this water?"
"With pleasure," said she, and took up the plastic cup.
"Drink, bondswoman."
She drank, her grave dark eyes never leaving his. She thought of the voices she'd heard in her dream of the Oxford jail-cell: this one dead, that one dead, ('other one dead; O Discordia, and the shadows grow deeper.
Roland kissed her mouth. "I love you, Susannah."
"I love you, too."
The gunslinger turned to Jake. "Do you call me dinh?"
"Yes," Jake said. There was no question about his pallor; even his lips were ashy. "Ka-shume means death, doesn't it?
Which one of us will it be?"
"I know not," Roland said, "and the shadow may yet lift from us, for the wheel's still in spin. Did you not feel ka-shume when you and Callahan went into the place of the vampires?"
"Yes."
"Ka-shume for both?"
"Yes."
"Yet here you are. Our ka-tet is strong, and has survived many dangers. It may survive this one, too."
"But I feel-"
"Yes," Roland said. His voice was kind, but that awful look was in his eyes. The look that was beyond mere sadness, the one that said this would be whatever it was, but the Tower was beyond, the Dark Tower was beyond and it was there that he dwelt, heart and soul, ka and khef. 'Yes, I feel it, too. So do we all. Which is why we take water, which is to say fellowship, one with the other. Will you share khef with me, and share this water?"
"Yes."
"Drink, bondsman."
Jake did. Then, before Roland could kiss him, he dropped the cup, flung his arms about the gunslinger's neck, and whispered fiercely into his ear: "Roland, I love you."
"I love you, too," he said, and released him. Outside, the wind gusted again. Jake waited for something to howl-perhaps in triumph-but nothing did.
Smiling, Roland turned to the billy-bumbler.
"Oy of Mid-World, do you call me dinh?"
"DinhF'Oysaid.
"Will you share khef with me, and this water?"
"Khef! Wat'!"
"Drink, bondsman."
Oy inserted his snout into his plastic cup-an act of some delicacy-and lapped until the water was gone. Then he looked up expectantly. There were beads of Perrier on his whiskers.
"Oy, I love you," Roland said, and leaned his face within range of the bumbler's sharp teeth. Oy licked his cheek a single time, then poked his snout back into t h e glass, hoping for a missed drop or two.
Roland put out his hands. Jake took one and Susannah the other. Soon they were all linked. Like drunks at the end of an A.A. meeting, Eddie thought.
"We are ka-tet," Roland said. "We are one from many. We have shared our water as we have shared our lives and our quest. If one should fall, that one will not be lost, for we are one and will not forget, even in death."
They held hands a moment longer. Roland was the first to let go.
"What's your plan?" Susannah asked him. She didn't call him sugar; never called him that or any other endearment ever again, so far as Jake was aware. "Will you tell us?"
Roland nodded toward the Wollensak tape recorder, still sitting on the barrel. "Perhaps we should listen to that first," he said. "I do have a plan of sorts, but what Brautigan has to say might help with some of the details."
FIVE
Night in Thunderclap is the very definition of darkness: no moon, no stars. Yet if we were to stand outside the cave where Roland and his tet have just shared khef and will now listen to the tapes Ted Brautigan has left them, we'd see two red coals floating in that wind-driven darkness. If we were to climb the path up the side of Steek-Tete toward those floating coals (a dangerous proposition in the dark), we'd eventually come upon a seven-legged spider now crouched over the queerly deflated body of a mutie coyote. This can-toi-tete was a literally misbegotten thing in life, with the stub of a fifth leg jutting from its chest and ajellylike mass of flesh hanging down between its rear legs like a deformed udder, but its flesh nourishes Mordred, and its blood-taken in a series of long, steaming gulps-is as sweet as a dessert wine. There are, in truth, all sorts of things to eat over here. Mordred has no friends to lift him from place to place via the seven-league boots of teleportation, but he found his journey from Thunderclap Station to Steek-Tete far from arduous.
He has overheard enough to be sure of what his father is planning: a surprise attack on the facility below. They're badly outnumbered, but Roland's band