For a moment he thought Eddie was going to do just that, and it would all end right here, on this high ridge, beneath a cloudless summer sky with the spires of the city glimmering on the horizon like blue ghosts. Then Eddie’s cheek began to twitch. The firm line of his lips softened and began to tremble. His hand fell from the sandalwood butt of Roland’s gun. His chest hitched once… twice… three times. His mouth opened and all his despair and terror came out in one groaning cry as he blundered toward the gunslinger.

“I’m afraid, you numb fuck! Don’t you understand that? Roland, I’m afraid!”

His feet tangled together, He fell forward. Roland caught him and held him close, smelling the sweat and dirt on his skin, smelling his tears and terror.

The gunslinger embraced him for a moment, then turned him toward Susannah. Eddie dropped to his knees beside her chair, his head hanging wearily. She put a hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head against her thigh, and said bitterly to Roland, “Sometimes I hate you, big white man.”

Roland placed the heels of his hands against his forehead and pressed hard. “Sometimes I hate myself.”

“Don’t ever stop you, though, do it?”

Roland didn’t reply. He looked at Eddie, who lay with his cheek pressed against Susannah’s thigh and his eyes tightly shut. His face was a study in misery. Roland fought away the dragging weariness that made him want to leave the rest of this charming discussion for another day. If Eddie was right, there was no other day. Jake was almost ready to make his move. Eddie had been chosen to midwife the boy into this world. If he wasn’t prepared to do that, Jake would die at the point of entry, as surely as an infant must strangle if the mother-root is tangled about its neck when the contractions begin,

“Stand up, Eddie.”

For a moment he thought Eddie would simply go on crouching there and hiding his face against the woman’s leg. If so, everything was lost… and that was ka, too. Then, slowly, Eddie got to his feet. He stood there with everything-hands, shoulders, head, hair-hanging, not good, but he was up, and that was a start.

“Look at me.”

Susannah stirred uneasily, but this time she said nothing.

Slowly, Eddie raised his head and brushed the hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand.

“This is for you. I was wrong to take it at all, no matter how deep my pain.” Roland curled his hand around the rawhide strip and yanked, snapping it. He held the key out to Eddie. Eddie reached for it like a man in a dream, but Roland did not immediately open his hand. “Will you try to do what needs to be done?”

“Yes.” His voice was almost inaudible.

“Do you have something to tell me?”

“I’m sorry I’m afraid.” There was something terrible in Eddie’s voice, something which hurt Roland’s heart, and he supposed, he knew what it was: here was the last of Eddie’s childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them. It could not be seen, but Roland could hear its weakening cries. He tried to make himself deaf to them.

Something else I’ve done in the name of the Tower. My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a longtime drunkard’s bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay?

“I don’t want your apology, least of all for being afraid,” he said.

“Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on our hocks.”

“What do you want, then?” Eddie cried. “You’ve taken everything else - everything I have to give! No, not even that, because in the end, I gave it to you! So what else do you want from me?”

Roland held the key which was their half of Jake Chambers’s salvation locked in his fist and said nothing. His eyes held Eddie’s, and the sun shone on the green expanse of plain and the blue-gray reach of the Send River, and somewhere in the distance the crow hailed again across the golden leagues of this fading summer afternoon.

After a while, understanding began to dawn in Eddie Dean’s eyes.

Roland nodded.

“I have forgotten the face…” Eddie paused. Dipped his head. Swallowed. Looked up at the gunslinger once more. The thing which had been dying among them had moved on now - Roland knew it. That thing was gone. Just like that. Here, on this sunny wind-swept ridge at the edge of everything, it had gone forever. “I have forgotten the face of my father, gunslinger… and I cry your pardon.”

Roland opened his hand and returned the small burden of the key to him who ka had decreed must carry it. “Speak not so, gunslinger,” he said in the High Speech. “Your father sees you very well… loves you very well… and so do I.”

Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his face. “Let’s go,” he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which stretched beyond.

16

JAKE WALKED SLOWLY ALONG Castle Avenue, past pizza shops and bars and bodegas where old women with suspicious faces poked the potatoes and squeezed the tomatoes. The straps of his pack had chafed the skin beneath his arms, and his feet hurt. He passed beneath a digital thermometer which announced it was eighty-five. It felt more like a hundred and five to Jake.

Up ahead, a police car turned onto the Avenue. Jake at once became extremely interested in a display of gardening supplies in the window of a hardware store. He watched the reflection of the blue-and-white pass in the window and didn’t move until it was gone.

Hey, Jake, old buddy-where, exactly, are you going?

He hadn’t the slightest idea. He felt positive that the boy he was looking for-the boy in the green bandanna and the yellow T-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN MID-WORLD-was somewhere close by, but so what? To Jake he was still nothing but a needle hiding in the haystack which was Brooklyn.

He passed an alley which had been decorated with a tangle of spray-painted graffiti. Mostly they were names-EL TIANTE 91, SPEEDY GONZALES, MOTORVAN MIKE-but a few mottos and words to the wise had been dropped in here and there, and Jake’s eyes fixed on two of these.

had been written across the bricks in spray-paint which had weathered to the same dusky-pink shade of the rose which grew in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli had once stood. Below it, in a blue so dark it was almost black, someone had spray-painted this oddity:

What does that mean? Jake wondered. He didn’t know-something from the Bible, maybe-but it held like the eye of a snake is reputed to hold a bird. At last he walked on, slowly and thoughtfully. It was almost two-thirty, and his shadow was beginning to grow longer.

Just ahead, he saw an old man walking down the street, keeping to the shade as much as possible and leaning on a gnarled cane. Behind the thick glasses he wore, his brown eyes swam like oversized eggs.

“I cry your pardon, sir,” Jake said without thinking or even really hearing himself.

The old man turned to look at him, blinking in surprise and fear. “Liff me alone, boy,” he said. He raised his walking-stick and brandished it clumsily in Jake’s direction.

“Would you know if there’s a place called Markey Academy anyplace around here, sir?” This was utter desperation, but it was the only thing he could think to ask.

The old man slowly lowered his stick-it was the sir that had done it. He looked at Jake with the slightly lunatic interest of the old and almost senile. “How come you not in school, boy?”

Jake smiled wearily. This one was getting very old. “Finals Week. I came down here to look up an old friend of mine who goes to Markey Academy, that’s all. Sorry to have bothered you.”