direction Gasher was pointing. Yes, he could make out—barely—two thin, silvery lines
that looked like guitar or banjo strings. They came down from opposite sides of the
passageway and crossed about two feet above the pavement.
“Crawl under, dear heart. And be ever so careful, for if you so much as twang one of those
wires, harf the steel and cement puke in the city’ll come down on your dear little head.
Mine, too, although I doubt if that’d disturb you much, would it? Now crawl!”
Jake shrugged out of his pack, lay down, and pushed it through the gap ahead of him. And
as he eased his way under the thin, taut wires, he discovered that he wanted to live a little
longer after all. It seemed that he could actually feel all those tons of carefully balanced
junk waiting to come down on him. These wires are probably holding a couple of carefully
chosen keystones in place, he thought. If one of them breaks . . . ashes, ashes, we all fall
down. His back brushed one of the wires, and high overhead, something creaked.
“Careful, cully!” Gasher almost moaned. “Be oh so careful!”
Jake pushed himself beneath the crisscrossing wires, using his feet and his elbows. His
stinking, sweat-clogged hair fell in his eyes again, but he did not dare brush it away.
“You’re clear,” Gasher grunted at last, and slipped beneath the tripwires himself with the ease of long practice. He stood up and snatched Jake’s pack before Jake could reshoulder it.
“What’s in here, cully?” he asked, undoing the straps and peering in. “Got any treats for yer old pal? For the Gasherman loves his treaties, so he does!”
“There’s nothing in there but-”
Gasher’s hand flashed out and rocked Jake’s head back with a hard slap that sent a fresh
spray of bloody froth flying from the boy’s nose.
“What did you do that for?” Jake cried, hurt and outraged.
“For tellin me what my own beshitted eyes can see!” Gasher yelled, and cast Jake’s pack aside. He bared his remaining teeth at the boy in a dangerous, terrible grin. “And fer almost bringin the whole beshitted works down on us!” He paused, then added in a quieter voice:
“And because I felt like it—I must admit that. Your stupid sheep’s face puts me wery much
in a slappin temper, so it does.” The grin widened, reveal- ing his oozing whitish gums, a
sight Jake could have done without. “If your hardcase friend follows us this far, he’ll have a
surprise when he runs into those wires, won’t he?” Gasher looked up, still grinning.
“There’s a city bus balanced up there someplace, as I remember.”
Jake began to weep—tired, hopeless tears that cut through the dirt on his cheeks in narrow
channels.
Gasher raised an open, threatening hand. “Get moving, cully, before I start cryin myself …
for a wery sentermental fellow is yer old pal, so he is, and when he starts to grieve and
mourn, a little slappin is the only thing to put a smile on his face again. Run!”
They ran. Gasher chose pathways leading deeper into the smelly, creaking maze
seemingly at random, indicating his choices with hard whacks to the shoulders. At some
point the sound of the drums began. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and
for Jake it was the final straw. He gave up hope and thought alike, and allowed himself to
descend wholly into the nightmare.
17
ROLAND HALTED IN FRONT of the barricade which choked the street from side to side
and top to bottom. Unlike Jake, he had no hopes of emerging into the open on the other side.
The buildings lying east of this point would be sentry-occupied islands emerging from an
inland sea of trash, tools, artifacts . . . and booby-traps, he had no doubt. Some of these
leavings undoubtedly still remained where they had fallen five hun- dred or seven hundred
or a thousand years ago, but Roland thought most of it had been dragged here by the Grays
a piece at a time. The eastern portion of Lud had become, in effect, the castle of the Grays,
and Roland was now standing outside its wall.
He walked forward slowly and saw the mouth of a passageway half-hidden behind a
ragged cement boulder. There were footprints in the powdery dust—two sets, one big, one
small. Roland started to get up, looked again, and squatted on his hunkers once more. Not
two sets but three, the third marking the paws of a small animal.
“Oy?” Roland called softly. For a moment there was no response, and then a single soft bark came from the shadows. Roland stepped into the passageway and saw gold-ringed
eyes peering at him from around the first crooked corner. Roland trotted down to the
humbler. Oy, who still didn’t like to come really close to anyone but Jake, backed up a step
and then held his ground, looking anxiously up at the gunslinger.
“Do you want to help me?” Roland asked. He could feel the dry red curtain that was battle fever at the edge of his consciousness, but this was not the time for it. The time would come,
but for now he must not allow himself that inexpressible relief. “Help me find Jake?”
“Ake!” Oy barked, still watching Roland with his anxious eyes.
“Go on, then. Find him.”
Oy turned away at once and ran rapidly down the alley, nose skim- ming the ground.
Roland followed, his eyes only occasionally flicking up to glance at Oy. Mostly he kept his
gaze fixed on the ancient pavement, looking for sign.
18
“JESUS,” EDDIE SAID. “WHAT land of people are these guys?”
They had followed the avenue at the base of the ramp for a couple of blocks, had seen the
barricade (missing Roland’s entry into the partially hidden passageway by less than a
minute) which lay ahead, and had turned north onto a broad thoroughfare which reminded
Eddie of Fifth Avenue. He hadn’t dared to tell Susannah that; he was still too bitterly
disappointed with this stinking, littered ruin of a city to articulate anything hopeful.
“Fifth Avenue” led them into an area of large white stone buildings that reminded Eddie of the way Rome looked in the gladiator movies he’d watched on TV as a kid. They were
austere and, for the most part, still in good shape. He was pretty sure they had been public
buildings of some sort—galleries, libraries, maybe museums. One, with a big domed roof
that had cracked like a granite egg, might have been an observatory, although Eddie had
read someplace that astronomers liked to be away from big cities, because all the electric
lights fucked up their star-gazing.
There were open areas between these imposing edifices, and although the grass and
flowers which had once grown there had been choked off by weeds and tangles of
underbrush, the area still had a stately feel, and Eddie wondered if it had once been the
center of Lud’s cultural life. Those days were long gone, of course; Eddie doubted if
Gasher and his pals were very interested in ballet or chamber music.
He and Susannah had come to a major intersection from which four more broad avenues
radiated outward like spokes on a wheel. At the hub of the wheel was a large paved square.
Ringing it were loudspeakers on forty-foot steel posts. In the center of the square was a
pedestal with the remains of a statue upon it—a mighty copper war-horse, green with
verdigris, pawing its forelegs at the air. The warrior who had once ridden this charger lay
off to the side on one corroded shoulder, waving what looked like a machine-gun in one
hand and a sword in the other. His legs were still bowed around the shape of the horse he
had once ridden, hut his boots remained welded to the sides of his metal mount. GRAYS
DIE! was written across the pedestal in fading orange letters.
Glancing down the radiating streets, Eddie saw more of the speaker-poles. A few had fallen over, but most still stood, and each of these had been festooned with a grisly garland
of corpses. As a result, the square into which “Fifth Avenue” emptied and the streets which led away were guarded by a small army of the dead.
“What kind of people are they?” Eddie asked again.
He didn’t expect an answer and Susannah didn’t give one . . . but she could have. She’d had
insights into the past of Roland’s world before, but never one as clear and sure as this. All
of her earlier insights, like those which had come to her in River Crossing, had had a
haunting visionary quality, like dreams, but what came now arrived in a single flash, and it
was like seeing the twisted face of a dangerous maniac illuminated by a stroke of lightning.
The speakers . . . the hanging bodies . . . the drums. She suddenly understood how they