but I’ve heard em talking. Jenna’s just come back among em recently, and those Dark Bells mean something special . . . but Mary’s still the one who swings the weight. I think the Dark Bells are only ceremonial, like the rings the old Barons used to hand down from father to son. Was it she who put Jimmy’s medal around your neck?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t take it off, whatever you do.” His face was strained, grim.
“I don’t know if it’s the gold or the God, but they don’t like to get too close. I think that’s the only reason I’m still here.” Now his voice dropped all the way to a whisper. “They ain’t human.”
“Well, perhaps a bit fey and magical, but . . .”
“No!” With what was clearly an effort, the boy got up on one elbow. He looked at Roland earnestly. “You’re thinking about hubberwomen, or witches. These ain’t hubbers, nor witches, either.
They ain’t human! ”
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“Then what are they?”
“Don’t know.”
“How came you here, John?”
Speaking in a low voice, John Norman told Roland what he knew of what had happened to him. He, his brother, and four other young men who were quick and owned good horses had been hired as scouts, riding drogue-and-forward, protecting a long-haul caravan of seven freight wagons taking goods—seeds, food, tools, mail, and four ordered brides—to an unincorporated township called Tejuas some two hundred miles farther west of Eluria. The scouts rode fore and aft of the goods-train in turn-and-turn-about fashion; one brother rode with each party because, Norman explained, when they were together they fought like . . . well . . .
“Like brothers,” Roland suggested.
John Norman managed a brief, pained smile. “Aye,” he said.
The trio of which John was a part had been riding drogue, about two miles behind the freight wagons, when the green mutants had sprung an ambush in Eluria.
“How many wagons did you see when you got there?” he asked Roland.
“Only one. Overturned.”
“How many bodies?”
“Only your brother’s.”
John Norman nodded grimly. “They wouldn’t take him because of the medallion, I think.”
“The muties?”
“The Sisters. The muties care nothing for gold or God. These bitches, though . . .” He looked into the dark, which was now almost complete. Roland felt lethargy creeping over him again, but it wasn’t until later that he realized the soup had been drugged.
“The other wagons?” Roland asked. “The ones not overturned?”
“The muties would have taken them, and the goods, as well,” Norman said. “They don’t care for gold or God; the Sisters don’t care for goods. Like as not they have their own foodstuffs, something I’d as soon not think of. Nasty stuff . . . like those bugs.”
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He and the other drogue riders galloped into Eluria, but the fight was over by the time they got there. Men had been lying about, some dead but many more still alive. At least two of the ordered brides had still been alive, as well. Survivors able to walk were being herded together by the green folk—John Norman remembered the one in the bowler hat very well, and the woman in the ragged red vest.
Norman and the other two had tried to fight. He had seen one of his pards gutshot by an arrow, and then he saw no more—someone had cracked him over the head from behind, and the lights had gone out.
Roland wondered if the ambusher had cried “Booh!” before he had struck, but didn’t ask.
“When I woke up again, I was here,” Norman said. “I saw that some of the others— most of them—had those cursed bugs on them.”
“Others?” Roland looked at the empty beds. In the growing darkness, they glimmered like white islands. “How many were brought here?”
“At least twenty. They healed . . . the bugs healed em . . . and then, one by one, they disappeared. You’d go to sleep, and when you woke up there’d be one more empty bed. One by one they went, until only me and that one down yonder was left.”
He looked at Roland solemnly.
“And now you.”
“Norman,” Roland’s head was swimming. “I—”
“I reckon I know what’s wrong with you,” Norman said. He seemed to speak from far away . . . perhaps from all the way around the curve of the earth. “It’s the soup. But a man has to eat. A woman, too. If she’s a natural woman, anyway. These ones ain’t natural. Even Sister Jenna’s not natural. Nice don’t mean natural.” Farther and farther away. “And she’ll be like them in the end. Mark me well.”
“Can’t move.” Saying even that required a huge effort. It was like moving boulders.
“No.” Norman suddenly laughed. It was a shocking sound, and echoed in the growing blackness which filled Roland’s head. “It ain’t just sleep medicine they put in their soup; it’s can’t-move med-179
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icine, too. There’s nothing much wrong with me, brother . . . so why do you think I’m still here?”
Norman was now speaking not from around the curve of the earth but perhaps from the moon. He said: “I don’t think either of us is ever going to see the sun shining on a flat piece of ground again.”
You’re wrong about that, Roland tried to reply, and more in that vein, as well, but nothing came out. He sailed around to the black side of the moon, losing all his words in the void he found there.
Yet he never quite lost awareness of himself. Perhaps the dose of
“medicine” in Sister Coquina’s soup had been badly calculated, or perhaps it was just that they had never had a gunslinger to work their mischief on, and did not know they had one now.
Except, of course, for Sister Jenna— she knew.
At some point in the night, whispering, giggling voices and lightly chiming bells brought him back from the darkness where he had been biding, not quite asleep or unconscious. Around him, so constant he now barely heard it, were the singing “doctors.”
Roland opened his eyes. He saw pale and chancy light dancing in the black air. The giggles and whispers were closer. Roland tried to turn his head and at first couldn’t. He rested, gathered his will into a hard blue ball, and tried again. This time his head did turn. Only a little, but a little was enough.
It was five of the Little Sisters—Mary, Louise, Tamra, Coquina, Michela. They came up the long aisle of the black infirmary, laughing together like children out on a prank, carrying long tapers in silver holders, the bells lining the forehead-bands of their wimples chiming little silver runs of sound. They gathered about the bed of the bearded man. From within their circle, candleglow rose in a shimmery column that died before it got halfway to the silken ceiling.
Sister Mary spoke briefly. Roland recognized her voice, but not the words—it was neither low speech nor the High, but some other language entirely. One phrase stood out— can de lach, mi him en tow—and he had no idea what it might mean.
He realized that now he could hear only the tinkle of bells—the doctor-bugs had stilled.
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“Ras me! On! On!” Sister Mary cried in a harsh, powerful voice. The candles went out. The light that had shone through the wings of their wimples as they gathered around the bearded man’s bed vanished, and all was darkness once more.
Roland waited for what might happen next, his skin cold. He tried to flex his hands or feet, and could not. He had been able to move his head perhaps fifteen degrees; otherwise he was as paralyzed as a fly neatly wrapped up and hung in a spider’s web.
The low jingling of bells in the black . . . and then sucking sounds.
As soon as he heard them, Roland knew he’d been waiting for them.
Some part of him had known what the Little Sisters of Eluria were, all along.
If Roland could have raised his hands, he would have put them to his ears to block those sounds out. As it was, he could only lie still, listening and waiting for them to stop.
For a long time—forever, it seemed—they did not. The women slurped and grunted like pigs snuffling half-liquefied feed up out of a trough. There was even one resounding belch, followed by more whispered giggles (these ended when Sister Mary uttered a single curt word— “Hais!” ). And once there was a low, moaning cry—from the bearded man, Roland was quite sure. If so, it was his last on this side of the clearing.
In time, the sounds of their feeding began to taper off. As it did, the bugs began to sing again—first hesitantly, then with more confidence.
The whispering and giggling recommenced. The candles were relit.