The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (73 page)

“Go to hell,” she said.

He smiled—a thin, hurty smile. “Likely I’ll find you there when I arrive,” he said. Then, to the other Coffin Hunter: “You checked the place careful?”

“Whatever they had, they took it,” the redhead answered. “Only thing they left was Dearborn’s punch-bunny.”

That made Jonas laugh meany-mean as he climbed on board his own horse. “Come on,” he said, “let’s ride.”

They went back into the Bad Grass. It closed around them, and it was as if they had never been there . . . except that Susan was gone, and so was Capi. The big rancher riding beside Susan had been leading the mule.

When he was sure they weren’t going to return, Sheemie walked slowly back into the clearing, doing up the button on top of his pants as he came. He looked from the way Roland and his friends had gone to the one in which Susan had been taken. Which?

A moment’s thought made him realize there was no choice. The grass out here was tough and springy. The path Roland and Alain and good old Arthur Heath (so Sheemie still thought of him, and always would) had taken was gone. The one made by Susan and her captors, on the other hand, was still clear. And perhaps, if he followed her, he could do something for her. Help her.

Walking at first, then jogging as his fear that they might double back and catch him dissipated, Sheemie went in the direction Susan had been taken. He would follow her most of that day.

Cuthbert—not the most sanguine of personalities in any situation—grew more and more impatient as the day brightened toward true dawn.
It’s Reaping,
he thought.
Finally Reaping, and here we sit with our knives sharpened and not a thing in the world to cut.

Twice he asked Alain what he “heard.” The first time Alain only grunted. The second time he asked what Bert
expected
him to hear, with someone yapping away in his ear like that.

Cuthbert, who did not consider two enquiries fifteen minutes apart as “yapping away,” wandered off and sat morosely in front of his horse. After a bit, Roland came over and sat down beside him.

“Waiting,” Cuthbert said. “That’s what most of our time in Mejis has been about, and it’s the thing I do worst.”

“You won’t have to do it much longer,” Roland said.

Jonas’s company reached the place where Fran Lengyll’s party had made a temporary camp about an hour after the sun had topped the horizon. Quint, Rhea, and Renfrew’s
vaqs
were already there and drinking coffee, Jonas was glad to see.

Lengyll started forward, saw Susan riding with her hands tied, and actually drew back a step, as if he wanted to find a corner to hide in. There were no corners out here, however, so he stood fast. He did not look happy about it, however.

Susan nudged her horse forward with her knees, and when Reynolds tried to grab her shoulder, she dipped it to the side, temporarily eluding him.

“Why, Francis Lengyll! Imagine meeting you here!”

“Susan, I’m sorry to see ye so,” Lengyll said. His flush crept closer and closer to his brow, like a tide approaching a seawall. “It’s bad company ye’ve fallen in with, girl . . . and in the end, bad company always leaves ye to face the music alone.”

Susan actually laughed. “Bad company!” she said. “Aye, ye’d know about that, wouldn’t ye, Fran?”

He turned, awkward and stiff in his embarrassment. She raised one booted foot and, before anyone could stop her, kicked him squarely between the shoulderblades. He went
down on his stomach, his whole face widening in shocked surprise.

“No ye don’t, ye bold cunt!” Renfrew shouted, and fetched her a wallop to the side of the head—it was on the left, and at least evened things up a bit, she would think later when her mind cleared and she was capable of thinking. She swayed in the saddle, but kept her seat. And she never looked at Renfrew, only at Lengyll, who had now managed to get to his hands and knees. He wore a deeply dazed expression.

“You killed my father!”
she screamed at him.
“You killed my father, you cowardly, sneaking excuse for a man!”
She looked at the party of ranchers and
vaqs,
all of them staring at her now.
“There he is, Fran Lengyll, head of the Horsemen’s Association, as low a sneak as ever walked! Low as coyote shit! Low as—”

“That’s enough,” Jonas said, watching with some interest as Lengyll scuttled back to his men—and yes, Susan was bitterly delighted to see, it was a full-fledged scuttle—with his shoulders hunched. Rhea was cackling, rocking from side to side and making a sound like fingernails on a piece of slate. The sound shocked Susan, but she wasn’t a bit surprised by Rhea’s presence in this company.

“It could never be enough,” she said, looking from Jonas to Lengyll with an expression of contempt so deep it seemed bottomless. “For him it could never be enough.”

“Well, perhaps, but you did quite well in the time you had, lady-sai. Few could have done better. And listen to the witch cackle! Like salt in his wounds, I wot . . . but we’ll shut her up soon enough.” Then, turning his head: “Clay!”

Reynolds rode up.

“Think you can get Sunbeam back to Seafront all right?”

“I think so.” Reynolds tried not to show the relief he felt at being sent back east instead of west. He had begun to have a bad feeling about Hanging Rock, Latigo, the tankers . . . about the whole show, really. God knew why. “Now?”

“Give it another minute,” Jonas said. “Mayhap there’s going to be a spot of killing right here. Who knows? But it’s the unanswered questions that makes it worthwhile getting up in the morning, even when a man’s leg aches like a tooth with a hole in it. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I don’t know, Eldred.”

“Sai Renfrew, watch our pretty Sunbeam a minute. I have a piece of property to take back.”

His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea’s cackles cut off suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife. Smiling, Jonas walked his horse toward the black cart with its jostling show of gold symbols. Reynolds rode on his left, and Jonas sensed rather than saw Depape fall in on his right. Roy was a good enough boy, really; his head was a little soft, but his heart was in the right place, and you didn’t have to tell him
everything.

For every step forward Jonas’s horse took, Rhea shrank back a little in the cart. Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, looking for a way out that wasn’t there.

“Keep away from me, ye charry man!” she cried, raising a hand toward him. With the other she clutched the sack with the ball in it ever more tightly. “Keep away, or I’ll bring the lightning and strike ye dead where ye sit yer horse! Yer harrier friends, too!”

Jonas thought Roy hesitated briefly at that, but Clay never did, nor did Jonas himself. He guessed there was a great lot she could do . . . or that there had been, at one time. But that was before the hungry glass had entered her life.

“Give it up to me,” he said. He reached the side of her wagon and held his hand out for the bag. “It’s not yours and never was. One day you’ll doubtless have the Good Man’s thanks for keeping it so well as you have, but now you must give it up.”

She screamed—a sound of such piercing intensity that several of the
vaqueros
dropped their tin coffee-cups and clapped their hands over their ears. At the same time she knotted her hand through the drawstring and raised the bag over her head. The curved shape of the ball swung back and forth at the bottom of it like a pendulum.

“I’ll not!”
she howled.
“I’ll smash it on the ground before I give it up to the likes o’ you!”

Jonas doubted if the ball would break, not hurled by her weak arms onto the trampled, springy mat of the Bad Grass, but he didn’t think he would have occasion to find out, one way or the other.

“Clay,” he said. “Draw your gun.”

He didn’t need to look at Clay to see that he’d done it; he
saw the frantic way her eyes shifted to the left, where Clay sat his horse.

“I’m going to have a count,” Jonas said. “Just a short one; if I get to three and she hasn’t passed that bag over, blow her ugly head off.”

“Aye.”

“One,” Jonas said, watching the ball pendulum back and forth at the bottom of the upheld bag. It was glowing; he could see dull pink even through the cloth. “Two. Enjoy hell, Rhea, goodbye. Thr—”

“Here!”
she screamed, thrusting it out toward him and shielding her face with the crooked hook of her free hand.
“Here, take it! And may it damn you the way it’s damned me!”

“Thankee-sai.”

He grabbed the bag just below the draw top and yanked. Rhea screamed again as the string skinned her knuckles and tore off one of her nails. Jonas hardly heard. His mind was a white explosion of exultation. For the first time in his long professional life he forgot his job, his surroundings, and the six thousand things that could get him killed on any day. He had it; he had it; by all the graves of all the gods, he had the fucking thing!

Mine!
he thought, and that was all. He somehow restrained the urge to open the bag and stick his head inside it, like a horse sticking its head into a bag of oats, and looped the drawstring over the pommel of his saddle twice instead. He took in a breath as deep as his lungs would allow, then expelled it. Better. A little.

“Roy.”

“Aye, Jonas.”

It would be good to get out of this place, Jonas thought, and not for the first time. To get away from these hicks. He was sick of
aye
and
ye
and
so it is,
sick to his bones.

“Roy, we’ll give the bitch a ten-count this time. If she isn’t out of my sight by then, you have my permission to blow her ass off. Now, let’s see if you can do the counting. I’ll be listening close, so mind you don’t skip any!”

“One,” Depape said eagerly. “Two. Three. Four.”

Spitting curses, Rhea snatched up the reins of the cart and spanked the pony’s back with them. The pony laid its ears back and jerked the cart forward so vigorously that Rhea went tumbling backward off the cantboard, her feet up, her white
and bony shins showing above her ankle-high black shoes and mismatched wool stockings. The
vaqueros
laughed. Jonas laughed himself. It was pretty funny, all right, seeing her on her back with her pins in the air.

“Fuh-fuh-
five,
” Depape said, laughing so hard he was hiccupping. “Sih-sih-
six
!”

Rhea climbed back up, flopped onto the cantboard again with all the grace of a dying fish, and peered around at them, wall-eyed and sneering.

“I curse ye all!”
she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clearing.
“Every last one of ye! Ye . . . and ye . . . and ye!”
Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas.
“Thief! Miserable thief!”

As though it was yours,
Jonas marveled (although “Mine!” was the first word to occur to him, once he had taken possession of it).
As though such a wonder could ever belong to a back-country reader of rooster-guts such as you.

The cart bounced its way into the Bad Grass, the pony pulling hard with its ears laid back; the old woman’s screams served to drive it better than any whip could have done. The black slipped into the green. They saw the cart flicker like a conjurer’s trick, and then it was gone. For a long time yet, however, they heard her shrieking her curses, calling death down upon them beneath the Demon Moon.

“Go on,” Jonas told Clay Reynolds. “Take our Sunbeam back. And if you want to stop on the way and make some use of her, why, be my guest.” He glanced at Susan as he said this, to see what effect it might be having, but he was disappointed—she looked dazed, as if the last blow Renfrew had dealt her had scrambled her brains, at least temporarily. “Just make sure she gets to Coral at the end of all the fun.”

“I will. Any message for sai Thorin?”

“Tell her to keep the wench someplace safe until she hears from me. And . . . why don’t you stay with her, Clay? Coral, I mean—come tomorrow, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about this ’un anymore, but Coral . . . ride with her to Ritzy when she goes. Be her escort, like.”

Reynolds nodded. Better and better. Seafront it would be, and that was fine. He might like a little taste of the girl once he got her there, but not on the way. Not under the ghostly-f daytime Demon Moon.

“Go on, then. Get started.”

Reynolds led her across the clearing, aiming for a point well away from the bent swath of grass where Rhea had made her exit. Susan rode silently, downcast eyes fixed on her bound wrists.

Jonas turned to face his men. “The three young fellows from In-World have broken their way out of jail, with that haughty young bitch’s help,” he said, pointing at Susan’s departing back.

There was a low, growling murmur from the men. That “Will Dearborn” and his friends were free they had known; that sai Delgado had helped them escape they had not . . . and it was perhaps just as well for her that Reynolds was at that moment leading her into the Bad Grass and out of sight.

“Never mind!” Jonas shouted, pulling their attention back to him. He reached out a stealthy hand and caressed the curve at the bottom of the drawstring bag. Just touching the ball made him feel as if he could do anything, and with one hand tied behind his back, at that.

“Never mind her, and never mind them!” His eyes moved from Lengyll to Wertner to Croydon to Brian Hookey to Roy Depape. “We’re close to forty men, going to join another hundred and fifty. They’re three, and not one a day over sixteen. Are you afraid of three little boys?”

“No!”
they cried.

“If we run on em, my cullies, what will we do?”

“KILL THEM!”
The shout so loud that it sent rooks rising up into the morning sun, cawing their displeasure as they commenced the hunt for more peaceful surroundings.

Jonas was satisfied. His hand was still on the sweet curve of the ball, and he could feel it pouring strength into him.
Pink strength,
he thought, and grinned.