“Finally,” Roland breathed, thumbing back the trigger. “Finally in my sights.”

8

“That six-shooter will do you no good, as I think you know,” the man on the throne said. “Not against me. Only misfires against me, Roland, old fellow. How’s the family, by the way? I seem to have lost touch with them over the years. I was always such a lousy correspondent. Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, aye, so they should!”

He threw back his head and laughed. Roland pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand. When the hammer fell there was only a dull click.

“Toadjer,” the man on the throne said. “I think you must have gotten some of those wet slugs in there by accident, don’t you? The ones with the flat powder? Good for blocking the sound of the thinny, but not so good for shooting old wizards, are they? Too bad. And your hand, Roland, look at your hand! Short a couple of fingers, by the look. My, this has been hard on you, hasn’t it? Things could get easier, though. You and your friends could have a fine, fruitful life-and, as Jake would say, that is the truth. No more lobstrosities, no more mad trains, no more disquieting-not to mention dangerous-trips to other worlds. All you have to do is give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower.”

“No,” Eddie said.

“No,” Susannah said.

“No,” Jake said.

“No!” Oy said, and added a bark.

The dark man on the green throne continued to smile, unperturbed. “Roland?” he asked. “What about you?” Slowly, he raised the drawstring bag. It looked dusty and old. It hung from the wizard’s fist like a teardrop, and now the thing in its pouch began to pulse with pink light. “Cry off, and they need never see what’s inside this-they need never see the last scene of that sad long-ago play. Cry off. Turn from the Tower and go your way.”

“No,” Roland said. He began to smile, and as his smile broadened, that of the man sitting on the throne began to falter. “You can enchant my guns, those of this world, I reckon,” he said.

“Roland, I don’t know what you’re thinking of, laddie, but I warn you not to-”

“Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten… or Maerlyn… or whoever you call yourself now…”

“Flagg, actually,” the man on the throne said. “And we’ve met before.” He smiled. Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted Flagg’s features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. “In the wreck of Gilead. You and your surviving pals-that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made another-were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake’s world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well.”

“And will again, I reckon,” Roland said. “Unless, that is, I kill you now and put an end to your interference.”

Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in the waistband of his jeans-Jake’s Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps immune to this creature’s enchantments-with his right. And he was fast as he had always been fast, his speed blinding.

The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and the glass ball-once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland himself-slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he had made a clean draw. He didn’t, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the quarter-second he had needed. He pumped three shots into the billowing smoke, then ran forward, oblivious of the shouts of the others.

He waved the smoke aside with his hands. His shots had shattered the back of the throne into thick green slabs of glass, but the man-shaped creature which had called itself Flagg was gone. Roland found himself already beginning to wonder if he-or it had been there in the first place.

The ball was still there, however, unharmed and glowing the same enticing pink he remembered from so long ago-from Mejis, when he had been young and in love. This survivor of Maerlyn’s Rainbow had rolled almost to the edge of the throne’s seat; two more inches and it would have plunged over and shattered on the floor. Yet it had not; still it remained, this bewitched thing Susan Delgado had first glimpsed through the window of Rhea’s hut, under the light of the Kissing Moon.

Roland picked it up-how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his palm, even after all these years-and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. “You always did have a charmed life,” he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as he had seen her in this ball-her ancient, laughing eyes. He thought of the flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.

Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly… the tears of all those you’ve put to ruin.

And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn’t believe they actually needed it. He thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to Mid-World… and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.

But you can’t go yet, gunslinger. Not until you’ve finished your story, told the last scene.

Whose voice was that? Vannay’s? No. Cort’s? No. Nor was it the voice of his father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore’s bed. That was the hardest voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.

This time what he heard was the voice of ka-ka like a wind. He had told so much of that awful fourteenth year… but he hadn’t finished the tale. As with Detta Walker and the Blue Lady’s forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden thing. The question wasn’t, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find their way out of the Green Palace and recover the Path of the Beam; the question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he had looked into the wizard’s glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them-

No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.

Yes. He knew better.

“Come,” he said, turning to them.

They drew slowly around him, their eyes wide and filling with the ball’s flashing pink light. Already they were half-hypnotized by it, even Oy.

“We are ka-tet,” Roland said, holding the ball toward them. “We are one from many. I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after. See it once and for all; see it very well.”

They looked. The ball, cupped in Roland’s upraised hands, began to pulse faster. It gathered them in and swept them away. Caught and whirled in the grip of that pink storm, they flew over the Wizard’s Rainbow to the Gilead that had been.