the gunslinger did best when he thought least. His arms were free
in a moment; so was his left leg. His right caught at the ankle,
however, twisting, hanging him up with his shoulders on the bed
and his leg in the air.
Coquina turned on him, hissing like a cat. Her lips pulled back
from teeth that were needle-sharp. She rushed at him, her fingers
splayed. The nails at the ends of them looked sharp and ragged.
Roland clasped the medallion and shoved it out towards her. She
recoiled from it, still hissing, and whirled back to Sister Jenna in a
flare of white skirt. 'I'll do for ye, ye interfering trull!' she cried in a
low, harsh voice.
Roland struggled to free his leg and couldn't. It was firmly caught,
the shitting sling actually wrapped around the ankle somehow, like
a noose.
Jenna raised her hands, and he saw he had been right: it was his
revolvers she had brought, holstered and hanging from the two old
gunbelts he had worn out of Gilead after the last burning.
'Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!'
Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head
as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back
her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with a
sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger's head like a spike.
The Dark Bells. The sigil of their ka-tet. What
The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that
was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet
about them now. Sister Coquina's hands faltered on their way to
Jenna's throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked
her eyes.
'No,' Coquina whispered. 'You can't!'
'I have,' Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the
legs of the bearded man, he'd observed a battalion. What he saw
coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had
they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than
all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody
history of World.
Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was
what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his
dream for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds.
These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle,
like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.
Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her
bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared to the
sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.
Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the be
Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland's
beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard p
Roland slid his leg free.
'Come,' she said. 'I've started them, but staying them could be a
different thing.'
Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The
