Wizard and glass - Stephen King [239]
“All quiet?” he asked.
Quint replied in Mejis bibble-babble. Barkie listened, then said: “All well, sai. He say he and his men grow impatient.” Smiling cheerfully, his face giving no indication of what he was saying, Barkie added: “If brains was blackpowder, this ijit couldn’t blow his nose.”
“But he’s a trustworthy idiot?”
Barkie shrugged. It might have been assent.
They went through the trees. Where Roland and Susan had seen almost thirty tankers, there were now only half a dozen, and of those six, only two actually had oil in them. Men sat on the ground or snoozed with their sombreros over their faces. Most had guns that looked about as trustworthy as the one in Quint’s waistband. A few of the poorer vaqs had bolas. On the whole, Reynolds guessed they would be more effective.
“Tell Lord Perth here that if the boys come, it’s got to be an ambush, and they’ll only have one chance to do the job right,” Reynolds said to Barkie.
Barkie spoke to Quint. Quint’s lips parted in a grin, revealing a scarifying picket of black and yellow fangs. He spoke briefly, then put his hands out in front of them and closed them into huge, scarred fists, one above the other, as if wringing the neck of an invisible enemy. When Barkie began to translate, Clay Reynolds waved it away. He had caught only one word, but it was enough: muerto.
5
All that pre-Fair week, Rhea sat in front of the glass, peering into its depths. She had taken time to sew Ermot’s head back onto his body with clumsy stitches of black thread, and she sat with the decaying snake around her neck as she watched and dreamed, not noticing the stench that began to arise from the reptile as time passed. Twice Musty came nigh, mewing for food, and each time Rhea batted the troublesome thing away without so much as a glance. She herself grew more and more gaunt, her eyes now looking like the sockets of the skulls stored in the net by the door to her bedroom. She dozed occasionally as she sat with the ball in her lap and the stinking snakeskin looped about her throat, her head down, the sharp point of her chin digging at her chest, runners of drool hanging from the loose puckers of her lips, but she never really slept. There was too much to see, far too much to see.
And it was hers for the seeing. These days she didn’t even have to pass her hands above the glass to open its pink mists. All the Barony’s meanness, all its petty (and not so petty) cruelties, all its cozening and lying lay before her. Most of what she saw was small and demeaning stuff—masturbating boys peeking through knotholes at their undressed sisters, wives going through husbands’ pockets, looking for extra money or tobacco, Sheb the piano-player licking the seat of the chair where his favorite whore had sat for awhile, a maid at Seafront spitting into Kimba Rimer’s pillowcase after the Chancellor had kicked her for being slow in getting out of his way.
These were all things which confirmed her opinion of the society she had left behind. Sometimes she laughed wildly; sometimes she spoke to the people she saw in the glass ball, as if they could hear her. By the third day of the week before Reaping, she had ceased her trips to the privy, even though she could carry the ball with her when she went, and the sour stench of urine began to rise from her.
By the fourth day, Musty had ceased coming near her.
Rhea dreamed in the ball and lost herself in her dreams, as others had done before her; deep in the petty pleasures of far-seeing, she was unaware that the pink ball was stealing the wrinkled remains of her anima. She likely would have considered it a fair trade if she had known. She saw all the things people did in the shadows, and they were the only things she cared for, and for them she almost certainly would have considered her life’s force a fair trade.
6
“Here,” the boy said, “let me light it, gods damn you.” Jonas would have recognized the speaker; he was the lad who had waved a severed dog’s tail across the street at Jonas and called, We’re Big Coffin Hunters just like you!