The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (40 page)

The foolish girl, who had come to Rhea singing and left in a more proper silence, had proved honest, and might well be honest yet (certainly she kissed and touched the boy with a virgin’s mingled greed and timidity), but she wouldn’t be honest much longer if they kept on the way they were going. And wouldn’t Hart Thorin be in for a surprise when he took his supposedly pure young gilly to bed? There were ways to fool men about that (men practically
begged
to be fooled about that), a thimble of pig’s blood would serve nicely, but
she
wouldn’t know that. Oh, this was too good! And to think she could watch Miss Haughty brought low, right here, in this wonderful glass! Oh, it was too good! Too wonderful!

She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the firestruck wall.

Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed—he could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.

She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her
sombrero
had gone askew on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward him, eyes rueful.

“What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?”

“The best we can,” he said. “As we both always have. As our fathers taught us.”

“This is mad.”

Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life—even the deep ache in his groin felt sane and right—said nothing.

“Do ye know how dangerous ’tis?” she asked, and went on before he could reply. “Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, ’twould be serious. To be seen as we just were—”

She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. “Best ye don’t, Will. If ye do, won’t be nothing done between us but spooning. Unless that was your intention?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

She nodded. “Have ye set your friends to watch?”

“Aye,” he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so well. “But not where they can watch
us
.”

“Thank the gods for that,” she said, and laughed rather distractedly. Then she stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms again. She looked curiously up into his face. “Who are you, really, Will?”

“Almost who I say I am. That’s the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren’t sent here because we were drunk and helling, but we weren’t sent here to uncover any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of the way in a time of danger. All that’s happened since—” He shook his head to show how helpless he felt, and Susan thought again of her father saying
ka
was like a wind—when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your barn. Even your life.

“And is Will Dearborn your real name?”

He shrugged. “One name’s as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor’s House today, for my friend Richard saw you ride up—”

“Aye, fittings,” she said. “For I am to be this year’s Reaping Girl—it’s Hart’s choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant.”

“You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was,” he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn’t know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year’s Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth—a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man’s couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.

“When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?”

“I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking,” she said.

“Not Depape? The redhead?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know the game Castles, Susan?”

“Aye. My father showed me when I was small.”

“Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What’s going on here in Hambry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?”

She nodded at once. “In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable.”

“In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest—”

“The horses on the Drop, for instance.”

“Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about—”

Her eyebrows shot up. “There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that.”

“No mistake.”

“Where?”

“The Rocking H.”

Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. “That’s Laslo Rimer’s place.”

“Aye—Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed—”

“Will,
no
!”

“Yes. All that and more. But to count them—to be
seen
counting them—is to break cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish—we try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, where most of the danger lies. It’s harder and harder to do. Then we received a message—”

“A message? How? From whom?”

“Best you not know those things, I think. But it’s led us to believe that some of the answers we’re looking for may be at Citgo.”

“Will, d’ye think that what’s out here may help me to know more about what happened to my da?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen doing it.” His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; Susan’s had cooled enough for her to take it in good confidence. She had put her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.

“Come on,” she said. “I know a path.”

In the moon’s pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland’s back prickle; made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunkhouse floorboards back at the Bar K.

“Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be much help to ye,” she said in a voice just a notch above a whisper. “I’ve been within hearing distance of Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I’ve actually been in it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on dares from my friends.”

“And then?”

“With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord always said he’d come to a bad end, meddling in their leavings.” She swallowed hard. “And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People responsible. Poor Da.”

They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly—the sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.

He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.

“You understand what these are? Were?” he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.

“Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here.” She paused, then added shyly: “It’s how I feel when you touch me.”

He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly against his cheek before drawing away.

“I hope your friends will watch well.”

“They will.”

“Is there a signal?”

“The whistle of the nighthawk. Let’s hope we don’t hear it.”

“Aye, be it so.” She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.

The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn’t heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.

“Be easy! It’s only the candle! The gas-pipe!”

He relaxed slowly. “That they use, don’t they?”

“Aye. To run a few machines—little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly.”

“I had some the day we met the Sheriff.”

When the flare licked out again—bright yellow with a bluish core—he didn’t jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called “the candle” without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.

“You’ve seen such before?” she asked.

He nodded.

“The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful,” Susan said.

“I’m beginning to think they’re no stranger than those of the Outer Arc,” he said, turning slowly. He pointed. “What’s yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?”

“Aye.”

To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it—this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair.
Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.

“There were useful things in there when my da was a child,” she said. “Paper and such—even a few ink-writers that would still work . . . for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard.” She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People’s weird, horseless mode of travel. “Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn’t rust like those that are left. I can’t think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. ’Twould be unlucky, even if they weren’t contaminated.”

She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.

“Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you.”

“What a pity for both of us,” he said, and then passed between them one of those long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.

She couldn’t decide which frightened her more—the few derricks that were still pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was that no power on the face of the earth could have gotten her within the fence of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now and then a cylinder screamed like someone being stabbed; at periodic intervals “the candle” would fire off with a sound like dragon’s breath, throwing their shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the nighthawk’s piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.

They came to a wide lane—what had once undoubtedly been a maintenance road—that split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty circumference protruding above ground level.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, ’tis been dry for years.”

He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space between the concrete sleeve and the pipe’s rusty side. She watched him nervously, biting her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?

Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. It was slick and black with oil.

“Dry for years?” he asked with a little smile.

She could only shake her head, bewildered.

They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The pipe (she could now see oil bleeding out of its old joints, even in the weak moonlight) ducked under the gate; they went over it. She thought his hands rather too intimate for polite company in their helping, and rejoiced at each touch.
If he doesn’t stop, the top of my head will explode like “the candle,”
she thought, and laughed.

“Susan?”

“ ’Tis nothing, Will, only nerves.”

Another of those long glances passed between them as they stood on the far side of the gate, and then they went down the hill together. As they walked, she noticed an odd thing: many of the pines had been stripped of their lower branches. The hatchet marks and scabs of pine resin were clear in the moonlight, and looked new. She pointed this out to Will, who nodded but said nothing.