Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy Read Online Free PDF Page B

the tips of her clever, soothing fingers.
    “Ye’ll be fine if God wills, sai,” the voice which went with the hand said. “But time belongs to God, not to you.”
    No, he would have said, if he had been able. Time belongs to the Tower.
    Then he slipped down again, descending as smoothly as he had risen, going away from the hand and the dreamlike sounds of the singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all the way back down.
    At one point he thought he heard the girl’s voice, although he couldn’t be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or both. “No!” she cried. “Ye can’t have it off him and ye know it! Go your course and stop talking of it, do!”
    When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw when he opened his eyes wasn’t the inside of a cloud, but at first that same phrase— white beauty —recurred to him. It was in some ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life … partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it was so fey and peaceful.
    It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his head—cautiously, so cautiously—to take its measure as well as he could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling of tremendous airiness.
    There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with, although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white silk, turning them into the bright swags that he had first mistaken for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as gray as twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze. Hanging from each wall panel was a curved rope bearing small bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming unison, like wind chimes, when the walls rippled.
    An aisle ran down the center of the long room; on either side of it
were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland’s side. There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on his right. This fellow—
    It’s the boy. The one who was in the trough.
    The idea ran goose bumps up Roland’s arms and gave him a nasty, superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
    Can’t be. You’re just dazed, that’s all; it can’t be.
    Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers that dangled over the side of the bed.
    You didn’t get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything, and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn’t have said for sure who it was.
    But Roland, who’d had a mother, knew better than that. He also knew that he’d seen the gold medallion around the boy’s neck. Just before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad’s corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone—the proprietors of this place, most likely, them who had sorcerously restored the lad named James to his interrupted life—had taken it back from Roland and put it around the boy’s neck again.
    Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead? He didn’t like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy’s bloated body had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
    Farther down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty