The Wind Through the Keyhole

  "I sent them away," I said.

  He looked at me with real curiosity. I searched for contempt in his face--part of me wanted to see it--but there was none that I could tell. "Did I raise you to the gun so you could become an ammie and nurse a broken old man?"

  I felt my anger flash at that. Cort had raised a moit of boys to the tradition of the Eld and the way of the gun. Those who were unworthy he had bested in combat and sent west with no weapons other than what remained of their wits. There, in Cressia and places even deeper in those anarchic kingdoms, many of those broken boys had joined with Farson, the Good Man. Who would in time overthrow everything my father's line had stood for. Farson had armed them, sure. He had guns, and he had plans.

  "Would you throw him on the dungheap, Father? Is that to be his reward for all his years of service? Who next, then? Vannay?"

  "Never in this life, as you know. But done is done, Roland, as thee also knows. And thee doesn't nurse him out of love. Thee knows that, too."

  "I nurse him out of respect!"

  "If 'twas only respect, I think you'd visit him, and read to him--for you read well, your mother always said so, and about that she spoke true--but you'd not clean his shit and change his bed. You are scourging yourself for the death of your mother, which was not your fault."

  Part of me knew this was true. Part of me refused to believe it. The publishment of her death was simple: "Gabrielle Deschain, she of Arten, died while possessed of a demon which troubled her spirit." It was always put so when someone of high blood committed suicide, and so the story of her death was given. It was accepted without question, even by those who had, either secretly or not so secretly, cast their lot with Farson. Because it became known--gods know how, not from me or my friends--that she had become the consort of Marten Broadcloak, the court magis and my father's chief advisor, and that Marten had fled west. Alone.

  "Roland, hear me very well. I know you felt betrayed by your lady mother. So did I. I know that part of you hated her. Part of me hated her, too. But we both also loved her, and love her still. You were poisoned by the toy you brought back from Mejis, and you were tricked by the witch. One of those things alone might not have caused what happened, but the pink ball and the witch together . . . aye."

  "Rhea." I could feel tears stinging my eyes, and I willed them back. I would not weep before my father. Never again. "Rhea of the Coos."

  "Aye, she, the black-hearted cunt. It was she who killed your mother, Roland. She turned you into a gun . . . and then pulled the trigger."

  I said nothing.

  He must have seen my distress, because he resumed shuffling his papers, signing his name here and there. Finally he raised his head again. "The ammies will have to see to Cort for a while. I'm sending you and one of your ka-mates to Debaria."

  "What? To Serenity?"

  He laughed. "The retreat where your mother stayed?"

  "Yes."

  "Not there, not at all. Serenity, what a joke. Those women are the black ammies. They'd flay you alive if you so much as trespassed their holy doors. Most of the sisters who bide there prefer the longstick to a man."

  I had no idea what he meant--remember I was still very young, and very innocent about many things, in spite of all I'd been through. "I'm not sure I'm ready for another mission, Father. Let alone a quest."

  He looked at me coldly. "I'll be the judge of what you're ready for. Besides, this is nothing like the mess you walked into in Mejis. There may be danger, it may even come to shooting, but at bottom it's just a job that needs to be done. Partly so that people who've come to doubt can see that the White is still strong and true, but mostly because what's wrong cannot be allowed to stand. Besides, as I've said, I won't be sending you alone."

  "Who'll go with me? Cuthbert or Alain?"

  "Neither. I have work for Laughing Boy and Thudfoot right here. You go with Jamie DeCurry."

  I considered this and thought I would be glad to ride with Jamie Red-Hand. Although I would have preferred either Cuthbert or Alain. As my father surely knew.

  "Will you go without argument, or will you annoy me further on a day when I have much to do?"

  "I'll go," I said. In truth, it would be good to escape the palace--its shadowy rooms, its whispers of intrigue, its pervasive sense that darkness and anarchy were coming and nothing could stop them. The world would move on, but Gilead would not move on with it. That glittering, beautiful bubble would soon burst.

  "Good. You're a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but it's true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing."

  I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him.

  "Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the women--Serenity, or whatever they call it--is the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. It's a dusty, hide-smelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and north--in every direction except the one where that bastard Farson's laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in Mid-World before long, but now it's still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. It's him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a sigul which I will give to you. Do you ken everything I've told you so far?"

  "Yes, Father," I said. "What's so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers?" I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mother's death. "Even baby gunslingers such as us?"

  "According to the reports I have"--he lifted some of the papers and shook them at me--"there's a skin-man at work. I have my doubts about that, but there's no doubt the folk are terrified."

  "I don't know what that is," I said.

  "Some sort of shape-changer, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. He's been collecting reports."

  "All right."

  "Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skins--that's probably what it amounts to--but be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. I'd have you back--you and all your ka-mates--before they fall."

  *

  Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stable-car of a special two-car train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and ground-shakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves land-pirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands Out-World, and they served John Farson's purposes well. He was, after all, just a land-pirate himself. One with pretensions.

  The train was little more than a steam-driven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma' Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster a-horseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie Red-Hand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep.

  We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gilead's green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders' huts. There were a few towns where folk--many of them muties--gaped at us as Sma' Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us
. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned.

  On the first day of our journey, outside Beesford-on-Arten, where a few of my mother's people still lived, a fat man threw a rock at the train. It bounced off the closed stable-car door, and I heard our horses whinny in surprise. The fat man saw us looking at him. He grinned, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and waddled away.

  "Someone has eaten well in a poor land," Jamie remarked as we watched his butters jounce in the seat of his old patched pants.

  The following morning, after the servant had put a cold breakfast of porridge and milk before us, Jamie said, "I suppose you'd better tell me what it's about."

  "Will you tell me something, first? If you know, that is?"

  "Of course."

  "My father said that the women at the retreat in Debaria prefer the longstick to a man. Do you know what he meant?"

  Jamie regarded me in silence for a bit--as if to make sure I wasn't shaking his knee--and then his lips twitched at the corners. For Jamie this was the equivalent of holding his belly, rolling around the floor, and howling with glee. Which Cuthbert Allgood certainly would have done. "It must be what the whores in the low town call a diddlestick. Does that help?"

  "Truly? And they . . . what? Use it on each other?"

  "So 'tis said, but much talk is just la-la-la. You know more of women than I do, Roland; I've never lain with one. But never mind. Given time, I suppose I will. Tell me what we're about in Debaria."

  "A skin-man is supposedly terrorizing the good folk. Probably the bad folk, as well."

  "A man who becomes some sort of animal?"

  It was actually a little more complicated in this case, but he had the nub of it. The wind was blowing hard, flinging handfuls of alkali at the side of the car. After one particularly vicious gust, the little train lurched. Our empty porridge bowls slid. We caught them before they could fall. If we hadn't been able to do such things, and without even thinking of them, we would not have been fit to carry the guns we wore. Not that Jamie preferred the gun. Given a choice (and the time to make it), he would reach for either his bow or his bah.

  "My father doesn't believe it," I said. "But Vannay does. He--"

  At that moment, we were thrown forward into the seats ahead of us. The old servant, who was coming down the center aisle to retrieve our bowls and cups, was flung all the way back to the door between the car and his little kitchen. His front teeth flew out of his mouth and into his lap, which gave me a start.

  Jamie ran up the aisle, which was now severely tilted, and knelt by him. As I joined him, Jamie plucked up the teeth and I saw they were made of painted wood and held together by a cunning clip almost too small to see.

  "Are you all right, sai?" Jamie asked.

  The old fellow got slowly to his feet, took his teeth, and filled the hole behind his upper lip with them. "I'm fine, but this dirty bitch has derailed again. No more Debaria runs for me, I have a wife. She's an old nag, and I'm determined to outlive her. You young men had better check your horses. With luck, neither of them will have broken a leg."

  *

  Neither had, but they were nervous and stamping, anxious to get out of confinement. We lowered the ramp and tethered them to the connecting bar between the two cars, where they stood with their heads lowered and their ears flattened against the hot and gritty wind blowing out of the west. Then we clambered back inside the passenger car and collected our gunna. The engineer, a broad-shouldered, bowlegged plug of a man, came down the side of his listing train with the old servant in tow. When he reached us, he pointed to what we could see very well.

  "Yonder on that ridge be Debaria high road--see the marking-posts? You can be at the place o' the females in less than an hour, but don't bother asking nothing o' those bitches, because you won't get it." He lowered his voice. "They eat men, is what I've heard. Not just a way o' speakin, boys: they . . . eat . . . the mens."

  I found it easier to believe in the reality of the skin-man than in this, but I said nothing. It was clear that the enjie was shaken up, and one of his hands was as red as Jamie's. But the enjie's was only a little burn, and would go away. Jamie's would still be red when he was sent down in his grave. It looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

  "They may call to you, or make promises. They may even show you their titties, as they know a young man can't take his eyes off such. But never mind. Turn yer ears from their promises and yer eyes from their titties. You just go on into the town. It'll be less than another hour by horse. We'll need a work crew to put this poxy whore upright. The rails are fine; I checked. Just covered with that damned alkali dust, is all. I suppose ye can't pay men to come out, but if ye can write--as I suppose such gentle fellows as yerselves surely can--you can give em a premissary note or whatever it's called--"

  "We have specie," I said. "Enough to hire a small crew."

  The enjie's eyes widened at this. I supposed they would widen even more if I told him my father had given me twenty gold knuckles to carry in a special pocket sewn inside my vest.

  "And oxes? Because we'll need oxes if they've got em. Hosses if they don't."

  "We'll go to the livery and see what they have," I said, mounting up. Jamie tied his bow on one side of his saddle and then moved to the other, where he slid his bah into the leather boot his father had made special for it.

  "Don't leave us stuck out here, young sai," the enjie said. "We've no horses, and no weapons."

  "We won't forget you," I said. "Just stay inside. If we can't get a crew out today, we'll send a bucka to take you into town."

  "Thankee. And stay away from those women! They . . . eat . . . the mens!"

  *

  The day was hot. We ran the horses for a bit because they wanted to stretch after being pent up, then pulled them down to a walk.

  "Vannay," Jamie said.

  "Pardon?"

  "Before the train derailed, you said your father didn't believe there was a skin-man, but Vannay does."

  "He said that after reading the reports High Sheriff Peavy sent along, it was hard not to believe. You know what he says at least once in every class: 'When facts speak, the wise man listens.' Twenty-three dead makes a moit of facts. Not shot or stabbed, mind you, but torn to pieces."

  Jamie grunted.

  "Whole families, in two cases. Large ones, almost clans. The houses turned all upsy-turvy and splashed with blood. Limbs ripped off the bodies and carried away, some found--partly eaten--some not. At one of those farms, Sheriff Peavy and his deputy found the youngest boy's head stuck on a fencepole with his skull smashed in and his brains scooped out."

  "Witnesses?"

  "A few. A sheepherder coming back with strays saw his partner attacked. The one who survived was on a nearby hill. The two dogs with him ran down to try and protect their other master, and were torn apart too. The thing came up the hill after the herder, but got distracted by the sheep instead, so the fellow struck lucky and got away. He said it was a wolf that ran upright, like a man. Then there was a woman with a gambler. He was caught cheating at Watch Me in one of the local pits. The two of them were given a bill of circulation and told to leave town by nightfall or be whipped. They were headed for the little town near the salt-mines when they were beset. The man fought. It gave the woman just enough time to get clear. She hid up in some rocks until the thing was gone. She's said 'twas a lion."

  "On its back legs?"

  "If so, she didn't wait to see. Last, two cowpunchers. They were camped on Debaria Stream near a young Manni couple on marriage retreat, although the punchers didn't know it until they heard the couple's screams. As they rode toward the sound, they saw the killer go loping off with the woman's lower leg in its jaws. It wasn't a man, but they swore on watch and warrant that it ran upright like a man."

  Jamie leaned over the neck of his horse and spat. "Can't be so."

  "Vannay says it can. He says there have been such before, although not for years. He believes
they may be some sort of mutation that's pretty much worked its way out of the true thread."

  "All these witnesses saw different animals?"

  "Aye. The cowpokes described it as a tyger. It had stripes."

  "Lions and tygers running around like trained beasts in a traveling show. And out here in the dust. Are you sure we aren't being tickled?"

  I wasn't old enough to be sure of much, but I did know the times were too desperate to be sending young guns even so far west as Debaria for a prank. Not that Steven Deschain could have been described as a prankster even in the best of times.

  "I'm only telling what Vannay told me. The rope-swingers who came into town with the remains of those two Manni behind them on a travois had never even heard of such a thing as a tyger. Yet that is what they described. The testimony's in here, green eyes and all." I took the two creased sheets of paper I had from Vannay out of my inner vest pocket. "Care to look?"

  "I'm not much of a reader," Jamie said. "As thee knows."

  "Aye, fine. But take my word. Their description is just like the picture in the old story of the boy caught in the starkblast."

  "What old story is that?"

  "The one about Tim Stoutheart--'The Wind Through the Keyhole.' Never mind. It's not important. I know the punchers may have been drunk, they usually are if they're near a town that has liquor, but if it's true testimony, Vannay says the creature is a shape-shifter as well as a shape-changer."

  "Twenty-three dead, you say. Ay-yi."

  The wind gusted, driving the alkali before it. The horses shied, and we raised our neckerchiefs over our mouths and noses.

  "Boogery hot," Jamie said. "And this damned dust."

  Then, as if realizing he had been excessively chatty, he fell silent. That was fine with me, as I had much to think about.

  A little less than an hour later, we breasted a hill and saw a sparkling white haci below us. It was the size of a barony estate. Behind it, tending down toward a narrow creek, was a large greengarden and what looked like a grape arbor. My mouth watered at the sight of it. The last time I'd had grapes, my armpits had still been smooth and hairless.

  The walls of the haci were tall and topped with forbidding sparkles of broken glass, but the wooden gates stood open, as if in invitation. In front of them, seated on a kind of throne, was a woman in a dress of white muslin and a hood of white silk that flared around her head like gullwings. As we drew closer, I saw the throne was ironwood. Surely no other chair not made of metal could have borne her weight, for she was the biggest woman I had ever seen, a giantess who could have mated with the legendary outlaw prince David Quick.