The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (56 page)

He got to his feet, still holding the letter in one dusty hand, the other ineffectually brushing his cheeks and leaving damp
smears there. When he staggered and Cuthbert put out a hand to steady him, Roland pushed him so hard that Cuthbert himself would have fallen, if Alain hadn’t caught hold of his shoulders.

Then, slowly, Roland went back down again—this time in front of Cuthbert with his hands up and his head down.

“Roland, no!” Cuthbert cried.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I have forgotten the face of my father, and cry your pardon.”

“Yes, all right, for gods’ sake,
yes!
” Cuthbert now sounded as if he were crying himself. “Just . . . please get up! It breaks my heart to see you so!”

And mine to be so,
Roland thought.
To be humbled so. But I brought it on myself, didn’t I? This dark yard, with my head throbbing and my heart full of shame and fear. This is mine, bought and paid for.

They helped him up and Roland let himself be helped. “That’s quite a left, Bert,” he said in a voice that almost passed for normal.

“Only when it’s going toward someone who doesn’t know it’s coming,” Cuthbert replied.

“This letter—how did you come by it?”

Cuthbert told of meeting Sheemie, who had been dithering along in his own misery, as if waiting for
ka
to intervene . . . and, in the person of “Arthur Heath,”
ka
had.

“From the witch,” Roland mused. “Yes, but how did
she
know? For she never leaves the Cöos, or so Susan has told me.”

“I can’t say. Nor do I much care. What I’m most concerned about right now is making sure that Sheemie isn’t hurt because of what he told me and gave me. After that, I’m concerned that what old witch Rhea has tried to tell once she doesn’t try to tell again.”

“I’ve made at least one terrible mistake,” Roland said, “but I don’t count loving Susan as another. That was beyond me to change. As it was beyond her. Do you believe that?”

“Yes,” Alain said at once, and after a moment, almost reluctantly, Cuthbert said, “Aye, Roland.”

“I’ve been arrogant and stupid. If this note had reached her aunt, she could have been sent into exile.”

“And we to the devil, by way of hangropes,” Cuthbert added dryly. “Although I know that’s a minor matter to you by comparison.”

“What about the witch?” Alain asked. “What do we do about her?”

Roland smiled a little, and turned toward the northwest. “Rhea,” he said. “Whatever else she is, she’s a first-class troublemaker, is she not? And troublemakers must be put on notice.”

He started back toward the bunkhouse, trudging with his head down. Cuthbert looked at Alain, and saw that Al was also a little teary-eyed. Bert put out his hand. For a moment Alain only looked at it. Then he nodded—to himself rather than to Cuthbert, it seemed—and shook it.

“You did what you had to,” Alain said. “I had my doubts at first, but not now.”

Cuthbert let out his breath. “And I did it the way I had to. If I hadn’t surprised him—”

“—he would have beaten you black and blue.”

“So many more colors than that,” Cuthbert said. “I would have looked like a rainbow.”

“The Wizard’s Rainbow, even,” Alain said. “Extra colors for your penny.”

That made Cuthbert laugh. The two of them walked back toward the bunkhouse, where Roland was unsaddling Bert’s horse.

Cuthbert turned in that direction to help, but Alain held him back. “Leave him alone for a little while,” he said. “It’s best you do.”

They went on ahead, and when Roland came in ten minutes later, he found Cuthbert playing his hand. And winning with it.

“Bert,” he said.

Cuthbert looked up.

“We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Cöos.”

“Are we going to kill her?”

Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.”

“Aye. We should. But are we going to?”

“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision—if it was a decision—bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall,
and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”

“Perhaps it would be best if she did,” Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.

“Yes. Perhaps it would. It’s not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early.”

“All right. Do you want your hand back?”

“When you’re on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all.”

Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.

The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to burn with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing holstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.

Cuthbert said not a word—he knew that if he started, he’d do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense—and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.

“I said I made at least one very bad mistake,” Roland told him. “One that this note”—he touched his breast pocket—“brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?”

“Not loving her—not that,” Cuthbert said. “You called that
ka,
and I call it the same.” It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not as his best friend’s lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.

“No,” Roland said. “Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives—one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lift me above
ka,
the way a bird’s wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?”

“It made you blind.” Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.

“Yes,” Roland said sadly. “It made me blind . . . but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over.”

They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing “Careless Love” beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea’s yard, they stopped.

“Wonderful view,” Roland murmured. “You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here.”

“Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though.”

That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear corner, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.

Roland had seen plenty of huts like it—the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead—but never one that felt as powerfully
wrong
as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.

Cuthbert felt it, too. “Do we have to go closer?” He swallowed. “Do we have to go in? Because . . . Roland, the door is open. Do you see?”

He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.

“Stay here.” Roland gigged Rusher forward.

“No! I’m coming!”

“No, cover my back. If I need to go inside, I’ll call you to join me . . . but if I need to go inside, the old woman who
lives here will breathe no more. As you said, that might be for the best.”

At every slow step Rusher took, the feeling of wrongness grew in Roland’s heart and mind. There was a stench to the place, a smell like rotten meat and hot putrefied tomatoes. It came from the hut, he supposed, but it also seemed to come wafting out of the very ground. And at every step, the whine of the thinny seemed louder, as if the atmosphere of this place somehow magnified it.

Susan came up here alone, and in the dark,
he thought.
Gods, I’m not sure I could have come up here in the dark with my friends for company.

He stopped beneath the tree, looking through the open door twenty paces away. He saw what could have been a kitchen: the legs of a table, the back of a chair, a filthy hearthstone. No sign of the lady of the house. But she was there. Roland could feel her eyes crawling on him like loathsome bugs.

I can’t see her because she’s used her art to make herself
dim
. . . but she’s there.

And just perhaps he
did
see her. The air had a strange shimmer just inside the door to the right, as if it had been heated. Roland had been told that you could see someone who was
dim
by turning your head and looking from the corner of your eye. He did that now.

“Roland?” Cuthbert called from behind him.

“Fine so far, Bert.” Barely paying attention to the words he was saying, because . . . yes! That shimmer was clearer now, and it had almost the shape of a woman. It could be his imagination, of course, but . . .

But at that moment, as if understanding he’d seen her, the shimmer moved farther back into the shadows. Roland glimpsed the swinging hem of an old black dress, there and then gone.

No matter. He had not come to see her but only to give her her single warning . . . which was one more than any of their fathers would have given her, no doubt.

“Rhea!” His voice rolled in the harsh tones of old, stern and commanding. Two yellow leaves fell from the tree, as if shivered loose by that voice, and one fell in his black hair. From the hut came only a waiting, listening silence . . . and then the discordant, jeering yowl of a cat.

“Rhea, daughter of none! I’ve brought something back to
you, woman! Something you must have lost!” From his shirt he took the folded letter and tossed it to the stony ground. “Today I’ve been your friend, Rhea—if this had gone where you had intended it to go, you would have paid with your life.”

He paused. Another leaf drifted down from the tree. This one landed in Rusher’s mane.

“Hear me well, Rhea, daughter of none, and understand me well. I have come here under the name of Will Dearborn, but Dearborn is not my name and it is the Affiliation I serve. More, ’tis all which lies behind the Affiliation—’tis the power of the White. You have crossed the way of our
ka,
and I warn you only this once:
do not cross it again.
Do you understand?”

Only that waiting silence.

“Do not touch a single hair on the head of the boy who carried your bad-natured mischief hence, or you’ll die. Speak not another word of those things you know or think you know to anyone—not to Cordelia Delgado, nor to Jonas, nor to Rimer, nor to Thorin—or you’ll die. Keep your peace and we will keep ours. Break it, and we’ll still you. Do you understand?”

More silence. Dirty windows peering at him like eyes. A puff of breeze sent more leaves showering down around him, and caused the stuffy-guy to creak nastily on his pole. Roland thought briefly of the cook, Hax, twisting at the end of his rope.

“Do you understand?”

No reply. Not even a shimmer could he see through the open door now.

“Very well,” Roland said. “Silence gives consent.” He gigged his horse around. As he did, his head came up a little, and he saw something green shift above him among the yellow leaves. There was a low hissing sound.

“Roland look out! Snake!”
Cuthbert screamed, but before the second word had left his mouth, Roland had drawn one of his guns.

He fell sideways in the saddle, holding with his left leg and heel as Rusher jigged and pranced. He fired three times, the thunder of the big gun smashing through the still air and then rolling back from the nearby hills. With each shot the snake
flipped upward again, its blood dotting red across a background of blue sky and yellow leaves. The last bullet tore off its head, and when the snake fell for good, it hit the ground in two pieces. From within the hut came a wail of grief and rage so awful that Roland’s spine turned to a cord of ice.

“You bastard!”
screamed a woman’s voice from the shadows.
“Oh, you murdering cull! My friend! My friend!”

“If it was your friend, you oughtn’t to have set it on me,” Roland said. “Remember, Rhea, daughter of none.”

The voice uttered one more shriek and fell silent.

Roland rode back to Cuthbert, holstering his gun. Bert’s eyes were round and amazed. “Roland, what shooting! Gods, what shooting!”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“But we still don’t know how she knew!”

“Do you think she’d tell?” There was a small but minute shake in Roland’s voice. The way the snake had come out of the tree like that, right at him . . . he could still barely believe he wasn’t dead. Thank gods for his hand, which had taken matters over.

“We could make her talk,” Cuthbert said, but Roland could tell from his voice that Bert had no taste for such. Maybe later, maybe after years of trail-riding and gunslinging, but now he had no more stomach for torture than for killing outright.

“Even if we could, we couldn’t make her tell the truth. Such as her lies as other folks breathe. If we’ve convinced her to keep quiet, we’ve done enough for today. Come on. I hate this place.”

As they rode back toward town, Roland said: “We’ve got to meet.”