The old man licked his lips. "All right; may it do ya fine. He said that he's crafty while you're young and without so much as a sip of guile. He said that if you don't stay back where you belong, he'll have your head off your shoulders. He said he'd like to hold it up to your Red Father as he stands trapped upon his balcony."
This was quite a bit more than Roland actually said (as we should know, having been there), and more than enough for Mordred.
Yet not enough for Rando Thoughtful. Perhaps only ten days before it would have accomplished the old man's purpose, which was to goad the boy into killing him quickly. But Mordred had seasoned in a hurry, and now withstood his first impulse to simply bolt across the bridge into the castle courtyard, changing as he charged, and tearing Rando Thoughtful's head from his body with the swipe of one barbed leg.
Instead he peered up at the rooks-hundreds of them, now-and they peered back at him, as intent as pupils in a classroom.
The boy made a fluttering gesture with his arms, then pointed at the old man. The air was at once filled with the rising whir of wings. The King's Minister turned to flee, but before he'd gotten a single step, the rooks descended on him in an inky cloud. He threw his arms up to protect his face as they lit on his head and shoulders, turning him into a scarecrow.
This instinctive gesture did no good; more of them alit on his upraised arms until the very weight of the birds forced them down. Bills nipped and needled at the old man's face, drawing blood in tiny tattoo stipples.
"No!" Mordred shouted. "Save the skin for me... but you may have his eyes."
It was then, as the eager rooks tore Rando Thoughtful's eyes from their living sockets, that the ex-Minister of State uttered the rising howl Roland and Susannah heard as they neared the edge of Castle-town. The birds who couldn't find a roostingplace hung around him in a living thunderhead. They turned him on his levitating heels and carried him toward the changeling, who had now advanced to die center of the bridge and squatted there. The boots and rotted pillowtick coat had been left behind for the nonce on the town side of the bridge; what waited for sai Thoughtful, reared up on its back legs, forelegs pawing the air, red mark on its hairy belly all too visible, was Dan-Tete, the Little Red King.
The man floated to his fate, shrieking and eyeless. He thrust his hands out in front of him, making warding-off gestures, and the spider's front legs seized one of them, guided it into the bristling maw of its mouth, and bit it off with a candy-cane crunch.
Sweet!
EIGHT
That night, beyond the last of the oddly narrow, oddly unpleasant townhouses, Roland stopped in front of what had probably been a smallhold farm. He stood facing the ruin of the main building, sniffing.
"What, Roland? What?"
"Can you smell the wood of that place, Susannah?"
She sniffed. "I can, as a matter of fact-what of it?"
He turned to her, smiling. "If we can smell it, we can burn it."
This turned out to be correct. They had trouble kindling the fire, even aided by Roland's slyest tricks of trailcraft and half a can of Sterno, but in die end they succeeded. Susannah sat as close to it as she could, turning at regular intervals in order to toast bodi sides equally, relishing die sweat diat popped out first on her face and her br**sts, then on her back. She had forgotten what it was to be warm, and went on feeding wood to die flames until the campfire was a roaring bonfire. To animals in the open lands furdier along die Padi of die healing Beam, diat fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object-to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father's sake-but he didn't. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.
"Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?" he asked her at last.
She nodded. "If I have to."
"Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold," he said. "And while I can't promise you we'll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don't believe it'll be any longer than two."
"You think it'll be easier to take game if we don't build a fire, don't you?"
Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.
"Will there be game as early as day after tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
He considered this, then shook his head. "I can't say-but I do."
"Can you smell it?"
"No."
"Touch their minds?"
"It's not that, either."
She let it go. "Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?"
He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon's breath. "They'll not come close to thy bonfire."
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow we'll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can persuade them to go."