“Thankee-sai, Blaine, you have answered true.” He tapped the bunched fingers of his left hand three times against his breastbone and then sat down. Susannah put her arm around him and gave him a brief squeeze. Jake looked at her gratefully.
Now Roland stood up. “Hile, Blaine,” he said.
“HILE, GUNSLINGER.” Once again Blaine sounded amused… possibly by the greeting, which Susannah hadn’t heard before. Heil what? she wondered. Hitler came to mind, and that made her think of the downed plane they’d found outside Lud. A Focke-Wulf, Jake had claimed. She didn’t know about that, but she knew it had contained one seriously dead harrier, too old even to stink. “SPEAK YOUR RIDDLE, ROLAND, AND LET IT BE HANDSOME.”
“Handsome is as handsome does, Blaine. In any case, here it is: What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?”
“THAT IS INDEED HANDSOME,” Blaine allowed. “SIMPLE BUT HANDSOME, JUST THE SAME. THE ANSWER IS A HUMAN BEing, WHO CRAWLS ON HANDS AND KNEES IN BABYHOOD, WALKS ON TWO LEGS DURING ADULTHOOD, AND WHO GOES ABOUT WITH THE HELP OF A CANE IN OLD AGE.”
Blaine sounded positively smug, and Susannah suddenly discovered a mildly interesting fact: she loathed the self-satisfied, murderous thing. Machine or not, it or he, she loathed Blaine. She had an idea she would have felt the same even if he hadn’t made them wager their lives in a stupid riddling contest.
Roland, however, did not look the slightest put out of countenance. “Thankee-sai, Blaine, you have answered true.” He sat down without tapping his breastbone and looked at Eddie. Eddie stood up and stepped into the aisle.
“What’s happening, Blaine my man?” he asked. Roland winced and shook his head, putting his mutilated right hand up briefly to shade his eyes.
Silence from Blaine.
“Blaine? Are you there?”
“YES, BUT IN NO MOOD FOR FRIVOLITY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK. SPEAK YOUR RIDDLE. I SUSPECT IT WILL BE DIFFICULT IN SPITE OF YOUR FOOLISH POSES. I LOOK FORWARD TO IT.”
Eddie glanced at Roland, who waved a hand at him-Go on, for your father’s sake, go on!-and then looked back at the route-map, where the green dot had just passed the point marked Rilea. Susannah saw that Eddie suspected what she herself all but knew: Blaine understood they were trying to test his capabilities with a spectrum of riddles. Blaine knew… and welcomed it.
Susannah felt her heart sink as any hopes they might find a quick and easy way out of this disappeared.
4
“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t know how hard it’ll seem to you, but it struck me as a toughie.” Nor did he know the answer, since that section of Riddle-De-Dum! had been torn out, but he didn’t think that made any difference; their knowing the answers hadn’t been part of the ground-rules.
“I SHALL HEAR AND ANSWER.”
“No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?”
“SILENCE, A THING YOU KNOW LITTLE ABOUT, EDDIE OF NEW YORK,” Blaine said with no pause at all, and Eddie felt his heart drop a little. There was no need to consult with the others; the answer was self-evident. And having it come back at him so quickly was the real bummer. Eddie never would have said so, but he had harbored the hope- almost a secret surety-of bringing Blaine down with a single riddle, ker-smash, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Blaine together again. The same secret surety, he supposed, that he had harbored every time he picked up a pair of dice in some sharpie’s back-bedroom crap game, every time he called for a hit on seventeen while playing blackjack. That feeling that you couldn’t go wrong because you were you, the best, the one and only.
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “Silence, a thing I know little about. Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak truth.”
“I HOPE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED SOMETHING WHICH WILL HELP YOU,” Blaine said, and Eddie thought: You fucking mechanical liar. The complacent tone had returned to Blaine’s voice, and Eddie found it of some passing interest that a machine could express such a range of emotion. Had the Great Old Ones built them in, or had Blaine created an emotional rainbow for himself at some point? A little dipolar pretty with which to pass the long decades and centuries? “DO YOU WISH ME TO GO AWAY AGAIN SO YOU MAY CONSULT?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
The route-map flashed bright red. Eddie turned toward the gunslinger. Roland composed his face quickly, but before he did, Eddie saw a horrible thing: a brief look of complete hopelessness. Eddie had never seen such a look there before, not when Roland had been dying of the lobstrosities’ bites, not when Eddie had been pointing the gunslinger’s own revolver at him, not even when the hideous Gasher had taken Jake prisoner and disappeared into Lud with him.
“What do we do next?” Jake asked. “Do another round of the four of us?”
“I think that would serve little purpose,” Roland said. “Blame must know thousands of riddles-perhaps millions-and that is bad. Worse, far worse, he understands the how of riddling… the place the mind has to go to in order to make them and solve them.” He turned to Eddie and Susannah, sitting once more with their arms about one another. “Am I right about that?” he asked them. “Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Susannah said, and Eddie nodded reluctantly. He didn’t want to agree… but he did.
“So?” Jake asked. “What do we do, Roland? I mean, there has to be a way out of this… doesn’t there?”
Lie to him, you bastard, Eddie sent fiercely in Roland’s direction. Roland, perhaps hearing the thought, did the best he could. He touched Jake’s hair with his diminished hand and ruffled through it. “I think there’s always an answer, Jake. The real question is whether or not we’ll have time to find the right riddle. He said it took him a little under nine hours to run his route-”
“Eight hours, forty-five minutes,” Jake put in. “… and that’s not much time. We’ve already been running almost an hour-”
“And if that map’s right, we’re almost halfway to Topeka,” Susannah said in a tight voice. “Could be our mechanical pal’s been lying to us about the length of the run. Hedging his bets a little.” “Could be,” Roland agreed. “So what do we do?” Jake repeated.
Roland drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Let me riddle him alone, for now. I’ll ask him the hardest ones I remember from the Fair-Days of my youth. Then, Jake, if we’re approaching the point of… if we’re approaching Topeka at this same speed with Blaine still unposed, I think you should ask him the last few riddles in your book. The hardest riddles.” He rubbed the side of his face distractedly and looked at the ice sculpture. This chilly rendering of his own likeness had now melted to an unrecognizable hulk. “I still think the answer must be in the book. Why else would you have been drawn to it before coming back to this world?” “And us?” Susannah asked. “What do Eddie and I do?” “Think,” Roland said. “Think, for your fathers’ sakes.” “I do not shoot with my hand,” Eddie said. He suddenly felt far away, strange to himself. It was the way he’d felt when he had seen first the slingshot and then the key in pieces of wood, just waiting for him to whittle them free… and at the same time this feeling was not like that at all.
Roland was looking at him oddly. “Yes, Eddie, you say true. A gunslinger shoots with his mind. What have you thought of?”
“Nothing.” He might have said more, but all at once a strange image-a strange memory-intervened: Roland hunkering by Jake at one of their stopping-points on the way to Lud. Both of them in front of an unlit campfire. Roland once more at his everlasting lessons. Jake’s turn this time. Jake with the flint and steel, trying to quicken the fire. Spark after spark licking out and dying in the dark. And Roland had said that he was being silly. That he was just being… well… silly.