Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,84

and down.

His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.

He dipped for his guns—the third time tonight he’d done that, and for the third time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he recognized what was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook’s skull.

The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, “ugly as an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed”) and hung it here as a prank greeting. Him and his jokes! Rusher’s master batted it aside hard enough to break the string and send the skull flying into the dark.

“Fie, Roland,” said a voice from the shadows. It was reproachful, but there was laughter bubbling just beneath . . . as there always was. Cuthbert was his oldest friend—the marks of their first teeth had been embedded on many of the same toys—but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. He’d told Roland he couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch . . . but in the end he had done both. Because neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.

As Roland entered the hollow at the center of the grove, a dark shape stepped out from behind the tree where it had been keeping. Halfway across the clearing, it resolved itself into a tall, narrow-hipped boy who was barefooted below his jeans and barechested above them. In one hand he held an enormous antique revolver—a kind which was sometimes called a beer-barrel because of the cylinder’s size.

“Fie,” Cuthbert repeated, as if he liked the sound of this word, not archaic only in forgotten backwaters like Mejis. “That’s a fine way to treat the guard o’ the watch, smacking the poor thin-faced fellow halfway to the nearest mountain-range!”

“If I’d been wearing a gun, I likely would have blown it to smithereens and woken half the countryside.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be going about strapped,” Cuthbert answered mildly. “You’re remarkably ill-looking, Roland son of Steven, but nobody’s fool even as you approach the ancient age of fifteen.”

“I thought we agreed we’d use the names we’re travelling under. Even among ourselves.”

Cuthbert stuck out his leg, bare heel planted in the turf, and bowed with his arms outstretched and his hands strenuously bent at the wrist—an inspired imitation of the sort of man for whom court has become career. He also looked remarkably like a heron standing in a marsh, and Roland snorted laughter in spite of himself. Then he touched the inside of his left wrist to his forehead, to see if he had a fever. He felt feverish enough inside his head, gods knew, but the skin above his eyes felt cool.

“I cry your pardon, gunslinger,” Cuthbert said, his eyes and hands still turned humbly down.

The smile on Roland’s face died. “And don’t call me that again, Cuthbert. Please. Not here, not anywhere. Not if you value me.”

Cuthbert dropped his pose at once and came quickly to where Roland sat his horse. He looked honestly humbled.

“Roland—Will—I’m sorry.”

Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “No harm done. Just remember from here on out. Mejis may be at the end of the world . . . but it still is the world. Where’s Alain?”

“Dick, do you mean? Where do you think?” Cuthbert pointed across the clearing, to where a dark hulk was either snoring or slowly choking to death.

“That one,” Cuthbert said, “would sleep through an earthquake.”

“But you heard me coming and woke.”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland’s face, searching it with an intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. “Did something happen to you? You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow.”

If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor’s House, it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm in that?

“I’ve been properly aired, all