Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,15

which to pass the long decades and centuries? “DO YOU WISH ME TO GO AWAY AGAIN SO YOU MAY CONSULT?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

The route-map flashed bright red. Eddie turned toward the gunslinger. Roland composed his face quickly, but before he did, Eddie saw a horrible thing: a brief look of complete hopelessness. Eddie had never seen such a look there before, not when Roland had been dying of the lobstrosities’ bites, not when Eddie had been pointing the gunslinger’s own revolver at him, not even when the hideous Gasher had taken Jake prisoner and disappeared into Lud with him.

“What do we do next?” Jake asked. “Do another round of the four of us?”

“I think that would serve little purpose,” Roland said. “Blaine must know thousands of riddles—perhaps millions—and that is bad. Worse, far worse, he understands the how of riddling . . . the place the mind has to go to in order to make them and solve them.” He turned to Eddie and Susannah, sitting once more with their arms about one another. “Am I right about that?” he asked them. “Do you agree?”

“Yes,” Susannah said, and Eddie nodded reluctantly. He didn’t want to agree . . . but he did.

“So?” Jake asked. “What do we do, Roland? I mean, there has to be a way out of this . . . doesn’t there?”

Lie to him, you bastard, Eddie sent fiercely in Roland’s direction.

Roland, perhaps hearing the thought, did the best he could. He touched Jake’s hair with his diminished hand and ruffled through it. “I think there’s always an answer, Jake. The real question is whether or not we’ll have time to find the right riddle. He said it took him a little under nine hours to run his route—”

“Eight hours, forty-five minutes,” Jake put in.

“. . . and that’s not much time. We’ve already been running almost an hour—”

“And if that map’s right, we’re almost halfway to Topeka,” Susannah said in a tight voice. “Could be our mechanical pal’s been lying to us about the length of the run. Hedging his bets a little.”

“Could be,” Roland agreed.

“So what do we do?” Jake repeated.

Roland drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Let me riddle him alone, for now. I’ll ask him the hardest ones I remember from the Fair-Days of my youth. Then, Jake, if we’re approaching the point of . . . if we’re approaching Topeka at this same speed with Blaine still unposed, I think you should ask him the last few riddles in your book. The hardest riddles.” He rubbed the side of his face distractedly and looked at the ice sculpture. This chilly rendering of his own likeness had now melted to an unrecognizable hulk. “I still think the answer must be in the book. Why else would you have been drawn to it before coming back to this world?”

“And us?” Susannah asked. “What do Eddie and I do?”

“Think,” Roland said. “Think, for your fathers’ sakes.”

“ ‘I do not shoot with my hand,’ ” Eddie said. He suddenly felt far away, strange to himself. It was the way he’d felt when he had seen first the slingshot and then the key in pieces of wood, just waiting for him to whittle them free . . . and at the same time this feeling was not like that at all.

Roland was looking at him oddly. “Yes, Eddie, you say true. A gunslinger shoots with his mind. What have you thought of?”

“Nothing.” He might have said more, but all at once a strange image—a strange memory—intervened: Roland hunkering by Jake at one of their stopping-points on the way to Lud. Both of them in front of an unlit campfire. Roland once more at his everlasting lessons. Jake’s turn this time. Jake with the flint and steel, trying to quicken the fire. Spark after spark licking out and dying in the dark. And Roland had said that he was being silly. That he was just being . . . well . . . silly.

“No,” Eddie said. “He didn’t say that at all. At least not to the kid, he didn’t.”

“Eddie?” Susannah. Sounding concerned. Almost frightened.

Well why don’t you ask him what he said, bro? That was Henry’s voice, the voice of the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. First time in a long time. Ask him, he’s practically sitting right next to you, go on and ask him what he said. Quit dancing around like a baby with a load in his diapers.

Except that was a