beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard p
Roland slid his leg free.
'Come,' she said. 'I've started them, but staying them could be a
different thing.'
Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The
bugs had found her.
'Don't look,' Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that
never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. 'Come. We
mu be quick - she'll rouse the others. I've put your boots and
clothes aside the path that leads away from here - I carried as much
as I could. How ye? Are ye strong?'
'Thanks to you.' How long he would stay strong Roland didn't
know... and right now it wasn't a question that mattered. He saw
Jenna snatch up two of the reeds - in his struggle to escape the
slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed - and then
they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from
Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.
Roland buckled on his guns and tied them down without breaking
stride.
They passed only three beds on each side before reaching the flap
of the tent . . . and it was a tent, he saw, not a vast pavilion. The
silk walls and ceiling were fraying canvas, thin enough to let in the
light of a threequarters Kissing Moon. And the beds weren't beds
at all, but only a double row of shabby cots.
He turned and saw a black, writhing hump on the floor where
Sister Coquina had been. At the sight of her, Roland was struck by
an unpleasant thought.
'I forgot John Norman's medallion!' A keen sense of regret - almost
of mourning - went through him like wind.
Jenna reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought it out. It
glimmered in the moonlight.
'I picked it up off the floor.'
He didn't know which made him gladder - the sight of the
medallion or the sight of it in her hand. It meant she wasn't like the
others.
Then, as if to dispel that notion before it got too firm a hold on
him, she said: 'Take it, Roland - I can hold it no more.' And, as he
took it, he saw unmistakable marks of charring on her fingers.
He took her hand and kissed each burn.
'Thankee-sai,' she said, and he saw she was crying. 'Thankee, dear.
To be kissed so is lovely, worth every pain. Now . . .'
Roland saw her eyes shift, and followed them. Here were bobbing
lights descending a rocky path. Beyond them he saw the building
where the Little Sisters had been living - not a convent but a ruined
hacienda that looked a thousand years old. There were three
candles; as they drew closer, Roland saw that there were only three
sisters. Mary wasn't among them.
He drew his guns.
'Oooo, it's a gunslinger-man he is!' Louise.
'A scary man!' Michela.
'And he's found his ladylove as well as his shooters!' Tamra.
'His slut-whore!' Louise.
Laughing angrily. Not afraid ... at least, not of his weapons.
'Put them away,' Jenna told him, and when she looked, saw that he
already had.
The others, meanwhile, had drawn closer.
'Ooo, see, she cries!' Tamra.
'Doffed her habit, she has!' Michela. 'Perhaps it's her broken vows
she cries for.'
'Why such tears, pretty?' Louise.
'Because he kissed my fingers where they were burned,' Jenna said.
'I've never been kissed before. It made me cry.'
'Ooooo!'
'Luv-ly!'
'Next he'll stick his thing in her! Even luv-lier!'
Jenna bore their japes with no sign of anger. When they were done,
she said: 'I'm going with him. Stand aside.'
They gaped at her, counterfeit laughter disappearing in shock.
'No!' Louise whispered. 'Are ye mad? Ye know what'll happen!'
'No, and neither do you,' Jenna said. 'Besides, I care not.' She half-
turned and held her hand out to the mouth of the ancient hospital
tent. It was a faded olive-drab in the moonlight, with an old red
cross drawn on its roof.
Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to With
this tent which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and
gloriously on the inside. How many towns and over how many
years.
Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were
doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was
somehow terrible.
'Stand aside or I'll have them on ye,' Jenna said.
'Ye never would!' Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.
'Aye. I've already set them on Sister Coquina. She's a part of the
medicine, now.'
Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was
all that dismay directed towards their own precious hides. What
Jenna h done was clearly far outside their reckoning.
'Then you're damned,' Sister Tamra said.
'Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside.'
They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from
him. but they shrank from her more.
'Damned?' he asked after they had skirted the haci and reached the
path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled
scree of rocks In its light Roland could see a small black opening
low on the scarp. guessed it was the cave the Sisters called
Thoughtful House. 'What did they mean, damned?'
'Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like
not that we haven't seen her.'
She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her
about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they
were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the
compass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in
the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.
'Tell me what they meant.'
'Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland - what good is it? 'Tis done,
the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could.' She
looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland
saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. 'I have supped with them.
There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could
help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was
in it.'
Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat... a
woman, too. He nodded.
'I'd go no further down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it
be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing
me back to them, but she was wrong.' She looked at him shyly and
fearfully ... but met his eyes. 'I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland
of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me.'
`you're welcome to your share of my way,' he said. 'And I am `
Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he
could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of
them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley
in which the Little Sisters had practised their glamours.
`It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.'
Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit
with its
bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a
corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging
face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted
dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors
gleamed.
Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled ...
but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.
'Stand clear,' Jenna said. 'Or I'll bring the can tam on ye.'
'No,' Sister Mary said, stepping closer, 'ye won't. They'll not stray
so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned
bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come.'
Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The
Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic
tone-quality that had gone through Roland's head like a spike. And
the doctor-bugs
what Jenna had called the can tam - did not come.
Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself
hadn't been completely sure they wouldn't come until the
experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them,
seeming to float above the ground. Her eyes flicked towards him.
'And put that away,' she said.
Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand.
He had no memory of drawing it.
'Unless it's been blessed or dipped in some sect's holy wet - blood,
water, semen - it can't harm such as I, gunslinger. For I am more
shade than substance ... yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all
that.'
She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her
eyes. Those shooters are all ye have, her eyes said. Without 'em,
you might as well be back in the tent we dreamed around ye,
caught up in our slings and awaiting our pleasure.
Instead of shooting, he dropped the revolver back into its holster
and launched himself at her with his hands out. Sister Mary uttered
a scream that was mostly surprise, but it was not a long one;
Roland's fingers clamped down on her throat and choked the sound
off before it was fairly started.
The touch of her flesh was obscene - it seemed not just alive but
various beneath his hands, as if it was trying to crawl away from
him. He could feel it running like liquid, flowing, and the sensation
was horrible beyond description. Yet he clamped down harder,
determined to choke the I out of her.
Then there came a blue flash (not in the air, he would think later;
that flash happened inside his head, a single stroke of lightning as
she touch off some brief but powerful brainstorm), and his hands
flew away from h neck. For one moment his dazzled eyes saw
great wet gouges in her flesh - gouges in the shapes of his hands.
Then he was flung backwards hitting the scree on his back and
sliding, striking his head on a jutting rock hard enough to provoke
a second, lesser, flash of light.
'Nay, my pretty man,' she said, grimacing at him, laughing with
those terrible dull eyes of hers. 'Ye don't choke such as I, and I'll
take ye slow yer impertinence - cut ye shallow in a hundred places
to refresh my thirst First, though, I'll have this vowless girl ... and
I'll have those damned bells off her, in the bargain.'
'Come and see if you can!' Jenna cried in a trembling voice, and
shook her head from side to side. The Dark Bells rang mockingly,
provokingly
Mary's grimace of a smile fell away. 'Oh, I can,' she breathed. Her
mouth yawned. In the moonlight, her fangs gleamed in her gums
like bone needles poked through a red pillow. 'I can and I -'
There was a growl from above them. It rose, then splintered into a
volley of snarling barks. Mary turned to her left, and in the
moment before the snarling thing left the rock on which it was
standing, Roland could clearly read the startled bewilderment on
Big Sister's face.
It launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs
outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even
before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above
her half-raise arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat,
Roland knew exactly what it was.
As the shape bore her over on to her back, Sister Mary uttered a
gibbering shriek that went through Roland's head like the Dark
Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy
thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws
planted on the grave-shroud above her, chest, where the rose had
been.
Roland grabbed Jenna, who was looking down at the fallen Sister
with a kind of frozen fascination.
'Come on!' he shouted. 'Before it decides it wants a bite of you,
too!'
The dog took no notice of them as Roland pulled Jenna past. It had
torn
Sister Mary's head mostly off. Her flesh seemed to be changing,
somehow - decomposing, very likely - but whatever was
happening, Roland did not want to see it. He didn't want Jenna to
see it, either.
They half-walked, half-ran to the top of the ridge, and when they
got there paused for breath in the moonlight, heads down, hands
linked, both of them gasping harshly.
The growling and snarling below them had faded, but was still
faintly audible when Sister Jenna raised her head and asked him,
'What was it? you know - I saw it in your face. And how could it
attack her? We all have power over animals, but she has - had - the
most.'
'Not over that one.' Roland found himself recalling the unfortunate
boy in the next bed. Norman hadn't known why the medallions
kept the Sisters at arm's length - whether it was the gold or the
God. Now Roland knew the answer. 'It was a dog. Just a town-dog.
I saw it in the square, before the green folk knocked me out and
took me to the Sisters. I suppose the other animals that could run
away did run away, but not that one. it had nothing to fear from the
Little Sisters of Eluria, and somehow it knew it didn't. It bears the
sign of the Jesus-man on its chest. Black fur on white. just an
accident of its birth, I imagine. In any case, it's done for her now. I
knew it was lurking around. I heard it barking two or three times.'
'Why?' Jenna whispered. 'Why would it come? Why would it stay?
And why would it take on her as it did?'
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when
such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka. Come on.
Let's get as far as we can from this place before we hide up for the
day.'
As far as they could turned out to be eight miles at most ... and
probably, Roland thought as the two of them sank down in a patch
of sweet-smelling sage beneath an overhang of rock, a good deal
less. Five, perhaps. It was him slowing them down; or rather, it
was the residue of the poison in the soup. When it was clear to him
that he could not go farther without help, he asked her for one of
the reeds. She refused, saying tha
t the stuff in it might combine
with the unaccustomed exercise to burst his heart.
'Besides,' she said as they lay back against the embankment of the
little nook they had found, 'they'll not follow. Those that are left -
Michela, Louise, Tamra - will be packing up to move on. They
know to leave when the time comes; that's why the Sisters have
survived as long as they have. As We have. We're strong in some
ways, but weak in many more. Sister
Mary forgot that. It was her arrogance that did for her as much as
the cross-dog, I think.'
She had cached not just his boots and clothes beyond the top of the
ridge, but the smaller of his two purses, as well. When she tried
apologize for not bringing his bedroll and the larger purse (she'd
tried she said, but they were simply too heavy), Roland hushed her
with a finger to her lips. He thought it a miracle to have as much as
he did. And besides (this he did not say, but perhaps she knew it,
anyway), the guns were the only things which really mattered. The
guns of his father, and his father before him, all the way back to
the days of Arthur Eld when dreams about dragons had still walked
the earth.
'Will you be all right?' he asked her as they settled down. The
moon had set, but dawn was still at least three hours away. They
were surrounded the sweet smell of the sage. A purple smell, he
thought it then ... and ever after. Already he could feel it forming a
kind of magic carpet under him, which would soon float him away
to sleep. He thought he had never been so tired.
'Roland, I know not.' But even then, he thought she had known.
Her mother had brought her back once; no mother would bring her
back again. And she had eaten with the others, had taken the
communion of the Sisters. Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from
which none ever escaped.
But then he was too tired to think much of such things ... and what
good would thinking have done, in any case? As she had said, the
bridge was burned. Even if they were to return to the valley,
Roland guess they would find nothing but the cave the Sisters had
called Thoughtful House. The surviving Sisters would have packed
their tent of bad dreams and moved on, just a sound of bells and
singing insects moving down the late night breeze.
He looked at her raised a hand (it felt heavy), and touched the curl
which once more lay across her forehead.
Jenna laughed, embarrassed. 'That one always escapes. It's
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