6
Cuthbert and Alain stood watching Roland with increasing concern. He had the piece of Maerlyn's Rainbow raised to his face, cupped in his hands as a man might cup a ceremonial goblet before making a toast. The drawstring bag lay crumpled on the dusty toes of his boots; his cheeks and forehead were washed in a pink glow that neither boy liked. It seemed alive, somehow, and hungry.
They thought, as if with one mind: I can't see his eyes. Where are his eyes?
"Roland?" Cuthbert repeated. "If we're going to get out to Hanging Rock before they're ready for us, you have to put that thing away."
Roland made no move to lower the ball. He muttered something under his breath; later, when Cuthbert and Alain had a chance to compare notes, they both agreed it had been thunderclap.
"Roland?" Alain asked, stepping forward. As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand between the curve of the ball and Roland's bent, studious face. There was no response. Alain pulled back and turned to Cuthbert.
"Can you touch him?" Bert asked.
Alain shook his head. "Not at all. It's like he's gone somewhere far away."
"We have to wake him up." Cuthbert's voice was dust-dry and shaky at the edges.
"Vannay told us that if you wake a person from a deep hypnotic trance too suddenly, he can go mad," Alain said. "Remember? I don't know if I dare - "
Roland stirred. The pink sockets where his eyes had been seemed to grow. His mouth flattened into the line of bitter determination they both knew well.
"No! It will not stand!" he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland's voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man.
"No," Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert , sat up before the campfire. "That was the voice of a king."
Now, however, the two of them only looked at their absent, roaring friend, paralyzed with fright.
"When I come here in my body, it will not stand! I swear on my father 's name, IT WILL NOT STAND!"
Then, as Roland's unnaturally pink face contorted, like the face of a man who confronts some unimaginable horror, Cuthbert and Alain lunged forward. It was no longer a question of perhaps destroying him in an effort to save him; if they didn't do something, the glass would kill him as they watched.
In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the gunslinger's forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught the boy and Alain caught the ball. Its heavy pink glow was weirdly insistent, beating at his eyes and pulling at his mind, but Alain stuffed it resolutely into the drawstring bag again without looking at it... and as he pulled the cord, yanking the bag's mouth shut, he saw the pink light wink out, as if it knew it had lost. For the time being, at least.
He turned back, and winced at the sight of the bruise puffing up from the middle of Roland's brow. "Is he - "
"Out cold," Cuthbert said.
"He better come to soon."
Cuthbert looked at him grimly, with not a trace of his usual amiability. "Yes," he said, "you're certainly right about that."
7
Sheemie waited at the foot of the stairs which led down to the kitchen area, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and waiting for sai Thorin to come back, or to call him. He didn't know how long she'd been in the kitchen, but it felt like forever. He wanted her to come back, and more than that - more than anything - he wanted her to bring Susan-sai with her. Sheemie had a terrible feeling about this place and this day; a feeling that darkened like the sky, which was now all obscured with smoke in the west. What was happening out there, or if it had anything to do with the thundery sounds he'd heard earlier, Sheemie didn't know, but he wanted to be out of here before the smoke-hazed sun went down and the real Demon Moon, not its pallid day-ghost, rose in the sky.
One of the swinging doors between the corridor and the kitchen pushed open and Olive came hurrying out.. She was alone.