The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (79 page)

“How can the future already be happening?” Alain asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t think it was always that way. I think it’s more to do with the world than Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Time is strange now. We
know
that, don’t we? How things
sometimes seem to . . . slip. It’s almost as if there’s a thinny everywhere, breaking things down. But Susan’s safe. I know that, and that’s enough for me. Sheemie is going to help her . . . or
is
helping her. Somehow Jonas missed Sheemie, and he followed Susan all the way back.”

“Good for Sheemie!” Alain said, and pumped his fist into the air. “Hurrah!” Then: “What about us? Did you see us in this future?”

“No. This part was all quick—I hardly snatched more than a glance before the ball took me away.
Flew
me away, it seemed. But . . . I saw smoke on the horizon. I remember that. It could have been the smoke of burning tankers, or the brush piled in front of Eyebolt, or both. I think we’re going to succeed.”

Cuthbert was looking at his old friend in a queerly distraught way. The young man so deeply in love that Bert had needed to knock him into the dust of the courtyard in order to wake him up to his responsibilities . . . where was that young man, exactly? What had changed him, given him those disturbing strands of white hair?

“If we survive what’s ahead,” Cuthbert said, watching the gunslinger closely, “she’ll meet us on the road. Won’t she, Roland?”

He saw the pain on Roland’s face, and now understood: the lover was here, but the ball had taken away his joy and left only grief. That, and some new purpose—yes, Cuthbert felt it very well—which had yet to be stated.

“I don’t know,” Roland said. “I almost hope not, because we can never be as we were.”

“What?”
This time Cuthbert
did
rein up.

Roland looked at him calmly enough, but now there were tears in his eyes.

“We are fools of
ka,
” the gunslinger said. “
Ka
like a wind, Susan calls it.” He looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. “The Tower is our
ka
; mine especially. But it isn’t hers, nor she mine. No more is John Farson our
ka.
We’re not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they’re in our way.” He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say,
What more do you need me to tell you?

“There
is
no Tower, Roland,” Cuthbert said patiently. “I don’t know what you saw in that glass ball, but there
is
no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose—like Arthur’s Cup, or
the Cross of the man-Jesus—but not as a real thing, a real building—”

“Yes,” Roland said. “It’s real.”

They looked at him uncertainly, and saw no doubt on his face.

“It’s real, and our fathers know. Beyond the dark land—I can’t remember its name now, it’s one of the things I’ve lost—is End-World, and in End-World stands the Dark Tower. Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it’s what has held them together as
ka-tet
across all the years of the world’s decline. When we return to Gilead—
if
we return, and I now think we will—I’ll tell them what I’ve seen, and they’ll confirm what I say.”

“You saw all that in the glass?” Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice.

“I saw much.”

“But not Susan Delgado,” Cuthbert said.

“No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our
ka-tet
ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries . . . or the Tower.” Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. “I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go . . .
and we will go
.” Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer’s eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner’s bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears.

There was nothing childish in his voice, however.

“I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else—she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.”

Susan mounted on Pylon, which Sheemie had hastened to bring around to the rear courtyard after lighting the draperies of the great parlor on fire. Olive Thorin rode one of the Barony geldings with Sheemie double-mounted behind her and holding onto Capi’s lead. Maria opened the back gate, wished them good luck, and the three trotted out. The sun was
westering now, but the wind had pulled away most of the smoke that had risen earlier. Whatever had happened in the desert, it was over now . . . or happening on some other layer of the same present time.

Roland, be thee well,
Susan thought.
I’ll see thee soon, dear . . . as soon as I can.

“Why are we going north?” she asked after half an hour’s silent riding.

“Because Seacoast Road’s best.”

“But—”

“Hush! They’ll find you gone and search the house first . . . if t’asn’t burned flat, that is. Not finding you there, they’ll send west, along the Great Road.” She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew . . . or thought they knew. “If I know that’s the direction you’d choose, so will others we’d do well to avoid.”

Susan was silent. She was too confused to speak, but Olive seemed to know what she was about, and Susan was grateful for that.

“By the time they get around to sniffing west, it’ll be dark. Tonight we’ll stay in one of the sea-cliff caves five miles or so from here. I grew up a fisherman’s daughter, and I know all those caves, none better.” The thought of the caves she’d played in as a girl seemed to cheer her. “Tomorrow we’ll cut west, as you like. I’m afraid you’re going to have a plump old widow as a chaperone for a bit. Better get used to the idea.”

“Thee’s too good,” Susan said. “Ye should send Sheemie and I on alone, sai.”

“And go back to what? Why, I can’t even get two old trailhands on kitchen-duty to follow my orders. Fran Lengyll’s boss of the shooting-match now, and I’ve no urge to wait and see how he does at it. Nor if he decides he’d be better off with me adjudged mad and put up safe in a
haci
with bars on the windows. Or shall I stay to see how Hash Renfrew does as Mayor, with his boots up on my tables?” Olive actually laughed.

“Sai, I’m sorry.”

“We shall all be sorry later on,” Olive said, sounding remarkably cheery about it. “For now, the most important thing is to reach those caves unobserved. It must seem that we vanished into thin air. Hold up.”

Olive checked her horse, stood in the stirrups, looked around to make sure of her position, nodded, then twisted in the saddle so she could speak to Sheemie.

“Young man, it’s time for ye to mount yer trusty mule and go back to Seafront. If there are riders coming after us, ye must turn em aside with a few well-chosen words. Will’ee do that?”

Sheemie looked stricken. “I don’t have any well-chosen words, sai Thorin, so I don’t. I hardly have any words at all.”

“Nonsense,” Olive said, and kissed Sheemie’s forehead. “Go back at a goodish trot. If’ee spy no one coming after us by the time the sun touches the hills, then turn north again and follow. We shall wait for ye by the signpost. Do ye know where I mean?”

Sheemie thought he did, although it marked the outmost northern boundary of his little patch of geography. “The red ’un? With the
sombrero
on it, and the arrow pointing back for town?”

“The very one. Ye won’t get that far until after dark, but there’ll be plenty of moonlight tonight. If ye don’t come right away, we’ll wait. But ye must go back, and shift any men that might be chasing us off our track. Do ye understand?”

Sheemie did. He slid off Olive’s horse, clucked Caprichoso forward, and climbed on board, wincing as the place the mule had bitten came down. “So it’ll be, Olive-sai.”

“Good, Sheemie. Good. Off’ee go, then.”

“Sheemie?” Susan said. “Come to me a moment, please.”

He did, holding his hat in front of him and looking up at her worshipfully. Susan bent and kissed him not on the forehead but firmly on the mouth. Sheemie came close to fainting.

“Thankee-sai,” Susan said. “For everything.”

Sheemie nodded. When he spoke, he could manage nothing above a whisper. “ ’Twas only
ka,
” he said. “I know that . . . but I love you, Susan-sai. Go well. I’ll see you soon.”

“I look forward to it.”

But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.

Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies.

When Cuthbert gave the Good Man’s
sigul
—hands clasped to the chest, left above right, then both held out to the person being greeted—the blond picket did the same, and with a grateful smile.

“What spin and raree back there?” he asked, speaking with a strong In-World accent—to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite.

“Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills,” Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own accent faultlessly. “There were a fight. It be over now, but they did fight fearful.”

“What—”

“No time,” Roland said brusquely. “We have dispatches.” He crossed his hands on his chest, then held them out. “Hile! Farson!”

“Good Man!” the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo’s perimeter. As easy as that.

“Remember that it’s hit-and-run,” Roland said. “Slow down for nothing. What we don’t get must be left—there’ll be no second pass.”

“Gods, don’t even suggest such a thing,” Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs.

Alain unslung Lengyll’s machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. “I don’t know about this, Roland. It’s loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but—”

“Then use it,” Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their
serapes.
“This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Roland.”

“Bert?”

“Aye,” Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, “so I am, so I am.”

Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.

Roland drew both revolvers.
“Gilead!”
he cried.
“Hile! Gilead!”

He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.

The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.

Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Susan’s heart sank.

The one on Reynolds’s left—he wore a stained white drover’s hat and had a lazily cocked eye—she didn’t know, but the one on the right, who looked like a stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, after smiling at Susan.

“Why, Las and I couldn’t even get us a drink to send his late brother, the Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with a word,” Reynolds said. “We hadn’t hardly hit town before we got persuaded out here. I wasn’t going to go, but . . . damn! That old lady’s something. Could talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you’ll pardon the crudity. I think your aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She—”

“Your friends are dead,” Susan told him.

Reynolds paused, shrugged. “Wellnow. Maybe
si
and maybe
no
. Me, I think I’ve decided to travel on without em even if they ain’t. But I might hang around here one more night. This Reaping business . . . I’ve heard so much about the way folks do it in the Outers. ’Specially the bonfire part.”

The man with the cocked eye laughed phlegmily.

“Let us pass,” Olive said. “This girl has done nothing, and neither have I.”

“She helped Dearborn escape,” Rimer said, “him who murdered your own husband and my brother. I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

“The gods may restore Kimba Rimer in the clearing,” Olive said, “but the truth is he looted half of this town’s treasury, and what he didn’t give over to John Farson, he kept for himself.”

Rimer recoiled as if slapped.

“Ye didn’t know I knew? Laslo, I’d be angry at how little any of ye thought of me . . . except why would I want to be thought of by the likes of you, anyway? I knew enough to make me sick, leave it at that. I know that the man you’re sitting beside—”

“Shut up,” Rimer muttered.

“—was likely the one who cut yer brother’s black heart open; sai Reynolds was seen that early morning in that wing, so I’ve been told—”

“Shut up, you cunt!”