it up to the moonlight. A red silk riding shirt, one of Mayor Thorin’s presents to Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. One of those she wouldn’t wear. Whore’s clothes, she had called them. And what did that make Cordelia Delgado, who had taken care of her even after her bullheaded da had decided he must stand against the likes of Fran Lengyll and John Croydon? It made her a whorehouse madam, she supposed.
This thought led to an image of Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin, naked and striving while a honky-tonk piano planked out “Red Dirt Boogie” below them, and Cordelia moaned like a dog.
She yanked the silk shirt over the stuffy’s head. Next came one of Susan’s split riding skirts. After the skirt, a pair of her slippers. And last, replacing the sombrero, one of Susan’s spring bonnets.
Presto! The stuffy-guy was now a stuffy-gal.
“And caught red-handed ye are,” she whispered. “I know. Oh yes, I know. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
She carried the stuffy from the garden to the pile of leaves on the lawn. She laid it close by the leaves, then scooped some up and pushed them into the bodice of the riding shirt, making rudimentary breasts. That done, she took a match from her pocket and struck it alight.
The wind, as if eager to cooperate, dropped. Cordelia touched the match to the dry leaves. Soon the whole pile was blazing. She picked the stuffy-gal up in her arms and stood with it in front of the fire. She didn’t hear the rattling firecrackers from town, or the wheeze of the steam-organ in Green Heart, or the mariachi band playing in the Low Market; when a burning leaf rose and swirled past her hair, threatening to set it alight, she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were wide and blank.
When the fire was at its height, she stepped to its edge and threw the stuffy on. Flame whumped up around it in bright orange gusts; sparks and burning leaves swirled skyward in a funnel.
“So let it be done!” Cordelia cried. The firelight on her face turned her tears to blood. “Charyou tree! Aye, just so!”
The thing in the riding clothes caught fire, its face charring, its red hands blazing, its white-cross eyes turning black. Its bonnet flared; the face began to bum.
Cordelia stood and watched, fists clenching and unclenching, heedless of the sparks that lit on her skin, heedless of the blazing leaves that swirled toward the house. Had the house caught tire, she would likely have ignored that as well.
She watched until the stuffy dressed in her niece’s clothes was nothing but ashes lying atop more ashes. Then, as slowly as a robot with rust in its works, she walked back to the house, lay down on the sofa, and slept like the dead.
13
It was three-thirty in the morning of the day before Reaping, and Stanley Ruiz thought he was finally done for the night. The last music had quit twenty minutes ago-Sheb had outlasted the mariachis by an hour or so, and now lay snoring with his face in the sawdust. Sai Thorin was upstairs, and there had been no sign of the Big Coffin Hunters; Stanley had an idea those were up to Seafront tonight. He also had an idea there was black work on offer, although he didn’t know that for sure. He looked up at the glassy, two-headed gaze of The Romp. “Nor want to, old pal,” he said. “All I want is about nine hours of sleep-tomorrow comes the real party, and they won’t leave till dawn. So-”
A shrill scream rose from somewhere behind the building. Stanley jerked backward, thumping into the bar. Beside the piano, Sheb raised his head briefly, muttered “Wuzzat?” and dropped it back with a thump.
Stanley had absolutely no urge to investigate the source of the scream, but he supposed he would, just the same. It had sounded like that sad old bitch Pettie the Trotter. “I’d like to trot your saggy old ass right out of town,” he muttered, then bent down to look under the bar. There were two stout ashwood clubs here, The Calmer and The Killer. The Calmer was smooth buried wood, guaranteed to put out the lights for two hours any time you tapped some boisterous cull’s head in the right place with it.
Stanley consulted his feelings and took the other club. It was shorter than The Calmer, wider at the top. And the business end of The Killer was studded with nails.
Stanley went down to the end of the bar, through the door, and across a dim supply-room stacked with barrels smelling of graf and whiskey. At the rear was a door giving on the back yard. Stanley approached it, took a deep breath, and unlocked it. He kept expecting Pettie to voice another head-bursting scream, but none came. There was only the sound of the wind.
Maybe you got lucky and she’s kilt, Stanley thought. He opened the door, stepping back and raising the nail-studded club at the same time.
Pettie wasn’t kilt. Dressed in a stained shift (a Pettie-skirt, one might say), the whore was standing on the path which led to the back privy, her hands clutched together above the swell of her bosom and below the drooping turkey-wattles of her neck. She was looking up at the sky.
“What is it?” Stanley asked, hurrying down to her. “Near scared ten years off my life, ye did.”
“The moon, Stanley!” she whispered. “Oh, look at the moon, would ye!”
He looked up, and what he saw set his heart thumping, but he tried to speak reasonably and calmly. “Come now, Pettie, it’s dust, that’s all. Be reasonable, dear, ye know how the wind’s blown these last few days, and no rain to knock down what it carries; it’s dust, that’s all.”
Yet it didn’t look like dust.
“I know what I see,” whispered Pettie.
Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.
Chapter VII
TAKING THE BALL
1
While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.
Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next two days, I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into-
Something fluffed the end of his nose, and he sneezed again. Coming out of his narrow chest and dry slot of a mouth, it sounded like a small-caliber pistol-shot in the black room.
“Who’s there?” he cried.
No answer. Rimer suddenly imagined a bird, something nasty and bad-tempered, that had gotten in here in daylight and was now flying around in the dark, fluttering against his face as he slept. His skin crawled-birds, bugs, bats, he hated them all-and he fumbled so energetically for the gas-lamp on the table by his bed that he almost knocked it off onto the floor.
As he drew it toward him, that flutter came again. This time puffing at his cheek. Rimer screamed and recoiled against the pillows, clutching the lamp to his chest. He turned the switch on the side, heard the hiss of gas, then pushed the spark. The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed. In one hand Reynolds held the feather with which he had been tickling Mejia’s Chancellor. His other was hidden in his cloak, which lay in his lap.
Reynolds had disliked Rimer from their first meeting in the woods far west of town-those same woods, beyond Eyebolt Canyon, where Far-son’s man Latigo now quartered the main contingent of his troops. It had been a windy night, and as he and the other Coffin Hunters entered the little glade where Rimer, accompanied by Lengyll and Croydon, were sitting by a small fire, Reynolds’s cloak swirled around him. “Sai Manto,” Rimer had said, and the other two had laughed. It had been meant as a harmless joke, but it hadn’t seemed harmless to Reynolds. In many of the lands where he had travelled, manto meant not “cloak” but “leaner” or “bender.” It was, in fact, a slang term for homosexual. That Rimer (a provincial man under his veneer of cynical sophistication) didn’t know this never crossed Reynolds’s mind. He knew when people were making small of him, and if he could make such a person pay, he did so.
For Kimba Rimer, payday had come.
“Reynolds? What are you doing? How did you get in h-”
“You got to be thinking of the wrong cowboy,” the man sitting on the bed replied. “No Reynolds here. Just Senor Manto.” He took out the hand which had been under his cloak. In it was a keenly honed cuchillo. Reynolds had purchased it in Low Market with this chore in mind. He raised it now and drove the twelve-inch blade into Rimer’s chest. It went all the way through, pinning him like a bug. A bedbug, Reynolds thought.
The lamp fell out of Rimer’s hands and rolled off the bed. It landed on the foot-runner, but did not break. On the far wall was Kimba Rimer’s distorted, struggling shadow. The shadow of the other man bent over it like a hungry vulture.
Reynolds lifted the hand which had held the knife. He turned it so the small blue tattooed coffin between thumb and forefinger was in front of Rimer’s eyes. He wanted it to be the last thing Rimer saw on this side of the clearing.
“Let’s hear you make fun of me now,” Reynolds said. He smiled. “Come on. Let’s just hear you.”
2
Shortly before five o'clock, Mayor Thorin woke from a terrible dream. In it, a bird with pink eyes had been cruising slowly back and forth above the Barony. Wherever its shadow fell, the grass turned yellow, the leaves fell shocked from the trees, and the crops died. The shadow was turning his green and pleasant Barony into a waste land. It may be my Barony, but it’s my bird, too, he thought just before awakening, huddled into a shuddery ball on one side of his bed. My bird, I brought it here, I let it out of its cage. There would be no more sleep for him this night, and Thorin knew it. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it, then walked into his study, absently picking his nightgown from the cleft of his bony old ass as he went. The puff on the end of his nightcap bobbed between his shoulder blades; his knees cracked at every step.
As for the guilty feelings expressed by the dream… well, what was done was done. Jonas and his friends would have what they’d come for (and paid so handsomely for) in another day; a day after that, they’d be gone. Fly away, bird with the pink eyes and pestilent shadow; fly away to wherever you came from and take the Big Coffin Boys with you. He had an idea that by Year’s End he’d be too busy dipping his wick to think much about such things. Or to dream such dreams.
