"We go together," Jake said. "They're buffaloed, Pere! And we're close! They took her through here... this room... and then through the kitchen-"
Callahan paid no attention. Still holding the turtle high (as one might hold a lantern in a deep cave), he had turned toward the tapestry. The silence from behind it was far more terrible than the shouts and feverish, gargling laughter. It was silence like a pointed weapon. And the boy had stopped.
"Go while you can," Callahan said, striving for calmness.
"Catch up to her if you can. This is the command of your dinh.
This is also the will of the White."
"But you can't-"
"Go, Jake!"
The low men and women in the Dixie Pig, whether in thrall to the skoldpadda or not, murmured uneasily at the sound of that shout, and well they might have, for it was not Callahan's voice coming from Callahan's mouth.
"You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command your Jake's eyes flew wide at the sound of Roland's voice issuing from Callahan's throat. His mouth dropped open. He looked around, dazed.
In the second before the tapestry to their left was torn aside, Callahan saw its black joke, what the careless eye would first surely overlook: the roast that was the banquet's main entree had a human form; die knights and their ladies were eating human flesh and drinking human blood. What the tapestry showed was a cannibals' communion.
Then the ancient ones who had been at their own sup tore aside the obscene tapestry and burst out, shrieking through the great fangs that propped their deformed mouths forever open.
Their eyes were as black as blindness, the skin of their cheeks and brows-even the backs of their hands-tumorous with wild teeth. Like the vampires in the dining room, they were surrounded with auras, but these were of a poisoned violet so dark it was almost black. Some sort of ichor dribbled from the corners of their eyes and mouths. They were gibbering and several were laughing: seeming not to create the sounds but rather to snatch them out of the air like something that could be rent alive.
And Callahan knew them. Of course he did. Had he not been sent hence by one of their number? Here were the true vampires, the Type Ones, kept like a secret and now loosed on the intruders.
The turde he held up did not slow them in the slightest.
Callahan saw Jake staring, pale, eyes shiny with horror and bulging from their sockets, all purpose forgotten at the sight of these freaks.
Without knowing what was going to come out of his mouth until he heard it, Callahan shouted: "They'll kill Oyfirst! They'll kill him in front of you and drink his blood!"
Oy barked at the sound of his name. Jake's eyes seemed to clear at the sound, but Callahan had no time to follow the boy's fortunes further.
Turtle won't stop them, but at least it's holding the others back. Bullets won't stop them, but-
With a sense of deja vu-and why not, he had lived all this before in the home of a boy named Mark Petrie-Callahan dipped into the open front of his shirt and brought out the cross he wore there. It clicked against the butt of the Ruger and then hung below it. The cross was lit with a brilliant bluish-white glare. The two ancient things in the lead had been about to grab him and draw him into their midst. Now they drew back instead, shrieking with pain. Callahan saw the surface of their skin sizzle and begin to liquefy. The sight of it filled him with savage happiness.
"Get back from me!" he shouted. "The power of God commands you! The power of Christ commands you! The ka of Mid-World commands you! The power of the White commands you!"
One of them darted forward nevertheless, a deformed skeleton in an ancient, moss-encrusted dinner suit. Around its neck it wore some sort of ancient award... the Cross of Malta, perhaps? It swiped one of its long-nailed hands at the crucifix Callahan was holding out. He jerked it down at the last second, and die vampire's claw passed an inch above it. Callahan lunged forward without drought and drove die tip of the cross into the yellow parchment of the thing's forehead. The gold crucifix went in like a red-hot skewer into butter. The thing in the rusty dinner suit let out a liquid cry of pained dismay and stumbled backward. Callahan pulled