Wolves of the Calla

'There ain't no gunslingers !' Overholser roared.

Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. 'Pere Callahan, God's grace on you—'

'—and you, Jorge.'

'—but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty Wolves?'

'Hear him, he speaks sense!' Eben Took, the storekeeper, called out.

'And why would they fight for us?' Estrada continued. 'We make it from year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few hot meals? And what man agrees to the for his dinner?'

'Hear him, hear him !' Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.

The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: 'I have books in the rectory. Half a dozen.'

Although most of them knew this, the thought of books— all that paper—still provoked a general sigh of wonder.

'According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward. Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld.'

'The Eld! The Eld!' the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers pointed. Hook em horns , the Old Fella thought. Go, Texas . He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the smile that rose on his lips.

'Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?' Telford asked in a gendy mocking voice. 'Surely you're too old for such tales, Pere.'

'Not hardcases,' Callahan said patiendy, 'gunslingers .'

'How can three men stand against the Wolves, Pere?' Tian heard himself ask.

According to Andy, one of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to, just the same). 'That's a question for their dinh, Tian. We'll ask him. And they wouldn't just be fighting for their suppers, you know. Not at all.'

'What else, then?' Bucky Javier asked.

Callahan thought they would want the thing that lay beneath the floorboards of his church. And that was good, because that thing had awakened. The Old Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem's Lot in another world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn't rid of it soon, it would kill him.

Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.

'In time, Mr. Javier,' Callahan said. 'All in good time, sai.'

Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along the benches from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.

Gunslingers.

Gunslingers to the west, come out of Mid-World.

And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld's last deadly children, moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a wind.

'Time to be men,' Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without compassion. 'Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true.'

Part One ToDash

Chapter I: The Face on the Water

ONE

Time is a face on the water . This was a proverb from the long-ago, in far-off Mejis. Eddie Dean had never been there.

Except he had, in a way. Roland had carried all four of his companions—Eddie, Susannah, Jake, Oy—to Mejis one night, storying long as they camped on 1-70, the Kansas Turnpike in a Kansas that never was. That night he had told them the story of Susan Delgado, his first love. Perhaps his only love. And how he had lost her.

The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as the world wound down like the mainspring in an ancient watch. Roland had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might be southwest tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if time had gotten lost.

They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the Mono. Blaine is a pain , Jake had said on several occasions, but he—or it—turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the Mono had been utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic ('Somethin you're just naturally good at, sugar,' Susannah told him), and they had detrained in a Topeka which wasn't quite part of the world from which Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had come. Which was good, really, because this world—one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team was called The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese car-maker was Takuro rather than Honda— had been overwhelmed by some sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone. So stick that in your Takuro Spirit and drive it , Eddie thought.

The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this. During much of it he'd been scared shitless— he guessed all of them had been, except maybe for Roland—but yes, it had seemed real and clear. He'd not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even when they'd been walking up 1-70 with bullets in their ears, looking at the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a thinny.

But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake's old friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland's old friend (Flagg… or Marten… or—just perhaps—Maerlyn), time had changed.

Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball … saw Roland kill his mother by mistake… and when we came back …

Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing perhaps thirty miles from the Green Palace. They had still been able to see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world. Someone—or some force—had carried them over or through the thinny and back to the Path of the Beam. Whoever or whatever it had been, it had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch, complete with Nozz- A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of Keebler cookies.