Wizard and glass - Stephen King [260]
“I don’t want to know,” he muttered from behind his pulled-up neckerchief. The only thing he did want right now was to get the hell out of here.
He spied the cart, which was painted black and overlaid with cabalistic designs in gold. It looked like a medicine-show wagon to Reynolds; it also looked a bit like a hearse. He seized it by the handles and dragged it out of the shed as fast as he could. Depape could do the rest, by gods. Hitch his horse to the cart and haul the old woman’s stinking freight to . . . where? Who knew? Eldred, maybe.
Rhea came tottering out of her hut with the drawstring bag they’d brought the ball in, but she stopped, head cocked, listening, when Reynolds asked his question.
Jonas thought it over, then said: “Seafront to begin, I guess. Yar, that’ll do for her, and this glass bauble as well, I reckon, until the party’s over tomorrow.”
“Aye, Seafront, I’ve never been there,” Rhea said, moving forward again. When she reached Jonas’s horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the bag. After a moment’s further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.
Rhea wore a sly smile. “Mayhap we’ll meet Thorin. If so, I might have something to show him in the Good Man’s toy that’d interest him ever so much.”
“If you meet him,” Jonas said, getting down to help hitch Depape’s horse to the black cart, “it’ll be in a place where no magic is needed to see far.”
She looked at him, frowning, and then the sly smile slowly resurfaced. “Why, I b’lieve our Mayor’s met wiv a accident!”
“Could be,” Jonas agreed.
She giggled, and soon the giggle turned into a full-throated cackle. She was still cackling as they drew out of the yard, cackling and sitting in the little black cart with its cabalistic decorations like the Queen of Black Places on her throne.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ASHES
1
Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux. It was the sight of Miguel, the old mozo, that started Susan down its greased slope. He was in the middle of Seafront’s courtyard, clutching his broom of twigs against his chest and looking at the riders who passed to and fro with an expression of perplexed misery. His sombrero was twisted around on his back, and Susan observed with something like horror that Miguel—usually brushed and clean and neat as a pin—was wearing his serape inside out. There were tears on his cheeks, and as he turned this way and that, following the passing riders, trying to hile those he recognized, she thought of a child she had once seen toddle out in front of an oncoming stage. The child had been pulled back in time by his father; who would pull Miguel back?
She started for him, and a vaquero aboard a wild-eyed spotted roan galloped so close by her that one stirrup ticked off her hip and the horse’s tail flicked her forearm. She voiced a strange-sounding little chuckle. She had been worried about Miguel and had almost been run down herself! Funny!
She looked both ways this time, started forward, then drew back again as a loaded wagon came careering around the corner, tottering on two wheels at first. What it was loaded with she couldn’t see—the goods in the wagonbed were covered with a tarp—but she saw Miguel move toward it, still clutching his broom. Susan thought of the child in front of the stage again and shrieked an inarticulate cry of alarm. Miguel cringed back at the last moment and the cart flew by him, bounded and swayed across the courtyard, and disappeared out through the arch.
Miguel dropped his broom, clapped both hands to his cheeks, fell to his knees, and began to pray in a loud, lamenting voice. Susan watched him for a moment, her mouth working, and then sprinted for the stables, no longer taking care to keep against the side of the building. She had caught the disease that would grip almost all of Hambry by noon, and although she managed to do a fairly apt job of saddling Pylon (on any other