The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (66 page)

“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. Farson 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 Cöos 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.”

Reynolds heard the buzzing of flies even before he slipped through the shed’s sagging door, and knew at once that Rhea’s goats had finished their days of pulling. They lay bloated and dead in their pen, legs sticking up and the sockets of their eyes squirming with maggots. It was impossible to know when Rhea had last fed and watered them, but Reynolds guessed at least a week, from the smell.

Too busy watching what goes on in that glass ball to bother,
he thought.
And what’s she wearing that dead snake around her neck for?

“I don’t want to know,” he muttered from behind his pulled-up neckerchief. The only thing he
did
want right now was to get the hell out of here.

He spied the cart, which was painted black and overlaid with cabalistic designs in gold. It looked like a medicine-show wagon to Reynolds; it also looked a bit like a hearse. He seized it by the handles and dragged it out of the shed as fast as he could. Depape could do the rest, by gods. Hitch his horse to the cart and haul the old woman’s stinking freight to . . . where? Who knew? Eldred, maybe.

Rhea came tottering out of her hut with the drawstring bag they’d brought the ball in, but she stopped, head cocked, listening, when Reynolds asked his question.

Jonas thought it over, then said: “Seafront to begin, I guess. Yar, that’ll do for her, and this glass bauble as well, I reckon, until the party’s over tomorrow.”

“Aye, Seafront, I’ve never been there,” Rhea said, moving forward again. When she reached Jonas’s horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the bag. After a moment’s further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.

Rhea wore a sly smile. “Mayhap we’ll meet Thorin. If so, I might have something to show him in the Good Man’s toy that’d interest him ever so much.”

“If you meet him,” Jonas said, getting down to help hitch Depape’s horse to the black cart, “it’ll be in a place where no magic is needed to see far.”

She looked at him, frowning, and then the sly smile slowly resurfaced. “Why, I b’lieve our Mayor’s met wiv a accident!”

“Could be,” Jonas agreed.

She giggled, and soon the giggle turned into a full-throated cackle. She was still cackling as they drew out of the yard, cackling and sitting in the little black cart with its cabalistic decorations like the Queen of Black Places on her throne.

Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux. It was the sight of Miguel, the old
mozo,
that started Susan down its greased slope. He was in the middle of Seafront’s courtyard, clutching his broom of twigs against his chest and looking at the riders who passed to and fro with an expression of perplexed misery. His
sombrero
was twisted around on his back, and Susan observed with something like horror that Miguel—usually brushed and clean and neat as a pin—was wearing his
serape
inside out. There were tears on his cheeks, and as he turned this way and that, following the passing riders, trying to hile those he recognized, she thought of a child she had once seen toddle out in front of an oncoming stage. The child had been pulled back in time by his father; who would pull Miguel back?

She started for him, and a
vaquero
aboard a wild-eyed spotted roan galloped so close by her that one stirrup ticked off her hip and the horse’s tail flicked her forearm. She voiced a strange-sounding little chuckle. She had been worried about Miguel and had almost been run down herself! Funny!

She looked both ways this time, started forward, then drew back again as a loaded wagon came careering around the corner, tottering on two wheels at first. What it was loaded with she couldn’t see—the goods in the wagonbed were covered with a tarp—but she saw Miguel move toward it, still clutching his broom. Susan thought of the child in front of the stage again and shrieked an inarticulate cry of alarm. Miguel cringed back at the last moment and the cart flew by him,
bounded and swayed across the courtyard, and disappeared out through the arch.

Miguel dropped his broom, clapped both hands to his cheeks, fell to his knees, and began to pray in a loud, lamenting voice. Susan watched him for a moment, her mouth working, and then sprinted for the stables, no longer taking care to keep against the side of the building. She had caught the disease that would grip almost all of Hambry by noon, and although she managed to do a fairly apt job of saddling Pylon (on any other day there would have been three stable-boys vying for the chance to help the pretty sai), any ability to think had left her by the time she heel-kicked the startled horse into a run outside the stable door.

When she rode past Miguel, still on his knees and praying to the bright sky with his hands upraised, she saw him no more than any other rider had before her.

She rode straight down the High Street, thumping her spurless heels at Pylon’s sides until the big horse was fairly flying. Thoughts, questions, possible plans of action . . . none of those had a place in her head as she rode. She was but vaguely aware of the people milling in the street, allowing Pylon to weave his own path through them. The only thing she was aware of was his name—
Roland, Roland, Roland!
—ringing in her head like a scream. Everything had gone upside down. The brave little
ka-tet
they had made that night at the graveyard was broken, three of its members jailed and with not long to live (if they even
were
still alive), the last member lost and confused, as crazy with terror as a bird in a barn.

If her panic had held, things might have turned out in a much different fashion. But as she rode through the center of town and out the other side, her way took her toward the house she had shared with her father and her aunt. That lady had been watching for the very rider who now approached.

As Susan neared, the door flew open and Cordelia, dressed in black from throat to toe, rushed down the front walk to the street, shrieking with either horror or laughter. Perhaps both. The sight of her cut through the foreground haze of panic in Susan’s mind . . . but not because she recognized her aunt.

“Rhea!”
she cried, and drew back on the reins so violently
that the horse skidded, reared, and almost tilted them over backward. That would likely have crushed the life out of his mistress, but Pylon managed to keep at least his back feet, pawing at the sky with his front ones and whinnying loudly. Susan slung an arm around his neck and hung on for dear life.

Cordelia Delgado, wearing her best black dress and a lace mantilla over her hair, stood in front of the horse as if in her own parlor, taking no notice of the hooves cutting the air less than two feet in front of her nose. In one gloved hand she held a wooden box.

Susan belatedly realized that this wasn’t Rhea, but the mistake really wasn’t that odd. Aunt Cord wasn’t as thin as Rhea (not yet, anyway), and more neatly dressed (except for her dirty gloves—why her aunt was wearing gloves in the first place Susan didn’t know, let alone why they looked so smudged), but the mad look in her eyes was horribly similar.

“Good day t’ye, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty!” Aunt Cord greeted her in a cracked, vivacious voice that made Susan’s heart tremble. Aunt Cord curtseyed one-handed, holding the little box curled against her chest with the other. “Where go ye on this fine autumn day? Where go ye so speedy? To no lover’s arms, that seems sure, for one’s dead and the other ta’en!”

Cordelia laughed again, thin lips drawing back from big white teeth. Horse teeth, almost. Her eyes glared in the sunlight.

Her mind’s broken,
Susan thought.
Poor thing. Poor old thing.

“Did thee put Dearborn up to it?” Aunt Cord asked. She crept to Pylon’s side and looked up at Susan with luminous, liquid eyes. “Thee did, didn’t thee? Aye! Perhaps thee even gave him the knife he used, after runnin yer lips o’er it for good luck. Ye’re in it together—why not admit it? At least admit thee’s lain with that boy, for I know it’s true. I saw the way he looked at ye the day ye were sitting in the window, and the way ye looked back at him!”

Susan said, “If ye’ll have truth, I’ll give it to ye. We’re lovers. And we’ll be man and wife ere Year’s End.”

Cordelia raised one dirty glove to the blue sky and waved it as if saying hello to the gods. She screamed with mingled triumph and laughter as she waved. “And t’be
wed,
she thinks! Ooooo! Ye’d no doubt drink the blood of your victims on the marriage altar, too, would ye not? Oh, wicked! It makes me
weep!” But instead of weeping she laughed again, a howl of mirth into the blind blue face of the sky.

“We planned no murders,” Susan said, drawing—if only in her own mind—a line of difference between the killings at Mayor’s House and the trap they had hoped to spring on Farson’s soldiers. “And he
did
no murders. No, this is the business of your friend Jonas, I wot. His plan, his filthy work.”

Cordelia plunged her hand into the box she held, and Susan understood at once why the gloves she wore were dirty: she had been grubbing in the stove.

“I curse thee with the ashes!”
Cordelia cried, flinging a black and gritty cloud of them at Susan’s leg and the hand which held Pylon’s reins.
“I curse thee to darkness, both of thee! Be ye happy together, ye faithless! Ye murderers! Ye cozeners! Ye liars! Ye fornicators! Ye lost and renounced!”

With each cry, Cordelia Delgado threw another handful of ashes. And with each cry, Susan’s mind grew clearer, colder. She held fast and allowed her aunt to pelt her; in fact, when Pylon, feeling the gritty rain against his side, attempted to pull away, Susan gigged him set. There were spectators now, avidly watching this old ritual of renunciation (Sheemie was among them, eyes wide and mouth quivering), but Susan barely noticed. Her mind was her own again, she had an idea of what to do, and for that alone she supposed she owed her aunt some sort of thanks.

“I forgive ye, Aunt,” she said.

The box of stove-ashes, now almost empty, tumbled from Cordelia’s hands as if Susan had slapped her. “What?” she whispered. “What does thee say?”

“For what ye did to yer brother and my father,” Susan said. “For what ye were a part of.”

She rubbed a hand on her leg and bent with the hand held out before her. Before her aunt could pull away, Susan had wiped ashes down one of her cheeks. The smudge stood out there like a wide, dark scar. “But wear that, all the same,” she said. “Wash it off if ye like, but I think ye’ll wear it in yer heart yet awhile.” She paused. “I think ye already do. Goodbye.”

“Where does thee think thee’s going?” Aunt Cord was pawing at the soot-mark on her face with one gloved hand, and when she lunged forward in an attempt to grasp Pylon’s reins, she stumbled over the box and almost fell. It was Susan, still bent over to her aunt’s side, who grasped her shoulder and
held her up. Cordelia pulled back as if from the touch of an adder. “Not to him! Ye’ll not go to him now, ye mad goose!”

Susan turned her horse away. “None of yer business, Aunt. This is the end between us. But mark what I say: we’ll be married by Year’s End. Our firstborn is already conceived.”

“Thee’ll be married tomorrow night if thee goes nigh him! Joined in smoke, wedded in fire, bedded in the ashes!
Bedded in the ashes,
do ye hear me?”

The madwoman advanced on her, railing, but Susan had no more time to listen. The day was fleeting. There would be time to do the things that needed doing, but only if she moved at speed.

“Goodbye,” she said again, and then galloped away. Her aunt’s last words followed her:
In the ashes, do ye hear me?

On her way out of town along the Great Road, Susan saw riders coming toward her, and got off the highway. This would not, she felt, be a good time to meet pilgrims. There was an old granary nearby; she rode Pylon behind it, stroked his neck, murmured for him to be quiet.

It took the riders longer to reach her position than she would have expected, and when they finally got there, she saw why. Rhea was with them, sitting in a black cart covered with magical symbols. The witch had been scary when Susan had seen her on the night of the Kissing Moon, but still recognizably human; what the girl saw passing before her now, rocking from side to side in the black cart and clutching a bag in her lap, was an unsexed, sore-raddled creature that looked more like a troll than a human being. With her were the Big Coffin Hunters.

“To Seafront!” the thing in the cart screamed. “Hie you on, and at full speed! I’ll sleep in Thorin’s bed tonight or know the reason why! Sleep in it and piss in it, if I take a notion! Hie you on, I say!”

Depape—it was to his horse that the cart had been harnessed—turned around and looked at her with distaste and fear. “Still your mouth.”

Her answer was a fresh burst of laughter. She rocked from side to side, holding a bag on her lap with one hand and pointing at Depape with the twisted, long-nailed index finger of
the other. Looking at her made Susan feel weak with terror, and she felt the panic around her again, like some dark fluid that would happily drown her brain if given half a chance.

She worked against the feeling as best she could, holding onto her mind, refusing to let it turn into what it had been before and would be again if she let it—a brainless bird trapped in a barn, bashing into the walls and ignoring the open window through which it had entered.

Even when the cart was gone below the next hill and there was nothing left of them but dust hanging in the air, she could hear Rhea’s wild cackling.

She reached the hut in the Bad Grass at one o’ the clock. For a moment she just sat astride Pylon, looking at it. Had she and Roland been here hardly twenty-four hours ago? Making love and making plans? It was hard to believe, but when she dismounted and went in, the wicker basket in which she had brought them a cold meal confirmed it. It still sat upon the rickety table.

Looking at the hamper, she realized she hadn’t eaten since the previous evening—a miserable supper with Hart Thorin that she’d only picked at, too aware of his eyes on her body. Well, they’d done their last crawl, hadn’t they? And she’d never have to walk down another Seafront hallway wondering what door he was going to come bursting out of like Jack out of his box, all grabbing hands and stiff, randy prick.

Ashes,
she thought.
Ashes and ashes. But not us, Roland. I swear, my darling, not us.

She was frightened and tense, trying to put everything she now must do in order—a process to be followed just as there was a process to be followed when saddling a horse—but she was also sixteen and healthy. One look at the hamper and she was ravenous.

She opened it, saw there were ants on the two remaining cold beef sandwiches, brushed them off, and gobbled the sandwiches down. The bread had gotten rather stiff, but she hardly noticed. There was a half jar of sweet cider and part of a cake, as well.

When she had finished everything, she went to the north corner of the hut and moved the hides someone had begun to
cure and then lost interest in. There was a hollow beneath. Within it, wrapped in soft leather, were Roland’s guns.

If things go badly, thee must come here and take them west to Gilead. Find my father.

With faint but genuine curiosity, Susan wondered if Roland had really expected she would ride blithely off to Gilead with his unborn child in her belly while he and his friends were roasted, screaming and red-handed, on the Reap-Night bonfire.

She pulled one of the guns out of its holster. It took her a moment or two to see how to get the revolver open, but then the cylinder rolled out and she saw that each chamber was loaded. She snapped it back into place and checked the other one.

She concealed them in the blanket-roll behind her saddle, just as Roland had, then mounted up and headed east again. But not toward town. Not yet. She had one more stop to make first.

At around two o’ the clock, word that Fran Lengyll would be speaking at the Town Gathering Hall began to sweep through the town of Mejis. No one could have said where this news (it was too firm and specific to be a rumor) began, and no one much cared; they simply passed it on.

By three o’ the clock, the Gathering Hall was full, and two hundred or more stood outside, listening as Lengyll’s brief address was relayed back to them in whispers. Coral Thorin, who had begun passing the news of Lengyll’s impending appearance at the Travellers’ Rest, was not there. She knew what Lengyll was going to say; had, in fact, supported Jonas’s argument that it should be as simple and direct as possible. There was no need for rabble-rousing; the townsfolk would be a mob by sundown of Reaping Day, a mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.