“If the other balls in the Wizard’s Rainbow did exist, most are broken now. Such things never stay in one place or one pair of hands for long, you know, and even enchanted glass has a way of breaking. Yet at least three or four bends o’ the Rainbow may still be rolling around this sad world of ours. The blue, almost certainly. A desert tribe of slow mutants—the Total Hogs, they called themselves—had that one less than fifty years ago, although it’s slipped from sight again since. The green and the orange are reputed to be in Lud and Dis, respectively. And, just maybe, the pink one.”

“What exactly do they do?” Roland asked. “What are they good for?”

“For seeing. Some colors of the Wizard’s Rainbow are reputed to look into the future. Others look into the other worlds—those where the demons live, those where the Old People are supposed to have gone when they left our world. These may also show the location of the secret doors which pass between the worlds. Other colors, they say, can look far in our own world, and see things people would as soon keep secret. They never see the good; only the ill. How much of this is true and how much is myth no one knows for sure.”

He looked at them, his smile fading.

“But this we do know: John Farson is said to have a talisman, something that glows in his tent late at night... sometimes before battles, sometimes before large movements of troop and horse, sometimes before momentous decisions are announced. And it glows pink.”

“Maybe he has an electric light and puts a pink scarf over it when he prays,” Cuthbert said. He looked around at his friends, a little defensively. “I’m not joking; there are people who do that.”

“Perhaps,” Roland’s father said. “Perhaps that’s all it is, or something like. But perhaps it’s a good deal more. All I can say of my own knowledge is that he keeps beating us, he keeps slipping away from us, and he keeps turning up where he’s least expected. If the magic is in him and not in some talisman he owns, gods help the Affiliation.”

“We’ll keep an eye out, if you like,” Roland said, “but Farson’s in the north or west. We’re going east.” As if his father did not know this.

“If it’s a bend o’ the Rainbow,” Steven replied, “it could be anywhere—east or south’s as likely as west. He can’t keep it with him all the time, you see. No matter how much it would ease his mind and heart to do so. No one can.”

“Why not?”