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.
“No,” Eddie said. “He didn’t say that at all. At least not to the kid, he didn’t.”
“Eddie?” Susannah. Sounding concerned. Almost frightened.
Well why don’t you ask him what he said, bro? That was Henry’s voice, the voice of the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. First time in a long time. Ask him, he’s practically sitting right next to you, go on and ask him what he said. Quit dancing around like a baby with a load in his diapers.
Except that was a bad idea, because that wasn’t the way things worked in Roland’s world. In Roland’s world everything was riddles, you didn’t shoot with your hand but with your mind, your motherfucking mind, and what did you say to someone who wasn’t getting the spark into the kindling? Move your flint in closer, of course, and that’s what Roland had said: Move your flint in closer, and hold it steady.
Except none of that was what this was about. It was close, yes, but close only counts in horseshoes, as Henry Dean had been wont to say before he became the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. Eddie’s memory was jinking a little because Roland had embarrassed him… shamed him… made a joke at his expense…
Probably not on purpose, but… something. Something that had made him feel the way Henry always used to make him feel, of course it was, why else would Henry be here after such a long absence?
All of them looking at him now. Even Oy.
“Go on,” he told Roland, sounding a little waspish. “You wanted us to think, we’re thinking, already.” He himself was thinking so hard (I shoot with my mind)
that his goddam brains were almost on fire, but he wasn’t going to tell old long, tall, and ugly that. “Go on and ask Blaine some riddles. Do your part.”
“As you will, Eddie.” Roland rose from his seat, went forward, and laid his hand on the scarlet rectangle again. The route-map reappeared at once. The green dot had moved farther beyond Rilea, but it was clear to Eddie that the mono had slowed down significantly, either obeying some built-in program or because Blaine was having too much fun to hurry.
“IS YOUR KA-TET READY TO CONTINUE OUR FAIR-DAY RIDDLING, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?”
“Yes, Blaine,” Roland said, and to Eddie his voice sounded heavy. “I will riddle you alone for awhile now. If you have no objection.”
“AS DINH AND FATHER OF YOUR KA-TET, SUCH IS YOUR RIGHT. WILL THESE BE FAIR-DAY RIDDLES?”
“Yes.”
“GOOD.” Loathsome satisfaction in that voice. “I WOULD HEAR MORE OF THOSE.”
“All right.” Roland took a deep breath, then began. “Feed me and I live. Give me to drink and I die. What am I?”
“FIRE.” No hesitation. Only that insufferable smugness, a tone which said That was old to me when your grandmother was young, but try again! This is more fun than I’ve had in centuries, so try again!
“I pass before the sun, Blaine, yet make no shadow. What am I?”
“WIND.” No hesitation.
“You speak true, sai. Next. This is as light as a feather, yet no man can hold it for long.”
“ONE’s BREATH.” No hesitation.
Yet he did hesitate, Eddie thought suddenly. Jake and Susannah were watching Roland with agonized concentration, fists clenched, willing him to ask Blaine the right riddle, the stumper, the one with the Get the Fuck Out of Jail Free card hidden inside it; Eddie couldn’t look at them-Suze, in particular-and keep his concentration. He lowered his gaze to his own hands, which were also clenched, and forced them to open on his lap. It was surprisingly hard to do. From the aisle he heard Roland continuing to trot out the golden oldies of his youth.
“Riddle me this, Blaine: If you break me, I’ll not stop working. If you can touch me, my work is done. If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon after. What am I?”
Susannah’s breath caught for a moment, and although he was looking down, Eddie knew she was thinking what he was thinking: that was a good one, a damned good one, maybe-
“THE HUMAN HEART,” Blaine said. Still with not a whit of hesitation. “THIS RIDDLE IS BASED IN LARGE PART UPON HUMAN POETIC CONCEITS; SEE FOR INSTANCE JOHN AVERY, SIRONIA HUNTZ, ONDOLA, WILLIAM BLAKE, JAMES TATE, VERONICA MAYS, AND OTHERS. IT IS REMARKABLE HOW HUMAN BEINGS PITCH THEIR MINDS ON LOVE. YET IT IS CONSTANT FROM ONE LEVEL OF THE TOWER TO THE NEXT, EVEN IN THESE DEGENERATE DAYS. CONTINUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD.”
Susannah’s breath resumed. Eddie’s hands wanted to clench again, but he wouldn’t let them. Move your flint in closer, he thought in Roland’s voice. Move your flint in closer, for your father’s sake!
And Blaine the Mono ran on, southeast under the Demon Moon.
Chapter II
THE FALLS OF THE HOUNDS
1
Jake didn’t know how easy or difficult Blaine might find the last ten puzzlers in Riddle-De-Dum!, but they looked pretty tough to him. Of course, he reminded himself, he wasn’t a thinking-machine with a citywide bank of computers to draw on. All he could do was go for it; God hates a coward, as Eddie sometimes said. If the last ten failed, he would try Aaron Deepneau’s Samson riddle (Out of the eater came forth meat, and so on). If that one also failed, he’d probably… shit, he didn’t know what he’d do, or even how he’d feel. The truth is, Jake thought, I’m fried.
And why not? He had gone through an extraordinary swarm of emotions in the last eight hours or so. First, terror: of being sure he and Oy were going to drop off the suspension bridge and to their deaths in the River Send; of being driven through the crazed maze that was Lud by Gasher; of having to look into the Tick-Tock Man’s terrible green eyes and try to answer his unanswerable questions about time, Nazis, and the nature of transitive circuits. Being questioned by Tick-Tock had been like having to take a final exam in hell.
Then the exhilaration of being rescued by Roland (and Oy; without Oy he would almost certainly be toast now), the wonder of all they had seen beneath the city, his awe at the way Susannah had solved Blaine’s gate-riddle, and the final mad rush to get aboard the mono before Blaine could release the stocks of nerve-gas stored under Lud.
After surviving all that, a kind of blissed-out surety had settled over him-of course Roland would stump Blaine, who would then keep his part of the bargain and set them down safe and sound at his final stop (whatever passed for Topeka in this world). Then they would find the Dark Tower and do whatever they were supposed to do there, right what needed righting, fix what needed fixing. And then? They Lived Happily Ever After, of course. Like folk in a fairy tale.
Except…
They shared each other’s thoughts, Roland had said; sharing khef was part of what ka-tet meant. And what had been seeping into Jake’s thoughts ever since Roland stepped into the aisle and began to try Blaine with riddles from his young days was a sense of doom. It wasn’t coming just from the gunslinger; Susannah was sending out the same grim blue-black vibe. Only Eddie wasn’t sending it, and that was because he’d gone off somewhere, was chasing his own thoughts. That might be good, but there were no guarantees, and-
–and Jake began to be scared again. Worse, he felt desperate, like a creature that is pressed deeper and deeper into its final comer by a relentless foe. His fingers worked restlessly in Oy’s fur, and when he looked down at them, he realized an amazing thing: the hand which Oy had bitten into to keep from falling off the bridge no longer hurt. He could see the holes the bumbler’s teeth had made, and blood was still crusted in his palm and on his wrist, but the hand itself no longer hurt. He flexed it cautiously. There was some pain, but it was low and distant, hardly there at all.
“Blaine, what may go up a chimney down but cannot go down a chimney up?”
“A LADY’s PARASOL,” Blaine replied in that tone of jolly complacency which Jake, too, was coming to loathe.
“Thankee-sai, Blaine, once again you have answered true. Next-”
“Roland?”
The gunslinger looked around at Jake, and his look of concentration lightened a bit. It wasn’t a smile, but it went a little way in that direction, at least, and Jake was glad.
“What is it, Jake?”
“My hand. It was hurting like crazy, and now it’s stopped!”
