“All right, fine. It’s ka, everybody’s favorite whipping-boy. That’s what the great unseen world’s for, after all, isn’t it? So we don’t have to take the blame for our acts of stupidity? Now let go of me, Al, before you break my shoulder.”

Alain let go and sat back in his chair, relieved. “Now if we only knew what to do about the Drop. If we don’t start counting there soon—”

“I’ve had an idea about that, actually,” Cuthbert said. “It just needs a little working out. I’m sure Roland could help... if either of us can get his attention for a few minutes, that is.”

They sat for awhile without speaking, looking out at the dooryard. Inside the bunkhouse, the pigeons—another bone of contention between Roland and Bert these days—cooed. Alain rolled himself a smoke. It was slow work, and the finished product looked rather comical, but it held together when he lit it.

“Your father would stripe you raw if he saw that in your hand,” Cuthbert remarked, but he spoke with a certain admiration. By the time the following year’s Huntress came around, all three of them would be confirmed smokers, tanned young men with most of the boyhood slapped out of their eyes.

Alain nodded. The strong Outer Crescent tobacco made him swimmy in the head and raw in the throat, but a cigarette had a way of calming his nerves, and right now his nerves could use some calming. He didn’t know about Bert, but these days he smelled blood on the wind. Possibly some of it would be their own. He wasn’t exactly frightened—not yet, at least—but he was very, very worried.

4

Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing. Roland knew better, even in his lovesickness, but his friends had forgotten that in the game of Castles, both sides wear the blindfold. They would have been surprised to find that at least two of the Big Coffin Hunters had grown extremely nervous about the three young men from In-World, and extremely tired of the waiting game both sides had been playing.

One early morning, as the Huntress neared the half, Reynolds and Depape came downstairs together from the second floor of the Travellers’ Rest. The main public room was silent except for various snores and phlegmy wheezings. In Hambry’s busiest bar, the party was over for another night.