The deck was huge, the designs on the back convoluted. “These are Tarot cards, gunslinger—of a sort. A mixture of the standard deck to which have been added a selection of my own development. Now watch carefully.”
“What will I watch?”
“I’m going to tell your future. Seven cards must be turned, one at a time, and placed in conjunction with the others. I’ve not done this since the days when Gilead stood and the ladies played at Points on the west lawn. And I suspect I’ve never read a tale such as yours.” Mockery was creeping into his voice again. “You are the world’s last adventurer. The last crusader. How that must please you, Roland! Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, as you resume your quest. Worlds turn about your head.”
“What do you mean, resume? I never left off.”
At this the man in black laughed heartily, but would not say what he found so funny. “Read my fortune then,” Roland said harshly.
The first card was turned.
“The Hanged Man,” the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his hood. “Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength, not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over the pits of Na’ar. You’ve already dropped one co-traveler into that pit, have you not?”
The gunslinger said nothing, and the second card was turned.
“The Sailor! Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.”
The gunslinger winced, said nothing.
The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly astride a young man’s shoulder. The young man’s face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip.
“The Prisoner,” the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.
“A trifle upsetting, isn’t he?” the man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sniggering.
He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger’s dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.
“The Lady of the Shadows,” the man in black remarked. “Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. Two faces at least. She broke the blue plate!”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” And—in this case, at least—the gunslinger thought his adversary was telling the truth.
“Why are you showing me these?”
“Don’t ask!” the man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. “Don’t ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church.”
He tittered and turned the fifth card.
A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. “Death,” the man in black said simply. “Yet not for you.”
The sixth card.
The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnameable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
“The Tower,” the man in black said softly. “Here is the Tower.”
The gunslinger’s card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.
“Where does that one go?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.
“What does that mean?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black did not answer.
“What does that mean?” he asked raggedly.
The man in black did not answer.
“Goddamn you!”
No answer.
“Then be damned to you. What’s the seventh card?”
The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it. Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone. Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, he thought, it’s both.
“The seventh card is Life,” the man in black said softly. “But not for you.”
“Where does it fit the pattern?”
“That is not for you to know now,” the man in black said. “Or for me to know. I’m not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary.” He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.
“Sleep now,”