Her lap was full of needlework. She might have been knitting a blanket, but held before that barrel of a body and breasts so big each of them could have fully shaded a baby from the sun, whatever it was looked no bigger than a handkerchief. She caught sight of us, laid her work aside, and stood up. There was six and a half feet of her, maybe a bit more. The wind was less in this dip, but there was enough to flutter her dress against her long thighs. The cloth made a sound like a sail in a running-breeze. I remembered the enjie saying they eat the mens, but when she put one large fist to the broad plain of her forehead and lifted the side of her dress to dip a curtsey with her free hand, I nonetheless reined up.
"Hile, gunslingers," she called. She had a rolling voice, not quite a man's baritone. "In the name of Serenity and the women who bide here, I salute thee. May your days be long upon the earth."
We raised our own fists to our brows, and wished her twice the number.
"Have you come from In-World? I think so, for your duds aren't filthy enough for these parts. Although they will be, if you bide longer than a day." And she laughed. The sound was moderate thunder.
"We do," I said. It was clear Jamie would say nothing. Ordinarily closemouthed, he was now stunned to silence. Her shadow rose on the whitewashed wall behind her, as tall as Lord Perth.
"And have you come for the skin-man?"
"Yes," I said. "Have you seen him, or do you only know of him from the talk? If that's the case, we'll move on and say thankee."
"Not a him, lad. Never think it."
I only looked at her. Standing, she was almost tall enough to look into my eyes, although I sat on Young Joe, a fine big horse.
"An it," she said. "A monster from the Deep Cracks, as sure as you two serve the Eld and the White. It may have been a man once, but no more. Yes, I've seen it, and seen its work. Sit where you are, never move, and you shall see its work, too."
Without waiting for any reply, she went through the open gate. In her white muslin she was like a sloop running before the wind. I looked at Jamie. He shrugged and nodded. This was what we had come for, after all, and if the enjie had to wait a bit longer for help putting Sma' Toot back on the rails, so be it.
"ELLEN!" she bawled. Raised to full volume, it was like listening to a woman shouting into an electric megaphone. "CLEMMIE! BRIANNA! BRING FOOD! BRING MEAT AND BREAD AND ALE--THE LIGHT, NOT THE DARK! BRING A TABLE, AND MIND YOU DON'T FORGET THE CLOTH! SEND FORTUNA TO ME NOW! HIE TO IT! DOUBLE-QUICK!"
With these orders delivered she returned to us, delicately lifting her hem to keep it out of the alkali that puffed around the black boats she wore on her enormous feet.
"Lady-sai, we thank you for your offer of hospitality, but we really must--"
"You must eat is what you must do," she said. "We'll have it out here a-roadside, so your digestion will not be discomposed. For I know what stories they tell about us in Gilead, aye, so do we all. Men tell the same about any women who dare to live on their own, I wot. It makes em doubt the worth of their hammers."
"We heard no stories about--"
She laughed and her bosom heaved like the sea. "Polite of you, young gunnie, aye, and very snick, but it's long since I was weaned. We'll not eat ye." Her eyes, as black as her shoes, twinkled. "Although ye'd make a tasty snack, I think--one or both. I am Everlynne of Serenity. The prioress, by the grace of God and the Man Jesus."
"Roland of Gilead," I said. "And this is Jamie of same."
Jamie bowed from his saddle.
She curtsied to us again, this time dropping her head so that the wings of her silken hood closed briefly around her face like curtains. As she rose, a tiny woman glided through the open gate. Or perhaps she was of normal size, after all. Perhaps she only looked tiny next to Everlynne. Her robe was rough gray cotton instead of white muslin; her arms were crossed over her scant bosom, and her hands were buried deep in her sleeves. She wore no hood, but we could still see only half of her face. The other half was hidden beneath a thick swath of bandagement. She curtsied to us, then huddled in the considerable shade of her prioress.
"Raise your head, Fortuna, and make your manners to these young gentlemen."
When at last she looked up, I saw why she had kept her head lowered. The bandages could not fully conceal the damage to her nose; on the right side, a good part of it was gone. Where it had been was only a raw red channel.
"Hile," she whispered. "May your days be long upon the earth."
"May you have twice the number," Jamie said, and I saw from the woeful glance she gave him with her one visible eye that she hoped this was not true.
"Tell them what happened," Everlynne said. "What you remember, any-ro'. I know 't isn't much."
"Must I, Mother?"
"Yes," she said, "for they've come to end it."
Fortuna peered doubtfully at us, just a quick snatch of a glance, and then back at Everlynne. "Can they? They look so young."
She realized what she had said must sound impolite, and a flush colored the cheek we could see. She staggered a little on her feet, and Everlynne put an arm around her. It was clear that she had been badly hurt, and her body was still far from complete recovery. The blood that had run to her face had more important work to do in other parts of her body. Chiefly beneath the bandage, I supposed, but given the voluminous robe she wore, it was impossible to tell where else she might have been wounded.
"They may still be a year or more from having to shave but once a week, but they're gunslingers, Fortie. If they can't set this cursed town right, then no one can. Besides, it will do you good. Horror's a worm that needs to be coughed out before it breeds. Now tell them."
She told. As she did, other Sisters of Serenity came out, two carrying a table, the others carrying food and drink to fill it. Better viands than any we'd had on Sma' Toot, by the look and the smell, yet by the time Fortuna had finished her short, terrible story, I was no longer hungry. Nor, by the look of him, was Jamie.
*
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. S
o 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 & 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.
Peavy opened the box, looked within, then returned his gaze to Jamie and me. "Once, when I was still only a deputy, Steven Deschain led me, and the High Sheriff that was, and a posse of seven against the Crow Gang. Has your father ever spoken to you of the Crows?"
I shook my head.
"Not skin-men, no, but a nasty lot of work, all the same. They robbed what there was to rob, not just in Debaria but all along the ranchlands out this way. Trains, too, if they got word one was worth stopping. But their main business was kidnapping for ransom. A coward's crime, sure--I'm told Farson favors it--but it paid well.
"Your da' showed up in town only a day after they stole a rancher's wife--Belinda Doolin. Her husband called on the jing-jang as soon as they left and he was able to get himself untied. The Crows didn't know about the jing-jang, and that was their undoing. Accourse it helped that there was a gunslinger doing his rounds in this part of the world; in those days, they had a knack of turning up when and where they were needed."
He eyed us. "P'raps they still do. Any-ro', we got out t'ranch while the crime was still fresh. There were places where any of us would have lost the trail--it's mostly hardpan out north of here, don'tcha see--but your father had eyes like you wouldn't believe. Hawks ain't even in it, dear, or eagles, either."
I knew of my father's sharp eyes and gift for trailing. I also knew that this story probably had nothing to do with our business, and I should have told him to move along. But my father never talked about his younger days, and I wanted to hear this tale. I was hungry to hear it. And it turned out to have a little more to do with our business in Debaria than I at first thought.
"The trail led in the direction of the mines--what Debaria folk call the salt-houses. The workings had been abandoned in those days; it was before the new plug was found twenty year ago."
"Plug?" Jamie asked.
"Deposit," I said. "He means a fresh deposit."
"Aye, as you say. But all that were abandoned then, and made a fine hideout for such as those beastly Crows. Once the trail left the flats, it went through a place of high rocks before coming out on the Low Pure, which is to say the foothill meadows below the salt-houses. The Low is where a sheepherder was killed just recent, by something that looked like a--"
"Like a wolf," I said. "This we know. Go on."
"Well-informed, are ye? Well, that's
all to the good. Where was I, now? Ah, I know--those rocks that are now known in these parts as Ambush Arroyo. It's not an arroyo, but I suppose people like the sound. That's where the tracks went, but Deschain wanted to go around and come in from the east. From the High Pure. The sheriff, Pea Anderson it was back then, didn't want none o' that. Eager as a bird with its eye on a worm he was, mad to press on. Said it would take em three days, and by then the woman might be dead and the Crows anywhere. He said he was going the straight way, and he'd go alone if no one wanted to go with him. 'Or unless you order me in the name of Gilead to do different,' he says to your da'.
"'Never think it,' Deschain says, 'for Debaria is your fill; I have my own.'
"The posse went. I stayed with your da', lad. Sheriff Anderson turned to me in the saddle and said, 'I hope they're hiring at one of the ranches, Hughie, because your days of wearing tin on your vest are over. I'm done with'ee.'
"Those were the last words he ever said to me. They rode off. Steven of Gilead squatted on his hunkers and I hunkered with him. After half an hour of quiet--might have been longer--I says to him, 'I thought we were going to hook around . . . unless you're done with me, too.'
"'No,' he says. 'Your hire is not my business, Deputy.'
"'Then what are we waitin for?'
"'Gunfire,' says he, and not five minutes later we heard it. Gunfire and screams. It didn't last long. The Crows had seen us coming--probably nummore'n a glint of sun on a bootcap or bit o' saddle brightwork was enough to attract their attention, for Pa Crow was powerful trig--and doubled back. They got up in those high rocks and poured down lead on Anderson and his possemen. There were more guns in those days, and the Crows had a good share. Even a speed-shooter or two.
"So we went around, all right? Took us only two days, because Steven Deschain pushed hard. On the third day, we camped downslope and rose before dawn. Now, if ye don't know, and no reason ye should, salt-houses are just caverns in the cliff faces up there. Whole families lived in em, not just the miners themselves. The tunnels go down into the earth from the backs of em. But as I say, in those days all were deserted. Yet we saw smoke coming from the vent on top of one, and that was as good as a kinkman standing out in front of a carnival tent and pointing at the show inside, don'tcha see it.