The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (37 page)

“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.

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 corners 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 brushpile, 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 Eyebolt 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 back 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 a part 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.”

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.”