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 Coos!”
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.
10
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.
11
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.”
“Never mind yer sops, time’s too short for em.” She came four steps farther and stopped with the ball still held over her head. Near her, a gray chunk of stone jutted from the weedy ground. She looked at it, then back at Jonas. The implication was unspoken but unmistakable.
“What do you want?” Jonas asked.
“The ball’s gone dark,” she said, answering from the side. “All the time I had it in my keeping, it was lively-aye, even when it showed nothing I could make out, it was passing lively, bright and pink-but it fell dark almost at the sound of yer voice. It doesn’t want to go with ye.”
“Nevertheless, I’m under orders to take it.” Jonas’s voice became soft and conciliating. It wasn’t the tone he used when he was in bed with Coral, but it was close. “Think a minute, and you’ll see my situation. Far-son wants it, and who am I to stand against the wants of a man who’ll be the most powerful in Mid-World when Demon Moon rises next year? If I come back without it and say Rhea of the Coos refused me it, I’ll be killed.”
“If ye come back and tell him I broke it in yer ugly old face, ye’ll be killed, too,” Rhea said. She was close enough for Jonas to see how far her sickness had eaten into her. Above the few remaining tufts of her hair, the wretched ball was trembling back and forth. She wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer. A minute at most. Jonas felt a dew of sweat spring out on his forehead.
“Aye, mother. But d'you know, given a choice of deaths, I’d choose to take the cause of my problem with me. That’s you, darling.”
She croaked again-that dusty replica of laughter-and nodded appreciatively.” 'Twon’t do Farson any good without me in any case,” she said. “It’s found its mistress, I wot-that’s why it went dark at the sound of yer voice.”
Jonas wondered how many others had believed the ball was just for them. He wanted to wipe the sweat from his brow before it ran in his eyes, but kept his hands in front of him, folded neatly on the horn of his saddle.
He didn’t dare look at either Reynolds or Depape. and could only hope they would leave the play to him. She was balanced on both a physical and mental knife-edge; the smallest movement would send her tumbling off in one direction or the other.
“Found the one it wants, has it?” He thought he saw a way out of this. If he was lucky. And it might be lucky for her, as well. “What should we do about that?”
“Take me with ye.” Her face twisted into an expression of gruesome greed; she looked like a corpse that is trying to sneeze. She doesn’t realize she’s dying, Jonas thought. Thank the gods for that. “Take the ball, but take me, as well. I’ll go with ye to Farson. I’ll become his soothsayer, and nothing will stand before us, not with me to read the ball for him. Take me with ye!”
“All right,” Jonas said. It was what he had hoped for. “Although what Farson decides is none o’ mine. You know that?”
“Aye.”
“Good. Now give me the ball. I’ll give it back into your keeping, if you like, but I need to make sure it’s whole.”
She slowly lowered it. Jonas didn’t think it was entirely safe even cradled in her arms, but he breathed a little easier when it was, all the same. She shuffled toward him, and he had to control an urge to gig his horse back from her.
He bent over in the saddle, holding his hands out for the glass. She looked up at him, her old eyes still shrewd behind their crusted lids. One of them actually drew down in a conspirator’s wink. “I know yer mind, Jonas. Ye think, 'I’ll take the ball, then draw my gun and kill her, what harm?' Isn’t that true? Yet there would be harm, and all to you and yours. Kill me and the ball will never shine for Farson again. For someone, aye, someday, mayhap; but not for him… and will he let ye live if ye bring his toy back and he discovers it’s broken?”
Jonas had already considered this. “We have a bargain, old mother. You go west with the glass… unless you die beside the trail some night. You’ll pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look well.”
She cackled. “I’m better'n I look, oh yar! Years left 'fore this clock o’ mine runs down!”
I think you may be wrong about that, old mother, Jonas thought. But he kept his peace and only held his hands out for the ball.
For a moment longer she held it. Their arrangement was made and agreed to on both sides, but in the end she could barely bring herself to ungrasp the ball. Greed shone in her eyes like moonlight through fog.
He held his hands out patiently, saying nothing, waiting for her mind to accept reality-if she let go, there was some chance. If she held on, very likely everyone in this stony, weedy yard would end up riding the handsome before long.
With a sigh of regret, she finally put the ball in his hands. At the instant it passed from her to him, an ember of pink light pulsed deep in the depths of the glass. A throb of pain drove into Jonas’s head… and a shiver of lust coiled in his balls.
As from a great distance, he heard Depape and Reynolds cocking their pistols.
“Put those away,” Jonas said. “But-” Reynolds looked confused.
“They thought'ee was going to double-cross Rhea,” the old woman said, cackling. “Good thing ye’re in charge rather than them, Jonas… mayhap you know summat they don’t.”
He knew something, all right-how dangerous the smooth, glassy thing in his hands was. It could take him in a blink, if it wanted. And in a month, he would be like the witch: scrawny, raddled with sores, and too obsessed to know or care.
“Put them away!” he shouted.
Reynolds and Depape exchanged a glance, then reholstered their guns. “There was a bag for this thing,” Jonas said. “A drawstring bag laid inside the box. Get it.”
“Aye,” Rhea said, grinning unpleasantly at him. “But it won’t keep the ball from takin ye if it wants to. Ye needn’t think it will.” She surveyed the other two, and her eye fixed on Reynolds. “There’s a cart in my shed, and a pair of good gray goats to pull it.” She spoke to Reynolds, but her eyes kept turning back to the ball, Jonas noticed… and now his damned eyes wanted to go there, too.
“You don’t give me orders,” Reynolds said.
“No, but I do,” Jonas said. His eyes dropped to the ball, both wanting and fearing to see that pink spark of life deep inside. Nothing. Cold and dark. He dragged his gaze back up to Reynolds again. “Get the cart.”
