Wizard and Glass

hunched figure made of smudged shadows with a pack clearly visible over one cringing shoulder. Behind it, the orange light seemed to flame like hellfire.

'Ugh,' Cuthbert said. 'That's an ill sight to see with that sound coming up from below.'

Yet they held their ground (and their horses, which periodically yanked back on their reins as if to tell them they should already be gone from this place), and the moon rose in the sky, shrinking a little as it went and turning silver. Eventually it rose enough to cast its bony light into Eyebolt Canyon. The three boys stood looking down. None of them spoke. Roland didn't know about his friends, but he didn't think he himself could have spoken even if called on to do so.

A box canyon, very short and steep-sided, Susan had said, and the description was perfectly accurate. She'd also said Eyebolt looked like a chimney lying on its side, and Roland supposed that was also true, if you allowed that a falling chimney might break up a little on impact, and lie with one crooked place in its middle.

Up to that crook, the canyon floor looked ordinary enough; even the litter of bones the moon showed them was not extraordinary. Many animals which wandered into box canyons hadn't the wit to find their way hack out again, and with Eyebolt the possibility of escape was further reduced by the choke of brush piled at the canyon's mouth. The sides were much too steep to climb except maybe for one place, just before that crooked little jog. There Roland saw a kind of groove running up the canyon wall, with enough jutting spurs inside it to—maybe!— provide handholds. There was no real reason for him to note this; he just did, as he would go on noting potential escape-routes his entire life.

Beyond the jag in the canyon floor was something none of them had ever seen before … and when they got back to the bunkhouse several hours later, they all agreed that they weren't sure exactly what they had seen. The latter part of Eyebolt Canyon was obscured by a sullen, silvery liquescence from which snakes of smoke or mist were rising in streamers. The liquid seemed to move sluggishly, lapping at the walls which held it in. Later, they would discover that both liquid and mist were a light green; it was only the moonlight that had made them look silver.

As they watched, a dark flying shape—perhaps it was the same one that had frightened them before— skimmed down toward the surface of the thinny. It snatched something out of the air—a bug? another, smaller, bird?—and then began to rise again. Before it could, a silvery arm of liquid rose from the canyon's floor. For a moment that soupy, grinding grumble rose a notch, and became almost a voice. It snatched the bird out of the air and dragged it down. Greenish light, brief and unfocused, flashed across the surface of the thinny like electricity, and was gone.

The three boys stared at each other with frightened eyes.

Jump in, gunslinger, a voice suddenly called. It was the voice of the thinny; it was the voice of his father; it was also the voice of Marten the enchanter, Marten the seducer. Most terrible of all, it was his own voice.

Jump in and let all these cares cease. There is no love of girls to worry you here, and no mourning of lost mothers to weigh your child's heart. Only the hum of the growing cavity at the center of the universe; only the punky sweetness of rotting flesh.

Come, gunslinger. Be apart of the thinny.

Dreamy-faced and blank-eyed, Alain began walking along the edge of the drop, his right boot so close to it that the heel puffed little clouds of dust over the chasm and sent clusters of pebbles down into it. Before he could get more than five steps, Roland grabbed him by the belt and yanked him roughly back.

'Where do you think you're going?'

Alain looked at him with sleepwalker's eyes. They began to clear, but slowly. 'I don't . . . know, Roland.'

Below them, the thinny hummed and growled and sang. There was a sound, as well: an oozing, sludgy mutter.

'I know,' Cuthbert said. 'I know where we're all going. Back to the Bar K. Come on, let's get out of here.' He looked pleadingly at Roland. 'Please. It's awful.'

'All right.'

But before he led them back to the path, he stepped to the edge and looked down at the smoky silver ooze below him. 'Counting,' he said with a kind of clear defiance. 'Counting one thinny.' Then, lowering his voice: 'And be damned to you.'

3

Their composure returned as they rode back—the sea-breeze in their faces was wonderfully restorative after the dead and somehow baked smell of the canyon and the thinny.

As they rode up the Drop (on a long diagonal, so as to save the horses a little), Alain said: 'What do we do next, Roland? Do you know?'

'No. As a matter of fact, I don't.'

'Supper would be a start,' Cuthbert said brightly, and tapped the lookout's hollow skull for emphasis.

'You know what I mean.'

'Yes,' Cuthbert agreed. 'And I'll tell you something, Roland—'

'Will, please. Now that we're back on the Drop, let me be Will.'

'Aye, fine. I'll tell you something, Will: we can't go on counting nets and boats and looms and wheel-irons much longer. We're running out of things that don't matter. I believe that looking stupid will become a good deal harder once we move to the horse-breeding side of life as it's lived in Hambry.'

'Aye,' Roland said. He stopped Rusher and looked back the way they had come. He was momentarily enchanted by the sight of horses, apparently infected with a kind of moon-madness, frolicking and racing across the silvery grass. 'But I tell you both again, this is not just about horses. Does Farson need them? Aye, mayhap. So does the Affiliation. Oxen as well. But there are horses everywhere—perhaps not as good as these, I'll admit, but any port does in a storm, so they say. So, if it's not horses, what is it? Until we know, or decide we'll never know, we go on as we are.'

Part of the answer was waiting for them back at the Bar K. It was perched on the hitching rail and flicking its tail saucily. When the pigeon hopped into Roland's hand, he saw that one of its wings was oddly frayed. Some animal—likely a cat—had crept up on it close enough to pounce, he reckoned.

The note curled against the pigeon's leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn't understood.

I'll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it, and felt a surge of gladness. His pulse quickened, and in the cold silver light of the Peddler's Moon, he smiled.

CHAPTER IX CITGO

1

The Peddler's Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the summer with it when it