“Aye,” Depape said. “I suppose you would. Three young men, one the son of a lord. Of a gunslinger, you think. Steven of Gilead.” And the name was familiar to him, aye, it was.
“Steven Deschain of Gilead, that’s it.”
“And what name did he give, this young lord?”
The old bastard had screwed his face up alarmingly in an effort to remember. “Deerfield? Deerstine? I don’t quite remember-”
“That’s all right, I know it. And you’ve earned your metal.”
“Have I?” the old bastard had edged close again, his breath gagging-sweet with the weed. “Gold or silver? Which is it, my friend?”
“Lead,” Depape replied, then hauled leather and shot the old man twice in the chest. Doing him a favor, really.
Now he rode back toward Mejis-it would be a faster trip without having to stop in every dipshit little town and ask questions.
There was a flurry of wings close above his head. A pigeon-dark gray, it was, with a white ring around its neck-fluttered down on a rock just ahead of him, as if to rest. An interesting-looking bird. Not, Depape thought, a wild pigeon. Someone’s escaped pet? He couldn’t imagine anyone in this desolate quarter of the world keeping anything but a half-wild dog to bite the squash off any would-be robber (although what these folks might have worth robbing was another question he couldn’t answer), but he supposed anything was possible. In any case, roast pigeon would go down a treat when he stopped for the night.
Depape drew his gun, but before he could cock the hammer, the pigeon was off and flying east. Depape took a shot after it, anyway. Sometimes you got lucky, but apparently not this time; the pigeon dipped a little, then straightened out and disappeared in the direction Depape himself was going. He sat astride his horse for a moment, not much put out of countenance; he thought Jonas was going to be very pleased with what he had found out.
After a bit, he booted his horse in the sides and began to canter east along the Barony Sea Road, back toward Mejis, where the boys who had embarrassed him were waiting to be dealt with. Lords they might be, sons of gunslingers they might be, but in these latter days, even such as those could die. As the old bastard himself would undoubtedly have pointed out, the world had moved on.
2
On a late afternoon three days after Roy Depape left Ritzy and headed his horse toward Hambry again, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode north and west of town, first down the long swell of the Drop, then into the freeland Hambry folk called the Bad Grass, then into deserty waste lands. Ahead of them and clearly visible once they were back in the open were crumbled and eroded bluffs. In the center of these was a dark, almost vaginal cleft; its edges so splintered it looked as if it had been whacked into reality by an ill-tempered god wielding a hatchet.
The distance between the end of the Drop and the bluffs was perhaps six miles. Three quarters of the way across, they passed the flatlands’ only real geographic feature: a jutting upthrust of rock that looked like a finger bent at the first knuckle. Below it was a small, boomerang-shaped greensward, and when Cuthbert gave a ululating yell to hear his voice bounce back at him from the bluffs ahead, a pack of chattering billy-bumblers broke from this greenplace and went racing back southeast, toward the Drop.
“That’s Hanging Rock,” Roland said. “There’s a spring at the base of it-only one in these parts, they say.”
It was all the talk that passed between them on the ride out, but a look of unmistakable relief passed between Cuthbert and Alain behind Roland’s back. For the last three weeks they had pretty much marched in place as summer rolled around them and past them. It was all well for Roland to say they must wait, they must pay greatest attention to the things that didn’t matter and count the things which did from the comers of their eyes, but neither of them quite trusted the dreamy, disconnected air which Roland wore these days like his own special version of Clay Reynolds’s cloak. They didn’t talk about this between themselves; they didn’t have to. Both knew that if Roland began courting the pretty girl whom Mayor Thorin meant for his gilly (and who else could that long blonde hair have belonged to?), they would be in very bad trouble. But Roland showed no courting plumage, neither of them spied any more blonde hairs on his shirt-collars, and tonight he seemed more himself, as if he had put that cloak of abstraction aside. Temporarily, mayhap. Permanently, if they were lucky. They could only wait and see. In the end, ka would tell, as it always did.
A mile or so from the bluffs, the strong sea breeze which had been at their backs for the whole ride suddenly dropped, and they heard the low, atonal squalling from the cleft that was Eyebolt Canyon. Alain pulled up, grimacing like a man who has bitten into a fruit of extravagant sourness. All he could think of was a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand. Buzzards circled above the canyon as if drawn to the sound.
“The lookout don’t like it. Will.” Cuthbert said, knocking his knuckles on the skull. “I don’t like it much, either. What are we out here for?”
“To count,” Roland said. “We were sent to count everything and see everything, and this is something to count and see.”
“Oh, aye,” Cuthbert said. He held his horse in with some effort; the low, grinding wail of the thinny had made it skittish. “Sixteen hundred and fourteen fishing nets, seven hundred and ten boats small, two hundred and fourteen boats large, seventy oxen that nobody will admit to, and, on the north of town, one thinny. Whatever the hell that is.”
“We’re going to find out,” Roland said.
They rode into the sound, and although none of them liked it, no one suggested they go back. They had come all the way out here, and Roland was right-this was their job. Besides, they were curious.
The mouth of the canyon had been pretty well stopped up with brush, as Susan had told Roland it would be. Come fall, most of it would probably be dead, but now the stacked branches still bore leaves and made it hard to see into the canyon. A path led through the center of the brush-pile, but it was narrow for the horses (who might have balked at going through, anyway), and in the failing light Roland could make out hardly anything.
“Are we going in?” Cuthbert asked. “Let the Recording Angel note that I’m against, although I’ll offer no mutiny.”
Roland had no intention of taking them through the brush and toward the source of that sound. Not when he had only the vaguest idea of what a thinny was. He had asked a few questions about it over the last few weeks, and gotten little useful response. “I’d stay away,” was the extent of Sheriff Avery’s advice. So far his best information was still what he had gotten from Susan on the night he met her.
“Sit easy, Bert. We’re not going in.”
“Good,” Alain said softly, and Roland smiled.
There was a path up the canyon’s west side, steep and narrow, but passable if they were careful. They went single file, stopping once to clear a rockfall, pitching splintered chunks of shale and hornfels into the groaning trench to their right. When this was done and just as the three of them were preparing to mount up again, a large bird of some sort-perhaps a grouse, perhaps a prairie chicken-rose above the lip of the canyon in an explosive whir of feathers. Roland dipped for his guns, and saw both Cuthbert and Alain doing the same. Quite funny, considering that their firearms were wrapped in protective oilcloth and secreted beneath the floorboards of the Bar K bunkhouse.
They looked at each other, said nothing (except with their eyes, which said plenty), and went on. Roland found that the effect of being this close to the thinny was cumulative-it wasn’t a sound you could get used to. Quite the contrary, in fact: the longer you were in the immediate vicinity of Eye-bolt Canyon, the more that sound scraped away at your brain. It got into your teeth as well as your ears; it vibrated in the knot of nerves below the breastbone and seemed to eat at the damp and delicate tissue behind the eyes. Most of all, though, it got into your head, telling you that everything you had ever been afraid of was just behind the next curve of the trail or yonder pile of tumbled rock, waiting to snake out of its place and get you.