powdery earth.
Roland shook the bells again.
A shiver ran through them in a subtle wave, and then they began
form a shape. They hesitated as if unsure of how to go on,
regrouped, began again. What they eventually made on the
whiteness of the sand there between the blowing fluffs of lilac-
coloured sage was one of Great Letters: the letter C.
Except it wasn't really a letter, the gunslinger saw; it was a curl.
They began to sing, and to Roland it sounded as if they were
singing his name.
The bells fell from his unnerved hand, and when they struck
ground and chimed there, the mass of bugs broke apart, running
every direction. He thought of calling them back - ringing the bell
again might do that - but to what purpose? To what end?
Ask me not, Roland. 'Tis done, the bridge burned.
Yet she had come to him one last time, imposing her will over
thousand various parts that should have lost the ability to think
when the whole lost its cohesion . . . and yet she had thought,
somehow enough to make that shape. How much effort might that
have taken?
They fanned wider and wider, some disappearing into the sage,
some trundling up the sides of rock overhang, pouring into the
cracks where they would, mayhap, wait out the heat of the day.
They were gone. She was gone.
Roland sat down on the ground and put his hands over his face. He
thought he might weep, but in time the urge passed; when he raised
his head again, his eyes were as dry as the desert he would
eventually come to, still following the trail of Walter, the man in
black.
If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing,
not theirs.
He knew a little about damnation himself ... and he had an idea that
the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
She had brought him the purse with his tobacco in it. He rolled a
cigarette and smoked it hunkered over his knees. He smoked it
down to a glowing roach, looking at her empty clothes the while,
remembering the steady gaze of her dark eyes. Remembering the
scorch-marks on her fingers from the chain of the medallion. Yet
she had picked it up, because she had known he would want it; had
dared that pain, and Roland now wore both around his neck.
When the sun was fully up, the gunslinger moved on west. He
would find another horse eventually, or a mule, but for now he was
content to walk. All that day he was haunted by a ringing, singing
sound in his ears, like bells. Several times he stopped and looked
around, sure he would see a dark following shape flowing over the
ground, chasing after as the shadows of our best and worst
memories chase after, but no shape was ever there. He was alone in
the low hill country west of Eluria.
Quite alone.
The Night
