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Luka, impaled at the head, seemed to dance as the snake dug its fangs into the struggling constable. Blood and gobbets of flesh spattered everywhere.
Jamie looked at me wildly. His guns were drawn, but where to shoot? The pooky was writhing between two dying men. Its lower body, now legless, flipped free of the heaped clothes, wound itself around Luka's waist in fat coils, drew tight. The part behind the head was slithering out through the widening hole at the nape of Luka's neck.
I stepped forward, seized Wegg, and dragged him backward by the scruff of his vest. His bitten arm had already turned black and swelled to twice its normal size. His eyes were bulging from their sockets as he stared at me, and white foam began to drizzle from his lips.
Somewhere, Billy Streeter was screaming.
The fangs tore free. "Burns," Wegg said in a low voice, and then he could say no more. His throat swelled, and his tongue shot out of his mouth. He collapsed, shuddering in his death-throes. The snake stared at me, its forked tongue licking in and out. They were black snake-eyes, but they were filled with human understanding. I lifted the revolver holding the special load. I had only one silver shell and the head was weaving erratically from side to side, but I never doubted I could make the shot; it's what such as I was made for. It lunged, fangs flashing, and I pulled the trigger. The shot was true, and the silver bullet went right into that yawning mouth. The head blew away in a splatter of red that had begun to turn white even before it hit the bars and the floor of the corridor. I'd seen such mealy white flesh before. It was brains. Human brains.
Suddenly it was Ollie Ang's ruined face peering at me from the ragged hole in the back of Luka's neck--peering from atop a snake's body. Shaggy black fur sprang from between the scales on its body as whatever force dying inside lost all control of the shapes it made. In the moment before it collapsed, the remaining blue eye turned yellow and became a wolf's eye. Then it went down, bearing the unfortunate Steg Luka with it. In the corridor, the dying body of the skin-man shimmered and burned, wavered and changed. I heard the pop of muscles and the grind of shifting bones. A naked foot shot out, turned into a furry paw, then became a man's foot again. The remains of Ollie Ang shuddered all over, then grew still.
The boy was still screaming.
"Go to yon pallet and lie down," I said to him. My voice was not quite steady. "Close your eyes and tell yourself it's over, for now it is."
"I want you," Billy sobbed as he went to the pallet. His cheeks were speckled with blood. I was drenched with it, but this he didn't see. His eyes were already closed. "I want you with me! Please, sai, please!"
"I'll come to you as soon as I can," I said. And I did.
*
Three of us spent the night on pushed-together pallets in the drunk-and-disorderly cell: Jamie on the left, me on the right, Young Bill Streeter in the middle. The simoom had begun to die, and until late, we heard the sound of revels on the high street as Debaria celebrated the death of the skin-man.
"What will happen to me, sai?" Billy asked just before he finally fell asleep.
"Good things," I said, and hoped Everlynne of Serenity would not prove me wrong about that.
"Is it dead? Really dead, sai Deschain?"
"Really."
But on that score I meant to take no chance. After midnight, when the wind was down to a bare breeze and Bill Streeter lay in an exhausted sleep so deep even bad dreams couldn't reach him, Jamie and I joined Sheriff Peavy on the waste ground behind the jail. There we doused the body of Ollie Ang with coal oil. Before setting match to it, I asked if either of them wanted the wrist-clock as a souvenir. Somehow it hadn't been broken in the struggle, and the cunning little second hand still turned.
Jamie shook his head.
"Not I," said Peavy, "for it might be haunted. Go on, Roland. If I may call ye so."
"And welcome," I said. I struck the sulphur and dropped it. We stood watching until the remains of Debaria's skin-man were nothing but black bones. The wrist-clock was a charred lump in the ash.
*
The following morning, Jamie and I rounded up a crew of men--more than willing, they were--to go out to the rail line. Once they were there, it was a matter of two hours to put Sma' Toot back on the double-steel. Travis, the enjie, directed the operation, and I made many friends by telling them I'd arranged for everyone in the crew to eat free at Racey's at top o' day and drink free at the Busted Luck that afternoon.
There was to be a town celebration that night, at which Jamie and I would be guests of honor. It was the sort of thing I could happily do without--I was anxious to get home, and as a rule, company doesn't suit me--but such events are often part of the job. One good thing: there would be women, some of them no doubt pretty. That part I wouldn't mind, and suspected Jamie wouldn't, either. He had much to learn about women, and Debaria was as good a place to begin his studies as any.
He and I watched Sma' Toot puff slowly up to the roundway and then make its way toward us again, pointed in the right direction: toward Gilead.
"Will we stop at Serenity on the way back to town?" Jamie asked. "To ask if they'll take the boy in?"
"Aye. And the prioress said she had something for me."
"Do you know what?"
I shook my head.
*
Everlynne, that mountain of a woman, swept toward us across the courtyard of Serenity, her arms spread wide. I was almost tempted to run; it was like standing in the path of one of the vast trucks that used to run at the oil-fields near Kuna.
Instead of running us down, she swept us into a vast and bosomy double hug. Her aroma was sweet: a mixture of cinnamon and thyme and baked goods. She kissed Jamie on the cheek--he blushed. Then she kissed me full on the lips. For a moment we were enveloped by her complicated and billowing garments and shaded by her winged silk hood. Then she drew back, her face shining.
"What a service you have done this town! And how we say thankya!"
I smiled. "Sai Everlynne, you are too kind."
"Not kind enough! You'll have noonies with us, yes? And meadow wine, although only a little. Ye'll have more to drink tonight, I have no doubt." She gave Jamie a roguish side-glance. "But ye'll want to be careful when the toasts go around; too much drink can make a man less a man later on, and blur memories he might otherwise want to keep." She paused, then broke into a knowing grin that went oddly with her robes. "Or . . . p'raps not."
Jamie blushed harder than ever, but said nothing.
"We saw you coming," Everlynne said, "and there's someone else who'd like to give you her thanks."
She moved aside and there stood the tiny Sister of Serenity named Fortuna. She was still swath
ed in bandagement, but she looked less wraithlike today, and the side of the face we could see was shining with happiness and relief. She stepped forward shyly.
"I can sleep again. And in time, I may even be able to sleep wi'out nightmares."
She twitched up the skirt of her gray robe, and--to my deep discomfort--fell on her knees before us. "Sister Fortuna, Annie Clay that was, says thank you. So do we all, but this comes from my own heart."
I took her gently by the shoulders. "Rise, bondswoman. Kneel not before such as us."
She looked at me with shining eyes, and kissed me on the cheek with the side of her mouth that could still kiss. Then she fled back across the courtyard toward what I assumed was their kitchen. Wonderful smells were already arising from that part of the haci.
Everlynne watched her go with a fond smile, then turned back to me.
"There's a boy--" I began.
She nodded. "Bill Streeter. I know his name and his story. We don't go to town, but sometimes the town comes to us. Friendly birds twitter news in our ears, if you take my meaning."
"I take it well," I said.
"Bring him tomorrow, after your heads have shrunk back to their normal size," said she. "We're a company of women, but we're happy to take an orphan boy . . . at least until he grows enough hair on his upper lip to shave. After that, women trouble a boy, and it might not be so well for him to stay here. In the meantime, we can set him about his letters and numbers . . . if he's trig enough to learn, that is. Would you say he's trig enough, Roland, son of Gabrielle?"
It was odd to be called from my mother's side rather than my father's, but strangely pleasant. "I'd say he's very trig."
"That's well, then. And we'll find a place for him when it's time for him to go."
"A plot and a place," I said.
Everlynne laughed. "Aye, just so, like in the story of Tim Stoutheart. And now we'll break bread together, shall we? And with meadow wine we'll toast the prowess of young men."
*
We ate, we drank, and all in all, it was a very merry meeting. When the sisters began to clear the trestle tables, Prioress Everlynne took me to her private quarters, which consisted of a bedroom and a much larger office where a cat slept in a bar of sun on a huge oaken desk heaped high with papers.
