Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.
He tried to speak but his voice was gone, the voice of the oracle, Star-Slut, Whore of the
Winds, both were gone; he saw a card fluttering down from nowhere to now here, turning
and turning in the lazy dark. On it a baboon grinned from over the shoulder of a young man
with dark hair; its disturbingly human fingers were buried so deeply in the young man’s
neck that their tips had disappeared in flesh. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the
baboon held a whip in one of those clutching, strangling hands. The face of the ridden man
seemed to writhe in wordless terror.
The Prisoner,the man in black (who had once been a man the gunslinger trusted, a man
named Walter) whispered chummily. A trifle upsetting, isn’t he? A trifle upsetting … a trifle upsetting … a trifle—
2
The gunslinger snapped awake, waving at something with his mutilated hand, sure that in
a moment one of the monstrous shelled things from the Western Sea would drop on him,
desperately enquiring in its foreign tongue as it pulled his face off his skull.
Instead a sea-bird, attracted by the glister of the morning sun on the buttons of his shirt,
wheeled away with a frightened squawk.
Roland sat up.
His hand throbbed wretchedly, endlessly. His right foot did the same. Both fingers and toe
continued to insist they were there. The bottom half of his shirt was gone; what was left
resembled a ragged vest. He had used one piece to bind his hand, the other to bind his foot.
Go away, he told the absent parts of his body. You are ghosts now. Go away.
It helped a little. Not much, but a little. They were ghosts, all right, but lively ghosts.
The gunslinger ate jerky. His mouth wanted it little, his stomach less, but he insisted.
When it was inside him, he felt a little stronger. There was not much left, though; he was
nearly up against it.
Yet things needed to be done.
He rose unsteadily to his feet and looked about. Birds swooped and dived, but the world
seemed to belong to only him and them. The monstrosities were gone. Perhaps they were
nocturnal; perhaps tidal. At the moment it seemed to make no difference.
The sea was enormous, meeting the horizon at a misty blue point that was impossible to
determine. For a long moment the gunslinger forgot his agony in its contemplation. He had
never seen such a body of water. Had heard of it in children’s stories, of course, had even
been assured by his teachers—some, at least—that it existed—but to actually see it, this
immensity, this amazement of water after years of arid land, was difficult to accept. . .
difficult to even see.
He looked at it for a long time, enrapt, making himself see it, temporarily forgetting his pain in wonder.
But it was morning, and there were still things to be done.
He felt for the jawbone in his back pocket, careful to lead with the palm of his right hand,
not wanting the stubs of his fingers to encounter it if it was still there, changing that hand’s
ceaseless sobbing to screams.
It was.
All right.
Next.
He clumsily unbuckled his gunbelts and laid them on a sunny rock. He removed the guns,
swung the chambers out, and removed the useless shells. He threw them away. A bird
settled on the bright gleam tossed back by one of them, picked it up in its beak, then
dropped it and flew away.
The guns themselves must be tended to, should have been tended to before this, but since
no gun in this world or any other was more than a club without ammunition, he laid the
gunbelts themselves over his lap before doing anything else and carefully ran his left hand
over the leather.
Each of them was damp from buckle and clasp to the point where the belts would cross his
hips; from that point they seemed dry. He carefully removed each shell from the dry
portions of the belts. His right hand kept trying to do this job, insisted on forgetting its
reduction in spite of the pain, and he found himself returning it to his knee again and again, like a dog too stupid or fractious to heel. In his distracted pain he came close to swatting it
once or twice.
I see serious problems ahead,he thought again.
He put these shells, hopefully still good, in a pile that was dishearteningly small. Twenty.
Of those, a few would almost certainly misfire. He could depend on none of them. He
removed the rest and put them in another pile. Thirty-seven.
Well, you weren’t heavy loaded, anyway,he thought, but he recognized the difference
between fifty-seven live rounds and what might be twenty. Or ten. Or five. Or one. Or
none.
He put the dubious shells in a second pile.
He still had his purse. That was one thing. He put it in his lap and then slowly
disassembled his guns and performed the ritual of cleaning. By the time he was finished,
two hours had passed and his pain was so intense his head reeled with it; conscious thought
had become difficult. He wanted to sleep. He had never wanted that more in his life/But in
the service ofduty there was never any acceptable reason for denial.
“Cort,” he said in a voice that he couldn’t recognize, and laughed dryly.
Slowly, slowly, he reassembled his revolvers and loaded them with the shells he presumed
to be dry. When the job was done, he held the one made for his left hand, cocked it… and
then slowly lowered the hammer again. He wanted to know, yes. Wanted to know if there
would be a satisfying report when he squeezed the trigger or only another of those useless
clicks. But a click would mean nothing, and a report would only reduce twenty to
nineteen… or nine… or three… or none.
He tore away another piece of his shirt, put the other shells—the ones which had been
wetted—in it, and tied it, using his left hand and his teeth. He put them in his purse.
Sleep,his body demanded. Sleep, you must sleep, now, before dark, there’s nothing left,
you’re used up—
He tottered to his feet and looked up and down the deserted strand. It was the color of an
undergarment which has gone a long time without washing, littered with sea-shells which
had no color. Here and there large rocks protruded from the gross-grained sand, and these
were covered with guano, the older layers the yellow of ancient teeth, the fresher splotches
white.
The high-tide line was marked with drying kelp. He could see pieces of his right boot and
his waterskins lying near that line. He thought it almost a miracle that the skins hadn’t been
washed out to sea by high-surging waves. Walking slowly, limping exquisitely, the
gunslinger made his way to where they were. He picked up one of them and shook it by his ear. The other was empty. This one still had a little water left in it. Most would not have
been able to tell the difference between the two, but the gunslinger knew each just as well
as a mother knows which of her identical twins is which. He had been travelling with these
waterskins for a long, long time. Water sloshed inside. That was good—a gift. Either the
crea- ture which had attacked him or any of the others could have torn this or the other open
with one casual bite or slice of claw, but none had and the tide had spared it. Of the creature
itself there was no sign, although the two of them had finished far above the tide-line.
Perhaps other predators had taken it; perhaps its own kind had given it a burial at sea, as
the elaphaunts, giant creatures of whom he had heard in child- hood stories, were reputed to bury their own dead.
He lifted the waterskin with his left elbow, drank deeply, and felt some strength come back
into him. The right boot was of course ruined. . . but then he felt a spark of hope. The foot
itself was intact—scarred but intact—and it might be possible to cut the other down to
match it, to make something which would last at least awhile. . . .
Faintness stole over him. He fought it but his knees unhinged and he sat down, stupidly
biting his tongue.
You won’t fall unconscious,he told himself grimly. Not here, not where another of those
things can come back tonight and finish the job.
So he got to his feet and tied the empty skin about his waist, but he had only gone twenty
yards back toward the place where he had left his guns and purse when he fell down again,
half-fainting. He lay there awhile, one cheek pressed against the sand, the edge of a