“You would have refreshed them wonderfully, if you’d pressed them against your skin,” Fimalo said regretfully.
“You didn’t really expect that to happen, did you?” Roland asked.
“No,” the old man admitted. He sat on the bridge with a weary sigh. One of the snakes attempted to crawl into his lap and he pushed it away with a gesture that was both absent and impatient. “But I had my orders, so I did.”
Susannah was looking at the corpses of the other two with horrified fascination. Feemalo and Fumalo, nowjust a couple of dead old men, were rotting with unnatural rapidity, their parchment skins deflating toward the bone and oozing slack rivulets of pus. As she watched, the sockets of Feemalo’s skull surfaced like twin periscopes, giving the corpse a momentary expression of shock. Some of the snakes crawled and writhed around these decaying corpses. Others were crawling into the basket of maggoty limbs, seeking the undoubtedly warmer regions at the bottom of the heap. Decay brought its own temporary fevers, and she supposed that she herself might be tempted to luxuriate in it while she could. If she were a snake, that was.
“Are you going to kill me?” Fimalo asked.
“Nay,” Roland said, “for your duties aren’t done. You have another coming along behind.”
Fimalo looked up, a gleam of interest in his rheumy old eyes. ’Your son?”
“Mine, and your master’s, as well. Would you give him a word for me during your palaver?”
“If I’m alive to give it, sure.”
“Tell him that I’m old and crafty, while he’s but young.
Tell him that if he lies back, he may live awhile yet with his dreams of revenge… although what I’ve done to him requiring his vengeance, I know not. And tell him that if he comes forward, I’ll kill him as I intend to kill his Red Father.”
“Either you listen and don’t hear or hear and don’t believe,”
Fimalo said. Now that his own ruse had been exposed (nothing so glamorous as an uffi, Susannah thought; just a retreaded adman from upstate New York), he seemed unutterably weary.
“You cannot kill a creature that has killed itself. Nor can you enter the Dark Tower, for there is only one entrance, and the balcony upon which Los’ is imprisoned commands it. And he’s armed with a sufficiency of weapons. The sneetches alone would seek you out and slay you before you’d crossed halfway through the field of roses.”
“That’s our worry,” Roland said, and Susannah thought he’d rarely spoken a truer word: she was worrying about it already. “As for you, will you pass my message on to Mordred, when you see him?”
Fimalo made a gesture of acquiescence.
Roland shook his head. “Don’t just flap thy hand at me, cully-let me hear from your mouth.”
“I’ll pass along your message,” said Fimalo, then added: “If I see him, and we palaver.”
“You will. ’day to you, sir.” Roland began to turn away, but Susannah caught his arm and he turned back.
“Swear to me that all you told us was true,” she bade the ugly ancient sitting on the cobbled bridge and below the cold gaze of the crows, who were beginning to settle back to their former places. What she meant to learn or prove by this she had not the slightest idea. Would she know this man’s lies, even now? Probably not. But she pressed on, just the same. “Swear it on the name of your father, and on his face, as well.”
The old man raised his right hand to her, palm out, and Susannah saw there were open sores even there. “I swear it on the name of Andrew John Cornwell, of Tioga Springs, New York.
And on his face, too. The King of this casde really did run mad, and really did burst those Wizard’s Glasses that had come into his hands. He really did force the staff to take poison and he really did watch them die.” He flung out the hand he’d held up in pledge to the box of severed limbs. “Where do you think I got those, Lady Blackbird? Body Parts R Us?”
She didn’t understand the reference, and remained still.
“He really has gone on to the Dark Tower. He’s like the dog in some old fable or other, wanting to make sure that if he can’t get any good from the hay, no one else will, either. I didn’t even lie to you about what was in these boxes, not really. I simply showed you the goods and let you draw your own conclusions.”
His smile of cynical pleasure made Susannah wonder if she ought to remind him that Roland, at least, had seen through this trick. She decided it wasn’t worth it.
“I told you only one outright lie,” said the former Austin Cornwell. “That he’d had me beheaded.”
“Are you satisfied, Susannah?” Roland asked her.
“Yes,” she said, although she wasn’t; not really. “Let’s go.”
“Climb up in Ho Fat, then, and don’t turn thy back on him when thee does. He’s sly.”
“Tell me about it,” Susannah said, and then did as she was asked.
“Long days and pleasant nights,” said the former sai Cornwell from where he sat amid the squirming, dying snakes. “May the Man Jesus watch over you and all your clan-fam. And may you show sense before it’s too late for sense and stay away from the Dark Tower!”
SIX
They retraced their path to the intersection where they had turned away from the Path of the Beam to go to the Crimson King’s castle, and here Roland stopped to rest for a few minutes.
A little bit of a breeze had gotten up, and the patriotic bunting flapped. She saw it now looked old and faded. The pictures of Nixon, Lodge, Kennedy, and Johnson had been defaced by graffiti which was itself ancient. All the glammer-such ragged glammer as the Crimson King had been able to manage, at any rate-was gone.
Masks off, masks off, she thought tiredly. It was a wonderful party, but now it’s finished… and the Red Death holds sway over all.
She touched the pimple beside her mouth, then looked at the tip of her finger. She expected to see blood or pus or both.
There was neither, and that was a relief.
“How much of it do you believe?” Susannah asked him.
“Pretty much all of it,” Roland replied.
“So he’s up there. In the Tower.”
“Not in it. Trapped outside it.” He smiled. “There’s a big difference.”
“Is there really? And what will you do to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think that if he did get control of your guns, diat he could get back inside the Tower and climb to the top?”
“Yes.” The reply was immediate.
“What will you do about it?”
“Not let him get either of them.” He spoke as if this should have been self-evident, and Susannah supposed it should have been. What she had a way of forgetting was how goddamned literalhe was. About everything.
“You were diinking of trapping Mordred, back at the castle.”
“Yes,” Roland agreed, “but given what we found there-and what we were told-it seemed better to move on. Simpler.
Look.”
He took out the watch and snapped open the lid. They both observed the second-hand racing its solitary course. But at the same speed as before? Susannah didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think so. She looked up at Roland with her eyebrows raised.
“Most of die time it’s still right,” Roland said, “but no longer all of the time. I think that it’s losing at least a second every sixdi or seventh revolution. Perhaps three to six minutes a day, all told.”
“That’s not very much.”
“No,” Roland admitted, putting the watch away, “but it’s a start. Let Mordred do as he will. The Dark Tower lies close beyond the white lands, and I mean to reach it.”
Susannah could understand his eagerness. She only hoped it wouldn’t make him careless. If it did, Mordred Deschain’s youth might no longer matter. If Roland made the right mistake at the wrong moment, she, he, and Oy might never see the Dark Tower at all.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a great fluttering from behind them. Not quite lost within it came a human sound that began as a howl and quickly rose to a shriek. Although distance diminished that cry, the horror and pain in it were all too clear. At last, mercifully, it faded.
“The Crimson King’s Minister of State has entered the clearing,” Roland said.
Susannah looked back toward the castle. She could see its blackish-red ramparts, but nothing else. She was glad she could see nothing else.
Mordred’s a-hungry, she thought. Her heart was beating fast and she thought she had never been so frightened in her whole life-not lying next to Mia as she gave birth, not even in the blackness under Castle Discordia.
Mordred’s a-hungry… but now he’ll be fed.
SEVEN
The old man who had begun life as Austin Cornwell and who would end it as Rando Thoughtful sat at the casde end of the bridge. The rooks waited above him, perhaps sensing that the day’s excitement was not yet done. Thoughtful was warm enough thanks to the pea-coat he was wearing, and he had helped himself to a mouthful of
