The Dark Tower (84 page)

Feemalo: “He
did
kill a great many. Beheaded his Minister of State.”

Fumalo: “Who had advanced syphilis and no more idea what was happening to him than a pig in a slaughterhouse chute, more’s the pity.”

Feemalo: “He lined up the kitchen staff and the women o’ work—”

Fumalo: “All of whom had been very loyal to him, very loyal indeed—”

Feemalo: “And made them take poison as they stood in front of him. He could have killed them in their sleep if he’d wanted to—”

Fumalo: “And by no more than wishing it on them.”

Feemalo: “But instead he made them take poison.
Rat
poison. They swallowed large brown chunks of it and died in convulsions right in front of him as he sat on his throne—”

Fumalo: “Which is made of skulls, do ye ken—”

Feemalo: “He sat there with his elbow on his knee and his fist on his chin, like a man thinking long thoughts, perhaps about squaring the circle or finding the Ultimate Prime Number, all the while watching them writhe and vomit and convulse on the floor of the Audience Chamber.”

Fumalo (with a touch of eagerness Susannah found both prurient and
extremely
unattractive): “Some died begging for water. It was a
thirsty
poison, aye! And we thought
we
were next!”

At this Feemalo at last betrayed, if not anger, then a touch of pique. “Will you let me tell this and have done with it so they can go on or back as they please?”

“Bossy as ever,” Fumalo said, and dropped into a sulky silence. Above them, the Castle Rooks jostled for position and looked down with beady eyes.
No doubt hoping to make a meal of those who don’t walk away,
Susannah thought.

“He had six of the surviving Wizard’s Glasses,” Feemalo said. “And when you were still in Calla Bryn Sturgis, he saw something in them that finished the job of running him mad. We don’t know for sure what it was, for we didn’t see, but we have an idea it was your victory not just in the Calla but further on, at Algul Siento. If so, it meant the end of his scheme to bring down the Tower from afar, by breaking the Beams.”

“Of course that’s what it was,” Fimalo said quietly, and once more both Stephen Kings on the bridge turned to look at him. “It could have been nothing else. What brought him to the brink of madness in the first place were two conflicting compulsions in his mind: to bring the Tower down, and to get there before
you
could get there,
Roland, and mount to the top. To destroy it . . . or to rule it. I’m not sure he has ever cared overmuch about
understanding
it—just about beating you to something you want, and then snatching it away from you. About such things he’d care much.”

“It’d no doubt please you to know how he raved about you, and cursed your name in the weeks before he smashed his precious playthings,” said Fumalo. “How he came to fear you, insofar as he
can
fear.”

“Not this one,” Feemalo contradicted, and rather glumly, Susannah thought. “It wouldn’t please this one much at all. He wins with no better grace than he loses.”

Fimalo said: “When the Red King saw that the Algul would fall to you, he understood that the working Beams would regenerate. More! That eventually those two working Beams would re-create the
other
Beams, knitting them forth mile by mile and wheel by wheel. If that happens, then eventually . . .”

Roland was nodding. In his eyes Susannah saw an entirely new expression: glad surprise.
Maybe he
does
know how to win,
she thought. “Then eventually what has moved on might return again,” the gunslinger said. “Perhaps Mid-World and In-World.” He paused. “Perhaps even Gilead. The light. The
White.
”

“No perhaps about it,” Fimalo said. “For ka is a wheel, and if a wheel be not broken, it will always roll. Unless the Crimson King can become either Lord of the Tower or its Lord High Executioner, all that was will eventually return.”

“Lunacy,” said Fumalo. “And
destructive
lunacy, at that. But of course Big Red always
was
Gan’s
crazy side.” He gave Susannah an ugly smirk and said, “That’s
Frooood,
Lady Blackbird.”

Feemalo resumed. “And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done—”

“This is what we’d have you understand,” said Fumalo. “If, that is, your heads aren’t too thick to get the sense of it.”

“After those chores were finished, he killed
himself,
” Fimalo said, and once more the other two turned to him. It was as if they were helpless to do otherwise.

“Did he do it with a spoon?” Roland asked. “For that was the prophecy my friends and I grew up with. ’Twas in a bit of doggerel.”

“Yes indeed,” said Fimalo. “I thought he’d cut his throat with it, for the edge of the spoon’s bowl had been sharpened (like certain plates, ye ken—ka’s a wheel, and always comes around to where it started), but he swallowed it.
Swallowed
it, can you imagine? Great gouts of blood poured from his mouth.
Freshets!
Then he mounted the greatest of the gray horses—he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams—and rode southeast into the white lands of Empathica with his little bit of gunna before him on the saddle.” He smiled. “There are great stores of food here, but
he
has no need of it, as you may ken. Los’ no longer eats.”

“Wait a minute, time out,” Susannah said, raising her hands in a T-shape (it was a gesture she’d picked up from Eddie, although she didn’t realize it). “If he swallowed a sharpened spoon and cut himself open as well as choking—”

“Lady Blackbird begins to see the light!” Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the sky.

“—then how could he do
anything
?”

“Los’ cannot die,” Feemalo said, as if explaining something obvious to a three-year-old. “And
you
—”

“You poor
saps
—” his partner put in with good-natured viciousness.

“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead,” Fimalo finished. “As he was, Roland, your guns might have ended him . . .”

Roland was nodding. “Handed down from father to son, with barrels made from Arthur Eld’s great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that’s also part of the prophecy. As he of course would know.”

“But now he’s safe from them. Has put himself
beyond
them. He is Un-dead.”

“We have reason to believe that he’s been shunted onto a balcony of the Tower,” Roland said. “Un-dead or not, he never could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld; surely if he knew so much prophecy, then he knew that.”

Fimalo was smiling grimly. “Aye, but as Horatio held the bridge in a story told in Susannah’s world, so Los’, the Crimson King, now holds the Tower. He has found his way into its mouth but cannot climb to the top, ’tis true. Yet while he holds it hard, neither can you.”

“It seems old King Red wasn’t entirely mad, after all,” Feemalo said.

“Cray-zee lak-a de
focks!
” Fumalo added. He tapped his temple gravely . . . and then burst out laughing.

“But if you go on,” said Fimalo, “you bring to him the siguls of the Eld he needs to gain possession of that which now holds him captive.”

“He’d have to take them from me first,” Roland said. “From
us
.” He spoke without drama, as if merely commenting on the weather.

“True,” Fimalo agreed, “but consider, Roland. You cannot kill him with them, but it
is
possible that he might be able to take them from you, for his mind is devious and his reach is long. If he were to do so . . . well! Imagine a dead king, and mad, at the top of the Dark Tower, with a pair of the great old guns in his possession! He might rule from there, but I think that, given his insanity, he’d choose to bring it down, instead. Which he might be able to do, Beams or no Beams.”

Fimalo studied them gravely from his place on the far side of the bridge.

“And then,” he said, “all would be darkness.”

There was a pause during which those gathered in that place considered the idea. Then Feemalo said, almost apologetically: “The cost might not be so great if one were just to consider this world, which we might call Tower Keystone, since the Dark Tower exists here not as a rose, as it does on many, or an immortal tiger, as it does on some, or the ur-dog Rover, as it does on at least one—”

“A dog named
Rover
?” Susannah asked, bemused. “Do you really say so?”

“Lady, you have all the imagination of a half-burnt stick,” Fumalo said in a tone of deep disgust.

Feemalo paid no heed. “In this world, the Tower is itself. In the world where you, Roland, have most lately been, most species still breed true and many lives are sweet. There is still energy and hope. Would you risk destroying that world as well as this, and the other worlds sai King has touched with his imagination, and drawn from? For it was not he
that created them, you know. To peek in Gan’s navel does not make one Gan, although many creative people seem to think so. Would you risk it all?”

“We’re just asking, not trying to convince you,” Fimalo said. “But the truth is bald: now this is only your quest, gunslinger. That’s
all
it is. Nothing sends you further. Once you pass beyond this castle and into the White Lands, you and your friends pass beyond ka itself. And you need not do it. All you have been through was set in motion so that you might save the Beams, and by saving them ensure the eternal existence of the Tower, the axle upon which all worlds and all life spins. That is done. If you turn back now, the dead King will be trapped forever where he is.”

“Sez
you,
” Susannah put in, and with a rudeness worthy of sai Fumalo.

“Whether you speak true or speak false,” Roland said, “I will push on. For I have promised.”

“To
whom
have you given your promise?” Fimalo burst out. For the first time since stopping on the castle side of the bridge, he unclasped his hands and used them to push his hair back from his brow. The gesture was small but expressed his frustration with perfect eloquence. “For there’s no prophecy of such a promise; I tell you so!”

“There wouldn’t be. For it’s one I made myself, and one I mean to keep.”

“This man is as crazy as Los’ the Red,” Fumalo said, not without respect.

“All right,” Fimalo said. He sighed and once more clasped his hands before him. “I have done what
I
can do.” He nodded to his other two thirds, who were looking attentively back at him.

Feemalo and Fumalo each dropped to one knee: Feemalo his right, Fumalo his left. They lifted away the lids of the wicker boxes they had carried and tilted them forward. (Susannah was fleetingly reminded of how the models on
The Price Is Right
and
Concentration
showed off the prizes.)

Inside one was food: roasts of chicken and pork, joints of beef, great pink rounds of ham. Susannah felt her stomach expand at the sight, as if making ready to swallow all of it, and it was only with a great effort that she stopped the sensual moan rising in her throat. Her mouth flooded with saliva and she raised a hand to wipe it away. They would know what she was doing, she supposed there was no help for that, but she could at least keep them from the satisfaction of seeing the physical evidence of her hunger gleaming on her lips and chin. Oy barked, but kept his seat by the gunslinger’s left heel.

Inside the other basket were big cable-knit sweaters, one green and one red: Christmas colors.

“There’s also long underwear, coats, fleece-lined shor’-boots, and gloves,” said Feemalo. “For Empathica’s deadly cold at this time of year, and you’ll have months of walking ahead.”

“On the outskirts of town we’ve left you a light aluminum sledge,” Fimalo said. “You can throw it in the back of your little cart and then use it to carry the lady and your gunna, once you reach the snowlands.”

“You no doubt wonder why we do all this, since we disapprove of your journey,” said Feemalo. “The fact is, we’re grateful for our survival—”

“We really did think we were done for,” Fumalo
broke in. “‘The quarterback is toast,’ Eddie might have said.”

And this, too, hurt her . . . but not as much as looking at all that food. Not as much as imagining how it would feel to slip one of those bulky sweaters over her head and let the hem fall all the way to the middle of her thighs.

“My decision was to try and talk you out of going if I could,” said Fimalo—the only one who spoke of himself in the first-person singular, Susannah had noticed. “And if I couldn’t, I’d give you the supplies you’d need to go on with.”

“You can’t kill him!” Fumalo burst out. “Don’t you see that, you wooden-headed killing machine, don’t you
see
? All you can do is get over-eager and play into his dead hands! How can you be so
stu
—”

“Hush,” Fimalo said mildly, and Fumalo hushed at once. “He’s taken his decision.”

“What will you do?” Roland asked. “Once we’ve pushed on, that is?”

The three of them shrugged in perfect mirror unison, but it was Fimalo—the so-called uffi’s superego—who answered. “Wait here,” he said. “See if the matrix of creation lives or dies. In the meanwhile, try to refurbish Le Casse and bring it to some of its previous glory. It was a beautiful place once. It can be beautiful again. And now I think our palaver’s done. Take your gifts with our thanks and good wishes.”

“
Grudging
good wishes,” said Fumalo, and actually smiled. Coming from him, that smile was both dazzling and unexpected.

Susannah almost started forward. Hungry as she was for fresh food (for fresh
meat
), it was the
sweaters and the thermal underwear that she really craved. Although supplies were getting thin (and would surely run out before they were past the place the uffi called Empathica), there were still cans of beans and tuna and corned beef hash rolling around in the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and their bellies were currently full. It was the cold that was killing her. That was what it felt like, at least; cold working its way inward toward her heart, one painful inch at a time.