In the next instant his own gun roared in his fist. Olive’s horse reared, whinnying.
Olive went off the gelding head over boots, with a black hole in the orange stripe of her serape— the stripe which lay above her heart.
Susan heard herself screaming. The sound seemed to come from very far away.
She might have gone on for some time, but then she heard the clop of approaching pony hooves from behind the men in the road… and knew. Even before the man with the lazy eye moved aside to show her, she knew, and her screams stopped.
The galloped-out pony that had brought the witch back to Hambry had been replaced by a fresh one, but it was the same black cart, the same golden cabalistic symbols, the same driver. Rhea sat with the reins in her claws, her head ticking from side to side like the head of a rusty old robot, grinning at Susan without humor. Grinning as a corpse grins.
“Hello, my little sweeting,” she said, calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest. On the night Susan had come running most of the way, out of simple high spirits. Beneath the light of the Kissing Moon she had come, her blood high from the exercise, her skin
flushed; she had been singing “Careless Love.”
“Yer pallies and screw-buddies have taken my ball, ye ken,” Rhea said, clucking the pony to a stop a few paces ahead of the riders. Even Reynolds looked down on her with uneasiness. “Took my lovely glam, that’s what those bad boys did. Those bad, bad boys. But it showed me much while yet I had it, aye. It sees far, and in more ways than one. Much of it I’ve forgot … but not which way ye’d come, my sweeting. Not which way that precious old dead bitch laying yonder on the road would bring ye. And now ye must go to town.” Her grin widened, became something unspeakable. “It’s time for the fair, ye ken.”
“Let me go,” Susan said. “Let me go, if ye’d not answer to Roland of Gilead.”
Rhea ignored her and spoke to Reynolds. “Bind her hands before her and stand her in the back of the cart. There’s people that’ll want to see her. A good look is what they’ll want, and a good look is just what they’ll have. If her aunt’s done a proper job, there’ll be a lot of them in town. Get her up, now, and be smart about it.”
14
Alain had time for one clear thought: We could have gone around them— if what Roland said is true, then only the wizard’s glass matters, and we have that. We could have gone around them.
Except, of course, that was impossible. A hundred generations of gunslinger blood argued against it. Tower or no Tower, the thieves must not be allowed to have their prize. Not if they could be stopped.
Alain leaned forward and spoke directly into his horse’s ear. “Jig or rear when I start shooting, and I’ll knock your fucking brains out.”
Roland led them in, outracing the other two on his stronger horse. The clot of men nearest by—five or six mounted, a dozen or more on foot and examining a pair of the oxen which had dragged the tankers out here— gazed at him stupidly until he began to fire, and then they scattered like quail. He got every one of the riders; their horses fled in a widening fan, trailing their reins (and, in one case, a dead soldier). Somewhere someone was shouting, “Harriers! Harriers! Mount up, you fools!”
“Alain!” Roland screamed as they bore down. In front of the tankers, a double handful of riders and armed men were coming together— milling together—in a
clumsy defensive line. “Now! Now!”
Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hollow of his shoulder, and remembered what little he knew about rapid-fire weapons: aim low, swing fast and smooth.
He touched the trigger and the speed-shooter bellowed into the dusty air, recoiling against his shoulder in a series of rapid thuds, shooting bright fire from the end of its perforated barrel. Alain raked it from left to right, running the sight above the scattering, shouting defenders and across the high steel hides of the tankers.
The third tanker actually blew up on its own. The sound it made was like no explosion Alain had ever heard: a guttural, muscular ripping sound accompanied by a brilliant flash of orange-red fire. The steel shell rose in two halves. One of these spun thirty yards through the air and landed on the desert floor in a furiously burning hulk; the other rose straight up into a column of greasy black smoke. A burning wooden wheel spun across the sky like a plate and came back down trailing sparks and burning splinters.
Men fled, screaming—some on foot, others laid flat along the necks of their nags, their eyes wide and panicky.
When Alain reached the end of the line of tankers, he reversed the track of the muzzle. The machine-gun was hot in his hands now, but he kept his finger pressed to the trigger. In this world, you had to use what you could while it still worked.
Beneath him, his horse ran on as if it had understood every word Alain had whispered in its ear.
Another! I want another!
But before he could blow another tanker, the gun ceased its chatter— perhaps jammed, probably empty. Alain threw it aside and drew his revolver. From beside him there came the thuppp of Cuthbert’s slingshot, audible even over the cries of the men, the hoofbeats of the horses, the whoosh of the burning tanker. Alain saw a sputtering big-bang arc into the sky and come down exactly where Cuthbert had aimed: in the oil puddling around the wooden wheels of a tanker marked sunoco.
For a moment Alain could clearly see the line of nine or a dozen holes in the tanker’s bright side—holes he had put there with sai Lengyll’s speed-shooter—and then there was a crack and a flash as the big-bang exploded. A moment later, the holes running along the bright flank of the tanker began to shimmer. The oil beneath them was on fire.
“Get out!” a man in a faded campaign hat yelled. “She’s gointer blow! They ‘re all going to b— ”
Alain shot him, exploding the side of his face and knocking him out of one old, sprung boot. A moment later the second tanker blew up. One burning steel panel shot out sidewards, landed in the growing puddle of crude oil beneath a third tanker, and then that one exploded, as well. Black smoke rose in the air like the fumes of a funeral pyre; it darkened the day and drew an oily veil across the sun.
15
All six of Parson’s chief lieutenants had been carefully described to Roland—to all fourteen gunslingers in training—and he recognized the man running for the remuda at once: George Latigo. Roland could have shot him as he ran, but that, ironically, would have made possible a getaway that was cleaner than he wanted.
Instead, he shot the man who ran to meet him.
Latigo wheeled on the heels of his boots and stared at Roland with blazing, hate-filled eyes. Then he ran again, hiling another man, shouting for the riders who were huddled together beyond the burning zone.
Two more tankers exploded, whamming at Roland’s eardrums with dull iron fists, seeming to suck the air back from his lungs like a riptide. The plan had been for Alain to perforate the tankers and for Cuthbert to then shoot in a steady, arcing stream of big-bangers, lighting the spilling oil. The one big-banger he actually shot seemed to confirm that the plan had been feasible, but it was the last slingshot-work Cuthbert did that day.
The ease with which the gunslingers had gotten inside the enemy’s perimeter and the confusion which greeted their original charge could have been chalked up to inexperience and exhaustion, but the placing of the tankers had been Latigo’s mistake, and his alone. He had drawn them tight without even thinking about it, and now they blew tight, one after another. Once the conflagration began, there was no chance of stopping it. Even before Roland raised his left arm and circled it in the air, signalling for Alain and Cuthbert to break off, the work was done.
Latigo’s encampment was an oily inferno, and John Farson’s plans for a motorized assault were so much black smoke being tattered apart by the fin de ano wind.
“Ride!” Roland screamed. “Ride, ride, ride!”
They spurred west, toward Eyebolt Canyon. As they went, Roland felt a single bullet drone past his left ear. It was, so far as he knew, the only shot fired at any of them during the assault on the tankers.