It saw them and immediately dashed into the woods, dropping its splintered lyre behind.
“Christ!” Eddie screamed. If that was a walk-in, he hoped never to see another.
“Stop, Eddie!” Roland shouted, then braced the heel of one hand against the dashboard as Cullum’s old Ford slid to a dusty halt close to where the thing had vanished.
“Open the backhold,” Roland said as he opened the door. “Get my widowmaker.”
“Roland, we’re in kind of a hurry here, and Turtleback Lane’s still three miles north. I really think we ought to—”
“Shut your fool’s mouth and get it!” Roland roared, then ran to the edge of the woods. He drew a deep breath, and when he shouted after the rogue creature, his voice sent gooseflesh racing up Eddie’s arms. He had heard Roland speak so once or twice before, but in between it was easy to forget that the blood of a King ran in his veins.
He spoke several phrases Eddie could not understand, then one he could: “So come forth, ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost, and make your bow before me, Roland, son of Steven, of the Line of Eld!”
For a moment there was nothing. Eddie opened the Ford’s trunk and brought Roland his gun. Roland strapped it on without so much as a glance at Eddie, let alone a word of thanks.
Perhaps thirty seconds went by. Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, the dusty roadside foliage began to shake. A moment or two later, the misbegotten thing reappeared. It staggered with its head lowered. On the front of its robe was a large wet patch. Eddie could smell the reek of a sick thing’s urine, wild and strong.
Yet it made a knee and raised one misshapen hand to its forehead, a doomed gesture of fealty that made Eddie feel like weeping. “Hile, Roland of Gilead, Roland of Eld! Will you show me some sigul, dear?”
In a town called River Crossing, an old woman who called herself Aunt Talitha had given Roland a silver cross on a fine-link silver chain. He’d worn it around his neck ever since. Now he reached into his shirt and showed it to the kneeling creature—a slow mutie dying of radiation sickness, Eddie was quite sure—and the thing gave a cracked cry of wonder.
“Would’ee have peace at the end of your course, thou Child of Roderick? Would’ee have the peace of the clearing?”
“Aye, my dear,” it said, sobbing, then added a great deal more in some gibberish tongue Eddie couldn’t understand. Eddie looked both ways along Route 7, expecting to see traffic—this was the height of the summer season, after all—but spied nothing in either direction. For the moment, at least, their luck still held.
“How many of you are there in these parts?” Roland asked, interrupting the walk-in. As he spoke, he drew his revolver and raised that old engine of death until it lay against his shirt.
The Child of Roderick tossed its hand at the horizon without looking up. “Delah, gunslinger,” he said, “for here the worlds are thin, say anro con fa; sey-sey desene fanno billet cobair can. I Chevin devar dan do. Because I felt sat for dem. Can-toi, can-tah, can Discordia, aven la cam mah can. May-mi? Iffin lah vainen, eth—”
“How many dan devar?”
It thought about Roland’s question, then spread its fingers (there were ten, Eddie noted) five times. Fifty. Although fifty of what, Eddie didn’t know.
“And Discordia?” Roland asked sharply. “Do you truly say so?”
“Oh aye, so says me, Chevin of Chayven, son of Hamil, minstrel of the South Plains that were once my home.”
“Say the name of the town that stands near Castle Discordia and I’ll release you.”
“Ah, gunslinger, all there are dead.”
“I think not. Say it.”
“Fedic!” screamed Chevin of Chayven, a wandering musica who could never have suspected its life would end in such a far, strange place—not the plains of Mid-World but the mountains of western Maine. It suddenly raised its horrid, glowing face to Roland. It spread its arms wide, like something which has been crucified. “Fedic on the far side of Thunderclap, on the Path of the Beam! On V Shardik, V Maturin, the Road to the Dark T—”
Roland’s revolver spoke a single time. The bullet took the kneeling thing in the center of its forehead, completing the ruin of its ruined face. As it was flung backward, Eddie saw its flesh turn to greenish smoke as ephemeral as a hornet’s wing. For a moment Eddie could see Chevin of Chayven’s floating teeth like a ghostly ring of coral, and then they were gone.
Roland dropped his revolver back into his holster, then pronged the two remaining fingers of his right hand and drew them downward in front of his face, a benedictory gesture if Eddie had ever seen one.
“Give you peace,” Roland said. Then he unbuckled his gunbelt and began to roll the weapon into it once more.
“Roland, was that… was it a slow mutant?”
“Aye, I suppose you’d say so, poor old thing. But the Rodericks are from beyond any lands I ever knew, although before the world moved on they gave their grace to Arthur Eld.” He turned to Eddie, his blue eyes burning in his tired face. “Fedic is where Mia has gone to have her baby, I have no doubt. Where she’s taken Susannah. By the last castle. We must backtrack to Thunderclap eventually, but Fedic’s where we need to go first. It’s good to know.”
“He said he felt sad for someone. Who?”
Roland only shook his head, not answering Eddie’s question. A Coca-Cola truck blasted by, and thunder rumbled in the far west.
“Fedic o’ the Discordia,” the gunslinger murmured instead. “Fedic o’ the Red Death. If we can save Susannah—and Jake—we’ll backtrack toward the Callas. But we’ll return when our business there is done. And when we turn southeast again…”
“What?” Eddie asked uneasily. “What then, Roland?”
“Then there’s no stopping until we reach the Tower.” He held out his hands, watched them tremble minutely. Then he looked up at Eddie. His face was tired but unafraid. “I have never been so close. I hear all my lost friends and their lost fathers whispering to me. They whisper on the Tower’s very breath.”
Eddie looked at Roland for a minute, fascinated and frightened, and then broke the mood with an almost physical effort. “Well,” he said, moving back toward the driver’s door of the Ford, “if any of those voices tells you what to say to Cullum—the best way to convince him of what we want—be sure to let me know.”
Eddie got in the car and closed the door before Roland could reply. In his mind’s eye he kept seeing Roland leveling his big revolver. Saw him aiming it at the kneeling figure and pulling the trigger. This was the man he called both dinh and friend. But could he say with any certainty that Roland wouldn’t do the same thing to him… or Suze… or Jake… if his heart told him it would take him closer to his Tower? He could not. And yet he would go on with him. Would have gone on even if he’d been sure in his heart—oh, God forbid!—that Susannah was dead. Because he had to. Because Roland had become a good deal more to him than his dinh or his friend.
“My father,” Eddie murmured under his breath just before Roland opened the passenger door and climbed in.
“Did you speak, Eddie?” Roland asked.
“Yes,” Eddie said. “ ‘Just a little farther.’ My very words.”
Roland nodded. Eddie dropped the transmission back into Drive and got the Ford rolling toward Turtleback Lane. Still in the distance—but a little closer than before—thunder rumbled again.
Chapter IV:
Dan-Tete
One
As the baby’s time neared, Susannah Dean looked around, once more counting her enemies as Roland had taught her. You must never draw, he’d said, until you know how many are against you, or you’ve satisfied yourself that you can never know, or you’ve decided it’s your day to die. She wished she didn’t also have to cope with the terrible thought-invading helmet on her head, but whatever that thing was, it didn’t seem concerned with Susannah’s effort to count those present at the arrival of Mia’s chap. And that was good.