SEVEN
The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. It widened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here stood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop it now. The next day they came to die first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped wreck with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a flattened barn out back. With Roland's help Susannah turned the sign over, and they could make out one word: LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come to know so well.
"I think the track we've been following was once a coachroad between Casde Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe," he said. "It makes sense."
They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads.
It was the outskirts of a town or village-perhaps even a city that had once spread around the Crimson King's casde. But unlike Lud, there was very litde of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in the remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard whispering voices in the shadows. Roland identified these-with a matter-of-factness Susannah found eerie-as the voices of ghosts of what he called "housies," and suggested they move back out into the street.
"I don't believe they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow," Roland said, and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual manner.
Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which they had tried to camp had a chill that she diought was worse than physical cold. The tilings they had heard whispering in there might be old, but she thought they were still hungry.
And so the three of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, beside Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a few degrees. They tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.
"Why?" Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate. "Why?"
"Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?"
"No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?"
"It won't burn because it hates us," Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. "This is his place, still his even though he's moved on. Everything here hates us. But... listen,
Susannah. Now that we're on an actual road, still more paved than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?"
"Sure," she said. "Anything's got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel."
So that was what they did-the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after that. She kept thinking, I'm gonna get sick,
I can't go on like this without coming down with something, but she didn't. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left of her lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.
Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needlegardens of rock, but Susannah had taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they could now read the occasional sign which proclaimed this to be THE KING's WAY (with the eye, of course; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still on Badlands Avenue.