Feemalo said, “There were times when Los’ would make us divide into six, or even seven, and for no other reason than because it hurt. Yet we could leave no more than anyone else in the castle could, for he’d set a dead-line around its walls.”
“We thought he’d kill us all before he left,” Fumalo said, and with none of his previous fuck-you cynicism. His face wore the long and introspective expression of one who looks back on a disaster perhaps averted by mere inches.
Feemalo: “He did kill a great many. Beheaded his Minister of State.”
Fumalo: “Who had advanced syphilis and no more idea what was happening to him than a pig in a slaughterhouse chute, more’s the pity.”
Feemalo: “He lined up the kitchen staff and the women o’ work-”
Fumalo: “All of whom had been very loyal to him, very loyal indeed-”
Feemalo: “And made them take poison as they stood in front of him. He could have killed them in their sleep if he’d wanted to-”
Fumalo: “And by no more than wishing it on them.”
Feemalo: “But instead he made them take poison. Rat poison.
They swallowed large brown chunks of it and died in convulsions right in front of him as he sat on his throne-”
Fumalo: “Which is made of skulls, do ye ken-”
Feemalo: “He sat there with his elbow on his knee and his fist on his chin, like a man thinking long thoughts, perhaps about squaring the circle or finding the Ultimate Prime Number, all the while watching them writhe and vomit and convulse on the floor of the Audience Chamber.”
Fumalo (with a touch of eagerness Susannah found both prurient and extremely unattractive): “Some died begging for water. It was a thirsty poison, aye! And we thought we were next!”
At this Feemalo at last betrayed, if not anger, then a touch of pique. “Will you let me tell this and have done with it so they can go on or back as they please?”
“Bossy as ever,” Fumalo said, and dropped into a sulky silence. Above them, the Castle Rooks josded for position and looked down with beady eyes. No doubt hoping to make a meal of those who don’t walk away, Susannah thought.
“He had six of the surviving Wizard’s Glasses,” Feemalo said. “And when you were still in Calla Bryn Sturgis, he saw something in them that finished the job of running him mad.
We don’t know for sure what it was, for we didn’t see, but we have an idea it was your victory not just in the Calla but further on, at Algul Siento. If so, it meant the end of his scheme to bring down the Tower from afar, by breaking the Beams.”
“Of course that’s what it was,” Fimalo said quiedy, and once more both Stephen Kings on the bridge turned to look at him.
“It could have been nothing else. What brought him to the brink of madness in die first place were two conflicting compulsions in his mind: to bring the Tower down, and to get diere before you could get diere, Roland, and mount to die top.
To destroy it… or to rule it. I’m not sure he has ever cared overmuch about understandingit-just about beating you to something you want, and then snatching it away from you. About such things he’d care much.”
“It’d no doubt please you to know how he raved about you, and cursed your name in the weeks before he smashed his precious playthings,” said Fumalo. “How he came to fear you, insofar as he can fear.”
“Not this one,” Feemalo contradicted, and rather glumly,
Susannah thought. “It wouldn’t please this one much at all. He wins with no better grace than he loses.”
Fimalo said: “When the Red King saw that the Algul would fall to you, he understood that die working Beams would regenerate.
More! That eventually those two working Beams would re-create the other Beams, knitting them forth mile by mile and wheel by wheel. If that happens, then eventually…”
Roland was nodding. In his eyes Susannah saw an entirely new expression: glad surprise. Maybe he does know how to win, she thought. “Then eventually what has moved on might return again,” the gunslinger said. “Perhaps Mid-World and In-World.”
He paused. “Perhaps even Gilead. The light. The White.”
“No perhaps about it,” Fimalo said. “For ka is a wheel, and if a wheel be not broken, it will always roll. Unless the Crimson King can become either Lord of the Tower or its Lord High Executioner, all that was will eventually return.”
“Lunacy,” said Fumalo. “And destructive lunacy, at that. Bixt of course Big Red always was Gan’s crazy side.” He gave Susannah an ugly smirk and said, “That’s Frooood, Lady Blackbird.”
Feemalo resumed. “And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done-”
“This is what we’d have you understand,” said Fumalo. “If, that is, your heads aren’t too thick to get the sense of it.”
“After those chores were finished, he killed himself,” Fimalo said, and once more the other two turned to him. It was as if they were helpless to do otherwise.
“Did he do it with a spoon?” Roland asked. “For that was die prophecy my friends and I grew up with. ’Twas in a bit of doggerel.”
“Yes indeed,” said Fimalo. “I thought he’d cut his throat with it, for the edge of the spoon’s bowl had been sharpened (like certain plates, ye ken- ka’s a wheel, and always comes around to where it started), but he swallowed it. Swallowed it, can you imagine? Great gouts of blood poured from his mouth. Freshets!
Then he mounted the greatest of the gray horses-he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams-and rode southeast into the white lands of Empathica with his litde bit of gunna before him on the saddle.” He smiled. “There are great stores of food here, but he has no need of it, as you may ken. Los’ no longer eats.”
“Wait a minute, time out,” Susannah said, raising her hands in a T-shape (it was a gesture she’d picked up from Eddie, although she didn’t realize it). “If he swallowed a sharpened spoon and cut himself open as well as choking-”
“Lady Blackbird begins to see the light!” Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the sky.
“-then how could he do anything)”
“Los’ cannot die,” Feemalo said, as if explaining something obvious to a three-year-old. “And you-”
“You poor saps-” his partner put in with good-natured viciousness.
“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead,” Fimalo finished.
“As he was, Roland, your guns might have ended him…”
Roland was nodding. “Handed down from father to son, with barrels made from Arthur Eld’s great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that’s also part of the prophecy. As he of course would know.”
“But now he’s safe from them. Has put himself beyond them.
He is Un-dead.”
“We have reason to believe that he’s been shunted onto a balcony of the Tower,” Roland said. “Un-dead or not, he never could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld; surely if he knew so much prophecy, then he knew that.”
Fimalo was smiling grimly. “Aye, but as Horatio held the bridge in a story told in Susannah’s world, so Los’, the Crimson King, now holds the Tower. He has found his way into its mouth but cannot climb to the top, ’tis true. Yet while he holds it hard, neither can you.”
“It seems old King Red wasn’t entirely mad, after all,”
Feemalo said.
“Cray-zee lak-a de focks!” Fumalo added. He tapped his temple gravely… and then burst out laughing.
“But if you go on,” said Fimalo, “you bring to him the siguls of the Eld he needs to gain possession of that which now holds him captive.”
“He’d have to take them from me first,” Roland said. “From us.” He spoke without drama, as if merely commenting on the weather.
“True,” Fimalo agreed, “but consider, Roland. You cannot kill him with them, but it is possible that he might be able to take them from you, for his mind is devious and his reach is long. If he were to do so… well! Imagine a dead king, and mad, at the top of the Dark Tower, with a pair of the great old guns in his possession! He might rule from there, but I think that, given his insanity, he’d choose to bring it down, instead. Which he might be able to do, Beams or no Beams.”
Fimalo studied them gravely from his place on the far side of the bridge.
“And then,” he said, “all would be darkness.”
FOUR
There was a pause during which those gathered in that place considered the idea. Then Feemalo said, almost apologetically:
“The cost might not be so great if one were just to consider this world, which we might call Tower Keystone, since the Dark Tower exists here not as a rose, as it does on many, or an immortal tiger, as it does on some, or the ur«log Rover, as it does on at least one-”
“A dog named Rover?” Susannah asked, bemused. “Do you really say so?”
“Lady, you have all the imagination of a half-burnt stick,”
Fumalo said in a tone of deep disgust.
Feemalo paid no heed. “In this world, the Tower is itself. In the world where you, Roland, have most lately been, most species still breed true and many lives are sweet. There is still energy and hope. Would you risk destroying that world as well as this, and the other worlds sai King has touched with his imagination, and drawn from? For it was not he that created them, you know. To peek in Gan’s navel does not make one Gan, although many creative people seem to think so. Would you risk it all?”
“We’re just asking, not trying to convince you,” Fimalo said.
“But the truth is bald: now this is only your quest, gunslinger.
That’s all it is. Nothing sends you further. Once you pass beyond this castle and into the White Lands, you and your friends pass beyond ka itself. And you need not do it. All you have been through was set in motion so that you might save the Beams, and by saving them ensure the eternal existence of the Tower, the axle upon which all worlds and all life spins. That is done.
