“Aye,” Henchick said. “But your woman took the magic ball with her, and whatever’ee may think, Mid-World and the Borderlands are well shed of it.”

“I’d sell my soul to have it back, and in my hands,” Eddie said clearly.

They all looked shocked at this, even Jake, and Roland felt a deep urge to tell Eddie he must take that back, must unsay it. There were powerful forces working against their quest for the Tower, dark ones, and Black Thirteen was their clearest sigul. What could be used could also be misused, and the bends o’ the rainbow had their own malevolent glammer, Thirteen most of all. Was the sum of all, perhaps. Even if they had possessed it, Roland would have fought to keep it out of Eddie Dean’s hands. In his current state of sorrowing distraction, the ball would either destroy him or make him its slave in minutes.

“A stone might drink if it had a mouth,” Rosa said dryly, startling them all. “Eddie, questions of magic aside, think of the path that goes up there. Then think of five dozen men, many of them nigh as old as Henchick, one or two blind as bats, trying to climb it after dark.”

“The boulder,” Jake said. “Remember the boulder you have to kind of slide by, with your feet sticking out over the drop?”

Eddie nodded reluctantly. Roland could see him trying to accept what he couldn’t change. Groping for sanity.

“Susannah Dean is also a gunslinger,” Roland said. “Mayhap she can take care of herself a little while.”

“I don’t think Susannah’s in charge anymore,” Eddie replied, “and neither do you. It’s Mia’s baby, after all, and it’ll be Mia at the controls until the baby—the chap—comes.”

Roland had an intuition then, and like so many he’d had over the years, it turned out to be true. “She may have been in charge when they left, but she may not be able to stay in charge.”

Callahan spoke at last, looking up from the book which had so stunned him. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not her world,” Roland said. “It’s Susannah’s. If they can’t find a way to work together, they may die together.”

TWO

Henchick and Cantab went back to Manni Redpath, first to tell the gathered (and entirely male) elders about the day’s work, and then to tell them what payment was required. Roland went with Rosa to her cottage. It stood up the hill from a formerly neat privy which was now mostly in ruins. Within this privy, standing useless sentinel, was what remained of Andy the Messenger Robot (many other functions). Rosalita undressed Roland slowly and completely. When he was mother-naked, she stretched beside him on her bed and rubbed him with special oils: cat-oil for his aches, a creamier, faintly perfumed blend for his most sensitive parts. They made love. They came together (the sort of physical accident fools take for fate), listening to the crackle of firecrackers from the Calla’s high street and the boisterous shouts of the folken, most of them now well past tipsy, from the sound.