“Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!”
Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with a sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger’s head like a spike.
The Dark Bells. The sigul of their ka-tet. What—
The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet about them now. Sister Coquina’s hands faltered on their way to Jenna’s throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked her eyes.
“No,” Coquina whispered. “You can’t! ”
“I have, ” Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the legs of the bearded man, he’d observed a battalion. What he saw coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody history of Mid-World.
Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was not what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his dreams for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds.
These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle, like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.
Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her own bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared with the sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.
Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the beds.
Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland’s 198
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guns beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard pull. Roland slid his leg free.
“Come,” she said. “I’ve started them, but staying them could be a different thing.”
Now Sister Coquina’s shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The bugs had found her.
“Don’t look,” Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. “Come.
We must be quick—she’ll rouse the others. I’ve put your boots and clothes aside up the path that leads away from here—I carried as much as I could. How are ye? Are ye strong?”
“Thanks to you.” How long he would stay strong Roland didn’t know . . . and right now it wasn’t a question that mattered. He saw Jenna snatch up two of the reeds—in his struggle to escape the slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed—and then they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.
Roland buckled on his guns and tied them down without breaking stride.
They passed only three beds on each side before reaching the flap of the tent . . . and it was a tent, he saw, not a vast pavilion. The silk walls and ceiling were fraying canvas, thin enough to let in the light of a three-quarters Kissing Moon. And the beds weren’t beds at all, but only a double row of shabby cots.
He turned and saw a black, writhing hump on the floor where Sister Coquina had been. At the sight of her, Roland was struck by an unpleasant thought.
“I forgot John Norman’s medallion!” A keen sense of regret—
almost of mourning—went through him like wind.
Jenna reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought it out. It glimmered in the moonlight.
“I picked it up off the floor.”
He didn’t know which made him gladder—the sight of the medallion or the sight of it in her hand. It meant she wasn’t like the others.
Then, as if to dispel that notion before it got too firm a hold on him, 199
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she said, “Take it, Roland—I can hold it no more.” And, as he took it, he saw unmistakable marks of charring on her fingers.
He took her hand and kissed each burn.
“Thankee-sai,” she said, and he saw she was crying. “Thankee, dear.
To be kissed so is lovely, worth every pain. Now . . .”
Roland saw her eyes shift, and followed them. Here were bobbing lights descending a rocky path. Beyond them he saw the building where the Little Sisters had been living—not a convent but a ruined hacienda that looked a thousand years old. There were three candles; as they drew closer, Roland saw that there were only three sisters.
Mary wasn’t among them.
He drew his guns.
“Oooo, it’s a gunslinger-man he is!” Louise.
“A scary man!” Michela.
“And he’s found his ladylove as well as his shooters!” Tamra.
“His slut-whore!” Louise.
Laughing angrily. Not afraid . . . at least, not of his weapons.
“Put them away,” Jenna told him, and when she looked, saw that he already had.
The others, meanwhile, had drawn closer.
“Ooo, see, she cries!” Tamra.
“Doffed her habit, she has!” Michela. “Perhaps it’s her broken vows she cries for.”
“Why such tears, pretty?” Louise.
“Because he kissed my fingers where they were burned,” Jenna said. “I’ve never been kissed before. It made me cry.”
“Ooooo!”
“Luv-ly!”
“Next he’ll stick his thing in her! Even luv-lier!”
Jenna bore their japes with no sign of anger. When they were done, she said, “I’m going with him. Stand aside.”
They gaped at her, counterfeit laughter disappearing in shock.
“No!” Louise whispered. “Are ye mad? Ye know what’ll happen!”
“No, and neither do you,” Jenna said. “Besides, I care not.” She half-turned and held her hand out to the mouth of the ancient hospital 200
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tent. It was a faded olive-drab in the moonlight, with an old red cross drawn on its roof. Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to with this tent, which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and gloriously dim on the inside. How many towns and over how many years.
Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were the doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was terrible.
“Stand aside or I’ll have them on ye,” Jenna said.
“Ye never would!” Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.
“Aye. I’ve already set them on Sister Coquina. She’s a part of their medicine, now.”
Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was all of that dismay directed toward their own precious hides. What Jenna had done was clearly far outside their reckoning.
“Then you’re damned,” Sister Tamra said.
“Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside.”
They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from him . . . but they shrank from her more.
“Damned?” he asked after they had skirted the hacienda and reached the path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled scree of rocks. In its light Roland could see a small black opening low on the scarp. He guessed it was the cave the Sisters called Thoughtful House. “What did they mean, damned?”
“Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like it not that we haven’t seen her.”
She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the com-pass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.
“Tell me what they meant.”
“Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland—what good is it? ’Tis done, the bridge burned. I can’t go back. Nor would if I could.” She looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland 201
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saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. “I have supped with them. There were times when I couldn’t help it, no more than you could help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was in it.”
Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat . . . a woman, too. He nodded.
“I’d go no farther down that road. If there’s to be damnation, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing me back to them, but she was wrong.” She looked at him shyly and fearfully . . . but met his eyes. “I’d go beside ye on yer road, Roland of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye’d have me.”
“You’re welcome to your share of my way,” he said. “And I am—”
Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley in which the Little Sisters had practiced their glamours.