Have to get a clean shirt,Susannah reminded her unwelcome guest.

Mia, daughter of none, made no reply. She clearly caredbupkes for shirts, clean or dirty. Mia was looking at the telephone. For the time being, with her labor on hold, the phone was all she cared about.

Now we palaver,Susannah said.You promised, and it’s a promise you’re going to keep. But not in that banquet room. She shuddered.Somewhere outside, hear me I beg. I want fresh air. That banqueting hall smelled of death.

Mia didn’t argue. Susannah got a vague sense of the other woman riffling through various files of memory—examining, rejecting, examining, rejecting—and at last finding something that would serve.

How do we go there?Mia asked indifferently.

The black woman who was now two women (again) sat on one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap.Like on a sled, the woman’s Susannah part said.I’ll push, you steer. And remember, Susannah-Mio, if you want my cooperation, you give me some straight answers.

I will,the other replied.Just don’t expect to like them. Or even understand them.

What do you—

Never mind! Gods, I never metanyonewho could ask so many questions! Time is short! When the telephone rings, our palaver ends! So if you’d palaver at all—

Susannah didn’t bother giving her a chance to finish. She closed her eyes and let herself fall back. No bed stopped that fall; she went right through it. She was falling for real, falling through space. She could hear the jangle of the todash chimes, dim and far.

Here I go again,she thought. And:Eddie, I love you.

All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond’s Beauty Bar, her mother’s soap and her mother’s borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought:It’s the Spring Hop! I’m going with Nathan Freeman !

Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond’s soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one’s calf and knee.

She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.

“Over here!” a woman’s voice called. It wasn’t the voice Susannah would have expected. Not strident, not a triumphant caw. “Over here, out of the wind!”

She looked and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah’s first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap’s mother waswhite. Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality, and how that must frost Detta Walker’s racially sensitive butt!

She herself was legless again, and sitting in a kind of rude one-person cart. It had been parked at a notch in a low parapet wall. She looked out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside she had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of a savage sickle moon. Away from the glare of that lunar grin, a billion stars burned like hot ice. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow path wound into the distance. Looking at it, Susannah thought that a party would have to travel that path in single file.And bring plenty of supplies. No mushrooms to pick along the way; no pokeberries, either. And in the distance—dim and baleful, its source somewhere over the horizon—a dark crimson light waxed and waned.Heart of the rose, she thought, and then:No, not that. Forge of the King. She looked at the pulsing sullen light with helpless, horrified fascination. Flex…and loosen. Wax…and wane. An infection announcing itself to the sky.

“Come to me now, if you’d come at all, Susannah of New York,” said Mia. She was dressed in a heavy serape and what looked like leather pants that stopped just below the knee. Her shins were scabbed and scratched. She wore thick-soledhuaraches on her feet. “For the King can fascinate, even at a distance. We’re on the Discordia side of the Castle. Would you like to end your life on the needles at the foot of this wall? If he fascinates you and tells you to jump, you’ll do just that. Your bossy gunslinger-men aren’t here to help you now, are they? Nay, nay. You’re on your own, so y’are.”

Susannah tried to pull her gaze from that steadily pulsing glow and at first couldn’t do it. Panic bloomed in her mind

(if he fascinates you and tells you to jump)

and she seized it as a tool, compressing it to an edge with which to cut through her frightened immobility. For a moment nothing happened, and then she threw herself backward so violently in the shabby little cart that she had to clutch the edge in order to keep herself from tumbling to the cobbles. The wind gusted again, blowing stone-dust and grit against her face and into her hair, seeming to mock her.

But that pull…fascination…glammer…whatever it had been, it was gone.

She looked at the dog-cart (so she thought it, whether that was the right name or not) and saw at once how it worked. Simple enough, too. With no mule to draw it,she was the mule. It was miles from the sweet, light little chair they’d found in Topeka, and light-years from being able to walk on the strong legs that had conveyed her from the little park to the hotel. God, she missed having legs. Missed it already.

But you made do.

She seized hold of the cart’s wooden wheels, strained, produced no movement, strained harder. Just as she was deciding she’d have to get out of the chair and hop-crawl her ignominious way to where Mia waited, the wheels turned with a groaning, oilless creak. She rumbled toward Mia, who was standing behind a squat stone pillar. There were a great many of these, marching away into the dark along a curve. Susannah supposed that once upon a time (before the world had moved on), archers would have stood behind them for protection while the assaulting army fired their arrows or red-hot catapults or whatever you called them. Then they’d step into the gaps and fire their own weapons. How long ago had that been? What worldwas this? And how close to the Dark Tower?

Susannah had an idea it might be very close indeed.

She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting. She drew down deep breaths of the dank and somehow stony air. The pillars—she had an idea they were called merlons, or something like that—were on her right. On her left was a circular pool of darkness surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the way, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.