'Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland - what good is it? 'Tis done,
the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could.' She
looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland
saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. 'I have supped with them.
There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could
help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was
in it.'
Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat... a
woman, too. He nodded.
'I'd go no further down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it
be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing
me back to them, but she was wrong.' She looked at him shyly and
fearfully ... but met his eyes. 'I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland
of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me.'
`you're welcome to your share of my way,' he said. 'And I am `
Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he
could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of
them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley
in which the Little Sisters had practised their glamours.
`It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.'
Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its
bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a
corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging
face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted
dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors
gleamed.
Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled ...
but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.
'Stand clear,' Jenna said. 'Or I'll bring the can tam on ye.'
'No,' Sister Mary said, stepping closer, 'ye won't. They'll not stray
so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned
bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come.'
Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The
Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic
tone-quality that had gone through Roland's head like a spike. And
the doctor-bugs
what Jenna had called the can tam - did not come.
Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself
hadn't been completely sure they wouldn't come until the
experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them,
seeming to float above the ground. Her eyes flicked towards him.
'And put that away,' she said.
Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand.
He had no memory of drawing it.
'Unless it's been blessed or dipped in some sect's holy wet - blood,
water, semen - it can't harm such as I, gunslinger. For I am more
shade than substance ... yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all
that.'
She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her
