Roland looped the bag’s drawstring over his shoulder and rode back toward Alain and Cuthbert, ready to give aid... but there was no need. They sat their horses side by side in the blowing dust, at the end of a scattered road of dead bodies, their eyes wide and dazed—eyes of boys who have passed through fire for the first time and can hardly believe they have not been burned. Only Alain had been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but left a scar he bore until his dying day. He could not remember who had shot him, he said later on, or at what point of the battle. He had been lost to himself during the shooting, and had only vague memories of what had happened after the charge began. Cuthbert said much the same.

“Roland,” Cuthbert said now. He passed a shaky hand down his face. “Hile, gunslinger.”

“Hile.”

Cuthbert’s eyes were red and irritated from the sand, as if he had been crying. He took back the unspent silver slingshot balls when Roland handed them to him without seeming to know what they were. “Roland, we’re alive.”

“Yes.”

Alain was looking around dazedly. “Where did the others go?”

“I’d say at least twenty-five of them are back there,” Roland said, gesturing at the road of dead bodies. “The rest—” He waved his hand, still with a revolver in it, in a wide half-circle. “They’ve gone. Had their fill of Mid-World’s wars, I wot.”

Roland slipped the drawstring bag off his shoulder, held it before him on the bridge of his saddle for a moment, and then opened it. For a moment the bag’s mouth was black, and then it filled with the irregular pulse of a lovely pink light.

It crept up the gunslinger’s smooth cheeks like fingers and swam in his eyes.

“Roland,” Cuthbert said, suddenly nervous, “I don’t think you should play with that. Especially not now. They’ll have heard the shooting out at Hanging Rock. If we’re going to finish what we started, we don’t have time for—”

Roland ignored him. He slipped both hands into the bag and lifted the wizard’s glass out. He held it up to his eyes, unaware that he had smeared it with droplets of Jonas’s blood. The ball did not mind; this was not the first time it had been blood-touched. It flashed and swirled formlessly for a moment, and then its pink vapors opened like curtains. Roland saw what was there, and lost himself within it.

Chapter X

BENEATH THE DEMON MOON (II)

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