“This where we stand is the allure,” Mia said. “The wall-walk of the Castle on the Abyss, once known as Castle Discordia. You said you wanted fresh air. I hope this does ya, as they say in the Calla. This is far beyond there, Susannah, this is deep in End-World, near the place where your quest ends, for good or for ill.” She paused and then said, “For ill, almost surely. Yet I care nothing for that, no, not I. I am Mia, daughter of none, mother of one. I care for my chap and nothing more. Chap be enough for me, aye! Would you palaver? Fine. I’ll tell you what I may and be true. Why not? What is it to me, one way or the other?”

Susannah looked around. When she faced in toward the center of the castle—what she supposed was the courtyard—she caught an aroma of ancient rot. Mia saw her wrinkle her nose and smiled.

“Aye, they’re long gone, and the machines the later ones left behind are mostly stilled, but the smell of their dying lingers, doesn’t it? The smell of death always does. Ask your friend the gunslinger, thetrue gunslinger. He knows, for he’s dealt his share of it. He is responsible for much, Susannah of New York. The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he’s gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination to finally draw the eyes of the great. He will be destroyed, aye, and all those who stand with him. I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not.” Her chin jutted forward in the starlight. Beneath the serape her breasts heaved…and, Susannah saw, her belly curved. In this world, at least, Mia was very clearly pregnant. Ready to burst, in fact.

“Ask your questions, have at me,” Mia said. “Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we’re bound together. We’re lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep…but we don’t sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that’s also fine. Ask. Or…are you not a gunslinger?” Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn’t be able to find her way from Forty-sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. “Soshoot! I should say.”

Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle’s soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she’d find that out for herself.

Meantime, she thought she’d start with something relatively easy.

“If this is the Castle on the Abyss,” she said, “where’s the Abyss? I don’t see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon.”

Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah’s; Mia’s was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.

“This is the inner keep,” she said. “Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that—”

“The Red Death?” Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). “Poe’sRed Death? Like in the story?” And why not? Hadn’t they already wandered into—and then back out of—L. Frank Baum’s Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?

“Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. ‘In the time before counting,’ as ’tis said. They’re horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance.”

She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.

“But not agunslinger. Surely not one such asthee. ”

“Why do you mock me?” Susannah asked quietly.

Mia looked startled, then grim. “Was it my idea to come here? To stand in this miserable cold where the King’s Eye dirties the horizon and sullies the very cheek of the moon with its filthy light? Nay, lady! ’Twas you, so harry me not with your tongue!”

Susannah could have responded that it hadn’t been her idea to catch preg with a demon’s baby in the first place, but this would be a terrible time to get into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t squabbles.

“I wasn’t scolding,” Susannah said, “only asking.”

Mia made an impatient shooing gesture with her hand as if to sayDon’t split hairs, and half-turned away. Under her breath she said, “I didn’t go to Morehouse orno house. And in any case I’ll bear my chap, do you hear? Whichever way the cards fall. Bear him and feed him!”

All at once Susannah understood a great deal. Mia mocked because she was afraid. In spite of all she knew, so much of herwas Susannah.

I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house,for instance; that was fromInvisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. When Mia had bought into Susannah, she had purchased at least two personalities for the price of one. It was Mia, after all, who’d brought Detta out of retirement (or perhaps deep hibernation), and it was Detta who was particularly fond of that line, which expressed so much of the Negro’s deep-held disdain for and suspicion of what was sometimes called “the finer post-war Negro education.” Not to Morehouse orno house; I know what I know, in other words, I heard it through the grapevine, I got it on the earie, dearie, I picked it up on the jungle telegraph.

“Mia,” she said now. “Whose chap is it besides yours? What demon was his father, do you know?”

Mia grinned. It wasn’t a grin Susannah liked. There was too much Detta in it; too much laughing, bitter knowledge. “Aye, lady, I know. And you’re right. It was a demon got him on you, a very great demon indeed, say true! A human one! It had to have been so, for know you that true demons, those left on the shore of these worlds which spin around the Tower when thePrim receded, are sterile. And for a very good reason.”

“Then how—”

“Your dinh is the father of my chap,” Mia said. “Roland of Gilead, aye, he. Steven Deschain finally has his grandson, although he lies rotten in his grave and knows it not.”

Susannah was goggling at her, unmindful of the cold wind rushing out of the Discordia wilderness. “Roland…?It can’t be! He was beside me when the demon wasin me, he was pulling Jake through from the house on Dutch Hill and fucking was thelast thing on his mind…” She trailed off, thinking of the baby she’d seen in the Dogan. Thinking of those eyes. Those blue bombardier’s eyes.No. No, I refuse to believe it.

“All the same, Roland is his father,” Mia insisted. “And when the chap comes, I shall name him from your own mind, Susannah of New York; from what you learned at the same time you learned of merlons and courtyards and tre-bouchets and barbicans. Why not? ’Tis a good name, and fair.”

Professor Murray’s Introduction to Medieval History, that’s what she’s talking about.

“I will name him Mordred,” said she. “He’ll grow quickly, my darling boy, quicker than human, after his demon nature. He’ll grow strong. The avatar of every gunslinger that ever was. And so, like the Mordred of your tale, will he slay his father.”

And with that, Mia, daughter of none, raised her arms to the star-shot sky and screamed, although whether in sorrow, terror, or joy, Susannah could not tell.