“Do you want to try it again?” he asked.

“No,” Susannah said, and sighed. “I takeyour word for it that your watch is keeping perfect time. And that means we’renot close to the Dark Tower. Not yet.”

“Perhaps not close enough to affect thewatch, but closer than I’ve ever been,” Roland said quietly. “Comparativelyspeaking, we’re now almost in its shadow. Believe me, Susannah—I know.”

“But—”

From over their heads came a cawing thatwas both harsh and oddly muffled: Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw!Susannah looked up and saw one of the huge blackbirds—the sort Roland hadcalled Castle Rooks—flying overhead low enough so that they could hearthe labored strokes of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limpstrand of something yellowy-green. To Susannah it looked like a piece of deadseaweed. Only not entirely dead.

She turned to Roland, looked at him withexcited eyes.

He nodded. “Devilgrass. Probably bringingit back to feather his mate’s nest. Certainly not for the babies to eat. Not thatstuff. But devilgrass always goes last when you’re walking into the NowhereLands, and always shows up first when you’re walking back out of them, as weare. As we finally are. Now listen to me, Susannah, I’d have you listen, andI’d have you push that tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would Ihave you waste my time by telling me she’s not there when I can see her dancingthe commala in your eyes.”

Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, asif she would protest. Then she looked away without saying anything. When shelooked back at him again, she could no longer feel the presence of the oneRoland had called “that tiresome bitch.” And Roland must no longer havedetected her presence, because he went on.

“I think it will soon look like we’recoming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to trust what you see—afew buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make for safety orcivilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le CasseRoi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he mayhave left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking tobe done, I want you to let me do it.”

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked.“What are you holding back?”

“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him,a rare earnestness). “It’s only a feeling, Susannah. We’re close to our goalnow, no matter what the watch may say. Close to winning our way to the DarkTower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just one rule with noexceptions: before victory comes temptation. And the greater the victoryto win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”

Susannah shivered and put her arms aroundherself. “All I want is to be warm,” she said. “If nobody offers me a big loadof firewood and a flannel union suit to cry off the Tower, I guess we’ll be allright awhile longer.”

Roland remembered one of Cort’s mostserious maxims—Never speak the worst aloud!—but kept his ownmouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away carefully and thenrose, ready to move on.

But Susannah paused a moment longer. “I’vedreamed of the other one,” she said. There was no need for her to say of whomshe was speaking. “Three nights in a row, scuttering along our backtrail. Doyou think he’s really there?”

“Oh yes,” Roland said. “And I think he’sgot an empty belly.”

“Hungry, Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said, forshe had also heard these words in her dream.

Susannah shivered again.

Seven

The path they walked widened, and thatafternoon the first scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. Itwidened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place whereanother path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Herestood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there wasnothing atop it now. The next day they came to the first building on this sideof Fedic, a slumped wreck with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch.There was a flattened barn out back. With Roland’s help Susannah turned thesign over, and they could make out one word: LIVERY. Below it was the red eyethey had come to know so well.

“I think the track we’ve been following wasonce a coach-road between Castle Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe,” hesaid. “It makes sense.”

They began to pass more buildings, moreintersecting roads. It was the outskirts of a town or village—perhapseven a city that had once spread around the Crimson King’s castle. But unlikeLud, there was very little of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listlessclumps around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. Andthe cold clamped down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing therooks, they tried camping in the remains of a building that was still standing,but both of them heard whispering voices in the shadows. Roland identifiedthese—with a matter-of-factness Susannah found eerie—as the voicesof ghosts of what he called “housies,” and suggested they move back out intothe street.

“I don’t believe they could do harm to us,but they might hurt the little fellow,” Roland said, and stroked Oy, who hadcrept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual manner.

Susannah was more than willing to retreat.The building in which they had tried to camp had a chill that she thought wasworse than physical cold. The things they had heard whispering in there mightbe old, but she thought they were still hungry. And so the three of themhuddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, besideHo Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a fewdegrees. They tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsedbuildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful ofSterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair theyhad used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.

“Why?” Susannah asked as she watched thelast few wisps of smoke dissipate. “Why?”

“Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?”

“No, but I want to know why. Is it too old?Petrified, or something?”

“It won’t burn because it hates us,” Rolandsaid, as if this should have been obvious to her. “This is his place,still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us. But… listen,Susannah. Now that we’re on an actual road, still more paved than not, what doyou say to walking at night again? Will you try it?”

“Sure,” she said. “Anything’s got to bebetter than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got aducking in a waterbarrel.”

So that was what they did—the rest ofthat first night, all the next, and the two after that. She kept thinking, I’mgonna get sick, I can’t go on like this without coming down with something,but she didn’t. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left ofher lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow ofblood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was theconstant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the center of them. The moon hadbegun to fatten once more, and one night she realized that they had beentrekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.

Slowly, a deserted village replaced thefantastic needle-gardens of rock, but Susannah had taken what Roland had saidto heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they could now read theoccasional sign which proclaimed this to be THE KING’S WAY (with the eye, ofcourse; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still onBadlands Avenue.

It was a weirding village, and she couldnot begin to imagine what species of freakish people might once have livedhere. The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed,the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folkseen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses,Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammedtogether under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-leanon the hills that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and thereone had collapsed, and there was an unpleasantly organic look to theseruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards andglass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her fromsome configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in therubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her thinkof the Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.