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soon burst.
    “Good. You’re a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but it’s true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing.”
    I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him.
    “Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the women—Serenity, or whatever they call it—is the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. It’s a dusty, hide-smelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and north—in every direction except the one where that bastard Farson’s laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in Mid-World before long, but now it’s still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. It’s him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a sigul which I will give to you. Do you ken everything I’ve told you so far?”
    “Yes, Father,” I said. “What’s so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers?” I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mother’s death. “Even baby gunslingers such as us?”
    “According to the reports I have”—he lifted some of the papers and shook them at me—“there’s a skin-man at work. I have my doubts about that, but there’s no doubt the folk are terrified.”
    “I don’t know what that is,” I said.
    “Some sort of shape-changer, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. He’s been collecting reports.”
    “All right.”
    “Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skins—that’s probably what it amounts to—but be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. I’d have you back—you and all your ka-mates—before they fall.”
    * * *
    Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stable-car of a special two-car train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and ground-shakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves land-pirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands Out-World, and they served John Farson’s purposes well. He was, after all, just a land-pirate himself. One with pretensions.
    The train was little more than a steam-driven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma’ Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster a-horseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie Red-Hand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep.
    We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gilead’s green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders’ huts. There were a few towns where folk—many of them muties—gaped at us as Sma’ Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned.
    On the first day of our