but we have an idea it was your victory not just in the Calla but further on, at Algul Siento. If so, it meant the end of his scheme to bring down the Tower from afar, by breaking the Beams."
"Of course that's what it was," Fimalo said quiedy, and once more both Stephen Kings on the bridge turned to look at him.
"It could have been nothing else. What brought him to the brink of madness in die first place were two conflicting compulsions in his mind: to bring the Tower down, and to get diere before you could get diere, Roland, and mount to die top.
To destroy it... or to rule it. I'm not sure he has ever cared overmuch about understandingit-just about beating you to something you want, and then snatching it away from you. About such things he'd care much."
"It'd no doubt please you to know how he raved about you, and cursed your name in the weeks before he smashed his precious playthings," said Fumalo. "How he came to fear you, insofar as he can fear."
"Not this one," Feemalo contradicted, and rather glumly,
Susannah thought. "It wouldn't please this one much at all. He wins with no better grace than he loses."
Fimalo said: "When the Red King saw that the Algul would fall to you, he understood that die working Beams would regenerate.
More! That eventually those two working Beams would re-create the other Beams, knitting them forth mile by mile and wheel by wheel. If that happens, then eventually..."
Roland was nodding. In his eyes Susannah saw an entirely new expression: glad surprise. Maybe he does know how to win, she thought. "Then eventually what has moved on might return again," the gunslinger said. "Perhaps Mid-World and In-World."
He paused. "Perhaps even Gilead. The light. The White."
"No perhaps about it," Fimalo said. "For ka is a wheel, and if a wheel be not broken, it will always roll. Unless the Crimson King can become either Lord of the Tower or its Lord High Executioner, all that was will eventually return."
"Lunacy," said Fumalo. "And destructive lunacy, at that. Bixt of course Big Red always was Gan's crazy side." He gave Susannah an ugly smirk and said, "That's Frooood, Lady Blackbird."
Feemalo resumed. "And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done-"
"This is what we'd have you understand," said Fumalo. "If, that is, your heads aren't too thick to get the sense of it."
"After those chores were finished, he killed himself," Fimalo said, and once more the other two turned to him. It was as if they were helpless to do otherwise.
"Did he do it with a spoon?" Roland asked. "For that was die prophecy my friends and I grew up with. 'Twas in a bit of doggerel."
"Yes indeed," said Fimalo. "I thought he'd cut his throat with it, for the edge of the spoon's bowl had been sharpened (like certain plates, ye ken-ka's a wheel, and always comes around to where it started), but he swallowed it. Swallowed it, can you imagine? Great gouts of blood poured from his mouth. Freshets!
Then he mounted the greatest of the gray horses-he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams-and rode southeast into the white lands of Empathica with his litde bit of gunna before him on the saddle." He smiled. "There are great stores of food here, but he has no need of it, as you may ken. Los' no longer eats."
"Wait a minute, time out," Susannah said, raising her hands in a T-shape (it was a gesture she'd picked up from Eddie, although she didn't realize it). "If he swallowed a sharpened spoon and cut himself open as well as choking-"
"Lady Blackbird begins to see the light!" Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the sky.
"-then how could he do anything)"
"Los' cannot die," Feemalo said, as if explaining something obvious to a three-year-old. "And you-"
"You poor saps-" his partner put in with good-natured viciousness.
"You can't kill a man who's already dead," Fimalo finished.
"As he was, Roland, your guns might have ended him..."
Roland was nodding. "Handed down from father to son, with barrels made from Arthur Eld's great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that's also part of the prophecy. As he of course would know."
"But now he's safe from them. Has put himself beyond them.
He is Un-dead."
"We have reason to believe that he's been shunted onto a balcony of the Tower," Roland said. "Un-dead or not, he never could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld; surely if he