When Jake opened his eyes again, the Falls of the Hounds were gone; Blaine had opaqued the cabin. He could still hear the sound, though—a waterfall of electricity, a force somehow drawn from the Beam and shot out through the eyes of the stone heads. Blaine was feeding himself with it, somehow. When we go on, Jake thought, he’ll be running on batteries. Then Lud really will be behind us. For good.

“Blaine,” Roland said. “How is the power of the Beam stored in that place? What makes it come from the eyes of yon stone temple-dogs? How do you use it?”

Silence from Blaine.

“And who carved them?” Eddie asked. “Was it the Great Old Ones? It wasn’t, was it? There were people even before them. Or... were they people?”

More silence from Blaine. And maybe that was good. Jake wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know about the Falls of the Hounds, or what went on beneath them. He had been in the dark of Roland’s world before, and had seen enough to believe that most of what was growing there was neither good nor safe.

“Better not to ask him,” the voice of Little Blaine drifted down from over their heads. “Safer.”

“Don’t ask him silly questions, he won’t play silly games,” Eddie said. That distant, dreaming look had come onto his face again, and when Susannah spoke his name, he didn’t seem to hear.

3

Roland sat down across from Jake and scrubbed his right hand slowly up the stubble on his right cheek, an unconscious gesture he seemed to make only when he was feeling tired or doubtful. “I’m running out of riddles,” he said.

Jake looked back at him, startled. The gunslinger had posed fifty or more to the computer, and Jake supposed that was a lot to just yank out of your head with no preparation, but when you considered that riddling had been such a big deal in the place where Roland had grown up...

He seemed to read some of this on Jake’s face, for a small smile, lemon-bitter, touched the corners of his mouth, and he nodded as if the boy had spoken out loud. “I don’t understand, either. If you’d asked me yesterday or the day before, I would have told you that I had at least a thousand riddles stored up in the junkbin I keep at the back of my mind. Perhaps two thousand. But...”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, shook his head, rubbed his hand up his cheek again.

“It’s not like forgetting. It’s as if they were never there in the first place. What’s happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon.”