Hadeverything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to do but push Susannah’s wheelchair through one boring field after another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard’s Glass was what Jake called the Mystery Number, and that probably meant nothing. They’d needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of Lud in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the Mystery Number was a holdover from that. Eddie was far from sure she was right, but hey, it was a theory.

And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun of his only real talent.

Two

They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks when they came to a pair of ancient double ruts that had surely once been a road. It didn’t follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland swung them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a road again might refocus things, help them to shake that maddening becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes feeling, but it didn’t. The road carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They finally topped a long north–south ridge. On the far side, their road descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale wood, Eddie thought as they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their second day in the forest (or maybe it was the third day…or the fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of vegetarian gunslinger burritos, but there were no orcs or trolls in the deep glades, and no elves—Keebler or otherwise. No more deer, either.

“I keep lookin for the candy house,” Eddie said. They’d been winding their way through the great old trees for several days by then. Or maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they were still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it in the sky…and they could feel it.

“What candy house is this?” Roland asked. “Is it another tale? If so, I’d hear.”