37
ROLAND HEARD A FOOTSTEP behind him as he knelt by Jake and turned, raising his gun. Tilly, her dough-colored face a mask of confusion and superstitious fear, raised her hands and shrieked: “Don’t kill me, sai! Please! Don’t kill me!”
“Run, then,” Roland said curtly, and as Tilly began to move, he struck her calf with the barrel of his revolver. “Not that way-through the door I came in. And if you ever see me again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see. Now go!”
She disappeared into the leaping, circling shadows.
Roland dropped his head to Jake’s chest, slamming his palm against his other ear to deaden the pulse of the alarm. He heard the boy’s heartbeat, slow but strong. He slipped his arms around the boy, and as he did, Jakes’s eyes fluttered open. “You didn’t let me fall this time.” His voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.
“No. Not this time, and not ever again. Don’t try your voice.”
“Where’s Oy?”
“Oy!” the bumbler barked. “Oy!”
Brandon had slashed Oy several times, but none of the wounds seemed mortal or even serious. It was clear that he was in some pain, but it was equally clear he was transported with joy. He regarded Jake with sparkling eyes, his pink tongue lolling out. “Ake, Ake, Ake!”
Jake burst into tears and reached for him; Oy limped into the circle of his arms and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment.
Roland got up and looked around. His gaze fixed on the door on the far side of the room. The two men he’d backshot had been heading in that direction, and the woman had also wanted to go that way. The gunslinger went toward the door with Jake in his arms and Oy at his heel. He kicked one of the dead Grays aside, and ducked through. The room beyond was a kitchen. It managed to look like a hog-wallow in spite of the built-in appliances and the stainless steel walls; the Grays were apparently not much interested in housekeeping.
“Drink,” Jake whispered. “Please… so thirsty.”
Roland felt a queer doubling, as if time had folded backward on itself. He remembered lurching out of the desert, crazy with the heat and the emptiness. He remembered passing out in the stable of the way station, half-dead from thirst, and waking at the taste of cool water trickling down his throat. The boy had taken off his shirt, soaked it under the flow from the pump, and given him to drink. Now it was his turn to do for Jake what Jake had already done for him.
Roland glanced around and saw a sink. He went over to it and turned on the faucet. Cold, clear water rushed out. Over them, around them, under them, the alarm roared on and on.
“Can you stand?”
Jake nodded. “I think so.”
Roland set the boy on his feet, ready to catch him if he looked too wobbly, but Jake hung onto the sink, then ducked his head beneath the flowing water. Roland picked Oy up and looked at his wounds. They were already clotting. You got off very lucky, my furry friend, Roland thought, then reached past Jake to cup a palmful of water for the animal. Oy drank it eagerly.
Jake drew back from the faucet with his hair plastered to the sides of his face. His skin was still too pale and the signs that he had been badly beaten were clearly visible, but he looked better than he had when Roland had first bent over him. For one terrible moment, the gunslinger had been positive Jake was dead.
He found himself wishing he could go back and kill Gasher again, and that led him to another thought.
“What about the one Gasher called the Tick-Tock Man? Did you see him, Jake?”
“Yes. Oy ambushed him. Tore up his face. Then I shot him.”
“Dead?”
Jake’s lips began to tremble. He pressed them firmly together. “Yes. In his…” He tapped his forehead high above his right eyebrow. “I was l-l-… I was lucky.”
Roland looked at him appraisingly, then slowly shook his head. “You know, I doubt that. But never mind now. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Jake’s voice was still little more than a husky murmur, and he kept looking past Roland’s shoulder toward the room where he had almost died.
Roland pointed across the kitchen. Beyond another hatchway, the corridor continued. “That’ll do for a start.”
“GUNSLINGER,” a voice boomed from everywhere.
Roland wheeled around, one arm cradling Oy and the other around Jake’s shoulders, but there was no one to see.
“Who speaks to me?” he shouted.
“NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER.”
“Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?”
“GILEAD IS NO MORE,” the voice mused, ignoring the question.
Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was coming from those.
“NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS.”
“I and my friends are the last.”
Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy’s swollen face; his gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness.
“It’s Blaine,” Jake whispered to Roland. “Isn’t it?”
Roland nodded. Of course it was-but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to Blaine than just a monorail train.
“BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?”
Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me. Jake of New York. Uh… son of Elmer.”
“DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD?”
Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recollection filled his face as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man’s narrow, finely carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at die corners of his mouth.
“You’ll have to fix die straps,” Roland said as Jake took the pack. “I made them longer.”
“But Riddle-De-Dum!-?”
Roland nodded. “Both books are still in there.”
“WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?” the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl.
“Gripes!” Jake said.
It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small glass eye in one corner, far above a man’s normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake’s face and the way the boy’s arms had tightened around Oy that he wasn’t alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same.
“The book,” Jake said. “I’ve got the riddle book.”
“GOOD.” There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. “REALLY EXCELLENT.”
A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer’s upper arm. “Fires in the walls!” he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. “Smoke on the lower levels! People killin theirselves! Somepin’s gone wrong! Hell, everythin’s gone wrong! We gotta-”
The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man’s head. He was driven backward with his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face.
Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy’s shoulders.
“HE INTERRUPTED ME,” the voice said. “THAT WAS RUDE, WASN’T IT?”
“Yes,” Roland said calmly. “Extremely rude.”
“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?”
“Yes.”
There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.
“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.
Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert’s favorite riddle. “All right, Blaine,” he said, “I will. What’s better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow.”
There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy’s fur to try to get away from the stink of the roasted Gray.
“Be careful, gunslinger.” The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer’s hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came only from the speaker directly overhead. “Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful.”
Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep his mouth shut.
“A CLEVER RIDDLE,” Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice. “THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?”
“That’s right,” Roland said. “You’re pretty clever yourself, Blaine.”
When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and ungovernable greed. “ASK ME ANOTHER.”
Roland drew a deep breath. “Not just now.”
“I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE.”
“Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud,” Roland said. “Then there may be time for riddling.”
“I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND,” the voice said, and now it was as cold as winter’s darkest day.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m sure you could. But the riddles would die with us.”
“I COULD TAKE THE BOY’s BOOK.”
“Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption,” Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on Jake’s shoulder.
“Besides,” Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, “the answers aren’t in the book. Those pages were torn out.” In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. “They’re up here, though.”
