The brilliance seemed to leave his eyes. "They're the ones Sayre... S-S-Sayre... "Another pause. Then the bird-thing said, "Oh sai, what is the lovely thing that you hold?"
"You know what it is," Callahan said. Jake was moving and Callahan, mindful of what the boy gunslinger had told him outside-
Make sure that every time I look on my right, I see your face-stepped back down from the table to move with him, still holding the turtle high. He could almost taste the room's silence, but-
But there was another room. Rough laughter and hoarse, carousing yells-a party from the sound of it, and close by. On the left. From behind the tapestry showing the knights and their ladies at dinner. Something going on back there, Callahan thought, and probably not Elks' Poker Night.
He heard Oy breathing fast and low through his perpetual grin, a perfect little engine. And something else. A harsh raiding sound with a low and rapid clicking beneath. The combination set Callahan's teeth on edge and made his skin feel cold. Something was hiding under the tables.
Oy saw the advancing insects first and froze like a dog on point, one paw raised and his snout thrust forward. For a moment the only part of him to move was the dark and velvety skin of his muzzle, first twitching back to reveal the clenched needles of his teeth, then relaxing to hide them, then twitching back again.
The bugs came on. Whatever they were, the Turtle Maturin upraised in the Pere's hand meant nothing to them. A fat guy wearing a tuxedo with plaid lapels spoke weakly, almost questioningly, to the bird-thing: "They weren't to come any further than here, Meiman, nor to leave. We were told..."
Oy lunged forward, a growl coming through his clamped teeth. It was a decidedly un-Oylike sound, reminding Callahan of a comic-strip balloon: Arrrrrr!
"No!" Jake shouted, alarmed. "No, Oy!"
At the sound of the boy's shout, the yells and laughter from behind the tapestry abruptly ceased, as if the folken back there had suddenly become aware that something had changed in the front room.
Oy took no notice of Jake's cry. He crunched three of the bugs in rapid succession, the crackle of their breaking carapaces gruesomely clear in the new stillness. He made no attempt to eat them but simply tossed the corpses, each the size of a mouse, into the air with a snap of the neck and a grinning release of the jaws.
And the others retreated back under the tables.
He was made for this, Callahan thought. Perhaps once in the long-ago all bumblers were. Made for it the way some breeds of terrier are made to-
A hoarse shout from behind the tapestry interrupted these thoughts: "Humes!" one voice cried, and then a second: "Kahumes!"
Callahan had an absurd impulse to yell Gesundheit!
Before he could yell that or anything else, Roland's voice suddenly filled his head.
"Jake, go."
SIX
The boy turned toward Pere Callahan, bewildered. He was walking with his arms crossed, ready to fling the 'Rizas at the first low man or woman who moved. Oy had returned to his heel, although he was swinging his head ceaselessly from side to side and his eyes were bright with the prospect of more prey.
"We go together," Jake said. "They're buffaloed, Pere! And we're close! They took her through here... this room... and then through the kitchen-"
Callahan paid no attention. Still holding the turtle high (as one might hold a lantern in a deep cave), he had turned toward the tapestry. The silence from behind it was far more terrible than the shouts and feverish, gargling laughter. It was silence like a pointed weapon. And the boy had stopped.
"Go while you can," Callahan said, striving for calmness.
"Catch up to her if you can. This is the command of your dinh.
This is also the will of the White."
"But you can't-"
"Go, Jake!"
The low men and women in the Dixie Pig, whether in thrall to the skoldpadda or not, murmured uneasily at the sound of that shout, and well they might have, for it was not Callahan's voice coming from Callahan's mouth.
"You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command your Jake's eyes flew wide at the sound of Roland's voice issuing from Callahan's throat. His mouth dropped open. He looked around, dazed.
In the second before the tapestry to their left was torn aside, Callahan saw its black joke, what the careless eye would first surely overlook: the roast that was the banquet's main entree had a human form; die knights and their ladies were eating human flesh and drinking human blood. What the tapestry showed was a cannibals' communion.