The Dark Tower - Stephen King [279]
“No!” Mordred shouted. “Save the skin for me…but you may have his eyes.”
It was then, as the eager rooks tore Rando Thoughtful’s eyes from their living sockets, that the ex-Minister of State uttered the rising howl Roland and Susannah heard as they neared the edge of Castle-town. The birds who couldn’t find a roosting-place hung around him in a living thunderhead. They turned him on his levitating heels and carried him toward the changeling, who had now advanced to the center of the bridge and squatted there. The boots and rotted pillowtick coat had been left behind for the nonce on the town side of the bridge; what waited for sai Thoughtful, reared up on its back legs, forelegs pawing the air, red mark on its hairy belly all too visible, was Dan-Tete, the Little Red King.
The man floated to his fate, shrieking and eyeless. He thrust his hands out in front of him, making warding-off gestures, and the spider’s front legs seized one of them, guided it into the bristling maw of its mouth, and bit it off with a candy-cane crunch.
Sweet!
Eight
That night, beyond the last of the oddly narrow, oddly unpleasant townhouses, Roland stopped in front of what had probably been a smallhold farm. He stood facing the ruin of the main building, sniffing.
“What, Roland? What?”
“Can you smell the wood of that place, Susannah?”
She sniffed. “I can, as a matter of fact—what of it?”
He turned to her, smiling. “If we can smell it, we can burn it.”
This turned out to be correct. They had trouble kindling the fire, even aided by Roland’s slyest tricks of trailcraft and half a can of Sterno, but in the end they succeeded. Susannah sat as close to it as she could, turning at regular intervals in order to toast both sides equally, relishing the sweat that popped out first on her face and her breasts, then on her back. She had forgotten what it was to be warm, and went on feeding wood to the flames until the campfire was a roaring bonfire. To animals in the open lands further along the Path of the healing Beam, that fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object—to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father’s sake—but he didn’t. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.
“Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?” he asked her at last.
She nodded. “If I have to.”
“Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold,” he said. “And while I can’t promise you we’ll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don’t believe it’ll be any longer than two.”
“You think it’ll be easier to take game if we don’t build a fire, don’t you?”
Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.
“Will there be game as early as day after tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
He considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t say—but I do.”
“Can you smell it?”
“No.”
“Touch their minds?”
“It’s not that, either.”
She let it go. “Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?”
He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon’s breath. “They’ll not come close