The Waste Lands (Page 152)

“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.

“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?” “Yes! Yes!”

“If you want to thank me—as I’m sure you do—you must say some-thing an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ‘My life for you,’ Andrew— can you say that?” He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t stop saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life—” The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed. “Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here—him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew—would you like that?”

“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists. “Yes!”

“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they have to die—they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on anything . . . after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”

“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about. Nor did he care; there was a feeling of exaltation creeping through his mind like some excellent drug, and after the pain of the cider-press, that was enough for him. More than enough. Richard Fannin’s lips curled. “Bear and bone . . . key and rose . . . day and night . . . time and tide. Enough! Enough, I say! They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now!”

Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm. “I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?” “No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leader-ship without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively—I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these envi-rons in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.” “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling. “Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew— I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing—he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.” He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.

VI • RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS

“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.” “What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”

“Nothing,” Roland said, “but it’s still possible that we may be able to do something for ourselves. Now what was the riddle?” Eddie looked toward the streamlined shape of the mono. “He said we’d have to prime the pump to get him going. Only his pump primes backward. Does it mean anything to you?”

Roland thought it over carefully, then shook his head. He looked down at Jake. “Any ideas, Jake?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t even see a pump.” “That’s probably the easy part,” Roland said. “We say he and him instead of it and that because Blaine sounds like a living being, but he’s still a machine—& sophisticated one, but a machine. He started his own engines, but it must take some sort of code or combination to open the gate and the train doors.” “We better hurry up,” Jake said nervously. “It’s got to be two or three minutes since he last talked to us. At least.”

“Don’t count on it,” Eddie said gloomily. “Time’s weird over here.” “Still—“

“Yeah, yeah.” Eddie glanced toward Susannah, but she was sitting astride Roland’s hip and looking at the numeric diamond with a day-dreamy expression on her face. He looked back at Roland. “I’m pretty sure you’re right about it being a combination—that must be what all those number-pads are for.” He raised his voice. “Is that it, Blaine? Have we got at least that much right?”

No response; only the quickening rumble of the mono’s engines. “Roland,” Susannah said abruptly. “You have to help me.” The daydreamy look was being replaced by an expression of mingled horror, dismay, and determination. To Roland’s eye, she had never looked more beautiful … or more alone. She had been on his shoulders when they stood at the edge of the clearing and watched the bear trying to claw Eddie out of the tree, and Roland had not seen her expression when he told her she must be the one to shoot it. But he knew what that expression had been, for he was seeing it now. Ka was a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started. So it had ever been and so it was now; Susannah was once again facing the bear, and her face said she knew it. “What?” he asked. “What is it, Susannah?” “I know the answer, but I can’t get it. It’s stuck in my mind the way a fishbone can get stuck in your throat. I need you to help me remember. Not his face, but his voice. What he said.”