There was no school at Reaptide, and the stalls opened only for a few hours in the afternoon, so Theresa sent her youngest daughter off with a pie. A Reaptide gift to a neighbor, Rhea surmised, although she couldn’t hear the soundless instructions the woman gave her daughter as she pulled a knitted cap down over the girl’s ears.
And ‘twouldn’t be a neighbor too close, either; she’d want time, would Theresa Maria Dolores O’Shyven, time to be a-choring. It was a good-sized house, and there were a lot of corners in it that needed cleaning.
Rhea chuckled; the chuckle turned into a hollow gust of coughing. In the corner, Musty looked at the old woman hauntedly. Although far from the emaciated skeleton that his mistress had become, Musty didn’t look good at all.
The girl was shown out with the pie under her arm; she paused to give her mother a single troubled look, and then the door was shut in her face.
“Now!” Rhea croaked. “Them comers is waitin! Down on yer knees, woman, and get to business!”
First Theresa went to the window. When she was satisfied with what she saw—her daughter out the gate and down the High Street, likely—she turned back to her kitchen. She walked to the table and stood there, looking dreamy-eyed into space.
“No, none o’ that, now!” Rhea cried impatiently. She no longer saw her own filthy hut, she no longer smelled either its rank aromas or her own. She had gone into the Wizard’s Rainbow. She was with Theresa O’Shyven, whose cottage had the cleanest comers in all Mejis. Mayhap in all Mid-World.
“Hurry, woman!” Rhea half-screamed. “Get to yer housework!”
As if hearing, Theresa unbuttoned her housedress, stepped out of it, and laid it neatly over a chair. She pulled the hem of her clean, mended shift up over her knees, went to the comer, and got down on all fours. “That’s it, my corazon!” Rhea cried, nearly choking on a phlegmy mixture of coughing and laughter. “Do yer chores, now, and do em wery pert!”
Theresa O’Shyven poked her head forward to the full length of her neck, opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and began to lick the corner. She lapped it as Musty lapped his milk. Rhea watched this, slapping her knee and whooping, her face growing redder and redder as she rocked from side to side. Oh, Theresa was her favorite, aye! No doubt! For hours now she would crawl about on her hands and knees with her ass in the air, licking into the comers, praying to some obscure god—not even the Man-Jesus God—for forgiveness of who knew what as she did this, her penance. Sometimes she got splinters in her tongue and had to pause to spit blood into the kitchen basin. Up until now some sixth sense had always gotten her to her feet and back into her dress before any of her family returned, but Rhea knew that sooner or later the woman’s obsession would take her too far, and she would be surprised. Perhaps today would be the day—the little girl would come back early, perhaps for a coin to spend in town, and discover her mother down on her knees and licking the comers. Oh, what a spin and raree! How Rhea wanted to see it! How she longed to—
Suddenly Theresa O’Shyven was gone. The interior of her neat little cottage was gone. Everything was gone, lost in curtains of shifting pink light. For the first time in weeks, the wizard’s glass had gone blank.
Rhea picked the ball up in her scrawny, long-nailed fingers and shook it. “What’s wrong with you, plaguey thing? What’s wrong?”
The ball was heavy, and Rhea’s strength was fading. After two or three hard shakes, it slipped in her grip. She cradled it against the deflated remains of her breasts, trembling.
“No, no, lovey,” she crooned. “Come back when ye’re ready, aye, Rhea lost her temper a bit but she’s got it back now, she never meant to shake ye and she’d never ever drop ye, so ye just—”
She broke off and cocked her head, listening. Horses approaching. No, not approaching; here. Three riders, by the sound. They had crept up on her while she was distracted.
The boys? Those plaguey boys?
Rhea held the ball against her bosom, eyes wide, lips wet. Her hands were now so thin that the ball’s pink glow shone through them, faintly illuminating the dark spokes that were her bones.
“Rhea! Rhea of the Coos!”
No, not the boys.
“Come out here, and bring what you were given!”
Worse.
“Farson wants his property! We’ve come to take it!”
Not the boys but the Big Coffin Hunters.
“Never, ye dirty old white-haired prick,” she whispered. “Ye’ll never take it.” Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo.
She looked down at the ball and a whining noise began to escape her. Now even the pink glow was gone. The sphere was as dark as a corpse’s eyeball.
10
A shriek came from the hut.
Depape turned to Jonas with wide eyes, his skin prickling. The thing which had uttered that cry hardly sounded human.
“Rhea!” Jonas called again. “Bring it out here now, woman, and hand it over! I’ve no time to play games with you!”
The door of the hut swung open. Depape and Reynolds drew their guns as the old crone stepped out, blinking against the sunlight like something that’s spent its whole life in a cave. She was holding John Farson’s favorite toy high over her head. There were plenty of rocks in the dooryard she could throw it against, and even if her aim was bad and she missed them all, it might smash anyway.
This could be bad, and Jonas knew it—there were some people you just couldn’t threaten. He had focused so much of his attention on the brats (who, ironically, had been taken as easy as milk) that it had never occurred to him to worry much about this part of it. And Kimba Rimer, the man who had suggested Rhea as the perfect custodian for Maerlyn’s Rainbow, was dead. Couldn’t lay it at Rimer’s doorstep if things went wrong up here, could he?
Then, just to make things a little worse when he’d have thought they’d gone as far west as they could without dropping off the cold end of the earth, he heard the cocking sound of Depape drawing the hammer of his gun.
“Put that away, you idiot!” he snarled.
“But look at her!” Depape almost moaned. “Look at her, Eldred!”
He was. The thing inside the black dress appeared to be wearing the corpse of a putrefying snake around its throat for a necklace. She was so scrawny that she resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton. Her peeling skull was only tufted with hair; the rest had fallen out. Sores clustered on her cheeks and brow, and there was a mark like a spider-bite on the left side of her mouth. Jonas thought that last might be a scurvy-bloom, but he didn’t really care one way or another.
What he cared about was the ball upraised in the dying woman’s long and shivering claws.
11
The sunlight so dazzled Rhea’s eyes that she didn’t see the gun pointed at her, and when her vision cleared, Depape had put it away again. She looked at the men lined up across from her—the bespectacled redhead, the one in the cloak, and Old White-Hair Jonas—and uttered a dusty croak of laughter. Had she been afraid of them, these mighty Coffin Hunters? She supposed she had, but for gods’ sake, why? They were men, that was all, just more men, and she had been beating such all her life. Oh, they thought they ruled the roost, all right—nobody in Mid-World accused anyone of forgetting the face of his mother— but they were poor things, at bottom, moved to tears by a sad song, utterly undone by the sight of a bare breast, and all the more capable of being manipulated simply because they were so sure they were strong and tough and wise.
The glass was dark, and as much as she hated that darkness, it had cleared her mind.
“Jonas!” she cried. “Eldred Jonas!”
“I’m here, old mother,” he said. “Long days and pleasant nights.”
“Never mind yer sops, time’s too short for em.” She came four steps farther and stopped with the ball still held over her head. Near her, a gray chunk of stone jutted from the weedy ground. She looked at it, then back at Jonas. The implication was unspoken but unmistakable.
“What do you want?” Jonas asked.
“The ball’s gone dark,” she said, answering from the side. “All the time I had it in my keeping, it was lively—aye, even when it showed nothing I could make out, it was passing lively, bright and pink—but it fell dark almost at the sound of yer