Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a rook’s skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. “The lookout,” he had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld’s Horn in the other, blood-bolted and half-blinded and dying…but still laughing. Ah dear gods, laughing and laughing.

“Roland!” he cries. “We’ve been betrayed! We’re outnumbered! Our backs are to the sea! We’ve got em right where we want em! Shall we charge?”

And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower is really to end here on Jericho Hill— betrayed by one of their own and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson’s army— then let it end splendidly.

“Aye!” he shouts. “Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!”

“As for gunslingers, Roland,” Cuthbert says, “I am here. And we are the last.”

Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He can feel Cuthbert’s burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness. And yet he’s laughing. Bert is still laughing.

“All right,” Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining men. “We’re going into them. And will accept no quarter.”

“Nope, no quarter, absolutely none,” Cuthbert says.

“We will not accept their surrender if offered.”

“Under no circumstances!” Cuthbert agrees, laughing harder than ever. “Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms.”

“Then blow that fucking horn.”

Cuthbert raises the horn to his bloody lips and blows a great blast— the final blast, for when it drops from his fingers a minute later (or perhaps it’s five, or ten; time has no meaning in that final battle), Roland will let it lie in the dust. In his grief and bloodlust he will forget all about Eld’s Horn.

“And now, my friends— hile!”

“Hile!” the last dozen cry beneath that blazing sun. It is the end of them, the end of Gilead, the end of everything, and he no longer cares. The old red fury, dry and maddening, is settling over his mind, drowning all thought.One last time, then, he thinks. Let it be so.

“To me!” cries Roland of Gilead. “Forward! For the Tower!”

“The Tower!” Cuthbert cries out beside him, reeling. He holds Eld’s Horn up to the sky in one hand, his revolver in the other.

“No prisoners!” Roland screams. “NO PRISONERS!”