“I look forward to it.”

But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.

12

Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies.

When Cuthbert gave the Good Man’s sigul-hands clasped to the chest, left above right, then both held out to the person being greeted-the blond picket did the same, and with a grateful smile.

“What spin and raree back there?” he asked, speaking with a strong In-World accent-to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite.

“Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills.” Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own accent faultlessly. “'I here were a tight. It be over now, but they did fight fearful.”

“What-”

“No time,” Roland said brusquely. “We have dispatches.” He crossed his hands on his chest, then held them out. “Hile! Farson!”

“Good Man!” the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo’s perimeter. As easy as that.

“Remember that it’s hit-and-run,” Roland said. “Slow down for nothing. What we don’t get must be left-there’ll be no second pass.”

“Gods, don’t even suggest such a thing,” Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs.

Alain unslung Lengyll’s machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. “I don’t know about this, Roland. It’s loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but-”

“Then use it,” Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their scrapes. “This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Roland.”

“Bert?”

“Aye,” Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, “so I am, so I am.”

Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.

Roland drew both revolvers. “Gilead!” he cried. “Hile! Gilead!”

He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.

The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.

13

Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Susan’s heart sank.

The one on Reynolds’s left-he wore a stained white drover’s hat and had a lazily cocked eye-she didn’t know, but the one on the right, who looked like a stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, after smiling at Susan.

“Why, Las and I couldn’t even get us a drink to send his late brother, the Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with a word,” Reynolds said. “We hadn’t hardly hit town before we got persuaded out here. I wasn’t going to go, but… damn! That old lady’s something. Could talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you’ll pardon the crudity. I think your aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She-”

“Your friends are dead,” Susan told him.

Reynolds paused, shrugged. “Well now. Maybe si and maybe no. Me, I think I’ve decided to travel on without em even if they ain’t. But I might hang around here one more night. This Reaping business… I’ve heard so much about the way folks do it in the Outers. ’specially the bonfire part.”

The man with the cocked eye laughed phlegmily.

“Let us pass,” Olive said. “This girl has done nothing, and neither have I.”

“She helped Dearborn escape,” Rimer said, “him who murdered your own husband and my brother. I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

“The gods may restore Kimba Rimer in the clearing,” Olive said, “but the truth is he looted half of this town’s treasury, and what he didn’t give over to John Farson, he kept for himself.”

Rimer recoiled as if slapped.

“Ye didn’t know I knew? Laslo, I’d be angry at how little any of ye thought of me… except why would I want to be thought of by the likes of you, anyway? I knew enough to make me sick, leave it at that. I know that the man you’re sitting beside-”

“Shut up,” Rimer muttered.

“-was likely the one who cut yer brother’s black heart open; sai Reynolds was seen that early morning in that wing, so I’ve been told-”

“Shut up, you cunt!”

“-and so I believe.”

“Better do as he says, sai, and hold your tongue,” Reynolds said. Some of the lazy good humor had left his face. Susan thought: He doesn’t like people knowing what he did. Not even when he’s the one on top and what they know can’t hurt him. And he’s less without Jonas. A lot less. He knows it, too.

“Let us pass,” Olive said.

“No, sai, I can’t do that.”

“I’ll help ye, then, shall I?”

Her hand had crept beneath the outrageously large serape during the palaver, and now she brought out a huge and ancient pistola, its handles of yellowed ivory, its filigreed barrel of old tarnished silver. On top was a brass powder-and-spark.

Olive had no business even drawing the thing-it caught on her serape, and she had to fight it free. She had no business cocking it, either, a process that took both thumbs and two tries. But the three men were utterly flummoxed by the sight of the elderly blunderbuss in her hands, Reynolds as much as the other two; he sat his horse with his jaw hanging slack. Jonas would have wept.

“Get her!” a cracked old voice shrieked from behind the men blocking the road. “What’s wrong with ye, ye stupid culls? GET HER!”

Reynolds started at that and went for his gun. He was fast, but he had given Olive too much of a headstart and was beaten, beaten cold. Even as he cleared leather with the barrel of his revolver, the Mayor’s widow held the old gun out in both hands, and, squinching her eyes shut like a little girl who is forced to eat something nasty, pulled the trigger.

The spark flashed, but the damp powder only made a weary floop sound and disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The ball-big enough to have taken Clay Reynolds’s head off from the nose on up, had it fired- stayed in the barrel.

In the next instant his own gun roared in his fist. Olive’s horse reared, whinnying. Olive went off the gelding head over boots, with a black hole in the orange stripe of her serape-the stripe which lay above her heart.

Susan heard herself screaming. The sound seemed to come from very far away. She might have gone on for some time, but then she heard the clop of approaching pony hooves from behind the men in the road… and knew. Even before the man with the lazy eye moved aside to show her, she knew, and her screams stopped.