at Lud, which was Blaine’s base of operations as well as his terminating point.
“YOU ARE LOOKING AT OUR ROUTE OF TRAVEL. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE SOME TWISTS AND TURNS ALONG THE BUNNY-TRAIL, YOU WILL NOTE THAT OUR COURSE KEEPS FIRMLY TO THE SOUTHWEST—ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. THE TOTAL DISTANCE IS JUST OVER EIGHT THOUSAND WHEELS—OR SEVEN THOUSAND MILES, IF YOU PREFER THAT UNIT OF MEASURE. IT WAS ONCE MUCH LESS, BUT THAT WAS BEFORE ALL TEMPORAL SYNAPSES BEGAN TO MELT DOWN.”
“What do you mean, temporal synapses?” Susannah asked.
Blaine laughed his nasty laugh . . . but did not answer her question.
“AT MY TOP SPEED, WE WILL REACH THE TERMINATING POINT OF MY RUN IN EIGHT HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.”
“Eight hundred-plus miles an hour over the ground,” Susannah said. Her voice was soft with awe. “Jesus-God.”
“I AM, OF COURSE, MAKING THE ASSUMPTION THAT ALL TRACKAGE ALONG MY ROUTE REMAINS INTACT. IT HAS BEEN NINE YEARS AND FIVE MONTHS SINCE I’VE BOTHERED TO MAKE THE RUN, SO I CAN’T SAY FOR SURE.”
Ahead, the wall at the southeastern edge of the city was drawing closer. It was high and thick and eroded to rubble at the top. It also appeared to be lined with skeletons—thousands upon thousands of dead Luddites. The notch toward which Blaine was slowly moving appeared to be at least two hundred feet deep, and here the trestle which bore the track was very dark, as if someone had tried to burn it or blow it up.
“What happens if we come to a place where the track is gone?” Eddie asked. He realized he kept raising his voice to talk to Blaine, as if he were speaking to somebody on the telephone and had a bad connection.
“AT EIGHT HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR?” Blaine sounded amused. “SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE, CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.”
“Come on!” Eddie said. “Don’t tell me a machine as sophisticated as you can’t monitor your own trackage for breaks.”
“WELL, I COULD HAVE,” Blaine agreed, “BUT—AW, SHUCKS!— I BLEW THOSE CIRCUITS OUT WHEN WE STARTED TO MOVE.”
Eddie’s face was a picture of astonishment. “Why?”
“IT’S QUITE A BIT MORE EXCITING THIS WAY, DON’T YOU THINK?”
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake exchanged thunderstruck looks. Roland, apparently not surprised at all, sat placidly in his chair with his hands folded in his lap, looking down as they passed thirty feet above the wretched hovels and demolished buildings which infested this side of the city.
“LOOK CLOSELY AS WE LEAVE THE CITY, AND MARK WHAT YOU SEE,” Blaine told them. “MARK IT VERY WELL.”
The invisible Barony Coach bore them toward the notch in the wall. They passed through, and as they came out the other side, Eddie and Susannah screamed in unison. Jake took one look and clapped his hands over his eyes. Oy began to bark wildly.
Roland stared down, eyes wide, lips set in a bloodless line like a scar. Understanding filled him like bright white light.
Beyond the Great Wall of Lud, the real waste lands began.
7
THE MONO HAD BEEN descending as they approached the notch in the wall, putting them not more than thirty feet above the ground. That made the shock greater . . . for when they emerged on the other side, they were skimming along at a horrifying height—eight hundred feet, perhaps a thousand.
Roland looked back over his shoulder at the wall, which was now receding behind them. It had seemed very high as they approached it, but from this perspective it seemed puny indeed—a splintered fingernail of stone clinging to the edge of a vast, sterile headland. Granite cliffs, wet with rain, plunged into what seemed at first glance to be an endless abyss. Directly below the wall, the rock was lined with large circular holes like empty eyesockets. Black water and tendrils of purple mist emerged from these in brackish, sludgy streams and spread downward over the granite in stinking, overlapping fans that looked almost as old as the rock itself. That must be where all the city’s waste-product goes, the gunslinger thought. Over the edge and into the pit.
Except it wasn’t a pit; it was a sunken plain. It was as if the land beyond the city had lain on top of a titanic, flat-roofed elevator, and at some point in the dim, unrecorded past the elevator had gone down, taking a huge chunk of the world with it. Blaine’s single track, centered on its narrow trestle, soaring above this fallen land and below the rain-swollen clouds, seemed to float in empty