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 ’ 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
