"You don't really believe he's gone, do you?" Eddie asked. "A slippery pup like him? Come on, get real. He's peeking, I guarantee you."
"I doubt it very much," Roland said, and Susannah decided she agreed with him. For now, at least. "You could hear how excited he was at the idea of riddling again after all these years. And - "
"And he's confident," Susannah said. "Doesn't expect to have much trouble with the likes of us."
"Will he?" Jake asked the gunslinger. "Will he have trouble with us?"
"I don't know," Roland said. "I don't have a Watch Me hidden up my sleeve, if that's what you're asking. It's a straight game . . . but at least it's a game I've played before. We've all played it before, at least to some extent. And there's that." He nodded toward the book which Jake had taken back from Oy. "There are forces at work here, big ones, and not all of them are working to keep us away from the Tower."
Susannah heard him, but it was Blaine she was thinking of - Blaine who had gone away and left them alone, like the kid who's been chosen "it" obediently covering his eyes while his playmates hide. And wasn't that what they were? Blaine's playmates? The thought was somehow worse than the image she'd had of trying the escape hatch and having her head torn off.
"So what do we do?" Eddie asked. "You must have an idea, or you never would have sent him away."
"His great intelligence - coupled with his long period of loneliness and forced inactivity - may have combined to make him more human than he knows. That's my hope, anyway. First, we must establish a kind of geography. We must tell, if we can, where he is weak and where he is strong, where he is sure of the game and where not so sure. Riddles are not just about the cleverness of the riddler, never think it. They are also about the blind spots of he who is riddled."
"Does he have blind spots?" Eddie asked.
"If he doesn't," Roland said calmly, "we're going to die on this train."
"I like the way you kind of ease us over the rough spots," Eddie said with a thin smile. "It's one of your many charms."
"We will riddle him four times to begin with," Roland said. "Easy, not so easy, quite hard, very hard. He'll answer all four, of that I am confident, but we will be listening for how he answers."
Eddie was nodding, and Susannah felt a small, almost reluctant glimmer of hope. It sounded like the right approach, all right.
"Then we'll send him away again and hold palaver," the gunslinger said. "Mayhap we'll get an idea of what direction to send our horses. These first riddles can come from anywhere, but" - he nodded gravely toward the book - "based on Jake's story of the bookstore, the answer we really need should be in there, not in any memories I have of Fair-Day riddlings. Must be in there."
"Question," Susannah said.
Roland looked at her, eyebrows raised over his faded, dangerous eyes.
"It's a question we're looking for, not an answer," she said. "This time it's the answers that are apt to get us killed."
The gunslinger nodded. He looked puzzled - frustrated, even - and this was not an expression Susannah liked seeing on his face. But this time when Jake held out the book, Roland took it. He held it for a moment (its faded but still g*y red cover looked very strange in his big sunburned hands . . . especially in the right one, with its essential reduction of two fingers), then passed it on to Eddie.
"You're easy," Roland said, turning to Susannah.
"Perhaps," she replied, with a trace of a smile, "but it's still not a very polite thing to say to a lady, Roland."
He turned to Jake. "You'll go second, with one that's a little harder. I'll go third. You'll go last, Eddie. Pick one from the book that looks hard - "
"The hard ones are toward the back," Jake supplied.
". . . but none of your foolishness, mind. This is life and death. The time for foolishness is past."
Eddie looked at him - old long, tall, and ugly, who'd done God knew how many ugly things in the name of reaching his Tower - and wondered if Roland had any idea at all of how much that hurt. Just that casual admonition not to behave like a child, grinning and cracking jokes, now that their lives were at wager.
He opened his mouth to say something - an Eddie Dean Special, something that would be both funny and stinging at the same time, the kind of remark that always used to drive his brother Henry dogshit - and then closed it again. Maybe long, tall, and ugly was right; maybe it was time to put away the one-liners and dead baby jokes. Maybe it was finally time to grow up.
3
After three more minutes of murmured consultation and some quick flipping through Riddle-De-Dum! on Eddie's and Susannah's parts (Jake already knew the one he wanted to try Blaine with first, he'd said), Roland went to the front of the Barony Coach and laid his hand on the fiercely glowing rectangle there. The route-map reappeared at once. Although there was no sensation of movement now that the coach was closed, the green dot was closer to Rilea than ever.