1
Coral's grip on Susan's arm was firm but not painful. There was nothing particularly cruel about the way she was moving Susan along the downstairs corridor, but there was a relentlessness about it that was disheartening. Susan didn't try to protest; it would have been useless. Behind the two women were a pair of vaqueros (armed with knives and bolas rather than guns; the available guns had all gone west with Jonas). Behind the vaqs, skulking along like a sullen ghost which lacks the necessary psychic energy to fully materialize itself, came the late Chancellor's older brother, Laslo. Reynolds, his taste for a spot of journey's-end rape blunted by his growing sense of disquiet, had either remained above or gone off to town. "I'm going to put ye in the cold pantry until I know better what to do with'ee, dear," Coral said. "Ye'll be quite safe there ... and warm. How fortunate ye wore a serape. Then . . . when Jonas gets back ..." "Ye'll never see sai Jonas again," Susan said. "He won't ever - " Fresh pain exploded in her sensitive face. For a moment it seemed the entire world had blown up. Susan reeled back against the dressed stone wall of the lower corridor, her vision first blurred, then slowly clearing. She could feel blood flowing down her cheek from a wound opened by the stone in Coral's ring when Coral had backhanded her. And her nose. That cussed thing was bleeding again, too. Coral was looking at her in a chilly this-is-all-business-to-me fashion, but Susan believed she saw something different in the woman's eyes. Fear, mayhap. "Don't talk to me about Eldred, missy. He's sent to catch the boys who killed my brother. The boys you set loose." "Get off it." Susan wiped her nose, grimaced at the blood pooled in her palm, and wiped it on the leg of her pants. "I know who killed Hart as well as ye do yerself, so don't pull mine and I won't yank yer own." She watched Coral's hand rise, ready to slap, and managed a dry laugh. "Go on. Cut my face open on the other side, if ye like. Will that change how ye sleep tonight with no man to warm the other side of the bed?" Coral's hand came down fast and hard, but instead of slapping, it seized Susan's arm again. Hard enough to hurt, this time, but Susan barely felt it. She had been hurt by experts this day, and would suffer more hurt gladly, if that would hasten the moment when she and Roland could be together again. Coral hauled her the rest of the way down the corridor, through the kitchen (that great room, which would have been all steam and bustle on any other Reaping Day, now stood uncannily deserted), and to the iron-bound door on the far side. This she opened. A smell of potatoes and gourds and sharproot drifted out. "Get in there. Go smart, before I decide to kick yer winsome ass square." Susan looked her in the eye, smiling. "I'd damn ye for a murderer's bed-bitch, sai Thorin, but ye've already damned yerself. Ye know it, too - 'tis written in yer face, to be sure. So I'll just drop ye a curtsey" - still smiling, she suited action to the words - "and wish ye a very good day." "Get in and shut up yer saucy mouth!" Coral cried, and pushed Susan into the cold pantry. She slammed the door, ran the bolt, and turned her blazing eyes upon the vaqs, who stood prudently away from her. "Keep her well, muchachos. Mind ye do." She brushed between them, not listening to their assurances, and went up to her late brother's suite to wait for Jonas, or word of Jonas. The whey-faced bitch sitting down there amongst the carrots and potatoes knew nothing, but her words (ye'll never see sai Jonas again) were in Coral's head now; they echoed and would not leave. 2 Twelve o' the clock sounded from the squat bell-tower atop the Town Gathering Hall. And if the unaccustomed silence which hung over the rest of Hambry seemed strange as that Reap morning passed into afternoon, the silence in the Travellers' Rest was downright eerie. Better than two hundred souls were packed together beneath the dead gaze of The Romp,, all of them drinking hard, yet there was hardly a sound among them save for the shuffle of feet and the impatient rap of glasses on the bar, indicating that another drink was wanted. Sheb had tried a hesitant tune on the piano - "Big Bottle Boogie," everyone liked that one - and a cowboy with a mutie-mark on one cheek had put the tip of a knife in his ear and told him to shut up that noise if he wanted to keep what passed for his brains on the starboard side of his eardrum. Sheb, who would be happy to go on drawing breath for another thousand years if the gods so allowed, quit his piano-bench at once, and went to the bar to help Stanley and Pettie the Trotter serve up the booze. The mood of the drinkers was confused and sullen. Reaping Fair had been stolen from them, and they didn't know what to do about it. There would still be a bonfire, and plenty of stuffy-guys to bum on it, but there were no Reap-kisses today and would be no dancing tonight; no riddles, no races, no pig-wrestle, no jokes ... no good cheer, dammit! No hearty farewell to the end of the year! Instead of joviality there had been murder in the dark, and the escape of the guilty, and now only the hope of retribution instead of the certainty of it. These folk, sullen-drunk and as potentially dangerous as stormclouds filled with lightning, wanted someone to focus on, someone to tell them what to do. And, of course, someone to toss on the fire, as in the days of Eld. It was at this point, not long after the last toll of noon had faded into the cold air, that the batwing doors opened and two women came in. A good many knew the crone in the lead, and several of them crossed their eyes with their thumbs as a ward against her evil look. A murmur ran through the room. It was the Coos, the old witch-woman, and although her face was pocked with sores and her eyes sunk so deep in their sockets they could barely be seen, she gave off a peculiar sense of vitality. Her lips were red, as if she had been eating winterberries. The woman behind her walked slowly and stiffly, with one hand pressed against her midsection. Her face was as white as the witch-woman's mouth was red. Rhea advanced to the middle of the floor, passing the gawking trail-hands at the Watch Me tables without so much as a glance. When she reached the center of the bar and stood directly beneath The Romp's glare, she turned to look at the silent drovers and townsfolk. "Most of ye know me!" she cried in a rusty voice which stopped just short of stridency. "Those of ye who don't have never wanted a love-potion or needed the ram put back in yer rod or gotten tired of a nagging mother-in-law's tongue. I'm Rhea, the wise-woman of the Coos, and this lady beside me is aunt to the girl who freed three murderers last night... this same girl who murdered yer town's Sheriff and a good young man - married, he was, and with a kid on the way. He stood before her with 'is defenseless hands raised, pleadin for his life on behalf of his wife and his babby to come, and still she shot 'im! Cruel, she is! Cruel and heartless!" A mutter ran through the crowd. Rhea raised her twisted old claws and it stilled at once. She turned in a slow circle to see them all, hands still raised, looking like the world's oldest, ugliest prizefighter. "Strangers came and ye welcomed em in!" she cried in her rusty crow's voice. "Welcomed em and gave em bread to eat, and it's ruin they've fed ye in return! The deaths of those ye loved and depended on, spoilage to the time of the harvest, and gods know what curses upon the time to follow fin de ano!" More murmurs, now louder. She had touched their deepest fear: that this year's evil would spread, might even snarl the newly threaded stock which had so slowly and hopefully begun to emerge along the Outer Arc. "But they've gone and likely won't be back!" Rhea continued. "Mayhap just as well - why should their strange blood taint our ground? But there's this other... one raised among us ... a young woman gone traitor to her town and rogue among her own kind." Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper on this last phrase; her listeners strained forward to hear, faces grim, eyes big. And now Rhea pulled the pallid, skinny woman in the rusty black dress forward. She stood Cordelia in front other like a doll or a ventriloquist's dummy, and whispered in her ear ... but the whisper travelled, somehow; they all heard it. "Come, dear. Tell em what ye told me." In a dead, carrying voice, Cordelia said: "She said she wouldn't be the Mayor's gilly. He wasn't good enough for such as her, she said. And then she seduced Will Dearborn. The price of her body was a fine position in Gilead as his consort . . . and the murder of Hart Thorin. Dearborn paid her price. Lusty as he was for her, he paid gladly. His friends helped; they may have had the use of 'er as well, for all I know. Chancellor Rimer must have gotten in their way. Or p'rhaps they just saw him, and felt like doing him, too." "Bastards!" Pettie cried. "Sneaking young culls!" "Now tell cm what's needed to clarify the new season before it's sp'iled, dearie," Rhea said in a crooning voice. Cordelia Delgado raised her head and looked around at the men. She took a breath, pulling the sour, intermingled smells of gray and beer and smoke and whiskey deep into her spinster's lungs. "Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do." Silent. Their eyes. "Paint her hands." The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the waiting room. "Charyou tree, " Cordelia whispered. They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through stripped trees. 3 Sheemie ran after the bad Coffin Hunter and Susan-sai until he could literally run no more - his lungs were afire and the stitch which had formed in his side turned into a cramp. He pitched forward onto the grass of the Drop, his left hand clutching his right armpit, grimacing with pain. He lay there for some time with his face deep in the fragrant grass, knowing they were getting farther and farther ahead but also knowing it would do him no good to get up and start running again until the stitch was good and gone. If he tried to hurry the process, the stitch would simply come back and lay him low again. So he lay where he was, lifting his head to look at the tracks left by Susan-sai and the bad Coffin Hunter, and he was just about ready to try his feet when Caprichoso bit him. Not a nip, mind you, but a good healthy chomp. Capi had had a difficult twenty-four hours, and he hadn't much liked to see the author of all his misery lying on the grass, apparently taking a nap. "Yeee-OWWWW-by-damn!" Sheemie cried, and rocketed to his feet. There was nothing so magical as a good bite on the ass, a man of more philosophic bent might have reflected; it made all other concerns, no matter how heavy or sorrowful, disappear like smoke. He whirled about. "Why did you do that, you mean old sneak of a Capi?" Sheemie was rubbing his bottom vigorously, and large tears of pain stood out in his eyes. "That hurts like . . . like a big old sonovabitch!" Caprichoso extended his neck to its maximum length, bared his teeth in the satanic grin which only mules and dromedaries can command, and brayed. To Sheemie that bray sounded very like laughter. The mule's lead still trailed back between his sharp little hoofs. Sheemie reached for it, and when Capi dipped his head to inflict another bite, the boy gave him a good hard whack across the side of his narrow head. Capi snorted and blinked. "You had that coming, mean old Capi," Sheemie said. "I'll have to shit from a squat for a week, so I will. Won't be able to sit on the damned jakes." He doubled the lead over his fist and climbed aboard the mule. Capi made no attempt to buck him off, but Sheemie winced as his wounded part settled atop the ridge of the mule's spine. This was good luck just the same, though, he thought as he kicked the animal into motion. His ass hurt, but at least he wouldn't have to walk ... or try to run with a stitch in his side. "Go on, stupid!" he said. "Hurry up! Fast as you can, you old sonovabitch!" In the course of the next hour, Sheemie called Capi "you old sonovabitch" as often as possible - he had discovered, as many others had before him, that only the first cussword is really hard; after that, there's nothing quite like them for relieving one's feelings. 4 Susan's trail cut diagonally across the Drop toward the coast and the grand old adobe that rose there. When Sheemie reached Seafront, he dismounted outside the arch and only stood, wondering what to do next. That they had come here, he had no doubt - Susan's horse, Pylon, and the bad Coffin Hunter's horse were tethered side by side in the shade, occasionally dropping their heads and blowing in the pink stone trough that ran along the courtyard's ocean side. What to do now? The riders who came and went beneath the arch (mostly white-headed vaqs who'd been considered too old to form a part of Lengyll's party) paid no attention to the inn-boy and his mule, but Miguel might be a different story. The old mozo had never liked him, acted as if he thought Sheemie would turn thief, given half a chance, and if he saw Coral's slop-and-carry-boy skulking in the courtyard, Miguel would very likely drive him away. No, he won't, he thought grimly. Not today, today I can't let him boss me. I won't go even if he hollers. But if the old man did holler and raised an alarm, what then? The bad Coffin Hunter might come and kill him. Sheemie had reached a point where he was willing to die for his friends, but not unless it served a purpose. So he stood in the cold sunlight, shifting from foot to foot, irresolute, wishing he was smarter than he was, that he could think of a plan. An hour passed this way, then two. It was slow time, each passing moment an exercise in frustration. He sensed any opportunity to help Susan-sai slipping away, but didn't know what to do about it. Once he heard what sounded like thunder from the west . . . although a bright fall day like this didn't seem right for thunder. He had about decided to chance the courtyard anyway - it was temporarily deserted, and he might be able to make it across to the main house - when the man he had feared came staggering out of the stables. Miguel Torres was festooned with reap-charms and was very drunk. He approached the center of the courtyard in rolling side-to-side loops, the tugstring of his sombrero twisted against his scrawny throat, his long white hair flying. The front of his chibosa was wet, as if he had tried to take a leak without remembering that you had to unlimber your dingus first. He had a small ceramic jug in one hand. His eyes were fierce and bewildered. "Who done this?" Miguel cried. He looked up at the afternoon sky and the Demon Moon which floated there. Little as Sheemie liked the old man, his heart cringed. It was bad luck to look directly at old Demon, so it was. "Who done this thing? I ask that you tell me, senor! Por favor!" A pause, then a scream so powerful that Miguel reeled on his feet and almost fell. He raised his fists, as if he would box an answer out of the winking face in the moon, then dropped them wearily. Corn liquor slopped from the neck of the jug and wet him further. "Maricon, " he muttered. He staggered to the wall (almost tripping over the rear legs of the bad Coffin Hunter's horse as he went), then sat down with his back against the adobe wall. He drank deeply from the jug, then pulled his sombrero up and settled it over his eyes. His arm twitched the jug, then settled it back, as if in the end it had proved too heavy. Sheemie waited until the old man's thumb came unhooked from the jughandle and the hand flopped onto the cobbles. He started forward, then decided to wait even a little longer. Miguel was old and Miguel was mean. but Sheemie guessed Miguel might also be tricky. Lots of folks were, especially the mean ones. He waited until he heard Miguel's dusty snores, then led Capi into the courtyard, wincing at every clop of the mule's hooves. Miguel never stirred, however. Sheemie tied Capi to the end of the hitching rail (wincing again as Caprichoso brayed a tuneless greeting to the horses tied there), then walked quickly across to the main door, through which he had never in his life expected to pass. He put his hand on the great iron latch, looked back once more at the old man sleeping against the wall, then opened the door and tiptoed in. He stood for a moment in the oblong of sun the open door admitted, his shoulders hunched all the way up to his ears, expecting a hand to settle on the scruff of his neck (which bad-natured folk always seemed able to find, no matter how high you hunched your shoulders) at any moment; an angry voice would follow, asking what he thought he was doing here. The foyer stood empty and silent. On the far wall was a tapestry depicting vaqueros herding horses along the Drop; against it leaned a guitar with a broken string. Sheemie's feet sent back echoes no matter how lightly he walked. He shivered. This was a house of murder now, a bad place. There were likely ghosts. Still, Susan was here. Somewhere. He passed through the double doors on the far side of the foyer and entered the reception hall. Beneath its high ceiling, his footfalls echoed more loudly than ever. Long-dead mayors looked down at him from the walls; most had spooky eyes that seemed to follow him as he walked, marking him as an intruder. He knew their eyes were only paint, but still . . . One in particular troubled him: a fat man with clouds of red hair, a bulldog mouth, and a mean glare in his eye, as if he wanted to ask what some halfwit inn-boy was doing in the Great Hall at Mayor's House. "Quit looking at me that way, you big old sonuvabitch," Sheemie whispered, and felt a little better. For the moment, at least. Next came the dining hall, also empty, with the long trestle tables pushed back against the wall. There was the remains of a meal on one - a single plate of cold chicken and sliced bread, half a mug of ale. Looking at those few bits of food on a table that had served dozens at various fairs and festivals - that should have served dozens this very day - brought the enormity of what had happened home to Sheemie. And the sadness of it, too. Things had changed in Hambry, and would likely never be the same again. These long thoughts did not keep him from gobbling the leftover chicken and bread, or from chasing it with what remained in the alepot. It had been a long, foodless day. He belched, clapped both hands over his mouth, eyes making quick and guilty side-to-side darts above his dirty fingers, and then walked on. The door at the far end of the room was latched but unlocked. Sheemie opened it and poked his head out into the corridor which ran the length of Mayor's House. The way was lit with gas chandeliers, and was as broad as an avenue. It was empty - at least for the moment - but he could hear whispering voices from other rooms, and perhaps other floors, as well. He supposed they belonged to the maids and any other servants that might be about this afternoon, but they sounded very ghostly to him, just the same. Perhaps one belonged to Mayor Thorin, wandering the corridor right in front of him (if Sheemie could but see him . . . which he was glad he couldn't). Mayor Thorin wandering and wondering what had happened to him, what this cold jellylike stuff soaking into his nightshirt might be, who - A hand gripped Sheemie's arm just above the elbow. He almost shrieked. "Don't!" a woman whispered. "For your father's sake!" Sheemie somehow managed to keep the scream in. He turned. And there, wearing jeans and a plain checked ranch-shirt, her hair tied back, her pale face set, her dark eyes blazing, stood the Mayor's widow. "S-S-Sai Thorin ... I... I... I..." There was nothing else he could think of to say. Now she'll call for the guards o' the watch, if there be any left, he thought. In a way, it would be a relief "Have ye come for the girl? The Delgado girl?" Grief had been good to Olive, in a terrible way - had made her face seem less plump, and oddly young. Her dark eyes never left his, and forbade any attempt at a lie. Sheemie nodded. "Good. I can use your help, boy. She's down below, in the pantry, and she's guarded." Sheemie gaped, not believing what he was hearing. "Do you think I believe she had anything to do with Hart's murder?" Olive asked, as if Sheemie had objected to her idea. "I may be fat and not so speedy on my pins anymore, but I'm not a complete idiot. Come on, now. Seafront's not a good place for sai Delgado just now - too many people from town know where she is." 5 "Roland." He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow - walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares. "Roland of Gilead." This voice, which he almost recognizes; a voice so like his own that a psychiatrist from Eddie's or Susannah's or Jake's when-and-where would say it is his voice, the voice of his subconscious, but Roland knows better; Roland knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders. "Roland, son of Steven." The ball has taken him first to Hambry and to Mayor's House, and he would see more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away - calls him away in that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, unlike Rhea or Jonas, he is not watching the ball and the creatures who speak soundlessly within it; he is inside the ball, a part of its endless pink storm. "Roland, come. Roland, see." And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the Drop, rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not alone in the pink storm which bears him west along the Path of the Beam. Sheb flies past him, his hat cocked back on his head; he is singing "Hey Jude " at the top of his lungs as his nicotine-stained fingers plink keys that are not there - transported by his tune, Sheb doesn't seem to realize that the storm has ripped his piano away. "Roland, come," the voice says - the voice of the storm, the voice of the glass - and Roland comes. The Romp flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in farmer's overalls goes flying past, his long red hair streaming out behind him. "Life for you, and for your crop, " he says - something like that, anyway - and then he's gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an iron chair (to Roland it looks like a torture device) equipped with wheels, and the boy gunslinger thinks The Lady of Shadows without knowing why he thinks it, or what it means. Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes above. Ahead, Roland sees an uprushing column of darkness and his heart quails, but this is where the pink storm is taking him, and this is where he must go. I want to get out, he thinks, but he's not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may never get out. The wizard's glass has swallowed him. He may remain in its stormy, muddled eye forever. I'll shoot my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no - he has no guns. He is naked in the storm, rushing bareass toward that virulent blue-black infection that has buried all the landscape beneath it. And yet he hears singing. Faint but beautiful - a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of Susan: bird and bear and hare and fish. Suddenly Sheemie's mule (Caprichoso, Roland thinks, a beautiful name) goes past, galloping on thin air with his eyes as bright as firedims in the storm's lumbre fuego. Following him, wearing a sombrera and riding a broom festooned with fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Coos. "I'll get you, my pretty!" she screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and brooming. Roland plunges into the black, and suddenly his breath is gone. The world around him is noxious darkness; the air seems to creep on his skin like a layer of bugs. He is buffeted, boxed to and fro by invisible fists, then driven downward in a dive so violent he fears he will be smashed against the ground: so fell Lord Perth. Dead fields and deserted villages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted trees that will give no shade - oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this is the edge of End-World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death here. "Gunslinger, this is Thunderclap." "Thunderclap," he says. "Here are the unbreathing; the white faces." "The unbreathing. The white faces. " Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered soldiers, the cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is Thunderclap, where clocks run backward and the graveyards vomit out their dead. Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as the pink storm carries Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and weariness. "Oy!" it cries, and then it, too, is gone and not to be remembered for many years. "Look ahead, Roland - see your destiny." Now, suddenly, he knows that voice - it is the voice of the Turtle. He looks and sees a brilliant blue-gold glow piercing the dirty darkness of Thunderclap. Before he can do more than register it, he breaks out of the darkness and into the light like something coming out of an egg, a creature at last being born. "Light! Let there be light!" the voice of the Turtle cries, and Roland has to put his hands to his eyes and peek through his fingers to keep from being blinded. Below him is a field of blood - or so he thinks then, a boy of fourteen who has that day done his first real killing. This is the blood that has flowed out of Thunderclap and threatens to drown our side of the world, he thinks, and it will not be for untold years that he will finally rediscover his time inside the ball and put this memory together with Eddie's dream and tell his com-padres, as they sit in the turnpike breakdown lane at the end of the night, that he was wrong, that he had been fooled by the brilliance, coming as it did, so hard on the heels of Thunderclap 's shadows. "It wasn't blood but roses, " he tells Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. "Gunslinger, look - look there." Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black pillar rearing on the horizon: the Dark Tower, the place where all Beams, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrong-ness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world's great mystery and last awful riddle. It is the Tower, the Dark Tower rearing to the sky, and as Roland rushes toward it in the pink storm, he thinks: I will enter you, me and my friends, if ka wills it so; we will enter you and we will conquer the wrong-ness within you. It may be years yet, but I swear by bird and bear and hare and fish, by all I love that - But now the sky fills with flaggy clouds which flow out of Thunderclap, and the world begins to go dark; the blue light from the Tower's rising windows shines like mad eyes, and Roland hears thousands of screaming,wailing voices. "You will kill everything and everyone you love," says the voice of the Turtle, and now it is a cruel voice, cruel and hard. "and still the Tower will be pent shut against you." The gunslinger draws in all his breath and draws together all his force; when he cries his answer to the Turtle, he does so for all the generations of his blood: "NO! IT WILL NOT STAND! WHEN I COME HERE IN MY BODY, IT WILL NOT STAND! I SWEAR ON MY FATHER 'S NAME. IT WILL NOT STAND/" "Then die," the voice says, and Roland is hurled at the gray-black stone flank of the Tower, to be smashed there like a bug against a rock. But before that can happen - 6 Cuthbert and Alain stood watching Roland with increasing concern. He had the piece of Maerlyn's Rainbow raised to his face, cupped in his hands as a man might cup a ceremonial goblet before making a toast. The drawstring bag lay crumpled on the dusty toes of his boots; his cheeks and forehead were washed in a pink glow that neither boy liked. It seemed alive, somehow, and hungry. They thought, as if with one mind: I can't see his eyes. Where are his eyes? "Roland?" Cuthbert repeated. "If we're going to get out to Hanging Rock before they're ready for us, you have to put that thing away." Roland made no move to lower the ball. He muttered something under his breath; later, when Cuthbert and Alain had a chance to compare notes, they both agreed it had been thunderclap. "Roland?" Alain asked, stepping forward. As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand between the curve of the ball and Roland's bent, studious face. There was no response. Alain pulled back and turned to Cuthbert. "Can you touch him?" Bert asked. Alain shook his head. "Not at all. It's like he's gone somewhere far away." "We have to wake him up." Cuthbert's voice was dust-dry and shaky at the edges. "Vannay told us that if you wake a person from a deep hypnotic trance too suddenly, he can go mad," Alain said. "Remember? I don't know if I dare - " Roland stirred. The pink sockets where his eyes had been seemed to grow. His mouth flattened into the line of bitter determination they both knew well. "No! It will not stand!" he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland's voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man. "No," Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert , sat up before the campfire. "That was the voice of a king." Now, however, the two of them only looked at their absent, roaring friend, paralyzed with fright. "When I come here in my body, it will not stand! I swear on my father 's name, IT WILL NOT STAND!" Then, as Roland's unnaturally pink face contorted, like the face of a man who confronts some unimaginable horror, Cuthbert and Alain lunged forward. It was no longer a question of perhaps destroying him in an effort to save him; if they didn't do something, the glass would kill him as they watched. In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the gunslinger's forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught the boy and Alain caught the ball. Its heavy pink glow was weirdly insistent, beating at his eyes and pulling at his mind, but Alain stuffed it resolutely into the drawstring bag again without looking at it... and as he pulled the cord, yanking the bag's mouth shut, he saw the pink light wink out, as if it knew it had lost. For the time being, at least. He turned back, and winced at the sight of the bruise puffing up from the middle of Roland's brow. "Is he - " "Out cold," Cuthbert said. "He better come to soon." Cuthbert looked at him grimly, with not a trace of his usual amiability. "Yes," he said, "you're certainly right about that." 7 Sheemie waited at the foot of the stairs which led down to the kitchen area, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and waiting for sai Thorin to come back, or to call him. He didn't know how long she'd been in the kitchen, but it felt like forever. He wanted her to come back, and more than that - more than anything - he wanted her to bring Susan-sai with her. Sheemie had a terrible feeling about this place and this day; a feeling that darkened like the sky, which was now all obscured with smoke in the west. What was happening out there, or if it had anything to do with the thundery sounds he'd heard earlier, Sheemie didn't know, but he wanted to be out of here before the smoke-hazed sun went down and the real Demon Moon, not its pallid day-ghost, rose in the sky. One of the swinging doors between the corridor and the kitchen pushed open and Olive came hurrying out.. She was alone. "She's in the pantry, all right," Olive said. She raked her fingers through her graying hair. "I got that much out of those two pupuras, but no more. I knew it was going to be that way as soon as they started talking that stupid crunk of theirs." There was no proper word for the dialect of the Mejis vaqueros, but "crunk" served well enough among the Barony's higher-born citizens. Olive knew both of the vaqs guarding the pantry, in the vague way of a person who has once ridden a lot and passed gossip and weather with other Drop-riders, and she knew damned well these old boys could do better than crunk. They had spoken it so they could pretend to misunderstand her, and save both them and her the embarrassment of an outright refusal. She had gone along with the deception for much the same reason, although she could have responded with crunk of her own perfectly well - and called them some names their mothers never used - had she wanted. "I told them there were men upstairs," she said, "and I thought maybe they meant to steal the silver. I said I wanted the maloficios turned out. And still they played dumb. Nohabla, sai. Shit. Shit!" Sheemie thought of calling them a couple of big old sonuvabitches, and decided to keep silent. She was pacing back and forth in front of him and throwing an occasional burning look at the closed kitchen doors. At last she stopped in front of Sheemie again. "Turn out your pockets," she said. "Let's see what you have for hopes and garlands." Sheemie did as she asked, producing a little pocketknife (a gift from Stanley Ruiz) and a half-eaten cookie from one. From the other he brought out three lady-finger firecrackers, a big-banger, and a few sulfur matches. Olive's eyes gleamed when she saw these. "Listen to me, Sheemie," she said. 8 Cuthbert patted Roland's face with no result. Alain pushed him aside, knelt, and took the gunslinger's hands. He had never used the touch this way, but had been told it was possible - that one could reach another's mind, in at least some cases. Roland! Roland, wake up! Please! We need you! At first there was nothing. Then Roland stirred, muttered, and pulled his hands out of Alain's. In the moment before his eyes opened, both of the other two boys were struck by the same fear of what they might see: no eyes at all, only raving pink light. But they were Roland's eyes, all right - those cool blue shooter's eyes. He struggled to gain his feet, and failed the first time. He held out his hands. Cuthbert took one, Alain the other. As they pulled him up, Bert saw a strange and frightening thing: there were threads of white in Roland's hair. There had been none that morning; he would have sworn to it. The morning had been a long time ago, however. "How long was I out?" Roland touched the bruise in the center of his forehead with the tips of his fingers and winced. "Not long," Alain said. "Five minutes, maybe. Roland, I'm sorry I hit you, but I had to. It was ... I thought it was killing you." "Mayhap 'twas. Is it safe?" Alain pointed wordlessly to the drawstring bag. "Good. It's best one of you carry it for now. I might be . . ." He searched for the right word, and when he found it, a small, wintry smile touched the comers of his mouth - "tempted," he finished. "Let's ride for Hanging Rock. We've got work yet to finish." "Roland . .." Cuthbert began. Roland turned, one hand on the horn of his horse's saddle. Cuthbert licked his lips, and for a moment Alain didn't think he would be able to ask. If you don't, I will, Alain thought . . . but Bert managed, bringing the words out in a rush. "What did you see?" "Much," Roland said. "I saw much, but most of it is already fading out of my mind, the way dreams do when you wake up. What I do remember I'll tell you as we ride. You must know, because it changes everything. We're going back to Gilead, but not for long." "Where after that?" Alain asked, mounting. "West. In search of the Dark Tower. If we survive today, that is. Come on. Let's take those tankers." 9 The two vaqs were rolling smokes when there was a loud bang from upstairs. They both jumped and looked at each other, the tobacco from their works-in-progress sifting down to the floor in small brown flurries. A woman shrieked. The doors burst open. It was the Mayor's widow again, this time accompanied by a maid. The vaqs knew her well - Maria Tomas, the daughter of an old compadre from the Piano Ranch. "The thieving bastards have set the place on fire!" Maria cried, speaking to them in crunk. "Come and help!" "Maria, sai, we have orders to guard - " "A putina locked in the pantry?" Maria shouted, her eyes blazing. "Come, ye stupid old donkey, before the whole place catches! Then ye can explain to Senor Lengyll why ye stood here using yer thumbs for fart-corks while Seafront burned down around yer ears!" "Go on!" Olive snapped. "Are you cowards?" There were several smaller bangs as, above them in the great parlor, Sheemie set off the lady-fingers. He used the same match to light the drapes. The two viejos exchanged a glance. "Andelay, " said the older of the two, then looked back at Maria. He no longer bothered with the crunk. "Watch this door," he said. "Like a hawk," she agreed. The two old men bustled out, one gripping the cords of his bolas, the other pulling a long knife from the scabbard on his belt. As soon as the women heard their footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall, Olive nodded to Maria and they crossed the room. Maria threw the bolts; Olive pulled the door open. Susan came out at once, looking from one to the other, then smiling tentatively. Maria gasped at the sight of her mistress's swelled face and the blood crusted around her nose. Susan took Maria's hand before the maid could touch her face and squeezed her fingers gently. "Do ye think Thorin would want me now?" she asked, and then seemed to realize who her other rescuer was. "Olive ... sai Thorin ... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be cruel. But ye must believe that Roland, him ye know as Will Dearborn, would never - " "I know it well," Olive said, "and there's no time for this now. Come on." She and Maria led Susan out of the kitchen, away from the stairs ascending to the main house and toward the storage rooms at the far north end of the lower level. In the drygoods storage room, Olive told the two of them to wait. She was gone for perhaps five minutes, but to Susan and Maria it seemed an eternity. When she came back, Olive was wearing a wildly colored scrape much too big for her - it might have been her husband's, but Susan thought it looked too big for the late Mayor, as well. Olive had tucked a piece of it into the side of her jeans to keep from stumbling over it. Slung over her arm like blankets, she had two more, both smaller and lighter. "Put these on," she said. "It's going to be cold." Leaving the drygoods store, they went down a narrow servants' passageway toward the back courtyard. There, if they were fortunate (and if Miguel was still unconscious), Sheemie would be waiting for them with mounts. Olive hoped with all her heart that they would be fortunate. She wanted Susan safely away from Hambry before the sun went down. And before the moon rose. 10 "Susan's been taken prisoner," Roland told the others as they rode west toward Hanging Rock. "That's the first thing I saw in the glass." He spoke with such an air of absence that Cuthbert almost reined up. This wasn't the ardent lover of the last few months. It was as if Roland had found a dream to ride through the pink air within the ball, and part of him rode it still. Or is it riding him? Cuthbert wondered. "What?" Alain asked. "Susan taken? How? By whom? Is she all right?'" "Taken by Jonas. He hurt her some, but not too badly. She'll heal . . . and she'll live. I'd turn around in a second if I thought her life was in any real danger." Ahead of them, appearing and disappearing in the dust like a mirage, was Hanging Rock. Cuthbert could see the sunlight pricking hazy sun-stars on the tankers, and he could see men. A lot of them. A lot of horses, as well. He patted the neck of his own mount, then glanced across to make sure Alain had Lengyll's machine-gun. He did. Cuthbert reached around to the small of his back, making sure of the slingshot. It was there. Also his deerskin ammunition bag, which now contained a number of the big-bangers Sheemie had stolen as well as steel shot. He's using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert thought. He found the realization comforting - sometimes Roland scared him. There was something in him that went beyond steel. Something like madness. If it was there, you were glad to have it on your side ... but often enough you wished it wasn't there at all. On anybody's side. "Where is she?" Alain asked. "Reynolds took her back to Seafront. She's locked in the pantry ... or was locked there. I can't say which, exactly, because . . ." Roland paused, thinking. "The ball sees far, but sometimes it sees more. Sometimes it sees a future that's already happening." "How can the future already be happening?" Alain asked. "I don't know, and I don't think it was always that way. I think it's more to do with the world than Maerlyn's Rainbow. Time is strange now. We know that, don't we? How things sometimes seem to ... slip. It's almost as if there's a thinny everywhere, breaking things down. But Susan's safe. I know that, and that's enough for me. Sheemie is going to help her ... or is helping her. Somehow Jonas missed Sheemie, and he followed Susan all the way back." "Good for Sheemie!" Alain said, and pumped his fist into the air. "Hurrah!" Then: "What about us? Did you see us in this future?" "No. This part was all quick - I hardly snatched more than a glance before the ball took me away. Flew me away, it seemed. But ... I saw smoke on the horizon. I remember that. It could have been the smoke of burning tankers, or the brush piled in front of Eyebolt, or both. I think we're going to succeed." Cuthbert was looking at his old friend in a queerly distraught way. The young man so deeply in love that Bert had needed to knock him into the dust of the courtyard in order to wake him up to his responsibilities . . . where was that young man, exactly? What had changed him, given him those disturbing strands of white hair? "If we survive what's ahead," Cuthbert said, watching the gunslinger closely, "she'll meet us on the road. Won't she, Roland?" He saw the pain on Roland's face, and now understood: the lover was here, but the ball had taken away his joy and left only grief. That, and some new purpose - yes, Cuthbert felt it very well - which had yet to be stated. "I don't know," Roland said. "I almost hope not, because we can never be as we were." "What? " This time Cuthbert did rein up. Roland looked at him calmly enough, but now there were tears in his eyes. "We are fools of ka" the gunslinger said. "Ka like a wind, Susan calls it." He looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. "The Tower is our ka; mine especially. But it isn't hers, nor she mine. No more is John Parson our ka. We're not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they're in our way." He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say, What more do you need me to tell you? "There is no Tower, Roland," Cuthbert said patiently. "I don't know what you saw in that glass ball, but there is no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose - like Arthur's Cup, or the Cross of the man-Jesus - but not as a real thing, a real building - " "Yes," Roland said. "It's real." They looked at him uncertainly, and saw no doubt on his face. "It's real, and our fathers know. Beyond the dark land - I can't remember its name now, it's one of the things I've lost - is End-World, and in End-World stands the Dark Tower. Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it's what has held them together as ka-tet across all the years of the world's decline. When we return to Gilead - if we return, and I now think we will - I'll tell them what I've seen, and they'll confirm what I say." "You saw all that in the glass?" Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice. "I saw much." "But not Susan Delgado," Cuthbert said. "No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries ... or the Tower." Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. "I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go ... and we will go." Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer's eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner's bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears. There was nothing childish in his voice, however. "I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else - she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower." 11 Susan mounted on Pylon, which Sheemie had hastened to bring around to the rear courtyard after lighting the draperies of the great parlor on fire. Olive Thorin rode one of the Barony geldings with Sheemie double-mounted behind her and holding onto Capi's lead. Maria opened the back gate, wished them good luck, and the three trotted out. The sun was westering now, but the wind had pulled away most of the smoke that had risen earlier. Whatever had happened in the desert, it was over now ... or happening on some other layer of the same present time. Roland, be thee well, Susan thought. I'llsee thee soon, dear . . . as soon as I can. "Why are we going north?" she asked after half an hour's silent riding. "Because Seacoast Road's best." "But - " "Hush! They'll find you gone and search the house first . . . if t'asn't burned flat, that is. Not finding you there, they'll send west, along the Great Road." She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew ... or thought they knew. "If I know that's the direction you'd choose, so will others we'd do well to avoid." Susan was silent. She was too confused to speak, but Olive seemed to know what she was about, and Susan was grateful for that. "By the time they get around to sniffing west, it'll be dark. Tonight we'll stay in one of the sea-cliff caves five miles or so from here. I grew up a fisherman's daughter, and I know all those caves, none better." The thought of the caves she'd played in as a girl seemed to cheer her. "Tomorrow we'll cut west, as you like. I'm afraid you're going to have a plump old widow as a chaperone for a bit. Better get used to the idea." "Thee's too good," Susan said. "Ye should send Sheemie and I on alone, sai." "And go back to what? Why, I can't even get two old trailhands on kitchen-duty to follow my orders. Fran Lengyll's boss of the shooting-match now, and I've no urge to wait and see how he does at it. Nor if he decides he'd be better off with me adjudged mad and put up safe in a haci with bars on the windows. Or shall I stay to see how Hash Renfrew does as Mayor, with his boots up on my tables?" Olive actually laughed. "Sai, I'm sorry." "We shall all be sorry later on," Olive said, sounding remarkably cheery about it. "For now, the most important thing is to reach those caves unobserved. It must seem that we vanished into thin air. Hold up." Olive checked her horse, stood in the stirrups, looked around to make sure of her position, nodded, then twisted in the saddle so she could speak to Sheemie. "Young man, it's time for ye to mount yer trusty mule and go back to Seafront. If there are riders coming after us, ye must turn em aside with a few well-chosen words. Will'ee do that?" Sheemie looked stricken. "I don't have any well-chosen words, sai Thorin, so I don't. I hardly have any words at all." "Nonsense," Olive said, and kissed Sheemie's forehead. "Go back at a goodish trot. If'ee spy no one coming after us by the time the sun touches the hills, then turn north again and follow. We shall wait for ye by the signpost. Do ye know where I mean?" Sheemie thought he did, although it marked the outmost northern boundary of his little patch of geography. "The red 'un? With the sombrero on it, and the arrow pointing back for town?" "The very one. Ye won't get that far until after dark, but there'll be plenty of moonlight tonight. If ye don't come right away, we'll wait. But ye must go back, and shift any men that might be chasing us off our track. Do ye understand?" Sheemie did. He slid off Olive's horse, clucked Caprichoso forward, and climbed on board, wincing as the place the mule had bitten came down. "So it'll be, Olive-sai." "Good, Sheemie. Good. Off'ee go, then." "Sheemie?" Susan said. "Come to me a moment, please." He did, holding his hat in front of him and looking up at her worship-fully. Susan bent and kissed him not on the forehead but firmly on the mouth. Sheemie came close to fainting. "Thankee-sai," Susan said. "For everything." Sheemie nodded. When he spoke, he could manage nothing above a whisper. " 'Twas only ka," he said. "I know that... but I love you, Susan-sai. Go well. I'll see you soon." "I look forward to it." But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing. 12 Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies. When Cuthbert gave the Good Man's sigul - hands clasped to the chest, left above right, then both held out to the person being greeted - the blond picket did the same, and with a grateful smile. "What spin and raree back there?" he asked, speaking with a strong In-World accent - to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite. "Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills." Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own accent faultlessly. "'I here were a tight. It be over now, but they did fight fearful." "What - " "No time," Roland said brusquely. "We have dispatches." He crossed his hands on his chest, then held them out. "Hile! Farson!" "Good Man!" the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo's perimeter. As easy as that. "Remember that it's hit-and-run," Roland said. "Slow down for nothing. What we don't get must be left - there'll be no second pass." "Gods, don't even suggest such a thing," Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs. Alain unslung Lengyll's machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. "I don't know about this, Roland. It's loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but - " "Then use it," Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their scrapes. "This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?" "Yes, Roland." "Bert?" "Aye," Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, "so I am, so I am." Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm. Roland drew both revolvers. "Gilead!" he cried. "Hile! Gilead!" He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips. The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies. 13 Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Susan's heart sank. The one on Reynolds's left - he wore a stained white drover's hat and had a lazily cocked eye - she didn't know, but the one on the right, who looked like a stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, after smiling at Susan. "Why, Las and I couldn't even get us a drink to send his late brother, the Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with a word," Reynolds said. "We hadn't hardly hit town before we got persuaded out here. I wasn't going to go, but . . . damn! That old lady's something. Could talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you'll pardon the crudity. I think your aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She - " "Your friends are dead," Susan told him. Reynolds paused, shrugged. "Well now. Maybe si and maybe no. Me, I think I've decided to travel on without em even if they ain't. But I might hang around here one more night. This Reaping business . . . I've heard so much about the way folks do it in the Outers. 'Specially the bonfire part." The man with the cocked eye laughed phlegmily. "Let us pass," Olive said. "This girl has done nothing, and neither have I." "She helped Dearborn escape," Rimer said, "him who murdered your own husband and my brother. I wouldn't call that nothing." "The gods may restore Kimba Rimer in the clearing," Olive said, "but the truth is he looted half of this town's treasury, and what he didn't give over to John Farson, he kept for himself." Rimer recoiled as if slapped. "Ye didn't know I knew? Laslo, I'd be angry at how little any of ye thought of me ... except why would I want to be thought of by the likes of you, anyway? I knew enough to make me sick, leave it at that. I know that the man you're sitting beside - " "Shut up," Rimer muttered. " - was likely the one who cut yer brother's black heart open; sai Reynolds was seen that early morning in that wing, so I've been told - " "Shut up, you cunt!" " - and so I believe." "Better do as he says, sai, and hold your tongue," Reynolds said. Some of the lazy good humor had left his face. Susan thought: He doesn't like people knowing what he did. Not even when he's the one on top and what they know can't hurt him. And he's less without Jonas. A lot less. He knows it, too. "Let us pass," Olive said. "No, sai, I can't do that." "I'll help ye, then, shall I?" Her hand had crept beneath the outrageously large serape during the palaver, and now she brought out a huge and ancient pistola, its handles of yellowed ivory, its filigreed barrel of old tarnished silver. On top was a brass powder-and-spark. Olive had no business even drawing the thing - it caught on her serape, and she had to fight it free. She had no business cocking it, either, a process that took both thumbs and two tries. But the three men were utterly flummoxed by the sight of the elderly blunderbuss in her hands, Reynolds as much as the other two; he sat his horse with his jaw hanging slack. Jonas would have wept. "Get her!" a cracked old voice shrieked from behind the men blocking the road. "What's wrong with ye, ye stupid culls? GET HER!" Reynolds started at that and went for his gun. He was fast, but he had given Olive too much of a headstart and was beaten, beaten cold. Even as he cleared leather with the barrel of his revolver, the Mayor's widow held the old gun out in both hands, and, squinching her eyes shut like a little girl who is forced to eat something nasty, pulled the trigger. The spark flashed, but the damp powder only made a weary floop sound and disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The ball - big enough to have taken Clay Reynolds's head off from the nose on up, had it fired - stayed in the barrel. In the next instant his own gun roared in his fist. Olive's horse reared, whinnying. Olive went off the gelding head over boots, with a black hole in the orange stripe of her serape - the stripe which lay above her heart. Susan heard herself screaming. The sound seemed to come from very far away. She might have gone on for some time, but then she heard the clop of approaching pony hooves from behind the men in the road... and knew. Even before the man with the lazy eye moved aside to show her, she knew, and her screams stopped. The galloped-out pony that had brought the witch back to Hambry had been replaced by a fresh one, but it was the same black cart, the same golden cabalistic symbols, the same driver. Rhea sat with the reins in her claws, her head ticking from side to side like the head of a rusty old robot, grinning at Susan without humor. Grinning as a corpse grins. "Hello, my little sweeting," she said, calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest. On the night Susan had come running most of the way, out of simple high spirits. Beneath the light of the Kissing Moon she had come, her blood high from the exercise, her skin flushed; she had been singing "Careless Love." "Yer pallies and screw-buddies have taken my ball, ye ken," Rhea said, clucking the pony to a stop a few paces ahead of the riders. Even Reynolds looked down on her with uneasiness. "Took my lovely glam, that's what those bad boys did. Those bad, bad boys. But it showed me much while yet I had it, aye. It sees far, and in more ways than one. Much of it I've forgot ... but not which way ye'd come, my sweeting. Not which way that precious old dead bitch laying yonder on the road would bring ye. And now ye must go to town." Her grin widened, became something unspeakable. "It's time for the fair, ye ken." "Let me go," Susan said. "Let me go, if ye'd not answer to Roland of Gilead." Rhea ignored her and spoke to Reynolds. "Bind her hands before her and stand her in the back of the cart. There's people that'll want to see her. A good look is what they'll want, and a good look is just what they'll have. If her aunt's done a proper job, there'll be a lot of them in town. Get her up, now, and be smart about it." 14 Alain had time for one clear thought: We could have gone around them - if what Roland said is true, then only the wizard's glass matters, and we have that. We could have gone around them. Except, of course, that was impossible. A hundred generations of gunslinger blood argued against it. Tower or no Tower, the thieves must not be allowed to have their prize. Not if they could be stopped. Alain leaned forward and spoke directly into his horse's ear. "Jig or rear when I start shooting, and I'll knock your fucking brains out." Roland led them in, outracing the other two on his stronger horse. The clot of men nearest by - five or six mounted, a dozen or more on foot and examining a pair of the oxen which had dragged the tankers out here - gazed at him stupidly until he began to fire, and then they scattered like quail. He got every one of the riders; their horses fled in a widening fan, trailing their reins (and, in one case, a dead soldier). Somewhere someone was shouting, "Harriers! Harriers! Mount up, you fools!" "Alain!" Roland screamed as they bore down. In front of the tankers, a double handful of riders and armed men were coming together - milling together - in a clumsy defensive line. "Now! Now!" Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hollo