Yet it didn’t look like dust.
“I know what I see,” whispered Pettie.
Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.
CHAPTER VII
TAKING THE BALL
1
While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.
Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next two days, I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into—
Something fluffed the end of his nose, and he sneezed again. Coming out of his narrow chest and dry slot of a mouth, it sounded like a small-caliber pistol-shot in the black room.
“Who’s there?” he cried.
No answer. Rimer suddenly imagined a bird, something nasty and bad-tempered, that had gotten in here in daylight and was now flying around in the dark, fluttering against his face as he slept. His skin crawled—birds, bugs, bats, he hated them all—and he fumbled so energetically for the gas-lamp on the table by his bed that he almost knocked it off onto the floor.
As he drew it toward him, that flutter came again. This time puffing at his cheek.
Rimer screamed and recoiled against the pillows, clutching the lamp to his chest.
He turned the switch on the side, heard the hiss of gas, then pushed the spark. The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed. In one hand Reynolds held the feather with which he had been tickling Mejia’s Chancellor. His other was hidden in his cloak, which lay in his lap.
Reynolds had disliked Rimer from their first meeting in the woods far west of town—those same woods, beyond Eyebolt Canyon, where Far-son’s man Latigo now quartered the main contingent of his troops. It had been a windy night, and as he and the other Coffin Hunters entered the little glade where Rimer, accompanied by Lengyll and Croydon, were sitting by a small fire, Reynolds’s cloak swirled around him. “Sai Manto,” Rimer had said, and the other two had laughed. It had been meant as a harmless joke, but it hadn’t seemed harmless to Reynolds. In many of the lands where he had travelled, manto meant not “cloak”
but “leaner” or “bender.” It was, in fact, a slang term for homosexual. That Rimer (a provincial man under his veneer of cynical sophistication) didn’t know this never crossed Reynolds’s mind. He knew when people were making small of him, and if he could make such a person pay, he did so.
For Kimba Rimer, payday had come.
“Reynolds? What are you doing? How did you get in h—”
“You got to be thinking of the wrong cowboy,” the man sitting on the bed replied.
“No Reynolds here. Just Senor Manto.” He took out the hand which had been under his cloak. In it was a keenly honed cuchillo. Reynolds had purchased it in Low Market with this chore in mind. He raised it now and drove the twelve-inch blade into Rimer’s chest. It went all the way through, pinning him like a bug. A bedbug, Reynolds thought.
The lamp fell out of Rimer’s hands and rolled off the bed. It landed on the foot-runner, but did not break. On the far wall was Kimba Rimer’s distorted, struggling shadow. The shadow of the other man bent over it like a hungry vulture.
Reynolds lifted the hand which had held the knife. He turned it so the small blue tattooed coffin between thumb and forefinger was in front of Rimer’s eyes. He wanted it to be the last thing Rimer saw on this side of the clearing.
“Let’s hear you make fun of me now,” Reynolds said. He smiled. “Come on. Let’s just hear you.”
2
Shortly before five o’clock, Mayor Thorin woke from a terrible dream. In it, a bird with pink eyes had been cruising slowly back and forth above the Barony.
Wherever its shadow fell, the grass turned yellow, the leaves fell shocked from the trees, and the crops died. The shadow was turning his green and pleasant Barony into a waste land. It may be my Barony, but it’s my bird, too, he thought just before awakening, huddled into a shuddery ball on one side of his bed. My bird, I brought it here, I let it out of its cage.
There would be
no more sleep for him this night, and Thorin knew it. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it, then walked into his study, absently picking his nightgown from the cleft of his bony old ass as he went. The puff on the end of his nightcap bobbed between his shoulder blades; his knees cracked at every step.
As for the guilty feelings expressed by the dream . . . well, what was done was done. Jonas and his friends would have what they’d come for (and paid so handsomely for) in another day; a day after that, they’d be gone. Fly away, bird with the pink eyes and pestilent shadow; fly away to wherever you came from and
take the Big Coffin Boys with you. He had an idea that by Year’s End he’d be too busy dipping his wick to think much about such things. Or to dream such dreams.
Besides, dreams without visible sign were just dreams, not omens.
The visible sign might have been the boots beneath the study drapes— just the scuffed tips of them showing—but Thorin never looked in that direction. His eyes were fixed on the bottle beside his favorite chair. Drinking claret at five in the morning was no sort of habit to get into, but this once wouldn’t hurt. He’d had a terrible dream, for gods’ sake, and after all—
“Tomorrow’s Reaping,” he said, sitting in the wing-chair on the edge of the hearth.
“I guess a man can jump a fence or two, come Reap.”
He poured himself a drink, the last he’d ever take in this world, and coughed as the fire hit his belly and then climbed back up his throat, warming it. Better, aye, much. No giant birds now, no plaguey shadows. He stretched out his arms, laced his long and bony fingers together, and cracked them viciously.
“I hate it when you do that, you scrawny git,” spoke a voice directly into Thorin’s left ear.
Thorin jumped. His heart took its own tremendous leap in his chest. The empty glass flew from his hand, and there was no foot-runner to cushion its landing. It smashed on the hearth.
Before Thorin could scream, Roy Depape brushed off the mayoral nightcap, seized the gauzy remains of the mayoral mane, and yanked the mayoral head back.
The knife Depape held in his other hand was much humbler than the one Reynolds had used, but it cut the old man’s throat efficiently enough. Blood sprayed scarlet in the dim room. Depape let go of Thorin’s hair, went back to the drapes he had been hiding behind, and picked something up off the floor. It was Cuthbert’s lookout. Depape brought it back to the chair and put it in the dying Mayor’s lap.
“Bird . ..” Thorin gargled through a mouthful of blood. “Bird!”
“Yar, old fella, and trig o’ you to notice at a time like this, I will say.” Depape pulled Thorin’s head back again and took the old man’s eyes out with two quick flips of his knife. One went into the dead fireplace; the other hit the wall and slid down behind the fire-tools. Thorin’s right foot trembled briefly and was still.
One more job to do.
Depape looked around, saw Thorin’s nightcap, and decided the ball on the end would serve. He picked it up, dipped it in the puddle of blood in the Mayor’s lap,
and drew the Good Man’s sigul—
— on the wall.
“There,” he murmured, standing back. “If that don’t finish em, nothing on earth will.”
True enough. The only question left unanswered was whether or not Roland’s ka
tet could be taken alive.
3
Jonas had told Fran Lengyll exactly where to place his men, two inside the stable and six more out, three of these latter gents hidden behind rusty old implements, two hidden in the burnt-out remains of the home place, one—Dave
Hollis—crouched on top of the stable itself, spying over the roofpeak. Lengyll was glad to see that the men in the posse took their job seriously. They were only boys, it was true, but boys who had on one occasion come off ahead of the Big Coffin Hunters.
Sheriff Avery gave a fair impression of being in charge of things until they got within a good shout of the Bar K. Then Lengyll, machine-gun slung over one shoulder (and as straight-hacked in the saddle as he had been at twenty), took command. Avery, who looked nervous and sounded out of breath, seemed relieved rather than offended.