Doings at the Rest were similarly odd. The hitching-rails were crowded (even more horses had been tied at the rails of the mercantile across the street) and light shone from every window—so many windows and so many lights that the inn looked like a vast ship on a darkened sea—but there was none of the usual riot and jubilation, all set to the jagtime tunes pouring out of Sheb’s piano.
She found she could imagine the customers inside all too well— a hundred men, maybe more—simply standing around and drinking. Not talking, not laughing, not chucking the dice down Satan’s Alley and cheering or groaning at the result. No bottoms stroked or pinched; no Reap-kisses stolen; no arguments started out of loose mouths and finished with hard fists. Just men drinking, not three hundred yards from where her love and his friends were locked up. The men who were here wouldn’t do anything tonight but drink, though. And if she was lucky . . . brave and lucky…
As she drew Pylon up in front of the saloon with a murmured word, a shape rose out of the shadows. She tensed, and then the first orangey light of the rising moon caught Sheemie’s face. She relaxed again—even laughed a little, mostly at herself.
He was a part of their ka-tet; she knew he was. Was it surprising that he should know, as well?
“Susan,” he murmured, taking off his sombrero and holding it against his chest. “I been waiting for’ee.”
“Why?” she asked.
” ‘Cause I knew ye’d come.” He looked back over his shoulder at the Rest, a black bulk spraying crazy light toward every point of the compass. “We’re going to let Arthur and them free, ain’t we?”
“I hope so,” she said.
“We have to. The folks in there, they don’t talk, but they don’t have to talk. I knows, Susan, daughter of Pat. I knows.”
She supposed he did. “Is Coral inside?”
Sheemie shook his head. “Gone up to Mayor’s House. She told Stanley she was going to help lay out the bodies for the funeral day after tomorrow, but I don’t think she’ll be here for the funeral. I think the Big Coffin Hunters is going and she’ll go with ’em.” He raised a hand and swiped at his leaking eyes. “Your mule, Sheemie—” “All saddled, and I got the long halter.” She looked at him, open-mouthed. “How did ye know—” “Same way I knew ye’d be coming, Susan-sai. I
just knew.” He shrugged, then pointed vaguely. “Capi’s around the back. I tied him to the cook’s pump.”
“That’s good.” She fumbled in the saddlebag where she had put the smaller firecrackers. “Here. Take some of these. Do’ee have a sulfur or two?”
“Aye.” He asked no questions, simply stuffed the firecrackers into his front pocket. She, however, who had never been through the bat-wing doors of the Travellers’ Rest in her whole life, had another question for him.
“What do they do with their coats and hats and scrapes when they come in, Sheemie? They must take em off; drinking’s warm work.”
“Oh, aye. They puts em on a long table just inside the door. Some fights about whose is whose when they’re ready to go home.”
She nodded, thinking hard and fast. He stood before her, still holding his sombrero against his chest, letting her do what he could not … at least not in the conventionally understood way. At last she raised her head again.
“Sheemie, if you help me, you’re done in Hambry … done in Mejis .. . done in the Outer Arc. You go with us if we get away. You have to understand that. Do you?”
She saw he did; his face fairly shone with the idea. “Aye, Susan! Go with you and Will Dearborn and Richard Stockworth and my best friend, Mr. Arthur Heath! Go to In-World! We’ll see buildings and statues and women in gowns like fairy princesses and—”
“If we’re caught, we’ll be killed.”
He stopped smiling, but his eyes didn’t waver. “Aye, killed we’ll be if ta’en, most like.”
“Will you still help me?”
“Capi’s all saddled,” he repeated. Susan reckoned that was answer enough. She took hold of the hand pressing the sombrero to Sheemie’s chest (the hat’s crown was pretty well crushed, and not for the first time). She bent, holding Sheemie’s fingers with one hand and the horn of her saddle with the other, and kissed his cheek. He smiled up at her.
“We’ll do our best, won’t we?” she asked him.
“Aye, Susan daughter of Pat. We’ll do our best for our friends. Our very best.”
“Yes. Now listen, Sheemie. Very carefully.”
She began to talk, and Sheemie listened.
10
Twenty minutes later, as the bloated orange moon struggled above the buildings of the town like a pregnant woman climbing a steep hill, a lone vaquero led a mule along Hill Street in the direction of the Sheriff’s office. This end of Hill Street was a pit of shadows. There was a little light around Green Heart, but even the park (which would have been thronged, noisy, and brilliantly lit in any other year) was mostly empty. Nearly all the booths were closed, and of those few that remained open, only the fortune-teller was doing any business. Tonight all fortunes were bad, but still they came—don’t they always?
The vaquero was wearing a heavy serape; if this particular cowboy had the breasts of a woman, they were concealed. The vaq wore a large, sweat-stained sombrero; if this cowboy had the face of a woman, it was likewise concealed. Low, from beneath that hat’s broad brim, came a voice singing “Careless Love.”
The mule’s small saddle was buried under the large bundle which had been roped to it—cloth or clothes of some kind, it might have been, although the deepening shadows made it impossible to say for sure. Most amusing of all was what hung around the mule’s neck like some peculiar reap-charm: two sombreros and a drover’s hat strung on a length of rope.
As the vaq neared the Sheriff’s office, the singing ceased. The place might have been deserted if not for the single dim light shining through one window. In the porch rocker was a comical stuffy-guy wearing one of Herk Avery’s embroidered vests and a tin star. There were no guards; absolutely no sign that the three most hated men in Mejis were sequestered within. And now, very faintly, the vaquero could hear the strum of a guitar.
It was blotted out by a thin rattle of firecrackers. The vaq looked over one shoulder and saw a dim figure. It waved. The vaquero nodded, waved back, then tied the mule to the hitching-post—the same one where Roland and his friends had tied their horses when they had come to introduce themselves to the Sheriff, on a summer day so long ago.
11
The door opened—no one had bothered to lock it—while Dave Hollis was trying,
for about the two hundredth time, to play the bridge of “Captain Mills, You Bastard.” Across from him, Sheriff Avery sat rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together on his paunch. The room flickered with mild orange lamplight.
“You keep it up, Deputy Dave, and there won’t have to be any execution,”
Cuthbert Allgood said. He was standing at the door of one of the cells with his hands wrapped around the bars. “We’ll kill ourselves. In self-defense.”
“Shut up, maggot,” Sheriff Avery said. He was half-dozing in the wake of a four-chop dinner, thinking of how he would tell his brother (and his brother’s wife, who was killing pretty) in the next Barony about this heroic day. He would be modest, but he would still get it across to them that he’d played a central role; that if not for him, these three young ladrones might have—
“Just don’t sing,” Cuthbert said to Dave. “I’ll confess to the murder of Arthur Eld himself if you just don’t sing.”
To Bert’s left, Alain was sitting cross-legged on his bunk. Roland was lying on his with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. But at the moment the door’s latch clicked, he swung to a sitting position. As if he’d only been waiting.
“That’ll be Bridger,” Deputy Dave said, gladly putting his guitar aside. He hated this duty and couldn’t wait to be relieved. Heath’s jokes were the worst. That he could continue to joke in the face of what was going to happen to them tomorrow.
“I think it’s likely one of them,” Sheriff Avery said, meaning the Big Coffin Hunters.
In fact, it was neither. It was a cowboy all but buried in a serape that looked much too big for him (the ends actually dragged on the boards as he clumped in and shut the door behind him), and wearing a hat that came way down over his eyes. To Herk Avery, the fellow looked like somebody’s idea of a cowboy stuffy.