Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,178

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 lovesickness, 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.

The breath of his guest also smoked. Kimba Rimer’s skeletal frame was all but buried in a gray serape lit with faint bands of orange. The two of them had been on the edge of getting down to business when Roy and Clay (Pinch and Jilly, Rimer thought) showed up, their plowing and planting in the second-floor cribs also apparently over for another night.

“Eldred,” Reynolds said, and then: “Sai Rimer.”

Rimer nodded back, looking from Reynolds to Depape with thin distaste. “Long days and pleasant nights, gentlemen.” Of course the world had moved on, he thought. To find such low culls as these two in positions of importance proved it. Jonas himself was only a little better.

“Might we have a word with you, Eldred?” Clay Reynolds asked. “We’ve been talking, Roy and I—”

“Unwise,” Jonas remarked in his wavery voice. Rimer wouldn’t be surprised to find, at the end of his life, that the Death Angel had such a voice. “Talking can lead to thinking, and thinking’s dangerous for such as you boys. Like picking your nose with bullet-heads.”

Depape donkeyed his damned hee-haw laughter, as if he didn’t realize the joke was on him.

“Jonas, listen,” Reynolds began, and then looked uncertainly at Rimer.

“You can talk in front of sai Rimer,” Jonas said, laying out a fresh line of cards. “He is, after all, our chief employer. I play at Chancellors’ Patience in his honor, so I do.”

Reynolds looked surprised. “I thought . . . that is