Stephen King – The Dark Tower

insofar as hecan fear.”

“Not this one,” Feemalo contradicted, and rather glumly, Susannah thought. “It wouldn’t

please this one much at all. He wins with no better grace than he loses.”

Fimalo said: “When the Red King saw that the Algul would fall to you, he understood that

the working Beams would regenerate. More! That eventually those two working Beams

would re-create theother Beams, knitting them forth mile by mile and wheel by wheel. If

that happens, then eventually…”

Roland was nodding. In his eyes Susannah saw an entirely new expression: glad

surprise.Maybe he doesknow how to win, she thought. “Then eventually what has moved

on might return again,” the gunslinger said. “Perhaps Mid-World and In-World.” He

paused. “Perhaps even Gilead. The light. TheWhite. ”

“No perhaps about it,” Fimalo said. “For ka is a wheel, and if a wheel be not broken, it will always roll. Unless the Crimson King can become either Lord of the Tower or its Lord

High Executioner, all that was will eventually return.”

“Lunacy,” said Fumalo. “Anddestructive lunacy, at that. But of course Big Red alwayswas

Gan’s crazy side.” He gave Susannah an ugly smirk and said, “That’sFrooood, Lady

Blackbird.”

Feemalo resumed. “And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done—”

“This is what we’d have you understand,” said Fumalo. “If, that is, your heads aren’t too

thick to get the sense of it.”

“After those chores were finished, he killedhimself, ” Fimalo said, and once more the

other two turned to him. It was as if they were helpless to do otherwise.

“Did he do it with a spoon?” Roland asked. “For that was the prophecy my friends and I

grew up with. ’Twas in a bit of doggerel.”

“Yes indeed,” said Fimalo. “I thought he’d cut his throat with it, for the edge of the

spoon’s bowl had been sharpened (like certain plates, ye ken—ka’s a wheel, and always

comes around to where it started), but he swallowed it.Swallowed it, can you imagine?

Great gouts of blood poured from his mouth.Freshets! Then he mounted the greatest of the

gray horses—he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams—and rode southeast into

the white lands of Empathica with his little bit of gunna before him on the saddle.” He

smiled. “There are great stores of food here, buthe has no need of it, as you may ken. Los’

no longer eats.”

“Wait a minute, time out,” Susannah said, raising her hands in a T-shape (it was a gesture she’d picked up from Eddie, although she didn’t realize it). “If he swallowed a sharpened

spoon and cut himself open as well as choking—”

“Lady Blackbird begins to see the light!” Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the sky.

“—then how could he doanything ?”

“Los’ cannot die,” Feemalo said, as if explaining something obvious to a three-year-old.

“Andyou —”

“You poorsaps —” his partner put in with good-natured viciousness.

“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead,” Fimalo finished. “As he was, Roland, your

guns might have ended him…”

Roland was nodding. “Handed down from father to son, with barrels made from Arthur

Eld’s great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that’s also part of the prophecy. As he of course would

know.”

“But now he’s safe from them. Has put himselfbeyond them. He is Un-dead.”

“We have reason to believe that he’s been shunted onto a balcony of the Tower,” Roland

said. “Un-dead or not, he never could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld;

surely if he knew so much prophecy, then he knew that.”

Fimalo was smiling grimly. “Aye, but as Horatio held the bridge in a story told in

Susannah’s world, so Los’, the Crimson King, now holds the Tower. He has found his way

into its mouth but cannot climb to the top, ’tis true. Yet while he holds it hard, neither can you.”

“It seems old King Red wasn’t entirely mad, after all,” Feemalo said.

“Cray-zee lak-a defocks! ” Fumalo added. He tapped his temple gravely…and then burst

out laughing.

“But if you go on,” said Fimalo, “you bring to him the siguls of the Eld he needs to gain

possession of that which now holds him captive.”

“He’d have to take them from me first,” Roland said. “Fromus .” He spoke without drama,

as if merely commenting on the weather.

“True,” Fimalo agreed, “but consider, Roland. You cannot kill him with them, but itis

possible that he might be able to take them from you, for his mind is devious and his reach

is long. If he were to do so…well! Imagine a dead king, and mad, at the top of the Dark

Tower, with a pair of the great old guns in his possession! He might rule from there, but I

think that, given his insanity, he’d choose to bring it down, instead. Which he might be able to do, Beams or no Beams.”

Fimalo studied them gravely from his place on the far side of the bridge.

“And then,” he said, “all would be darkness.”

Four

There was a pause during which those gathered in that place considered the idea. Then

Feemalo said, almost apologetically: “The cost might not be so great if one were just to

consider this world, which we might call Tower Keystone, since the Dark Tower exists

here not as a rose, as it does on many, or an immortal tiger, as it does on some, or the ur-dog Rover, as it does on at least one—”

“A dog namedRover ?” Susannah asked, bemused. “Do you really say so?”

“Lady, you have all the imagination of a half-burnt stick,” Fumalo said in a tone of deep

disgust.

Feemalo paid no heed. “In this world, the Tower is itself. In the world where you, Roland,

have most lately been, most species still breed true and many lives are sweet. There is still energy and hope. Would you risk destroying that world as well as this, and the other worlds

sai King has touched with his imagination, and drawn from? For it was not he that created

them, you know. To peek in Gan’s navel does not make one Gan, although many creative

people seem to think so. Would you risk it all?”

“We’re just asking, not trying to convince you,” Fimalo said. “But the truth is bald: now

this is only your quest, gunslinger. That’sall it is. Nothing sends you further. Once you pass beyond this castle and into the White Lands, you and your friends pass beyond ka itself.

And you need not do it. All you have been through was set in motion so that you might save

the Beams, and by saving them ensure the eternal existence of the Tower, the axle upon

which all worlds and all life spins. That is done. If you turn back now, the dead King will be trapped forever where he is.”

“Sezyou, ” Susannah put in, and with a rudeness worthy of sai Fumalo.

“Whether you speak true or speak false,” Roland said, “I will push on. For I have

promised.”

“Towhom have you given your promise?” Fimalo burst out. For the first time since

stopping on the castle side of the bridge, he unclasped his hands and used them to push his

hair back from his brow. The gesture was small but expressed his frustration with perfect

eloquence. “For there’s no prophecy of such a promise; I tell you so!”

“There wouldn’t be. For it’s one I made myself, and one I mean to keep.”

“This man is as crazy as Los’ the Red,” Fumalo said, not without respect.

“All right,” Fimalo said. He sighed and once more clasped his hands before him. “I have

done whatI can do.” He nodded to his other two thirds, who were looking attentively back

at him.

Feemalo and Fumalo each dropped to one knee: Feemalo his right, Fumalo his left. They

lifted away the lids of the wicker boxes they had carried and tilted them forward.

(Susannah was fleetingly reminded of how the models onThe Price Is Right

andConcentration showed off the prizes.)

Inside one was food: roasts of chicken and pork, joints of beef, great pink rounds of ham.

Susannah felt her stomach expand at the sight, as if making ready to swallow all of it, and it was only with a great effort that she stopped the sensual moan rising in her throat. Her

mouth flooded with saliva and she raised a hand to wipe it away. They would know what

she was doing, she supposed there was no help for that, but she could at least keep them

from the satisfaction of seeing the physical evidence of her hunger gleaming on her lips

and chin. Oy barked, but kept his seat by the gunslinger’s left heel.

Inside the other basket were big cable-knit sweaters, one green and one red: Christmas

colors.

“There’s also long underwear, coats, fleece-lined shor’-boots, and gloves,” said Feemalo.

“For Empathica’s deadly cold at this time of year, and you’ll have months of walking