All of this meant little this far out in the Outposts - these great empty spaces, Anders said, made politics seem unimportant. Only the deadly change in the Wolf tribe made a practical difference to them, and since most of the bad Wolfs went to the Other Place, even that didn't make much difference to them ('It fashes us little, my Lord' was what Jack's ears insisted they had heard).
Then, not long after the news of the Queen's illness had reached this far west, Morgan had sent out a crew of grotesque, twisted slaves from the ore-pits back east; these slaves were tended by stolen Wolfs and other, stranger creatures. Their foreman was a terrible man who carried a whip; he had been here almost constantly when the work began, but then he had disappeared. Anders, who had spent most of those terrible weeks and months cowering in his house, which was some five miles south of here, had been delighted to see him go. He had heard rumors that Morgan had called the man with the whip back east, where affairs were reaching some great point of cl**ax; Anders didn't know if this was true or not, and didn't care. He was simply glad that the man, who was sometimes accompanied by a scrawny, somehow gruesome-looking little boy, was gone.
'His name,' Jack demanded. 'What was his name?'
'My Lord, I don't know. The Wolfs called him He of the Lashes. The slaves just called him the devil. I'd say they were both right.'
'Did he dress like a dandy? Velvet coats? Shoes with buckles on the tops, maybe?'
Anders was nodding.
'Did he wear a lot of strong perfume?'
'Aye! Aye, he did!'
'And the whip had little rawhide strings with metal caps on them.'
'Aye, my Lord. An evil whip. And he was fearsome good with it, aye, he was.'
It was Osmond. It was Sunlight Gardener. He was here, overseeing some project for Morgan . . . then the Queen got sick and Osmond was called back to the summer palace, where I first made his cheerful acquaintance.
'His son,' Jack said. 'What did his son look like?'
'Skinny,' Anders said slowly. 'One eye was afloat. That's all I can remember. He . . . my Lord, the Whipman's son was hard to see. The Wolfs seemed more afraid of him than of his father, although the son carried no whip. They said he was dim.'
'Dim,' Jack mused.
'Yes. It is their word for one who is hard to see, no matter how hard ye look for that one. Invisibility is impossible - so the Wolfs say - but one can make himself dim if only he knows the trick of it. Most Wolfs do, and this little whoreson knew it, too. So all I remember is how thin he was, and that floating eye, and that he was as ugly as black, syphilitic sin.'
Anders paused.
'He liked to hurt things. Little things. He used to take them under the porch and I'd hear the most awful screams ' Anders shuddered. 'That was one of the reasons I kept to my house, you know. I don't like to hear wee animals in pain. Makes me feel turrible bad, it does.'
Everything Anders said raised a hundred fresh questions in Jack's mind. He would particularly have liked to know all that Anders knew about the Wolfs - just hearing of them woke simultaneous pleasure and a deep, dully painful longing for his Wolf in his heart.
But time was short; this man was scheduled to drive west into the Blasted Lands in the morning, a horde of crazy scholars led by Morgan himself might burst through from what the liveryman called the Other Place at any moment, Richard might wake up and want to know who this Morgan was they were discussing, and who this dim fellow was - this dim fellow who sounded suspiciously like the fellow who had lived next door to him in Nelson House.
'They came,' he prompted, 'this crew came, and Osmond was their foreman - at least until he was called away or whenever he had to lead the devotions at night-chapel back in Indiana - '
'My Lord?' Anders's face was again ponderous with puzzlement.
'They came, and they built . . . what?' He was sure he already knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear Anders himself say it.
'Why, the tracks,' Anders said. 'The tracks going west into the Blasted Lands. The tracks I must travel myself tomorrow.' He shuddered.
'No,' Jack said. A hot, terrible excitement exploded in his chest like a sun, and he rose to his feet. Again there was that click in his head, that terrible, persuasive feeling of great things coming together.
Anders fell on his knees with a crash as a terrible, beautiful light filled Jack's face. Richard stirred at the sound and sat sleepily up.
'Not you,' Jack said. 'Me. And him.' He pointed at Richard.
'Jack?' Richard looked at him with sleepy, nearsighted confusion. 'What are you talking about? And why is that man sniffing the floor?'
'My Lord . . . yer will, of course . . . but I don't understand '
'Not you,' Jack said, 'us. We'll take the train for you.'
'But my Lord, why?' Anders managed, not yet daring to look up.
Jack Sawyer looked out into the darkness.
'Because,' he said, 'I think there's something at the end of the tracks - at the end of the tracks or near the end - that I have to get.'
INTERLUDE