That deep, warning voice never spoke to Roland about Sheemie as it had about the dangers of the red rock . . . but his conscience spoke to him, and when he finally mentioned this to Susan (the two of them wrapped in a saddle-blanket and lying naked in each other’s arms), he found that her conscience had been troubling her, as well. It wasn’t fair to put the boy in the way of their possible trouble. After coming to that conclusion, Roland and Susan arranged their meetings strictly between the two of them. If she could not meet him, Susan said, she would hang a red shirt over the sill of her window, as if to dry. If he could not meet her, he was to leave a white stone in the northeast comer of the yard, diagonally across the road from Hockey’s Livery, where the town pump stood. As a last resort, they would use the red rock in the pavilion, risky or not, rather than bringing Sheemie into their affairs—their affair— again.
Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland’s descent into addiction first with disbelief, envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent horror. They had been sent to what was supposed to have been safety and had discovered a place of conspiracy, instead; they had come to take census in a Barony where most of the aristocracy had apparently switched its allegiance to the Affiliation’s bitterest enemy; they had made personal enemies of three hard men who had probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard. Yet they had felt equal to the situation, because they had come here under the leadership of their friend, who had attained near-mythic status in their minds by besting Cort—with a hawk as his weapon!—and becoming a gunslinger at the unheard-of age of fourteen. That they had been given guns themselves for this mission had meant a great deal to them when they set out from Gilead, and nothing at all by the time they began to realize the scope of what was going on in Hambry-town and the Barony of which it was a part. When that realization came, Roland was the weapon they counted on. And now—
“He’s like a revolver cast into water!” Cuthbert exclaimed one evening, not long after Roland had ridden away to meet Susan. Beyond the bunkhouse porch, Huntress rose in her first quarter. “Gods know if it’ll ever fire again, even if it’s fished out and dried off.”
“Hush, wait,” Alain said, and looked toward the porch rail. Hoping to jolly Cuthbert out of his bad temper (a task that was quite easy under ordinary circumstances), Alain said: “Where’s the lookout? Gone to bed early for once, has he?”
This only irritated Cuthbert more. He hadn’t seen the rook’s skull in days—he couldn’t exactly say how many—and he took its loss as an ill omen. “Gone, but not to bed,” he replied, then looked balefully to the west, where Roland had disappeared aboard his big old galoot of a horse. “Lost, I reckon. Like a certain fellow’s mind and heart and good sense.”
“He’ll be all right,” Alain said awkwardly. “You know him as well as I do, Bert—known him our whole lives, we have. He’ll be all right.”
Quietly, without even a trace of his normal good humor, Cuthbert said: “I don’t feel I know him now.”
They had both tried to talk to Roland in their different ways; both received a similar response, which was no real response at all. The dreamy (and perhaps slightly troubled) look of abstraction in Roland’s eyes during these one-sided discussions would have been familiar to anyone who has ever tried to talk sense to a drug addict. It was a look that said Roland’s mind was occupied by the shape of Susan’s face, the smell of Susan’-s skin, the feel of Susan’s body. And occupied was a silly word for it, one that fell short. It wasn’t an occupation but an obsession.
“I hate her a little for what she’s done,” Cuthbert said, and there was a note in his voice Alain had never heard before—a mixture of jealousy, frustration, and fear.
“Perhaps more than a little.”
“You mustn’t!” Alain tried not to sound shocked, but couldn’t help it. “She isn’t responsible for—”
“Is she not? She went out to Citgo with him. She saw what he saw. God knows how much else he’s told her after they’ve finished making the beast with two backs. And she’s all the way around the world from stupid. Just the way she’s managed her side of their affair shows that.” Bert was thinking, Alain guessed, of her tidy little trick with the corvette. “She must know she’s become part of the problem herself. She must know that!”
Now his bitterness was fiighteningly clear. He’s jealous of her for stealing his best friend, Alain thought, but it doesn’t stop there. He’s jealous of his best friend, as well, because his best friend has won the most beautiful girl any of us have ever
seen.
Alain leaned over and grasped Cuthbert’s shoulder. When Bert turned away from his morose examination of the dooryard to look at his friend, he was startled by the grimness on Alain’s face. “It’s ka,” Alain said.
Cuthbert almost sneered. “If I had a hot dinner for every time someone blamed theft or lust or some other stupidity on ka—”
Alain’s grip tightened until it became painful. Cuthbert could have pulled away but didn’t. He watched Alain closely. The joker was, temporarily, at least, gone.
“Blame is exactly what we two can’t afford,” Alain said. “Don’t you see that? And if it’s ka that’s swept them away, we needn’t blame. We can’t blame. We must rise above it. We need him. And we may need her, too.”
Cuthbert looked into Alain’s eyes for what seemed to be a very long time. Alain saw Bert’s anger at war with his good sense. At last (and perhaps only for the time being), good sense won out.
“All right, fine. It’s ka, everybody’s favorite whipping-boy. That’s what the great unseen world’s for, after all, isn’t it? So we don’t have to take the blame for our acts of stupidity? Now let go of me, Al, before you break my shoulder.”
Alain let go and sat back in his chair, relieved. “Now if we only knew what to do about the Drop. If we don’t start counting there soon—”
“I’ve had an idea about that, actually,” Cuthbert said. “It just needs a little working out. I’m sure Roland could help … if either of us can get his attention for a few minutes, that is.”
They sat for awhile without speaking, looking out at the dooryard. Inside the bunkhouse, the pigeons—another bone of contention between Roland and Bert these days—cooed. Alain rolled himself a smoke. It was slow work, and the finished product looked rather comical, but it held together when he lit it.
“Your father would stripe you raw if he saw that in your hand,” Cuthbert remarked, but he spoke with a certain admiration. By the time the following year’s Huntress came around, all three of them would be confirmed smokers, tanned young men with most of the boyhood slapped out of their eyes.
Alain nodded. The strong Outer Crescent tobacco made him swimmy in the head and raw in the throat, but a cigarette had a way of calming his nerves, and right now his nerves could use some calming. He didn’t know about Bert, but these days he smelled blood on the wind. Possibly some of it would be their own. He wasn’t
exactly frightened—not yet, at least— but he was very, very worried.
4
Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing. Roland knew better, even in his love-sickness, but his friends had forgotten that in the game of Castles, both sides wear the blindfold. They would have been surprised to find that at least two of the Big Coffin Hunters had grown extremely nervous about the three young men from In-World, and extremely tired of the waiting game both sides had been playing.
One early morning, as the Huntress neared the half, Reynolds and Depape came downstairs together from the second floor of the Travellers’ Rest. The main public room was silent except for various snores and phlegmy wheezings. In Hambry’s busiest bar, the party was over for another night.
Jonas, accompanied by a silent guest, sat playing Chancellors’ Patience at Coral’s table to the left of the batwing doors. Tonight he was wearing his duster, and his breath smoked faintly as he bent over his cards. It wasn’t cold enough to frost—not quite yet—but the frost would come soon. The chill in the air left no doubt of that.