“And the name of Tian’s village. I always knew it sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Now I do. The movie was called The Magnificent Seven, and just by the way, Roland, how many of us were in the ditch that day, waiting for the Wolves?”

“Would you boys mind telling us what you’re talking about?” Deepneau asked. But although he asked politely, both Roland and Eddie ignored him, too.

Roland took a moment to cull his memory, then said: “You, me, Susannah, Jake, Margaret, Zalia, and Rosa. There were more—the Tavery twins and Ben Slightman’s boy—but seven fighters.”

“Yes. And the link I couldn’t quite make was to the movie’s director. When you’re making a movie, you need a director to run things. He’s the dinh.”

Roland nodded.

“The dinh of The Magnificent Seven was a man named John Sturges.”

Roland sat a moment longer, thinking. Then he said: “Ka.”

Eddie burst out laughing. He simply couldn’t help it. Roland always had the answer.

ELEVEN

“In order to catch the pain,” Roland said, “you have to clamp down on the belt at the instant you feel it. Do you understand? The very instant. Pin it with your teeth.”

“Gotcha. Just make it quick.”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

Roland dipped first the pliers and then the knife into the disinfectant. Eddie waited with the belt in his mouth, lying across his teeth. Yes, once you saw the basic pattern, you couldn’t unsee it, could you? Roland was the hero of the piece, the grizzled old warrior who’d be played by some grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or maybe Eastwood in the Hollywood version. He himself was the young buck, played by the hot young boy star of the moment. Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, someone like that. And here’s a set we all know, a cabin in the woods, and a situation we’ve seen many times before but still relish, Pulling the Bullet. All that was missing was the ominous sound of drums in the distance. And, Eddie realized, probably the drums were missing because they’d already been through the Ominous Drums part of the story: the god-drums. They had turned out to be an amplified version of a Z.Z. Top song being broadcast through streetcorner speakers in the City of Lud. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone’s story. This whole world—

I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft. Hey, Pere, I’m with you—I refuse to believe I’m a character. This is my fucking life!

“Go on, Roland,” he said. “Get that thing outta me.”

The gunslinger poured some of the disinfectant from the bowl over Eddie’s shin, then used the tip of the knife to flick the clot out of the wound. With that done, he lowered the pliers. “Be ready to bite the pain, Eddie,” he murmured, and a moment later Eddie did.