Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss.
“What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice.
“I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.”
Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.
Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.
“Is it fighting?” Jake asked.
Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.
He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and—of course—the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.
“Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.
Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang—clearly an explosion of some kind. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.
Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.
Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”
“Because of the train?”
Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.”
Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don’t know much about ka yet—it’s the sort of subject men study all their lives.”
“I don’t know if it’s ka or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison.”
“How do you know these things?”
“I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”
“All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpowder. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”
“Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.
8
LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road—now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone—began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had been broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal.
“Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?”
Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.
“Then why?”
“Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.
“You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.
Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No idea,” he said.