At the way station

"Just me," he said, unperturbed. "Why do you have to think you're in the middle of such a mystery?"

The slayer lit a smoke without replying.

"I think you're very close to your ebony man," Agri said.

"Is he desperate?"

"I don't know."

"Are you?"

"Not yet," the slayer said. He looked at Agri with a

a shade of defiance.

"I go where I have to go, do what I have to do."

"That's good then," Agri said and turned over and went to sleep.

The next morning, Agri fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight, he was an amazing figure with his scrawny, sunburnt chest, pencil-like collarbones, and loony shock of red hair.

The bird perched on his shoulder.

"The mule?" the slayer asked.

"I'll eat it," Agri said.

"Okay."

Agri offered his hand and the slayer shook it. The

dweller nodded to the southeast. "Walk easy.

Long days and

pleasant nights."

"May you have twice the number."

They nodded at each other and then the man Alina had called, Bertrand walked away, his body festooned with guns and water.

He looked back once. Agri was rooting furiously at his little corn bed.

The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.

The fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked restlessly and told its tale to no one.

The slayer twitched

in his sleep and was still again. He dreamed a thirsty dream.

In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded.

The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot. Cort had known black from white.

He stirred again and woke. He blinked at the dead fire with its shape superimposed over the other, more geometrical one.

He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously. It was a secret he had shared with only a few over the years.

The girl named Susan, the girl from Mejis, had been one of them.

That, of course, made him think of Cort again. Cort was dead.

They were all dead, except for him. The world had moved on.

The slayer shouldered his gun and moved on with it.

A nursery rhyme had been playing itself through his mind all day, the maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that mockingly ignores all commands of the conscious mind to cease.

The rhyme was:

The rain in Spain falls on the plain

There is joy and also pain

but the rain in Spain falls on the plain.

Time's a sheet, life's a stain,

All the things we know will change

and all those things remain the same,

but be ye mad or only sane,

the rain in Spain falls on the plain.

We walk in love but fly in chains

And the planes in Spain fall in the rain.

He didn't know what a plane was in the context of the rhyme's last couplet but knew why the rhyme had occurred to him in the first place.

There had been the recurring dream of his room in the castle and of his mother, who had sung it to him as he lay solemnly in the tiny bed by the window of many colors.

She did not sing it because all small boys born to the High Speech must face the dark alone, but she sang to him at nap times and he could remember the heavy gray rain light that shivered into rainbows on the counterpane; he could feel the coolness of the room and the heavy warmth of blankets, love for his mother and her red lips, the haunting melody of the little nonsense lyric, and her voice.

Now it came back maddeningly, like a dog chasing its tail in his mind as he walked.

All his water was gone, and he knew he was very likely a dead man.

He had never expected it to

come to this, and he was sorry. Since noon he had been watching his feet rather than the way ahead.

Out here even the devil grass had grown stunted and yellow. The hardpan had disintegrated in

places to mere rubble.

The mountains were not noticeably clearer,

although sixteen days had passed since he had left the hut of the last homesteader, a loony-sane young man on the edge of the desert.

He had had a bird, the slayer remembered, but he

couldn't remember the bird's name.

He watched his feet move up and down like the heddles of a loom, listened to the nonsense rhyme sing itself into a pitiful garble in his mind, and wondered when he would fall for

the first time. He didn't want to fall, even though there was no one to see him.

It was a matter of pride. A slayer knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff. What hadn't come to him from his father had been kicked into him by Cort, a boy's gentleman if there ever was one. Cort, yar, with his red bulb of a nose and his scarred face.

He stopped and looked up suddenly. It made his head buzz and for a moment his whole body seemed to float.

The mountains dreamed against the far horizon. But there was something else up ahead, something much closer.

Perhaps only five miles away. He squinted at it, but his eyes were sandblasted, and going glare blind. He shook his head and began to walk again.

The rhyme circled and buzzed. About an hour later he fell and skinned his hands.

He looked at the tiny beads of blood on his flaked skin with disbelief. The blood looked no thinner; it looked like any blood, now dying in the air. It seemed almost as smug as the desert.

He dashed the drops away, hating them blindly. Smug?

Why not? The blood was not thirsty. The blood was being served.

The blood was being made sacrifice unto. Blood sacrifice.

All the blood needed to do was run . . . and run . . . and run.

He looked at the splotches that had landed on the hardpan and watched as they were sucked up with uncanny suddenness.

How do you like that, blood? How does that suit you?

O Jesus, I'm far gone.

He got up, holding his hands to his chest, and the thing he'd seen earlier was almost in front of him, so close it made him cry out, a dust-choked crow-crow croaks a building.

No, two buildings, surrounded by a fallen rail fence. The wood seemed old, fragile to the point of selfishness transmogrified into the sand.

Another one of the buildings had a stable shape

was clear and unmistakable. The other was a house or an inn.

A way station for the coach line. The tottering sand-house (the wind had crusted the wood with grit until it looked like a sand castle that the sun had beat upon at low tide and hardened to a temporary abode) cast a thin line of shadow, and someone sat in the shadow, leaning against the building.

And the building seemed to lean with the burden of his weight.

Him, then. At last. The ebony man.

The slayer stood with his hands to his chest, unaware of his declamatory posture, and gawped.

But instead of the tremendous winging excitement he had, expected (or perhaps fear, or awe), there was nothing but the dim, atavistic guilt for the sudden, raging hate of his blooms earlier and the endless ring-a-rosy of the childhood song:. . . the rain in Spain . . .He moved forward, drawing one gun.. . . falls on the plain.

He came the last quarter mile at a jolting, flat-footed run, not trying to hide was nothing to hide behind.

His short shadow raced him. He was not aware that his face had become a gray and dusty death mask of exhaustion; he was aware of nothing but the figure in the shadow.

It did not occur to him until later that the figure might even have been dead.

He kicked through one of the leaning fence rails (it broke in two without a sound, almost apologetically) and lunged across the dazzled and silent stable yard, bringing the gun up.

"You're covered! You're covered! Hands up, you whoreson, you're"

The figure moved restlessly and stood up. The slayer thought: My God, he is worn and has worn nothing, what's happened to him? Because the ebony man had shrunk two full feet and his hair had gone white.

He paused, struck dumb, his head buzzing tunelessly. His was racing at a lunatic rate and he thought, I'm dying right here.

He sucked the white-hot air into his lungs and hung his head for a moment.

When he raised it again, he saw it wasn't the man

in black but a boy with sun-bleached hair, regarding him with eyes that did not even seem interested.

The slayer stared at him blankly and then shook his head in negation. But the boy survived his refusal to believe; he was a strong delusion. One wearing blue jeans with a patch on one knee and a plain Agri shirt of the rough weave.