Wizard and glass - Stephen King [16]
Susannah felt her heart sink as any hopes they might find a quick and easy way out of this disappeared.
4
“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t know how hard it’ll seem to you, but it struck me as a toughie.” Nor did he know the answer, since that section of Riddle-De-Dum! had been torn out, but he didn’t think that made any difference; their knowing the answers hadn’t been part of the ground-rules.
“I SHALL HEAR AND ANSWER.”
“No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?”
“SILENCE, A THING YOU KNOW LITTLE ABOUT, EDDIE OF NEW YORK,” Blaine said with no pause at all, and Eddie felt his heart drop a little. There was no need to consult with the others; the answer was self-evident. And having it come back at him so quickly was the real bummer. Eddie never would have said so, but he had harbored the hope—almost a secret surety—of bringing Blaine down with a single riddle, ker-smash, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Blaine together again. The same secret surety, he supposed, that he had harbored every time he picked up a pair of dice in some sharpie’s back-bedroom crap game, every time he called for a hit on seventeen while playing blackjack. That feeling that you couldn’t go wrong because you were you, the best, the one and only.
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “Silence, a thing I know little about. Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak truth.”
“I HOPE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED SOMETHING WHICH WILL HELP YOU,” Blaine said, and Eddie thought: You fucking mechanical liar. The complacent tone had returned to Blaine’s voice, and Eddie found it of some passing interest that a machine could express such a range of emotion. Had the Great Old Ones built them in, or had Blaine created an emotional rainbow for himself at some point? A little dipolar pretty with which to pass the long decades and centuries? “DO YOU WISH ME TO GO AWAY AGAIN SO YOU MAY CONSULT?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
The route-map flashed bright red. Eddie turned toward the gunslinger. Roland composed his face quickly, but before he did, Eddie saw a horrible thing: a brief look of complete hopelessness. Eddie had never seen such a look there before, not when Roland had been dying of the lobstrosities’ bites, not when Eddie had been pointing the gunslinger’s own revolver at him, not even when the hideous Gasher had taken Jake prisoner and disappeared into Lud with him.
“What do we do next?” Jake asked. “Do another round of the four of us?”
“I think that would serve little purpose,” Roland said. “Blaine must know thousands of riddles—perhaps millions—and that is bad. Worse, far worse, he understands the how of riddling . . . the place the mind has to go to in order to make them and solve them.” He turned to Eddie and Susannah, sitting once more with their arms about one another. “Am I right about that?” he asked them. “Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Susannah said, and Eddie nodded reluctantly. He didn’t want to agree . . . but he did.
“So?” Jake asked. “What do we do, Roland? I mean, there has to be a way out of this . . . doesn’t there?”
Lie to him, you bastard, Eddie sent fiercely in Roland’s direction.
Roland, perhaps hearing the thought, did the best he could. He touched Jake’s hair with his diminished hand and ruffled through it. “I think there’s always an answer, Jake. The real question is whether or not we’ll have time to find the right riddle. He said it took him a little under nine hours to run his route—”
“Eight hours, forty-five minutes,” Jake put in.
“. . . and that’s not much time. We’ve already been running almost an hour—”
“And if that map’s right, we’re almost halfway to Topeka,” Susannah said in a tight voice. “Could be our mechanical pal’s been lying to us about the length of the run. Hedging his bets a little.”
“Could be,” Roland agreed.
“So what do we do?” Jake repeated.
Roland drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Let