them would ever have said so out loud, even to each other), until they could come back to
the yard behind the Great Hall at the very minute Cort had specified. It was strange how
that clock-in-the-head thing worked. The thing was, at first it didn’t. And didn’t. And
didn’t. Down would come Cort’s callused hand, down it would come a-clout, and Cort
would growlArrr, maggot, back to the woods tomorrow night! You must like it out there!
But once that headclock started ticking, it always seemed to run true. For awhile Roland
had lost it, just as the world had lost its points of the compass, but now it was back and that cheered him greatly.
“Did you count the minute?” she asked. “Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, like that?”
He shook his head. “I just know. When a minute’s up, or an hour.”
“Bol-she-vecky!” she scoffed. “You guessed!”
“If I’d guessed, would I have spoken after exactly one revolution of the hand?”
“You mought got lucky,” Detta said, and eyed him shrewdly with one eye mostly closed,
an expression Roland detested. (But never said so; that would only cause Detta to goad him
with it on those occasions when she peeked out.)
“Do you want to try it again?” he asked.
“No,” Susannah said, and sighed. “I take your word for it that your watch is keeping
perfect time. And that means we’re not close to the Dark Tower. Not yet.”
“Perhaps not close enough to affect the watch, but closer than I’ve ever been,” Roland said
quietly. “Comparatively speaking, we’re now almost in its shadow. Believe me, Susannah—I know.”
“But—”
From over their heads came a cawing that was both harsh and oddly muffled:Croo, croo!
instead ofCaw, caw! Susannah looked up and saw one of the huge blackbirds—the sort
Roland had called Castle Rooks—flying overhead low enough so that they could hear the
labored strokes of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limp strand of
something yellowy-green. To Susannah it looked like a piece of dead seaweed. Only
notentirely dead.
She turned to Roland, looked at him with excited eyes.
He nodded. “Devilgrass. Probably bringing it back to feather his mate’s nest. Certainly not
for the babies to eat. Notthat stuff. But devilgrass always goes last when you’re walking
into the Nowhere Lands, and always shows up first when you’re walking back out of them,
as we are. As we finally are. Now listen to me, Susannah, I’d have you listen, and I’d have
you push that tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would I have you waste my
time by telling me she’s not there when I can see her dancing the commala in your eyes.”
Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, as if she would protest. Then she looked away
without saying anything. When she looked back at him again, she could no longer feel the
presence of the one Roland had called “that tiresome bitch.” And Roland must no longer
have detected her presence, because he went on.
“I think it will soon look like we’re coming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to
trust what you see—a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make
for safety or civilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le Casse
Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he may have left a
trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking to be done, I want you to let me do it.”
“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked. “What are you holding back?”
“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him, a rare earnestness). “It’s only a feeling,
Susannah. We’re close to our goal now, no matter what the watch may say. Close to
winning our way to the Dark Tower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just
one rule with no exceptions:before victory comes temptation . And the greater the victory
to win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”
Susannah shivered and put her arms around herself. “All I want is to be warm,” she said.
“If nobody offers me a big load of firewood and a flannel union suit to cry off the Tower, I
guess we’ll be all right awhile longer.”
Roland remembered one of Cort’s most serious maxims—Never speak the worst
aloud!—but kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away carefully and then rose, ready to move on.
But Susannah paused a moment longer. “I’ve dreamed of the other one,” she said. There
was no need for her to say of whom she was speaking. “Three nights in a row, scuttering
along our backtrail. Do you think he’s really there?”
“Oh yes,” Roland said. “And I think he’s got an empty belly.”
“Hungry, Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said, for she had also heard these words in her dream.
Susannah shivered again.
Seven
The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first scabby plates of pavement
began to show on its surface. It widened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here
stood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop
it now. The next day they came to the first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped wreck
with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a flattened barn out back.
With Roland’s help Susannah turned the sign over, and they could make out one word:
LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come to know so well.
“I think the track we’ve been following was once a coach-road between Castle Discordia
and the Le Casse Roi Russe,” he said. “It makes sense.”
They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads. It was the outskirts of a town
or village—perhaps even a city that had once spread around the Crimson King’s castle. But
unlike Lud, there was very little of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps
around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped
down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in
the remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard whispering voices
in the shadows. Roland identified these—with a matter-of-factness Susannah found
eerie—as the voices of ghosts of what he called “housies,” and suggested they move back
out into the street.
“I don’t believe they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow,” Roland
said, and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual
manner.
Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which they had tried to camp
had a chill that she thought was worse than physical cold. The things they had heard
whispering in there might be old, but she thought they were still hungry. And so the three
of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, beside
Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a few degrees. They
tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered
pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply
refused to burn.
“Why?” Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate.“Why?”
“Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?”
“No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?”
“It won’t burn because it hates us,” Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her.
“This ishis place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us.
But…listen, Susannah. Now that we’re on an actual road, still more paved than not, what
do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?”
“Sure,” she said. “Anything’s got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel.”
So that was what they did—the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after that.
She kept thinking,I’m gonna get sick, I can’t go on like this without coming down with
something, but she didn’t. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left of her lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and
deeper into the center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she