“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?
