Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [52]
“And to you comes Callahan, of the Lot,” he said when the introductions were done. “Or so I was. Now I guess I’m just the Old Fella. That’s what they call me in the Calla.”
“Won’t your friends join us?” Roland said. “We haven’t a great deal to eat, but there’s always tea.”
“Perhaps not just yet.”
“Ah,” Roland said, and nodded as if he understood.
“In any case, we’ve eaten well,” Callahan said. “It’s been a good year in the Calla—until now, anyway—and we’ll be happy to share what we have.” He paused, seemed to feel he had gone too far too fast, and added: “Mayhap. If all goes well.”
“If,” Roland said. “An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long.”
Callahan laughed. “Not bad! In any case, we’re probably better off for food than you are. We also have fresh muffin-balls—Zalia found em—but I suspect you know about those. She said the patch, although large, had a picked-over look.”
“Jake found them,” Roland said.
“Actually, it was Oy,” Jake said, and stroked the bumbler’s head. “I guess he’s sort of a muffin-hound.”
“How long have you known we were here?” Callahan asked.
“Two days.”
Callahan contrived to look both amused and exasperated. “Since we cut your trail, in other words. And we tried to be so crafty.”
“If you didn’t think you needed someone craftier than you are, you wouldn’t have come,” Roland said.
Callahan sighed. “You say true, I say thankya.”
“Do you come for aid and succor?” Roland asked. There was only mild curiosity in his voice, but Eddie Dean felt a deep, deep chill. The words seemed to hang there, full of resonance. Nor was he alone in feeling that. Susannah took his right hand. A moment later Jake’s hand crept into Eddie’s left.
“That is not for me to say.” Callahan sounded suddenly hesitant and unsure of himself. Afraid, maybe.
“Do you know you come to the line of Eld?” Roland asked in that same curiously gentle voice. He stretched a hand toward Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. Even toward Oy. “For these are mine, sure. As I am theirs. We are round, and roll as we do. And you know what we are.”
“Are you?” Callahan asked. “Are you all?”
Susannah said, “Roland, what are you getting us into?”
“Naught be zero, naught be free,” he said. “I owe not you, nor you owe me. At least for now. They have not decided to ask.”
They will, Eddie thought. Dreams of the rose and the deli and little todash-jaunts aside, he didn’t think of himself as particularly psychic, but he didn’t need to be psychic to know that they—the people from whom this Callahan had come as representative—would ask. Somewhere chestnuts had fallen into a hot fire, and Roland was supposed to pull them out.
But not just Roland.
You’ve made a mistake here, Pops, Eddie thought. Perfectly understandable, but a mistake, all the same. We’re not the cavalry. We’re not the posse. We’re not gunslingers. We’re just three lost souls from the Big Apple who—
But no. No. Eddie had known who they were since River Crossing, when the old people had knelt in the street to Roland. Hell, he’d known since the woods (what he still thought of as Shardik’s Woods), where Roland had taught them to aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart. Not three, not four. One. That Roland should finish them so, complete them so, was horrible. He was filled with poison and had kissed them with his poisoned lips. He had made them gunslingers, and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of Arthur Eld in this mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got to Roland’s Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? Well, guess again.
It was Jake who said what was in Eddie’s mind, and Eddie didn’t like the look of excitement in the boy’s eyes. He guessed plenty of kids had gone off to plenty of wars with that same excited gonna-kick-some-ass look on their faces. Poor kid didn’t know he’d been poisoned, and that made him pretty dumb, because no one should have