He spent the next hour strolling around the derricks, paying especially close attention to those that still worked, looking for sign. He found plenty of tracks, but it was impossible (especially after a week of wet weather) to read them with any degree of accuracy. The In-World boys might have been out here; that ugly little band of brats from town might have been out here; Arthur Eld and the whole company of his knights might have been out here. The ambiguity put Jonas in a foul temper, as ambiguity (other than on a Castles board) always did.
He started back the way he’d come, meaning to descend the slope to his horse and ride back to town. His leg was aching like fury, and he wanted a stiff drink to quiet it down. The bunkhouse at the Bar K could wait another day.
He got halfway to the gate, saw the weedy spur track tying Citgo to the Great Road, and sighed. There would be nothing on that little strip of road to see, but now that he’d come all the way out here, he supposed he should finish the job.
Bugger finishing the job, I want a damned drink.
But Roland wasn’t the only one who sometimes found his wishes overruled by training. Jonas sighed, rubbed at his leg, then walked back to the weedy twin ruts.
Where, it seemed, there was something to find after all.
It lay in the grassy ditch less than a dozen paces from the place where the old road joined the Great Road. At first he saw only a smooth white shape in the weeds and thought it was a stone. Then he saw a black round-ness that could only be an eyehole. Not a stone, then; a skull.
Grunting, Jonas knelt and fished it out while the few living derricks continued to squeal and thump behind him. A rook’s skull. He had seen it before. Hell, he suspected most of the town had. It belonged to the showoff, Arthur Heath … who, like all showoffs, needed his little props.
“He called it the lookout,” Jonas murmured. “Put it on the horn of his saddle sometimes, didn’t he? And sometimes wore it around his neck like a pendant.”
Yes. The youngster had been wearing it so that night in the Travellers’ Rest,
when—
Jonas turned the bird’s skull. Something rattled inside like a last lonely thought.
Jonas tilted it, shook it over his open palm, and a fragment of gold chain dropped out. That was how the boy had been wearing it. At some point the chain had broken, the skull had fallen in the ditch, and sai Heath had never troubled to go looking for it. The thought that someone might find it had probably never crossed his mind. Boys were careless. It was a wonder any ever grew up to be men.
Jonas’s face remained calm as he knelt there examining the bird’s skull, but behind the unlined brow he was as furious as he had ever been in his life. They had been out here, all right—it was another thing he would have scoffed at just yesterday.
He had to assume they had seen the tankers, camouflage or no camouflage, and if not for the chance of finding this skull, he never would have known for sure, one way or the other.
“When I finish with em, their eyesockets’ll be as empty as yours. Sir Rook. I’ll gouge em clean myself.”
He started to throw the skull away, then changed his mind. It might come in handy. Carrying it in one hand, he started back to where he’d left his horse.
7
Coral Thorin walked down High Street toward the Travellers’ Rest, her head thumping rustily and her heart sour in her breast. She had been up only an hour, but her hangover was so miserable it felt like a day already. She was drinking too much of late and she knew it—almost every night now—but she was very careful not to take more than one or two (and always light ones) where folks could see.
So far, she thought no one suspected. And as long as no one suspected, she supposed she would keep on. How else to bear her idiotic brother? This idiotic town? And, of course, the knowledge that all of the ranchers in the Horsemen’s Association and at least half of the large landowners were traitors? “Fuck the Affiliation,” she whispered. “Better a bird in the hand.”
But did she really have a bird in the hand? Did any of them? Would 1-arson keep his promises—promises made by a man named Latigo and passed on by their own inimitable Kimba Rimer? Coral had her doubts; despots had such a convenient way of forgetting their promises, and birds in the hand such an irritating way of
pecking your fingers, shitting in your palm, and then flying away. Not that it mattered now; she had made her bed. Besides, folks would always want to drink and gamble and rut, regardless of who they bowed their knees to or in whose name their taxes were collected.
Still, when the voice of old demon conscience whispered, a few drinks helped to still its lips.
She paused outside Craven’s Undertaking Parlor, looking upstreet at the laughing boys on their ladders, hanging paper lanterns from high poles and building eaves.
These gay lamps would be lit on the night of the Reap Fair, filling Hambry’s main street with a hundred shades of soft, conflicting light.
For a moment Coral remembered the child she had been, looking at the colored paper lanterns with wonder, listening to the shouts and the rattle of fireworks, listening to the dance-music coming from Green Heart as her father held her hand
. . . and, on his other side, her big brother Hart’s hand. In this memory, Hart was proudly wearing his first pair of long trousers.
Nostalgia swept her, sweet at first, then bitter. The child had grown into a sallow woman who owned a saloon and whorehouse (not to mention a great deal of land along the Drop), a woman whose only sexual partner of late was her brother’s Chancellor, a woman whose chief goal upon arising these days was getting to the hair of the dog that bit her as soon as possible. How, exactly, had things turned out so? This woman whose eyes she used was the last woman the child she had been would have expected to become.
“Where did I go wrong?” she asked herself, and laughed. “Oh dear Man Jesus, where did this straying sinner-child go wrong? Can you say hallelujah.” She sounded so much like the wandering preacher-woman that had come through town the year before—Pittston, her name had been, Sylvia Pittston—that she laughed again, this time almost naturally. She walked on toward the Rest with a better will.
Sheemie was outside, tending to the remains of his silkflowers. He waved to her and called a greeting. She waved back and called something in return. A good enough lad, Sheemie, and although she could have found another easily enough, she supposed she was glad Depape hadn’t killed him.
The bar was almost empty but brilliantly lit, all the gas-jets flaring. It was clean, as well. Sheemie would have emptied the spittoons, but Coral guessed it was the plump woman behind the bar who had done all the rest. The makeup couldn’t hide
the sallowness of that woman’s cheeks, the hollow-ness of her eyes, or the way her neck had started to go all crepey (seeing that sort of lizardy skin on a woman’s neck always made Coral shiver inside).
It was Pettie the Trotter tending bar beneath The Romp’s stem glass gaze, and if allowed to do so, she would continue until Stanley appeared and banished her.
Pettie had said nothing out loud to Coral—she knew better—but had made her wants clear enough just the same. Her whoring days were almost at an end. She desperately desired to go to work tending bar. There was precedent for it, Coral knew—a female bartender at Forest Trees in Pass o’ the River, and there had been another at Glencove, up the coast in Tavares, until she had died of the pox. What Pettie refused to see was that Stanley Ruiz was younger by fifteen years and in far better health. He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper’s grave.
“Good even, sai Thorin,” Pettie said. And before Coral could so much as open her mouth, the whore had put a shot glass on the bar and filled it full of whiskey.
Coral looked at it with dismay. Did they all know, then?
“I don’t want that,” she snapped. “Why in Eld’s name would I? Sun isn’t even down! Pour it back into the bottle, for yer father’s sake, and then get the hell out of here. Who d’ye think yer serving at five o’ the clock, anyway? Ghosts?”