Something hard and cold and very much to the point pressed against the back of Jonas’s shirt, dead center between the shoulderblades. He knew what it was and who held it at once, understood the game was lost, but couldn’t understand how such a ludicrous, maddening turn of events could have happened.

“Holster the gun,” the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow—not just calm, but emotionless. “Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking’s done. Do it or die.”

Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He holstered his gun.

“You with the black hair. Take your gun out of my friend’s ear and put it back in your holster. Now.”

Clay Reynolds didn’t have to be invited twice, and he uttered a long, shaky sigh when Alain took the blade off his throat and stood back. Cuthbert did not look around, only stood with the elastic of his slingshot pulled and his elbow cocked.

“You at the bar,” Roland said. “Holster up.”

Depape did so, grimacing with pain as he bumped his hurt finger against his gunbelt. Only when this gun was put away did Cuthbert relax his hold on his sling and drop the ball from the cup into the palm of his hand.

The cause of all this had been forgotten as the effects played themselves out. Now Sheemie got to his feet and pelted across the room. His cheeks were wet with tears. He grasped one of Cuthbert’s hands, kissed it several times (loud smacking noises that would have been comic under other circumstances), and held the hand to his cheek for a moment. Then he dodged past Reynolds, pushed open the righthand batwing, and flew right into the arms of a sleepy-eyed and still half-drunk Sheriff. Avery had been fetched by Sheb from the jailhouse, where the Sheriff o’ Barony had been sleeping off the Mayor’s ceremonial dinner in one of his own cells.

8

“This is a nice mess, isn’t it?”

Avery speaking. No one answering. He hadn’t expected they would, not if they knew what was good for them.

The office area of the jail was too small to hold three men, three strapping not-quite-men, and one extra-large Sheriff comfortably, so Avery had herded them into the nearby Town Gathering Hall, which echoed to the soft flutter of the pigeons in the rafters and the steady beat-beat-beat of the grandfather clock behind the podium.