It was dusk, a fortnight and a day gone. She and another, Dolores, had come out to close the gate and draw water for the evening chores. Fortuna was the one with the bucket, and so she was the one who lived. As Dolores began to swing the gate closed, a creature knocked it wide, grabbed her, and bit her head from her shoulders with its long jaws. Fortuna said that she saw it well, for the Peddler’s Moon had just risen full in the sky. Taller than a man it was, with scales instead of skin and a long tail that dragged behind it on the ground. Yellow eyes with slitted dark pupils glowed in its flat head. Its mouth was a trap filled with teeth, each as long as a man’s hand. They dripped with Dolores’s blood as it dropped her still-twitching body on the cobbles of the courtyard and ran on its stubby legs toward the well where Fortuna stood.
“I turned to flee… it caught me… and I remember no more.”
“I do,” Everlynne said grimly. “I heard the screams and came running out with our gun. It’s a great long thing with a bell at the end of the barrel. It’s been loaded since time out of mind, but none of us has ever fired it. For all I knew, it could have blown up in my hands. But I saw it tearing at poor Fortie’s face, and then something else, too. When I did, I never thought of the risk. I never even thought that I might kill her, poor thing, as well as it, should the gun fire.”
“I wish you had killed me,” Fortuna said. “Oh, I wish you had.” She sat in one of the chairs that had been brought to the table, put her face in her hands, and began to weep. Her one remaining eye did, at least.
“Never say so,” Everlynne told her, and stroked her hair on the side of her head not covered by the bandagement. “For ’tis blasphemy.”
“Did you hit it?” I asked.
“A little. Our old gun fires shot, and one of the pellets-or p’raps more than one-tore away some of the knobs and scales on its head. Black tarry stuff flew up. We saw it later on the cobbles, and sanded it over without touching it, for fear it might poison us right through our skin. The chary thing dropped her, and I think it had almost made up its mind to come for me. So I pointed the gun at it, though a gun like that can only be fired once, then must be recharged down its throat with powder and shot. I told it to come on. Told it I’d wait until it was good and close, so the shot wouldn’t spread.” She hawked back and spat into the dust. “It must have a brain of some sort even when it’s out of its human shape, because it heard me and ran. But before I lost sight of it round the wall, it turned and looked back at me. As if marking me. Well, let it. I have no more shot for the gun, and won’t unless a trader happens to have some, but I have this.”
She lifted her skirts to her knee, and we saw a butcher’s knife in a rawhide scabbard strapped to the outside of her calf.
“So let it come for Everlynne, daughter of Roseanna.”
“You said you saw something else,” I said.
She considered me with her bright black eyes, then turned to the women. “Clemmie, Brianna, serve out. Fortuna, you will say grace, and be sure to ask God forgiveness for your blasphemy and thank Him that your heart still beats.”
Everlynne grasped me above the elbow, drew me through the gate, and walked me to the well where the unfortunate Fortuna had been attacked. There we were alone.
“I saw its prick,” she said in a low voice. “Long and curved like a scimitar, twitching and full of the black stuff that serves it for blood… serves it for blood in that shape, any-ro’. It meant to kill her as it had Dolores, aye, right enough, but it meant to fuck her, too. It meant to fuck her as she died.”
Jamie and I ate with them-Fortuna even ate a little-and then we mounted up for town. But before we left, Everlynne stood by my horse and spoke to me again.
“When your business here is done, come and see me again. I have something for you.”
“What might that be, sai?”
She shook her head. “Now is not the time. But when the filthy thing is dead, come here.” She took my hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “I know who you are, for does your mother not live in your face? Come to me, Roland, son of Gabrielle. Fail not.”
Then she stepped away before I could say another word, and glided in through the gate.
The Debaria high street was wide and paved, although the pavement was crumbling away to the hardpan beneath in many places and would be entirely gone before too many years passed. There was a good deal of commerce, and judging from the sound coming from the saloons, they were doing a fine business. We only saw a few horses and mules tied to the hitching-posts, though; in that part of the world, livestock was for trading and eating, not for riding.
A woman coming out of the mercantile with a basket over her arm saw us and stared. She ran back in, and several more people came out. By the time we reached the High Sheriff’s office-a little wooden building attached to the much larger stone-built town jail-the streets were lined with spectators on both sides.
“Have ye come to kill the skin-man?” the lady with the basket called.
“Those two don’t look old enough to kill a bottle of rye,” a man standing in front of the Cheery Fellows Saloon amp; Cafe called back. There was general laughter and murmurs of agreement at this sally.
“Town looks busy enough now,” Jamie said, dismounting and looking back at the forty or fifty men and women who’d come away from their business (and their pleasure) to have a gleep at us.
“It’ll be different after sundown,” I said. “That’s when such creatures as this skin-man do their marauding. Or so Vannay says.”
We went into the office. Hugh Peavy was a big-bellied man with long white hair and a droopy mustache. His face was deeply lined and careworn. He saw our guns and looked relieved. He noted our beardless faces and looked less so. He wiped off the nib of the pen he had been writing with, stood up, and held out his hand. No forehead-knocking for this fellow.
After we’d shaken with him and introduced ourselves, he said: “I don’t mean to belittle you, young fellows, but I was hoping to see Steven Deschain himself. And perhaps Peter McVries.”
“McVries died three years ago,” I said.
Peavy looked shocked. “Do you say so? For he was a trig hand with a gun. Very trig.”
“He died of a fever.” Very likely induced by poison, but this was nothing the High Sheriff of the Debaria Outers needed to know. “As for Steven, he’s otherwise occupied, and so he sent me. I am his son.”
“Yar, yar, I’ve heard your name and a bit of your exploits in Mejis, for we get some news even out here. There’s the dit-dah wire, and even a jing-jang.” He pointed to a contraption on the wall. Written on the brick beneath it was a sign reading DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMIZION. “It used to go all the way to Gilead, but these days only to Sallywood in the south, the Jefferson spread to the north, and the village in the foothills-Little Debaria, it’s called. We even have a few streetlamps that still work-not gas or kerosene but real sparklights, don’tcha see. Townfolk think such’ll keep the creature away.” He sighed. “I am less confident. This is a bad business, young fellows. Sometimes I feel the world has come loose of its moorings.”
“It has,” I said. “But what comes loose can be tied tight again, Sheriff.”
“If you say so.” He cleared his throat. “Now, don’t take this as disrespect, I know ye are who ye say ye are, but I was promised a sigul. If you’ve brought it, I’d have it, for it means special to me.”
I opened my swag-bag and brought out what I’d been given: a small wooden box with my father’s mark-the D with the S inside of it-stamped on the hinged lid. Peavy took it with the smallest of smiles dimpling the corners of his mouth beneath his mustache. To me it looked like a remembering smile, and it took years off his face.
“Do’ee know what’s inside?”
“No.” I had not been asked to look.