Eddie held Roland and kissed his cheek. Tasted his tears.

“So what? Saddle up again? Go on and meet the man again?”

The gunslinger said not a word.

“I mean, we haven’t seen many people, but I know they’re up ahead, and whenever there’s a Tower involved, there’s a man. You wait for the man because you gotta meet the man, and in the end money talks and bullshit walks, or maybe here it’s bullets instead of bucks that do the talking. So is that it? Saddle up? Go to meet the man? Because if it’s just a replay of the same old shitstorm, you two should have left me for the lobsters.” Eddie looked at him with dark-ringed eyes. “I been dirty, man. If I found out anything, it’s that I don’t want to die dirty.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No? You gonna tell me you’re not hooked?”

Roland said nothing.

“Who’s gonna come through some magic door and save you, man? Do you know? I do. No one. You drew all you could draw. Only thing you can draw from now on is a fucking gun, because that’s all you got left. Just like Balazar.”

Roland said nothing.

“You want to know the only thing my brother ever had to teach me?” His voice was hitching and thick with tears.

“Yes,” the gunslinger said. He leaned forward, his eyes intent upon Eddie’s eyes.

“He taught me if you kill what you love, you’re damned.”

“I am damned already,” Roland said calmly. “But perhaps even the damned may be saved.”

“Are you going to get all of us killed?”

Roland said nothing.

Eddie seized the rags of Roland’s shirt. “Are you going to get her killed?”

“We all die in time,” the gunslinger said. “It’s not just the world that moves on.” He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. “But we will be magnificent.” He paused. “There’s more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her—I would not have allowed the boy to die—if that was all there was.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everything there is,” the gunslinger said calmly. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.”

Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.

Roland gently grasped Eddie’s arm. “Even the damned love,” he said.

5

Eddie eventually slept beside Susannah, the third Roland had drawn to make a new three, but Roland sat awake and listened to voices in the night while the wind dried the tears on his cheeks.

Damnation?

Salvation?

The Tower.

He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.

The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: