feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors-each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard's glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
"The room behind that window is where I would go," Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. "That is where my quest ends." His voice was low and awestruck. "This picture wasn't done from any dream, Susannah. It's as if I could touch the texture of every brick. Do you agree?"
"Yes." It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre's wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
"The person who painted it must have been there," Roland mused. "Must have set up his easel in the very roses."
"Patrick Danville," she said. "It's the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?"
"I see it very well."
"And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?"
"Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead-"
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
"Is that the Crimson King?" she asked, pointing. She didn't quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
"Yes," Roland said. "Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted."
"Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him.
Give him the old raspberry on the way by." And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.
This time the gunslinger's smile was faint and distracted. "I
don't think it will be so easy," he said.
Susannah sighed. "Actually I don't, either."
They had what they'd come for-quite a bit more, in fact-but they still found it hard to leave Sayre's office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn't want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre's desk and roll it up.
Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.
In the end, maybe it's just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
"We'll leave it," he said. "Soon enough-in months, maybe even weeks-we'll have the real thing to look at."
"Do you say so?" she asked faintly. "Roland, do you really say so?"
"I do."
"All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn't you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn't that how a writer would want it?"
"That doesn't mean he can do it," Roland said. "Stephen King's not the water, Susannah-he's only the pipe the water runs through."
"I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure I entirely believe it."
Roland wasn't completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the batde of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
"I started lonejohn, but that's not