“All right, Blaine, we play for keeps and no one cries off. Here’s the next.”

“AS ALWAYS, I AWAIT IT WITH PLEASURE.”

Roland looked down at Jake. “Be ready with yours, Jake; I’m almost at the end of mine.”

Jake nodded.

Beneath them, the mono’s slo-trans engines continued to cycle up—that beat-beat-beat which Susannah did not so much hear as feel in the hinges of her jaw, the hollows of her temples, the pulse-points of her wrists.

It’s not going to happen unless there’s a stumper in Jake’s book, she thought. Roland can’t pose Blaine, and I think he knows it. I think he knew it an hour ago.

“Blaine, I occur once in a minute, twice in every moment, but not once in a hundred thousand years. What am I?”

And so the contest would continue, Susannah realized, Roland asking and Blaine answering with his increasingly terrible lack of hesitation, like an all-seeing, all-knowing god. Susannah sat with her cold hands clasped in her lap and watched the glowing dot draw nigh Topeka, the place where all rail service ended, the place where the path of their ka-tet would end in the clearing. She thought about the Hounds of the Falls, how they had jutted from the thundering white billows below the dark and starshot sky; she thought of their eyes.

Their electric-blue eyes.

Chapter III

THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE

1

Eddie Dean—who did not know Roland sometimes thought of him as ka-mai, ka’s fool—heard all of it and heard none of it; saw all of it and saw none of it. The only thing to really make an impression on him once the riddling began in earnest was the fire flashing from the stone eyes of the Hounds; as he raised his hand to shield his eyes from that chain-lightning glare, he thought of the Portal of the Beam in the Clearing of the Bear, how he had pressed his ear against it and heard the distant, dreamy rumble of machinery.

Watching the eyes of the Hounds light up, listening as Blaine drew that current into his batteries, powering up for his final plunge across Mid-World, Eddie had thought: Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that’s really the horror of it, wouldn’t you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.

Eddie had been with his friends for a short time after that, mentally as well as physically, but then he had fallen back into his thoughts again. Eddie’s zonin, Henry would have said. Let ’im be.