Wizard and glass - Stephen King [215]
Miguel shuffled forward, grinning his gummy old grin, and took the reins of Jonas’s horse.
“Reconocimiento.”
“Por nada, jefe.”
Jonas went in, saw Olive Thorin sitting in the front parlor like a forlorn ghost, and nodded to her. She nodded back, and managed a wan smile.
“Sai Jonas, how well you look. If you see Hart—”
“Cry your pardon, lady, but it’s the Chancellor I’ve come to see,” Jonas said. He went on quickly upstairs toward the Chancellor’s suite of rooms, then down a narrow stone hall lit (and not too well) with gas-jets.
When he reached the end of the corridor, he rapped on the door waiting there—a massive thing of oak and brass set in its own arch. Rimer didn’t care for such as Susan Delgado, but he loved the trappings of power; that was what took the curve out of his noodle and made it straight. Jonas rapped.
“Come in, my friend,” a voice—not Rimer’s—called. It was followed by a tittery laugh that made Jonas’s flesh creep. He laughs like a dead person, Roy had said.
Jonas pushed open the door and stepped in. Rimer cared for incense no more than he cared for the hips and lips of women, but there was incense burning in here now—a woody smell that made Jonas think of court at Gilead, and functions of state in the Great Hall. The gas-jets were turned high. The draperies—purple velvet, the color of royalty, Rimer’s absolute favorite—trembled minutely in the breath of sea breeze coming in through the open windows. Of Rimer there was no sign. Or of anyone else, come to that. There was a little balcony, but the doors giving on it were open, and no one was out there.
Jonas stepped a little farther into the room, glancing into a gilt-framed mirror on the far side to check behind him without turning his head. No one there, either. Ahead and to the left was a table with places set for two and a cold supper in place, but no one in either chair. Yet someone had spoken to him. Someone who’d been directly on the other side of the door, from the sound. Jonas drew his gun.
“Come, now,” said the voice which had bid him enter. It came from directly behind Jonas’s left shoulder. “No need for that, we’re all friends here. All on the same side, you know.”
Jonas whirled on his heels, suddenly feeling old and slow. Standing there was a man of medium height, powerfully built from the look of him, with bright blue eyes and the rosy cheeks of either good health or good wine. His parted, smiling lips revealed cunning little teeth which must have been filed to points—surely such points couldn’t be natural. He wore a black robe, like the robe of a holy man, with the hood pushed back. Jonas’s first thought, that the fellow was bald, had been wrong, he saw. The hair was simply cropped so stringently that it was nothing but fuzz.
“Put the beanshooter away,” the man in black said. “We’re friends here, I tell you—absolutely palsy-walsy. We’ll break bread and speak of many things—oxen and oil-tankers and whether or not Frank Sinatra really was a better crooner than Der Bingle.”
“Who? A better what?”
“No one you know; nothing that matters.” The man in black tittered again. It was, Jonas thought, the sort of sound one might expect to hear drifting through the barred windows of a lunatic asylum.
He turned. Looked into the mirror again. This time he saw the man in black standing there and smiling at him, big as life. Gods, had he been there all along?
Yes, but you couldn’t see him until he was ready to be seen. I don’t know if he’s a wizard, but he’s a glamor-man, all right. Mayhap even Farson’s sorcerer.
He turned back. The man in the priest’s robe was still smiling. No pointed teeth now. But they had been pointed. Jonas would lay his watch and warrant on it.
“Where’s Rimer?”
“I sent him away to work with young sai Delgado on her Reaping Day catechisms,” the man in black said. He slung a chummy arm around Jonas’s shoulders and began leading him toward the table. “Best we palaver alone, I think.”
Jonas didn’t want to offend Farson’s man, but he couldn’t bear the touch of that arm. He couldn’t say why, but it was unbearable.