The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (65 page)

“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.

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 stormclouds 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.”

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’ll 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 corners 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 corners 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 corner, and got down on all fours.

“That’s it, my
corazón
!” 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 corners, 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 corners. 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 Cöos!”

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.

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.

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.”