“New York isn’t home for us anymore,” Susannah said. She looked very small yet very fearless as she sat in her new wheelchair at the foot of the enormous, pulsing throne. “No more than Gilead is home for Roland. Take us back to the Path of the Beam. That’s where we want to go, because that’s our way home. Only way home we got.”
“GO AWAY!” cried the voice from the pipes. “GO AWAY AND COME BACK TOMORROW! WE’ll DISCUSS THE BEAM THEN! FIDDLE-DE-DEE, SAID SCARLETT, WE’ll TALK ABOUT THE BEAM TOMORROW, FOR TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY!”
“No,” Eddie said. “We’ll talk about it now.”
“DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!” the voice cried, and the pipes flashed furiously with each word. Susannah was sure this was supposed to be scary, but she found it almost amusing, instead. It was like watching a salesman demonstrate a child’s toy. Hey, kids! When you talk, the pipes flash bright colors! Try it and see!
“Sugar, you best listen, now,” Susannah said. “What you don’t want to do is arouse the wrath of folks with guns. Especially when you be livin in a glass house.”
“I SAID COME BACK TOMORROW!”
Red smoke once more began to boil out of the slots in the arms of the throne. It was thicker now. The shape which had been Blaine’s route-map melted apart and joined it. The smoke formed a face, this time. It was narrow and hard and watchful, framed by long hair.
It’s the man Roland shot in the desert, Susannah thought wonderingly. It’s that man Jonas. I know it is.
Now Oz spoke in a slightly trembling voice: “DO YOU PRESUME TO THREATEN THE GREAT OZ?” The lips of the huge, smoky face hovering over the throne’s seat parted in a snarl of mingled menace and contempt. “YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES! OH, YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES!”
Eddie, who knew smoke and mirrors when he saw them, had glanced in another direction. His eyes widened and he gripped Susannah’s arm above the elbow. “Look,” he whispered. “Christ, Suze, look at Oy!”
The billy-bumbler had no interest in smoke-ghosts, whether they were monorail route-maps, dead Coffin Hunters, or just Hollywood special effects of the pre-World War II variety. He had seen (or smelled) something that was more interesting.
Susannah grabbed Jake, turned him, and pointed at the bumbler. She saw the boy’s eyes widen with understanding a moment before Oy reached the small alcove in the left wall. It was screened from the main chamber by a green curtain which matched the glass walls. Oy stretched his long neck forward, caught the curtain’s fabric in his teeth, and yanked it back.
6
Behind the curtain red and green lights flashed; cylinders spun inside glass boxes; needles moved back and forth inside long rows of lighted dials. Yet Jake barely noticed these things. It was the man who took all his attention, the one sitting at the console, his back to them. His filthy hair, streaked with dirt and blood, hung to his shoulders in matted clumps. He was wearing some sort of headset, and was speaking into a tiny mike which hung in front of his mouth. His back was to them, and at first he had no idea that Oy had smelled him out and uncovered his hiding place.
“GO!” thundered the voice from the pipes… except now Jake saw where it was really coming from. “COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU LIKE, BUT GO NOW! I WARN YOU!”
“It is Jonas, Roland must not have killed him after all,” Eddie whispered, but Jake knew better. He had recognized the voice. Even distorted by the amplification of the colored pipes, he had recognized the voice. How could he have ever believed it to be the voice of Blaine?
“I WARN YOU, IF YOU REFUSE-”
Oy barked, a sharp and somehow forbidding sound. The man in the equipment alcove began to turn.
Tell me, cully, Jake remembered this voice saying before its owner had discovered the dubious attractions of amplification. Tell me all you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Tell me and I’ll give you a drink.
It wasn’t Jonas, and it wasn’t the Wizard of anything. It was David Quick’s grandson. It was the Tick-Tock Man.
7
Jake stared at him, horrified. The coiled, dangerous creature who had lived beneath Lud with his mates-Gasher and Hoots and Brandon and Tilly-was gone. This might have been that monster’s ruined father… or grandfather. His left eye-the one Oy had punctured with his claws- bulged white and misshapen, partly in its socket and partly on his unshaven cheek. The right side of his head looked half-scalped, the skull showing through in a long, triangular strip. Jake had a distant, panic-darkened memory of a flap of skin falling over the side of Tick-Tock’s face, but he had been on the edge of hysteria by that point… and was again now.
Oy had also recognized the man who had tried to kill him and was barking hysterically, head down, teeth bared, back bowed. Tick-Tock stared at him with wide, stunned eyes.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said a voice from behind them, and then tittered. “My friend Andrew is having another in a long series of bad days. Poor boy. I suppose I was wrong to bring him out of Lud, but he just looked so lost…” The owner of the voice tittered again.
Jake swung around and saw that there was now a man sitting in the middle of the great throne, with his legs casually crossed in front of him. He was wearing jeans, a dark jacket that belted at the waist, and old, rundown cowboy boots. On his jacket was a button that showed a pig’s head with a bullethole between the eyes. In his lap this newcomer held a drawstring bag. He rose, standing in the seat of the throne like a child in daddy’s chair, and the smile dropped away from his face like loose skin. Now his eyes blazed, and his lips parted over vast, hungry teeth.
“Get them, Andrew! Get them! Kill them! Every sister-fucking one of them!”
“My life for you!” the man in the alcove screamed, and for the first time Jake saw the machine-gun propped in the comer. Tick-Tock sprang for it and snatched it up. “My life for you!”
He turned, and Oy was on him once again, leaping forward and upward, sinking his teeth deep into Tick-Tock’s left thigh, just below the crotch.
Eddie and Susannah drew in unison, each raising one of Roland’s big guns. They fired in concert, not even the smallest overlap in the sound of their shots. One of them tore off the top of Tick-Tock’s miserable head, buried itself in the equipment, and created a loud but mercifully brief snarl of feedback. The other took him in the throat.
He staggered forward one step, then two. Oy dropped to the floor and backed away from him, snarling. A third step took Tick-Tock out into the throneroom proper. He raised his arms toward Jake, and the boy could read Ticky’s hatred in his remaining green eye; the boy thought he could hear the man’s last, hateful thought: Oh, you fucking little squint-
Then Tick-Tock collapsed forward, as he had collapsed in the Cradle of the Grays… only this time he would rise no more.
“Thus fell Lord Perth, and the earth did shake with that thunder,” said the man on the throne.
Except he’s not a man, Jake thought. Not a man at all. We’ve found the Wizard at last, I think. And I’m pretty sure I know what’s in the bag he has.
“Marten,” Roland said. He held out his left hand, the one which was still whole. “Marten Broadcloak. After all these years. After all these centuries.”
“Want this, Roland?”
Eddie put the gun he had used to kill the Tick-Tock Man in Roland’s hand. A tendril of blue smoke was still rising from the barrel. Roland looked at the old revolver as if he had never seen it before, then slowly lifted it and pointed it at the grinning, rosy-cheeked figure sitting cross-legged on the Green Palace’s throne.