There was a flurry of wings close above his head. A pigeon—dark gray, it was, with a white ring around its neck—fluttered down on a rock just ahead of him, as if to rest. An interesting-looking bird. Not, Depape thought, a wild pigeon. Someone’s escaped pet? He couldn’t imagine anyone in this desolate quarter of the world keeping anything but a half-wild dog to bite the squash off any would-be robber (although what these folks might have worth robbing was another question he couldn’t answer), but he supposed anything was possible. In any case, roast pigeon would go down a treat when he stopped for the night.

Depape drew his gun, but before he could cock the hammer, the pigeon was off and flying east. Depape took a shot after it, anyway. Sometimes you got lucky, but apparently not this time; the pigeon dipped a little, then straightened out and disappeared in the direction Depape himself was going. He sat astride his horse for a moment, not much put out of countenance; he thought Jonas was going to be very pleased with what he had found out.

After a bit, he booted his horse in the sides and began to canter east along the Barony Sea Road, back toward Mejis, where the boys who had embarrassed him were waiting to be dealt with. Lords they might be, sons of gunslingers they might be, but in these latter days, even such as those could die. As the old bastard himself would undoubtedly have pointed out, the world had moved on.

2

On a late afternoon three days after Roy Depape left Ritzy and headed his horse toward Hambry again, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode north and west of town, first down the long swell of the Drop, then into the freeland Hambry folk called the Bad Grass, then into deserty waste lands. Ahead of them and clearly visible once they were back in the open were crumbled and eroded bluffs. In the center of these was a dark, almost vaginal cleft, its edges so splintered it looked as if it had been whacked into reality by an ill-tempered god wielding a hatchet.

The distance between the end of the Drop and the bluffs was perhaps six miles. Three quarters of the way across, they passed the flatlands’ only real geographic feature: a jutting upthrust of rock that looked like a finger bent at the first knuckle. Below it was a small, boomerang-shaped greensward, and when Cuthbert gave a ululating yell to hear his voice bounce back at him from the bluffs ahead, a pack of chattering billy-bumblers broke from this greenplace and went racing back southeast, toward the Drop.

“That’s Hanging Rock,” Roland said. “There’s a spring at the base of it—only one in these parts, they say.”