Something farther off to the east screamed like a woman in life-ending agony. Jake knew it was only a rock-cat—he’d heard them before, when he’d been at the river with Benny, either fishing or swimming—but he still put his hand on the butt of the Ruger until it stopped. Oy had assumed the bowing position, front paws apart, head lowered, rump pointed skyward. Usually this meant he wanted to play, but there was nothing playful about his bared teeth.
“S’okay,” Jake said. He rummaged in his bedroll again (he hadn’t bothered to bring a saddlebag) until he found a red-checked cloth. This was Slightman the Elder’s neckerchief, stolen four days previous from beneath the bunkhouse table, where the foreman had dropped it during a game of Watch Me and then forgotten it.
Quite the little thief I am, Jake thought. My Dad’s gun, now Benny’s Dad’s snotrag. I can’t tell if I’m working my way up or down.
It was Roland’s voice that replied. You’re doing what you were called here to do. Why don’t you stop beating your breast and get started?
Jake held the neckerchief between his hands and looked down at Oy. “This always works in the movies,” he said to the bumbler. “I have no idea if it works in real life… especially after weeks have gone by.” He lowered the neckerchief to Oy, who stretched out his long neck and sniffed it delicately. “Find this smell, Oy.
Find it and follow it.”
“Oy!” But he just sat there, looking up at Jake.
“This, Dumbo,” Jake said, letting him smell it again. “Find it! Go on!”
Oy got up, turned around twice, then began to saunter north along the bank of the river. He lowered his nose occasionally to the rocky ground, but seemed a lot more interested in the occasional dying-woman howl of the rock-cat. Jake watched his friend with steadily diminishing hope. Well, he’d seen which way Slightman had gone. He could go in that direction himself, course around a little, see what there was to see.
Oy turned around, came back toward Jake, then stopped. He sniffed a patch of ground more closely. The place where Slightman had come out of the water? It could have been. Oy made a thoughtful hoofing sound far back in his throat and then turned to his right—east. He slipped sinuously between two rocks. Jake, now feeling at least a tickle of hope, mounted up and followed.
SIX
They hadn’t gone far before Jake realized Oy was following an actual path that wound through the hilly, rocky, arid land on this side of the river. He began to see signs of technology: a cast-off, rusty electrical coil, something that looked like an ancient circuit-board poking out of the sand, tiny shards and shatters of glass.
In the black moonlight-created shadow of a large boulder, he spied what looked like a whole bottle. He dismounted, picked it up, poured out God knew how many decades (or centuries) of accumulated sand, and looked at it. Written on the side in raised letters was a word he recognized: Nozz-A-La.
“The drink of finer bumhugs everywhere,” Jake murmured, and put the bottle down again. Beside it was a crumpled-up cigarette pack. He smoothed it out, revealing a picture of a red-lipped woman wearing a jaunty red hat. She was holding a cigarette between two glamorously long fingers, PARTI appeared to be the brand name.
Oy, meanwhile, was standing ten or twelve yards farther along and looking back at him over one low shoulder.
“Okay,” Jake said. “I’m coming.”
Other paths joined the one they were on, and Jake realized this was a continuation of the East Road. He could see only a few scattered bootprints and smaller, deeper footprints. These were in places guarded by high rocks—wayside coves the prevailing winds didn’t often reach. He guessed the bootprints were Slightman’s, the deep footprints Andy’s. There were no others. But there would be, and not many days from now, either.
The prints of the Wolves’ gray horses, coming out of the east. They would also be deep prints, Jake reckoned.
Deep like Andy’s.
Up ahead, the path breasted the top of a hill. On either side were fantastically misshapen organ-pipe cactuses
with great thick barrel arms that seemed to point every which way. Oy was standing there, looking down at something, and once more seeming to grin. As Jake approached him, he could smell the cactus-plants. The odor was bitter and tangy. It reminded him of his father’s martinis.
He sat astride his pony beside Oy, looking down. At the bottom of the hill on the right was a shattered concrete driveway. A sliding gate had been frozen half-open ages ago, probably long before the Wolves started raiding the borderland Callas for children. Beyond it was a building with a curved metal roof. Small windows lined the side Jake could see, and his heart lifted at the sight of the steady white glow that came through them. Not ‘seners, and not lightbulbs, either (what Roland called “sparklights”). Only fluorescents threw that kind of white light. In his New York life, fluorescent lights made him think mostly of unhappy, boring things: giant stores where everything was always on sale and you could never find what you wanted, sleepy afternoons at school when the teacher droned on and on about the trade routes of ancient China or the mineral deposits of Peru and rain poured endlessly down outside and it seemed the Closing Bell would never ring, doctors’ offices where you always wound up sitting on a tissue-covered exam table in your underpants, cold and embarrassed and somehow positive that you would be getting a shot.
Tonight, though, those lights cheered him up.
“Good boy!” he told the bumbler.
Instead of responding as he usually did, by repeating his name, Oy looked past Jake and commenced a low growl. At the same moment the pony shifted and gave a nervous whinny. Jake reined him, realizing that bitter (but not entirely unpleasant) smell of gin and juniper had gotten stronger. He looked around and saw two spiny barrels of the cactus-tangle on his right swiveling slowly and blindly toward him. There was a faint grinding sound, and dribbles of white sap were running down the cactus’s central barrel. The needles on the arms swinging toward Jake looked long and wicked in the moonlight. The thing had smelled him, and it was hungry.
“Come on,” he told Oy, and booted the pony’s sides lightly. The pony needed no further urging. It hurried downhill, not quite trotting, toward the building with the fluorescent lights. Oy gave the moving cactus a final mistrustful look, then followed them.
SEVEN
Jake reached the driveway and stopped. About fifty yards farther down the road (it was now very definitely a road, or had been once upon a time), train-tracks crossed and then ran on toward the Devar-Tete Whye, where a low bridge took them across. The folken called that bridge “the causeway.” The older folken, Callahan had told them, called it the devil’s causeway.
“The trains that bring the roont ones back from Thunderclap come on those tracks,” he murmured to Oy. And did he feel the tug of the Beam? Jake was sure he did. He had an idea that when they left Calla Bryn Sturgis
— if they left Calla Bryn Sturgis—it would be along those tracks.
He stood where he was a moment longer, feet out of the stirrups, then headed the pony up the crumbling driveway toward the building. To Jake it looked like a Quonset hut on a military base. Oy, with his short legs, was having hard going on the broken-up surface. That busted-up paving would be dangerous for his horse, too. Once the frozen gate was behind them, he dismounted and looked for a place to tether his mount. There were bushes close by, but something told him they were too close. Too visible. He led the pony out onto the hardpan, stopped, and looked around at Oy. “Stay!”
“Stay! Oy! Ake!”
Jake found more bushes behind a pile of boulders like a strew of huge and eroded toy blocks. Here he felt satisified enough to tether the pony. Once it was done, he stroked the long, velvety muzzle. “Not long,” he said. “Can you be good?”
The pony blew through his nose and appeared to nod. Which meant exactly nothing, Jake knew. And it was probably a needless precaution, anyway. Still, better safe than sorry. He went back to the driveway and bent to scoop the bumbler up. As soon as he straightened, a row of brilliant lights flashed on, pinning him like a bug on a microscope stage. Holding Oy in the curve of one arm, Jake raised the other to shield his eyes. Oy whined and blinked.
There was no warning shout, no stern request for identification, only the faint snuffle of the breeze. The lights were turned on by motion-sensors, Jake guessed. What came next? Machine-gun fire directed by dipolar computers? A scurry of small but deadly robots like those Roland, Eddie, and Susannah had dispatched in the clearing where the Beam they were following had begun? Maybe a big net dropping from overhead, like in this jungle movie he’d seen once on TV?