claws splayed against the flesh of his chest and belly like small sharp knives. Then they withdrew and Oy only peered out of Roland’s shirt with his bright eyes, panting like a steam engine. The gunslinger could feel the rapid beat of Oy’s heart against his own. He pulled the rawhide lace from the eyelets in his shirt and found another, longer, lace in his purse.
“I’m going to leash you. I don’t like it and you’re going to like it even less, but it’s going to be very dark down there.”
He tied the two lengths of rawhide together and formed one end into a wide loop which he slipped over Oy’s head. He expected Oy to bare his teeth again, perhaps even to nip him, but Oy didn’t. He only looked up at Roland with his gold-ringed eyes and barked “Ake!” again in his impatient voice.
Roland put the loose end of his makeshift leash in his mouth, then sat down on the edge of the sewer shaft . . . if that was what it was. He felt for the top rung of the ladder and found it. He descended slowly and carefully, more aware than ever that he was missing half a hand and that the steel rungs were slimy with oil and some thicker stuff that was probably moss. Oy was a heavy, warm weight between his shirt and belly, panting steadily and harshly. The gold rings in his eyes gleamed like medallions in the dim light.
At last, the gunslinger’s groping foot splashed into the water at the bottom of the shaft. He glanced up briefly at the coin of white light far above him. This is where it starts getting hard, he thought. The tunnel was warm and dank and smelled like an ancient charnel house. Somewhere nearby, water was dripping hollowly and monotonously. Farther off, Roland could hear the rumble of machinery. He lifted a very grateful Oy out of his shirt and set him down in the shallow water running sluggishly along the sewer tunnel.
“Now it’s all up to you,” he murmured in the bumbler’s ear. “To Jake, Oy. To Jake!”
“Ake!” the bumbler barked, and splashed rapidly off into the darkness, swinging his head from side to side at the end of his long neck like a pendulum. Roland followed with the end of the rawhide leash wrapped around his diminished right hand.
24
THE CRADLE—IT WAS easily big enough to have acquired proper-noun status in their minds—stood in the center of a square five times larger than the one where they had come upon the blasted statue, and when she got a really good look at it, Susannah realized how old and gray and fundamentally grungy the rest of Lud really was. The Cradle was so clean it almost hurt her eyes. No vines overgrew its sides; no graffiti daubed its blinding white walls and steps and columns. The yellow plains dust which had coated everything else was absent here. As they drew closer, Susannah saw why: streams of water coursed endlessly down the sides of the Cradle, issuing from nozzles hidden in the shadows of the copper-sheathed eaves. Interval sprays created by other hidden nozzles washed the steps, turning them into off-and-on waterfalls.
“Wow,” Eddie said. “It makes Grand Central look like a Greyhound station in Buttfuck, Nebraska.”
“What a poet you are, dear,” Susannah said dryly.
The steps surrounded the entire building and rose to a great open lobby. There were no obscuring mats of vegetation here, but Eddie and Susannah found they still couldn’t get a good look inside; the shadows thrown by the overhanging roof were too deep. The Totems of the Beam marched all the way around the building, two by two, but the corners were reserved for creatures Susannah fervently hoped never to meet outside of the occasional nightmare—hideous stone dragons with scaly bodies, clutching, claw-tipped hands, and nasty peering eyes.
Eddie touched her shoulder and pointed higher. Susannah looked . . . and felt her breath come to a stop in her throat. Standing astride the peak of the roof, far above The Totems of the Beam and the dragonish gargoyles, as if given dominion over them, was a golden warrior at least sixty feet high. A battered cowboy hat was shoved back to reveal his lined and careworn brow; a bandanna hung askew on his upper chest, as if it had just been pulled down after serving long, hard duty as a dust-muffle. In one upraised fist he held a revolver; in