"OH DEAR, STILL HERE!"Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasn't easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.
Another crazed scream in response-"EEEEEEEEE!"Roland was amazed that the Red King didn't split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he'd emptied-he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could-and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whisde, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he'd been famous in his time, this was it.
Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the world's clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.
He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King's back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.
"HOW SLOW YOU ARE!" the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. "TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!"
Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure's feet, but wasn't entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony's floor and its railing obscured it.
Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn't matter.
Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time,
Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he'd been made for.
Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.
The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony's railing... and then peer directly into the gunslinger's eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.
The King's call drifted to him. "WAIT THEN, A BIT-AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOUD GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND... LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!"
He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind... and what the King wanted him to hear.
The call of the Tower.