Cleaning the guns calmed me. So did Penny’s warm presence next to me, solemnly mimicking me as I disassembled and reassembled the ancient revolvers. That they were ancient – weapons handed down through generations of real gunslingers – made routine into ritual, cleaning into ceremony.
It was a miracle that these revolvers hadn’t been snatched up by the blue-painted barbarians. Probably they would have been turned on innocents and used to commit horrible deeds until the bullets ran out and then they might go on as nothing more than ornate clubs, or ended their long lineage rusting in a field, grass growing up through the empty cylinders. Or maybe they might have been destroyed. Just taken apart and flung from the cliff or melted down to scrap out of pure spite for being relics of the White. The guns of Allain Johns and Jamie DeCurry had met that fate.
When Roland first drew Eddie into his world (where we were now. Except that he hasn’t drawn Eddie yet. Fuck it, only Carrie could understand it), he didn’t like Eddie the junkie touching his guns. How then would Cuthbert feel if he knew a vampire was touching his? He probably wouldn’t be thrilled.
For the most part I kept the guns rolled up and in my pack. I strapped one on to hunt with Ashleigh and Alistair and Penny, but I always took it off when we returned. I felt guilty touching them, but also…hungry. The old, old steel and the worn sandalwood was…soothing? Part of me still hated what I was, wanted to put one of those ancient guns against my head and pull the trigger. That is what they were made to do: to send things like me to the clearing in the end of the path – which for us was probably hell.
But another part…a new part of me…resisted. We were called upon to stand and be true. And I had. Wasn’t I a part of a new ka-tet? A real family, bound by ka, but also by friendship. And maybe even love. Rather than betray them, I had saved them and been saved. And more than just standing shoulder to shoulder, gunning down low men… We’d sat around the fire before the battle playing with worn cards, betting nothing, but just enjoying the game and each other. We’d sat around the fire after the battle, laughing and watching the billy bumbler mimicking Alistair with uncanny accuracy.
Ashleigh, the slow talker, always thoughtful. His long-fingered hands, maybe not as fast as mine, but expert at their own tricks. Making taut wire and hollow wood produce music. Forging bits of nothing into art, a gift for everybody, a rose, a drum, a shield.
Alistair, the fast-talker. I could barely understand his accent sometimes, even though I was born and raised in the big apple. As distracted as Ashleigh was thoughtful, his mind working on a higher level than ours. Maybe a higher level of the tower. Quirky and kind.
Eden, lost but found. Maybe she was finding herself now sorta the same way I was. There was definitely a hell of a lot more steel in her than she knew about. But all the same, her thoughts were always on the tet, keeping us patched up, keeping us going. “Thou shalt not harm,” wasn’t her motto – we were gunslingers after all – but it was something like that. An imperative driving her to protect us.
Carrie, the heart of the ka-tet. Sweet and gentle and maybe a little sad. Even more than Eden she lived for the tet. We were her only friends since before we met, all she had to live for. It hurt to watch her suffer, now that she was just beginning to become herself instead of a shadow stretching out below the tet. But was it better to see her hurt now, or to watch her try to stand on her own, only to find herself unable to ditch her crutch? If I had to choose to have Carrie by my side, her own self, or a Carrie with heroin puppet strings pulled by the future, I’d have said fuck the future. It’ll be now soon anyways.
And then there was Penny. There are no words, not even in khef.
Yeah, I’d been a bad guy, nothing more than a regulator, a kidnapper and blood-drinker and murderer. But I served the White now. I felt a bit like an aging actor, trying to shake the type-cast of a long career playing villains. All I needed was one good part, one hit in a role as a hero to turn things around and save myself.
When I touched the cold metal, slowly rolling out the cylinders and cleaning them lovingly, I think I felt a kind of redemption.
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