He turned. Looked into the mirror again. This time he saw the man in black standing there and smiling at him, big as life. Gods, had he been there all along?
Yes, but you couldn't see him until he was ready to be seen. I don't know if he's a wizard, but he's a glamor-man, all right. Mayhap even Farson 's sorcerer.
He turned back. The man in the priest's robe was still smiling. No pointed teeth now. But they had been pointed. Jonas would lay his watch and warrant on it.
"Where's Rimer?"
"I sent him away to work with young sai Delgado on her Reaping Day catechisms," the man in black said. He slung a chummy arm around Jonas's shoulders and began leading him toward the table. "Best we palaver alone, I think."
Jonas didn't want to offend Farson's man, but he couldn't bear the touch of that arm. He couldn't say why, but it was unbearable. Pestilential. He shrugged it off and went on to one of the chairs, trying not to shiver. No wonder Depape had come back from Hanging Rock looking pale. No damned wonder.
Instead of being offended, the man in black tittered again (Yes, Jonas thought, he does laugh like the dead, very like, so he does). For one moment Jonas thought it was Fardo, Cort's father, in this room with him - that it was the man who had sent him west all those years ago - and he reached for his gun again. Then it was just the man in black, smiling at him in an unpleasantly knowing way, those blue eyes dancing like the flame from the gas-jets.
"See something interesting, sai Jonas?"
"Aye," Jonas said, sitting down. "Eats." He took a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. The bread stuck to his dry tongue, but he chewed determinedly all the same.
"Good boy." The other also sat, and poured wine, filling Jonas's glass first. "Now, my friend, tell me everything you've done since the three troublesome boys arrived, and everything you know, and everything you have planned. I would not have you leave out a single jot."
"First show me your sigul."
"Of course. How prudent you are."
The man in black reached inside his robe and brought out a square of metal - silver, Jonas guessed. He tossed it onto the table, and it clattered across to Jonas's plate. Engraved on it was what he had expected - that hideous staring eye.
"Satisfied?"
Jonas nodded.
"Slide it back to me."
Jonas reached for it, but for once his normally steady hand resembled his reedy, unstable voice. He watched the fingers tremble for a moment, then lowered the hand quickly to the table.
"I... I don't want to."
No. He didn't want to. Suddenly he knew that if he touched it, the engraved silver eye would roll... and look directly at him.
The man in black tittered and made a come-along gesture with the fingers of his right hand. The silver buckle (that was what it looked like to Jonas) slid back to him . . . and up the sleeve of his homespun robe.
"Abracadabra! Bool! The end! Now," the man in black went on, sipping his wine delicately, "if we have finished the tiresome formalities..."
"One more," Jonas said. "You know my name; I would know yours."
"Call me Walter," the man in black said, and the smile suddenly fell off his lips. "Good old Walter, that's me. Now let us see where we are, and where we're going. Let us, in short, palaver."
14
When Cuthbert came back into the bunkhouse, night had fallen. Roland and Alain were playing cards. They had cleaned the place up so that it looked almost as it had (thanks to turpentine found in a closet of the old foreman's office, even the slogans written on the walls were just pink ghosts of their former selves), and now were deeply involved in a game of Casa Fuerte, or Hotpatch, as it was known in their own part of the world. Either way, it was basically a two-man version of Watch Me, the card-game which had been played in barrooms and bunkhouses and around campfires since the world was young.
Roland looked up at once, trying to read Bert's emotional weather. Outwardly, Roland was as impassive as ever, had even played Alain to a draw across four difficult hands, but inwardly he was in a turmoil of pain and indecision. Alain had told him what Cuthbert had said while the two of them stood talking in the yard, and they were terrible things to hear from a friend, even when they came at second hand. Yet what haunted him more was what Bert had said just before leaving: You've called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. Was there even a chance he had done such a thing? Over and over he told himself no - that the course he had ordered them to follow was hard but sensible, the only course that made sense. Cuthbert's shouting was just so much angry wind, brought on by nerves .. . and his fury at having their private place defiled so outrageously. Still. . .
Tell him he's right for the - wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.
That couldn't be.
Could it?