its bluff authority. It was now 
the voice of a man who realizes (too late) that he has bought chips in a game 
where the stakes are likely much too high.
They rode. As they did, Roland turned one last time. The contempt Jonas saw in 
those cool young eyes stung him worse than the whips that had scarred his back 
in Garlan years ago.
 
6
 
When they were out of sight, Jonas went into the bunkhouse, pulled up the board 
which concealed their little armory, and found only two guns. The matched set of 
six-shooters with the dark handles—Dearborn's guns, surely—were gone.
You 're in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west. 
You'll live in exile and die as you lived.
Jonas's hands went to work, disassembling the revolvers Cuthbert and Alain had 
brought west. Alain's had never even been worn, save on the practice-range. 
Outside, Jonas threw the pieces, scattering them every which way. He threw as 
hard as he could, trying to rid himself of that cool blue gaze and the shock of 
hearing what he'd believed no man had known. Roy and Clay suspected, but even 
they hadn't known for sure.
Before the sun went down, everyone in Mejis would know that Eldred Jonas, the 
white-haired regulator with the tattooed coffin on his hand, was nothing but a 
failed gunslinger.
You'll live in exile and die as you lived.
"P'raps," he said, looking at the burned-out ranch house without really seeing 
it. "But I'll live longer than you, young Dearborn, and die long after your 
bones are rusting in the ground."
He mounted up and swung his horse around, sawing viciously at the reins. He rode 
for Citgo, where Roy and Clay would be waiting, and he rode hard, but Roland's 
eyes rode with him.
 
7
 
"Wake up! Wake up, sai! Wake up! Wake up!"
At first the words seemed to be coming from far away, drifting down by some 
magical means to the dark place where she lay. Even when the voice was joined by 
a rudely shaking hand and Susan knew she must wake up, it was a long, hard 
struggle.
It had been weeks since she'd gotten a decent night's sleep, and she had 
expected more of the same last night. . . especially last night. She had lain 
awake in her luxurious bedchamber at Seafront, tossing from side to side, 
possibilities—none good—crowding her mind. The nightgown she wore crept up to 
her hips and bunched at the small of her back. When she got up to use the 
commode, she took the hateful thing off, hurled it into a comer, and crawled 
back into bed naked.
Being out of the heavy silk nightgown had done the trick. She dropped off almost 
at once . . . and in this case, dropped off was, exactly right: it was less like 
falling asleep than falling into some thoughtless, dreamless crack in the earth.
Now this intruding voice. This intruding arm, shaking her so hard that her head 
rolled from side to side on the pillow. Susan tried to slide away from it, 
pulling her knees up to her chest and mouthing fuzzy protests, but the arm 
followed. The shaking recommenced; the nagging, calling voice never stopped.
"Wake up, sai! Wake up! In the name of the Turtle and the Bear, wake up!"
Maria's voice. Susan hadn't recognized it at first because Maria was so upset. 
Susan had never heard her so, or expected to. Yet it was so; the maid sounded on 
the verge of hysteria.
Susan sat up. For a moment so much input—all of it wrong—crashed in on her that 
she was incapable of moving. The duvet beneath which she had slept tumbled into 
her lap, exposing her breasts, and she could do no more than pluck weakly at it 
with the tips of her fingers.
The first wrong thing was the light. It flooded through the windows more 
strongly than it ever had before . . . because, she realized, she had never been 
in this room so late before. Gods, it had to be ten o' the clock, perhaps later.
The second wrong thing was the sounds from below. Mayor's House was ordinarily a 
peaceful place in the morning; until noon one heard little but casa vaqueros 
leading the horses out for their morning exercise, the whicker-whicker-whick of 
Miguel sweeping the courtyard, and the con­stant boom and shush of the waves. 
This morning there were shouts, curses, galloping horses, the occasional burst 
of strange, jagged laughter. Somewhere outside her room—perhaps not in this 
wing, but close— Susan heard the running thud of booted feet.
The wrongest thing of all was Maria herself, cheeks ashy beneath her olive 
skin-tone, and her usually neat hair tangled and unbound. Susan would have 
guessed only an earthquake could make her look so, if that.
"Maria, what is it?"
"You have to go, sai. Seafront maybe not safe for you just now. Your own house 
maybe better. When I don't see you earlier, I think you gone there already. You 
chose a bad day to sleep late."
"Go?" Susan asked. Slowly, she pulled the duvet all the way up to her nose and 
stared at Maria over it with wide, puffy eyes. "What do you mean, go?"
"Out the back." Maria plucked the duvet from Susan's sleep-numbed hands again 
and this time stripped it all the way down to her ankles. "Like you did before. 
Now, missy, now! Dress and go! Those boys put away, aye, but what if they have 
friends? What if they come back, kill you, too?"
Susan had been getting up. Now all the strength ran out of her legs and she sat 
back down on the bed again. "Boys?" she whispered. "Boys kill who? Boys kill 
who?"
This was a good distance from grammatical, but Maria took her meaning.
"Dearborn and his pinboys," she said.
"Who are they supposed to have killed?"
"The Mayor and the Chancellor." She looked at Susan with a kind of distracted 
sympathy. "Now get up, I tell you. And get gone. This place gone loco."
"They didn't do any such thing," Susan said, and only just restrained herself 
from adding, It wasn't in the plan.
"Sai Thorin and sai Rimer jus' as dead, whoever did it." There were more shouts 
below, and a sharp little explosion that didn't sound like a firecracker. Maria 
looked in that direction, then began to throw Susan her clothes. "The Mayor's 
eyes, they gouged right out of his head."
"They couldn't have! Maria, I know them—"
"Me, I don't know nothing about them and care less—but I care about you. Get 
dressed and get out, I tell you. Quick as you can."
"What's happened to them?" A terrible thought came to Susan and she leaped to 
her feet, clothes falling all around her. She seized Maria by the shoulders. 
"They haven't been killed?" Susan shook her. "Say they haven't been killed!"
"I don't think so. There's been a t'ousan' shouts and ten t'ousan' ru­mors go 
the rounds, but I think jus' jailed. Only . .."
There was no need for her to finish; her eyes slipped from Susan's, and that 
involuntary shift (along with the confused shouts from below) told all the rest. 
Not killed yet, but Hart Thorin had been greatly liked, and from an old family. 
Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain were strangers.
Not killed yet ... but tomorrow was Reaping, and tomorrow night was Reaping 
Bonfire.
Susan began to dress as fast as she could.
 
8
 
Reynolds, who had been with Jonas longer than Depape, took one look at the 
figure cantering toward them through the skeletal oil derricks, and turned to 
his partner. "Don't ask him any questions—he's not in any mood for silly 
questions this morning."
"How do you know?"
"Never mind. Just keep your ever-fucking gob shut."
Jonas reined up before them. He sat slumped in his saddle, pale and thoughtful. 
His look prompted one question from Roy Depape in spite of Reynolds's caution. 
"Eldred, are you all right?"
"Is anyone?" Jonas responded, then fell silent again. Behind them, Citgo's few 
remaining pumpers squalled tiredly.
At last Jonas roused himself and sat a little straighter in the saddle. "The 
cubs'll be stored supplies by now. I told Lengyll and Avery to fire a double set 
of pistol-shots if anything went wrong, and there hasn't been any shooting like 
that."
"We didn't hear none, either, Eldred," Depape said eagerly. "Nothing atall like 
that."
Jonas grimaced. "You wouldn't, would you? Not out in this noise.
Fool!"
Depape bit his lip, saw something in the neighborhood of his left stir­rup that 
needed adjusting, and bent to it.
"Were you boys seen at your business?" Jonas asked. "This morning, I mean, when 
you sent Rimer and Thorin off. Even a chance either of you was seen?"
Reynolds shook his head for both of them. " 'Twas clean as could be."
Jonas nodded as if the subject had been of only passing interest to him, then 
turned to regard the oilpatch and the rusty derricks. "Mayhap folks are right," 
he said in a voice almost too low to hear. "Mayhap the Old People were devils." 
He turned back to them. "Well, we're the devils now. Ain't we. Clay?"
"Whatever you think, Eldred," Reynolds said.
"I said what I think. We're the devils now, and by God, that's how we'll behave. 
What about Quint and that lot down there?" He cocked his head toward the 
forested slope where the ambush had been laid.
"Still there, pending your word," Reynolds said.
"No need of em now." He favored Reynolds with a dark look. "That Dearborn's a 
coozey brat. I wish I was going to be in Hambry tomorrow night just so I could 
lay a torch between his feet. I almost left him cold and dead at the Bar K. 
Would've if not for Lengyll. Coozey little brat is what he is."
Slumping as he spoke. Face growing blacker and blacker, like storm clouds 
drifting across the sun. Depape, his stirrup fixed, tossed Reynolds a nervous 
glance. Reynolds didn't answer it. What point? If Eldred went crazy now (and 
Reynolds had seen it happen before), there was no way they could get out of his 
killing-zone in time.
"Eldred, we got quite a spot more to do."
Reynolds spoke quietly, but it got through. Jonas straightened. He took off his 
hat, hung it on his saddle as if the horn were a coathook, and brushed absently 
through his hair with his fingers.
"Yar—quite a spot is right. Ride down there. Tell Quint to send for oxen to pull 
those last two full tankers out to Hanging Rock. He sh'd keep four men with him 
to hook em up and take em on to Latigo. The rest can go on ahead."
Reynolds now judged it safe to ask a question. "When do the rest of Latigo's men 
get there?"
"Men?" Jonas snorted. "Don't we wish, cully! The rest of Latigo's boys'll ride 
out to Hanging Rock by moonlight, pennons no doubt flying for all the coyotes 
and other assorted desert-dogs to see and be awed by. They'll be ready to do 
escort duty by ten tomorrow, I sh'd think ... al­though if they're the sort of 
lads I'm expecting, fuck-ups are apt to be the rule of the day. The good news is 
that we don't much need em, anyway. Things look well in hand. Now go down there, 
get them about their busi­ness, and then ride back to me, just as fast's you 
can."
Jonas turned and looked toward the lumpy swell of hills to the northwest.
"We have business of our own," he said. "Soonest begun, boys, soon­est done.  I 
want to shake the dust of fucking Mejis off my hat and boots as soon as I can. I 
don't like the way it feels anymore. Not at all."
 
9
 
The woman, Theresa Maria Dolores O'Shyven, was forty years old, plump, pretty, 
mother of four, husband of Peter, a vaquero of laughing tempera­ment. She was 
also a seller of rugs and draperies in the Upper Market; many of the prettier 
and more delicate appointments at Seafront had passed through Theresa O'Shyven's 
hands, and her family was quite well-to-do. Although her husband was a 
range-rider, the O'Shyven clan was what would have been called middle-class in 
another place and time. Her two oldest children were grown and gone, one right 
out o' Barony. The third eldest was sparking and hoping to marry his heart's 
delight at Year's End. Only the youngest suspected something was wrong with Ma, 
and this one had no idea how close Theresa was to complete obsessional madness.
Soon, Rhea thought, watching Theresa avidly in the ball. She 'II start doing it 
soon, but first she's got to get rid of the brat.
There was no school at Reaptide, and the stalls opened only for a few hours in 
the afternoon, so Theresa sent her youngest daughter off with a pie. A Reaptide 
gift to a neighbor, Rhea surmised, although she couldn't hear the soundless 
instructions the woman gave her daughter as she pulled a knitted cap down over 
the girl's ears. And 'twouldn't be a neighbor too close, either; she'd want 
time, would Theresa Maria Dolores O'Shyven, time to be a-choring. It was a 
good-sized house, and there were a lot of corners in it that needed cleaning.
Rhea chuckled; the chuckle turned into a hollow gust of coughing. In the corner, 
Musty looked at the old woman hauntedly. Although far from the emaciated 
skeleton that his mistress had become, Musty didn't look good at all.
The girl was shown out with the pie under her arm; she paused to give her mother 
a single troubled look, and then the door was shut in her face.
"Now!" Rhea croaked. "Them comers is waitin! Down on yer knees, woman, and get 
to business!"
First Theresa went to the window. When she was satisfied with what she saw—her 
daughter out the gate and down the High Street, likely—she turned back to her 
kitchen. She walked to the table and stood there, look­ing dreamy-eyed into 
space.
"No, none o' that, now!" Rhea cried impatiently. She no longer saw her own 
filthy hut, she no longer smelled either its rank aromas or her own. She had 
gone into the Wizard's Rainbow. She was with Theresa O'Shyven, whose cottage had 
the cleanest comers in all Mejis. Mayhap in all Mid-World.
"Hurry, woman!" Rhea half-screamed. "Get to yer housework!"
As if hearing, Theresa unbuttoned her housedress, stepped out of it, and laid it 
neatly over a chair. She pulled the hem of her clean, mended shift up over her 
knees, went to the comer, and got down on all fours. "That's it, my corazon!" 
Rhea cried, nearly choking on a phlegmy mixture of coughing and laughter. "Do 
yer chores, now, and do em wery pert!"
Theresa O'Shyven poked her head forward to the full length of her neck, opened 
her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and began to lick the cor­ner. She lapped it as 
Musty lapped his milk. Rhea watched this, slapping her knee and whooping, her 
face growing redder and redder as she rocked from side to side. Oh, Theresa was 
her favorite, aye! No doubt! For hours now she would crawl about on her hands 
and knees with her ass in the air, licking into the comers, praying to some 
obscure god—not even the Man-Jesus God—for forgiveness of who knew what as she 
did this, her penance. Sometimes she got splinters in her tongue and had to 
pause to spit blood into the kitchen basin. Up until now some sixth sense had 
always gotten her to her feet and back into her dress before any of her family 
returned, but Rhea knew that sooner or later the woman's obses­sion would take 
her too far, and she would be surprised. Perhaps today would be the day—the 
little girl would come back early, perhaps for a coin to spend in town, and 
discover her mother down on her knees and licking the comers. Oh, what a spin 
and raree! How Rhea wanted to see it! How she longed to—
Suddenly Theresa O'Shyven was gone. The interior of her neat little cottage was 
gone. Everything was gone, lost in curtains of shifting pink light. For the 
first time in weeks, the wizard's glass had gone blank.
Rhea picked the ball up in her scrawny, long-nailed fingers and shook it. 
"What's wrong with you, plaguey thing? What's wrong?"
The ball was heavy, and Rhea's strength was fading. After two or three hard 
shakes, it slipped in her grip. She cradled it against the deflated remains of 
her breasts, trembling.
"No, no, lovey," she crooned. "Come back when ye're ready, aye, Rhea lost her 
temper a bit but she's got it back now, she never meant to shake ye and she'd 
never ever drop ye, so ye just—"
She broke off and cocked her head, listening. Horses approaching. No, not 
approaching; here. Three riders, by the sound. They had crept up on her while 
she was distracted.
The boys? Those plaguey boys?
Rhea held the ball against her bosom, eyes wide, lips wet. Her hands were now so 
thin that the ball's pink glow shone through them, faintly il­luminating the 
dark spokes that were her bones.
"Rhea! Rhea of the Coos!"
No, not the boys.
"Come out here, and bring what you were given!"
Worse.
"Farson wants his property! We've come to take it!"
Not the boys but the Big Coffin Hunters.
"Never, ye dirty old white-haired prick," she whispered. "Ye'll never take it." 
Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and 
tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo.
She looked down at the ball and a whining noise began to escape her. Now even 
the pink glow was gone. The sphere was as dark as a corpse's eyeball.
 
10
 
A shriek came from the hut.
Depape turned to Jonas with wide eyes, his skin prickling. The thing which had 
uttered that cry hardly sounded human.
"Rhea!" Jonas called again. "Bring it out here now, woman, and hand it over! 
I've no time to play games with you!"
The door of the hut swung open. Depape and Reynolds drew their guns as the old 
crone stepped out, blinking against the sunlight like some­thing that's spent 
its whole life in a cave. She was holding John Farson's favorite toy high over 
her head. There were plenty of rocks in the dooryard she could throw it against, 
and even if her aim was bad and she missed them all, it might smash anyway.
This could be bad, and Jonas knew it—there were some people you just couldn't 
threaten. He had focused so much of his attention on the brats (who, ironically, 
had been taken as easy as milk) that it had never occurred to him to worry much 
about this part of it. And Kimba Rimer, the man who had suggested Rhea as the 
perfect custodian for Maerlyn's Rainbow, was dead. Couldn't lay it at Rimer's 
doorstep if things went wrong up here, could he?
Then, just to make things a little worse when he'd have thought they'd gone as 
far west as they could without dropping off the cold end of the earth, he heard 
the cocking sound of Depape drawing the hammer of his gun.
"Put that away, you idiot!" he snarled.
"But look at her!" Depape almost moaned. "Look at her, Eldred!"
He was. The thing inside the black dress appeared to be wearing the corpse of a 
putrefying snake around its throat for a necklace. She was so scrawny that she 
resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton. Her peeling skull was only 
tufted with hair; the rest had fallen out. Sores clus­tered on her cheeks and 
brow, and there was a mark like a spider-bite on the left side of her mouth. 
Jonas thought that last might be a scurvy-bloom, but he didn't really care one 
way or another. What he cared about was the ball upraised in the dying woman's 
long and shivering claws.
 
11
 
The sunlight so dazzled Rhea's eyes that she didn't see the gun pointed at her, 
and when her vision cleared, Depape had put it away again. She looked at the men 
lined up across from her—the bespectacled redhead, the one in the cloak, and Old 
White-Hair Jonas—and uttered a dusty croak of laughter. Had she been afraid of 
them, these mighty Coffin Hunters? She supposed she had, but for gods' sake, 
why? They were men, that was all, just more men, and she had been beating such 
all her life. Oh, they thought they ruled the roost, all right—nobody in 
Mid-World ac­cused anyone of forgetting the face of his mother—but they were 
poor things, at bottom, moved to tears by a sad song, utterly undone by the 
sight of a bare breast, and all the more capable of being manipulated sim­ply 
because they were so sure they were strong and tough and wise.
The glass was dark, and as much as she hated that darkness, it had cleared her 
mind.
"Jonas!" she cried. "Eldred Jonas!"
"I'm here, old mother," he said. "Long days and pleasant nights."
"Never mind yer sops, time's too short for em." She came four steps farther and 
stopped with the ball still held over her head. Near her, a gray chunk of stone 
jutted from the weedy ground. She looked at it, then back at Jonas. The 
implication was unspoken but unmistakable.
"What do you want?" Jonas asked.
"The ball's gone dark," she said, answering from the side. "All the time I had 
it in my keeping, it was lively—aye, even when it showed nothing I could make 
out, it was passing lively, bright and pink—but it fell dark almost at the sound 
of yer voice. It doesn't want to go with ye."
"Nevertheless, I'm under orders to take it." Jonas's voice became soft and 
conciliating. It wasn't the tone he used when he was in bed with Coral, but it 
was close. "Think a minute, and you'll see my situation. Far-son wants it, and 
who am I to stand against the wants of a man who'll be the most powerful in 
Mid-World when Demon Moon rises next year? If I come back without it and say 
Rhea of the Coos refused me it, I'll be killed."
"If ye come back and tell him I broke it in yer ugly old face, ye'll be killed, 
too," Rhea said. She was close enough for Jonas to see how far her sickness had 
eaten into her. Above the few remaining tufts of her hair, the wretched ball was 
trembling back and forth. She wouldn't be able to hold it much longer. A minute 
at most. Jonas felt a dew of sweat spring out on his forehead.
"Aye, mother. But d'you know, given a choice of deaths, I'd choose to take the 
cause of my problem with me. That's you, darling."
She croaked again—that dusty replica of laughter—and nodded ap­preciatively. " 
'Twon't do Farson any good without me in any case," she said. "It's found its 
mistress, I wot—that's why it went dark at the sound of yer voice."
Jonas wondered how many others had believed the ball was just for them. He 
wanted to wipe the sweat from his brow before it ran in his eyes, but kept his 
hands in front of him, folded neatly on the horn of his saddle.
He didn't dare look at either Reynolds or Depape. and could only hope they would 
leave the play to him. She was balanced on both a physical and mental 
knife-edge; the smallest movement would send her tumbling off in one direction 
or the other.
"Found the one it wants, has it?" He thought he saw a way out of this. If he was 
lucky. And it might be lucky for her, as well. "What should we do about that?"
"Take me with ye." Her face twisted into an expression of gruesome greed; she 
looked like a corpse that is trying to sneeze. She doesn't realize she's dying, 
Jonas thought. Thank the gods for that. "Take the ball, but take me, as well. 
I'll go with ye to Farson. I'll become his soothsayer, and nothing will stand 
before us, not with me to read the ball for him. Take me with ye!"
"All right," Jonas said. It was what he had hoped for. "Although what Farson 
decides is none o' mine. You know that?"
"Aye."
"Good. Now give me the ball. I'll give it back into your keeping, if you like, 
but I need to make sure it's whole."
She slowly lowered it. Jonas didn't think it was entirely safe even cradled in 
her arms, but he breathed a little easier when it was, all the same. She 
shuffled toward him, and he had to control an urge to gig his horse back from 
her.
He bent over in the saddle, holding his hands out for the glass. She looked up 
at him, her old eyes still shrewd behind their crusted lids. One of them 
actually drew down in a conspirator's wink. "I know yer mind, Jonas. Ye think, 
'I'll take the ball, then draw my gun and kill her, what harm?' Isn't that true? 
Yet there would be harm, and all to you and yours. Kill me and the ball will 
never shine for Farson again. For someone, aye, someday, mayhap; but not for him 
. . . and will he let ye live if ye bring his toy back and he discovers it's 
broken?"
Jonas had already considered this. "We have a bargain, old mother. You go west 
with the glass ... unless you die beside the trail some night. You'll pardon me 
for saying so, but you don't look well."
She cackled. "I'm better'n I look, oh yar! Years left 'fore this clock o' mine 
runs down!"
I think you may be wrong about that, old mother, Jonas thought. But he kept his 
peace and only held his hands out for the ball.
For a moment longer she held it. Their arrangement was made and agreed to on 
both sides, but in the end she could barely bring herself to ungrasp the ball. 
Greed shone in her eyes like moonlight through fog.
He held his hands out patiently, saying nothing, waiting for her mind to accept 
reality—if she let go, there was some chance. If she held on, very likely 
everyone in this stony, weedy yard would end up riding the handsome before long.
With a sigh of regret, she finally put the ball in his hands. At the in­stant it 
passed from her to him, an ember of pink light pulsed deep in the depths of the 
glass. A throb of pain drove into Jonas's head . . . and a shiver of lust coiled 
in his balls.
As from a great distance, he heard Depape and Reynolds cocking their pistols.
"Put those away," Jonas said. "But—" Reynolds looked confused.
"They thought'ee was going to double-cross Rhea," the old woman said, cackling. 
"Good thing ye're in charge rather than them, Jonas ... mayhap you know summat 
they don't."
He knew something, all right—how dangerous the smooth, glassy thing in his hands 
was. It could take him in a blink, if it wanted. And in a month, he would be 
like the witch: scrawny, raddled with sores, and too obsessed to know or care.
"Put them away!" he shouted.
Reynolds and Depape exchanged a glance, then reholstered their guns. "There was 
a bag for this thing," Jonas said. "A drawstring bag laid inside the box. Get 
it."
"Aye," Rhea said, grinning unpleasantly at him. "But it won't keep the ball from 
takin ye if it wants to. Ye needn't think it will." She sur­veyed the other two, 
and her eye fixed on Reynolds. "There's a cart in my shed, and a pair of good 
gray goats to pull it." She spoke to Reynolds, but her eyes kept turning back to 
the ball, Jonas noticed .. . and now his damned eyes wanted to go there, too.
"You don't give me orders," Reynolds said.
"No, but I do," Jonas said. His eyes dropped to the ball, both wanting and 
fearing to see that pink spark of life deep inside. Nothing. Cold and dark. He 
dragged his gaze back up to Reynolds again. "Get the cart."
 
12
 
Reynolds heard the buzzing of flies even before he slipped through the shed's 
sagging door, and knew at once that Rhea's goats had finished their days of 
pulling. They lay bloated and dead in their pen, legs sticking up and the 
sockets of their eyes squirming with maggots. It was impossi­ble to know when 
Rhea had last fed and watered them, but Reynolds guessed at least a week, from 
the smell.
Too busy watching what goes on in that glass ball to bother, he thought. And 
what's she wearing that dead snake around her neck for?
"I don't want to know," he muttered from behind his pulled-up neck­erchief. The 
only thing he did want right now was to get the hell out of here.
He spied the cart, which was painted black and overlaid with cabalis­tic designs 
in gold. It looked like a medicine-show wagon to Reynolds; it also looked a bit 
like a hearse. He seized it by the handles and dragged it out of the shed as 
fast as he could. Depape could do the rest, by gods. Hitch his horse to the cart 
and haul the old woman's stinking freight to ... where? Who knew? Eldred, maybe.
Rhea came tottering out of her hut with the drawstring bag they'd brought the 
ball in, but she stopped, head cocked, listening, when Rey­nolds asked his 
question.
Jonas thought it over, then said: "Seafront to begin, I guess. Yar, that'll do 
for her, and this glass bauble as well, I reckon, until the party's over 
tomorrow."
"Aye, Seafront, I've never been there," Rhea said, moving forward again. When 
she reached Jonas's horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the 
bag. After a moment's further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It 
bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.
Rhea wore a sly smile. "Mayhap we'll meet Thorin. If so, I might have something 
to show him in the Good Man's toy that'd interest him ever so much."
"If you meet him," Jonas said, getting down to help hitch Depape's horse to the 
black cart, "it'll be in a place where no magic is needed to see far."
She looked at him, frowning, and then the sly smile slowly resur­faced. "Why, I 
b'lieve our Mayor's met wiv a accident!"
"Could be," Jonas agreed.
She giggled, and soon the giggle turned into a full-throated cackle. She was 
still cackling as they drew out of the yard, cackling and sitting in the little 
black cart with its cabalistic decorations like the Queen of Black Places on her 
throne.

 

 
 
CHAPTER     VIII
the ashes
 
1
 
Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and 
everything is in flux. It was the sight of Miguel, the old mozo, that started 
Susan down its greased slope. He was in the middle of Seafront's courtyard, 
clutching his broom of twigs against his chest and looking at the riders who 
passed to and fro with an expression of perplexed misery. His sombrero was 
twisted around on his back, and Susan observed with something like horror that 
Miguel—usually brushed and clean and neat as a pin—was wearing his serape inside 
out. There were tears on his cheeks, and as he turned this way and that, 
following the passing riders, trying to hile those he recognized, she thought of 
a child she had once seen toddle out in front of an oncoming stage. The child 
had been pulled back in time by his father; who would pull Miguel back?
She started for him, and a vaquero aboard a wild-eyed spotted roan galloped so 
close by her that one stirrup ticked off her hip and the horse's tail flicked 
her forearm. She voiced a strange-sounding little chuckle. She had been worried 
about Miguel and had almost been run down herself! Funny!
She looked both ways this time, started forward, then drew back again as a 
loaded wagon came careering around the comer, tottering on two wheels at first. 
What it was loaded with she couldn't see—the goods in the wagonbed were covered 
with a tarp -but she saw Miguel move toward it, still clutching his broom. Susan 
thought of the child in front of the stage again and shrieked an inarticulate 
cry of alarm. Miguel cringed back at the last moment and the cart flew by him, 
bounded and swayed across the courtyard, and disappeared out through the arch.
Miguel dropped his broom, clapped both hands to his cheeks, fell to his knees, 
and began to pray in a loud, lamenting voice. Susan watched him for a moment, 
her mouth working, and then sprinted for the stables, no longer taking care to 
keep against the side of the building. She had caught the disease that would 
grip almost all of Hambry by noon, and al­though she managed to do a fairly apt 
job of saddling Pylon (on any other day there would have been three stable-boys 
vying for the chance to help the pretty sai), any ability to think had left her 
by the time she heel-kicked the startled horse into a run outside the stable 
door.
When she rode past Miguel, still on his knees and praying to the bright sky with 
his hands upraised, she saw him no more than any other rider had before her.
 
2
 
She rode straight down the High Street, thumping her spurless heels at Pylon's 
sides until the big horse was fairly flying. Thoughts, questions, possible plans 
of action ... none of those had a place in her head as she rode. She was but 
vaguely aware of the people milling in the street, allow­ing Pylon to weave his 
own path through them. The only thing she was aware of was his name—Roland, 
Roland, Roland!—ringing in her head like a scream. Everything had gone upside 
down. The brave little ka-tet they had made that night at the graveyard was 
broken, three of its mem­bers jailed and with not long to live (if they even 
were still alive), the last member lost and confused, as crazy with terror as a 
bird in a barn.
If her panic had held, things might have turned out in a much differ­ent 
fashion. But as she rode through the center of town and out the other side, her 
way took her toward the house she had shared with her father and her aunt. That 
lady had been watching for the very rider who now approached.
As Susan neared, the door flew open and Cordelia, dressed in black from throat 
to toe, rushed down the front walk to the street, shrieking with either horror 
or laughter. Perhaps both. The sight of her cut through the foreground haze of 
panic in Susan's mind .. . but not because she recog­nized her aunt.
"Rhea!" she cried, and drew back on the reins so violently that the horse 
skidded, reared, and almost tilted them over backward. That would likely have 
crushed the life out of his mistress, but Pylon managed to keep at least his 
back feet, pawing at the sky with his front ones and whinnying loudly. Susan 
slung an arm around his neck and hung on for dear life.
Cordelia Delgado, wearing her best black dress and a lace mantilla over her 
hair, stood in front of the horse as if in her own parlor, taking no notice of 
the hooves cutting the air less than two feet in front other nose. In one gloved 
hand she held a wooden box.
Susan belatedly realized that this wasn't Rhea, but the mistake really wasn't 
that odd. Aunt Cord wasn't as thin as Rhea (not yet, anyway), and more neatly 
dressed (except for her dirty gloves—why her aunt was wear­ing gloves in the 
first place Susan didn't know, let alone why they looked so smudged), but the 
mad look in her eyes was horribly similar.
"Good day t'ye, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty!" Aunt Cord greeted her in a 
cracked, vivacious voice that made Susan's heart tremble. Aunt Cord curtseyed 
one-handed, holding the little box curled against her chest with the other. 
"Where go ye on this fine autumn day? Where go ye so speedy? To no lover's arms, 
that seems sure, for one's dead and the other ta'en!"
Cordelia laughed again, thin lips drawing back from big white teeth. Horse 
teeth, almost. Her eyes glared in the sunlight.
Her mind's broken, Susan thought. Poor thing. Poor old thing.
     "Did thee put Dearborn up to it?" Aunt Cord asked. She crept to Py­lon's 
side and looked up at Susan with luminous, liquid eyes. "Thee did, didn't thee? 
Aye! Perhaps thee even gave him the knife he used, after runnin yer lips o'er it 
for good luck. Ye're in it together—why not admit it? At least admit thee's lain 
with that boy, for I know it's true. I saw the way he looked at ye the day ye 
were sitting in the window, and the way ye looked back at him!"
Susan said, "If ye'll have truth, I'll give it to ye. We're lovers. And we'll be 
man and wife ere Year's End."
Cordelia raised one dirty glove to the blue sky and waved it as if say­ing hello 
to the gods. She screamed with mingled triumph and laughter as she waved. "And 
t'be wed, she thinks! Ooooo! Ye'd no doubt drink the blood of your victims on 
the marriage altar, too, would ye not? Oh, wicked! It makes me weep!" But 
instead of weeping she laughed again, a howl of mirth into the blind blue face 
of the sky.
"We planned no murders," Susan said, drawing—if only in her own mind—a line of 
difference between the killings at Mayor's House and the trap they had hoped to 
spring on Parson's soldiers. "And he did no mur­ders. No, this is the business 
of your friend Jonas, I wot. His plan, his filthy work."
Cordelia plunged her hand into the box she held, and Susan under­stood at once 
why the gloves she wore were dirty: she had been grubbing in the stove.
"I curse thee with the ashes!" Cordelia cried, flinging a black and gritty cloud 
of them at Susan's leg and the hand which held Pylon's reins. "I curse thee to 
darkness, both of thee! Be ye happy together, ye faith­less! Ye murderers! Ye 
cozeners! Ye liars! Ye fornicators! Ye lost and renounced!"
With each cry, Cordelia Delgado threw another handful of ashes. And with each 
cry, Susan's mind grew clearer, colder. She held fast and al­lowed her aunt to 
pelt her; in fact, when Pylon, feeling the gritty rain against his side, 
attempted to pull away, Susan gigged him set. There were spectators now, avidly 
watching this old ritual of renunciation (Sheemie was among them, eyes wide and 
mouth quivering), but Susan barely noticed. Her mind was her own again, she had 
an idea of what to do, and for that alone she supposed she owed her aunt some 
sort of thanks.
"I forgive ye, Aunt," she said.
The box of stove-ashes, now almost empty, tumbled from Cordelia's hands as if 
Susan had slapped her. "What?" she whispered. "What does thee say?"
"For what ye did to yer brother and my father," Susan said. "For what ye were a 
part of."
She rubbed a hand on her leg and bent with the hand held out before her. Before 
her aunt could pull away, Susan had wiped ashes down one of her cheeks. The 
smudge stood out there like a wide, dark scar. "But wear that, all the same," 
she said. "Wash it off if ye like, but I think ye'll wear it in yer heart yet 
awhile." She paused. "I think ye already do. Goodbye."
"Where does thee think thee's going?" Aunt Cord was pawing at the soot-mark on 
her face with one gloved hand, and when she lunged for­ward in an attempt to 
grasp Pylon's reins, she stumbled over the box and almost fell. It was Susan, 
still bent over to her aunt's side, who grasped her shoulder and held her up. 
Cordelia pulled back as if from the touch of an adder. "Not to him! Ye'll not go 
to him now, ye mad goose!"
Susan turned her horse away. "None of yer business. Aunt. This is the end 
between us. But mark what I say: we'll be married by Year's End. Our firstborn 
is already conceived."
"Thee'll be married tomorrow night if thee goes nigh him' Joined in smoke, 
wedded in fire, bedded in the ashes! Bedded in the ashes, do ye hear me?"
The madwoman advanced on her, railing, but Susan had no more time to listen. The 
day was fleeting. There would be time to do the things that needed doing, but 
only if she moved at speed.
"Goodbye," she said again, and then galloped away. Her aunt's last words 
followed her: In the ashes, do ye hear me?
 
3
 
On her way out of town along the Great Road, Susan saw riders coming toward her, 
and got off the highway. This would not, she felt, be a good time to meet 
pilgrims. There was an old granary nearby; she rode Pylon behind it, stroked his 
neck, murmured for him to be quiet.
It took the riders longer to reach her position than she would have ex­pected, 
and when they finally got there, she saw why. Rhea was with them, sitting in a 
black cart covered with magical symbols. The witch had been scary when Susan had 
seen her on the night of the Kissing Moon, but still recognizably human; what 
the girl saw passing before her now, rocking from side to side in the black cart 
and clutching a bag in her lap, was an unsexed, sore-raddled creature that 
looked more like a troll than a human being. With her were the Big Coffin 
Hunters.
"To Seafront!" the thing in the cart screamed. "Hie you on, and at full speed! 
I'll sleep in Thorin's bed tonight or know the reason why! Sleep in it and piss 
in it, if I take a notion! Hie you on, I say!"
Depape—it was to his horse that the cart had been harnessed—turned around and 
looked at her with distaste and fear. "Still your mouth."
Her answer was a fresh burst of laughter. She rocked from side to side, holding 
a bag on her lap with one hand and pointing at Depape with the twisted, 
long-nailed index finger of the other. Looking at her made Susan feel weak with 
terror, and she felt the panic around her again, like some dark fluid that would 
happily drown her brain if given half a chance.
She worked against the feeling as best she could, holding onto her mind, 
refusing to let it turn into what it had been before and would be again if she 
let it—a brainless bird trapped in a barn, bashing into the walls and ignoring 
the open window through which it had entered.
Even when the cart was gone below the next hill and there was noth­ing left of 
them but dust hanging in the air, she could hear Rhea's wild cackling.
 
4
 
She reached the hut in the Bad Grass at one o' the clock. For a moment she just 
sat astride Pylon, looking at it. Had she and Roland been here hardly 
twenty-four hours ago? Making love and making plans? It was hard to believe, but 
when she dismounted and went in, the wicker basket in which she had brought them 
a cold meal confirmed it. It still sat upon the rickety table.
Looking at the hamper, she realized she hadn't eaten since the previ­ous 
evening—a miserable supper with Hart Thorin that she'd only picked at, too aware 
of his eyes on her body. Well, they'd done their last crawl, hadn't they? And 
she'd never have to walk down another Seafront hall­way wondering what door he 
was going to come bursting out of like Jack out of his box, all grabbing hands 
and stiff, randy prick.
Ashes, she thought. Ashes and ashes. But not us, Roland. I swear, my darling, 
not us.
She was frightened and tense, trying to put everything she now must do in 
order—a process to be followed just as there was a process to be fol­lowed when 
saddling a horse—but she was also sixteen and healthy. One look at the hamper 
and she was ravenous.
She opened it, saw there were ants on the two remaining cold beef sandwiches, 
brushed them off, and gobbled the sandwiches down. The bread had gotten rather 
stiff, but she hardly noticed. There was a half jar of sweet cider and part of a 
cake, as well.
When she had finished everything, she went to the north comer of the hut and 
moved the hides someone had begun to cure and then lost interest in. There was a 
hollow beneath. Within it, wrapped in soft leather, were Roland's guns.
If things go badly, thee must come here and take them west to Gilead. Find my 
father.
With faint but genuine curiosity, Susan wondered if Roland had really expected 
she would ride blithely off to Gilead with his unborn child in her belly while 
he and his friends were roasted, screaming and red-handed, on the Reap-Night 
bonfire.
She pulled one of the guns out of its holster. It took her a moment or two to 
sec how to get the revolver open, hut then the cylinder rolled out and she saw 
that each chamber was loaded. She snapped it back into place and checked the 
other one.
She concealed them in the blanket-roll behind her saddle, just as Roland had, 
then mounted up and headed east again. But not toward town. Not yet. She had one 
more stop to make first.
 
5
 
At around two o' the clock, word that Fran Lengyll would be speaking at the Town 
Gathering Hall began to sweep through the town of Mejis. No one could have said 
where this news (it was too firm and specific to be a rumor) began, and no one 
much cared; they simply passed it on.
By three o' the clock, the Gathering Hall was full, and two hundred or more 
stood outside, listening as Lengyll's brief address was relayed back to them in 
whispers. Coral Thorin, who had begun passing the news of Lengyll's impending 
appearance at the Travellers' Rest, was not there. She knew what Lengyll was 
going to say; had, in fact, supported Jonas's argument that it should be as 
simple and direct as possible. There was no need for rabble-rousing; the 
townsfolk would be a mob by sundown of
Reaping Day, a mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right 
ones.
Lengyll spoke with his hat held in one hand and a silver reap-charm hanging from 
the front of his vest. He was brief, he was rough, and he was convincing. Most 
folks in the crowd had known him all their lives, and didn't doubt a word he 
said.
Hart Thorin and Kimba Rimer had been murdered by Dearborn, Heath, and 
Stockworth, Lengyll told the crowd of men in denim and women in faded gingham. 
The crime had come home to them because of a certain item—a bird's skull—left in 
Mayor Thorin's lap.
Murmurs greeted this. Many of Lengyll's listeners had seen the skull, either 
mounted on the horn of Cuthbert's saddle or worn jauntily around his neck. They 
had laughed at his prankishness. Now they thought of how he had laughed back at 
them, and realized he must have been laughing at a different joke all along. 
Their faces darkened.
The weapon used to slit the Chancellor's throat, Lengyll continued, had belonged 
to Dearborn. The three young men had been taken that morning as they prepared to 
flee Mejis. Their motivations were not en­tirely clear, but they were likely 
after horses. If so, they would be for John Farson, who was known to pay well 
for good nags, and in cash. They were, in other words, traitors to their own 
lands and to the cause of the Affiliation.
Lengyll had planted Brian Hockey's son Rufus three rows back. Now, exactly on 
time, Rufus Hookey shouted out: "Has they confessed?"
"Aye," Lengyll said. "Confessed both murders, and spoke it most proud, so they 
did."
A louder murmur at this, almost a rumble. It ran backward like a wave to the 
outside, where it went from mouth to mouth: most proud, most proud, they had 
murdered in the dark of night and spoke it most proud.
Mouths were tucked down. Fists clenched.
"Dearborn said that Jonas and his friends had caught on to what they were doing, 
and took the word to Rimer. They killed Chancellor Rimer to shut him up while 
they finished their chores, and Thorin in case Rimer had passed word on."
This made little sense, Latigo had argued. Jonas had smiled and nod­ded. No, he 
had said, not a mite of sense, but it doesn't matter.
Lengyll was prepared to answer questions, but none were asked. There was only 
the murmur, the dark looks, the muted click and clink of reap-charms as people 
shifted on their feet.
The boys were in jail. Lengyll made no statement concerning what would happen to 
them next, and once again he was not asked. He said that some of the activities 
scheduled for the next day—the games, the rides, the turkey-run, the 
pumpkin-carving contest, the pig-scramble, the rid­dling competition, and the 
dance—had been cancelled out of respect for the tragedy. The things that really 
mattered would go on, of course, as they always had and must: the cattle and 
livestock judging, the horse-pull, the sheep-shearing, the stockline meetings, 
and the auctions: horse, pig, cow, sheep. And the bonfire at moonrise. The 
bonfire and the burning of the guys. Charyou tree was the end of Reaping 
Fair-Day, and had been since time out of mind. Nothing would stop it save the 
end of the world.
"The bonfire will bum and the stuffy-guys will bum on it," Eldred Jonas had told 
Lengyll. "That's all you're to say. It's all you need to say."
And he'd been right, Lengyll saw. It was on every face. Not just the 
determination to do right, but a kind of dirty eagerness. There were old ways, 
old rites of which the red-handed stuffy-guys were one surviving remnant. There 
were los ceremoniosos: Charyou tree. It had been genera­tions since they had 
been practiced (except, every once and again, in se­cret places out in the 
hills), but sometimes when the world moved on, it came back to where it had 
been.
Keep it brief, Jonas had said, and it had been fine advice, fine advice indeed. 
He wasn't a man Lengyll would have wanted around in more peaceful times, but a 
useful one in times such as these.
"Gods give you peace," he said now, stepping back and folding his arms with his 
hands on his shoulders to show he had finished. "Gods give us all peace."
"Long days and peaceful nights," they returned in a low, automatic chorus. And 
then they simply turned and left, to go wherever folks went on the afternoon 
before Reaping. For a good many of them, Lengyll knew, it would be the 
Travellers' Rest or the Bayview Hotel. He raised a hand and mopped his brow. He 
hated to be out in front of people, and never so much as today, but he thought 
it had gone well. Very well, indeed.
 
6
 
The crowd streamed away without speaking. Most, as Lengyll had fore­seen, headed 
for the saloons. Their way took them past the jail, but few looked at it... and 
those few who did, did so in tiny, furtive glances. The porch was empty (save 
for a plump red-handed stuffy sprawled in Sheriff Avery's rocker), and the door 
stood ajar, as it usually did on warm and sunny afternoons. The boys were 
inside, no doubt about that, but there was no sign that they were being guarded 
with any particular zeal.
If the men passing on their way downhill to the Rest and the Bayview had banded 
together into one group, they could have taken Roland and his friends with no 
trouble whatsoever. Instead, they went by with their heads down, walking 
stolidly and with no conversation to where the drinks were waiting. Today was 
not the day. Nor tonight.
Tomorrow, however—
 
7
 
Not too far from the Bar K, Susan saw something on the Barony's long slope of 
grazing-land that made her rein up and simply sit in the saddle with her mouth 
open. Below her and much farther east of her position, at least three miles 
away, a band of a dozen cowboys had rounded up the biggest herd of Drop-runners 
she had ever seen: perhaps four hundred head in all. They ran lazily, going 
where the vaqs pointed them with no trouble.
Probably think they're going in for the winter, Susan thought. But they weren't 
headed in toward the ranches running along the crest of the Drop; the herd, so 
large it flowed on the grass like a cloud-shadow, was headed west, toward 
Hanging Rock.
Susan had believed everything Roland said, but this made it true in a personal 
way, one she could relate directly to her dead father. Horses, of courses.
"You bastards," she murmured. "You horse-thieving bastards." She turned Pylon 
and rode for the burned-out ranch. To her right, her shadow was growing long. 
Overhead, the Demon Moon glimmered ghostly in the daylight sky.
 
8
 
She had worried that Jonas might have left men at the Bar K—although why he 
would've she didn't really know, and the fear turned out to be groundless in any 
case. The ranch was as empty as it had been for the five or six years between 
the fire that had put paid to it and the arrival of the boys from In-World. She 
could see signs of that morning's confrontation, however, and when she went into 
the bunkhouse where the three of them had slept, she at once saw the gaping hole 
in the floorboards. Jonas had neglected to close it up again after taking 
Alain's and Cuthbert's guns.
She went down the aisle between the bunks, dropped to one knee, and looked into 
the hole. Nothing. Yet she doubted if what she had come for had been there in 
the first place—the hole wasn't big enough.
She paused, looking at the three cots. Which was Roland's? She sup­posed she 
could find out—her nose would tell her, she knew the smell of his hair and skin 
very well—but she thought she would do better to put such soft impulses behind 
her. What she needed now was to be hard and quick—to move without pausing or 
looking back.
Ashes, Aunt Cord whispered in her head, almost too faintly to hear. Susan shook 
her head impatiently, as if to clear that voice away, and walked out back.
There was nothing behind the bunkhouse, nothing behind the privy or to either 
side of it. She went around to the back of the old cook-shack next, and there 
she found what she'd come looking for, placed casually and with no attempt at 
concealment: the two small barrels she had last seen slung over Caprichoso's 
back.
The thought of the mule summoned the thought of Sheemie, looking down at her 
from his man's height and with his hopeful boy's face. I'd like to take a fin de 
ano kiss from ye, so I would.
Sheemie, whose life had been saved by "Mr. Arthur Heath." Sheemie, who had 
risked the wrath of the witch by giving Cuthbert the note meant for her aunt. 
Sheemie, who had brought these barrels up here. They had been smeared with soot 
to partially camouflage them, and Susan got some on her hands and the sleeves of 
her shirt as she took off the tops— more ashes. But the firecrackers were still 
inside: the round, fist-sized big-bangers and the smaller ladyfingers.
She took plenty of both, stuffing her pockets until they bulged and carrying 
more in her arms. She stowed them in her saddlebags, then looked up at the sky. 
Three-thirty. She wanted to get back to Hambry no earlier than twilight, and 
that meant at least an hour to wait. There was a little time to be soft, after 
all.
Susan went back into the bunkhouse and found the bed which had been Roland's 
easily enough. She knelt beside it like a child saying bed­time prayers, put her 
face against his pillow, and inhaled deeply.
"Roland," she said, her voice muffled. "How I love thee. How I love thee, dear."
She lay on his bed and looked toward the window, watching the light drain away. 
Once she raised her hands in front of her eyes, examining the barrel-soot on her 
fingers. She thought of going to the pump in front of the cookhouse and washing, 
but decided not to. Let it stay. They were ka-tet, one from many—strong in 
purpose and strong in love.
Let the ashes stay, and do their worst.
 
9
 
My Susie has'er faults, but she's always on time. Pat Delgado used to say. 
Fearful punctual, that girl.
It was true on the night before Reap. She skirted her own house and rode up to 
the Travellers' Rest not ten minutes after the sun had finally gone behind the 
hills, filling the High Street with thick mauve shadows.
The street was eerily deserted, considering it was the night before Reap; the 
band which had played in Green Heart every night for the last week was silent; 
there were periodic rattles of firecrackers, but no yelling, laughing children; 
only a few of the many colored lamps had been lit.
Stuffy-guys seemed to peer from every shadow-thickened porch. Susan shivered at 
the sight of their blank white-cross eyes.
Doings at the Rest were similarly odd. The hitching-rails were crowded (even 
more horses had been tied at the rails of the mercantile across the street) and 
light shone from every window—so many windows and so many lights that the inn 
looked like a vast ship on a darkened sea—but there was none of the usual riot 
and jubilation, all set to the jagtime tunes pouring out of Sheb's piano.
She found she could imagine the customers inside all too well— a hundred men, 
maybe more—simply standing around and drinking. Not talking, not laughing, not 
chucking the dice down Satan's Alley and cheering or groaning at the result. No 
bottoms stroked or pinched; no Reap-kisses stolen; no arguments started out of 
loose mouths and finished with hard fists. Just men drinking, not three hundred 
yards from where her love and his friends were locked up. The men who were here 
wouldn't do anything tonight but drink, though. And if she was lucky . . . brave 
and lucky...
As she drew Pylon up in front of the saloon with a murmured word, a shape rose 
out of the shadows. She tensed, and then the first orangey light of the rising 
moon caught Sheemie's face. She relaxed again—even laughed a little, mostly at 
herself. He was a part of their ka-tet; she knew he was. Was it surprising that 
he should know, as well?
"Susan," he murmured, taking off his sombrero and holding it against his chest. 
"I been waiting for'ee."
"Why?" she asked.
" 'Cause I knew ye'd come." He looked back over his shoulder at the Rest, a 
black bulk spraying crazy light toward every point of the compass. "We're going 
to let Arthur and them free, ain't we?"
"I hope so," she said.
"We have to. The folks in there, they don't talk, but they don't have to talk. I 
knows, Susan, daughter of Pat. I knows."
She supposed he did. "Is Coral inside?"
Sheemie shook his head. "Gone up to Mayor's House. She told Stan­ley she was 
going to help lay out the bodies for the funeral day after to­morrow, but I 
don't think she'll be here for the funeral. I think the Big Coffin Hunters is 
going and she'll go with 'em." He raised a hand and swiped at his leaking eyes. 
"Your mule, Sheemie—" "All saddled, and I got the long halter." She looked at 
him, open-mouthed. "How did ye know—" "Same way I knew ye'd be coming, 
Susan-sai. I just knew." He shrugged, then pointed vaguely. "Capi's around the 
back. I tied him to the cook's pump."
"That's good." She fumbled in the saddlebag where she had put the smaller 
firecrackers. "Here. Take some of these. Do'ee have a sulfur or two?"
"Aye." He asked no questions, simply stuffed the firecrackers into his front 
pocket. She, however, who had never been through the bat-wing doors of the 
Travellers' Rest in her whole life, had another question for him.
"What do they do with their coats and hats and scrapes when they come in, 
Sheemie? They must take em off; drinking's warm work."
"Oh, aye. They puts em on a long table just inside the door. Some fights about 
whose is whose when they're ready to go home."
She nodded, thinking hard and fast. He stood before her, still holding his 
sombrero against his chest, letting her do what he could not ... at least not in 
the conventionally understood way. At last she raised her head again.
"Sheemie, if you help me, you're done in Hambry ... done in Mejis .. . done in 
the Outer Arc. You go with us if we get away. You have to under­stand that. Do 
you?"
She saw he did; his face fairly shone with the idea. "Aye, Susan! Go with you 
and Will Dearborn and Richard Stockworth and my best friend, Mr. Arthur Heath! 
Go to In-World! We'll see buildings and statues and women in gowns like fairy 
princesses and—"
"If we're caught, we'll be killed."
He stopped smiling, but his eyes didn't waver. "Aye, killed we'll be if ta'en, 
most like."
"Will you still help me?"
"Capi's all saddled," he repeated. Susan reckoned that was answer enough. She 
took hold of the hand pressing the sombrero to Sheemie's chest (the hat's crown 
was pretty well crushed, and not for the first time). She bent, holding 
Sheemie's fingers with one hand and the horn of her saddle with the other, and 
kissed his cheek. He smiled up at her.
"We'll do our best, won't we?" she asked him.
"Aye, Susan daughter of Pat. We'll do our best for our friends. Our very best."
"Yes. Now listen, Sheemie. Very carefully."
She began to talk, and Sheemie listened.
 
10
 
Twenty minutes later, as the bloated orange moon struggled above the buildings 
of the town like a pregnant woman climbing a steep hill, a lone vaquero led a 
mule along Hill Street in the direction of the Sheriff's of­fice. This end of 
Hill Street was a pit of shadows. There was a little light around Green Heart, 
but even the park (which would have been thronged, noisy, and brilliantly lit in 
any other year) was mostly empty. Nearly all the booths were closed, and of 
those few that remained open, only the fortune-teller was doing any business. 
Tonight all fortunes were bad, but still they came—don't they always?
The vaquero was wearing a heavy serape; if this particular cowboy had the 
breasts of a woman, they were concealed. The vaq wore a large, sweat-stained 
sombrero; if this cowboy had the face of a woman, it was likewise concealed. 
Low, from beneath that hat's broad brim, came a voice singing "Careless Love."
The mule's small saddle was buried under the large bundle which had been roped 
to it—cloth or clothes of some kind, it might have been, al­though the deepening 
shadows made it impossible to say for sure. Most amusing of all was what hung 
around the mule's neck like some peculiar reap-charm: two sombreros and a 
drover's hat strung on a length of rope.
As the vaq neared the Sheriff's office, the singing ceased. The place might have 
been deserted if not for the single dim light shining through one window. In the 
porch rocker was a comical stuffy-guy wearing one of Herk Avery's embroidered 
vests and a tin star. There were no guards; ab­solutely no sign that the three 
most hated men in Mejis were sequestered within. And now, very faintly, the 
vaquero could hear the strum of a guitar.
It was blotted out by a thin rattle of firecrackers. The vaq looked over one 
shoulder and saw a dim figure. It waved. The vaquero nodded, waved back, then 
tied the mule to the hitching-post—the same one where Roland and his friends had 
tied their horses when they had come to introduce themselves to the Sheriff, on 
a summer day so long ago.
 
11
 
The door opened—no one had bothered to lock it—while Dave Hollis was trying, for 
about the two hundredth time, to play the bridge of "Cap­tain Mills, You 
Bastard." Across from him, Sheriff Avery sat rocked back in his desk chair with 
his hands laced together on his paunch. The room flickered with mild orange 
lamplight.
"You keep it up, Deputy Dave, and there won't have to be any execu­tion," 
Cuthbert Allgood said. He was standing at the door of one of the cells with his 
hands wrapped around the bars. "We'll kill ourselves. In self-defense."
"Shut up, maggot," Sheriff Avery said. He was half-dozing in the wake of a 
four-chop dinner, thinking of how he would tell his brother (and his brother's 
wife, who was killing pretty) in the next Barony about this heroic day. He would 
be modest, but he would still get it across to them that he'd played a central 
role; that if not for him, these three young ladrones might have—
"Just don't sing," Cuthbert said to Dave. "I'll confess to the murder of Arthur 
Eld himself if you just don't sing."
To Bert's left, Alain was sitting cross-legged on his bunk. Roland was lying on 
his with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. But at the moment 
the door's latch clicked, he swung to a sitting position. As if he'd only been 
waiting.
"That'll be Bridger," Deputy Dave said, gladly putting his guitar aside. He 
hated this duty and couldn't wait to be relieved. Heath's jokes were the worst. 
That he could continue to joke in the face of what was go­ing to happen to them 
tomorrow.
"I think it's likely one of them," Sheriff Avery said, meaning the Big Coffin 
Hunters.
In fact, it was neither. It was a cowboy all but buried in a serape that looked 
much too big for him (the ends actually dragged on the boards as he clumped in 
and shut the door behind him), and wearing a hat that came way down over his 
eyes. To Herk Avery, the fellow looked like some­body's idea of a cowboy stuffy.
"Say, stranger!" he said, beginning to smile ... for this was surely someone's 
joke, and Herk Avery could take a joke as well as any man. Especially after four 
chops and a mountain of mashed. "Howdy! What business do ye—"
The hand which hadn't closed the door had been under the scrape. When it came 
out, it was clumsily holding a gun all three of the prisoners recognized at 
once. Avery stared at it, his smile slowly fading. His hands unlaced themselves. 
His feet, which had been propped up on his desk, came down to the floor.
"Whoa, partner," he said slowly. "Let's talk about it."
"Get the keys off the wall and unlock the cells," the vaq said in a hoarse, 
artificially deep voice. Outside, unnoticed by all save Roland, more 
firecrackers rattled in a dry, popping string.
"I can't hardly do that," Avery said, easing open the bottom drawer of his desk 
with his foot. There were several guns, left over from that morning, inside. 
"Now, I don't know if that thing's loaded, but I don't hardly think a traildog 
like you—"
The newcomer pointed the gun at the desk and pulled the trigger. The report was 
deafening in the little room, but Roland thought—hoped—that with the door shut, 
it would sound like just another firecracker. Bigger than some, smaller than 
others.
Good girl, he thought. Oh, good girl—but be careful. For gods' sake, Sue, be 
careful.
All three of them standing in a line at the cell doors now, eyes wide and mouths 
tight.
The bullet struck the comer of the Sheriff's rolltop and tore off a huge 
splinter. Avery screamed, tilted back in his chair again, and went sprawl­ing. 
His foot remained hooked under the drawer-pull; the drawer shot out and 
overturned, spilling three ancient firearms across the board floor.
"Susan, look out!" Cuthbert shouted, and then: "No, Dave!"
At the end of his life, it was duty and not fear of the Big Coffin Hunters which 
propelled Dave Hollis, who had hoped to be Sheriff of Mejis himself when Avery 
retired (and, he sometimes told his wife, Judy, a better one than Fatso had ever 
dreamed of being). He forgot that he had serious questions about the way the 
boys had been taken as well as about what they might or might not have done. All 
he thought of then was that they were prisoners o' the Barony, and such would 
not be taken if he could help it.
He lunged for the cowboy in the too-big clothes, meaning to tear the gun out of 
his hands. And shoot him with it, if necessary.
 
12
 
Susan was staring at the yellow blaze of fresh wood on the comer of the 
Sheriff's desk, forgetting everything in her amazement—so much dam­age inflicted 
by the single twitch of a finger!—when Cuthbert's desperate shout awakened her 
to her position.
She shrank back against the wall, avoiding Dave's first swipe at the oversized 
serape, and, without thinking, pulled the trigger again. There was another loud 
explosion, and Dave Hollis—a young man only two years older than she herself—was 
flung backward with a smoking hole in his shirt between two points of the star 
he wore. His eyes were wide and unbelieving. His monocle lay by one outstretched 
hand on its length of black silk ribbon. One of his feet struck his guitar and 
knocked it to the floor with a thrum nearly as musical as the chords he had been 
trying to make.
"Dave," she whispered. "Oh Dave, I'm sorry, what did I do?"
Dave tried once to get up, then collapsed forward on his face. The hole going 
into the front of him was small, but the one she was looking at now, the one 
coming out the back, was huge and hideous, all black and red and charred edges 
of cloth ... as if she had run him through with a blazing hot poker instead of 
shooting him with a gun, which was sup­posed to be merciful and civilized and 
was clearly neither one.
"Dave," she whispered. "Dave, I..."
"Susan look out!" Roland shouted.
It was Avery. He scuttled forward on his hands and knees, seized her around the 
calves, and yanked her feet out from under her. She came down on her bottom with 
a tooth-rattling crash and was face to face with him—his frog-eyed, large-pored 
face, his garlic-smelling hole of a mouth.
"Gods, ye're a girl," he whispered, and reached for her. She pulled the trigger 
of Roland's gun again, setting the front of her serape on fire and blowing a 
hole in the ceiling. Plaster dust drifted down. Avery's ham sized hands settled 
around her throat, cutting off her wind. Somewhere far away, Roland shrieked her 
name.
She had one more chance.
Maybe.
One's enough, Sue, her father spoke inside of her head. One's all ye need, my 
dear.
She cocked Roland's pistol with the side of her thumb, socked the muzzle deep 
into the flab hanging from the underside of Sheriff Herk Avery's head, and 
pulled the trigger.
The mess was considerable.
 
13
 
Avery's head dropped into her lap, as heavy and wet as a raw roast. Above it, 
she could feel growing heat. At the bottom edge of her vision was the yellow 
flicker of fire.
"On the desk!" Roland shouted, yanking the door of his cell so hard it rattled 
in its frame. "Susan, the water-pitcher! For your father's sake!"
She rolled Avery's head out of her lap, got to her feet, and staggered to the 
desk with the front of the serape burning. She could smell its charred stench 
and was grateful in some far comer of her mind that she'd had time, while 
waiting for dusk, to tie her hair behind her.
The pitcher was almost full, but not with water; she could smell the sweet-sour 
tang of graf. She doused herself with it, and there was a brisk hissing as the 
liquid hit the flames. She stripped the serape off (the over­sized sombrero came 
with it) and threw it on the floor. She looked at Dave again, a boy she had 
grown up with, one she might even have kissed behind the door of Hockey's, once 
upon an antique time.
"Susan!" It was Roland's voice, harsh and urgent. "The keys! Hurry!"
Susan grabbed the keyring from the nail on the wall. She went to Roland's cell 
first and thrust the ring blindly through the bars. The air was thick with 
smells of gunsmoke, burned wool, blood. Her stomach clenched helplessly at every 
breath.
Roland picked the right key, reached back through the bars with it, and plunged 
it into the lockbox. A moment later he was out, and hugging her roughly as her 
tears broke. A moment after that, Cuthbert and Alain were out, as well.
"You're an angel!" Alain said, hugging her himself.
"Not I," she said, and began to cry harder. She thrust the gun at Roland. It 
felt filthy in her hand; she never wanted to touch one again. "Him and me played 
together when we were berries. He was one of the good ones—never a braid-puller 
or a bully—and he grew up a good one. Now I've ended him, and who'll tell his 
wife?"
Roland took her back into his arms and held her there for a moment. "You did 
what you had to. If not him, then us. Does thee not know it?"
She nodded against his chest. "Avery, him I don't mind so much, but Dave . . ."
"Come on," Roland said. "Someone might recognize the gunshots for what they 
were. Was it Sheemie throwing firecrackers?"
She nodded. "I've got clothes for you. Hats and scrapes."
Susan hurried back to the door, opened it, peeked out in either direc­tion, then 
slipped into the growing dark.
Cuthbert took the charred serape and put it over Deputy Dave's face. "Tough 
luck, partner," he said. "You got caught in between, didn't you? I reckon you 
wasn't so bad."
Susan came back in, burdened with the stolen gear which had been tied to Capi's 
saddle. Sheemie was already off on his next errand without having to be told. If 
the inn-boy was a halfwit, she'd known a lot of folks in her time who were 
running on quarters and eighths.
"Where'd you get this stuff?" Alain asked.
"The Travellers' Rest. And I didn't. Sheemie did." She held the hats out. "Come 
on, hurry."
Cuthbert took the headgear and passed it out. Roland and Alain had already 
slipped into the scrapes; with the hats added and pulled well down over their 
faces, they could have been any Drop-vaqs in Barony.
"Where are we going?" Alain asked as they stepped out onto the porch. The street 
was still dark and deserted at this end; the gunshots had attracted no 
attention.
"Hockey's, to start with," Susan said. "That's where your horses are."
They went down the street together in a little group of four. Capi was gone; 
Sheemie had taken the mule along. Susan's heart was thudding rapidly and she 
could feel sweat standing out on her brow, but she still felt cold. Whether or 
no what she had done was murder, she had ended two lives this evening, and 
crossed a line that could never be recrossed in the other direction. She had 
done it for Roland, for her love, and simply knowing she could have done no 
different now offered some consolation.
Be happy together, ye faithless, ye cozeners, ye murderers. I curse thee with 
the ashes.
Susan seized Roland's hand, and when he squeezed, she squeezed back. And as she 
looked up at Demon Moon, its wicked face now drain­ing from choleric red-orange 
to silver, she thought that when she had pulled the trigger on poor, earnest 
Dave Hollis, she had paid for her love with the dearest currency of all—had paid 
with her soul. If he left her now, her aunt's curse would be fulfilled, for only 
ashes would remain.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      IX
REAPING
 
1
 
As they stepped into the stable, which was lit by one dim gas lamp, a shadow 
moved out of one of the stalls. Roland, who had belted on both guns, now drew 
them. Sheemie looked at him with an uncertain smile, holding a stirrup in one 
hand. Then the smile broadened, his eyes flashed with happiness, and he ran 
toward them.
Roland bolstered his guns and made ready to embrace the boy, but Sheemie ran 
past him and threw himself into Cuthbert's arms.
"Whoa, whoa," Cuthbert said, first staggering back comically and then lifting 
Sheemie off his feet. "You like to knock me over, boy!"
"She got ye out!" Sheemie cried. "Knew she would, so I did! Good old Susan!" 
Sheemie looked around at Susan, who stood beside Roland. She was still pale, but 
now seemed composed. Sheemie turned back to Cuthbert and planted a kiss directly 
in the center of Bert's forehead.
"Whoa!" Bert said again. "What's that for?"
" 'Cause I love you, good old Arthur Heath! You saved my life!"
"Well, maybe I did," Cuthbert said, laughing in an embarrassed way (his borrowed 
sombrero, too large to begin with, now sat comically askew on his head), "but if 
we don't get a move on, I won't have saved it for long."
"Horses are all saddled," Sheemie said. "Susan told me to do it and I did. I did 
it just right. I just have to put this stirrup on Mr. Richard Stock-worth's 
horse, because the one on there's 'bout worn through."
"That's a job for later," Alain said, taking the stirrup. He put it aside, then 
turned to Roland. "Where do we go?"
Roland's first thought was that they should return to the Thorin mausoleum.
Sheemie reacted with instant horror. "The boneyard? And with De­mon Moon at the 
full?" He shook his head so violently that his sombrero came off and his hair 
flew from side to side. "They're dead in there, sai Dearborn, but if ye tease em 
during the time of the Demon, they's apt to get up and walk!"
"It's no good, anyway," Susan said. "The women of the town'll be lining the way 
from Seafront with flowers, and filling the mausoleum, too. Olive will be in 
charge, if she's able, but my aunt and Coral are apt to be in the company. Those 
aren't ladies we want to meet."
"All right," Roland said. "Let's mount up and ride. Think about it, Susan. You 
too, Sheemie. We want a place where we can hide up until dawn, at least, and it 
should be a place we can get to in less than an hour. Off the Great Road, and in 
any direction from Hambry but northwest."
"Why not northwest?" Alain asked.
"Because that's where we're going now. We've got a job to do ... and we're going 
to let them know we're doing it. Eldred Jonas most of all." He offered a thin 
blade of smile. "I want him to know the game is over. No more Castles. The real 
gunslingers are here. Let's see if he can deal with them."
 
2
 
An hour later, with the moon well above the trees, Roland's ka-tet arrived at 
the Citgo oilpatch. They rode out parallel to the Great Road for safety's sake, 
but, as it happened, the caution was wasted: they saw not one rider on the road, 
going in either direction. It's as if Reaping's been cancelled this year, Susan 
thought . .. then she thought of the red-handed stuffies, and shivered. They 
would have painted Roland's hands red tomorrow night, and still would, if they 
were caught. Not just him, either. All of us.
Sheemie, too.
They left the horses (and Caprichoso, who had trotted ill-temperedly but nimbly 
behind them on a tether) tied to some long-dead pumping equipment in the 
southeastern comer of the patch, and then walked slowly toward the working 
derricks, which were clustered in the same area. They spoke in whispers when 
they spoke at all. Roland doubted if that was nec­essary, but whispers here 
seemed natural enough. To Roland, Citgo was far spookier than the graveyard, and 
while he doubted that the dead in that latter place awoke even when Old Demon 
was full, there were some very unquiet corpses here, squalling zombies that 
stood rusty-weird in the moonlight with their pistons going up and down like 
marching feet.
Roland led them into the active part of the patch, nevertheless, past a sign 
which read how's your hardhat? and another reading we produce oil, we refine 
safety. They stopped at the foot of a derrick grinding so loudly that Roland had 
to shout in order to be heard.
"Sheemie! Give me a couple of those big-bangers!"
Sheemie had taken a pocketful from Susan's saddlebag and now handed a pair of 
them over. Roland took Bert by the arm and pulled him forward. There was a 
square of rusty fencing around the derrick, and when the boys tried to climb it, 
the horizontals snapped like old bones. They looked at each other in the running 
shadows combined of machinery and moonlight, nervous and amused.
Susan twitched Roland's arm. "Be careful!" she shouted over the rhythmic 
whumpa-whumpa-whumpa of the derrick machinery. She didn't look frightened, he 
saw, only excited and alert.
He grinned, pulled her forward, and kissed the lobe of her ear. "Be ready to 
run," he whispered. "If we do this right, there's going to be a new candle here 
at Citgo. A hellacious big one."
He and Cuthbert ducked under the lowest strut of the rusty derrick tower and 
stood next to the equipment, wincing at the cacophony. Roland wondered that it 
hadn't torn itself apart years ago. Most of the works were housed in rusty metal 
blocks, but he could see a gigantic turning shaft of some kind, gleaming with 
oil that must be supplied by automated jets. Up this close, there was a gassy 
smell that reminded him of the jet that flared rhythmically on the other side of 
the oilpatch.
"Giant-farts!" Cuthbert shouted.
"What?"
"I said it smells like . . . aw, never mind! Let's do it if-we can ... can we? "
Roland didn't know. He walked toward the machinery crying out be­neath metal 
cowls which were painted a faded, rusting green. Bert fol­lowed with some 
reluctance. The two of them slid into a short aisle, smelly and baking hot, that 
took them almost directly beneath the derrick. Ahead of them, the shaft at the 
end of the piston turned steadily, shedding oily teardrops down its smooth 
sides. Beside it was a curved pipe— almost surely an overflow pipe, Roland 
thought. An occasional drop of crude oil fell from its lip, and there was a 
black puddle on the ground beneath. He pointed at it, and Cuthbert nodded.
Shouting would do no good in here; the world was a roaring, squeal­ing din. 
Roland curled one hand around his friend's neck and pulled Cuth­bert's ear to 
his lips; he held a big-bang up in front of Bert's eyes with the other.
"Light it and run," he said. "I'll hold it, give you as much time as I can. 
That's for my benefit as much as for yours. I want a clear path back through 
that machinery, do you understand?"
Cuthbert nodded against Roland's lips, then turned the gunslinger's head so he 
could speak in the same fashion. "What if there's enough gas here to bum the air 
when I make a spark?"
Roland stepped back. Raised his palms in a "How-do-I-know?" ges­ture. Cuthbert 
laughed and drew out a box of sulfur matches which he had scooped off Avery's 
desk before leaving. He asked with his eyebrows if Roland was ready. Roland 
nodded.
The wind was blowing hard, but under the derrick the surrounding machinery cut 
it off and the flame from the sulfur rose straight. Roland held out the 
big-banger, and had a momentary, painful memory of his mother: how she had hated 
these things, how she had always been sure that he would lose an eye or a finger 
to one.
Cuthbert tapped his chest above his heart and kissed his palm in the universal 
gesture of good luck. Then he touched the flame to the fuse. It began to 
sputter. Bert turned, pretended to bang off a covered block of machinery—that 
was Bert, Roland thought; he would joke on the gallows—and then dashed back down 
the short corridor they'd used to get here.
Roland held the round firework as long as he dared, then lobbed it into the 
overflow pipe. He winced as he turned away, half-expecting what Bert was afraid 
of: that the very air would explode. It didn't. He ran down the short aisle, 
came into the clear, and saw Cuthbert standing just outside the broken bit of 
fencing. Roland flapped both hands at him—Go, you idiot, go!—and then the world 
blew up behind him.
The sound was a deep, belching thud that seemed to shove his eardrums inward and 
suck the breath out of his throat. The ground rolled under his feet like a wave 
under a boat, and a large, warm hand planted it­self in the center of his back 
and shoved him forward. He thought he ran with it for a step—maybe even two or 
three steps—and then he was lifted off his feet and hurled at the fence, where 
Cuthbert was no longer stand­ing; Cuthbert was sprawled on his back, staring up 
at something behind Roland. The boy's eyes were wide and wondering; his mouth 
hung open. Roland could see all this very well, because Citgo was now as bright 
as in full daylight. They had lit their own Reaping bonfire, it seemed, a night 
early and much brighter than the one in town could ever hope to be.
He went skidding on his knees to where Cuthbert lay, and grabbed him under one 
arm. From behind them came a vast, ripping roar, and now chunks of metal began 
to fall around them. They got up and ran toward where Alain stood in front of 
Susan and Sheemie, trying to protect them.
Roland took a quick look back over his shoulder and saw that the re­mains of the 
derrick—about half of it still stood—were glowing blackish red, like a heated 
horseshoe, around a flaring yellow torch that ran per­haps a hundred and fifty 
feet into the sky. It was a start. He didn't know how many other derricks they 
could fire before folk began arriving from town, but he was determined to do as 
many as possible, no matter what the risks might be. Blowing up the tankers at 
Hanging Rock was only half the job. Farson's source had to be wiped out.
Further firecrackers dropped down further overflow pipes turned out not to be 
necessary. There was a network of interconnected pipes under the oilpatch, most 
filled with natural gas that had leaked in through an­cient, decaying seals. 
Roland and Cuthbert had no more than reached the others when there was a fresh 
explosion, and a fresh tower of flame erupted from a derrick to the right of the 
one they had set afire. A moment later, a third derrick—this one sixty full 
yards away from the first two— exploded with a dragon's roar. The ironwork tore 
free of its anchoring concrete pillars like a tooth pulled from a decayed gum. 
It rose on a cush­ion of blazing blue and yellow, attained a height of perhaps 
seventy feet, then heeled over and came crashing back down, spewing sparks in 
every direction.
Another. Another. And yet another.
The five young people stood in their comer, stunned, holding their hands up to 
shield their eyes from the glare. Now the oilpatch flared like a birthday cake, 
and the heat baking toward them was enormous.
"Gods be kind," Alain whispered.
If they lingered here much longer, Roland realized, they would be popped like 
corn. There were the horses to consider, too; they were well away from the main 
focus of the explosions, but there was no guaran­tee that the focus would stay 
where it was; already he saw two derricks that hadn't even been working engulfed 
in flames. The horses would be terrified.
Hell, he was terrified.
"Come on!" he shouted.
They ran for the horses through shifting yellow-orange brilliance.
 
3
 
At first Jonas thought it was going on in his own head—that the explo­sions were 
part of their lovemaking.
Lovemaking, yar. Lovemaking, horseshit. He and Coral made love no more than 
donkeys did sums. But it was something. Oh yes indeed it was.
He'd been with passionate women before, ones who took you into a kind of 
oven-place and then held you there, staring with greedy intensity as they pumped 
their hips, but until Coral he'd never been with a woman that sparked such a 
powerfully harmonic chord in himself. With sex, he had always been the kind of 
man who took it when it came and forgot it when it didn't. But with Coral he 
only wanted to take it, take it, and take it some more. When they were together 
they made love like cats or ferrets, twisting and hissing and clawing; they bit 
at each other and cursed at each other, and so far none of it was even close to 
enough. When he was with her, Jonas sometimes felt as if he were being fried in 
sweet oil.
Tonight there had been a meeting with the Horsemen's Association, which had 
pretty much become the Farson Association in these latter days. Jonas had 
brought them up to date, had answered their idiotic ques­tions, and had made 
sure they understood what they'd be doing the next day. With that done, he had 
checked on Rhea, who had been installed in Kimba Rimer's old suite. She hadn't 
even noticed Jonas peering in at her. She sat in Rimer's high-ceilinged, 
book-lined study—behind Rimer's ironwood desk, in Rimer's upholstered chair, 
looking as out of place as a whore's bloomers on a church altar. On Rimer's desk 
was the Wizard's Rainbow. She was passing her hands back and forth above it and 
mutter­ing rapidly under her breath, but the ball remained dark.
Jonas had locked her in and had gone to Coral. She had been waiting for him in 
the parlor where tomorrow's Conversational would have been held. There were 
plenty of bedrooms in that wing, but it was to her dead brother's that she had 
led him ... and not by accident, either, Jonas was sure. There they made love in 
the canopied bed Hart Thorin would never share with his gilly.
It was fierce, as it had always been, and Jonas was approaching his or­gasm when 
the first oil derrick blew. Christ, she's something, he thought. There's never 
in the whole damned world been a woman like—
Then two more explosions, in rapid succession, and Coral froze for a moment 
beneath him before beginning to thrust her hips again. "Citgo," she said in a 
hoarse, panting voice.
"Yar," he growled, and began to thrust with her. He had lost all inter­est in 
making love, but they had reached the point where it was impossi­ble to stop, 
even under threat of death or dismemberment.
Two minutes later he was striding, naked, toward Thorin's little lick of a 
balcony, his half-erect penis wagging from side to side ahead of him like some 
halfwit's idea of a magic wand. Coral was a step behind him, as naked as he was.
"Why now?" she burst out as Jonas thrust open the balcony door. "I could have 
come three more times!"
Jonas ignored her. The countryside looking northwest was a moon-gilded darkness 
. . . except where the oilpatch was. There he saw a fierce yellow core of light. 
It was spreading and brightening even as he watched; one thudding explosion 
after another hammered across the intervening miles.
He felt a curious darkening in his mind—that feeling had been there ever since 
the brat, Dearborn, by the some febrile leap of intuition, had recognized him 
for who and what he was. Making love to the energetic Coral melted that feeling 
a little, but now, looking at the burning tangle of fire which had five minutes 
ago been the Good Man's oil reserves, it came back with debilitating intensity, 
like a swamp-fever that sometimes quits the flesh but hides in the bones and 
never really leaves. You 're in the west, Dearborn had said. The soul of a man 
such as you can never leave the west. Of course it was true, and he hadn't 
needed any such titmonkey as Will Dearborn to tell him ... but now that it had 
been said, there was a part of his mind that couldn't stop thinking about it.
Fucking Will Dearborn. Where, exactly, was he now, him and his pair of 
good-mannered mates? In Avery's culabozo? Jonas didn't think so. Not anymore.
Fresh explosions ripped the night. Down below, men who had run and shouted in 
the wake of the early morning's assassinations were run­ning and shouting again.
"It's the biggest Reaping firework that ever was," Coral said in a low voice.
Before Jonas could reply, there was a hard hammering on the bed­room door. It 
was thrown open a second later, and Clay Reynolds came clumping across the room, 
wearing a pair of blue jeans and nothing else. His hair was wild; his eyes were 
wilder.
"Bad news from town, Eldred," he said. "Dearborn and the other two In-World 
brats"
Three more explosions, falling almost on top of each other. From the blazing 
Citgo oilpatch a great red-orange fireball rose lazily into the black of night, 
faded, disappeared. Reynolds walked out onto the balcony and stood between them 
at the railing, unmindful of their nakedness. He stared at the fireball with 
wide, wondering eyes until it was gone. As gone as the brats. Jonas felt that 
curious, debilitating gloom trying to steal over him again.
"How did they get away?" he asked. "Do you know? Does Avery?"
"Avery's dead. The deputy who was with him, too. 'Twas another deputy found em, 
Todd Bridger . . . Eldred, what's going on out there? What happened?"
"Oh, that's your boys," Coral said. "Didn't take em long to start their own 
Reaping party, did it?"
How much heart do they have? Jonas asked himself. It was a good question—maybe 
the only one that mattered. Were they now done mak­ing trouble ... or just 
getting started?
He once more wanted to be out of here—out of Seafront, out of Hambry, out of 
Mejis. Suddenly, more than anything, he wanted to be miles and wheels and 
leagues away. He had bounded around his Hillock, it was too late to go back, and 
now he felt horribly exposed.
"Clay."
"Yes, Eldred?"
But the man's eyes—and his mind—were still on the conflagration at Citgo. Jonas 
took his shoulder and turned Reynolds toward him. Jonas felt his own mind 
starting to pick up speed, ticking past points and details, and welcomed the 
feeling. That queer, dark sense of fatalism faded and disappeared.
"How many men are here?" he asked.
Reynolds frowned, thought about it. "Thirty-five." he said. "Maybe."
"How many armed?"
"With guns?"
"No, with pea-blowers, you damned fool."
"Probably . . ." Reynolds pulled his lower lip, frowning more fiercely than 
ever. "Probably a dozen. That's guns likely to work, you ken."
"The big boys from the Horsemen's Association? Still all here?"
"I think so."
"Get Lengyll and Renfrew. At least you won't have to wake em up; they'll all be 
up, and most of em right down there." Jonas jerked a thumb at the courtyard. 
"Tell Renfrew to put together an advance party. Armed men. I'd like eight or 
ten, but I'll take five. Have that old woman's cart harnessed to the strongest, 
hardiest pony this place has got. Tell that old fuck Miguel that if the pony he 
chooses dies in the traces between here and Hanging Rock, he'll be using his 
wrinkled old balls for earplugs."
Coral Thorin barked brief, harsh laughter. Reynolds glanced at her, did a 
double-take at her breasts, then looked back at Jonas with an effort.
"Where's Roy?" Jonas asked.
Reynolds looked up. "Third floor. With some little serving maid."
"Kick him out," Jonas said. "It's his job to get the old bitch ready to ride."
"We're going?"
"Soon as we can. You and me first, with Renfrew's boys, and Lengyll behind, with 
the rest of the men. You just make sure Hash Renfrew's with us, Clay; that man's 
got sand in his craw."
"What about the horses out on the Drop?"
"Never mind the everfucking horses." There was another explosion at Citgo; 
another fireball floated into the sky. Jonas couldn't see the dark clouds of 
smoke which must be rushing up, or smell the oil; the wind, out of the east and 
into the west, would be carrying both away from town.
"But—"
"Just do as I say." Jonas now saw his priorities in clear, ascending or­der. The 
horses were on the bottom—Farson could find horses damned near anywhere. Above 
them were the tankers gathered at Hanging Rock. They were more important than 
ever now, because the source was gone. Lose the tankers, and the Big Coffin 
Hunters could forget going home.
Yet most important of all was Parson's little piece of the Wizard's Rainbow. It 
was the one truly irreplaceable item. If it was broken, let it be broken in the 
care of George Latigo, not that of Eldred Jonas.
"Get moving," he told Reynolds. "Depape rides after, with Lengyll's men. You 
with me. Go on. Make it happen."
"And me?" Coral asked.
He reached out and tugged her toward him. "I ain't forgot you, darlin," he said.
Coral nodded and reached between his legs, oblivious of the staring Clay 
Reynolds. "Aye," she said. "And I ain't forgot you."
 
4
 
They escaped Citgo with ringing ears and slightly singed around the edges but 
not really hurt, Sheemie riding double behind Cuthbert and Caprichoso clattering 
after, at the end of his long lead.
It was Susan who came up with the place they should go, and like most solutions, 
it seemed completely obvious . . . once someone had thought of it. And so, not 
long after Reaping Eve had become Reaping Mom, the five of them came to the hut 
in the Bad Grass where Susan and Roland had on several occasions met to make 
love.
Cuthbert and Alain unrolled blankets, then sat on them to examine the guns they 
had liberated from the Sheriff's office. They had also found Bert's slingshot.
"These're hard calibers," Alain said, holding one up with the cylinder sprung 
and peering one-eyed down the barrel. "If they don't throw too high or wide, 
Roland, I think we can do some business with them."
"I wish we had that rancher's machine-gun," Cuthbert said wistfully.
"You know what Cort would say about a gun like that?" Roland asked, and Cuthbert 
burst out laughing. So did Alain.
"Who's Cort?" Susan asked.
"The tough man Eldred Jonas only thinks he is," Alain said. "He was our 
teacher."
Roland suggested that they catch an hour or two of sleep—the next day was apt to 
be difficult. That it might also be their last was something he didn't feel he 
had to say.
"Alain, are you listening?"
Alain, who knew perfectly well that Roland wasn't speaking of his ears or his 
attention-span, nodded.
"Do you hear anything?"
"Not yet."
"Keep at it."
"I will . . . but I can't promise anything. The touch is flukey. You know that 
as well as I do."
"Just keep trying."
Sheemie had carefully spread two blankets in the comer next to his proclaimed 
best friend. "He's Roland . . . and he's Alain . . . who are you, good old 
Arthur Heath? Who are you really?"
"Cuthbert's my name." He stuck out his hand. "Cuthbert Allgood. How do y'do, and 
how do y'do, and how do y'do again?"
Sheemie shook the offered hand, then began giggling. It was a cheer­ful, 
unexpected sound, and made them all smile. Smiling hurt Roland a little, and he 
guessed that if he could see his own face, he'd observe a pretty good bum from 
being so close to the exploding derricks.
"Key-youth-bert," Sheemie said, giggling. "Oh my! Key-youth-bert, that's a funny 
name, no wonder you're such a funny fellow. Key-youth-bert, oh-aha-ha-ha, that's 
a pip, a real pip!"
Cuthbert smiled and nodded. "Can I kill him now, Roland, if we don't need him 
any longer?"
"Save him a bit, why don't you?" Roland said, then turned to Susan, his own 
smile fading. "Will thee walk out with me a bit, Sue? I'd talk to thee."
She looked up at him, trying to read his face. "All right." She held out her 
hand. Roland took it, they walked into the moonlight together, and be­neath its 
light, Susan felt dread take hold of her heart.
 
5
 
They walked out in silence, through sweet-smelling grass that tasted good to 
cows and horses even as it was expanding in their bellies, first bloating and 
then killing them. It was high—at least a foot taller than Roland's head—and 
still green as summer. Children sometimes got lost in the Bad Grass and died 
there, but Susan had never feared to be here with Roland, even when there were 
no sky-markers to steer by; his sense of direction was uncannily perfect.
"Sue, thee disobeyed me in the matter of the guns," he said at last.
She looked at him, smiling, half-amused and half-angry. "Does thee wish to be 
back in thy cell, then? Thee and thy friends?"
"No, of course not. Such bravery!" He held her close and kissed her. When he 
drew back, they were both breathing hard. He took her by the arms and looked 
into her eyes. "But thee mustn't disobey me this time."
She looked at him steadily, saying nothing.
"Thee knows," he said. "Thee knows what I'd tell thee."
"Aye, perhaps."
"Say. Better you than me, maybe."
"I'm to stay at the hut while you and the others go. Sheemie and I are to stay."
He nodded. "Will you? Will thee?”
She thought of how unfamiliar and wretched Roland's gun had felt in her hand as 
she held it beneath the serape; of the wide, unbelieving look in Dave's eyes as 
the bullet she'd fired into his chest flung him backward; of how the first time 
she'd tried to shoot Sheriff Avery, the bullet had only succeeded in setting her 
own clothing afire, although he had been right there in front of her. They 
didn't have a gun for her (unless she took one of Roland's), she couldn't use 
one very well in any case ... and, more im­portant, she didn't want to use one. 
Under those circumstances, and with Sheemie to think about, too, it was best she 
just stay out of the way.
Roland was waiting patiently. She nodded. "Sheemie and I'll wait for thee. It's 
my promise."
He smiled, relieved.
"Now pay me back with honesty, Roland."
"If I can."
She looked up at the moon, shuddered at the ill-omened face she saw, and looked 
back at Roland. "What chance thee'll come back to me?"
He thought about this very carefully, still holding to her arms. "Far better 
than Jonas thinks," he said at last. "We'll wait at the edge of the Bad Grass 
and should be able to mark his coming well enough."
"Aye, the herd o' horses I saw—"
"He may come without the horses," Roland said, not knowing how well he had 
matched Jonas's thinking, "but his folk will make noise even if they come 
without the herd. If there's enough of them, we'll see them, as well—they'll cut 
a line through the grass like a part in hair."
Susan nodded. She had seen this many times from the Drop—the mysterious parting 
of the Bad Grass as groups of men rode through it.
"If they're looking for thee, Roland? If Jonas sends scouts ahead?"
"I doubt he'll bother." Roland shrugged. "If they do, why, we'll kill them. 
Silent, if we can. Killing's what we were trained to do; we'll do it."
She turned her hands over, and now she was gripping his arms instead of the 
other way around. She looked impatient and afraid. "Thee hasn't answered my 
question. What chance I'll see thee back?"
He thought it over. "Even toss," he said at last.
She closed her eyes as if struck, drew in a breath, let it out, opened her eyes 
again. "Bad," she said, "yet maybe not as bad as I thought. And if thee doesn't 
come back? Sheemie and I go west, as thee said before?"
"Aye, to Gilead. There'll be a place of safety and respect for you there, dear, 
no matter what . . . but it's especially important that you go if you don't hear 
the tankers explode. Thee knows that, doesn't thee?"
"To warn yer people—thy ka-tet."
Roland nodded.
"I'll warn them, no fear. And keep Sheemie safe, too. He's as much the reason 
we've got this far as anything I've done."
Roland was counting on Sheemie for more than she knew. If he and Bert and Alain 
were killed, it was Sheemie who would stabilize her, give her reason to go on.
"When does thee leave?" Susan asked. "Do we have time to make love?"
"We have time, but perhaps it's best we don't," he said. "It's going to be hard 
enough to leave thee again without. Unless you really want to . . ." His eyes 
half-pleaded with her to say yes.
"Let's just go back and lie down a bit," she said, and took his hand. For a 
moment it trembled on her lips to tell him that she was kindled with his child, 
but at the last moment she kept silent. There was enough for him to think about 
without that added, mayhap ... and she didn't want to pass such happy news 
beneath such an ugly moon. It would surely be bad luck.
They walked back through high grass that was already springing to­gether along 
their path. Outside the hut, he turned her toward him, put his hands on her 
cheeks, and softly kissed her again.
"I will love thee forever, Susan," he said. "Come whatever storms."
She smiled. The upward movement of her cheeks spilled a pair of tears from her 
eyes. "Come whatever storms," she agreed. She kissed him again, and they went 
inside.
 
6
 
The moon had begun to descend when a party of eight rode out beneath the arch 
with come in peace writ upon it in the Great Letters. Jonas and Reynolds were in 
the lead. Behind them came Rhea's black wagon, drawn by a trotting pony that 
looked strong enough to go all night and half the next day. Jonas had wanted to 
give her a driver, but Rhea re­fused—"Never was an animal I didn't get on with 
better than any man ever could," she'd told him, and that seemed to be true. The 
reins lay limp in her lap; the pony worked smart without them. The other five 
men consisted of Hash Renfrew, Quint, and three of Renfrew's best vaqueros.
Coral had wanted to come as well, but Jonas had different ideas. "If we're 
killed, you can go on more or less as before," he'd said. "There'll be nothing 
to tie you to us."
"Without ye, I'm not sure there'd be any reason to go on," she said.
"Ar, quit that schoolgirl shit, it don't become you. You'd find plenty of 
reasons to keep staggerin down the path, if you had to put your mind to it. If 
all goes well—as I expect it will—and you still want to be with me, ride out of 
here as soon as you get word of our success. There's a town west of here in the 
Vi Castis Mountains. Ritzy. Go there on the fastest horse you can swing a leg 
over. You'll be there ahead of us by days, no matter how smart we're able to 
push along. Find a respectable inn that'll take a woman on her own . . . if 
there is such a thing in Ritzy. Wait. When we get there with the tankers, you 
just fall into the column at my right hand. Have you got it?"
She had it. One woman in a thousand was Coral Thorin—sharp as Lord Satan, and 
able to fuck like Satan's favorite harlot. Now if things only turned out to be 
as simple as he'd made them sound.
Jonas fell back until his horse was pacing alongside the black cart. The ball 
was out of its bag and lay in Rhea's lap. "Anything?" he asked. He both hoped 
and dreaded to see that deep pink pulse inside it again.
"Nay. It'll speak when it needs to, though—count on it."
"Then what good are you, old woman?"
"Ye'll know when the time comes," Rhea said, looking at him with arrogance (and 
some fear as well, he was happy to see).
Jonas spurred his horse back to the head of the little column. He had decided to 
take the ball from Rhea at the slightest sign of trouble. In truth, it had 
already inserted its strange, addicting sweetness into his head; he thought 
about that single pink pulse of light he'd seen far too much.
Balls, he told himself. Battlesweat's all I've got. Once this business is over, 
I'll be my old self again.
Nice if true, but...
... but he had, in truth, begun to wonder.
Renfrew was now riding with Clay. Jonas nudged his horse in be­tween them. His 
dicky leg was aching like a bastard; another bad sign.
"Lengyll?" he asked Renfrew.
"Putting together a good bunch," Renfrew said, "don't you fear Fran Lengyll. 
Thirty men."
"Thirty! God Harry's body, I told you I wanted forty! Forty at least!"
Renfrew measured him with a pale-eyed glance, then winced at a par­ticularly 
vicious gust of the freshening wind. He pulled his neckerchief up over his mouth 
and nose. The vaqs riding behind had already done so. "How afraid of these three 
boys are you, Jonas?"
"Afraid for both of us, I guess, since you're too stupid to know who they are or 
what they're capable of." He raised his own neckerchief, then forced his voice 
into a more reasonable timbre. It was best he do so; he needed these bumpkins 
yet awhile longer. Once the ball was turned over to Latigo, that might change. 
"Though mayhap we'll never see them."
"It's likely they're already thirty miles from here and riding west as fast as 
their horses'll take em," Renfrew agreed. "I'd give a crown to know how they got 
loose."
What does it matter, you idiot? Jonas thought, but said nothing.
"As for Lengyll's men, they'll be the hardest boys he can lay hands on—if it 
comes to a fight, those thirty will fight like sixty."
Jonas's eyes briefly met Clay's. I'll believe it when I see it, Clay's brief 
glance said, and Jonas knew again why he had always liked this one better than 
Roy Depape.
"How many armed?"
"With guns? Maybe half. They'll be no more than an hour behind us."
"Good." At least their back door was covered. It would have to do. And he 
couldn't wait to be rid of that thrice-cursed ball.
Oh? whispered a sly, half-mad voice from a place much deeper than his heart. Oh, 
can't you?
Jonas ignored the voice until it stilled. Half an hour later, they turned off 
the road and onto the Drop. Several miles ahead, moving in the wind like a 
silver sea, was the Bad Grass.

 
7
 
Around the time that Jonas and his party were riding down the Drop, Roland, 
Cuthbert, and Alain were swinging up into their saddles. Susan and Sheemie stood 
by the doorway to the hut, holding hands and watch­ing them solemnly.
"Thee'll hear the explosions when the tankers go, and smell the smoke," Roland 
said. "Even with the wind the wrong way, I think thee'll smell it. Then, no more 
than an hour later, more smoke. There." He pointed. "That'll be the brush piled 
in front of the canyon's mouth."
"And if we don't see those things?"
"Into the west. But thee will, Sue. I swear thee will."
She stepped forward, put her hands on his thigh, and looked up at him in the 
latening moonlight. He bent; put his hand lightly against the back of her head; 
put his mouth on her mouth.
"Go thy course in safety," Susan said as she drew back from him.
"Aye," Sheemie added suddenly. "Stand and be true, all three." He came forward 
himself and shyly touched Cuthbert's boot.
Cuthbert reached down, took Sheemie's hand, and shook it. "Take care of her, old 
boy."
Sheemie nodded seriously. "I will."
"Come on," Roland said. He felt that if he looked at her solemn, up­turned face 
again, he would cry. "Let's go."
They rode slowly away from the hut. Before the grass closed behind them, hiding 
it from view, he looked back a final time.
"Sue, I love thee."
She smiled. It was a beautiful smile. "Bird and bear and hare and fish," she 
said.
The next time Roland saw her, she was caught inside the Wizard's glass.
 
8
 
What Roland and his friends saw west of the Bad Grass had a harsh, lonely 
beauty. The wind was lifting great sheets of sand across the stony desert floor; 
the moonlight turned these into foot racing phantoms. At mo­ments Hanging Rock 
was visible some two wheels distant, and the mouth of Eyebolt Canyon two wheels 
farther on. Sometimes both were gone, hidden by the dust. Behind them, the tall 
grass made a soughing, singing sound.
"How do you boys feel?" Roland asked. "All's well?"
They nodded.
"There's going to be a lot of shooting, I think."
"We'll remember the faces of our fathers," Cuthbert said.
"Yes," Roland agreed, almost absently. "We'll remember them very well." He 
stretched in the saddle. "The wind's in our favor, not theirs— that's one good 
thing. We'll hear them coming. We must judge the size of the group. All right?"
They both nodded.
"If Jonas has still got his confidence, he'll come soon, in a small 
party—whatever gunnies he can put together on short notice—and he'll have the 
ball. In that case, we'll ambush them, kill them all, and take the Wizard's 
Rainbow."
Alain and Cuthbert sat quiet, listening intently. The wind gusted, and Roland 
clapped a hand to his hat to keep it from flying off. "If he fears more trouble 
from us, I think he's apt to come later on, and with a bigger party of riders. 
If that happens, we'll let them pass . . . then, if the wind is our friend and 
keeps up, we'll fall in behind them."
Cuthbert began to grin. "Oh Roland," he said. "Your father would be proud. Only 
fourteen, but cozy as the devil!"
"Fifteen come next moonrise," Roland said seriously. "If we do it this way, we 
may have to kill their drogue riders. Watch my signals, all right?"
"We're going to cross to Hanging Rock as part of their party?" Alain asked. He 
had always been a step or two behind Cuthbert, but Roland didn't mind; sometimes 
reliability was better than quickness. "Is that it?"
"If the cards fall that way, yes."
"If they've got the pink ball with em, you'd better hope it doesn't give us 
away," Alain said.
Cuthbert looked surprised. Roland bit his lip, thinking that sometimes Alain was 
plenty quick. Certainly he had come up with this unpleasant lit­tle idea ahead 
of Bert . . . ahead of Roland, too.
"We've got a lot to hope for this morning, but we'll play our cards as they come 
off the top of the pack."
They dismounted and sat by their horses there on the edge of the grass, saying 
little. Roland watched the silver clouds of dust racing each other across the 
desert floor and thought of Susan. He imagined them married, living in a 
freehold somewhere south of Gilead. By then Farson would have been defeated, the 
world's strange decline reversed (the childish part of him simply assumed that 
making an end to John Farson would somehow see to that), and his gunslinging 
days would be over. Less than a year it had been since he had won the right to 
carry the six-shooters he wore on his hips—and to carry his father's great 
revolvers when Steven Deschain decided to pass them on—and already he was tired 
of them. Susan's kisses had softened his heart and quickened him, some­how; had 
made another life possible. A better one, perhaps. One with a house, and 
kiddies, and—
"They're coming," Alain said, snapping Roland out of his reverie.
The gunslinger stood up, Rusher's reins in one fist. Cuthbert stood tensely 
nearby. "Large party or small? Does thee ... do you know?"
Alain stood facing southeast, hands held out with the palms up. Be­yond his 
shoulder, Roland saw Old Star just about to slip below the hori­zon. Only an 
hour until dawn, then.
"I can't tell yet," Alain said.
"Can you at least tell if the ball—"
"No. Shut up, Roland, let me listen!"
Roland and Cuthbert stood and watched Alain anxiously, at the same time 
straining their ears to hear the hooves of horses, the creak of wheels, or the 
murmur of men on the passing wind. Time spun out. The wind, rather than dropping 
as Old Star disappeared and dawn approached, blew more fiercely than ever. 
Roland looked at Cuthbert, who had taken out his slingshot and was playing 
nervously with the pull. Bert raised one shoul­der in a shrug.
"It's a small party," Alain said suddenly. "Can either of you touch them?"
They shook their heads.
"No more than ten, maybe only six."
"Gods!" Roland murmured, and pumped a fist at the sky. He couldn't help it. "And 
the ball?"
"I can't touch it," Alain said. He sounded almost as though he were sleeping 
himself. "But it's with them, don't you think?"
Roland did. A small party of six or eight, probably travelling with the ball. It 
was perfect.
"Be ready, boys," he said. "We're going to take them."
 
9
 
Jonas's party made good time down the Drop and into the Bad Grass. The 
guide-stars were brilliant in the autumn sky, and Renfrew knew them all. He had 
a click-line to measure between the two he called The Twins, and he stopped the 
group briefly every twenty minutes or so to use it. Jonas hadn't the slightest 
doubt the old cowboy would bring them out of the tall grass pointed straight at 
Hanging Rock.
Then, about an hour after they'd entered the Bad Grass, Quint rode up beside 
him. "That old lady, she want to see you, sai. She say it's important."
"Do she, now?" Jonas asked.
"Aye." Quint lowered his voice. "That ball she got on her lap all glowy."
"Is that so? I tell you what. Quint—keep my old trail-buddies com­pany while I 
see what's what." He dropped back until he was pacing be­side the black cart. 
Rhea raised her face to him, and for a moment, washed as it was in the pink 
light, he thought it the face of a young girl.
"So," she said. "Here y'are, big boy. I thought ye'd show up pretty smart." She 
cackled, and as her face broke into its sour lines of laughter, Jonas again saw 
her as she really was—all but sucked dry by the thing in her lap. Then he looked 
down at it himself . . . and was lost. He could feel that pink glow radiating 
into all the deepest passages and hollows of his mind, lighting them up in a way 
they'd never been lit up before. Even Coral, at her dirty busiest, couldn't 
light him up that way.
"Ye like it, don't ye?" she half-laughed, half-crooned. "Aye, so ye do, so would 
anyone, such a pretty glam it is! But what do ye see, sai Jonas?"
Leaning over, holding to the saddle-horn with one hand, his long hair hanging 
down in a sheaf, Jonas looked deeply into the ball. At first he saw only that 
luscious, labial pink, and then it began to draw apart. Now he saw a hut 
surrounded by tall grass. The sort of hut only a hermit could love. The door—it 
was painted a peeling but still bright red—stood open. And sitting there on the 
stone stoop with her hands in her lap, her blankets on the ground at her feet, 
and her unbound hair around her shoulders was ...
"I'll be damned!" Jonas whispered. He had now leaned so far out of the saddle 
that he looked like a trick rider in a circus show, and his eyes seemed to have 
disappeared; there were only sockets of pink light where they had been.
Rhea cackled delightedly. "Aye, it's Thorin's gilly that never was! Dearborn's 
lovergirl!" Her cackling stopped abruptly. "Lovergirl of the young proddy who 
killed my Ermot. And he'll pay for it, aye, so he will. Look closer, sai Jonas! 
Look closer!"
He did. Everything was clear now, and he thought he should have seen it earlier. 
Everything this girl's aunt had feared had been true. Rhea had known, although 
why she hadn't told anyone the girl had been screw­ing one of the In-World boys, 
Jonas didn't know. And Susan had done more than just screw Will Dearborn; she'd 
helped him escape, him and his trail-mates, and she might well have killed two 
lawmen for him, into the bargain.
The figure in the ball swam closer. Watching that made him feel a lit­tle dizzy, 
but it was a pleasant dizziness. Beyond the girl was the hut, faintly lit by a 
lamp which had been turned down to the barest core of flame. At first Jonas 
thought someone was sleeping in one comer, but on second glance he decided it 
was only a heap of hides that looked vaguely human.
"Do'ee spy the boys?" Rhea asked, seemingly from a great distance. "Do'ee spy 
em, m'lord sai?"
"No," he said, his own voice seeming to come from that same distant place. His 
eyes were pinned to the ball. He could feel its light baking deeper and deeper 
into his brain. It was a good feeling, like a hot fire on a cold night. "She's 
alone. Looks as if she's waiting."
"Aye." Rhea gestured above the ball—a curt dusting-off movement of the hands—and 
the pink light was gone. Jonas gave a low, protesting cry, but no matter; the 
ball was dark again. He wanted to stretch his hands out and tell her to make the 
light return—to beg her, if necessary—and held himself back by pure force of 
will. He was rewarded by a slow return of his wits. It helped to remind himself 
that Rhea's gestures were as meaningless as the puppets in a Pinch and Jilly 
show. The ball did what it wanted, not what she wanted.
Meanwhile, the ugly old woman was looking at him with eyes that were perversely 
shrewd and clear. "Waiting for what, do'ee suppose?" she asked.
There was only one thing she could be waiting for. Jonas thought with rising 
alarm. The boys. The three beardless sons of bitches from In-World. And if they 
weren't with her, they might well be up ahead, doing their own waiting.
Waiting for him. Possibly even waiting for—
"Listen to me," he said. "I'll only speak once, and you best answer true. Do 
they know about that thing? Do those three boys know about the Rainbow?"
Her eyes shifted away from his. It was answer enough in one way, but not in 
another. She had had things her way all too long up there on her hill; she had 
to know who was boss down here. He leaned over again and grabbed her shoulder. 
It was horrible—like grabbing a bare bone that somehow still lived—but he made 
himself hold on all the same. And squeeze. She moaned and wriggled, but he held 
on.
"Tell me, you old bitch! Run your fucking gob!"
"They might know of it," she whined. "The girl might've seen some­thing the 
night she came to be—am-, let go, ye're killing me!"
"If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead." He took another longing glance at the 
ball, then sat up straight in the saddle, cupped his hands around his mouth, and 
called: "Clay! Hold up!" As Reynolds and Ren­frew reined back, Jonas raised a 
hand to halt the vaqs behind him.
The wind whispered through the grass, bending it, rippling it, whip­ping up 
eddies of sweet smell. Jonas stared ahead into the dark, even though he knew it 
was fruitless to look for them. They could be any­where, and Jonas didn't like 
the odds in an ambush. Not one bit.
He rode to where Clay and Renfrew were waiting. Renfrew looked impatient. 
"What's the problem? Dawn'll be breaking soon. We ought to get a move-on."
"Do you know the huts in the Bad Grass?"
"Aye, most. Why—"
"Do you know one with a red door?"
Renfrew nodded and pointed northish. "Old Soony's place. He had some sort of 
religious conversion—a dream or a vision or something. That's when he painted 
the door of his hut red. He's gone to the Manni-folk these last five years." He 
no longer asked why, at least; he had seen something on Jonas's face that had 
shut up his questions.
Jonas raised his hand, looked at the blue coffin tattooed there for a second, 
then turned and called for Quint. "You're in charge," Jonas told him.
Quint's shaggy eyebrows shot up. "Me?"
"Yar. But you're not going on—there's been a change of plan."
"What—"
"Listen and don't open your mouth again unless there's something you don't 
understand. Get that damned black cart turned around. Put your men around it and 
hie on back the way we came. Join up with Lengyll and his men. Tell them Jonas 
says wait where you find em until he and Rey­nolds and Renfrew come. Clear?"
Quint nodded. He looked bewildered but said nothing.
"Good. Get about it. And tell the witch to put her toy back in its bag." Jonas 
passed a hand over his brow. Fingers which had rarely shaken before had now 
picked up a minute tremble. "It's distracting."
Quint started away, then looked back when Jonas called his name.
"I think those In-World boys are out here, Quint. Probably ahead of where we are 
now, but if they're back the way you're going, they'll probably set on you."
Quint looked nervously around at the grass, which rose higher than his head. 
Then his lips tightened and he returned his attention to Jonas.
"If they attack, they'll try to take the ball," Jonas continued. "And sai, mark 
me well: any man who doesn't die protecting it will wish he had." He lifted his 
chin at the vaqs, who sat astride their horses in a line behind the black cart. 
"Tell them that."
"Aye, boss," Quint said.
"When you reach Lengyll's party, you'll be safe."
"How long should we wait for yer if ye don't come?"
"Til hell freezes over. Now go." As Quint left, Jonas turned to Reynolds and 
Renfrew. "We're going to make a little side-trip, boys," he said.
 
10
 
"Roland." Alain's voice was low and urgent. "They've turned around."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. There's another group coming along behind them. A much larger one. That's 
where they're headed."
"Safety in numbers, that's all," Cuthbert said.
"Do they have the ball?" Roland asked. "Can you touch it yet?"
"Yes, they have it. It makes them easy to touch even though they're going the 
other way now. Once you find it, it glows like a lamp in a mineshaft."
"Does Rhea still have the keeping of it?"
"I think so. It's awful to touch her."
"Jonas is afraid of us," Roland said. "He wants more men around him when he 
comes. That's what it is, what it must be." Unaware that he was both right and 
badly out in his reckoning. Unaware that for one of the few times since they had 
left Gilead, he had lapsed into a teenager's disastrous certainty.
"What do we do?" Alain asked.
"Sit here. Listen. Wait. They'll bring the ball this way again if they're going 
to Hanging Rock. They'll have to."
"Susan?" Cuthbert asked. "Susan and Sheemie? What about them? How do we know 
they're all right?"
"I suppose that we don't." Roland sat down, cross-legged, with Pusher's trailing 
reins in his lap. "But Jonas and his men will be back soon enough. And when they 
come, we'll do what we must."
 
11
 
Susan hadn't wanted to sleep inside—the hut felt wrong to her without Roland. 
She had left Sheemie huddled under the old hides in the comer and taken her own 
blankets outside. She sat in the hut's doorway for a lit­tle while, looking up 
at the stars and praying for Roland in her own fash­ion. When she began to feel 
a little better, she lay down on one blanket and pulled the other over her. It 
seemed an eternity since Maria had shaken her out of her heavy sleep, and the 
open-mouthed, glottal snores drifting out of the hut didn't bother her much. She 
slept with her head pil­lowed on one arm, and didn't wake when, twenty minutes 
later, Sheemie came to the doorway, blinked at her sleepily, and then walked off 
into the grass to urinate. The only one to notice him was Caprichoso, who stuck 
out his long muzzle and took a nip at Sheemie's butt as the boy passed him. 
Sheemie, still mostly asleep, reached back and pushed the muzzle away. He knew 
Capi's tricks well enough, so he did.
Susan dreamed of the willow grove—bird and bear and hare and fish—and what woke 
her wasn't Sheemie's return from his necessary but a cold circle of steel 
pressing into her neck. There was a loud click that she recognized at once from 
the Sheriff's office: a pistol being cocked. The willow grove faded from the eye 
of her mind.
"Shine, little sunbeam," said a voice. For a moment her bewildered, half-waking 
mind tried to believe it was yesterday, and Maria wanted her to get up and out 
of Seafront before whoever had killed Mayor Thorin and Chancellor Rimer could 
come back and kill her, as well.
No good. It wasn't the strong light of midmorning that her eyes opened upon, but 
the ash-pallid glow of five o'clock. Not a woman's voice but a man's. And not a 
hand shaking her shoulder but the barrel of a gun against her neck.
She looked up and saw a lined, narrow face framed by white hair. Lips no more 
than a scar. Eyes the same faded blue as Roland's. Eldred Jonas. The man 
standing behind him had bought her own da drinks once upon a happier time: Hash 
Renfrew. A third man, one of Jonas's ka-tet, ducked into the hut. Freezing 
terror filled her midsection—some for her, some for Sheemie. She wasn't sure the 
boy would even understand what was happening to them. These are two of the three 
men who tried to kill him, she thought. He'll understand that much.
"Here you are, Sunbeam, here you come," Jonas said companionably, watching her 
blink away the sleepfog. "Good! You shouldn't be napping all the way out here on 
your own, not a pretty sai such as yourself. But don't worry, I'll see you get 
back to where you belong."
His eyes flicked up as the redhead with the cloak stepped out of the hut. Alone. 
"What's she got in there. Clay? Anything?"
Reynolds shook his head. "All still on the hoss, I reckon."
Sheemie, Susan thought. Where are you, Sheemie?
Jonas reached out and caressed one of her breasts briefly. "Nice," he said. 
"Tender and sweet. No wonder Dearborn likes you."
"Get yer filthy blue-marked hand off me, you bastard."
Smiling, Jonas did as she bid. He turned "his head and regarded the mule. "I 
know this one; it belongs to my good friend Coral. Along with everything else, 
you've turned livestock thief! Shameful, shameful, this younger generation. 
Don't you agree, sai Renfrew?"
But her father's old associate said nothing. His face was carefully blank, and 
Susan thought he might be just the tiniest tad ashamed of his presence here.
Jonas turned back to her, his thin lips curved in the semblance of a benevolent 
smile. "Well, after murder I suppose stealing a mule comes easy, don't it?"
She said nothing, only watched as Jonas stroked Capi's muzzle.
"What all were they hauling, those boys, that it took a mule to put it on?"
"Shrouds," she said through numb lips. "For you and all yer friends. A fearful 
heavy load it made, too—near broke the poor animal's back."
"There's a saying in the land I come from," Jonas said, still smil­ing. "Clever 
girls go to hell. Ever heard it?" He went on stroking Capi's nose. The mule 
liked it; his neck was thrust out to its full length, his stupid little eyes 
half-closed with pleasure. "Has it crossed your mind that fellows who unload 
their pack animal, split up what it was carrying, and take the goods away 
usually ain't coming back?"
Susan said nothing.
"You've been left high and dry, Sunbeam. Fast fucked is usually fast forgot, sad 
to say. Do you know where they went?"
"Yes," she said. Her voice was low, barely a whisper.
Jonas looked pleased. "If you was to tell, things might go easier for you. Would 
you agree, Renfrew?"
"Aye," Renfrew said. "They're traitors, Susan—for the Good Man. If you know 
where they are or what they're up to, tell us."
Keeping her eyes fixed on Jonas, Susan said: "Come closer." Her numbed lips 
didn't want to move and it came out sounding like Cung gloser, but Jonas 
understood and leaned forward, stretching his neck in a way that made him look 
absurdly like Caprichoso. When he did, Susan spat in his face.
Jonas recoiled, lips twisting in surprise and revulsion. "Arrr! BITCH!" he 
cried, and launched a full-swung, open-handed blow that drove her to the ground. 
She landed at full length on her side with black stars ex­ploding across her 
field of vision. She could already feel her right cheek swelling like a balloon 
and thought, If he'd hit an inch or two lower, he might've broken my neck. 
Mayhap that would've been best. She raised her hand to her nose and wiped blood 
from the right nostril.
Jonas turned to Renfrew, who had taken a single step forward and then stopped 
himself. "Put her on her horse and tie her hands in front of her. Tight." He 
looked down at Susan, then kicked her in the shoulder hard enough to send her 
rolling toward the hut. "Spit on me, would you? Spit on Eldred Jonas, would you, 
you bitch?"
Reynolds was holding out his neckerchief. Jonas took it, wiped the spittle from 
his face with it, then dropped into a hunker beside her. He took a handful of 
her hair and carefully wiped the neckerchief with it. Then he hauled her to her 
feet. Tears of pain now peeped from the comers of her eyes, but she kept silent.
"I may never see your friend again, sweet Sue with the tender little titties, 
but I've got you, ain't I? Yar. And if Dearborn gives us trouble, I'll give you 
double. And make sure Dearborn knows. You may count on it."
His smile faded, and he gave her a sudden, bitter shove that almost sent her 
sprawling again.
"Now get mounted, and do it before I decide to change your face a lit­tle with 
my knife."
 
12
 
Sheemie watched from the grass, terrified and silently crying, as Susan spit in 
the bad Coffin Hunter's face and was knocked to the ground, hit so hard the blow 
might have killed her. He almost rushed out then, but some­thing—it could have 
been his friend Arthur's voice in his head—told him that would only get him 
killed.
He watched as Susan mounted. One of the other men—not a Coffin Hunter but a big 
rancher Sheemie had seen in the Rest from time to time—tried to help, but Susan 
pushed him away with the sole of her boot. The man stood back with a red face.
Don't make em mad, Susan, Sheemie thought. Oh gods, don't do that, they'll hit 
ye some more! Oh, yer poor face! And ye got a nosebleed, so you do!
"Last chance," Jonas told her. "Where are they, and what do they mean to do?"
"Go to hell," she said.
He smiled—a thin, hurty smile. "Likely I'll find you there when I ar­rive," he 
said. Then, to the other Coffin Hunter: "You checked the place careful?"
"Whatever they had, they took it," the redhead answered. "Only thing they left 
was Dearborn's punch-bunny."
That made Jonas laugh meany-mean as he climbed on board his own horse. "Come 
on," he said, "let's ride."
They went back into the Bad Grass. It closed around them, and it was as if they 
had never been there . . . except that Susan was gone, and so was Capi. The big 
rancher riding beside Susan had been leading the mule.
When he was sure they weren't going to return, Sheemie walked slowly back into 
the clearing, doing up the button on top of his pants as he came. He looked from 
the way Roland and his friends had gone to the one in which Susan had been 
taken. Which?
A moment's thought made him realize there was no choice. The grass out here was 
tough and springy. The path Roland and Alain and good old Arthur Heath (so 
Sheemie still thought of him, and always would) had taken was gone. The one made 
by Susan and her captors, on the other hand, was still clear. And perhaps, if he 
followed her, he could do some­thing for her. Help her.
Walking at first, then jogging as his fear that they might double back and catch 
him dissipated, Sheemie went in the direction Susan had been taken. He would 
follow her most of that day.
 
13
 
Cuthbert—not the most sanguine of personalities in any situation—grew more and 
more impatient as the day brightened toward true dawn. It's Reaping, he thought. 
Finally Reaping, and here we sit with our knives sharpened and not a thing in 
the world to cut.
Twice he asked Alain what he "heard." The first time Alain only grunted. The 
second time he asked what Bert expected him to hear, with someone yapping away 
in his ear like that.
Cuthbert, who did not consider two enquiries fifteen minutes apart as "yapping 
away," wandered off and sat morosely in front of his horse. Af­ter a bit, Roland 
came over and sat down beside him.
"Waiting," Cuthbert said. "That's what most of our time in Mejis has been about, 
and it's the thing I do worst."
"You won't have to do it much longer," Roland said.
 
14
 
Jonas's company reached the place where Fran Lengyll's party had made a 
temporary camp about an hour after the sun had topped the horizon. Quint, Rhea, 
and Renfrew's vaqs were already there and drinking coffee, Jonas was glad to 
see.
Lengyll started forward, saw Susan riding with her hands tied, and ac­tually 
drew back a step, as if he wanted to find a comer to hide in. There were no 
comers out here, however, so he stood fast. He did not look happy about it, 
however.
Susan nudged her horse forward with her knees, and when Reynolds tried to grab 
her shoulder, she dipped it to the side, temporarily elud­ing him.
"Why, Francis Lengyll! Imagine meeting you here!"
"Susan, I'm sorry to see ye so," Lengyll said. His flush crept closer and closer 
to his brow, like a tide approaching a seawall. "It's bad com­pany ye've fallen 
in with, girl . . . and in the end, bad company always leaves ye to face the 
music alone."
Susan actually laughed. "Bad company!" she said. "Aye, ye'd know about that, 
wouldn't ye, Fran?"
He turned, awkward and stiff in his embarrassment. She raised one booted foot 
and, before anyone could stop her, kicked him squarely be­tween the 
shoulderblades. He went down on his stomach, his whole face widening in shocked 
surprise.
"No ye don't, ye bold cunt!" Renfrew shouted, and fetched her a wal­lop to the 
side of the head—it was on the left, and at least evened things up a bit, she 
would think later when her mind cleared and she was capable of thinking. She 
swayed in the saddle, but kept her seat. And she never looked at Renfrew, only 
at Lengyll, who had now managed to get to his hands and knees. He wore a deeply 
dazed expression.
"You killed my father!" she screamed at him. "You killed my father, you 
cowardly, sneaking excuse for a man!" She looked at the party of ranchers and 
vaqs, all of them staring at her now. "There he is, Fran Lengyll, head of the 
Horsemen's Association, as low a sneak as ever walked! Low as coyote shit! Low 
as— "
"That's enough," Jonas said, watching with some interest as Lengyll scuttled 
back to his men—and yes, Susan was bitterly delighted to see, it was a 
full-fledged scuttle—with his shoulders hunched. Rhea was cack­ling, rocking 
from side to side and making a sound like fingernails on a piece of slate. The 
sound shocked Susan, but she wasn't a bit surprised by Rhea's presence in this 
company.
"It could never be enough," she said, looking from Jonas to Lengyll with an 
expression of contempt so deep it seemed bottomless. "For him it could never be 
enough."
"Well, perhaps, but you did quite well in the time you had, lady-sai. Few could 
have done better. And listen to the witch cackle! Like salt in his wounds, I wot 
. . . but we'll shut her up soon enough." Then, turning his head: "Clay!"
Reynolds rode up.
"Think you can get Sunbeam back to Seafront all right?"
"I think so." Reynolds tried not to show the relief he felt at being sent back 
east instead of west. He had begun to have a bad feeling about Hang­ing Rock, 
Latigo, the tankers . . . about the whole show, really. God knew why. "Now?"
"Give it another minute," Jonas said. "Mayhap there's going to be a spot of 
killing right here. Who knows? But it's the unanswered questions that makes it 
worthwhile getting up in the morning, even when a man's leg aches like a tooth 
with a hole in it. Wouldn't you say so?"
"I don't know, Eldred."
"Sai Renfrew, watch our pretty Sunbeam a minute. I have a piece of property to 
take back."
His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea's cackles cut off 
suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife. Smiling, Jonas 
walked his horse toward the black cart with its jost­ling show of gold symbols. 
Reynolds rode on his left, and Jonas sensed rather than saw Depape fall in on 
his right. Roy was a good enough boy, really; his head was a little soft, but 
his heart was in the right place, and you didn't have to tell him everything.
For every step forward Jonas's horse took, Rhea shrank back a little in the 
cart. Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, look­ing for a 
way out that wasn't there.
"Keep away from me, ye charry man!" she cried, raising a hand toward him. With 
the other she clutched the sack with the ball in it ever more tightly. "Keep 
away, or I'll bring the lightning and strike ye dead where ye sit yer horse! Yer 
harrier friends, too!"
Jonas thought Roy hesitated briefly at that, but Clay never did, nor did Jonas 
himself. He guessed there was a great lot she could do ... or that there had 
been, at one time. But that was before the hungry glass had en­tered her life.
"Give it up to me," he said. He reached the side of her wagon and held his hand 
out for the bag. "It's not yours and never was. One day you'll doubtless have 
the Good Man's thanks for keeping it so well as you have, but now you must give 
it up."
She screamed—a sound of such piercing intensity that several of the vaqueros 
dropped their tin coffee-cups and clapped their hands over their ears. At the 
same time she knotted her hand through the drawstring and raised the bag over 
her head. The curved shape of the ball swung back and forth at the bottom of it 
like a pendulum.
"I'll not!" she howled. "I'll smash it on the ground before I give it up to the 
likes o' you!"
Jonas doubted if the ball would break, not hurled by her weak arms onto the 
trampled, springy mat of the Bad Grass, but he didn't think he would have 
occasion to find out, one way or the other.
"Clay," he said. "Draw your gun."
He didn't need to look at Clay to see that he'd done it; he saw the frantic way 
her eyes shifted to the left, where Clay sat his horse.
"I'm going to have a count," Jonas said. "Just a short one; if I get to three 
and she hasn't passed that bag over, blow her ugly head off."
"Aye."
"One," Jonas said, watching the ball pendulum back and forth at the bottom of 
the upheld bag. It was glowing; he could see dull pink even through the cloth. 
"Two. Enjoy hell, Rhea, goodbye. Thr—"
"Here!" she screamed, thrusting it out toward him and shielding her face with 
the crooked hook of her free hand. "Here, take it! And may it damn you the way 
it's damned me!"
"Thankee-sai."
He grabbed the bag just below the draw top and yanked. Rhea screamed again as 
the string skinned her knuckles and tore off one of her nails. Jonas hardly 
heard. His mind was a white explosion of exultation. For the first time in his 
long professional life he forgot his job, his sur­roundings, and the six 
thousand things that could get him killed on any day. He had it; he had it; by 
all the graves of all the gods, he had the fuck­ing thing!
Mine! he thought, and that was all. He somehow restrained the urge to open the 
bag and stick his head inside it, like a horse sticking its head into a bag of 
oats, and looped the drawstring over the pommel of his saddle twice instead. He 
took in a breath as deep as his lungs would allow, then expelled it. Better. A 
little.
"Roy."
"Aye, Jonas."
It would be good to get out of this place, Jonas thought, and not for the first 
time. To get away from these hicks. He was sick of aye and ye and so it is, sick 
to his bones.
"Roy, we'll give the bitch a ten-count this time. If she isn't out of my sight 
by then, you have my permission to blow her ass off. Now, let's see if you can 
do the counting. I'll be listening close, so mind you don't skip any!"
"One," Depape said eagerly. "Two. Three. Four."
Spitting curses, Rhea snatched up the reins of the cart and spanked the pony's 
back with them. The pony laid its ears back and jerked the cart forward so 
vigorously that Rhea went tumbling backward off the cant-board, her feet up, her 
white and bony shins showing above her ankle-high black shoes and mismatched 
wool stockings. The vaqueros laughed. Jonas laughed himself. It was pretty 
funny, all right, seeing her on her back with her pins in the air.
"Fuh-fuh-five," Depape said, laughing so hard he was hiccupping. "Sih-sih-six!"
Rhea climbed back up, flopped onto the cantboard again with all the grace of a 
dying fish, and peered around at them, wall-eyed and sneering.
"I curse ye all!" she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter 
even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clear­ing. "Every last 
one of ye! Ye... and ye... and ye!" Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas. 
"Thief! Miserable thief!"
As though it was yours, Jonas marveled (although "Mine!" was the first word to 
occur to him, once he had taken possession of it). As though such a wonder could 
ever belong to a back-country reader of rooster-guts such as you.
The cart bounced its way into the Bad Grass, the pony pulling hard with its ears 
laid back; the old woman's screams served to drive it better than any whip could 
have done. The black slipped into the green. They saw the cart flicker like a 
conjurer's trick, and then it was gone. For a long time yet, however, they heard 
her shrieking her curses, calling death down upon them beneath the Demon Moon.
 
15
 
"Go on," Jonas told Clay Reynolds. "Take our Sunbeam back. And if you want to 
stop on the way and make some use of her, why, be my guest." He glanced at Susan 
as he said this, to see what effect it might be having, but he was 
disappointed—she looked dazed, as if the last blow Renfrew had dealt her had 
scrambled her brains, at least temporarily. "Just make sure she gets to Coral at 
the end of all the fun." "I will. Any message for sai Thorin?"
"Tell her to keep the wench someplace safe until she hears from me. And . . . 
why don't you stay with her. Clay? Coral, I mean—come tomor­row, I don't think 
we'll have to worry about this 'un anymore, but Coral . . . ride with her to 
Ritzy when she goes. Be her escort, like."
Reynolds nodded. Better and better. Seafront it would be, and that was fine. He 
might like a little taste of the girl once he got her there, but not on the way. 
Not under the ghostly-full daytime Demon Moon. "Go on, then. Get started."
Reynolds led her across the clearing, aiming for a point well away from the bent 
swath of grass where Rhea had made her exit. Susan rode silently, downcast eyes 
fixed on her bound wrists.
Jonas turned to face his men. "The three young fellows from In-World have broken 
their way out of jail, with that haughty young bitch's help," he said, pointing 
at Susan's departing back.
There was a low, growling murmur from the men. That "Will Dear­born" and his 
friends were free they had known; that sai Delgado had helped them escape they 
had not . . . and it was perhaps just as well for her that Reynolds was at that 
moment leading her into the Bad Grass and out of sight.
"Never mind!" Jonas shouted, pulling their attention back to him. He reached out 
a stealthy hand and caressed the curve at the bottom of the drawstring bag. Just 
touching the ball made him feel as if he could do anything, and with one hand 
tied behind his back, at that.
"Never mind her, and never mind them!" His eyes moved from Lengyll to Wertner to 
Croydon to Brian Hookey to Roy Depape. "We're close to forty men, going to join 
another hundred and fifty. They're three, and not one a day over sixteen. Are 
you afraid of three little boys?"
“No!" they cried.
"If we run on em, my cullies, what will we do?"
"KILL THEM!" The shout so loud that it sent rooks rising up into the morning 
sun, cawing their displeasure as they commenced the hunt for more peaceful 
surroundings.
Jonas was satisfied. His hand was still on the sweet curve of the ball, and he 
could feel it pouring strength into him. Pink strength, he thought, and grinned.
"Come on, boys. I want those tankers in the woods west of Eyebolt before the 
home folks light their Reap-Night Bonfire."
 
16
 
Sheemie, crouched down in the grass and peering into the clearing, was nearly 
run over by Rhea's black wagon; the screaming, gibbering witch passed so close 
to him that he could smell her sour skin and dirty hair. If she had looked down, 
she couldn't have missed seeing him and undoubt­edly would have turned him into 
a bird or a bumbler or maybe even a mosquito.
The boy saw Jonas pass custody of Susan to the one in the cloak, and began 
working his way around the edge of the clearing. He heard Jonas haranguing the 
men (many of whom Sheemie knew; it shamed him to know how many Mejis cowboys 
were doing that bad Coffin Hunter's bid­ding), but paid no attention to what he 
was saying. Sheemie froze in place as they mounted up, momentarily scared they 
would come in his direc­tion, but they rode the other way, west. The clearing 
emptied almost as if by magic . . . except it wasn't entirely empty. Caprichoso 
had been left behind, his lead trailing on the beaten grass. Capi looked after 
the depart­ing riders, brayed once—as if to tell them they could all go to 
hell—then turned and made eye-contact with Sheemie, who was peering out into the 
clearing. The mule flicked his ears at the boy, then tried to graze. He lipped 
the Bad Grass a single time, raised his head, and brayed at Sheemie, as if to 
say this was all the inn-boy's fault.
Sheemie stared thoughtfully at Caprichoso, thinking of how much easier it was to 
ride than to walk. Gods, yes ... but that second bray de­cided him against it. 
The mule might give one of his disgusted cries at the wrong time and alert the 
man who had Susan.
"You'll find your way home, I reckon," Sheemie said. "So long, pal. So long, 
good old Capi. See you farther down the path."
He found the path made by Susan and Reynolds, and began to trot af­ter them once 
more.
 
17
 
"They're coming again," Alain said a moment before Roland sensed it himself—a 
brief flicker in his head like pink lightning. "All of them."
Roland hunkered in front of Cuthbert. Cuthbert looked back at him without even a 
suggestion of his usual foolish good humor.
"Much of it's on you," Roland said, then tapped the slingshot. "And on that."
"I know."
"How much have you got in the armory?"
"Almost four dozen steel balls." Bert held up a cotton bag which had, in more 
settled times, held his father's tobacco. "Plus assorted fireworks in my 
saddlebag."
"How many big-bangers?"
"Enough, Roland." Unsmiling. With the laughter gone from them, he had the hollow 
eyes of just one more killer. "Enough."
Roland ran a hand down the front of the serape he wore, letting his palm 
reacquaint itself with the rough weave. He looked at Cuthbert's, then at 
Alain's, telling himself again that it could work, yes, as long as they held 
their nerve and didn't let themselves think of it in terms of three against 
forty or fifty, it could work.
"The ones out at Hanging Rock will hear the shooting once it starts, won't 
they?" Al asked.
Roland nodded. "With the wind blowing from us to them, there's no doubt of 
that."
"We'll have to move fast, then."
"We'll go as best we can." Roland thought of standing between the tangled green 
hedges behind the Great Hall, David the hawk on his arm and a sweat of terror 
trickling down his back. I think you die today, he had told the hawk, and he had 
told it true. Yet he himself had lived, and passed his test, and walked out of 
the testing corridor facing east. Today it was Cuthbert and Alain's turn to be 
tested—not in Gilead, in the tradi­tional place of proving behind the Great 
Hall, but here in Mejis, on the edge of the Bad Grass, in the desert, and in the 
canyon. Eyebolt Canyon.
"Prove or die," Alain said, as if reading the run of the gunslinger's thoughts. 
"That's what it comes down to."
"Yes. That's what it always comes down to, in the end. How long be­fore they get 
here, do you think?"
"An hour at least, I'd say. Likely two."
"They'll be running a 'watch-and-go.' "
Alain nodded. "I think so, yes."
"That's not good," Cuthbert said.
"Jonas is afraid of being ambushed in the grass," Roland said. "Maybe of us 
setting fire to it around him. They'll loosen up when they get into the clear."
"You hope," Cuthbert said.
Roland nodded gravely. "Yes. I hope."
 
18
 
At first Reynolds was content to lead the girl along the broken backtrail at a 
fast walk, but about thirty minutes after leaving Jonas, Lengyll, and the rest, 
he broke into a trot. Pylon matched Reynolds's horse easily, and just as easily 
when, ten minutes later, he upped their speed to a light but steady run.
Susan held to the horn of her saddle with her bound hands and rode easily at 
Reynolds's right, her hair streaming out behind her. She thought her face must 
be quite colorful; the skin of her cheeks felt raised at least two inches higher 
than usual, welted and tender. Even the passing wind stung a little.
At the place where the Bad Grass gave way to the Drop, Reynolds stopped to give 
the horses a blow. He dismounted himself, turned his back to her, and took a 
piss. As he did, Susan looked up along the rise of land and saw the great herd, 
now untended and unravelling at the edges. They had done that much, perhaps. It 
wasn't much, but it was something.
"Do you need to do the necessary?" Reynolds asked. "I'll help you down if you 
do, but don't say no now and whine about it later."
"Ye're afraid. Big brave regulator that ye are, ye're scared, ain't ye? Aye, 
coffin tattoo and all."
Reynolds tried a contemptuous grin. It didn't fit his face very well this 
morning. "You ort to leave the fortune-telling to those that are good at it, 
missy. Now do you need a necessary stop or not?"
"No. And ye are afraid. Of what?"
Reynolds, who only knew that his bad feeling hadn't left him when he left Jonas, 
as he'd hoped it would, bared his tobacco-stained teeth at her. "If you can't 
talk sensible, just shut up."
"Why don't ye let me go? Perhaps my friends will do the same for you, when they 
catch us up."
This time Reynolds grunted laughter which was almost genuine. He swung himself 
into his saddle, hawked, spat. Overhead, Demon Moon was a pale and bloated ball 
in the sky. "You can dream, miss'sai," he said, "dreaming's free. But you ain't 
never going to see those three again. They're for the worms, they are. Now let's 
ride."
They rode.
 
19
 
Cordelia hadn't gone to bed at all on Reaping Eve. She sat the night through in 
her parlor chair, and although there was sewing on her lap, she had put not a 
single stitch in nor picked one out. Now, as morning's light brightened toward 
ten o' the clock, she sat in the same chair, looking out at nothing. What was 
there to look at, anyway? Everything had come down with a smash—all her hopes of 
the fortune Thorin would settle on Susan and Susan's child, perhaps while he 
still lived, certainly in his dead-letter; all her hopes of ascending to her 
proper place in the commu­nity; all her plans for the future. Swept away by two 
wilful young people who couldn't keep their pants up.
She sat in her old chair with her knitting on her lap and the ashes Su­san had 
smeared on her cheek standing out like a brand, and thought:
They'll find me dead in this chair, someday—old, poor, and forgotten. That 
ungrateful child! After all I did for her!
What roused her was a weak scratching at the window. She had no idea how long it 
had been going on before it finally intruded on her con­sciousness, but when it 
did, she laid her needlework aside and got up to see. A bird, perhaps. Or 
children playing Reaping jokes, unaware that the world had come to an end. 
Whatever it was, she would shoo it away.
Cordelia saw nothing at first. Then, as she was about to turn away, she spied a 
pony and cart at the edge of the yard. The cart was a little dis­quieting—black, 
with gold symbols overpainted—and the pony in the shafts stood with its head 
lowered, not grazing, looking as if it had been run half to death.
She was still frowning out at this when a twisted, filthy hand rose in the air 
directly in front of her and began to scratch at the glass again. Cordelia 
gasped and clapped both hands to her bosom as her heart took a startled leap in 
her chest. She backed up a step, and gave a little shriek as her calf brushed 
the tender of the stove.
The long, dirty nails scratched twice more, then fell away.
Cordelia stood where she was for a moment, irresolute, then went to the door, 
stopping at the woodbox to pick up a chunk of ash which fitted her hand. Just in 
case. Then she jerked the door open, went to the comer of the house, drew in a 
deep, steadying breath, and went around to the garden side, raising the 
ash-chunk as she did.
"Get out, whoever ye are! Scat before I—"
Her voice was stilled by what she saw: an incredibly old woman crawling through 
the frost-killed flowerbed next to the house—crawling toward her. The crone's 
stringy white hair (what remained of it) hung in her face. Sores festered on her 
cheeks and brow; her lips had split and drizzled blood down her pointed, warty 
chin. The corneas of her eyes had gone a filthy gray-yellow, and she panted like 
a cracked bellows as she moved.
"Good woman, help me," this specter gasped. "Help me if ye will, for I'm about 
done up."
The hand holding the chunk of ash sagged. Cordelia could hardly be­lieve what 
she was seeing. "Rhea?" she whispered. "Is it Rhea?"
"Aye," Rhea whispered, crawling relentlessly through the dead silk-flowers, 
dragging her hands through the cold earth. "Help me."
Cordelia retreated a step, her makeshift bludgeon now hanging at her knee. "No, 
I... I can't have such as thee in my house ... I'm sorry to see ye so, but . . . 
but I have a reputation, ye ken . . . folk watch me close, so they do ..."
She glanced at the High Street as she said this, as if expecting to see a line 
of townspeople outside her gate, watching eagerly, avid to fleet their wretched 
gossip on its lying way, but there was no one there. Hambry was quiet, its walks 
and byways empty, the customary joyous noise of Reap­ing Fair-Day stilled. She 
looked back at the thing which had fetched up in her dead flowers.
"Yer niece ... did this . . ." the thing in the dirt whispered. "All . . . her 
fault . . ."
Cordelia dropped the chunk of wood. It clipped the side of her ankle, but she 
hardly noticed. Her hands curled into fists before her.
"Help me," Rhea whispered. "I know ... where she is ... we ... we have work, us 
two ... women's . . . work ..."
Cordelia hesitated a moment, then went to the woman, knelt, got an arm around 
her, and somehow got her to her feet. The smell coming off her was reeky and 
nauseating—the smell of decomposing flesh.
Bony fingers caressed Cordelia's cheek and the side of her neck as she helped 
the hag into the house. Cordelia's flesh crawled, but she didn't pull away until 
Rhea collapsed into a chair, gasping from one end and farting from the other.
"Listen to me," the old woman hissed.
"I am." Cordelia drew a chair over and sat beside her. At death's door she might 
be, but once her eye fell on you, it was strangely hard to look away. Now Rhea's 
fingers dipped inside the bodice of her dirty dress, brought out a silver charm 
of some kind, and began to move it back and forth rapidly, as if telling beads. 
Cordelia, who hadn't felt sleepy all night, began to feel that way now.
"The others are beyond us," Rhea said, "and the ball has slipped my grasp. But 
she—! Back to Mayor's House she's been ta'en, and mayhap we could see to her—we 
could do that much, aye."
"You can't see to anything," Cordelia said distantly. "You're dying."
Rhea wheezed laughter and a trickle of yellowish drool. "Dying? Nay! Just done 
up and in need of a refreshment. Now listen to me, Cordelia daughter of Hiram 
and sister of Pat!"
She hooked a bony (and surprisingly strong) arm around Cordelia's neck and drew 
her close. At the same time she raised her other hand, twirling the silver 
medallion in front of Cordelia's wide eyes. The crone whispered, and after a bit 
Cordelia began to nod her understanding.
"Do it, then," the old woman said, letting go. She slumped back in her chair, 
exhausted. "Now, for I can't last much longer as I am. And I'll need a bit o' 
time after, mind ye. To revive, like."
Cordelia moved across the room to the kitchen area. There, on the counter beside 
the hand-pump, was a wooden block in which were sheathed the two sharp knives of 
the house. She took one and came back. Her eyes were distant and far, as Susan's 
had been when she and Rhea stood in the open doorway of Rhea's hut in the light 
of the Kissing Moon.
"Would ye pay her back?" Rhea asked. "For that's why I've come to ye."
"Miss Oh So Young and Pretty," Cordelia murmured in a barely audi­ble voice. The 
hand not holding the knife floated up to her face and touched her ash-smeared 
cheek. "Yes. I'd be repaid of her, so I would."
"To the death?"
"Aye. Hers or mine."
" 'Twill be hers," Rhea said, "never fear it. Now refresh me, Cordelia. Give me 
what I need!"
Cordelia unbuttoned her dress down the front, pushing it open to re­veal an 
ungenerous bosom and a middle which had begun to curve out in the last year or 
so, making a tidy little potbelly. Yet she still had the ves­tige of a waist, 
and it was here she used the knife, cutting through her shift and the top layers 
of flesh beneath. The white cotton began to bloom red at once along the slit.
"Aye," Rhea whispered. "Like roses. I dream of them often enough, roses in 
bloom, and what stands black among em at the end of the world. Come closer!" She 
put her hand on the small of Cordelia's back, urging her forward. She raised her 
eyes to Cordelia's face, then grinned and licked her lips. "Good. Good enough."
Cordelia looked blankly over the top of the old woman's head as Rhea of the Coos 
buried her face against the red cut in the shift and began to drink.
 
20
 
Roland was at first pleased as the muted jingle of harness and buckle drew 
closer to the place where the three of them were hunkered down in the high 
grass, but as the sounds drew closer still—close enough to hear mur­muring 
voices as well as soft-thudding hooves—he began to be afraid. For the riders to 
pass close was one thing, but if they were, through foul luck, to come right 
upon them, the three boys would likely die like a nest of moles uncovered by the 
blade of a passing plow.
Ka surely hadn't brought them all this way to end in such fashion, had it? In 
all these miles of Bad Grass, how could that party of oncoming rid­ers possibly 
strike the one point where Roland and his friends had pulled up? But still they 
closed in, the sound of tack and buckle and men's voices growing ever sharper.
Alain looked at Roland with dismayed eyes and pointed to the left. Roland shook 
his head and patted his hands toward the ground, indicating they would stay put. 
They had to stay put; it was too late to move without being heard.
Roland drew his guns.
Cuthbert and Alain did the same.
In the end, the plow missed the moles by sixty feet. The boys could actually see 
the horses and riders flashing through the thick grass; Roland easily made out 
that the party was led by Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll, rid­ing three abreast. 
They were followed by at least three dozen others, glimpsed as roan flashes and 
the bright red and green of serapes through the grass. They were strung out 
pretty well, and Roland thought he and his friends could reasonably hope they'd 
string out even more once they reached open desert.
The boys waited for the party to pass, holding their horses' heads in case one 
of them took it in mind to whicker a greeting to the nags so close by. When they 
were gone, Roland turned his pale and unsmiling face to his friends.
"Mount up," he said. "Reaping's come."
 
21
 
They walked their horses to the edge of the Bad Grass, meeting the path of 
Jonas's party where the grass gave way first to a zone of stunted bushes and 
then to the desert itself.
The wind howled high and lonesome, carrying big drifts of gritty dust under a 
cloudless dark blue sky. Demon Moon stared down from it like the filmed eye of a 
corpse. Two hundred yards ahead, the drogue riders backing Jonas's party were 
spread out in a line of three, their sombreros jammed down tight on their heads, 
their shoulders hunched, their scrapes blowing.
Roland moved so that Cuthbert rode in the middle of their trio. Bert had his 
slingshot in his hand. Now he handed Alain half a dozen steel balls, and Roland 
another half-dozen. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly. Roland nodded and 
they began to ride.
Dust blew past them in rattling sheets, sometimes turning the drogue riders into 
ghosts, sometimes obscuring them completely, but the boys closed in steadily. 
Roland rode tense, waiting for one of the drogues to turn in his saddle and see 
them, but none did—none of them wanted to put his face into that cutting, 
grit-filled wind. Nor was there sound to warn them; there was sandy hardpack 
under the horses' hooves now, and it didn't give away much.
When they were just twenty yards behind the drogues, Cuthbert nodded—they were 
close enough for him to work. Alain handed him a ball. Bert, sitting ramrod 
straight in the saddle, dropped it into the cup of his slingshot, pulled, waited 
for the wind to drop, then released. The rider ahead on the left jerked as if 
stung, raised one hand a little, then toppled out of his saddle. Incredibly, 
neither of his two companeros seemed to no­tice. Roland saw what he thought was 
the beginning of a reaction from the one on the right when Bert drew again, and 
the rider in the middle col­lapsed forward onto his horse's neck. The horse, 
startled, reared up. The rider flopped bonelessly backward, his sombrero 
tumbling off, and fell. The wind dropped enough for Roland to hear his knee snap 
as his foot caught in one of his stirrups.
The third rider now began to turn. Roland caught a glimpse of a bearded face—a 
dangling cigarette, unlit because of the wind, one aston­ished eye—and then 
Cuthbert's sling thupped again. The astonished eye was replaced by a red socket. 
The rider slid from his saddle, groping for the horn and missing it.
Three gone, Roland thought.
He kicked Rusher into a gallop. The others did the same, and the boys rode 
forward into the dust a stirrup's width apart. The horses of the am­bushed 
drogue riders veered off to the south in a group, and that was good. Riderless 
horses ordinarily didn't raise eyebrows in Mejis, but when they were saddled—
More riders up ahead: a single, then two side by side, then another single.
Roland drew his knife, and rode up beside the fellow who was now drogue and 
didn't know it.
"What news?" he asked conversationally, and when the man turned, Roland buried 
his knife in his chest. The vaq's brown eyes widened above the bandanna he'd 
pulled up outlaw-style over his mouth and nose, and then he tumbled from his 
saddle.
Cuthbert and Alain spurred past him, and Bert, not slowing, took the two riding 
ahead with his slingshot. The fellow beyond them heard some­thing in spite of 
the wind, and swivelled in his saddle. Alain had drawn his own knife and now 
held it by the tip of the blade. He threw hard, in the exaggerated full-arm 
motion they had been taught, and although the range was long for such 
work—twenty feet at least, and in windy air—his aim was true. The hilt came to 
rest protruding from the center of the man's bandanna. The vaq groped for it, 
making choked gargling sounds around the knife in his throat, and then he too 
dropped from the saddle.
Seven now.
Like the story of the shoemaker and the flies, Roland thought. His heart was 
beating slow and hard in his chest as he caught up with Alain and Cuthbert. The 
wind gusted a lonely whine. Dust flew, swirled, then dropped with the wind. 
Ahead of them were three more riders, and ahead of them the main party.
Roland pointed at the next three, then mimed the slingshot. Pointed beyond them 
and mimed firing a revolver. Cuthbert and Alain nodded. They rode forward, once 
again stirrup-to-stirrup, closing in.
 
22
 
Bert got two of the three ahead of them clean, but the third jerked at the wrong 
moment, and the steel ball meant for the back of his head only clipped his 
earlobe on the way by. Roland had drawn his gun by then, however, and put a 
bullet in the man's temple as he turned. That made ten, a full quarter of 
Jonas's company before the riders even realized trouble had begun. Roland had no 
idea if it would be enough of an advan­tage, but he knew that the first part of 
the job was done. No more stealth; now it was a matter of raw killing.
"Hile! Hile!" he screamed in a ringing, carrying voice. "To me, gunslingers! To 
me! Ride them down! No prisoners!"
They spurred toward the main party, riding into battle for the first time, 
closing like wolves on sheep, shooting before the men ahead of them had any 
slight idea of who had gotten in behind them or what was happening. The three 
boys had been trained as gunslingers, and what they lacked in experience they 
made up for with the keen eyes and reflexes of the young. Under their guns, the 
desert east of Hanging Rock became a killing-floor.
Screaming, not a single thought among them above the wrists of their deadly 
hands, they sliced into the unprepared Mejis party like a three-sided blade, 
shooting as they went. Not every shot killed, but not a one went entirely wild, 
either. Men flew out of their saddles and were dragged by boots caught in 
stirrups as their horses bolted; other men, some dead, some only wounded, were 
trampled beneath the feet of their panicky, rearing mounts.
Roland rode with both guns drawn and tiring, Rusher's reins gripped in his teeth 
so they wouldn't fall overside and trip the horse up. Two men dropped beneath 
his fire on his left, two more on the right. Ahead of them, Brian Hookey turned 
in his saddle, his beard-stubbly face long with amazement. Around his neck, a 
reap-charm in the shape of a bell swung and tinkled as he grabbed for the 
shotgun which hung in a scabbard over one burly blacksmith's shoulder. Before he 
could do more than get a hand on the gunstock, Roland blew the silver bell off 
his chest and exploded the heart which lay beneath it. Hookey pitched out of his 
saddle with a grunt.
Cuthbert caught up with Roland on the right side and shot two more men off their 
horses. He gave Roland a fierce and blazing grin. "Al was right!" he shouted. 
"These are hard calibers!"
Roland's talented fingers did their work, rolling the cylinders of the guns he 
held and reloading at a full gallop—doing it with a ghastly, super­natural 
speed—and then beginning to fire again. Now they had come al­most all the way 
through the group, riding hard, laying men low on both sides and straight ahead 
as well. Alain dropped back a little and turned his horse, covering Roland and 
Cuthbert from behind.
Roland saw Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll reining around to face their attackers. 
Lengyll was clawing at his machine-gun, but the strap had got­ten tangled in the 
wide collar of the duster he wore, and every time he grabbed for the stock, it 
bobbed out of his reach. Beneath his heavy gray-blond mustache, Lengyll's mouth 
was twisted with fury.
Now, riding between Roland and Cuthbert and these three, holding a huge 
blued-steel five-shot in one hand, came Hash Renfrew.
"Gods damn you!" Renfrew cried. "Oh, you rotten sister-fuckers!" He dropped his 
reins and laid the five-shot in the crook of one elbow to steady it. The wind 
gusted viciously, wrapping him in an envelope of swirling brown grit.
Roland had no thought of retreating, or perhaps jigging to one side or the 
other. He had, in fact, no thoughts at all. The fever had descended over his 
mind and he burned with it like a torch inside a glass sleeve. Screaming through 
the reins caught in his teeth, he galloped toward Hash Renfrew and the three men 
behind him.
 
23
 
Jonas had no clear idea of what was happening until he heard Will Dear­born 
screaming
(Hile! To me! No prisoners!)
a battle-cry he knew of old. Then it fell into place and the rattle of gunfire 
made sense. He reined around, aware of Roy doing the same be­side him . . . but 
most aware of the ball in its bag, a thing both powerful and fragile, swinging 
back and forth against the neck of his horse.
"It's those kids!" Roy exclaimed. His total surprise made him look more stupid 
than ever.
"Dearborn, you bastard!" Hash Renfrew spat, and the gun in his hand thundered a 
single time.
Jonas saw Dearborn's sombrero rise from his head, its brim chewed away. Then the 
kid was firing, and he was good—better than anyone Jonas had ever seen in his 
life. Renfrew was hammered back out of his saddle with both legs kicking, still 
holding onto his monster gun, firing it twice at the dusty-blue sky before 
hitting the ground on his back and rolling, dead, on his side.
Lengyll's hand dropped away from the elusive wire stock of his speed-shooter and 
he only stared, unable to believe the apparition bearing down on him out of the 
dust. "Get back!" he cried. "In the name of the Horsemen's Association, I tell 
you—" Then a large black hole appeared in the center of his forehead, just above 
the place where his eyebrows tangled together. His hands flew up to his 
shoulders, palms out, as if he were declaring surrender. That was how he died.
"Son of a bitch, oh you little sister-fucking son of a bitch!" Depape howled. He 
tried to draw and his revolver got caught in his scrape. He was still trying to 
pull it free when a bullet from Roland's gun opened his mouth in a red scream 
almost all the way down to his adam's apple.
This can't be happening, Jonas thought stupidly. It can't, there are too many of 
us.
But it was happening. The In-World boys had struck unerringly at the 
fracture-line; were performing what amounted to a textbook example of how 
gunslingers were supposed to attack when the odds were bad. And Jonas's 
coalition of ranchers, cowboys, and town tough-boys had shat­tered. Those not 
dead were fleeing to every point of the compass, spurring their horses as if a 
hundred devils paroled from hell were in pursuit. They were far from a hundred, 
but they fought like a hundred. Bodies were scattered in the dust everywhere, 
and as Jonas watched, he saw the one serving as their back door—Stockworth—ride 
down another man, bump him out of his saddle, and put a bullet in his head as he 
fell. Gods of the earth, he thought, that was Croydon, him that owns the Piano 
Ranch!
Except he didn't own it anymore.
And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.
Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound 
it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, 
his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.
"Come any closer and I'll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you 
are!"
Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands 
did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was 
distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror 
... or a wizard's glass.
Jonas thought: Gods, it's him! It's Arthur Eld himself come to take me!
And as the barrel of Roland's gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a 
tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the 
dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never 
leave the west.
I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But 
surely he won't risk the ball . . . he can't risk the ball, he's the dinh of 
this ka-tet and he can't risk it...
"To me!" Jonas screamed. "To me, boys! They're only three, for gods' sake! To 
me, you cowards!"
But he was alone—Lengyll killed with his idiotic machine-gun lying by his side, 
Roy a corpse glaring up at the bitter sky, Quint fled, Hookey dead, the ranchers 
who had ridden with them gone. Only Clay still lived, and he was miles from 
here.
"I'll smash it!" he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like 
death's sleekest engine. "Before all the gods, I'll—"
Roland thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and fired. The bul­let struck the 
center of the tattooed hand holding the drawstring cord and vaporized the palm, 
leaving only fingers that twitched their random way out of a spongy red mass. 
For just a moment Roland saw the blue coffin, and then it was covered by 
downspilling blood.
The bag dropped. And, as Rusher collided with Jonas's horse and slewed it to the 
side. Roland caught the bag deftly in the crook of one arm. Jonas, screaming in 
dismay as the prize left him, grabbed at Roland, caught his shoulder, and almost 
succeeded in turning the gunslinger out of his saddle. Jonas's blood rained 
across Roland's face in hot drops.
"Give it back, you brat!" Jonas clawed under his serape and brought out another 
gun. "Give it back, it's mine!"
"Not anymore," Roland said. And, as Rusher danced around, quick and delicate for 
such a large animal, Roland fired two point-blank rounds into Jonas's face. 
Jonas's horse bolted out from under him and the man with the white hair landed 
spreadeagled on his back with a thump. His arms and legs spasmed, jerked, 
trembled, then stilled.
Roland looped the bag's drawstring over his shoulder and rode back toward Alain 
and Cuthbert, ready to give aid ... but there was no need. They sat their horses 
side by side in the blowing dust, at the end of a scat­tered road of dead 
bodies, their eyes wide and dazed—eyes of boys who have passed through fire for 
the first time and can hardly believe they have not been burned. Only Alain had 
been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but 
left a scar he bore until his dying day. He could not remember who had shot him, 
he said later on, or at what point of the battle. He had been lost to himself 
during the shoot­ing, and had only vague memories of what had happened after the 
charge began. Cuthbert said much the same.
"Roland," Cuthbert said now. He passed a shaky hand down his face. "Hile, 
gunslinger."
"Hile."
Cuthbert's eyes were red and irritated from the sand, as if he had been crying. 
He took back the unspent silver slingshot balls when Roland handed them to him 
without seeming to know what they were. "Roland, we're alive."
"Yes."
Alain was looking around dazedly. "Where did the others go?"
"I'd say at least twenty-five of them are back there," Roland said, ges­turing 
at the road of dead bodies. "The rest—" He waved his hand, still with a revolver 
in it, in a wide half-circle. "They've gone. Had their fill of Mid-World's wars, 
I wot."
Roland slipped the drawstring bag off his shoulder, held it before him on the 
bridge of his saddle for a moment, and then opened it. For a moment the bag's 
mouth was black, and then it filled with the irregular pulse of a lovely pink 
light.
It crept up the gunslinger's smooth cheeks like fingers and swam in his eyes.
"Roland," Cuthbert said, suddenly nervous, "I don't think you should play with 
that. Especially not now. They'll have heard the shooting out at Hanging Rock. 
If we're going to finish what we started, we don't have time for—"
Roland ignored him. He slipped both hands into the bag and lifted the wizard's 
glass out. He held it up to his eyes, unaware that he had smeared it with 
droplets of Jonas's blood. The ball did not mind; this was not the first time it 
had been blood-touched. It flashed and swirled formlessly for a moment, and then 
its pink vapors opened like curtains. Roland saw what was there, and lost 
himself within it.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      X
BENEATH THE 
DEMON MOON (II)
 
1
 
Coral's grip on Susan's arm was firm but not painful. There was nothing 
particularly cruel about the way she was moving Susan along the down­stairs 
corridor, but there was a relentlessness about it that was dishearten­ing. Susan 
didn't try to protest; it would have been useless. Behind the two women were a 
pair of vaqueros (armed with knives and bolas rather than guns; the available 
guns had all gone west with Jonas). Behind the vaqs, skulking along like a 
sullen ghost which lacks the necessary psychic energy to fully materialize 
itself, came the late Chancellor's older brother, Laslo. Reynolds, his taste for 
a spot of journey's-end rape blunted by his growing sense of disquiet, had 
either remained above or gone off to town.
"I'm going to put ye in the cold pantry until I know better what to do with'ee, 
dear," Coral said. "Ye'll be quite safe there ... and warm. How fortunate ye 
wore a serape. Then . . . when Jonas gets back ..."
"Ye'll never see sai Jonas again," Susan said. "He won't ever—"
Fresh pain exploded in her sensitive face. For a moment it seemed the entire 
world had blown up. Susan reeled back against the dressed stone wall of the 
lower corridor, her vision first blurred, then slowly clearing. She could feel 
blood flowing down her cheek from a wound opened by the stone in Coral's ring 
when Coral had backhanded her. And her nose. That cussed thing was bleeding 
again, too.
Coral was looking at her in a chilly this-is-all-business-to-me fashion, but 
Susan believed she saw something different in the woman's eyes. Fear, mayhap.
"Don't talk to me about Eldred, missy. He's sent to catch the boys who killed my 
brother. The boys you set loose."
"Get off it." Susan wiped her nose, grimaced at the blood pooled in her palm, 
and wiped it on the leg of her pants. "I know who killed Hart as well as ye do 
yerself, so don't pull mine and I won't yank yer own." She watched Coral's hand 
rise, ready to slap, and managed a dry laugh. "Go on. Cut my face open on the 
other side, if ye like. Will that change how ye sleep tonight with no man to 
warm the other side of the bed?"
Coral's hand came down fast and hard, but instead of slapping, it seized Susan's 
arm again. Hard enough to hurt, this time, but Susan barely felt it. She had 
been hurt by experts this day, and would suffer more hurt gladly, if that would 
hasten the moment when she and Roland could be together again.
Coral hauled her the rest of the way down the corridor, through the kitchen 
(that great room, which would have been all steam and bustle on any other 
Reaping Day, now stood uncannily deserted), and to the iron-bound door on the 
far side. This she opened. A smell of potatoes and gourds and sharproot drifted 
out.
"Get in there. Go smart, before I decide to kick yer winsome ass square."
Susan looked her in the eye, smiling.
"I'd damn ye for a murderer's bed-bitch, sai Thorin, but ye've already damned 
yerself. Ye know it, too—'tis written in yer face, to be sure. So I'll just drop 
ye a curtsey"—still smiling, she suited action to the words— "and wish ye a very 
good day."
"Get in and shut up yer saucy mouth!" Coral cried, and pushed Susan into the 
cold pantry. She slammed the door, ran the bolt, and turned her blazing eyes 
upon the vaqs, who stood prudently away from her.
"Keep her well, muchachos. Mind ye do."
She brushed between them, not listening to their assurances, and went up to her 
late brother's suite to wait for Jonas, or word of Jonas. The whey-faced bitch 
sitting down there amongst the carrots and potatoes knew nothing, but her words
(ye'll never see sai Jonas again)
were in Coral's head now; they echoed and would not leave.
 
2
 
Twelve o' the clock sounded from the squat bell-tower atop the Town Gathering 
Hall. And if the unaccustomed silence which hung over the rest of Hambry seemed 
strange as that Reap morning passed into afternoon, the silence in the 
Travellers' Rest was downright eerie. Better than two hundred souls were packed 
together beneath the dead gaze of The Romp,, all of them drinking hard, yet 
there was hardly a sound among them save for the shuffle of feet and the 
impatient rap of glasses on the bar, indicat­ing that another drink was wanted.
Sheb had tried a hesitant tune on the piano—"Big Bottle Boogie," everyone liked 
that one—and a cowboy with a mutie-mark on one cheek had put the tip of a knife 
in his ear and told him to shut up that noise if he wanted to keep what passed 
for his brains on the starboard side of his eardrum. Sheb, who would be happy to 
go on drawing breath for another thousand years if the gods so allowed, quit his 
piano-bench at once, and went to the bar to help Stanley and Pettie the Trotter 
serve up the booze.
The mood of the drinkers was confused and sullen. Reaping Fair had been stolen 
from them, and they didn't know what to do about it. There would still be a 
bonfire, and plenty of stuffy-guys to bum on it, but there were no Reap-kisses 
today and would be no dancing tonight; no riddles, no races, no pig-wrestle, no 
jokes ... no good cheer, dammit! No hearty farewell to the end of the year! 
Instead of joviality there had been murder in the dark, and the escape of the 
guilty, and now only the hope of retribu­tion instead of the certainty of it. 
These folk, sullen-drunk and as poten­tially dangerous as stormclouds filled 
with lightning, wanted someone to focus on, someone to tell them what to do.
And, of course, someone to toss on the fire, as in the days of Eld.
It was at this point, not long after the last toll of noon had faded into the 
cold air, that the batwing doors opened and two women came in. A good many knew 
the crone in the lead, and several of them crossed their eyes with their thumbs 
as a ward against her evil look. A murmur ran through the room. It was the Coos, 
the old witch-woman, and although her face was pocked with sores and her eyes 
sunk so deep in their sockets they could barely be seen, she gave off a peculiar 
sense of vitality. Her lips were red, as if she had been eating winterberries.
The woman behind her walked slowly and stiffly, with one hand pressed against 
her midsection. Her face was as white as the witch-woman's mouth was red.
Rhea advanced to the middle of the floor, passing the gawking trail-hands at the 
Watch Me tables without so much as a glance. When she reached the center of the 
bar and stood directly beneath The Romp's glare, she turned to look at the 
silent drovers and townsfolk.
"Most of ye know me!" she cried in a rusty voice which stopped just short of 
stridency. "Those of ye who don't have never wanted a love-potion or needed the 
ram put back in yer rod or gotten tired of a nagging mother-in-law's tongue. I'm 
Rhea, the wise-woman of the Coos, and this lady beside me is aunt to the girl 
who freed three murderers last night... this same girl who murdered yer town's 
Sheriff and a good young man— married, he was, and with a kid on the way. He 
stood before her with 'is defenseless hands raised, pleadin for his life on 
behalf of his wife and his babby to come, and still she shot 'im! Cruel, she is! 
Cruel and heartless!"
A mutter ran through the crowd. Rhea raised her twisted old claws and it stilled 
at once. She turned in a slow circle to see them all, hands still raised, 
looking like the world's oldest, ugliest prizefighter.
"Strangers came and ye welcomed em in!" she cried in her rusty crow's voice. 
"Welcomed em and gave em bread to eat, and it's ruin they've fed ye in return! 
The deaths of those ye loved and depended on, spoilage to the time of the 
harvest, and gods know what curses upon the time to follow fin de ano!"
More murmurs, now louder. She had touched their deepest fear: that this year's 
evil would spread, might even snarl the newly threaded stock which had so slowly 
and hopefully begun to emerge along the Outer Arc.
"But they've gone and likely won't be back!" Rhea continued. "Mayhap just as 
well—why should their strange blood taint our ground? But there's this other... 
one raised among us ... a young woman gone traitor to her town and rogue among 
her own kind."
Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper on this last phrase; her listen­ers 
strained forward to hear, faces grim, eyes big. And now Rhea pulled the pallid, 
skinny woman in the rusty black dress forward. She stood Cordelia in front other 
like a doll or a ventriloquist's dummy, and whis­pered in her ear ... but the 
whisper travelled, somehow; they all heard it.
"Come, dear. Tell em what ye told me."
In a dead, carrying voice, Cordelia said: "She said she wouldn't be the Mayor's 
gilly. He wasn't good enough for such as her, she said. And then she seduced 
Will Dearborn. The price of her body was a fine position in Gilead as his 
consort . . . and the murder of Hart Thorin. Dearborn paid her price. Lusty as 
he was for her, he paid gladly. His friends helped; they may have had the use of 
 'er as well, for all I know. Chancellor Rimer must have gotten in their way. Or 
p'rhaps they just saw him, and felt like doing him, too."
"Bastards!" Pettie cried. "Sneaking young culls!"
"Now tell cm what's needed to clarify the new season before it's sp'iled, 
dearie," Rhea said in a crooning voice.
Cordelia Delgado raised her head and looked around at the men. She took a 
breath, pulling the sour, intermingled smells of gray and beer and smoke and 
whiskey deep into her spinster's lungs.
"Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do."
Silent. Their eyes.
"Paint her hands."
The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the 
waiting room.
"Charyou tree, " Cordelia whispered.
They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through 
stripped trees.
 
3
 
Sheemie ran after the bad Coffin Hunter and Susan-sai until he could lit­erally 
run no more—his lungs were afire and the stitch which had formed in his side 
turned into a cramp. He pitched forward onto the grass of the Drop, his left 
hand clutching his right armpit, grimacing with pain.
He lay there for some time with his face deep in the fragrant grass, knowing 
they were getting farther and farther ahead but also knowing it would do him no 
good to get up and start running again until the stitch was good and gone. If he 
tried to hurry the process, the stitch would sim­ply come back and lay him low 
again. So he lay where he was, lifting his head to look at the tracks left by 
Susan-sai and the bad Coffin Hunter, and he was just about ready to try his feet 
when Caprichoso bit him. Not a nip, mind you, but a good healthy chomp. Capi had 
had a difficult twenty-four hours, and he hadn't much liked to see the author of 
all his misery lying on the grass, apparently taking a nap.
"Yeee-OWWWW-by-damn!" Sheemie cried, and rocketed to his feet. There was nothing 
so magical as a good bite on the ass, a man of more philosophic bent might have 
reflected; it made all other concerns, no mat­ter how heavy or sorrowful, 
disappear like smoke.
He whirled about. "Why did you do that, you mean old sneak of a Capi?" Sheemie 
was rubbing his bottom vigorously, and large tears of pain stood out in his 
eyes. "That hurts like . . . like a big old sonovabitch!”
Caprichoso extended his neck to its maximum length, bared his teeth in the 
satanic grin which only mules and dromedaries can command, and brayed. To 
Sheemie that bray sounded very like laughter.
The mule's lead still trailed back between his sharp little hoofs. Sheemie 
reached for it, and when Capi dipped his head to inflict another bite, the boy 
gave him a good hard whack across the side of his narrow head. Capi snorted and 
blinked.
"You had that coming, mean old Capi," Sheemie said. "I'll have to shit from a 
squat for a week, so I will. Won't be able to sit on the damned jakes." He 
doubled the lead over his fist and climbed aboard the mule. Capi made no attempt 
to buck him off, but Sheemie winced as his wounded part settled atop the ridge 
of the mule's spine. This was good luck just the same, though, he thought as he 
kicked the animal into mo­tion. His ass hurt, but at least he wouldn't have to 
walk ... or try to run with a stitch in his side.
"Go on, stupid!" he said. "Hurry up! Fast as you can, you old sonovabitch!"
In the course of the next hour, Sheemie called Capi "you old sonovabitch" as 
often as possible—he had discovered, as many others had before him, that only 
the first cussword is really hard; after that, there's nothing quite like them 
for relieving one's feelings.
 
4
 
Susan's trail cut diagonally across the Drop toward the coast and the grand old 
adobe that rose there. When Sheemie reached Seafront, he dis­mounted outside the 
arch and only stood, wondering what to do next. That they had come here, he had 
no doubt—Susan's horse, Pylon, and the bad Coffin Hunter's horse were tethered 
side by side in the shade, occa­sionally dropping their heads and blowing in the 
pink stone trough that ran along the courtyard's ocean side.
What to do now? The riders who came and went beneath the arch (mostly 
white-headed vaqs who'd been considered too old to form a part of Lengyll's 
party) paid no attention to the inn-boy and his mule, but Miguel might be a 
different story. The old mozo had never liked him, acted as if he thought 
Sheemie would turn thief, given half a chance, and if he saw Coral's 
slop-and-carry-boy skulking in the courtyard, Miguel would very likely drive him 
away.
No, he won't, he thought grimly. Not today, today I can't let him boss me. I 
won't go even if he hollers.
But if the old man did holler and raised an alarm, what then? The bad Coffin 
Hunter might come and kill him. Sheemie had reached a point where he was willing 
to die for his friends, but not unless it served a purpose.
So he stood in the cold sunlight, shifting from foot to foot, irresolute, 
wishing he was smarter than he was, that he could think of a plan. An hour 
passed this way, then two. It was slow time, each passing moment an exercise in 
frustration. He sensed any opportunity to help Susan-sai slip­ping away, but 
didn't know what to do about it. Once he heard what sounded like thunder from 
the west . . . although a bright fall day like this didn't seem right for 
thunder.
He had about decided to chance the courtyard anyway—it was tem­porarily 
deserted, and he might be able to make it across to the main house—when the man 
he had feared came staggering out of the stables.
Miguel Torres was festooned with reap-charms and was very drunk. He approached 
the center of the courtyard in rolling side-to-side loops, the tugstring of his 
sombrero twisted against his scrawny throat, his long white hair flying. The 
front of his chibosa was wet, as if he had tried to take a leak without 
remembering that you had to unlimber your dingus first. He had a small ceramic 
jug in one hand. His eyes were fierce and bewildered.
"Who done this?" Miguel cried. He looked up at the afternoon sky and the Demon 
Moon which floated there. Little as Sheemie liked the old man, his heart 
cringed. It was bad luck to look directly at old Demon, so it was. "Who done 
this thing? I ask that you tell me, senor! Por favor!" A pause, then a scream so 
powerful that Miguel reeled on his feet and al­most fell. He raised his fists, 
as if he would box an answer out of the winking face in the moon, then dropped 
them wearily. Corn liquor slopped from the neck of the jug and wet him further. 
"Maricon, " he muttered. He staggered to the wall (almost tripping over the rear 
legs of the bad Coffin Hunter's horse as he went), then sat down with his back 
against the adobe wall. He drank deeply from the jug, then pulled his sombrero 
up and settled it over his eyes. His arm twitched the jug, then settled it back, 
as if in the end it had proved too heavy. Sheemie waited until the old man's 
thumb came unhooked from the jughandle and the hand flopped onto the cobbles. He 
started forward, then decided to wait even a little longer. Miguel was old and 
Miguel was mean. but Sheemie guessed Miguel might also be tricky. Lots of folks 
were, especially the mean ones.
He waited until he heard Miguel's dusty snores, then led Capi into the 
courtyard, wincing at every clop of the mule's hooves. Miguel never stirred, 
however. Sheemie tied Capi to the end of the hitching rail (winc­ing again as 
Caprichoso brayed a tuneless greeting to the horses tied there), then walked 
quickly across to the main door, through which he had never in his life expected 
to pass. He put his hand on the great iron latch, looked back once more at the 
old man sleeping against the wall, then opened the door and tiptoed in.
He stood for a moment in the oblong of sun the open door admitted, his shoulders 
hunched all the way up to his ears, expecting a hand to settle on the scruff of 
his neck (which bad-natured folk always seemed able to find, no matter how high 
you hunched your shoulders) at any moment; an angry voice would follow, asking 
what he thought he was doing here.
The foyer stood empty and silent. On the far wall was a tapestry de­picting 
vaqueros herding horses along the Drop; against it leaned a guitar with a broken 
string. Sheemie's feet sent back echoes no matter how lightly he walked. He 
shivered. This was a house of murder now, a bad place. There were likely ghosts.
Still, Susan was here. Somewhere.
He passed through the double doors on the far side of the foyer and entered the 
reception hall. Beneath its high ceiling, his footfalls echoed more loudly than 
ever. Long-dead mayors looked down at him from the walls; most had spooky eyes 
that seemed to follow him as he walked, marking him as an intruder. He knew 
their eyes were only paint, but still . . .
One in particular troubled him: a fat man with clouds of red hair, a bulldog 
mouth, and a mean glare in his eye, as if he wanted to ask what some halfwit 
inn-boy was doing in the Great Hall at Mayor's House.
"Quit looking at me that way, you big old sonuvabitch," Sheemie whispered, and 
felt a little better. For the moment, at least.
Next came the dining hall, also empty, with the long trestle tables pushed back 
against the wall. There was the remains of a meal on one—a single plate of cold 
chicken and sliced bread, half a mug of ale. Looking at those few bits of food 
on a table that had served dozens at various fairs and festivals—that should 
have served dozens this very day—brought the enormity of what had happened home 
to Sheemie. And the sadness of it, too. Things had changed in Hambry, and would 
likely never be the same again.
These long thoughts did not keep him from gobbling the leftover chicken and 
bread, or from chasing it with what remained in the alepot. It had been a long, 
foodless day.
He belched, clapped both hands over his mouth, eyes making quick and guilty 
side-to-side darts above his dirty fingers, and then walked on.
The door at the far end of the room was latched but unlocked. Sheemie opened it 
and poked his head out into the corridor which ran the length of Mayor's House. 
The way was lit with gas chandeliers, and was as broad as an avenue. It was 
empty—at least for the moment—but he could hear whispering voices from other 
rooms, and perhaps other floors, as well. He supposed they belonged to the maids 
and any other servants that might be about this afternoon, but they sounded very 
ghostly to him, just the same. Perhaps one belonged to Mayor Thorin, wandering 
the cor­ridor right in front of him (if Sheemie could but see him . . . which he 
was glad he couldn't). Mayor Thorin wandering and wondering what had hap­pened 
to him, what this cold jellylike stuff soaking into his nightshirt might be, 
who—
A hand gripped Sheemie's arm just above the elbow. He almost shrieked.
"Don't!" a woman whispered. "For your father's sake!"
Sheemie somehow managed to keep the scream in. He turned. And there, wearing 
jeans and a plain checked ranch-shirt, her hair tied back, her pale face set, 
her dark eyes blazing, stood the Mayor's widow.
"S-S-Sai Thorin ... I... I... I..."
There was nothing else he could think of to say. Now she'll call for the guards 
o' the watch, if there be any left, he thought. In a way, it would be a relief
"Have ye come for the girl? The Delgado girl?"
Grief had been good to Olive, in a terrible way—had made her face seem less 
plump, and oddly young. Her dark eyes never left his, and for­bade any attempt 
at a lie. Sheemie nodded.
"Good. I can use your help, boy. She's down below, in the pantry, and she's 
guarded."
Sheemie gaped, not believing what he was hearing.
"Do you think I believe she had anything to do with Hart's murder?" Olive asked, 
as if Sheemie had objected to her idea. "I may be fat and not so speedy on my 
pins anymore, but I'm not a complete idiot. Come on, now. Seafront's not a good 
place for sai Delgado just now—too many people from town know where she is."
 
5
 
"Roland."
He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite 
remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling 
ill somehow—walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, 
listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
"Roland of Gilead."
This voice, which he almost recognizes; a voice so like his own that a 
psychiatrist from Eddie's or Susannah's or Jake's when-and-where would say it is 
his voice, the voice of his subconscious, but Roland knows better; Roland knows 
that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our 
heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders.
"Roland, son of Steven."
The ball has taken him first to Hambry and to Mayor's House, and he would see 
more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away— calls him away in 
that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, 
unlike Rhea or Jonas, he is not watching the ball and the creatures who speak 
soundlessly within it; he is inside the ball, a part of its endless pink storm.
"Roland, come. Roland, see."
And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the Drop, 
rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not 
alone in the pink storm which bears him west along the Path of the Beam. Sheb 
flies past him, his hat cocked back on his head; he is singing "Hey Jude " at 
the top of his lungs as his nicotine-stained fingers plink keys that are not 
there—transported by his tune, Sheb doesn't seem to realize that the storm has 
ripped his piano away.
"Roland, come,"
the voice says—the voice of the storm, the voice of the glass—and Roland comes. 
The Romp flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in 
farmer's overalls goes flying past, his long red hair streaming out behind him. 
"Life for you, and for your crop, " he says—something like that, anyway—and then 
he's gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an iron chair (to Roland 
it looks like a torture de­vice) equipped with wheels, and the boy gunslinger 
thinks The Lady of Shadows without knowing why he thinks it, or what it means.
Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile 
green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting 
a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes 
above. Ahead, Roland sees an uprushing column of dark­ness and his heart quails, 
but this is where the pink storm is taking him, and this is where he must go.
I want to get out, he thinks, but he's not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may 
never get out. The wizard's glass has swallowed him. He may re­main in its 
stormy, muddled eye forever.
I'll shoot my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no—he has no guns. He is 
naked in the storm, rushing bareass toward that virulent blue-black infection 
that has buried all the landscape beneath it.
 And yet he hears singing.
Faint but beautiful—a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of 
Susan: bird and bear and hare and fish.
Suddenly Sheemie's mule (Caprichoso, Roland thinks, a beautiful name) goes past, 
galloping on thin air with his eyes as bright as firedims in the storm's lumbre 
fuego. Following him, wearing a sombrera and rid­ing a broom festooned with 
fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Coos. "I'll get you, my pretty!" she 
screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and 
brooming.
Roland plunges into the black, and suddenly his breath is gone. The world around 
him is noxious darkness; the air seems to creep on his skin like a layer of 
bugs. He is buffeted, boxed to and fro by invisible fists, then driven downward 
in a dive so violent he fears he will be smashed against the ground: so fell 
Lord Perth.
Dead fields and deserted villages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted 
trees that will give no shade—oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this 
is the edge of End-World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death 
here.
"Gunslinger, this is Thunderclap."
"Thunderclap," he says.
"Here are the unbreathing; the white faces."
"The unbreathing. The white faces. "
Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered sol­diers, the 
cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is 
Thunderclap, where clocks run backward and the grave­yards vomit out their dead.
Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a 
billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as the pink storm carries 
Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and 
weariness. "Oy!" it cries, and then it, too, is gone and not to be remembered 
for many years.
"Look ahead, Roland—see your destiny."
Now, suddenly, he knows that voice—it is the voice of the Turtle. He looks and 
sees a brilliant blue-gold glow piercing the dirty dark­ness of Thunderclap. 
Before he can do more than register it, he breaks out of the darkness and into 
the light like something coming out of an egg, a creature at last being born.
"Light! Let there be light!"
the voice of the Turtle cries, and Roland has to put his hands to his eyes and 
peek through his fingers to keep from being blinded. Below him is a field of 
blood—or so he thinks then, a boy of fourteen who has that day done his first 
real killing. This is the blood that has flowed out of Thun­derclap and 
threatens to drown our side of the world, he thinks, and it will not be for 
untold years that he will finally rediscover his time inside the ball and put 
this memory together with Eddie's dream and tell his com-padres, as they sit in 
the turnpike breakdown lane at the end of the night, that he was wrong, that he 
had been fooled by the brilliance, coming as it did, so hard on the heels of 
Thunderclap 's shadows. "It wasn't blood but roses, " he tells Eddie, Susannah, 
and Jake.
"Gunslinger, look—look there."
Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black pillar rearing on the horizon: the Dark 
Tower, the place where all Beams, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling 
windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent 
within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrong-ness of it; he 
can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions 
between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as 
disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body af­flicted with cancer; 
this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world's great mystery and last awful 
riddle.
It is the Tower, the Dark Tower rearing to the sky, and as Roland rushes toward 
it in the pink storm, he thinks: I will enter you, me and my friends, if ka 
wills it so; we will enter you and we will conquer the wrong-ness within you. It 
may be years yet, but I swear by bird and bear and hare and fish, by all I love 
that—
But now the sky fills with flaggy clouds which flow out of Thunder­clap, and the 
world begins to go dark; the blue light from the Tower's ris­ing windows shines 
like mad eyes, and Roland hears thousands of screaming, wailing voices.
"You will kill everything and everyone you love,"
says the voice of the Turtle, and now it is a cruel voice, cruel and hard.
"and still the Tower will be pent shut against you."
The gunslinger draws in all his breath and draws together all his force; when he 
cries his answer to the Turtle, he does so for all the gen­erations of his 
blood: "NO! IT WILL NOT STAND! WHEN I COME HERE IN MY BODY, IT WILL NOT STAND! I 
SWEAR ON MY FA­THER 'S NAME. IT WILL NOT STAND/"
"Then die,"
the voice says, and Roland is hurled at the gray-black stone flank of the Tower, 
to be smashed there like a bug against a rock. But before that can happen—
 
6
 
Cuthbert and Alain stood watching Roland with increasing concern. He had the 
piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow raised to his face, cupped in his hands as a man 
might cup a ceremonial goblet before making a toast. The drawstring bag lay 
crumpled on the dusty toes of his boots; his cheeks and forehead were washed in 
a pink glow that neither boy liked. It seemed alive, somehow, and hungry.
They thought, as if with one mind: I can't see his eyes. Where are his eyes?
"Roland?" Cuthbert repeated. "If we're going to get out to Hanging Rock before 
they're ready for us, you have to put that thing away."
Roland made no move to lower the ball. He muttered something un­der his breath; 
later, when Cuthbert and Alain had a chance to compare notes, they both agreed 
it had been thunderclap.
"Roland?" Alain asked, stepping forward. As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a 
scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand be­tween the curve 
of the ball and Roland's bent, studious face. There was no response. Alain 
pulled back and turned to Cuthbert.
"Can you touch him?" Bert asked.
Alain shook his head. "Not at all. It's like he's gone somewhere far away."
"We have to wake him up." Cuthbert's voice was dust-dry and shaky at the edges.
"Vannay told us that if you wake a person from a deep hypnotic trance too 
suddenly, he can go mad," Alain said. "Remember? I don't know if I dare—"
Roland stirred. The pink sockets where his eyes had been seemed to grow. His 
mouth flattened into the line of bitter determination they both knew well.
"No! It will not stand!" he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh rip­ple the 
skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland's voice at all, at least not as 
he was now; that was the voice of a man.
"No," Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert , sat up 
before the campfire. "That was the voice of a king."
Now, however, the two of them only looked at their absent, roaring friend, 
paralyzed with fright.
"When I come here in my body, it will not stand! I swear on my fa­ther 's name, 
IT WILL NOT STAND!"
Then, as Roland's unnaturally pink face contorted, like the face of a man who 
confronts some unimaginable horror, Cuthbert and Alain lunged forward. It was no 
longer a question of perhaps destroying him in an ef­fort to save him; if they 
didn't do something, the glass would kill him as they watched.
In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time 
Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the 
gunslinger's forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his 
loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught 
the boy and Alain caught the ball. Its heavy pink glow was weirdly insistent, 
beating at his eyes and pulling at his mind, but Alain stuffed it resolutely 
into the drawstring bag again without look­ing at it... and as he pulled the 
cord, yanking the bag's mouth shut, he saw the pink light wink out, as if it 
knew it had lost. For the time being, at least.
He turned back, and winced at the sight of the bruise puffing up from the middle 
of Roland's brow. "Is he—"
"Out cold," Cuthbert said.
"He better come to soon."
Cuthbert looked at him grimly, with not a trace of his usual amia­bility. "Yes," 
he said, "you're certainly right about that."
 
7
 
Sheemie waited at the foot of the stairs which led down to the kitchen area, 
shifting uneasily from foot to foot and waiting for sai Thorin to come back, or 
to call him. He didn't know how long she'd been in the kitchen, but it felt like 
forever. He wanted her to come back, and more than that—more than anything—he 
wanted her to bring Susan-sai with her. Sheemie had a terrible feeling about 
this place and this day; a feeling that darkened like the sky, which was now all 
obscured with smoke in the west. What was happening out there, or if it had 
anything to do with the thundery sounds he'd heard earlier, Sheemie didn't know, 
but he wanted to be out of here before the smoke-hazed sun went down and the 
real De­mon Moon, not its pallid day-ghost, rose in the sky.
One of the swinging doors between the corridor and the kitchen pushed open and 
Olive came hurrying out.. She was alone.
"She's in the pantry, all right," Olive said. She raked her fingers through her 
graying hair. "I got that much out of those two pupuras, but no more. I knew it 
was going to be that way as soon as they started talking that stupid crunk of 
theirs."
There was no proper word for the dialect of the Mejis vaqueros, but "crunk" 
served well enough among the Barony's higher-born citizens. Olive knew both of 
the vaqs guarding the pantry, in the vague way of a person who has once ridden a 
lot and passed gossip and weather with other Drop-riders, and she knew damned 
well these old boys could do better than crunk. They had spoken it so they could 
pretend to misunder­stand her, and save both them and her the embarrassment of 
an outright refusal. She had gone along with the deception for much the same 
reason, although she could have responded with crunk of her own perfectly 
well—and called them some names their mothers never used—had she wanted.
"I told them there were men upstairs," she said, "and I thought maybe they meant 
to steal the silver. I said I wanted the maloficios turned out. And still they 
played dumb. No habla, sai. Shit. Shit!"
Sheemie thought of calling them a couple of big old sonuvabitches, and decided 
to keep silent. She was pacing back and forth in front of him and throwing an 
occasional burning look at the closed kitchen doors. At last she stopped in 
front of Sheemie again.
"Turn out your pockets," she said. "Let's see what you have for hopes and 
garlands."
Sheemie did as she asked, producing a little pocketknife (a gift from Stanley 
Ruiz) and a half-eaten cookie from one. From the other he brought out three 
lady-finger firecrackers, a big-banger, and a few sulfur matches.
Olive's eyes gleamed when she saw these. "Listen to me, Sheemie," she said.
 
8
 
Cuthbert patted Roland's face with no result. Alain pushed him aside, knelt, and 
took the gunslinger's hands. He had never used the touch this way, but had been 
told it was possible—that one could reach another's mind, in at least some 
cases.
Roland! Roland, wake up! Please! We need you!
At first there was nothing. Then Roland stirred, muttered, and pulled his hands 
out of Alain's. In the moment before his eyes opened, both of the other two boys 
were struck by the same fear of what they might see: no eyes at all, only raving 
pink light.
But they were Roland's eyes, all right—those cool blue shooter's eyes.
He struggled to gain his feet, and failed the first time. He held out his hands. 
Cuthbert took one, Alain the other. As they pulled him up, Bert saw a strange 
and frightening thing: there were threads of white in Ro­land's hair. There had 
been none that morning; he would have sworn to it. The morning had been a long 
time ago, however.
"How long was I out?" Roland touched the bruise in the center of his forehead 
with the tips of his fingers and winced.
"Not long," Alain said. "Five minutes, maybe. Roland, I'm sorry I hit you, but I 
had to. It was ... I thought it was killing you."
"Mayhap 'twas. Is it safe?"
Alain pointed wordlessly to the drawstring bag.
"Good. It's best one of you carry it for now. I might be . . ." He searched for 
the right word, and when he found it, a small, wintry smile touched the comers 
of his mouth—"tempted," he finished. "Let's ride for Hanging Rock. We've got 
work yet to finish."
"Roland . .." Cuthbert began.
Roland turned, one hand on the horn of his horse's saddle.
Cuthbert licked his lips, and for a moment Alain didn't think he would be able 
to ask. If you don't, I will, Alain thought . . . but Bert man­aged, bringing 
the words out in a rush.
"What did you see?"
"Much," Roland said. "I saw much, but most of it is already fading out of my 
mind, the way dreams do when you wake up. What I do re­member I'll tell you as 
we ride. You must know, because it changes everything. We're going back to 
Gilead, but not for long."
"Where after that?" Alain asked, mounting.
"West. In search of the Dark Tower. If we survive today, that is. Come on. Let's 
take those tankers."
 
9
 
The two vaqs were rolling smokes when there was a loud bang from up­stairs. They 
both jumped and looked at each other, the tobacco from their works-in-progress 
sifting down to the floor in small brown flurries. A woman shrieked. The doors 
burst open. It was the Mayor's widow again, this time accompanied by a maid. The 
vaqs knew her well—Maria Tomas, the daughter of an old compadre from the Piano 
Ranch.
"The thieving bastards have set the place on fire!" Maria cried, speak­ing to 
them in crunk. "Come and help!"
"Maria, sai, we have orders to guard—"
"A putina locked in the pantry?" Maria shouted, her eyes blazing. "Come, ye 
stupid old donkey, before the whole place catches! Then ye can explain to Senor 
Lengyll why ye stood here using yer thumbs for fart-corks while Seafront burned 
down around yer ears!"
"Go on!" Olive snapped. "Are you cowards?"
There were several smaller bangs as, above them in the great parlor, Sheemie set 
off the lady-fingers. He used the same match to light the drapes.
The two viejos exchanged a glance. "Andelay, " said the older of the two, then 
looked back at Maria. He no longer bothered with the crunk. "Watch this door," 
he said.
"Like a hawk," she agreed.
The two old men bustled out, one gripping the cords of his bolas, the other 
pulling a long knife from the scabbard on his belt.
As soon as the women heard their footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall, 
Olive nodded to Maria and they crossed the room. Maria threw the bolts; Olive 
pulled the door open. Susan came out at once, looking from one to the other, 
then smiling tentatively. Maria gasped at the sight of her mistress's swelled 
face and the blood crusted around her nose.
Susan took Maria's hand before the maid could touch her face and squeezed her 
fingers gently. "Do ye think Thorin would want me now?" she asked, and then 
seemed to realize who her other rescuer was. "Olive ... sai Thorin ... I'm 
sorry. I didn't mean to be cruel. But ye must believe that Roland, him ye know 
as Will Dearborn, would never—"
"I know it well," Olive said, "and there's no time for this now. Come on."
She and Maria led Susan out of the kitchen, away from the stairs as­cending to 
the main house and toward the storage rooms at the far north end of the lower 
level. In the drygoods storage room, Olive told the two of them to wait. She was 
gone for perhaps five minutes, but to Susan and Maria it seemed an eternity.
When she came back, Olive was wearing a wildly colored scrape much too big for 
her—it might have been her husband's, but Susan thought it looked too big for 
the late Mayor, as well. Olive had tucked a piece of it into the side of her 
jeans to keep from stumbling over it. Slung over her arm like blankets, she had 
two more, both smaller and lighter. "Put these on," she said. "It's going to be 
cold."
Leaving the drygoods store, they went down a narrow servants' passageway toward 
the back courtyard. There, if they were fortunate (and if Miguel was still 
unconscious), Sheemie would be waiting for them with mounts. Olive hoped with 
all her heart that they would be fortunate. She wanted Susan safely away from 
Hambry before the sun went down.
And before the moon rose.
 
10
 
"Susan's been taken prisoner," Roland told the others as they rode west toward 
Hanging Rock. "That's the first thing I saw in the glass."
He spoke with such an air of absence that Cuthbert almost reined up. This wasn't 
the ardent lover of the last few months. It was as if Roland had found a dream 
to ride through the pink air within the ball, and part of him rode it still. Or 
is it riding him? Cuthbert wondered.
"What?" Alain asked. "Susan taken? How? By whom? Is she all right?'"
"Taken by Jonas. He hurt her some, but not too badly. She'll heal . . . and 
she'll live. I'd turn around in a second if I thought her life was in any real 
danger."
Ahead of them, appearing and disappearing in the dust like a mirage, was Hanging 
Rock. Cuthbert could see the sunlight pricking hazy sun-stars on the tankers, 
and he could see men. A lot of them. A lot of horses, as well. He patted the 
neck of his own mount, then glanced across to make sure Alain had Lengyll's 
machine-gun. He did. Cuthbert reached around to the small of his back, making 
sure of the slingshot. It was there. Also his deerskin ammunition bag, which now 
contained a number of the big-bangers Sheemie had stolen as well as steel shot.
He's using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert 
thought. He found the realization comforting—sometimes Roland scared him. There 
was something in him that went beyond steel. Some­thing like madness. If it was 
there, you were glad to have it on your side ... but often enough you wished it 
wasn't there at all. On anybody's side.
"Where is she?" Alain asked.
"Reynolds took her back to Seafront. She's locked in the pantry ... or was 
locked there. I can't say which, exactly, because . . ." Roland paused, 
thinking. "The ball sees far, but sometimes it sees more. Sometimes it sees a 
future that's already happening."
"How can the future already be happening?" Alain asked. "I don't know, and I 
don't think it was always that way. I think it's more to do with the world than 
Maerlyn's Rainbow. Time is strange now. We know that, don't we? How things 
sometimes seem to ... slip. It's almost as if there's a thinny everywhere, 
breaking things down. But Su­san's safe. I know that, and that's enough for me. 
Sheemie is going to help her ... or is helping her. Somehow Jonas missed 
Sheemie, and he followed Susan all the way back."
 "Good for Sheemie!" Alain said, and pumped his fist into the air. "Hurrah!" 
Then: "What about us? Did you see us in this future?"
"No. This part was all quick—I hardly snatched more than a glance before the 
ball took me away. Flew me away, it seemed. But ... I saw smoke on the horizon. 
I remember that. It could have been the smoke of burning tankers, or the brush 
piled in front of Eyebolt, or both. I think we're going to succeed."
Cuthbert was looking at his old friend in a queerly distraught way. The young 
man so deeply in love that Bert had needed to knock him into the dust of the 
courtyard in order to wake him up to his responsibilities . . . where was that 
young man, exactly? What had changed him, given him those disturbing strands of 
white hair?
"If we survive what's ahead," Cuthbert said, watching the gunslinger closely, 
"she'll meet us on the road. Won't she, Roland?"
He saw the pain on Roland's face, and now understood: the lover was here, but 
the ball had taken away his joy and left only grief. That, and some new 
purpose—yes, Cuthbert felt it very well—which had yet to be stated.
"I don't know," Roland said. "I almost hope not, because we can never be as we 
were."
"What? " This time Cuthbert did rein up.
Roland looked at him calmly enough, but now there were tears in
his eyes.
"We are fools of ka" the gunslinger said. "Ka like a wind, Susan calls it." He 
looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. "The Tower is 
our ka; mine especially. But it isn't hers, nor she mine. No more is John Parson 
our ka. We're not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they're 
in our way." He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say, What 
more do you need me to tell you?
"There is no Tower, Roland," Cuthbert said patiently. "I don't know what you saw 
in that glass ball, but there is no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose—like 
Arthur's Cup, or the Cross of the man-Jesus—but not as a real thing, a real 
building—"
"Yes," Roland said. "It's real."
They looked at him uncertainly, and saw no doubt on his face. "It's real, and 
our fathers know. Beyond the dark land—I can't re­member its name now, it's one 
of the things I've lost—is End-World, and in End-World stands the Dark Tower. 
Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it's what has held them 
together as ka-tet across all the years of the world's decline. When we return 
to Gilead—if we return, and I now think we will—I'll tell them what I've seen, 
and they'll confirm what I say."
"You saw all that in the glass?" Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice.
"I saw much."
"But not Susan Delgado," Cuthbert said.
"No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our 
ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her 
husband and father of the child she now carries ... or the Tower." Roland wiped 
his face with a shaking hand. "I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for 
one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be 
swept away. There will be chaos be­yond our imagining. We must go ... and we 
will go." Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, 
were the ancient killer's eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror 
of an air­liner's bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears.
There was nothing childish in his voice, however.
"I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone 
else—she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower."
 
11
 
Susan mounted on Pylon, which Sheemie had hastened to bring around to the rear 
courtyard after lighting the draperies of the great parlor on fire. Olive Thorin 
rode one of the Barony geldings with Sheemie double-mounted behind her and 
holding onto Capi's lead. Maria opened the back gate, wished them good luck, and 
the three trotted out. The sun was west­ering now, but the wind had pulled away 
most of the smoke that had risen earlier. Whatever had happened in the desert, 
it was over now ... or hap­pening on some other layer of the same present time.
Roland, be thee well, Susan thought. I'll see thee soon, dear . . . as soon as I 
can.
"Why are we going north?" she asked after half an hour's silent riding.
"Because Seacoast Road's best."
"But—"
"Hush! They'll find you gone and search the house first . . . if t'asn't burned 
flat, that is. Not finding you there, they'll send west, along the Great Road." 
She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly 
confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew ... or thought they knew. 
"If I know that's the direction you'd choose, so will others we'd do well to 
avoid."
Susan was silent. She was too confused to speak, but Olive seemed to know what 
she was about, and Susan was grateful for that.
"By the time they get around to sniffing west, it'll be dark. Tonight we'll stay 
in one of the sea-cliff caves five miles or so from here. I grew up a 
fisherman's daughter, and I know all those caves, none better." The thought of 
the caves she'd played in as a girl seemed to cheer her. "To­morrow we'll cut 
west, as you like. I'm afraid you're going to have a plump old widow as a 
chaperone for a bit. Better get used to the idea."
"Thee's too good," Susan said. "Ye should send Sheemie and I on alone, sai."
"And go back to what? Why, I can't even get two old trailhands on kitchen-duty 
to follow my orders. Fran Lengyll's boss of the shooting-match now, and I've no 
urge to wait and see how he does at it. Nor if he decides he'd be better off 
with me adjudged mad and put up safe in a haci with bars on the windows. Or 
shall I stay to see how Hash Renfrew does as Mayor, with his boots up on my 
tables?" Olive actually laughed.
"Sai, I'm sorry."
"We shall all be sorry later on," Olive said, sounding remarkably cheery about 
it. "For now, the most important thing is to reach those caves unobserved. It 
must seem that we vanished into thin air. Hold up."
Olive checked her horse, stood in the stirrups, looked around to make sure of 
her position, nodded, then twisted in the saddle so she could speak to Sheemie.
"Young man, it's time for ye to mount yer trusty mule and go back to Seafront. 
If there are riders coming after us, ye must turn em aside with a few 
well-chosen words. Will'ee do that?"
Sheemie looked stricken. "I don't have any well-chosen words, sai Thorin, so I 
don't. I hardly have any words at all."
"Nonsense," Olive said, and kissed Sheemie's forehead. "Go back at a goodish 
trot. If'ee spy no one coming after us by the time the sun touches the hills, 
then turn north again and follow. We shall wait for ye by the signpost. Do ye 
know where I mean?"
Sheemie thought he did, although it marked the outmost northern boundary of his 
little patch of geography. "The red 'un? With the som­brero on it, and the arrow 
pointing back for town?"
"The very one. Ye won't get that far until after dark, but there'll be plenty of 
moonlight tonight. If ye don't come right away, we'll wait. But ye must go back, 
and shift any men that might be chasing us off our track. Do ye understand?"
Sheemie did. He slid off Olive's horse, clucked Caprichoso forward, and climbed 
on board, wincing as the place the mule had bitten came down. "So it'll be, 
Olive-sai."
"Good, Sheemie. Good. Off'ee go, then."
"Sheemie?" Susan said. "Come to me a moment, please."
He did, holding his hat in front of him and looking up at her worship-fully. 
Susan bent and kissed him not on the forehead but firmly on the mouth. Sheemie 
came close to fainting.
"Thankee-sai," Susan said. "For everything."
Sheemie nodded. When he spoke, he could manage nothing above a whisper. " 'Twas 
only ka," he said. "I know that... but I love you, Susan-sai. Go well. I'll see 
you soon."
"I look forward to it."
But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back 
as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It 
was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.
 
12
 
Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, 
Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused 
and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his 
mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden 
hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies.
When Cuthbert gave the Good Man's sigul—hands clasped to the chest, left above 
right, then both held out to the person being greeted—the blond picket did the 
same, and with a grateful smile.
"What spin and raree back there?" he asked, speaking with a strong In-World 
accent—to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite.
"Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills." 
Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own 
accent faultlessly. "'I here were a tight. It be over now, but they did fight 
fearful."
"What—"
"No time," Roland said brusquely. "We have dispatches." He crossed his hands on 
his chest, then held them out. "Hile! Farson!"
"Good Man!" the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile 
that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related 
to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo's 
perimeter. As easy as that.
"Remember that it's hit-and-run," Roland said. "Slow down for noth­ing. What we 
don't get must be left—there'll be no second pass."
"Gods, don't even suggest such a thing," Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He 
pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with 
a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem 
there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs.
Alain unslung Lengyll's machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back 
the slide-cock. "I don't know about this, Roland. It's loaded, and I think I see 
how to use it, but—"
"Then use it," Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the 
hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling 
the fronts of their scrapes. "This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it 
jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?"
"Yes, Roland."
"Bert?"
"Aye," Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, "so I am, so I am."
Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and be­hind the 
tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the 
oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.
Roland drew both revolvers. "Gilead!" he cried. "Hile! Gilead!"
He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in 
the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches 
radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.
The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.
 
13
 
Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a 
sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. 
In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin 
tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Su­san's heart sank.
The one on Reynolds's left—he wore a stained white drover's hat and had a lazily 
cocked eye—she didn't know, but the one on the right, who looked like a 
stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, 
after smiling at Susan.
"Why, Las and I couldn't even get us a drink to send his late brother, the 
Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with 
a word," Reynolds said. "We hadn't hardly hit town before we got persuaded out 
here. I wasn't going to go, but . . . damn! That old lady's something. Could 
talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you'll pardon the crudity. I think your 
aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She—"
"Your friends are dead," Susan told him.
Reynolds paused, shrugged. "Well now. Maybe si and maybe no. Me, I think I've 
decided to travel on without em even if they ain't. But I might hang around here 
one more night. This Reaping business . . . I've heard so much about the way 
folks do it in the Outers. 'Specially the bonfire part."
The man with the cocked eye laughed phlegmily.
"Let us pass," Olive said. "This girl has done nothing, and neither have I."
"She helped Dearborn escape," Rimer said, "him who murdered your own husband and 
my brother. I wouldn't call that nothing."
"The gods may restore Kimba Rimer in the clearing," Olive said, "but the truth 
is he looted half of this town's treasury, and what he didn't give over to John 
Farson, he kept for himself."
Rimer recoiled as if slapped.
"Ye didn't know I knew? Laslo, I'd be angry at how little any of ye thought of 
me ... except why would I want to be thought of by the likes of you, anyway? I 
knew enough to make me sick, leave it at that. I know that the man you're 
sitting beside—"
"Shut up," Rimer muttered.
"—was likely the one who cut yer brother's black heart open; sai Reynolds was 
seen that early morning in that wing, so I've been told—"
"Shut up, you cunt!"
"—and so I believe."
"Better do as he says, sai, and hold your tongue," Reynolds said. Some of the 
lazy good humor had left his face. Susan thought: He doesn't like people knowing 
what he did. Not even when he's the one on top and what they know can't hurt 
him. And he's less without Jonas. A lot less. He knows it, too.
"Let us pass," Olive said.
"No, sai, I can't do that."
"I'll help ye, then, shall I?"
Her hand had crept beneath the outrageously large serape during the palaver, and 
now she brought out a huge and ancient pistola, its handles of yellowed ivory, 
its filigreed barrel of old tarnished silver. On top was a brass 
powder-and-spark.
Olive had no business even drawing the thing—it caught on her serape, and she 
had to fight it free. She had no business cocking it, either, a process that 
took both thumbs and two tries. But the three men were ut­terly flummoxed by the 
sight of the elderly blunderbuss in her hands, Reynolds as much as the other 
two; he sat his horse with his jaw hanging slack. Jonas would have wept.
"Get her!" a cracked old voice shrieked from behind the men block­ing the road. 
"What's wrong with ye, ye stupid culls? GET HER!"
Reynolds started at that and went for his gun. He was fast, but he had given 
Olive too much of a headstart and was beaten, beaten cold. Even as he cleared 
leather with the barrel of his revolver, the Mayor's widow held the old gun out 
in both hands, and, squinching her eyes shut like a little girl who is forced to 
eat something nasty, pulled the trigger.
The spark flashed, but the damp powder only made a weary floop sound and 
disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The ball—big enough to have taken Clay 
Reynolds's head off from the nose on up, had it fired— stayed in the barrel.
In the next instant his own gun roared in his fist. Olive's horse reared, 
whinnying. Olive went off the gelding head over boots, with a black hole in the 
orange stripe of her serape—the stripe which lay above her heart.
Susan heard herself screaming. The sound seemed to come from very far away. She 
might have gone on for some time, but then she heard the clop of approaching 
pony hooves from behind the men in the road... and knew. Even before the man 
with the lazy eye moved aside to show her, she knew, and her screams stopped.
The galloped-out pony that had brought the witch back to Hambry had been 
replaced by a fresh one, but it was the same black cart, the same golden 
cabalistic symbols, the same driver. Rhea sat with the reins in her claws, her 
head ticking from side to side like the head of a rusty old robot, grinning at 
Susan without humor. Grinning as a corpse grins.
"Hello, my little sweeting," she said, calling her as she had all those months 
ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest. On the night 
Susan had come running most of the way, out of simple high spirits. Beneath the 
light of the Kissing Moon she had come, her blood high from the exercise, her 
skin flushed; she had been singing "Care­less Love."
"Yer pallies and screw-buddies have taken my ball, ye ken," Rhea said, clucking 
the pony to a stop a few paces ahead of the riders. Even Reynolds looked down on 
her with uneasiness. "Took my lovely glam, that's what those bad boys did. Those 
bad, bad boys. But it showed me much while yet I had it, aye. It sees far, and 
in more ways than one. Much of it I've forgot ... but not which way ye'd come, 
my sweeting. Not which way that precious old dead bitch laying yonder on the 
road would bring ye. And now ye must go to town." Her grin widened, became 
some­thing unspeakable. "It's time for the fair, ye ken."
"Let me go," Susan said. "Let me go, if ye'd not answer to Roland of Gilead."
Rhea ignored her and spoke to Reynolds. "Bind her hands before her and stand her 
in the back of the cart. There's people that'll want to see her. A good look is 
what they'll want, and a good look is just what they'll have. If her aunt's done 
a proper job, there'll be a lot of them in town. Get her up, now, and be smart 
about it."
 
14
 
Alain had time for one clear thought: We could have gone around them— if what 
Roland said is true, then only the wizard's glass matters, and we have that. We 
could have gone around them.
Except, of course, that was impossible. A hundred generations of gunslinger 
blood argued against it. Tower or no Tower, the thieves must not be allowed to 
have their prize. Not if they could be stopped.
Alain leaned forward and spoke directly into his horse's ear. "Jig or rear when 
I start shooting, and I'll knock your fucking brains out."
Roland led them in, outracing the other two on his stronger horse. The clot of 
men nearest by—five or six mounted, a dozen or more on foot and examining a pair 
of the oxen which had dragged the tankers out here— gazed at him stupidly until 
he began to fire, and then they scattered like quail. He got every one of the 
riders; their horses fled in a widening fan, trailing their reins (and, in one 
case, a dead soldier). Somewhere someone was shouting, "Harriers! Harriers! 
Mount up, you fools!"
"Alain!" Roland screamed as they bore down. In front of the tankers, a double 
handful of riders and armed men were coming together—milling together—in a 
clumsy defensive line. "Now! Now!"
Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hol­low of his 
shoulder, and remembered what little he knew about rapid-fire weapons: aim low, 
swing fast and smooth.
He touched the trigger and the speed-shooter bellowed into the dusty air, 
recoiling against his shoulder in a series of rapid thuds, shooting bright fire 
from the end of its perforated barrel. Alain raked it from left to right, 
running the sight above the scattering, shouting defenders and across the high 
steel hides of the tankers.
The third tanker actually blew up on its own. The sound it made was like no 
explosion Alain had ever heard: a guttural, muscular ripping sound accompanied 
by a brilliant flash of orange-red fire. The steel shell rose in two halves. One 
of these spun thirty yards through the air and landed on the desert floor in a 
furiously burning hulk; the other rose straight up into a column of greasy black 
smoke. A burning wooden wheel spun across the sky like a plate and came back 
down trailing sparks and burning splinters.
Men fled, screaming—some on foot, others laid flat along the necks of their 
nags, their eyes wide and panicky.
When Alain reached the end of the line of tankers, he reversed the track of the 
muzzle. The machine-gun was hot in his hands now, but he kept his finger pressed 
to the trigger. In this world, you had to use what you could while it still 
worked. Beneath him, his horse ran on as if it had understood every word Alain 
had whispered in its ear.
Another! I want another!
But before he could blow another tanker, the gun ceased its chatter— perhaps 
jammed, probably empty. Alain threw it aside and drew his re­volver. From beside 
him there came the thuppp of Cuthbert's slingshot, audible even over the cries 
of the men, the hoofbeats of the horses, the whoosh of the burning tanker. Alain 
saw a sputtering big-bang arc into the sky and come down exactly where Cuthbert 
had aimed: in the oil pud­dling around the wooden wheels of a tanker marked 
sunoco. For a mo­ment Alain could clearly see the line of nine or a dozen holes 
in the tanker's bright side—holes he had put there with sai Lengyll's 
speed-shooter—and then there was a crack and a flash as the big-bang exploded. A 
moment later, the holes running along the bright flank of the tanker be­gan to 
shimmer. The oil beneath them was on fire.
"Get out!" a man in a faded campaign hat yelled. "She's gointer blow! They 're 
all going to b— "
Alain shot him, exploding the side of his face and knocking him out of one old, 
sprung boot. A moment later the second tanker blew up. One burning steel panel 
shot out sidewards, landed in the growing puddle of crude oil beneath a third 
tanker, and then that one exploded, as well. Black smoke rose in the air like 
the fumes of a funeral pyre; it darkened the day and drew an oily veil across 
the sun.
 
15
 
All six of Parson's chief lieutenants had been carefully described to Roland—to 
all fourteen gunslingers in training—and he recognized the man running for the 
remuda at once: George Latigo. Roland could have shot him as he ran, but that, 
ironically, would have made possible a get­away that was cleaner than he wanted.
Instead, he shot the man who ran to meet him.
Latigo wheeled on the heels of his boots and stared at Roland with blazing, 
hate-filled eyes. Then he ran again, hiling another man, shouting for the riders 
who were huddled together beyond the burning zone.
Two more tankers exploded, whamming at Roland's eardrums with dull iron fists, 
seeming to suck the air back from his lungs like a riptide. The plan had been 
for Alain to perforate the tankers and for Cuthbert to then shoot in a steady, 
arcing stream of big-bangers, lighting the spilling oil. The one big-banger he 
actually shot seemed to confirm that the plan had been feasible, but it was the 
last slingshot-work Cuthbert did that day.
The ease with which the gunslingers had gotten inside the enemy's perimeter and 
the confusion which greeted their original charge could have been chalked up to 
inexperience and exhaustion, but the placing of the tankers had been Latigo's 
mistake, and his alone. He had drawn them tight without even thinking about it, 
and now they blew tight, one after another. Once the conflagration began, there 
was no chance of stopping it. Even before Roland raised his left arm and circled 
it in the air, signalling for Alain and Cuthbert to break off, the work was 
done. Latigo's encamp­ment was an oily inferno, and John Farson's plans for a 
motorized assault were so much black smoke being tattered apart by the fin de 
ano wind.
"Ride!" Roland screamed. "Ride, ride, ride!"
They spurred west, toward Eyebolt Canyon. As they went, Roland felt a single 
bullet drone past his left ear. It was, so far as he knew, the only shot fired 
at any of them during the assault on the tankers.
 
16
 
Latigo was in an ecstasy of fury, a perfect brain-bursting rage, and that was 
probably merciful—it kept him from thinking of what the Good Man would do when 
he learned of this fiasco. For the time being, all Latigo cared about was 
catching the men who had ambushed him ... if an am­bush in desert country was 
even possible.
Men? No.
The boys who had done this.
Latigo knew who they were, all right; he didn't know how they had gotten out 
here, but he knew who they were, and their run would stop right here, east of 
the woods and rising hills.
"Hendricks!" he bawled. Hendricks had at least managed to hold his men—half a 
dozen of them, all mounted—near the remuda. "Hendricks, to me!"
As Hendricks rode toward him, Latigo spun the other way and saw a huddle of men 
standing and watching the burning tankers. Their gaping mouths and stupid young 
sheep faces made him feel like screaming and dancing up and down, but he refused 
to give in to that. He held a narrow beam of concentration, one aimed directly 
at the raiders, who must not under any circumstances be allowed to escape.
"You!" he shouted at the men. One of them turned; the others did not. Latigo 
strode to them, drawing his pistol as he went. He slapped it into the hand of 
the man who had turned toward the sound of his voice, and pointed at random to 
one of those who had not. "Shoot that fool."
Dazed, his face that of a man who believes he is dreaming, the soldier raised 
the pistol and shot the man to whom Latigo had pointed. That un­lucky fellow 
went down in a heap of knees and elbows and twitching hands. The others turned.
"Good," Latigo said, taking his gun back.
"Sir!" Hendricks cried. "I see them, sir! I have the enemy in clear view!"
Two more tankers exploded. A few whickering shards of steel flew in their 
direction. Some of the men ducked; Latigo did not so much as twitch. Nor did 
Hendricks. A good man. Thank God for at least one such in this nightmare.
"Shall I hie after them, sir? "
"I'll take your men and hie after them myself, Hendricks. Mount these hoss-guts 
before us." He swept an arm at the standing men, whose doltish attention had 
been diverted from the burning tankers to their dead comrade. "Pull in as many 
others as you can. Do you have a bugler?"
"Yes, sir, Raines, sir!" Hendricks looked around, beckoned, and a pimply, 
scared-looking boy rode forward. A dented bugle on a frayed strap hung askew on 
the front of his shirt.
"Raines," Latigo said, "you're with Hendricks."
"Yes, sir."
"Get as many men as you can, Hendricks, but don't linger over the job. They're 
headed for that canyon, and I believe someone told me it's a box. If so, we're 
going to turn it into a shooting gallery."
Hendricks's lips spread in a twisted grin. "Yes, sir."
Behind them, the tankers continued to explode.
 
17
 
Roland glanced back and was astonished by the size of the black, smoky column 
rising into the air. Ahead he could clearly see the brush blocking most of the 
canyon's mouth. And although the wind was blowing the wrong way, he could now 
hear the maddening mosquito-whine of the thinny.
He patted the air with his outstretched hands, signalling for Cuthbert and Alain 
to slow down. While they were both still looking at him, he took off his 
bandanna, whipped it into a rope, and tied it so it would cover his ears. They 
copied him. It was better than nothing.
The gunslingers continued west, their shadows now running out be­hind them as 
long as gantries on the desert floor. Looking back, Roland could see two groups 
of riders streaming in pursuit. Latigo was at the head of the first, Roland 
thought, and he was deliberately holding his rid­ers back a little, so that the 
two groups could merge and attack together.
Good, he thought.
The three of them rode toward Eyebolt in a tight line, continuing to hold their 
own horses in, allowing their pursuers to close the distance. Every now and then 
another thud smote the air and shivered through the ground as one of the 
remaining tankers blew up. Roland was amazed at how easy it had been—even after 
the battle with Jonas and Lengyll, which should have put the men out here on 
their mettle, it had been easy. It made him think of a Reaptide long ago, he and 
Cuthbert surely no more than seven years old, running along a line of 
stuffy-guys with sticks, knocking them over one after the other, 
bang-bang-bangety-bang.
The sound of the thinny was warbling its way into his brain in spite of the 
bandanna over his ears, making his eyes water. Behind him, he could hear the 
whoops and shouts of the pursuing men. It delighted him. Latigo's men had 
counted the odds—two dozen against three, with many more of their own force 
riding hard to join the battle—and their peckers were up once more.
Roland faced front and pointed Rusher at the slit in the brush marking the 
entrance to Eyebolt Canyon.

 
18
 
Hendricks fell in beside Latigo, breathing hard, cheeks glaring with color. 
"Sir! Beg to report!"
"Then do it."
"I have twenty men, and there are p'raps three times that number rid­ing hard to 
join us."
Latigo ignored all of this. His eyes were bright blue flecks of ice. Un­der his 
mustache was a small, greedy smile. "Rodney," he said, speaking Hendricks's 
first name almost with the caress of a lover.
"Sir?"
"I think they're going in, Rodney. Yes . . . look. I'm sure of it. Two more 
minutes and it'll be too late for them to turn back." He raised his gun, laid 
the muzzle across his forearm, and threw a shot at the three rid­ers ahead, 
mostly in exuberance.
"Yes, sir, very good, sir." Hendricks turned and waved viciously for his men to 
close up, close up.
 
19
 
"Dismount!" Roland shouted when they reached the line of tangled brush. It had a 
smell that was at once dry and oily, like a fire waiting to happen. He didn't 
know if their failure to ride their horses into the canyon would put Latigo's 
wind up or not, and he didn't care. These were good mounts, fine Gilead stock, 
and over these last months, Rusher had become his friend. He would not take him 
or any of the horses into the canyon, where they would be caught between the 
fire and the thinny.
The boys were off the horses in a flash, Alain pulling the drawstring bag free 
of his saddle-horn and slinging it over one shoulder. Cuthbert's and Alain's 
horses ran at once, whinnying, parallel to the brush, but Rusher lingered for a 
moment, looking at Roland. "Go on." Roland slapped him on the flank. "Run."
Rusher ran, tail streaming out behind him. Cuthbert and Alain slipped through 
the break in the brush. Roland followed, glancing down to make sure that the 
powder-trail was still there. It was, and still dry—there had been not a drop of 
rain since the day they'd laid it.
"Cuthbert," he said. "Matches."
Cuthbert gave him some. He was grinning so hard it was a wonder they hadn't 
fallen out of his mouth. "We warmed up their day, didn't we, Roland? Aye!"
"We did, indeed," Roland said, grinning himself. "Go on, now. Back to that 
chimney-cut."
"Let me do it," Cuthbert said. "Please, Roland, you go with Alain and let me 
stay. I'm a firebug at heart, always have been."
"No," Roland said. "This part of it's mine. Don't argue with me. Go on. And tell 
Alain to mind the wizard's glass, no matter what."
Cuthbert looked at him for a moment longer, then nodded. "Don't wait too long."
"I won't."
"May your luck rise, Roland."
"May yours rise twice."
Cuthbert hurried away, boots rattling on the loose stone which car­peted the 
floor of the canyon. He reached Alain, who lifted a hand to Roland. Roland 
nodded back, then ducked as a bullet snapped close enough to his temple to flick 
his hatbrim.
He crouched to the left of the opening in the brush and peered around, the wind 
now striking full in his face. Latigo's men were closing rapidly. More rapidly 
than he had expected. If the wind blew out the lucifers—
Never mind the ifs. Hold on, Roland. . . hold on... wait for them. . .
He held on, hunkering with an unlit match in each hand, now peering out through 
a tangle of interlaced branches. The smell of mesquite was strong in his 
nostrils. Not far behind it was the reek of burning oil. The drone of the thinny 
filled his head, making him feel dizzy, a stranger to himself. He thought of how 
it had been inside the pink storm, flying through the air ... how he had been 
snatched away from his vision of Su­san. Thank God for Sheemie, he thought 
distantly. He'll make sure she finishes the day someplace safe. But the craven 
whine of the thinny seemed somehow to mock him, to ask him if there had been 
more to see.
Now Latigo and his men were crossing the last three hundred yards to the 
canyon's mouth at a full-out gallop, the ones behind closing up fast. It would 
be hard for the ones riding point to stop suddenly without the risk of being 
ridden down.
It was time. Roland stuck one of the lucifers between his front teeth and raked 
it forward. It lit, spilling one hot and sour spark onto the wet bed of his 
tongue. Before the lucifer's head could bum away, Roland touched it to the 
powder in the trench. It lit at once, running left beneath the north end of the 
brush in a bright yellow thread.
He lunged across the opening—which might be wide enough for two horses running 
flank to flank—with the second lucifer already poised behind his teeth. He 
struck it as soon as he was somewhat blocked from the wind, dropped it into the 
powder, heard the splutter-hiss, then turned and ran.
 
20
 
Mother and father, was Roland's first shocked thought—memory so deep and 
unexpected it was like a slap. At Lake Saroni.
When had they gone there, to beautiful Lake Saroni in the northern part of 
Gilead Barony? That Roland couldn't remember. He knew only that he had been very 
small, and that there had been a beautiful stretch of sandy beach for him to 
play on, perfect for an aspiring young castle-builder such as he. That was what 
he had been doing on one day of their 
(vacation? was it a vacation? did my parents once upon a time actu­ally take a 
vacation?)
trip, and he had looked up, something—maybe only the cries of the birds circling 
over the lake—had made him look up, and there were his mother and father, Steven 
and Gabrielle Deschain, at the water's edge, standing with their backs to him 
and their arms around each other's waists, looking out at blue water beneath a 
blue summer sky. How his heart had filled with love for them! How infinite was 
love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong 
strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human's life and soul.
It wasn't love he felt now, however, but terror. The figures standing before him 
as he ran back to where the canyon ended (where the rational part of the canyon 
ended) weren't Steven of Gilead and Gabrielle of Arten but his mollies, Cuthbert 
and Alain. They didn't have their arms around each other's waists, either, but 
their hands were clasped, like the hands of fairy-tale children lost in a 
threatening fairy-tale wood. Birds circled, but they were vultures, not gulls, 
and the shimmering, mist-topped stuff before the two boys wasn't water.
It was the thinny, and as Roland watched, Cuthbert and Alain began to walk 
toward it.
"Stop!" he screamed. "For your fathers' sakes, stop!"
They did not stop. They walked hand-in-hand toward the white-edged hem of the 
smoky green shimmer. The thinny whined its pleasure, mur­mured endearments, 
promised rewards. It baked the nerves numb and picked at the brain.
There was no time to reach them, so Roland did the only thing he could think of: 
raised one of his guns and fired it over their heads. The re­port was a 
hammer-blow in the canyon's enclosure, and for a moment the ricochet whine was 
louder than that of the thinny. The two boys stopped only inches from its sick 
shimmer. Roland kept expecting it to reach out and grab them, as it had grabbed 
the low-flying bird when they had been here on the night of the Peddler's Moon.
He triggered two more shots into the air, the reports hitting the walls and 
rolling back. "Gunslingers!" he cried. "To me! To me!"
It was Alain who turned toward him first, his dazed eyes seeming to float in his 
dust-streaked face. Cuthbert continued forward another step, the tips of his 
boots disappearing in the greenish-silver froth at the edge of the thinny (the 
whingeing grumble of the thing rose half a note, as if in anticipation), and 
then Alain yanked him back by the tugstring of his som­brero. Cuthbert tripped 
over a good-sized chunk of fallen rock and landed hard. When he looked up, his 
eyes had cleared.
"Gods!" he murmured, and as he scrambled to his feet, Roland saw that the toes 
of his boots were gone, clipped off neatly, as if with a pair of gardening 
shears. His great toes stuck out.
"Roland," he gasped as he and Alain stumbled toward him. "Roland, we were almost 
gone. It talks!"
"Yes. I've heard it. Come on. There's no time."
He led them to the notch in the canyon wall, praying that they could get up 
quick enough to avoid being riddled with bullets ... as they cer­tainly would 
be, if Latigo arrived before they could get up at least part of the way.
A smell, acrid and bitter, began to fill the air—an odor like boiling juniper 
berries. And the first tendrils of whitish-gray smoke drifted past them.
"Cuthbert, you first. Alain, you next. I'll come last. Climb fast, boys. Climb 
for your lives."
 
21
 
Latigo's men poured through the slot in the wall of brush like water pour­ing 
into a funnel, gradually widening the gap as they came. The bottom layer of the 
dead vegetation was already on fire, but in their excitement none of them saw 
these first low flames, or marked them if they did. The pungent smoke also went 
unnoticed; their noses had been deadened by the colossal stench of the burning 
oil. Latigo himself, in the lead with Hendricks close behind, had only one 
thought; two words that pounded at his brain in a kind of vicious triumph: Box 
canyon! Box canyon! Box canyon!
Yet something began to intrude on this mantra as he galloped deeper into 
Eyebolt, his horse's hooves clattering nimbly through the scree of rocks and
(bones)
whitish piles of cow-skulls and ribcages. This was a kind of low buzzing, a 
maddening, slobbering whine, insectile and insistent. It made his eyes water. 
Yet, strong as the sound was (if it was a sound; it almost seemed to be coming 
from inside him), he pushed it aside, holding onto his mantra
(box canyon box canyon got em in a box canyon)
instead. He would have to face Walter when this was over, perhaps Farson 
himself, and he had no idea what his punishment would be for los­ing the tankers 
... but all that was for later. Now he wanted only to kill these interfering 
bastards.
Up ahead, the canyon took a jog to the north. They would be beyond that point, 
and probably not far beyond, either. Backed up against the canyon's final wall, 
trying to squeeze themselves behind what fallen rocks there might be. Latigo 
would mass what guns he had and drive them out into the open with ricochets. 
They would probably come with their hands up, hoping for mercy. They would hope 
in vain. After what they'd done, the trouble they'd caused—
As Latigo rode around the jog in the canyon's wall, already levelling his 
pistol, his horse screamed—like a woman, it screamed—and reared beneath him. 
Latigo caught the saddle-horn and managed to stay up, but the horse's rear 
hooves slid sideways in the scree and the animal went down. Latigo let go of the 
horn and threw himself clear, already aware that the sound which had been 
creeping into his ears was suddenly ten times stronger, buzzing loud enough to 
make his eyeballs pulse in their sockets, loud enough to make his balls tingle 
unpleasantly, loud enough to blot out the mantra which had been beating so 
insistently in his head.
The insistence of the thinny was far, far greater than any George Latigo could 
have managed.
Horses flashed around him as he landed in a kind of sprawling squat, horses that 
were shoved forward willy-nilly by the oncoming press from behind, by riders 
that squeezed through the gap in pairs (then trios as the hole in the brush, now 
burning all along its length, widened) and then spread out again once they were 
past the bottleneck, none of them clearly realizing that the entire canyon was a 
bottleneck.
Latigo got a confused glimpse of black tails and gray forelegs and dappled 
fetlocks; he saw chaps, and jeans, and boots jammed into stir­rups. He tried to 
get up and a horseshoe clanged against the back of his skull. His hat saved him 
from unconsciousness, but he went heavily to his knees with his head down, like 
a man who means to pray, his vision full of stars and the back of his neck 
instantly soaked with blood from the gash the passing hoof had opened in his 
scalp.
Now he heard more screaming horses. Screaming men, as well. He got up again, 
coughing out the dust raised by the passing horses (such acrid dust, too; it 
clawed his throat like smoke), and saw Hendricks trying to spur his horse south 
and east against the oncoming tide of riders. He couldn't do it. The rear third 
of the canyon was some sort of swamp, filled with greenish steaming water, and 
there must be quicksand beneath it, be­cause Hendricks's horse seemed stuck. It 
screamed again, and tried to rear. Its hindquarters slewed sideways. Hendricks 
crashed his boots into the animal's sides again and again, attempting to get it 
in motion, but the horse didn't—or couldn't—move. That hungry buzzing sound 
filled Latigo's ears, and seemed to fill the world.
"Back! Turn back!"
He tried to scream the words, but they came out in what was little more than a 
croak. Still the riders pounded past him, raising dust that was too thick to be 
only dust. Latigo pulled in breath so he could scream louder—they had to go 
back, something was dreadfully wrong in Eyebolt Canyon—and hacked it out without 
saying anything.
Screaming horses.
Reeking smoke.
And everywhere, filling the world like lunacy, that whining, whingeing, cringing 
buzz.
Hendricks's horse went down, eyes rolling, bit-parted teeth snapping at the 
smoky air and splattering curds of foam from its lips. Hendricks fell into the 
steaming stagnant water, and it wasn't water at all. It came alive, somehow, as 
he struck it; grew green hands and a green, shifty mouth; pawed his cheek and 
melted away the flesh, pawed his nose and tore it off, pawed at his eyes and 
stripped them from their sockets. It pulled Hen­dricks under, but before it did, 
Latigo saw his denuded jawbone, a bloody piston to drive his screaming teeth.
Other men saw, and tried to wheel away from the green trap. Those who managed to 
do so in time were broadsided by the next wave of men—some of whom were, 
incredibly, still yipping or bellowing full-throated battle cries. More horses 
and riders were driven into the green shimmer, which accepted them eagerly. 
Latigo, standing stunned and bleeding like a man in the middle of a stampede 
(which was exactly what he was), saw the soldier to whom he had given his gun. 
This fellow, who had obeyed Latigo's order and shot one of his compadres in 
order to awaken the rest of them, threw himself from his saddle, howling, and 
crawled back from the edge of the green stuff even as his horse plunged in. He 
tried to get to his feet, saw two riders bearing down on him, and clapped his 
hands across his face. A moment later he was ridden down.
The shrieks of the wounded and dying echoed in the smoky canyon, but Latigo 
hardly heard them. What he heard mostly was that buzzing, a sound that was 
almost a voice. Inviting him to jump in. To end it here. Why not? It was over, 
wasn't it? All over.
He struggled away instead, and was now able to make some head­way; the stream of 
riders packing its way into the canyon was easing. Some of the riders fifty or 
sixty yards back from the jog had even been able to turn their horses. But these 
were ghostly and confused in the thick­ening smoke.
The cunning bastards have set the brush on fire behind us. Gods of heaven, gods 
of earth, I think we 're trapped in here.
He could give no commands—every time he drew in breath to try, he coughed it 
wordlessly back out again—but he was able to grab a passing rider who looked all 
of seventeen and yank him out of his saddle. The boy went down headfirst and 
smashed his brow open on a jutting chunk of rock. Latigo was mounted in his 
place before the kid's feet had stopped twitching.
He jerked the horse's head around and spurred for the front of the canyon, but 
the smoke thickened to a choking white cloud before he got more than twenty 
yards. The wind was driving it this way. Latigo could make out—barely—the 
shifting orange glare of the burning brush at the desert end.
He wheeled his new horse back the way it had come. More horses loomed out of the 
fog. Latigo crashed into one of them and was thrown for the second time in five 
minutes. He landed on his knees, scrambled to his feet, and staggered back 
downwind, coughing and retching, eyes red and streaming.
It was a little better beyond the canyon's northward jog, but wouldn't be for 
much longer. The edge of the thinny was a tangle of milling horses, many with 
broken legs, and crawling, shrieking men. Latigo saw sev­eral hats floating on 
the greenish surface of the whining organism that filled the back of the canyon; 
he saw boots; he saw wristlets; he saw neckerchiefs; he saw the bugle-boy's 
dented instrument, still trailing its frayed strap.
Come in, the green shimmer invited, and Latigo found its buzz strangely 
attractive ... intimate, almost. Come in and visit, squat and hun­ker, be at 
rest, be at peace, be at one.
Latigo raised his gun, meaning to shoot it. He didn't believe it could be 
killed, but he would remember the face of his father and go down shooting, all 
the same.
Except he didn't. The gun dropped from his relaxing fingers and he walked 
forward—others around him were now doing the same—into the thinny. The buzzing 
rose and rose, filling his ears until there was noth­ing else.
Nothing else at all.
 
22
 
They saw it all from the notch, where Roland and his friends had stopped in a 
strung-out line about twenty feet below the top. They saw the scream­ing 
confusion, the panicky milling, the men who were trampled, the men and horses 
that were driven into the thinny ... and the men who, at the end, walked 
willingly into it.
Cuthbert was closest to the top of the canyon's wall, then Alain, then Roland, 
standing on a six-inch shelf of rock and holding an outcrop just above him. From 
their vantage-point they could see what the men strug­gling in their smoky hell 
below them could not: that the thinny was grow­ing, reaching out, crawling 
eagerly toward them like an incoming tide.
Roland, his battle-lust slaked, did not want to watch what was happening below, 
but he couldn't turn away. The whine of the thinny— cowardly and triumphant at 
the same time, happy and sad at the same time, lost and found at the same 
time—held him like sweet, sticky ropes. He hung where he was, hypnotized, as did 
his friends above him, even when the smoke began to rise, and its pungent tang 
made him cough dryly.
Men shrieked their lives away in the thickening smoke below. They struggled in 
it like phantoms. They faded as the fog thickened, climbing the canyon walls 
like water. Horses whinnied desperately from beneath that acrid white death. The 
wind swirled its surface in prankish whirl­pools. The thinny buzzed, and above 
where it lay, the surface of the smoke was stained a mystic shade of palest 
green.
Then, at long last, John Farson's men screamed no more. We killed them, Roland 
thought with a kind of sick and fascinated horror. Then: No, not we. I. I killed 
them.
How long he might have stayed there Roland didn't know—perhaps until the rising 
smoke engulfed him as well, but then Cuthbert, who had begun to climb again, 
called down three words from above him; called down in a tone of surprise and 
dismay. "Roland! The moon!”
Roland looked up, startled, and saw that the sky had darkened to a velvety 
purple. His friend was outlined against it and looking east, his face stained 
fever-orange with the light of the rising moon.
Yes, orange, the thinny buzzed inside his head. Laughed inside his head. Orange 
as 'twas when it rose on the night you came out here to see me and count me. 
Orange like afire. Orange like a bonfire.
How can it be almost dark? he cried inside himself, but he knew—yes, he knew 
very well. Time had slipped back together, that was all, like lay­ers of ground 
embracing once more after the argument of an earthquake. Twilight had come. 
Moonrise had come.
Terror struck Roland like a closed fist aimed at the heart, making him jerk 
backward on the small ledge he'd found. He groped for the horn-shaped outcrop 
above him, but that act of rebalancing was far away; most of him was inside the 
pink storm again, before he had been snatched away and shown half the cosmos. 
Perhaps the wizard's glass had only shown him what stood worlds far away in 
order to keep from showing him what might soon befall so close to home.
I'd turn around if I thought her life was in any real danger, he had said. In a 
second.
And if the ball knew that? If it couldn't lie, might it not misdirect? Might it 
not take him away and show him a dark land, a darker tower? And it had shown him 
something else, something that recurred to him only now: a scrawny man in 
farmer's overalls who had said. . . what? Not quite what he'd thought, not what 
he had been used to hearing all his life; not Life for you and life for your 
crop, but. . .
"Death," he whispered to the stones surrounding him. "Death for you, life for my 
crop. Charyou tree. That's what he said, Charyou tree. Come, Reap."
Orange, gunslinger, a cracked old voice laughed inside his head. The voice of 
the Coos. The color of bonfires. Charyou tree, fin de ano, these are the old 
ways of which only the stuffy-guys with their red hands re­main . . . until 
tonight. Tonight the old ways are refreshed, as the old ways must be, from time 
to time. Charyou tree, you damned babby, Charyou tree: tonight you pay for my 
sweet Ermot. Tonight you pay for all. Come, Reap.
"Climb!" he screamed, reaching up and slapping Alain's behind. "Climb, climb! 
For your father's sake, climb!"
"Roland, what—?" Alain's voice was dazed, but he did begin to climb, going from 
handhold to handhold and rattling small pebbles down into Roland's upturned 
face. Squinting against their fall, Roland reached and swatted Al's bottom 
again, driving him like a horse.
"Climb, gods damn you!" he cried. "It mayn't be too late, even now!"
But he knew better. Demon Moon had risen, he had seen its orange light shining 
on Cuthbert's face like delirium, arid he knew better. In his head the lunatic 
buzz of the thinny, that rotting sore eating through the flesh of reality, 
joined with the lunatic laughter of the witch, and he knew better.
Death for you, life for the crop. Charyou tree.
Oh, Susan—
 
23
 
Nothing was clear to Susan until she saw the man with the long red hair and the 
straw hat which did not quite obscure his lamb-slaughterer's eyes; the man with 
the cornshucks in his hands. He was the first, just a farmer (she had glimpsed 
him in the Lower Market, she thought; had even nod­ded to him, as countryfolk 
do, and he back to her), standing by himself not far from the place where Silk 
Ranch Road and the Great Road inter­sected, standing in the light of the rising 
moon. Until they came upon him, nothing was clear; after he hurled his bundle of 
cornshucks at her as she passed, standing in the slowly rolling cart with her 
hands bound in front of her and her head lowered and a rope around her neck, 
everything was clear.
"Charyou tree, " he called, almost sweetly uttering words of the Old People she 
hadn't heard since her childhood, words that meant "Come, Reap" . . . and 
something else, as well. Something hidden, something se­cret, something to do 
with that root word, char, that word which meant only death. As the dried shucks 
fluttered around her boots, she understood the secret very well; understood also 
that there would be no baby for her, no wedding for her in the fairy-distant 
land of Gilead, no hall in which she and Roland would be joined and then saluted 
beneath the electric lights, no husband, no more nights of sweet love; all that 
was over. The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly 
begun.
She knew that she had been put in the back of the cart, stood in the back of the 
cart, and that the surviving Coffin Hunter had looped a noose around her neck. 
"Don't try to sit," he had said, sounding almost apolo­getic. "I have no desire 
to choke you, girly. If the wagon bumps and you fall, I'll try to keep the knot 
loose, but if you try to sit, I'll have to give you a pinching. Her orders." He 
nodded to Rhea, who sat erect on the seat of the cart, the reins in her warped 
hands. "She's in charge now."
And so she had been; so, as they neared town, she still was. Whatever the 
possession of her glam had done to her body, whatever the loss of it had done to 
her mind, it had not broken her power; that seemed to have increased, if 
anything, as if she'd found some other source from which she could feed, at 
least for awhile. Men who could have broken her over one knee like a stick of 
kindling followed her commands as unquestioningly as children.
There were more and more men as that Reaping afternoon wound its shallow course 
to night: half a dozen ahead of the cart, riding with Rimer and the man with the 
cocked eye, a full dozen riding behind it with Reynolds, the rope leading to her 
neck wound around his tattooed hand, at their head. She didn't know who these 
men were, or how they had been summoned.
Rhea had taken this rapidly increasing party north a little farther, then turned 
southwest on the old Silk Ranch Road, which wound back toward town. On the 
eastern edge of Hambry, it rejoined the Great Road. Even in her dazed state, 
Susan had realized the harridan was moving slowly, mea­suring the descent of the 
sun as they went, not clucking at the pony to hurry but actually reining it in, 
at least until afternoon's gold had gone. When they passed the farmer, 
thin-faced and alone, a good man, no doubt, with a freehold farm he worked hard 
from first gleam to last glow and a family he loved (but oh, there were those 
lamb-slaughterer eyes below the brim of his battered hat), she understood this 
leisurely course of travel, too. Rhea had been waiting for the moon.
With no gods to pray to, Susan prayed to her father.
Da? If thee's there, help me to be strong as lean be, and help me hold to him, 
to the memory of him. Help me to hold to myself as well. Not for rescue, not for 
salvation, but just so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing my pain 
and my fear. And him, help him as well. . .
"Help keep him safe," she whispered. "Keep my love safe; take my love safe to 
where he goes, give him joy in who he sees, and make him a cause of joy in those 
who see him."
"Praying, dearie?" the old woman asked without turning on the seat. Her croaking 
voice oozed false compassion. "Aye, ye'd do well t'make things right with the 
Powers while ye still can—before the spit's burned right out of yer throat!" She 
threw back her head and cackled, the strag­gling remains of her broomstraw hair 
flying out orange in the light of the bloated moon.
 
24
 
Their horses, led by Rusher, had come to the sound of Roland's dismayed shout. 
They stood not far away, their manes rippling in the wind, shaking their heads 
and whinnying their displeasure whenever the wind dropped enough for them to get 
a whiff of the thick white smoke rising from the canyon.
Roland paid no attention to the horses or the smoke. His eyes were fixed on the 
drawstring sack slung over Alain's shoulder. The ball inside had come alive 
again; in the growing dark, the bag seemed to pulse like some weird pink 
firefly. He held out his hands for it.
"Give it to me!"
"Roland, I don't know if—"
"Give it to me, damn your face!"
Alain looked at Cuthbert, who nodded . . . then lifted his hands sky­ward in a 
weary, distracted gesture.
Roland tore the bag away before Alain could do more than begin to shrug it off 
his shoulder. The gunslinger dipped into it and pulled the glass out. It was 
glowing fiercely, a pink Demon Moon instead of an or­ange one.
Behind and below them, the nagging whine of the thinny rose and fell, rose and 
fell.
"Don't look directly into that thing," Cuthbert muttered to Alain. "Don't, for 
your father's sake."
Roland bent his face over the pulsing ball, its light running over his cheeks 
and brow like liquid, drowning his eyes in its dazzle.
In Maerlyn’s Rainbow he saw her—Susan, horse-drover's daughter, lovely girl at 
the window. He saw her standing in the back of a black cart decorated with gold 
symbols, the old witch's cart. Reynolds rode behind her, holding the end of a 
rope that was noosed around her neck. The cart was rolling toward Green Heart, 
making its way with processional slow-ness. Hill Street was lined with people of 
whom the farmer with the lamb-slaughterer's eyes had been only the first—all 
those folk of Hambry and Mejis who had been deprived of their fair but were now 
given this ancient dark attraction in its stead: Charyou tree, come, Reap, death 
for you, life for our crops.
A soundless whispering ran through them like a gathering wave, and they began to 
pelt her—first with cornhusks, then with rotting tomatoes, then with potatoes 
and apples. One of these latter struck her cheek. She reeled, almost fell, then 
stood straight again, now raising her swollen but still lovely face so the moon 
painted it. She looked straight ahead.
"Charyou tree, " they whispered. Roland couldn't hear them, but he could see the 
words on their lips. Stanley Ruiz was there, and Pettie, and Gert Moggins, and 
Frank Claypool, the deputy with the broken leg; Jamie McCann, who was to have 
been this year's Reap Lad. Roland saw a hun­dred people he had known (and mostly 
liked) during his time in Mejis. Now these people pelted his love with 
cornshucks and vegetables as she stood, hands bound before her, in the back of 
Rhea's cart.
The slowly rolling cart reached Green Heart, with its colored paper lanterns and 
silent carousel where no laughing children rode ... no, not this year. The 
crowd, still speaking those two words—chanting them now, it appeared—parted. 
Roland saw the heaped pyramid of wood that was the unlit bonfire. Sitting around 
it, their backs propped on the central col­umn, their lumpy legs outstretched, 
was a ring of red-handed stuffy-guys. There was a single hole in the ring; a 
single waiting vacancy.
And now a woman emerged from the crowd. She wore a rusty black dress and held a 
pail in one hand. A smear of ash stood out on one of her cheeks like a brand. 
She—
Roland began to shriek. It was a single word, over and over again:
No, no, no, no, no, no! The ball's pink light flashed brighter with each 
repetition, as if his horror refreshed and strengthened it. And now, with each 
of those pulses, Cuthbert and Alain could see the shape of the gunslinger's 
skull beneath his skin.
"We have to take it away from him," Alain said. "We have to, it's sucking him 
dry. It's killing him!"
Cuthbert nodded and stepped forward. He grabbed the ball, but couldn't take it 
from Roland's hands. The gunslinger's fingers seemed welded to it.
"Hit him!" he told Alain. "Hit him again, you have to!"
But Alain might as well have been hitting a post. Roland didn't even rock back 
on his heels. He continued to cry out that single negative— "No! No! No! No 
"—and the ball flashed faster and faster, eating its way into him through the 
wound it had opened, sucking up his grief like blood.
 
25
 
"Charyou tree!" Cordelia Delgado cried, darting forward from where she had been 
waiting. The crowd cheered her, and beyond her left shoulder Demon Moon winked, 
as if in complicity. "Charyou tree, ye faithless bitch! Charyou tree!"
She flung the pail of paint at her niece, splattering her pants and dressing her 
tied hands in a pair of wet scarlet gloves. She grinned up at Susan as the cart 
rolled past. The smear of ash stood out on her cheek; in the center of her pale 
forehead, a single vein pulsed like a worm.
"Bitch!" Cordelia screamed. Her fists were clenched; she danced a kind of 
hilarious jig, feet jumping, bony knees pumping beneath her skirt. "Life for the 
crops! Death for the bitch! Charyou tree! Come, Reap!"
The cart rolled past her; Cordelia faded from Susan's sight, just one more cruel 
phantasm in a dream that would soon end. Bird and bear and hare and fish, she 
thought. Be safe, Roland; go with my love. That's my fondest wish.
"Take her!" Rhea screamed. "Take this murdering bitch and cook her red-handed! 
Charyou tree!"
"Charyou tree!" the crowd responded. A forest of willing hands grew in the 
moonlit air; somewhere firecrackers rattled and children laughed excitedly.
Susan was lifted from the cart and handed toward the waiting wood­pile above the 
heads of the crowd, passed by uplifted hands like a heroine returned 
triumphantly home from the wars. Her hands dripped red tears upon their 
straining, eager faces. The moon overlooked it all, dwarfing the glow of the 
paper lanterns.
"Bird and bear and hare and fish," she murmured as she was first low­ered and 
then slammed against the pyramid of dry wood, put in the place which had been 
left for her—the whole crowd chanting in unison now, "Charyou TREE! Charyou 
TREE! Charyou TREE!"
"Bird and bear and hare and fish."
Trying to remember how he had danced with her that night. Trying to remember how 
he had loved with her in the willow grove. Trying to re­member that first 
meeting on the dark road: Thankee-sai, we 're well met, he had said, and yes, in 
spite of everything, in spite of this miserable end­ing with the folk who had 
been her neighbors turned into prancing goblins by moonlight, in spite of pain 
and betrayal and what was coming, he had spoken the truth: they had been well 
met, they had been very well met, indeed.
"Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!"
Women came and piled dry cornshucks around her feet. Several of them slapped her 
(it didn't matter; her bruised and puffy face seemed to have gone numb), and 
one—it was Misha Alvarez, whose daughter Susan had taught to ride—spat into her 
eyes and then leaped prankishly away, shaking her hands at the sky and laughing. 
For a moment she saw Coral Thorin, festooned with reap-charms, her arms filled 
with dead leaves which she threw at Susan; they fluttered down around her in a 
crackling, aro­matic shower.
And now came her aunt again, and Rhea beside her. Each held a torch. They stood 
before her, and Susan could smell sizzling pitch.
Rhea raised her torch to the moon. "CHARYOU TREE!" she screamed in her rusty old 
voice, and the crowd responded, "CHARYOU TREE!"
Cordelia raised her own torch. "COME, REAP!"
"COME, REAP!" they cried back to her.
"Now, ye bitch," Rhea crooned. "Now comes warmer kisses than any yer love ever 
gave ye."
"Die, ye faithless," Cordelia whispered. "Life for the crops, death for you."
It was she who first flung her torch into the cornshucks which were piled as 
high as Susan's knees; Rhea flung hers a bare second later. The cornshucks 
blazed up at once, dazzling Susan with yellow light.
She drew in a final breath of cool air, warmed it with her heart, and loosed it 
in a defiant shout: "ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!"
The crowd fell back, murmuring, as if uneasy at what they had done, now that it 
was too late to take it back; here was not a stuffy-guy but a cheerful girl they 
all knew, one of their own, for some mad reason backed up against the Reap-Night 
bonfire with her hands painted red. They might have saved her, given another 
moment—some might have, anyway—but it was too late. The dry wood caught; her 
pants caught; her shirt caught; her long blonde hair blazed on her head like a 
crown.
"ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!"
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to 
consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first 
light of morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher 
flat-out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his necker­chief 
rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again 
in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his 
laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat into the 
silky, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird 
and bear and hare and fish.
 
26
 
There was no word, not even no, in his screams at the end: he howled like a 
gutted animal, his hands welded to the ball, which beat like a runaway heart. He 
watched in it as she burned.
Cuthbert tried again to take the cursed thing away, and couldn't. He did the 
only other thing he could think of—drew his revolver, pointed it at the ball, 
and thumbed back the hammer. He would likely wound Roland, and the flying glass 
might even blind him, but there was no other choice. If they didn't do 
something, the glam would kill him.
But there was no need. As if seeing Cuthbert's gun and understanding what it 
meant, the ball went instantly dark and dead in Roland's hands. Roland's stiff 
body, every line and muscle trembling with horror and out­rage, went limp. He 
dropped like a stone, his fingers at last letting go of the ball. His stomach 
cushioned it as he struck the ground; it rolled off him and trickled to a stop 
by one of his limp, outstretched hands. Nothing burned in its darkness now 
except for one baleful orange spark—the tiny reflection of the rising Demon 
Moon.
Alain looked at the glass with a species of disgusted, frightened awe; looked at 
it as one might look at a vicious animal that now sleeps ... but will wake 
again, and bite when it does.
He stepped forward, meaning to crush it to powder beneath his boot. "Don't you 
dare," Cuthbert said in a hoarse voice. He was kneeling beside Roland's limp 
form but looking at Alain. The rising moon was in his eyes, two small, bright 
stones of light. "Don't you dare, after all the misery and death we've gone 
through to get it. Don't you even think of it."
Alain looked at him uncertainly for a moment, thinking he should de­stroy the 
cursed thing, anyway—misery suffered did not justify misery to come, and as long 
as the thing on the ground remained whole, misery was all it would bring anyone. 
It was a misery-machine, that was what it was, and it had killed Susan Delgado. 
He hadn't seen what Roland had seen in the glass, but he had seen his friend's 
face, and that had been enough. It had killed Susan, and it would kill more, if 
left whole.
But then he thought of ka and drew back. Later he would bitterly re­gret doing 
so.
"Put it in the bag again," Cuthbert said, "and then help me with Roland. We have 
to get out of here."
The drawstring bag lay crumpled on the ground nearby, fluttering in the wind. 
Alain picked up the ball, hating the feel of its smooth, curved surface, 
expecting it to come alive under his touch. It didn't, though. He put it in the 
bag, and looped it over his shoulder again. Then he knelt be­side Roland.
He didn't know how long they tried unsuccessfully to bring him around—until the 
moon had risen high enough in the sky to turn silver again, and the smoke 
roiling out of the canyon had begun to dissipate, that was all he knew. Until 
Cuthbert told him it was enough; they would have to sling him over Rusher's 
saddle and ride with him that way. If they could get into the heavily forested 
lands west o' Barony before dawn, Cuthbert said, they would likely be safe . . . 
but they had to get at least that far. They had smashed Parson's men apart with 
stunning ease, but the remains would likely knit together again the following 
day. Best they be gone before that happened.
And that was how they left Eyebolt Canyon, and the seacoast side of Mejis; 
riding west beneath the Demon Moon, with Roland laid across his saddle like a 
corpse.
 
27
 
The next day they spent in II Bosque, the forest west of Mejis, waiting for 
Roland to wake up. When afternoon came and he remained unconscious, Cuthbert 
said: "See if you can touch him."
Alain took Roland's hands in his own, marshalled all his concentra­tion, bent 
over his friend's pale, slumbering face, and remained that way for almost half 
an hour. Finally he shook his head, let go of Roland's hands, and stood up.
"Nothing?" Cuthbert asked.
Alain sighed and shook his head.
They made a travois of pine branches so he wouldn't have to spend another night 
riding oversaddle (if nothing else, it seemed to make Rusher nervous to be 
carrying his master in such a way), and went on, not travel­ling on the Great 
Road—that would have been far too dangerous—but parallel to it. When Roland 
remained unconscious the following day (Mejis falling behind them now, and both 
boys feeling a deep tug of homesick­ness, inexplicable but as real as tides), 
they sat on either side of him, look­ing at each other over the slow rise and 
fall of his chest.
"Can an unconscious person starve, or die of thirst?" Cuthbert asked. "They 
can't, can they?"
"Yes," Alain said. "I think they can."
It had been a long, nerve-wracking night of travel. Neither boy had slept well 
the previous day, but on this one they slept like the dead, with blankets over 
their heads to block the sun. They awoke minutes apart as the sun was going down 
and Demon Moon, now two nights past the full, was rising through a troubled rack 
of clouds that presaged the first of the great autumn storms.
Roland was sitting up. He had taken the glass from the drawstring bag. He sat 
with it cradled in his arms, a darkened bit of magic as dead as the glass eyes 
of The Romp. Roland's own eyes, also dead, looked indif­ferently off into the 
moonlit corridors of the forest. He would eat but not sleep. He would drink from 
the streams they passed but not speak. And he would not be parted from the piece 
of Maerlyn's Rainbow which they had brought out of Mejis at such great price. It 
did not glow for him, however. Not, Cuthbert thought once, while Al and I are 
awake to see it, anyway.
Alain couldn't get Roland's hands off the ball, and so he laid his own on 
Roland's cheeks, touching him that way. Except there was nothing to touch, 
nothing there. The thing which rode west with them toward Gilead was not Roland, 
or even a ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the close of its cycle, Roland had 
gone.

 

 
 
PART FOUR
ALL GOD'S 
CHILLUN GOT 
SHOES

 

 
 
CHAPTER   I
KANSAS IN 
THE MORNING
 
1
 
For the first time in
(hours? days?)
the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to 
the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape 
surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees. Then he 
took the waterskin which lay on the pavement beside him, held it over his face, 
opened his mouth, and upended it.
He drank what happened to go in his mouth—the others could see his adam's apple 
working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pour­ing—but drinking didn't 
seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead 
and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the 
base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning 
it darker.
At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms 
stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam 
rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.
"Ahhh," he said.
"Feel better?" Eddie asked.
The gunslinger's lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue 
eyes. "Yes. I do. I don't understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this 
telling . . . but I do."
"An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you," Susan­nah said, 
"but I doubt you'd listen." She put her hands in the small of her back, 
stretched and winced ... but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness 
she'd expected weren't there, and although there was one small creak near the 
base other spine, she didn't get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and 
pops she had expected.
"Tell you one thing," Eddie said, "this gives a whole new meaning to 'Get it off 
your chest.' How long have we been here, Roland?"
"Just one night."
" 'The spirits have done it all in a single night,' " Jake said in a dreamy 
voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by 
the boy's bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.
Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake 
sharply. "What is it you say?"
"Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas 
Carol. All in a single night, huh?"
"Does any part of your body say it was longer?"
Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning—better 
than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren't exactly 
floating, or anything like that.
"Eddie? Susannah?"
"I feel good," Susannah said. "Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone 
many of em."
Eddie said, "It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way—"
"Doesn't everything?" Roland asked dryly.
"Oh, that's funny," Eddie said. "A real howl. Next train that goes crazy on us, 
you can ask it the silly questions. What I meant was that you'd spend so many 
nights high that you got used to feeling like ten pounds of shit in a nine-pound 
bag when you got up in the morning—bad head, stuffy nose, thumping heart, glass 
in the old spine. Take it from your pal Eddie, you can tell just from the way 
you feel in the morning how good dope is for you. Anyway, you'd get so used to 
that—/did, any­way—that when you actually took a night off, you'd wake up the 
next morning and sit there on the edge of the bed, thinking, 'What the flick's 
wrong with me? Am I sick? I feel weird. Did I have a stroke in the night?' "
Jake laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth so violently that it was as if 
he wanted not just to hold the sound in but call it back. "Sorry," he said. 
"That made me think of my dad."
"One of my people, huh?" Eddie said. "Anyway, I expect to be sore, I expect to 
be tired, I expect to creak when I walk... but I actually think all I need to 
put me right is a quick pee in the bushes."
"And a bite to eat?" Roland asked.
Eddie had been wearing a ^mall smile. Now it faded. "No," he said. "After that 
story, I'm not all that hungry. In fact, I'm not hungry at all."
 
2
 
Eddie carried Susannah down the embankment and popped her behind a stand of 
laurel bushes to do her necessary. Jake was sixty or seventy yards east, in a 
grove of birches. Roland had said he would use the remedial strip to do his 
morning necessary, then raised his eyebrows when his New York friends laughed.
Susannah wasn't laughing when she came out of the bushes. Her face was streaked 
with tears. Eddie didn't ask her; he knew. He had been fight­ing the feeling 
himself. He took her gently in his arms and she put her face against the side of 
his neck. They stayed that way for a little while.
"Charyou tree, " she said at last, pronouncing it as Roland had: chair-you tree, 
with a little upturned vowel at the end.
"Yeah," Eddie said, thinking that a Charlie by any other name was still a 
Charlie. As, he supposed, a rose was a rose was a rose. "Come, Reap."
She raised her head and began to wipe her swimming eyes. "To have gone through 
all that," she said, keeping her voice low ... and looking once at the turnpike 
embankment to make sure Roland wasn't there, look­ing down at them. "And at 
fourteen."
"Yeah. It makes my adventures searching for the elusive dime bag in Tompkins 
Square look pretty tame. In a way, though, I'm almost relieved."
"Relieved? Why?"
"Because I thought he was going to tell us that he killed her himself. For his 
damned Tower."
Susannah looked squarely into his eyes. "But he thinks that's what he did. Don't 
you understand that?"
 
3
 
When they were back together again and there was food actually in sight, all of 
them decided they could eat a bit, after all. Roland shared out the last of the 
burritos (Maybe later today we can stop in at the nearest Boing Boing Burgers 
and see what they've got for leftovers, Eddie thought), and they dug in. All of 
them, that was, except Roland. He picked up his burrito, looked at it, then 
looked away. Eddie saw an expression of sadness on the gunslinger's face that 
made him look both old and lost. It hurt Ed­die's heart, but he couldn't think 
what to do about it.
Jake, almost ten years younger, could. He got up, went to Roland, knelt beside 
him, put his arms around the gunslinger's neck, and hugged him. "I'm sorry you 
lost your friend," he said.
Roland's face worked, and for a moment Eddie was sure he was go­ing to lose it. 
A long time between hugs, maybe. Mighty long. Eddie had to look away for a 
moment. Kansas in the morning, he told himself. A sight you never expected to 
see. Dig on that for awhile, and let the man be.
When he looked back, Roland had it together again. Jake was sitting beside him, 
and Oy had his long snout on one of the gunslinger's boots. Roland had begun to 
eat his burrito. Slowly, and without much relish . . . but he was eating.
A cold hand—Susannah's—crept into Eddie's. He took it and folded his fingers 
over it.
"One night," she marvelled.
"On our body-clocks, at least," Eddie said. "In our heads . .."
"Who knows?" Roland agreed. "But storytelling always changes time. At least it 
does in my world." He smiled. It was unexpected, as al­ways, and as always, it 
transformed his face into something nearly beauti­ful. Looking at that, Eddie 
mused, you could see how a girl might have fallen in love with Roland, once upon 
a time. Back when he had been long and going on tall but maybe not so ugly; back 
when the Tower hadn't yet got its best hold on him.
"I think it's that way in all worlds, sugar," Susannah said. "Could I ask you a 
couple of questions, before we get rolling?"
"If you like."
"What happened to you? How long were you ... gone?"
"I was certainly gone, you're right about that. I was travelling. Wan­dering. 
Not in Maerlyn's Rainbow, exactly ... I don't think I ever would have returned 
from there, if I'd gone into it while I was still . . . sick . . . but everyone 
has a wizard's glass, of course. Here." He tapped his fore­head gravely, just 
above the space between his eyebrows. "That's where I went. That's where I 
travelled while my friends travelled east with me. I got better there, little by 
little. I held onto the ball, and I travelled inside my head, and I got better. 
But the glass never glowed for me until the very end ... when the battlements of 
the castle and the towers of the city were actually in sight. If it had awakened 
earlier..."
He shrugged.
"If it had awakened before I'd started to get some of my strength of mind back, 
I don't think I'd be here now. Because any world—even a pink one with a glass 
sky—would have been preferable to one where there was no Susan. I suppose the 
force that gives the glass its life knew that... and waited."
"But when it did glow for you again, it told you the rest," Jake said. "It must 
have. It told you the parts that you weren't there to see."
"Yes. I know as much of the story as I do because of what I saw in the ball."
"You told us once that John Farson wanted your head on a pole," Ed­die said. 
"Because you stole something from him. Something he held dear. It was the glass 
ball, wasn't it?"
"Yes. He was more than furious when he found out. He was insane with rage. In 
your parlance, Eddie, he 'went nuclear.' "
"How many more times did it glow for you?" Susannah asked.
"And what happened to it?" Jake added.
"I saw in it three times after we left Mejis Barony," Roland said. "The first 
was on the night before we came home to Gilead. That was when I travelled in it 
the longest, and it showed me what I've told you. A few things I've only guessed 
at, but most I was shown. It showed me these things not to teach or enlighten, 
but to hurt and wound. The remaining pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow are all evil 
things. Hurt enlivens them, somehow. It waited until my mind was strong enough 
to understand and withstand... and then it showed me all the things I missed in 
my stu­pid adolescent complacency. My lovesick daze. My prideful, murderous 
conceit."
"Roland, don't," Susannah said. "Don't let it hurt you still."
"But it does. It always will. Never mind. It doesn't matter now; that tale is 
told.
"The second time I saw into the glass—went into the glass—was three days after I 
came home. My mother wasn't there, although she was due that evening. She had 
gone into Debaria—a kind of retreat for women—to wait and pray for my return. 
Nor was Marten there. He was in Cressia, with Farson."
"The ball," Eddie said. "Your father had it by then?"
"No-o," Roland said. He looked down at his hands, and Eddie ob­served a faint 
flush rising into his cheeks. "I didn't give it to him at first. 1 found it... 
hard to give up."
"I bet," Susannah said. "You and everyone else who ever looked into the goddam 
thing."
"On the third afternoon, before we were to be banqueted to celebrate our safe 
return"
"I bet you were really in a mood to party, too," Eddie said.
Roland smiled without humor, still studying his hands. "At around four o' the 
clock, Cuthbert and Alain came to my rooms. We were a trio for an artist to 
paint, I wot—windburned, hollow-eyed, hands covered with healing cuts and 
scrapes from our climb up the side of the canyon, scrawny as scarecrows. Even 
Alain, who tended toward stoutness, all but disappeared when he turned sideways. 
They confronted me, I suppose you'd say. They'd kept the secret of the ball to 
that point—out of respect for me and for the loss I'd suffered, they told me, 
and I believed them— but they would keep it no longer than that night's meal. If 
I wouldn't give it up voluntarily, it would be a question for our fathers to 
decide. They were horribly embarrassed, especially Cuthbert, but they were 
determined.
"I told them I'd give it over to my own father before the banquet— before my 
mother arrived by coach from Debaria, even. They should come early and see that 
I kept my promise. Cuthbert started to hem and haw and say that wouldn't be 
necessary, but of course it was necessary—"
"Yeah," Eddie said. He had the look of a man who understood this part of the 
story perfectly. "You can go into the crapper on your own, but it's a lot easier 
to actually flush all the bad shit down the toilet if you have somebody with 
you."
"Alain, at least, knew it would be better for me—easier—if I didn't have to hand 
the ball over alone. He hushed Cuthbert up and said they'd be there. And they 
were. And I gave it over, little as I wanted to. My fa­ther went as pale as 
paper when he looked into the bag and saw what was there, then excused himself 
and took it away. When he came back, he picked up his glass of wine and went on 
talking to us of our adventures in Mejis as if nothing had happened."
"But between the time your friends talked to you about it and the time you gave 
it up, you looked into it," Jake said. "Went into it. Travelled in it. What did 
it show you that time?"
"First the Tower again," Roland said, "and the beginning of the way there. I saw 
the fall of Gilead, and the triumph of the Good Man. We'd put those things back 
a mere twenty months or so by destroying the tankers and the oilpatch. I could 
do nothing about that, but it showed me something I could do. There was a 
certain knife. The blade had been treated with an especially potent poison, 
something from a distant Mid-World Kingdom called Garlan. Stuff so strong even 
the tiniest cut would cause almost instant death. A wandering singer—in truth, 
John Parson's eldest nephew—had brought this knife to court. The man he gave it 
to was the castle's chief of domestic staff. This man was to pass the knife on 
to the actual assassin. My father was not meant to see the sun come up on the 
morning after the banquet." He smiled at them grimly. "Because of what I saw in 
the Wizard's Glass, the knife never reached the hand that would have used it, 
and there was a new chief of domestics by the end of that week. These are pretty 
tales I tell you, are they not? Aye, very pretty, indeed."
"Did you see the person the knife was meant for?" Susannah asked. "The actual 
killer?"
"Yes."
"Anything else? Did you see anything else?" Jake asked. The plan to murder 
Roland's father didn't seem to hold much interest for him.
"Yes." Roland looked puzzled. "Shoes. Just for a minute. Shoes tum­bling through 
the air. At first I thought they were autumn leaves. And when I saw what they 
really were, they were gone and I was lying on my bed with the ball hugged in my 
arms . . . pretty much the way I carried it back from Mejis. My father ... as 
I've said, his surprise when he looked inside the bag was very great, indeed."
You told him who had the knife with the special poison on it, Susan­nah thought, 
Jeeves the Butler, or whoever, but you didn't tell him who was supposed to 
actually use it, did you, sugar? Why not? Because you wanted to take care of dat 
little spot o' work yo ownself? But before she could ask, Eddie was asking a 
question of his own.
"Shoes? Flying through the air? Does that mean anything to you now?"
Roland shook his head.
"Tell us about the rest of what you saw in it," Susannah said.
He gave her a look of such terrible pain that what Susannah had only suspected 
immediately solidified to fact in her mind. She looked away from him and groped 
for Eddie's hand.
"I cry your pardon, Susannah, but I cannot. Not now. For now, I've told all I 
can."
"All right," Eddie said. "All right, Roland, that's cool."
"Ool," Oy agreed.
"Did you ever see the witch again?" Jake asked.
For a long time it seemed Roland would not answer this, either, but in the end 
he did.
"Yes. She wasn't done with me. Like my dreams of Susan, she fol­lowed me. All 
the way from Mejis, she followed me."
"What do you mean?" Jake asked in a low, awed voice. "Cripes, Roland, what do 
you mean?"
"Not now." He got up. "It's time we were on our way again." He nodded to the 
building which floated ahead of them; the sun was just now clearing its 
battlements. "Yon glitter-dome's a good distance away, but I think we can reach 
it this afternoon, if we move brisk. 'Twould be best. It's not a place I'd reach 
after nightfall, if that can be avoided."
"Do you know what it is yet?" Susannah asked.
"Trouble," he repeated. "And in our road."
 
4
 
For awhile that morning, the thinny warbled so loudly that not even the bullets 
in their ears would entirely stop up the sound; at its worst, Susan­nah felt as 
if the bridge of her nose would simply disintegrate, and when she looked at 
Jake, she saw he was weeping copiously—not crying the way people do when they're 
sad, but the way they do when their sinuses are in total revolt. She couldn't 
get the saw-player the kid had mentioned out of her mind. Sounds Hawaiian, she 
thought over and over again as Eddie pushed her grimly along in the new 
wheelchair, weaving in and out of the stalled vehicles. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't 
it? Sounds fucking Hawaiian, doesn't it. Miss Oh So Black and Pretty?
On both sides of the turnpike the thinny lapped all the way up to the 
embankment, casting its twitching, misshapen reflections of trees and grain 
elevators, seeming to watch the pilgrims pass as hungry animals in a zoo might 
watch plump children. Susannah would find herself thinking of the thinny in 
Eyebolt Canyon, reaching out hungrily through the smoke for Latigo's milling 
men, pulling them in (and some going in on their own, walking like zombies in a 
horror movie), and then she would find herself thinking of the guy in Central 
Park again, the wacko with the saw. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it? Counting one 
thinny, and it sounds Hawai­ian, doesn't it?
Just when she thought she could stand it not a moment longer, the thinny began 
to draw back from 1-70 again, and its humming warble at last began to fade. 
Susannah was eventually able to pull the bullets out of her ears. She tucked 
them into the side-pocket of her chair with a hand that shook slightly.
"That was a bad one," Eddie said. His voice sounded clogged and weepy. She 
looked around at him and saw his cheeks were wet, his eyes red. "Take it easy, 
Suzie-pie," he said. "It's my sinuses, that's all. That sound kills em."
"Me, too," Susannah said.
"My sinuses are okay, but my head aches," Jake said. "Roland, do you have any 
more aspirin?"
Roland stopped, rummaged, and found the bottle.
"Did you ever see Clay Reynolds again?" Jake asked, after swallow­ing the pills 
with water from the skin he carried.
"No, but I know what happened to him. He got a bunch together, some of them 
deserters from Parson's army, went to robbing banks ... in toward our part of 
the world, this was, but by then bank-thieves and stage-robbers didn't have much 
to fear from gunslingers."
"The gunslingers were busy with Farson," Eddie said.
"Yes. But Reynolds and his men were trapped by a smart sheriff who turned the 
main street of a town called Oakley into a killing-zone. Six of the ten in the 
gang were killed outright. The rest were hung. Reynolds was one of those. This 
was less than a year later, during the time of Wide Earth." He paused, then 
said: "One of those shot dead in the killing-zone was Coral Thorin. She had 
become Reynolds's woman; rode and killed with the rest of them."
They went on in silence for a bit. In the distance, the thinny warbled its 
endless song. Jake suddenly ran ahead to a parked camper. A note had been left 
under the wiper blade on the driver's side. By standing on his toes, he was just 
able to reach it. He scanned it, frowning.
"What does it say?" Eddie asked.
Jake handed it over. Eddie looked, then passed it to Susannah, who read it in 
turn and gave it to Roland. He looked, then shook his head. "I can make out only 
a few words—old woman, dark man. What does the rest say? Read it to me."
Jake took it back. " 'The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is 
Abagail.' " He paused. "Then, down here, it says, 'The dark man is in the west. 
Maybe Vegas.' "
Jake looked up at the gunslinger, the note fluttering in his hand, his face 
puzzled and uneasy. But Roland was looking toward the palace which shimmered 
across the highway—the palace that was not in the west but in the east, the 
palace that was light, not dark.
"In the west," Roland said. "Dark man, Dark Tower, and always in the west."
"Nebraska's west of here, too," Susannah said hesitantly. "I don't know if that 
matters, this Abagail person, but..."
"I think she's part of another story," Roland said.
"But a story close to this one," Eddie put in. "Next door, maybe. Close enough 
to swap sugar for salt... or start arguments."
"I'm sure you're right," Roland said, "and we may have business with the 'old 
woman' and the 'dark man' yet... but today our business is east. Come on."
They began walking again.

 
5
 
"What about Sheemie?" Jake asked after awhile.
Roland laughed, partly in surprise at the question, partly in pleased 
remembrance. "He followed us. It couldn't have been easy for him, and it must 
have been damned scary in places—there were wheels and wheels of wild country 
between Mejis and Gilead, and plenty of wild folks, too. Worse than just folks, 
mayhap. But ka was with him, and he showed up in time for Year's End Fair. He 
and that damned mule."
"Capi," Jake said.
"Appy," Oy repeated, padding along at Jake's heel.
"When we went in search of the Tower, I and my friends, Sheemie was with us. As 
a sort of squire, I suppose you'd say. He . . ." But Roland trailed off, biting 
at his lip, and of that he would say no more.
"Cordelia?" Susannah asked. "The crazy aunt?"
"Dead before the bonfire had burned down to embers. It might have been a 
heart-storm, or a brain-storm—what Eddie calls a stroke."
"Perhaps it was shame," Susannah said. "Or horror at what she'd done."
"It may have been," Roland said. "Waking to the truth when it's too late is a 
terrible thing. I know that very well."
"Something up there," Jake said, pointing at a long stretch of road from which 
the cars had been cleared. "Do you see?"
Roland did—with his eyes he seemed to see everything—but it was another fifteen 
minutes or so before Susannah began to pick up the small black specks ahead in 
the road. She was quite sure she knew what they were, although what she thought 
was less vision than intuition. Ten min­utes after that, she was sure.
They were shoes. Six pairs of shoes placed neatly in a line across the eastbound 
lanes of Interstate 70.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      II
SHOES IN THE ROAD
 
1
 
They reached the shoes at mid-morning. Beyond them, clearer now, stood the glass 
palace. It glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad 
in still water. There were shining gates in front of it; red pen­nons snapped 
from its towers in a light breeze.
The shoes were also red.
Susannah's impression that there were six pairs was understandable but 
wrong—there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter— four dark red 
booties made of supple leather—was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member 
of their ka-tet. Roland picked one of them up and felt inside it. He didn't know 
how many bumblers had worn shoes in the history of the world, but he was willing 
to guess that none had ever been gifted with a set of silk-lined leather 
booties.
"Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out," Eddie said. "This is great stuff."
Susannah's were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the femi­nine, 
sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren't really shoes at all—they had been made 
to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.
"Now look at this," she marvelled, holding one up so the sun could flash on the 
rhinestones with which the shoes were decorated ... if they were rhinestones. 
She had a crazy notion that maybe they were diamond chips. "Cappies. After four 
years of gettin along in what my friend Cyn­thia calls 'circumstances of reduced 
leg-room,' I finally got myself a pair of cappies. Think of that."
"Cappies," Eddie mused. "Is that what they call em?"
"That's what they call em, sugar."
Jake's were bright red Oxfords—except for the color, they would have looked 
perfectly at home in the well-bred classrooms of The Piper School. He flexed 
one, then turned it over. The sole was bright and un­marked. There was no 
manufacturer's stamp, nor had he really expected one. His father had maybe a 
dozen pairs of fine handmade shoes. Jake knew them when he saw them.
Eddie's were low boots with Cuban heels {Maybe in this world you call them Mejis 
heels, he thought) and pointed toes ... what, back in his other life, had been 
known as "street-boppers." Kids from the mid-sixties—an era 
Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed—might have called them "Beatle-boots."
Roland's, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones—you'd go danc­ing rather than 
droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decora­tions, narrow, haughty 
arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow 
travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said 
three people couldn't do that, only a pair ... but you only would have said it 
if you'd never been part of a ka-tet.
Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their 
mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it's of their world. They 
come from different whens of that world, but they see some­thing here that's 
common to all three of them.
"What is it?" he asked. "What do they mean, these shoes?"
"I don't think any of us know that, exactly," Susannah said.
"No," Jake said. "It's another riddle." He looked at the weird, blood red Oxford 
shoe in his hands with distaste. "Another goddamned riddle."
"Tell what you know." He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps 
fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a 
mirage, but as real as ... well, as real as shoes. "Please, tell me what you 
know about these shoes."
"I got shoes, you got shoes, all God's chillun got shoes," Odetta said. "That's 
the prevailin opinion, anyway."
"Well," Eddie said, "we got em, anyway. And you're thinking what I'm thinking, 
aren't you?"
"I guess I am."
"You, Jake?"
Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no 
doubt that all the shoes, including Oy's, would fit per­fectly) and clapped them 
briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and 
Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if 
expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. I hey ended up 
looking at the glass palace again . . . and then at each other, in that knowing, 
round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth 
rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.
"After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball," Eddie said, turning to him.
"Yes."
"Travelled in the ball."
"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with 
these—"
"I think it does," Eddie said. "You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink 
gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn't it? 
Especially if you were making up a riddle."
"Sure," Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. 
"When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard's Rainbow? When she's a Gale."
"We ain't in Kansas anymore, sugar," Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, 
humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laugh­ter. "May look a 
little like it, but Kansas was never . . . you know, this thin:'
"I don't understand you," Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was 
beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn't he told them that? 
Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day 
when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?
"You saw things as you flew," Eddie said. "Before you got to the dark land, the 
one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned 
up again later in your life, didn't he?"
"Yes, in Tull."
"And the dweller with the red hair?"
"Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the 
normal. 'Life for you, life for your crop,' that sort of thing. I thought I 
heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said 
something else." He glanced at Susannah. "I saw your wheel-chair, too. The old 
one."
"And you saw the witch."
"Yes. I—"
In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers 
cried: "I'll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!"
Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.
"Only in the movie, the witch wasn't riding a broom," Jake said. "She was on her 
bike, the one with the basket on the back."
"Yeah, no reap-charms, either," Eddie said. "Would have been a nice touch, 
though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have night­mares about the 
way she laughed."
"It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps," Susannah said. "The flying 
monkeys. I'd get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom 
and dad. They'd still be arguin 'bout whose bright idea it was to take me to 
that show in the foist place when I fell asleep be­tween em."
"I wasn't worried about clapping the heels together," Jake said. "Not a bit." It 
was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if 
Roland wasn't even there. "I wasn't wearing them, after all."
"True," Susannah said, sounding severe, "but you know what my daddy always used 
to say?"
"No, but I have a feeling we're going to find out," Eddie said.
She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake. " 
'Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,' " she said. "And it's 
good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think."
"Spanked again," Eddie said, grinning.
'Tanked!" Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.
"Explain this to me," Roland said in his softest voice. "I would hear. I would 
share your khef. And I would share it now.”
 
2
 
They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth cen­tury 
knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a 
cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no 1-70 
in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and 
there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, 
Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the Tin 
Woodman, and the Scare­crow. They each had
(bird and bear and hare and fish)
a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy's that Roland's new friends (and Roland 
himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her 
way home again.
"The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz," 
Jake said, "and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you 
met us, Roland—"
"Although you don't look much like Judy Garland," Eddie put in. 
"—and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who 
lived in the Emerald Palace." He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, 
greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.
"Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a 
King?"
Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded. 
"That's complicated," Jake said. "He was sort of a humbug—"
"A bumhug? What's that?"
"Humbug, " Jake said, laughing. "A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the 
important thing is that the Wizard actually came from—"
"Wizard?" Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake's shoulder with his diminished 
right hand. "Why do you call him so?"
"Because that was his title, sug," Susannah said. "The Wizard of Oz." She lifted 
Roland's hand gently but firmly from Jake's shoulder. "Let him tell it, now. He 
don't need you to squeeze it out of him."
"Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon."
"Nah, I'm fine," Jake said. "Don't worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her 
friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a 
bumhug." Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing 
back his hair, like a child of five. "He couldn't give the Lion courage, the 
Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn't send 
Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I 
don't think he meant to, but he did."
"It seems to me, from your telling of the tale," Roland said, speaking very 
slowly, "that Dorothy's friends had the things they wanted all along."
"That's the moral of the story," Eddie said. "Maybe what makes it a great story. 
But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good. 
And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and 
melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones 
Glinda gave her."
Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on 
the dotted white line of 1-70.
"Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three 
times. That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did." "And that's 
the end of the tale?"
"Well," Jake said, "it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and 
wrote about a thousand more Oz stories—"
"Yeah," Eddie said. "Everything but Glinda's Guide to Firm Thighs."
 "—and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people—"
"Really?" Susannah asked. She looked bemused. "What a peculiar concept."
"—but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think," Jake 
finished.
Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He 
lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. "Are we supposed to put them 
on, do you think? Here and now?"
His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last 
Susannah spoke for them—fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share 
on his own.
"Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here." "Takuro spirits," 
Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: "Look, let's just take em along. If 
we're supposed to put em on, I think we'll know when the time comes. In the 
meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts."
It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image 
got into your funny bone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the 
word "bumhug" might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of today, however, he 
was going to laugh every time he heard it. Eddie intended to use it a lot, 
especially when ole Jake wasn't expect­ing it.
They picked up the red shoes which had been left for them in the east-bound 
lanes (Jake took Oy's) and moved on again toward the shimmering glass castle.
Oz, Roland thought. He searched his memory, but he didn't think it was a name he 
had ever heard before, or a word of the High Speech that had come in disguise, 
as char had come disguised as Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this 
business; a sound more of his world than of Jake's, Susannah's, and Eddie's, 
from whence the tale had come.
 
3
 
Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer 
to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew 
close to them—not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a 
part of the world as the comer bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you 
could touch, stuff you could write fuck piper on, if you took a notion.
But that didn't happen, wasn't going to happen, and as they neared the Green 
Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing 
he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it—and he did not— didn't change the 
fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become 
real, somehow. And, like the thinny, it hummed ... except that this sound was 
far fainter, and not unpleasant.
Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming 
almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were 
topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red 
pennants nickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye
had been traced in yellow.
It's the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It's really his sigul, not John 
Farson 's. He didn't know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama's Crimson 
Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.
"So beautiful," Susannah murmured, and when Jake glanced at her, he thought she 
was almost crying. "But not nice, somehow. Not right. Maybe not downright bad, 
the way the thinny is, but.. ."
"But not nice," Eddie said. "Yeah. That works. Not a red light, maybe, but a 
bright yellow one just the same." He rubbed the side of his face (a gesture he 
had picked up from Roland without even realizing it) and looked puzzled. "It 
feels almost not serious—a practical joke."
"I doubt it's a joke," Roland said. "Do you think it's a copy of the place where 
Dorothy and her ka-tet met the false wizard?"
Again, the three erstwhile New Yorkers seemed to exchange a single glance of 
consultation. When it was over, Eddie spoke for all of them. "Yeah. Yeah, 
probably. It's not the same as the one in the movie, but if this thing came out 
of our minds, it wouldn't be. Because we see the one from L. Frank Baum's book, 
too. Both from the illustrations in the book. . ."
"And the ones from our imaginations," Jake said.
"But that's it," Susannah said. "I'd say we're definitely off to see the 
Wizard."
"You bet," Eddie said. "Because-because-because-because-because—"
"Because of the wonderful things he does!" Jake and Susannah fin­ished in 
unison, then laughed, delighted with each other, while Roland frowned at them, 
feeling puzzled and looking left out.
"But I have to tell you guys," Eddie said, "that it's only gonna take about one 
more wonderful thing to send me around to the dark side of the Psycho Moon. Most 
likely for good."
 
4
 
As they drew closer, they could see Interstate 70 stretching away into the pale 
green depths of the castle's slightly rounded outer wall; it floated there like 
an optical illusion. Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in 
the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow 
walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.
There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass—it was a color Jake as­sociated 
with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in—and a rust-hued wall-walk between the 
redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires 
root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.
The way in was blocked by a barred gate that was both huge and ethe­real: it 
looked like wrought iron which had been turned to glass. Each cunningly made 
stake was a different color, and these colors seemed to come from the inside, as 
if the bars were filled with some bright gas or liquid.
The travellers stopped before it. There was no sign of the turnpike be­yond it; 
instead of roadway, there was a courtyard of silver glass—a huge flat mirror, in 
fact. Clouds floated serenely through its depths; so did the image of the 
occasional swooping bird. Sun reflected off this glass courtyard and ran across 
the green castle walls in ripples. Un the far side, the wall of the palace's 
inner ward rose in a glimmery green cliff, broken by narrow loophole windows of 
jet-black glass. There was also an arched entry in this wall that made Jake 
think of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
To the left of the main doorway was a sentry-box made of cream-colored glass 
shot through with hazy orange threads. Its door, painted with red stripes, stood 
open. The phone-booth-sized room inside was empty, although there was something 
on the floor which looked to Jake like a newspaper.
Above the entry, flanking its darkness, were two crouching, leering gargoyles of 
darkest violet glass. Their pointed tongues poked out like bruises.
The pennants atop the towers flapped like schoolyard flags.
Crows cawed over empty cornfields now a week past the Reap.
Distant, the thinny whined and warbled.
"Look at the bars of this gate," Susannah said. She sounded breathless and 
awestruck. "Look very closely."
Jake bent toward the yellow bar until his nose nearly touched it and a faint 
yellow stripe ran down the middle of his face. At first he saw noth­ing, and 
then he gasped. What he had taken for motes of some kind were creatures—living 
creatures—imprisoned inside the bar, swimming in tiny schools. They looked like 
fish in an aquarium, but they also (their heads, Jake told himself, I think it's 
mostly their heads) looked oddly, disquietingly human. As if, Jake thought, he 
were looking into a vertical golden sea, all the ocean in a glass rod—and living 
myths no bigger than grains of dust swimming within it. A tiny woman with a 
fish's tail and long blonde hair streaming out behind her swam to her side of 
the glass, seemed to peer out at the giant boy (her eyes were round, startled, 
and beautiful), and then flipped away again.
Jake felt suddenly dizzy and weak. He closed his eyes until the feel­ing of 
vertigo went away, then opened them again and looked around at the others. 
"Cripes! Are they all the same?"
"All different, I think," said Eddie, who had already peered into two or three. 
He bent close to the purple rod, and his cheeks lit up as if in the glow of an 
old-fashioned fluoroscope. "These guys here look like birds— little tiny birds."
Jake looked and saw that Eddie was right: inside the gate's purple up­right were 
flocks of birds no bigger than summer minges. They swooped giddily about in 
their eternal twilight, weaving over and under one an­other, their wings leaving 
tiny silver trails of bubbles.
"Are they really there?" Jake asked breathlessly. "Are they, Roland, or are we 
only imagining them?"
"I don't know. But I know what this gate has been made to look like."
"So do I," Eddie said. He surveyed the shining posts, each with its own column 
of imprisoned light and life. Each of the gate's wings con­sisted of six colored 
bars. The one in the center—broad and flat instead of round, and made to split 
in two when the gate was opened—was the thir­teenth. This one was dead black, 
and in this one nothing moved.
Oh, maybe not that you can see, but there are things moving around in there, all 
right, Jake thought. There's life in there, terrible life. And maybe there are 
roses, too. Drowned ones.
"It's a Wizard's Gate," Eddie said. "Each bar has been made to look like one of 
the balls in Maerlyn's Rainbow. Look, here's the pink one."
Jake leaned toward it, hands propped on his thighs. He knew what would be inside 
even before he saw them: horses, of courses. Tiny herds of them, galloping 
through that strange pink stuff that was neither light nor liquid. Horses 
running in search of a Drop they would never find, mayhap.
Eddie stretched his hands out to grasp the sides of the central post, the black 
one.
"Don't!" Susannah called sharply.
Eddie ignored her, but Jake saw his chest stop for a moment and his lips tighten 
as he wrapped his hands around the black bar and waited for something—some force 
perhaps sent Special Delivery all the way from the Dark Tower itself—to change 
him, or even to strike him dead. When nothing happened, he breathed deep again, 
and risked a smile. "No elec­tricity, but . . ." He pulled; the gate held fast. 
"No give, either. I see where it splits down the middle, but I get nothing. Want 
to take a shot, Roland?"
Roland reached for the gate, but Jake put a hand on his arm and stopped him 
before the gunslinger could do more than give it a prelimi­nary shake. "Don't 
bother. That's not the way."
"Then what is?"
Instead of answering, Jake sat down in front of the gate, near the place where 
this strange version of 1-70 ended, and began putting on the shoes which had 
been left for him. Eddie watched a moment, then sat down beside him. "I guess we 
ought to try it," he said to Jake, "even though it'll probably turn out to be 
just another bumhug."
Jake laughed, shook his head, and began to tighten the laces of the blood-red 
Oxfords. He and Eddie both knew it was no bumhug. Not this time.
 
5
 
"Okay," Jake said when they had all put on their red shoes (he thought they 
looked extraordinarily stupid, especially Eddie's pair). "I'll count to three, 
and we'll click our heels together. Like this." He clicked the Ox­fords together 
once, sharply . . . and the gate shivered like a loosely fas­tened shutter blown 
by a strong wind. Susannah cried out. There followed a low, sweet chiming sound 
from the Green Palace, as if the walls them­selves had vibrated.
"I guess this'll do the trick, all right," Eddie said. "I warn you, though, I'm 
not singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' That's not in my contract."
"The rainbow is here," the gunslinger said softly, stretching his di­minished 
hand out to the gate.
It wiped the smile off Eddie's face. "Yeah, I know. I'm a little scared, 
Roland."
"So am I," the gunslinger said, and indeed, Jake thought he looked pale and ill.
"Go on, sugar," Susannah said. "Count before we all lose our nerve." "One ... 
two ... three."
They clicked their heels together solemnly and in unison: tock, tock, tock. The 
gate shivered more violently this time, the colors in the uprights brightening 
perceptibly. The chime that followed was higher, sweeter— the sound of fine 
crystal tapped with the haft of a knife. It echoed in dreamy harmonics that made 
Jake shiver, half with pleasure and half with pain.
But the gate didn't open.
"What—" Eddie began.
"I know," Jake said. "We forgot Oy."
"Oh Christ," Eddie said. "I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put 
booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed."
Roland ignored him, watching Jake closely as the boy sat down on the turnpike 
and called, "Oy! To me!"
The bumbler came willingly enough, and although he had surely been a wild 
creature before they had met him on the Path of the Beam, he al­lowed Jake to 
slip the red leather booties onto his paws without making trouble: in fact, once 
he got the idea, he stepped into the last two. When all four of the little red 
shoes were in place (they looked, in fact, the most like Dorothy's ruby 
slippers), Oy sniffed at one of them, then looked at­tentively back at Jake.
Jake clicked his heels together three times, looking at the bumbler as he did 
so, ignoring the rattle of the gate and the soft chime from the walls of the 
Green Palace.
"You, Oy!"
"Oy!"
He rolled over on his back like a dog playing dead, then simply looked at his 
own feet with a kind of disgusted bewilderment. Looking at him, Jake had a sharp 
memory: trying to pat his stomach and rub his head at the same time, and his 
father making fun of him when he couldn't do it right away.
"Roland, help me. He knows what he's supposed to do, but he doesn't know how to 
do it." Jake glanced up at Eddie. "And don't make any smart remarks, okay?"
"No," Eddie said. "No smart remarks, Jake. Do you think just Oy has to do it 
this time, or is it still a group effort?"
"Just him, I think."
"But it wouldn't hurt us to kind of click along with Mitch," Susan­nah said.
"Mitch who?" Eddie asked, looking blank.
"Never mind. Go on, Jake, Roland. Give us a count again."
Eddie grasped Oy's forepaws. Roland gently grasped the bumbler's rear paws. Oy 
looked nervous at this—as if he perhaps expected to be swung briskly into the 
air and given the old heave-ho—but he didn't struggle.
"One, two, three."
Jake and Roland gently patted Oy's forepaws and rear paws together in unison. At 
the same time they clicked the heels of their own footwear. Eddie and Susannah 
did the same.
This time the harmonic was a deep, sweet bong, like a glass church bell. The 
black glass bar running down the center of the gate did not split open but 
shattered, spraying crumbs of obsidian glass in all directions.
Some rattled against Oy's hide. He sprang up in a hurry, yanking out of Jake's 
and Roland's grip and trotting a little distance away. He sat on the broken 
white line between the travel lane and the passing lane of the high­way, his 
ears laid back, looking at the gate and panting.
"Come on," Roland said. He went to the left wing of the gate and pushed it 
slowly open. He stood at the edge of the mirror courtyard, a tall, lanky man in 
cowpoke jeans, an ancient shirt of no particular color, and improbable red 
cowboy boots. "Let's go in and see what the Wizard of Oz has to say for 
himself."
"If he's still here," Eddie said.
"Oh, I think he's here," Roland murmured. "Yes, I think he's here."
He ambled toward the main door with the empty sentry-box beside it. The others 
followed, welded to their own downward reflections by the red shoes like sets of 
Siamese twins.
Oy came last, skipping nimbly along in his ruby slippers, pausing once to sniff 
down at his own reflected snout.
"Oy!" he cried to the humbler floating below him, and then hurried after Jake.

 

 
 
CHAPTER      III
the wizard
 
1
 
Roland stopped at the sentry-box, glanced in, then picked up the thing which was 
lying on the floor. The others caught up with him and clustered around. It had 
looked like a newspaper, and that was just what it was . . . although an 
exceedingly odd one. No Topeka Capital-Journal this, and no news of a 
population-levelling plague.

The Oy Daily Buzz
 
Vol. MDLXVDI No. 96 "Daily Buzz, Daily Buzz, Handsome Iz as Handsome Duuzz" 
Weather: Here today, gone tomorrow Lucky Numbers: None Prognosis: Bad
 
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 
blah blah blah blah yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak 
yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak blah blah blah good is bad bad is good all the 
stuffs the same good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same go slow past the 
drawers all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blame is 
a pain all the stuffs the same yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak charyou 
tree all the stuffs the same blah yak blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak 
yak baked turkey cooked goose all the stuffs the same blah blah yak yak ride a 
train die in pain all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 
blah blah blah blah blah blah blame blame blame blame blame blame blah blah blah 
blah blah blah blah yak yak blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 
blah. (Related story p. 6)

Below this was a picture of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake cross­ing the 
mirrored courtyard, as if this had happened the day before instead of only 
minutes ago. Beneath it was a caption reading: Tragedy in Oz: Travellers Arrive 
Seeking Fame and Fortune; Find Death Instead.
"I like that," Eddie said, adjusting Roland's revolver in the holster he wore 
low on his hip. "Comfort and encouragement after days of confu­sion. Like a hot 
drink on a cold fucking night."
"Don't be afraid of this," Roland said. "This is a joke."
"I'm not afraid," Eddie said, "but it's a little more than a joke. I lived with 
Henry Dean for a lot of years, and I know when there's a plot to psych me out 
afoot. I know it very well." He looked curiously at Roland. "I hope you don't 
mind me saying this, but you 're the one who looks scared, Roland."
"I'm terrified," Roland said simply.
 
2
 
The arched entryway made Susannah think of a song which had been popular ten 
years or so before she had been yanked out of her world and into Roland's. Saw 
an eyeball peepin through a smoky cloud behind the Green Door, the lyric went. 
When I said "Joe sent me, " someone laughed out loud behind the Green Door. 
There were actually two doors here in­stead of one, and no peephole through 
which an eyeball could look in ei­ther. Nor did Susannah try that old speakeasy 
deal about how Joe had sent her. She did, however, bend forward to read the sign 
hanging from one of the circular glass door-pulls. bell out of order, please 
knock, it said.
"Don't bother," she said to Roland, who had actually doubled up his fist to do 
as the sign said. "It's from the story, that's all."
Eddie pulled her chair back slightly, stepped in front of it, and took hold of 
the circular pulls. The doors opened easily, the hinges rolling in silence. He 
took a step forward into what looked like a shadowy green grotto, cupped his 
hands to his mouth, and called: "Hey!"
The sound of his voice rolled away and came back changed... small, echoing, 
lost. Dying, it seemed.
"Christ," Eddie said. "Do we have to do this?"
"If we want to get back to the Beam, I think so." Roland looked paler than ever, 
but he led them in. Jake helped Eddie lift Susannah's chair over the sill (a 
milky block of jade-colored glass) and inside. Oy's little shoes flashed dim red 
on the green glass floor. They had gone only ten paces when the doors slammed 
shut behind them with a no-question-about-it boom that rolled past them and went 
echoing away into the depths of the Green Palace.
 
3
 
There was no reception room; only a vaulted, cavernous hallway that seemed to go 
on forever. The walls were lit with a faint green glow. This is just like the 
hallway in the movie, Jake thought, the one where the Cow­ardly Lion got so 
scared when he stepped on his own tail.
And, adding a little extra touch of verisimilitude Jake could have done without, 
Eddie spoke up in a trembly (and better than passable) Bert Lahr imitation: 
"Wait a minute, fellas, I wuz just thinkin—I really don't wanna see the Wizard 
this much. I better wait for you outside!"
"Stop it," Jake said sharply.
"Oppit!" Oy agreed. He walked directly at Jake's heel, swinging his head 
watchfully from side to side as he went. Jake could hear no sound except for 
their own passage ... yet he sensed something: a sound that wasn't. It was, he 
thought, like looking at a wind-chime that wants only the slightest puff of 
breeze to set it tinkling.
"Sorry," Eddie said. "Really." He pointed. "Look down there."
About forty yards ahead of them, the green corridor did end, in a nar­row green 
doorway of amazing height—perhaps thirty feet from the floor to its pointed tip. 
And from behind it, Jake could now hear a steady thrumming sound. As they drew 
closer and the sound grew louder, his dread grew. He had to make a conscious 
effort to take the last dozen steps to the door. He knew this sound; he knew it 
from the run he'd made with Gasher under Lud, and from the run he and his 
friends had made on Blaine the Mono. It was the steady beat-beat-beat of 
slo-trans engines.
"It's like a nightmare," he said in a small, close-to-tears voice. "We're right 
back where we started."
"No, Jake," the gunslinger said, touching his hair. "Never think it. What you 
feel is an illusion. Stand and be true."
The sign on this door wasn't from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from 
Dante. abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it said.
Roland reached out with his two-fingered right hand and pulled the thirty-foot 
door open.
 
4
 
What lay beyond it was, to the eyes of Jake, Susannah, and Eddie, a weird 
combination of The Wizard of Oz and Blaine the Mono. A thick mg (pale blue, like 
the one in the Barony Coach) lay on the floor. The chamber was like the nave of 
a cathedral, soaring to impenetrable heights of greenish-black. The pillars 
which supported the glowing walls were great glass ribs of alternating green and 
pink light; the pink was the exact shade of Blaine's hull. Jake saw these 
supporting pillars had been carven with a billion different images, none of them 
comforting; they jostled the eye and unsettled the heart. There seemed to be a 
preponderance of screaming faces.
Ahead of them, dwarfing the visitors, turning them into creatures that seemed no 
bigger than ants, was the chamber's only furnishing: an enor­mous green glass 
throne. Jake tried to estimate its size and was unable— he had no 
reference-points to help him. He thought that the throne's back might be fifty 
feet high, but it could as easily have been seventy-five or a hundred. It was 
marked with the open eye symbol, this time traced in red instead of yellow. The 
rhythmic thrusting of the light made the eye seem alive; to be beating like a 
heart.
Above the throne, rising like the pipes of a mighty medieval organ, were 
thirteen great cylinders, each pulsing a different color. Each, that was, save 
for the pipe which ran directly down in back of the throne's center. That one 
was black as midnight and as still as death.
"Hey!" Susannah shouted from her chair. "Anyone here?"
At the sound of her voice, the pipes flashed so brilliantly that Jake had to 
shield his eyes. For a moment the entire throneroom glared like an ex­ploding 
rainbow. Then the pipes went out, went dark, went dead, just as the wizard's 
glass in Roland's story had done when the glass (or the force inhabiting the 
glass) decided to shut up for awhile. Now there was only the column of 
blackness, and the steady green pulse of the empty throne.
Next, a somehow tired humming sound, as of a very old servomechanism being 
called into use one final time, began to whine its way into their ears. Panels, 
each at least six feet long and two feet wide, slid open in the arms of the 
throne. From the black slots thus revealed, a rose-colored smoke began to drift 
out and up. As it rose, it darkened to a bright red. And in it, a terribly 
familiar zigzag line appeared. Jake knew what it was even before the words
{Lud Candleton Rilea The Falls of the Hounds Dasherville Topeka)
appeared, glowing smoke-bright.
It was Blaine's route-map.
Roland could say all he wanted about how things had changed, how Jake's feeling 
of being trapped in a nightmare
{this is the worst nightmare of my life, and that is the truth)
was just an illusion created by his confused mind and frightened heart, but Jake 
knew better. This place might look a little bit like the throneroom of Oz the 
Great and Terrible, but it was really Blaine the Mono. They were back aboard 
Blaine, and soon the riddling would begin all over again.
Jake felt like screaming.
 
5
 
Eddie recognized the voice that boomed out of the smoky route-map hanging above 
the green throne, but he believed it was Blaine the Mono no more than he 
believed it was the Wizard of Oz. Some wizard, perhaps, but this wasn't the 
Emerald City, and Blaine was just as dead as dogshit. Eddie had sent him home 
with a fuckin rupture.
"HELLO THERE AGAIN, LITTLE TRAILHANDS!"
The smoky route-map pulsed, but Eddie no longer associated it with the voice, 
although he guessed they were supposed to. No, the voice was coming from the 
pipes.
He glanced down, saw Jake's paper-white face, and knelt beside him. "If scrap, 
kid," he said.
"N-No ... it's Blaine ... not dead..."
"He's dead, all right. This is nothing but an amplified version of the 
after-school announcements . . . who's got detention and who's supposed to 
report to Room Six for Speech Therapy. You dig?"
"What?" Jake looked up at him, lips wet and trembling, eyes dazed. "What do 
you—"
"Those pipes are speakers. Even a pipsqueak can sound big through a 
twelve-speaker Dolby sound-system; don't you remember the movie? It has to sound 
big because it's a bumhug, Jake—just a bumhug."
"WHAT ARE YOU TELLING HIM, EDDIE OF NEW YORK? ONE OF YOUR STUPID, NASTY-MINDED 
LITTLE JOKES? ONE OF YOUR UNFAIR RIDDLES?"
"Yeah," Eddie said. "The one that goes, 'How many dipolar comput­ers does it 
take to screw in a lightbulb?' Who are you, buddy? 1 know goddam well you're not 
Blaine the Mono, so who are you?"
"I ... AM . . . Oz!" the voice thundered. The glass columns flashed; so did the 
pipes behind the throne. "OZ THE GREAT! OZ THE POWERFUL! WHO ARE YOU?"
Susannah rolled forward until her wheelchair was at the base of the dull green 
steps leading up to a throne that would have dwarfed even Lord Perth.
"I'm Susannah Dean, the small and crippled," she said, "and I was raised to be 
polite, but not to suffer bullshit. We're here because we're s'pozed to be 
here—why else did we get left the shoes?"
"WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME, SUSANNAH? WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE, LITTLE COWGIRL?"
"You know," she said. "We want what everyone wants, so far as I know—to go back 
home again, 'cause there's no place like home. We—"
"You can't go home," Jake said. He spoke in a rapid, frightened murmur. "You 
can't go home again, Thomas Wolfe said that, and that is the truth."
"It's a lie, sug," Susannah said. "A flat-out lie. You can go home again. All 
you have to do is find the right rainbow and walk under it. We've found it; the 
rest is just, you know, footwork."
"WOULD YOU GO BACK TO NEW YORK, SUSANNAH DEAN? EDDIE DEAN? JAKE CHAMBERS? IS 
THAT WHAT YOU ASK OF OZ, THE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL?"
"New York isn't home for us anymore," Susannah said. She looked very small yet 
very fearless as she sat in her new wheelchair at the foot of the enormous, 
pulsing throne. "No more than Gilead is home for Roland. Take us back to the 
Path of the Beam. That's where we want to go, be­cause that's our way home. Only 
way home we got."
"GO AWAY!" cried the voice from the pipes. "GO AWAY AND COME BACK TOMORROW! 
WE'LL DISCUSS THE BEAM THEN! FIDDLE-DE-DEE, SAID SCARLETT, WE'LL TALK ABOUT THE 
BEAM TOMORROW, FOR TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY!"
"No," Eddie said. "We'll talk about it now."
"DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POW­ERFUL OZ!" the voice cried, and 
the pipes flashed furiously with each word. Susannah was sure this was supposed 
to be scary, but she found it almost amusing, instead. It was like watching a 
salesman demonstrate a child's toy. Hey, kids! When you talk, the pipes flash 
bright colors! Try it and see!
"Sugar, you best listen, now," Susannah said. "What you don't want to do is 
arouse the wrath of folks with guns. Especially when you be livin in a glass 
house."
"I SAID COME BACK TOMORROW!"
Red smoke once more began to boil out of the slots in the arms of the throne. It 
was thicker now. The shape which had been Blaine's route-map melted apart and 
joined it. The smoke formed a face, this time. It was nar­row and hard and 
watchful, framed by long hair.
It's the man Roland shot in the desert, Susannah thought wonderingly. It's that 
man Jonas. I know it is.
Now Oz spoke in a slightly trembling voice: "DO YOU PRESUME TO THREATEN THE 
GREAT OZ?" The lips of the huge, smoky face hovering over the throne's seat 
parted in a snarl of mingled menace and contempt. "YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES! OH, 
YOU UNGRATE­FUL CREATURES!"
Eddie, who knew smoke and mirrors when he saw them, had glanced in another 
direction. His eyes widened and he gripped Susannah's arm above the elbow. 
"Look," he whispered. "Christ, Suze, look at Oy!"
The billy-bumbler had no interest in smoke-ghosts, whether they were monorail 
route-maps, dead Coffin Hunters, or just Hollywood spe­cial effects of the 
pre-World War II variety. He had seen (or smelled) something that was more 
interesting.
Susannah grabbed Jake, turned him, and pointed at the bumbler. She saw the boy's 
eyes widen with understanding a moment before Oy reached the small alcove in the 
left wall. It was screened from the main chamber by a green curtain which 
matched the glass walls. Oy stretched his long neck forward, caught the 
curtain's fabric in his teeth, and yanked it back.
 
6
 
Behind the curtain red and green lights flashed; cylinders spun inside glass 
boxes; needles moved back and forth inside long rows of lighted di­als. Yet Jake 
barely noticed these things. It was the man who took all his attention, the one 
sitting at the console, his back to them. His filthy hair, streaked with dirt 
and blood, hung to his shoulders in matted clumps. He was wearing some sort of 
headset, and was speaking into a tiny mike which hung in front of his mouth. His 
back was to them, and at first he had no idea that Oy had smelled him out and 
uncovered his hiding place.
"GO!" thundered the voice from the pipes . .. except now Jake saw where it was 
really coming from. "COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU LIKE, BUT GO NOW! I WARN YOU!"
"It is Jonas, Roland must not have killed him after all," Eddie whis­pered, but 
Jake knew better. He had recognized the voice. Even distorted by the 
amplification of the colored pipes, he had recognized the voice. How could he 
have ever believed it to be the voice of Blaine?
"I WARN YOU, IF YOU REFUSE—"
Oy barked, a sharp and somehow forbidding sound. The man in the equipment alcove 
began to turn.
Tell me, cully, Jake remembered this voice saying before its owner had 
discovered the dubious attractions of amplification. Tell me all you know about 
dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Tell me and I'll give you a drink.
It wasn't Jonas, and it wasn't the Wizard of anything. It was David Quick's 
grandson. It was the Tick-Tock Man.
 
7
 
Jake stared at him, horrified. The coiled, dangerous creature who had lived 
beneath Lud with his mates—Gasher and Hoots and Brandon and Tilly—was gone. This 
might have been that monster's ruined father ... or grandfather. His left 
eye—the one Oy had punctured with his claws— bulged white and misshapen, partly 
in its socket and partly on his un­shaven cheek. The right side of his head 
looked half-scalped, the skull showing through in a long, triangular strip. Jake 
had a distant, panic-darkened memory of a flap of skin falling over the side of 
Tick-Tock's face, but he had been on the edge of hysteria by that point... and 
was again now.
Oy had also recognized the man who had tried to kill him and was barking 
hysterically, head down, teeth bared, back bowed. Tick-Tock stared at him with 
wide, stunned eyes.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," said a voice from behind 
them, and then tittered. "My friend Andrew is having another in a long series of 
bad days. Poor boy. I suppose I was wrong to bring him out of Lud, but he just 
looked so lost..." The owner of the voice tittered again.
Jake swung around and saw that there was now a man sitting in the middle of the 
great throne, with his legs casually crossed in front of him. He was wearing 
jeans, a dark jacket that belted at the waist, and old, run­down cowboy boots. 
On his jacket was a button that showed a pig's head with a bullethole between 
the eyes. In his lap this newcomer held a draw­string bag. He rose, standing in 
the seat of the throne like a child in daddy's chair, and the smile dropped away 
from his face like loose skin. Now his eyes blazed, and his lips parted over 
vast, hungry teeth.
"Get them, Andrew! Get them! Kill them! Every sister-fucking one of them!"
"My life for you!" the man in the alcove screamed, and for the first time Jake 
saw the machine-gun propped in the comer. Tick-Tock sprang for it and snatched 
it up. "My life for you!"
He turned, and Oy was on him once again, leaping forward and up­ward, sinking 
his teeth deep into Tick-Tock's left thigh, just below the crotch.
Eddie and Susannah drew in unison, each raising one of Roland's big guns. They 
fired in concert, not even the smallest overlap in the sound of their shots. One 
of them tore off the top of Tick-Tock's miserable head, buried itself in the 
equipment, and created a loud but mercifully brief snarl of feedback. The other 
took him in the throat.
He staggered forward one step, then two. Oy dropped to the floor and backed away 
from him, snarling. A third step took Tick-Tock out into the throneroom proper. 
He raised his arms toward Jake, and the boy could read Ticky's hatred in his 
remaining green eye; the boy thought he could hear the man's last, hateful 
thought: Oh, you fucking little squint—
Then Tick-Tock collapsed forward, as he had collapsed in the Cradle of the Grays 
. . . only this time he would rise no more.
"Thus fell Lord Perth, and the earth did shake with that thunder," said the man 
on the throne.
Except he's not a man, Jake thought. Not a man at all. We've found the Wizard at 
last, I think. And I'm pretty sure I know what's in the bag he has.
"Marten," Roland said. He held out his left hand, the one which was still whole. 
"Marten Broadcloak. After all these years. After all these centuries.”
"Want this, Roland?"
Eddie put the gun he had used to kill the Tick-Tock Man in Roland's hand. A 
tendril of blue smoke was still rising from the barrel. Roland looked at the old 
revolver as if he had never seen it before, then slowly lifted it and pointed it 
at the grinning, rosy-cheeked figure sitting cross-legged on the Green Palace's 
throne.
"Finally," Roland breathed, thumbing back the trigger. "Finally in my sights."
 
8
 
"That six-shooter will do you no good, as I think you know," the man on the 
throne said. "Not against me. Only misfires against me, Roland, old fellow. 
How's the family, by the way? I seem to have lost touch with them over the 
years. I was always such a lousy correspondent. Someone ought to take a hosswhip 
to me, aye, so they should!"
He threw back his head and laughed. Roland pulled the trigger of the gun in his 
hand. When the hammer fell there was only a dull click.
"Toadjer," the man on the throne said. "I think you must have gotten some of 
those wet slugs in there by accident, don't you? The ones with the flat powder? 
Good for blocking the sound of the thinny, but not so good for shooting old 
wizards, are they? Too bad. And your hand, Roland, look at your hand! Short a 
couple of fingers, by the look. My, this has been hard on you, hasn't it? Things 
could get easier, though. You and your friends could have a fine, fruitful 
life—and, as Jake would say, that is the truth. No more lobstrosities, no more 
mad trains, no more disquiet­ing—not to mention dangerous—trips to other worlds. 
All you have to do is give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower."
"No," Eddie said.
"No," Susannah said.
"No," Jake said.
"No!" Oy said, and added a bark.
The dark man on the green throne continued to smile, unperturbed. "Roland?" he 
asked. "What about you?" Slowly, he raised the drawstring bag. It looked dusty 
and old. It hung from the wizard's fist like a teardrop, and now the thing in 
its pouch began to pulse with pink light. "Cry off, and they need never see 
what's inside this—they need never see the last scene of that sad long-ago play. 
Cry off. Turn from the Tower and go your way."
"No," Roland said. He began to smile, and as his smile broadened, that of the 
man sitting on the throne began to falter. "You can enchant my guns, those of 
this world, I reckon," he said.
"Roland, I don't know what you're thinking of, laddie, but I warn you not to—"
"Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten ... or 
Maerlyn ... or whoever you call yourself now..."
"Flagg, actually," the man on the throne said. "And we've met be­fore." He 
smiled. Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted 
Flagg's features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. "In the wreck of Gilead. 
You and your surviving pals—that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of 
your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made 
another—were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake's 
world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew 
until now that I saw you, as well."
"And will again, I reckon," Roland said. "Unless, that is, I kill you now and 
put an end to your interference."
Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in 
the waistband of his jeans—Jake's Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps 
immune to this creature's enchantments—with his right. And he was fast as he had 
always been fast, his speed blinding.
The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and 
the glass ball—once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland 
himself—slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, 
billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. 
Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he 
had made a clean draw. He didn't, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his 
reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took 
only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the 
quarter-second he had needed. He pumped three shots into the billowing smoke, 
then ran forward, oblivious of the shouts of the others.
He waved the smoke aside with his hands. His shots had shattered the back of the 
throne into thick green slabs of glass, but the man-shaped creature which had 
called itself Flagg was gone. Roland found himself al­ready beginning to wonder 
if he—or it had been there in the first place.
The ball was still there, however, unharmed and glowing the same en­ticing pink 
he remembered from so long ago—from Mejis, when he had been young and in love. 
This survivor of Maerlyn's Rainbow had rolled almost to the edge of the throne's 
seat; two more inches and it would have plunged over and shattered on the floor. 
Yet it had not; still it remained, this bewitched thing Susan Delgado had first 
glimpsed through the win­dow of Rhea's hut, under the light of the Kissing Moon.
Roland picked it up—how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his 
palm, even after all these years—and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. 
"You always did have a charmed life," he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as 
he had seen her in this ball—her ancient, laugh­ing eyes. He thought of the 
flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty 
shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.
Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown 
in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly . . . the tears of 
all those you've put to ruin.
And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back 
to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn't believe they actu­ally needed it. He 
thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been 
their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to 
Mid-World ... and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.
But you can't go yet, gunslinger. Not until you've finished your story, told the 
last scene.
Whose voice was that? Vannay's? No. Cort's? No. Nor was it the voice of his 
father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore's bed. That was the hardest 
voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to 
please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.
This time what he heard was the voice of ka—ka like a wind. He had told so much 
of that awful fourteenth year ... but he hadn't finished the tale. As with Detta 
Walker and the Blue Lady's forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden 
thing. The question wasn't, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find 
their way out of the Green Palace and re­cover the Path of the Beam; the 
question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, 
there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he 
had looked into the wizard's glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the 
welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them—
No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.
Yes. He knew better.
"Come," he said, turning to them.
They drew slowly around him, their eyes wide and filling with the ball's 
flashing pink light. Already they were half-hypnotized by it, even Oy.
"We are ka-tet," Roland said, holding the ball toward them. "We are one from 
many. I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. 
Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long 
after. See it once and for all; see it very well."
They looked. The ball, cupped in Roland's upraised hands, began to pulse faster. 
It gathered them in and swept them away. Caught and whirled in the grip of that 
pink storm, they flew over the Wizard's Rain­bow to the Gilead that had been.

 

 
 
CHAPTER.     IV
the glass

Jake of New York stands in an upper corridor of the Great Hall of Gilead—more 
castles, here in the green land, than Mayor's House. He looks around and sees 
Susannah and Eddie standing by a tapestry, their eyes big, their hands tightly 
entwined. And Susannah is standing; she has her legs back, at least for now, and 
what she called "cappies " have been replaced by a pair of ruby slippers exactly 
like those Dorothy wore when she stepped out upon her version of the Great Road 
to find the Wizard of Oz, that bumhug.
She has her legs because this is a dream, Jake thinks, but knows it is no dream. 
He looks down and sees Oy looking up at him with his anxious, intelligent, 
gold-ringed eyes. He is still wearing the red booties. Jake bends and strokes Oy 
's head. The feel of the humbler's fur under his hand is clear and real. No, 
this isn't a dream.
Yet Roland is not here, he realizes; they are four instead of five. He realizes 
something else as well: the air of this corridor is faintly pink, and small pink 
halos revolve around the funny, old-fashioned lightbulbs that illuminate the 
corridor. Something is going to happen; some story is go­ing to play out in 
front of their eyes. And now, as if the very thought had summoned them, the boy 
hears the click of approaching footfalls.
It's a story I know, Jake thinks. One I've been told before.
As Roland comes around the corner, he realizes what story it is: the one where 
Marten Broadcloak stops Roland as Roland passes by on his way to the rooftop, 
where it will perhaps be cooler. "You, boy, " Marten will say. "Come in! Don't 
stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you. " But of course that isn't 
the truth, was never the truth, will never be the truth, no matter how much time 
slips and bends. What Marten wants is for the boy to see his mother, and to 
understand that Gabrielle Deschain has become the mistress of his father's 
wizard. Marten wants to goad the boy into an early test of manhood while his 
father is away and can't put a stop to it; he wants to get the puppy out of his 
way before it can grow teeth long enough to bite.
Now they will see all this; the sad comedy will go its sad and pre­ordained 
course in front of their eyes. I'm too young, Jake thinks, but of course he is 
not too young; Roland will be only three years older when he comes to Mejis with 
his friends and meets Susan upon the Great Road. Only three years older when he 
loves her; only three years older when he loses her.
I don't care, I don't want to see it—
And won't, he realizes as Roland draws closer; all that has already happened. 
For this is not August, the time of Full Earth, but late fall or early winter. 
He can tell by the serape Roland wears, a souvenir of his trip to the Outer Arc, 
and by the vapor that smokes from his mouth and nose each time he exhales: no 
central heating in Gilead, and it's cold up here.
There are other changes as well: Roland is now wearing the guns which are his 
birthright, the big ones with the sandalwood grips. His fa­ther passed them on 
at the banquet, Jake thinks. He doesn't know how he knows this, but he does. And 
Roland's face, although still that of a boy, is not the open, untried face of 
the one who idled up this same corridor five months before; the boy who was 
ensnared by Marten has been through much since then, and his battle with Cort 
has been the very least of it.
Jake sees something else, too: the boy gunslinger is wearing the red cowboy 
boots. He doesn't know it, though. Because this isn't really happening.
Yet somehow it is. They are inside the wizard's glass, they are inside the pink 
storm (those pink halos revolving around the light fixtures re­mind Jake of The 
Falls of the Hounds, and the moonbows revolving in the mist), and this is 
happening all over again.
"Roland!" Eddie calls from where he and Susannah stand by the ta­pestry. 
Susannah gasps and squeezes his shoulder, wanting him to be silent, but Eddie 
ignores her. "No, Roland! Don't! Bad idea! " "No! Olan!" Oy yaps.
Roland ignores both of them, and he passes by Jake a hand's breadth away without 
seeing him. For Roland, they are not here; red boots or no red boots, this 
ka-tet is far in his future.
He stops at a door near the end of the corridor, hesitates, then raises his fist 
and knocks. Eddie starts down the corridor toward him, still hold­ing Susannah's 
hand... now he looks almost as if he is dragging her.
"Come on, Jake, " says Eddie.
"No, I don't want to."
"It's not about what you want, and you know it. We're supposed to see. If we 
can't stop him, we can at least do what we came here to do. Now come on!"
Heart heavy with dread, his stomach clenched in a knot, Jake comes along. As 
they approach Roland—the guns look enormous on his slim hips, and his unlined 
but already tired face somehow makes Jake feel like weeping—the gunslinger 
knocks again.
"She ain't there, sugar!" Susannah shouts at him. "She ain't there or she ain't 
answering the door, and which one it is don't matter to you! Leave it! Leave 
her! She ain't worth it! Just bein your mother don't make her worth it! Go 
away!"
But he doesn't hear her, either, and he doesn't go away. As Jake, Eddie, 
Susannah, and Oy gather unseen behind him, Roland tries the door to his mother's 
room and finds it unlocked. He opens it, revealing a shadowy chamber decorated 
with silk hangings. On the floor is a rug that looks like the Persians beloved 
of Jake's mother . . . only this rug, Jake knows, comes from the Province of 
Kashamin.
On the far side of the parlor, by a window which has been shuttered against the 
winter winds, Jake sees a low-backed chair and knows it is the one she was in on 
the day of Roland's manhood test; it is where she was sitting when her son 
observed the love-bite on her neck.
The chair is empty now, but as the gunslinger takes another step into the room 
and turns to look toward the apartment's bedroom, Jake ob­serves a pair of 
shoes—black, not red—beneath the drapes flanking the shuttered window.
"Roland!" he shouts. "Roland, behind the drapes! Someone behind the drapes! Look 
out!"
But Roland doesn't hear.
"Mother? " he calls, and even his voice is the same, Jake would know it anywhere 
. . . but it is such a magically freshened version of it! Young and uncracked by 
all the years of dust and wind and cigarette smoke. "Mother, it's Roland! I want 
to talk to you!"
Still no answer. He walks down the short hall which leads to the bed­room. Part 
of Jake wants to stay here in the parlor, to go to that drape and yank it aside, 
but he knows this isn't the way it's supposed to go. Even if he tried, he doubts 
it would do any good; his hand would likely pass right through, like the hand of 
a ghost.
"Come on, " Eddie says. "Stay with him."
They go in a cluster that might have been comic under other circum­stances. Not 
under these; here it is a case of three people desperate for the comfort of 
friends.
Roland stands looking at the bed against the room's left wall. He looks at it as 
if hypnotized. Perhaps he is trying to imagine Marten in it with his mother; 
perhaps he is remembering Susan, with whom he never slept in a proper bed, let 
alone a canopied luxury such as this. Jake can see the gunslinger's dim profile 
in a three-paneled mirror across the room, in an alcove. This triple glass 
stands in front of a small table the boy recognizes from his mother's side of 
his parents' bedroom; it is a vanity.
The gunslinger shakes himself and comes back from whatever thoughts have seized 
his mind. On his feet are those terrible boots; in this dim light, they look 
like the boots of a man who has walked through a creek of blood.
"Mother!"
He takes a step toward the bed and actually bends a little, as if he thinks she 
might be hiding under it. If she's been hiding, however, it wasn't there; the 
shoes which Jake saw beneath the drape were women's shoes, and the shape which 
now stands at the end of the short corridor, just out­side the bedroom door, is 
wearing a dress. Jake can see its hem.
And he sees more than that. Jake understands Roland's troubled rela­tionship 
with his mother and father better than Eddie or Susannah ever could, because 
Jake's own parents are peculiarly like them: Elmer Cham­bers is a gunslinger for 
the Network, and Megan Chambers has a long history of sleeping with sick 
friends. This is nothing Jake has been told, but he knows, somehow; he has 
shared khef with his mother and father, and he knows what he knows.
He knows something about Roland, as well: that he saw his mother in the wizard's 
glass. It was Gabrielle Deschain, fresh back from her retreat in Debaria, 
Gabrielle who would confess to her husband the errors of her ways and her 
thinking after the banquet, who would cry his pardon and beg to be taken back to 
his bed. . . and, when Steven drowsed after their lovemaking, she would bury the 
knife in his breast . . . or perhaps only lightly scratch his arm with it, not 
even waking him. With that knife, it would come to the same either way.
Roland had seen it all in the glass before finally turning the wretched thing 
over to his father, and Roland had put a stop to it. To save Steven Deschain 's 
life, Eddie and Susannah would have said, had they seen so far into the 
business, but Jake has the unhappy wisdom of unhappy chil­dren and sees further. 
To save his mother's life as well. To give her one last chance to recover her 
sanity, one last chance to stand at her hus­band's side and be true. One last 
chance to repent of Marten Broadcloak.
Surely she will, surely she must! Roland saw her face that day, how unhappy she 
was, and surely she must! Surely she cannot have chosen the magician! If he can 
only make her see . . .
So, unaware that he has once more lapsed into the unwisdom of the very 
young—Roland cannot grasp that unhappiness and shame are often no match for 
desire—he has come here to speak to his mother, to beg her to come back to her 
husband before it's too late. He has saved her from herself once, he will tell 
her, but he cannot do it again.
And if she still won't go, Jake thinks, or tries to brave it out, pretend she 
doesn't know what he's talking about, he'll give her a choice: leave Gilead with 
his help—now, tonight—or be clapped in chains tomorrow morning, a traitor so 
outrageous she will almost certainly be hung as Hax the cook was hung.
"Mother? " he calls, still unaware of the shape standing in the shad­ows behind 
him. He takes one further step into the room, and now the shape moves. The shape 
raises its hands. There is something in its hands. Not a gun, Jake can tell that 
much, but it has a deadly look to it, a snaky look, somehow—
"Roland, watch out!" Susannah shrieks, and her voice is like a magi­cal switch. 
There is something on the dressing table—the glass, of course;
Gabrielle has stolen it, it's what she 'II bring to her lover as a consolation 
prize for the murder her son prevented—and now it lights as if in re­sponse to 
Susannah's voice. It sprays brilliant pink light up the triple mir­ror and casts 
its glow back into the room. In that light, in that triple glass, Roland finally 
sees the figure behind him.
"Christ!" Eddie Dean shrieks, horrified. "Oh Christ, Roland! That's not your 
mother! That's—"
It's not even a woman, not really, not anymore; it is a kind of living corpse in 
a road-filthy black dress. There are only a few straggling tufts of hair left on 
her head and there's a gaping hole where her nose used to be, but her eyes still 
blaze, and the snake she holds wriggling between her hands is very lively. Even 
in his own horror, Jake has time to wonder if she got it from under the same 
rock where she found the one Roland killed.
It is Rhea who has been waiting for the gunslinger in his mother's apartment; it 
is the Coos, come not just to retrieve her glam but to finish with the boy who 
has caused her so much trouble.
"Now, ye trollop's get!" she cries shrilly, cackling. "Now ye'll pay!"
But Roland has seen her, in the glass he has seen her, Rhea betrayed by the very 
ball she came to take back, and now he is whirling, his hands dropping to his 
new guns with all their deadly speed. He is fourteen, his reflexes are the 
sharpest and quickest they 'II ever be, and he goes off like exploding 
gunpowder.
"No, Roland, don't!" Susannah screams. "It's a trick, it's a glam!"
Jake has just time to look from the mirror to the woman actually standing in the 
doorway; has just time to realize he, too, has been tricked.
Perhaps Roland also understands the truth at the last split-second— that the 
woman in the doorway really is his mother after all, that the thing in her hands 
isn't a snake but a belt, something she has made for him, a peace offering, 
mayhap, that the glass has lied to him in the only way it can...by reflection.
In any case, it's too late. The guns are out and thundering, their bright yellow 
flashes lighting the room. He pulls the trigger of each gun twice before he can 
stop, and the four slugs drive Gabrielle Deschain back into the corridor with 
the hopeful can-we-make-peace smile still on her face.
She dies that way, smiling.
Roland stands where he is, the smoking guns in his hands, his face cramped in a 
grimace of surprise and horror, just beginning to get the truth of what he must 
carry with him the rest of his life: he has used the guns of his father to kill 
his mother.
Now cackling laughter fills the room. Roland does not turn; he is frozen by the 
woman in the blue dress and black shoes who lies bleeding in the corridor of her 
apartment; the woman he came to save and has killed, instead. She lies with the 
hand-woven belt draped across her bleed­ing stomach.
Jake turns for him, and is not surprised to see a green-faced woman in a pointed 
black hat swimming inside the hall. It is the Wicked Witch of the East; it is 
also, he knows, Rhea of the Coos. She stares at the boy with the guns in his 
hands and bares her teeth at him in the most terrible grin Jake has ever seen in 
his life.
"I've burned the stupid girl ye loved—aye, burned her alive, I did— and now I've 
made ye a matricide. Do ye repent of killing my snake yet, gunslinger? My poor, 
sweet Ermot? Do ye regret playing yer hard games with one more trig than ye 'II 
ever be in yer miserable life? "
He gives no sign that he hears, only stares at his lady mother. Soon he will go 
to her, kneel by her, but not yet; not yet.
The face in the ball now turns toward the three pilgrims, and as it does it 
changes, becomes old and bald and raddled—becomes, in fact, the face Roland saw 
in the lying mirror. The gunslinger has been unable to see his future friends, 
but Rhea sees them; aye, she sees them very well.
"Cry it off! " she croaks—it is the caw of a raven sitting on a leafless branch 
beneath a winter-dimmed sky. "Cry it off! Renounce the Tower!"
"Never, you bitch, " Eddie says.
"Ye see what he is! What a monster he is! And this is only the beginning of it, 
ye ken! Ask him what happened to Cuthbert! To Alain—Alain 's touch, clever as 
'twas, saved him not in the end, so it didn't! Ask him what happened to Jamie De 
Curry! He never had a friend he didn't kill, never had a lover who's not dust in 
the wind!"
"Go your way, " Susannah says, "and leave us to ours. "
Rhea's green, cracked lips twist in a horrible sneer. "He's killed his own 
mother! What will he do to you, ye stupid brown-skinned bitch ? "
"He didn't kill her, " Jake said. "You killed her. Now go!"
Jake takes a step toward the ball, meaning to pick it up and dash it to the 
floor . . . and he can do that, he realizes, for the ball is real. It's the one 
thing in this vision that is. But before he can put his hands to it, it flashes 
a soundless explosion of pink light. Jake throws his hands up in front of his 
face to keep from being blinded, and then he is
(melting I'm melting what a world oh what a world) 
falling, he is being whirled down through the pink storm, out of Oz and back to 
Kansas, out of Oz and back to Kansas, out of Oz and back to—

 

 
 
CHAPTER      V
THE PATH OF 
THE BEAM
 
1
 
"—home," Eddie muttered. His voice sounded thick and punch-drunk to his own 
ears. "Back home, because there's no place like home, no indeed."
He tried to open his eyes and at first couldn't. It was as if they were glued 
shut. He put the heel of his hand to his forehead and pushed up, tightening the 
skin on his face. It worked; his eyes popped open. He saw neither the throneroom 
of the Green Palace nor (and this was what he had really expected) the richly 
appointed but somehow claustrophobic bed­room in which he had just been.
He was outside, lying in a small clearing of winter-white grass. Nearby was a 
little grove of trees, some still with their last brown leaves clinging to the 
branches. And one branch with an odd white leaf, an al­bino leaf. There was a 
pretty trickle of running water farther into the grove. Standing abandoned in 
the high grass was Susannah's new and im­proved wheelchair. There was mud on the 
tires, Eddie saw, and a few late leaves, crispy and brown, caught in the spokes. 
A few swatches of grass, too. Overhead was a skyful of still white clouds, every 
bit as interesting as a laundry-basket full of sheets.
The sky was clear when we went inside the Palace, he thought, and realized time 
had slipped again. How much or how little, he wasn't sure he wanted to 
know—Roland's world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped 
away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in 
overdrive.
Was this Roland's world, though? And if it was, how had they gotten back to it?
"How should I know?" Eddie croaked, and got slowly to his feet, wincing as he 
did so. He didn't think he was hungover, but his legs were sore and he felt as 
if he had just taken the world's heaviest Sunday after­noon nap.
Roland and Susannah lay on the ground under the trees. The gunslinger was 
stirring, but Susannah lay on her back, arms spread extravagantly wide, snoring 
in an unladylike way that made Eddie grin. Jake was nearby, with Oy sleeping on 
his side by one of the kid's knees. As Eddie looked at them, Jake opened his 
eyes and sat up. His gaze was wide but blank; he was awake, but had been so 
heavily asleep he didn't know it yet.
"Gruz," Jake said, and yawned.
"Yep," Eddie said, "that works for me." He turned in a slow circle, and had 
gotten three quarters of the way back to where he'd started when he saw the 
Green Palace on the horizon. From here it looked very small, and its brilliance 
had been robbed by the sunless day. Eddie guessed it might be thirty miles away. 
Leading toward them from that direction were the tracks of Susannah's 
wheelchair.
He could hear the thinny, but faintly. He thought he could see it, as well—a 
quicksilver shimmer like bogwater, stretching across the flat, open land .. . 
and finally drying up about five miles away. Five miles west of here? Given the 
location of the Green Palace and the fact that they had been travelling east on 
1-70, that was the natural assumption, but who really knew, especially with no 
visible sun to use for orientation?
"Where's the turnpike?" Jake asked. His voice sounded thick and gummy. Oy joined 
him, stretching first one rear leg, then the other. Eddie saw he had lost one of 
his booties at some point.
"Maybe it was cancelled due to lack of interest."
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," Jake said. Eddie looked at him sharply, 
but didn't believe the kid was consciously riffing on The Wizard of Oz. "Not the 
one where the Kansas City Royals play, not the one where the Monarchs play, 
either."
"What gives you that idea?"
Jake hoisted a thumb toward the sky, and when Eddie looked up, he saw that he 
had been wrong: it wasn't all still white overcast, boring as a basket of 
sheets. Directly above their heads, a band of clouds was moiling toward the 
horizon as steadily as a conveyor belt.
They were back on the Path of the Beam.
 
2
 
"Eddie? Where you at, sugar?"
Eddie looked down from the lane of clouds in the sky and saw Susan­nah sitting 
up, rubbing the back of her neck. She looked unsure of where she was. Perhaps 
even of who she was. The red cappies she was wearing looked oddly dull in this 
light, but they were still the brightest things in Eddie's view ... until he 
looked down at his own feet and saw the street-boppers with their Cuban heels. 
Yet these also looked dull, and Eddie no longer thought it was just the day's 
cloudy light that made them seem so. He looked at Jake's shoes, Oy's remaining 
three slippers, Roland's cow­boy boots (the gunslinger was sitting up now, arms 
crossed around his knees, looking blankly off into the distance). All the same 
ruby red, but a lifeless red, somehow. As if some magic essential to them had 
been used up.
Suddenly, Eddie wanted them off his feet.
He sat down beside Susannah, gave her a kiss, and said: "Good morning, Sleeping 
Beauty. Or afternoon, if it's that." Then, quickly, almost hating to touch them 
(it was like touching dead skin, somehow), Eddie yanked off the street-boppers. 
As he did, he saw that they were scuffed at the toes and muddy at the heels, no 
longer new looking. He'd wondered how they'd gotten here; now, feeling the ache 
in the muscles of his legs and remembering the wheelchair tracks, he knew. They 
had walked, by God. Walked in their sleep.
"That," Susannah said, "is the best idea you've had since . . . well, in a long 
time." She stripped off the cappies. Close by, Eddie saw Jake tak­ing off Oy's 
booties. "Were we there?" Susannah asked him. "Eddie, were we really there when 
he..."
"When I killed my mother," Roland said. "Yes, you were there. As I was. Gods 
help me, I was there. I did it." He covered his face with his hands and began to 
voice a series of harsh sobs.
Susannah crawled across to him in that agile way that was almost a version of 
walking. She put an arm around him and used her other hand to take his hands 
away from his face. At first Roland didn't want to let her do that, but she was 
persistent, and at last his hands—those killer's hands—came down, revealing 
haunted eyes which swam with tears.
Susannah urged his face down against her shoulder. "Be easy, Roland," she said. 
"Be easy and let it go. This part is over now. You past it."
"A man doesn't get past such a thing," Roland said. "No, I don't think so. Not 
ever."
"You didn't kill her," Eddie said.
"That's too easy." The gunslinger's face was still against Susannah's shoulder, 
but his words were clear enough. "Some responsibilities can't be shirked. Some 
sins can't be shirked. Yes, Rhea was there—in a way, at least—but I can't shift 
it all to the Coos, much as I might like to."
"It wasn't her, either," Eddie said. "That's not what I mean."
Roland raised his head. "What in hell's name are you talking about?"
"Ka, " Eddie said. "Ka like a wind."
 
3
 
In their packs there was food none of them had put there—cookies with Keebler 
elves on the packages, Saran Wrapped sandwiches that looked like the kind you 
could get (if you were desperate, that was) from turnpike vending machines, and 
a brand of cola neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake knew. It tasted like Coke and 
came in a red and white can, but the brand was Nozz-A-La.
They ate a meal with their backs to the grove and their faces to the distant 
glam-gleam of the Green Palace, and called it lunch. If we start to lose the 
light in an hour or so, we can make it supper by voice vote, Eddie thought, but 
he didn't believe they'd need to. His interior clock was run­ning again now, and 
that mysterious but usually accurate device sug­gested that it was early 
afternoon.
At one point he stood up and raised his soda, smiling into an invisible camera. 
"When I'm travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink 
Nozz-A-La!" he proclaimed. "It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me 
happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and 
the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain't I glad to be 
alive!' I say—"
"Sit down, you bumhug," Jake said, laughing.
"Ug," Oy agreed. His snout was on Jake's ankle, and he was watch­ing the boy's 
sandwich with great interest.
Eddie started to sit, and then that strange albino leaf caught his eye again. 
That's no leaf, he thought, and walked over to it. No, not a leaf but a scrap of 
paper. He turned it over and saw columns of "blah blah" and "yak yak" and "all 
the stuff's the same." Usually newspapers weren't blank on one side, but Eddie 
wasn't surprised to find this one was—the Oz Daily Buzz had only been a prop, 
after all.
Nor was the blank side blank. Printed on it in neat, careful letters, was this 
message:

Below that, a little drawing:

 
Eddie brought the note back to where the others were eating. Each of them looked 
at it. Roland held it last, ran his thumb over it thoughtfully, feeling the 
texture of the paper, then gave it back to Eddie.
"R.F.," Eddie said. "The man who was running Tick-Tock. This is from him, isn't 
it?"
"Yes. He must have brought the Tick-Tock Man out of Lud."
"Sure," Jake said darkly. "That guy Flagg looked like someone who'd know a 
first-class bumhug when he found one. But how did they get here before us? What 
could be faster than Blaine the Mono, for cripe's sake?"
"A door," Eddie said. "Maybe they came through one of those special doors."
"Bingo," Susannah said. She held her hand out, palm up, and Eddie slapped it.
"In any case, what he suggests is not bad advice," Roland said. "I urge you to 
consider it most seriously. And if you want to go back to your world, I will 
allow you to go."
"Roland, I can't believe you," Eddie said. "This, after you dragged me and Suze 
over here, kicking and screaming? You know what my brother would say about you? 
That you're as contrary as a hog on ice-skates."
"I did what I did before I learned to know you as friends," Roland said. "Before 
I learned to love you as I loved Alain and Cuthbert. And be­fore I was forced to 
... to revisit certain scenes. Doing that has ..." He paused, looking down at 
his feet (he had put his old boots back on again) and thinking hard. At last he 
looked up again. "There was a part of me that hadn't moved or spoken in a good 
many years. 1 thought it was dead. It isn't. I have learned to love again, and 
I'm aware that this is probably my last chance to love. I'm slow—Vannay and Cort 
knew that; so did my father—but I'm not stupid."
"Then don't act that way," Eddie said. "Or treat us as if we were."
"What you call 'the bottom line,' Eddie, is this: I get my friends killed. And 
I'm not sure I can even risk doing that again. Jake especially.. . I... never 
mind. I don't have the words. For the first time since I turned around in a dark 
room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the 
Tower. Leave it at that."
"All right, I guess I can respect that."
"So can I," Susannah said, "but Eddie's right about ka." She took the note and 
ran a finger over it thoughtfully. "Roland, you can't talk about that—ka, I 
mean—then turn around and take it back again, just because you get a little low 
on willpower and dedication."
"Willpower and dedication are good words," Roland remarked. "There's a bad one, 
though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession."
She shrugged it away with an impatient twitch of her shoulders. "Sugarpie, 
either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be—the 
idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound's nose— I find the idea of no ka 
even scarier." She tossed the R.F. note aside on the matted grass.
"Whatever you call it, you're just as dead if it runs you over," Roland said. 
"Rimer . . . Thorin . . . Jonas . . . my mother . . . Cuthbert . . . Susan. Just 
ask them. Any of them. If you only could."
"You're missing the biggest part of this," Eddie said. "You can't send us back. 
Don't you realize that, you big galoot? Even if there was a door, we wouldn't go 
through it. Am I wrong about that?"
He looked at Jake and Susannah. They shook their heads. Even Oy shook his head. 
No, he wasn't wrong.
"We've changed," Eddie said. "We..." Now he was the one who didn't know how to 
go on. How to express his need to see the Tower . . . and his other need, just 
as strong, to go on carrying the gun with the sandal-wood insets. The big iron 
was how he'd come to think of it. Like in that old Marty Robbins song about the 
man with the big iron on his hip. "It's ka," he said. It was all he could think 
of that was big enough to cover it.
"Kaka," Roland replied, after a moment's consideration. The three of them stared 
at him, mouths open. Roland of Gilead had made a joke.
 
4
 
"There's one thing I don't understand about what we saw," Susannah said 
hesitantly. "Why did your mother hide behind that drape when you came in, 
Roland? Did she mean to..." She bit her lip, then brought it out. "Did she mean 
to kill you?"
"If she'd meant to kill me, she wouldn't have chosen a belt as her weapon. The 
very fact that she had made me a present—and that's what it was, it had my 
initials woven into it—suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she 
had had a change of heart."
Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a 
question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way 
back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his 
mother's apartment, and that was enough.
"I think she hid because she was ashamed," the gunslinger said. "Or because she 
needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain."
"And the ball?" Susannah asked him gently. "Was it on the vanity table, where we 
saw it? And did she steal it from your father?"
"Yes to both," Roland said. "Although . . . did she steal it?" He seemed to ask 
this question of himself. "My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes 
kept what he knew to himself."
"Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other," Susannah 
said.
"Yes."
"But, Roland . .. you surely don't believe that your father would knowingly have 
allowed you to ... to ..."
Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he 
tried to smile at her question, he was unable. "Have knowingly allowed his son 
to kill his wife?" he asked. "No, I can't say that. Much as I'd like to, I 
can't. That he should have caused such a thing to have hap­pened, to have 
deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles . . . that I cannot 
believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly."
"What happened to the ball?" Jake asked.
"I don't know. I fainted. When I awoke, my mother and 1 were still alone, one 
dead and one alive. No one had come to the sound of the shots—the walls of that 
place were thick stone, and that wing mostly empty as well. Her blood had dried. 
The belt she'd made me was covered with it, but I took it, and I put it on. I 
wore that bloodstained gift for many years, and how I lost it is a tale for 
another day—I'll tell it to you before we have done, for it bears on my quest 
for the Tower.
"But although no one had come to investigate the gunshots, someone had come for 
another reason. While I lay fainted away by my mother's corpse, that someone 
came in and took the wizard's glass away."
"Rhea?" Eddie asked.
"I doubt she was so close in her body ... but she had a way of making friends, 
that one. Aye, a way of making friends. I saw her again, you know." Roland 
explained no further, but a stony gleam arose in his eyes. Eddie had seen it 
before, and knew it meant killing.
Jake had retrieved the note from R.F. and now gestured at the little drawing 
beneath the message. "Do you know what this means?"
"I have an idea it's the sigul of a place I saw when I first travelled in the 
wizard's glass. The land called Thunderclap." He looked around at them, one by 
one. "I think it's there that we'll meet this man—this thing—named Flagg again."
Roland looked back the way they had come, sleepwalking in their fine red shoes. 
"The Kansas we came through was his Kansas, and the plague that emptied out that 
land was his plague. At least, that's what I believe."
"But it might not stay there," Susannah said.
"It could travel," Eddie said.
"To our world," Jake said.
Still looking back toward the Green Palace, Roland said: "To your world, or any 
other."
"Who's the Crimson King?" Susannah asked abruptly.
"Susannah, I know not."
They were quiet, then, watching Roland look toward the palace where he had faced 
a false wizard and a true memory and somehow opened the door back to his own 
world by so doing.
Our world, Eddie thought, slipping an arm around Susannah. Our world now. If we 
go back to America, and perhaps we'll have to before this is over, we 'II arrive 
as strangers in a strange land, no matter what when it is. This is our world 
now. The world of the Beams, and the Guardians, and the Dark Tower.
"We got some daylight left," he said to Roland, and put a hesitant hand on the 
gunslinger's shoulder. When Roland immediately covered it with his own hand, 
Eddie smiled. "You want to use it, or what?"
"Yes," Roland said. "Let's use it." He bent and shouldered his pack.
"What about the shoes?" Susannah asked, looking doubtfully at the little red 
pile they had made.
"Leave them here," Eddie said. "They've served their purpose. Into your 
wheelchair, girl." He put his arms around her and helped her in.
"All God's children have shoes," Roland mused. "Isn't that what you said, 
Susannah?"
"Well," she said, settling herself, "the correct dialect adds a soupcon of 
flavor, but you've got the essence, honey, yes."
"Then we'll undoubtedly find more shoes as God wills it," Ro­land said.
Jake was looking into his knapsack, taking inventory of the foodstuffs that had 
been added by some unknown hand. He held up a chicken leg in a Baggie, looked at 
it, then looked at Eddie. "Who do you suppose packed this stuff?"
Eddie raised his eyebrows, as if to ask Jake how he could possibly be so stupid. 
"The Keebler Elves," he said. "Who else? Come on, let's go."
 
5
 
They clustered near the grove, five wanderers on the face of an empty land. 
Ahead of them, running across the plain, was a line in the grass which exactly 
matched the lane of rushing clouds in the sky. This line was nothing so obvious 
as a path . . . but to the awakened eye, the way that everything bent in the 
same direction was as clear as a painted stripe.
The Path of the Beam. Somewhere ahead, where this Beam inter­sected all the 
others, stood the Dark Tower. Eddie thought that, if the wind were right, he 
would almost be able to smell its sullen stone.
And roses—the dusky scent of roses.
He took Susannah's hand as she sat in her chair; Susannah took Roland's; Roland 
took Jake's. Oy stood two paces before them, head up, scenting the autumn air 
that combed his fur with unseen fingers, his gold-ringed eyes wide.
"We are ka-tet," Eddie said. It crossed his mind to wonder at how much he'd 
changed; how he had become a stranger, even to himself. "We are one from many."
"Ka-tet, " Susannah said. "We are one from many."
"One from many," Jake said. "Come on, let's go."
Bird and bear and hare and fish, Eddie thought.
With Oy in the lead, they once more set out for the Dark Tower, walking along 
the Path of the Beam.

 

 
 
AFTERWORD

The scene in which Roland bests his old teacher, Cort, and goes off to roister 
in the less savory section of Gilead was written in the spring of 1970. The one 
in which Roland's father shows up the following morning was written in the 
sum­mer of 1996. Although only sixteen hours pass between the two occurrences in 
the world of the story, twenty-six years had passed in the life of the story's 
teller. Yet the moment finally came, and I found myself confronting myself 
across a whore's bed—the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard 
on one side, the successful popular novelist ("America's shlockmeister," as I am 
affectionately known by my legions of admiring critics) on the other.
I mention this only because it sums up the essential weirdness of the Dark Tower 
experience for me. I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a 
solar system of the imagination, but Roland's story is my Jupiter—a planet that 
dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange 
atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, 
did I say? I think there's more to it than that, actually. I am coming to 
understand that Roland's world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of 
my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the 
wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned 
priest from 'Salem 's Lot, who rode out of New England on a Grey­hound Bus and 
wound up dwelling on the border of a terrible Mid-World land called Thunderclap. 
This seems to be where they all finish up, and why not? Mid-World was here 
first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland's bombardier 
eyes.
This book has been too long in coming—a good many readers who enjoy Roland's 
adventures have all but howled in frustration—and for that I apolo­gize. The 
reason is best summed up by Susannah's thought as she prepares to tell Blaine 
the first riddle of their contest: It is hard to begin. There's nothing in these 
pages that I agree with more.
I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland's young days, and to 
his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Sus­pense is 
relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard. Consequently I dallied, I 
temporized, I procrastinated, and the book remained unwritten.
I began at last, working in motel rooms on my Macintosh PowerBook, while driving 
cross-country from Colorado to Maine after finishing my work on the miniseries 
version of The Shining. It occurred to me as I drove north through the deserted 
miles of western Nebraska (where I also happened to be, driving back from 
Colorado, when I got the idea for a story called "Children of the Corn"), that 
if I didn't start soon, I would never write the book at all.
But I no longer know the truth of romantic love, I told myself. I know about 
marriage, and mature love, but forty-eight has a way of forgetting the heat and 
passion of seventeen.
I will help you with that part, came the reply. I didn't know who that voice 
belonged to on that day outside Thetford, Nebraska, but I do now, be­cause I 
have looked into his eyes across a whore's bed in a land that exists very 
clearly in my imagination. Roland's love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is 
what was told to me by the boy who began this story. If it's right, thank him. 
If it's wrong, blame whatever got lost in the translation.
Also thank my friend Chuck Verrill, who edited the book and hung with me every 
step of the way. His encouragement and help were invaluable, as was the 
encouragement of Elaine Koster, who has published all of these cow­boy romances 
in paperback.
Most thanks of all go to my wife, who supports me in this madness as best she 
can and helped me on this book in a way she doesn't even know. Once, in a dark 
time, she gave me a funny little rubber figure that made me smile. It's Rocket 
J. Squirrel, wearing his blue aviator's hat and with his arms bravely 
outstretched. I put that figure on my manuscript as it grew (and grew ... and 
grew), hoping some of the love that came with it would kind of fertilize the 
work. It must have worked, at least to a degree; the book is here, after all. I 
don't know if it's good or bad—I lost all sense of perspective around page four 
hundred—but it's here. That alone seems like a miracle. And I have started to 
believe I might actually live to complete this cycle of stories. (Knock on 
wood.)
There are three more to be told, I think, two set chiefly in Mid-World and one 
almost entirely in our world—that's the one dealing with the vacant lot on the 
comer of Second and Forty-sixth, and the rose that grows there. That rose, I 
must tell you, is in terrible danger.
In the end; Roland's ka-tet will come to the nightscape which is Thunderclap . . 
. and to what lies beyond it. All may not live to reach the Tower, but I believe 
that those who do reach it will stand and be true. 
—Stephen King
Lovell, Maine, October 27, 1996 
 
STEPHEN KING, the world's best selling novelist, is the author of more than 
thirty books, most recently Desperation, Rose Madder, Insomnia, and The Green 
Mile. His four volumes in the Dark Tower series, including The Gunslinger, The 
Drawing of the Three, and The Waste Lands, are all available in Plume trade 
paperback editions. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha 
King.