The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (72 page)

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 corner, 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—arrr, 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 Mannifolk 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.

“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 Rusher’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.”

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 corner 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 corners 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.”

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?”