The Dark Tower-Part 1#-2#(33)

Walter o' Dim had wandered long, and under a hundred names, but the Tower had always been his goal. Like Roland, he wanted to climb it and see what lived at the top. If anything did.

He had belonged to none of the cliques and cults and faiths and factions that had arisen in the confused years since the Tower began to totter, although he wore their siguls when it suited him. His service to the Crimson King was a late thing, as was his service to John Farson, the Good Man who'd brought down Gilead, the last bastion of civilization, in a tide of blood and murder. Walter had done his own share of murder in those years, living a long and only quasi-mortal life. He had witnessed the end of what he had then believed to be Roland's last ka-tet at Jericho Hill. Witnessed it? That was a little overmodest, by all the gods and fishes! Under the name of Rudin Filaro, he had fought with his face painted blue, had screamed and charged with the rest of the stinking barbarians, and had brought down Cuthbert Allgood himself, with an arrow through the eye. Yet through all that he'd kept his gaze on the Tower. Perhaps that was why the damned gunslinger-as the sun went down on that day's work, Roland of Gilead had been the last of them-had been able to escape, having buried himself in a cart filled with the dead and then creeping out of the slaughterpile at sundown, just before the whole works had been set alight.

He had seen Roland years earlier, in Mejis, and had just missed his grip on him there, too (although he put that mostly down to Eldred Jonas, he of the quavery voice and the long gray hair, and Jonas had paid). The King had told him then that they weren't done with Roland, that the gunslinger would begin the end of matters and ultimately cause the tumble of that which he wished to save. Walter hadn't begun to believe that until the Mohaine Desert, where he had looked around one day and discovered a certain gunslinger on his backtrail, one who had grown old over the course of falling years, and hadn't completely believed it until the reappearance of Mia, who fulfilled an old and grave prophecy by giving birth to the Crimson King's son. Certainly the Old Red Thing was of no more use to him, but even in his imprisonment and insanity, he-it-was dangerous.

Still, until he'd had Roland to complete him-to make him greater than his own destiny, perhaps-Walter o' Dim had been little more than a wanderer left over from the old days, a mercenary with a vague ambition to penetrate the Tower before it was brought down. Was that not what had brought him to the Crimson King in the first place? Yes. And it wasn't his fault that the great scuttering spider-king had run mad.

Never mind. Here was his son with the same mark on his heel-Walter could see it at this very moment-and everything balanced. Of course he'd need to be careful. The thing in the chair looked helpless, perhaps even thought it was helpless, but it wouldn't do to underestimate it just because it looked like a baby.

Walter slipped the gun into his pocket (for the moment; only for the moment) and held his hands out, empty and palms up. Then he closed one of them into a fist, which he raised to his forehead. Slowly, never taking his eyes from Mordred, wary lest he should change (Walter had seen that change, and what had happened to the little beast's mother), the newcomer dropped to one knee.

"Hile, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland of Gilead that was and of the Crimson King whose name was once spoken from End-World to Out-World; hile you son of two fathers, both of them descended from Arthur Eld, first king to rise after the Prim receded, and Guardian of the Dark Tower."

For a moment nothing happened. In the Control Center there was only silence and the lingering smell of Nigel's fried circuits.

Then the baby lifted its chubby fists, opened them, and raised his hands: Rise, bondsman, and come to me.

TWO

"It's best you not ‘think strong,' in any case," the newcomer said, stepping closer. "They knew you were here, and Roland is almighty Christing clever; trig-delah is he. He caught up with me once, you know, and I thought I was done. I truly did." From his gunna the man who sometimes called himself Flagg (on another level of the Tower, he had brought an entire world to ruin under that name) had taken peanut butter and crackers.

He'd asked permission of his new dinh, and the baby (although bitterly hungry himself) had nodded regally. Now Walter sat cross-legged on the floor, eating rapidly, secure in his thinkingcap, unaware there was an intruder inside and all that he knew was being ransacked. He was safe until that ransacking was done, but afterward-

Mordred raised one chubby baby-hand in the air and swooped it gracefully down in the shape of a question mark.

"How did I escape?" Walter asked. "Why, I did what any true cozener would do in such circumstances-told him the truth!

Showed him the Tower, at least several levels of it. It stunned him, right and proper, and while he was open in such fashion,

I took a leaf from his own book and hypnotized him. We were in one of the fistulas of time which sometimes swirl out from the Tower, and the world moved on all around us as we had our palaver in that bony place, aye! I brought more bones-human ones-and while he slept I dressed em in what was left of my own clothes. I could have killed him then, but what of the Tower if I had, eh? What of you, for that matter? You never would have come to be. It's fair to say, Mordred, that by allowing Roland to live and draw his three, I saved your life before your life was even kindled, so I did. I stole away to the seashore-felt in need of a little vacation, hee! When Roland got there, he went one way, toward the three doors. I'd gone the other, Mordred my dear, and here I am!"

He laughed through a mouthful of crackers and sprayed crumbs on his chin and shirt. Mordred smiled, but he was revolted. This was what he was supposed to work with, this? A cracker-gobbling, crumb-spewing fool who was too full of his own past exploits to sense his present danger, or to know his defenses had been breached? By all the gods, he deserved to die!

But before that could happen, there were two more things he needed. One was to know where Roland and his friends had gone. The other was to be fed. This fool would serve both purposes.

And what made it easy? Why, that Walter had also grown old-old and lethally sure of himself-and too vain to realize it.

"You may wonder why I'm here, and not about your father's business," Walter said. "Do you?"

Mordred didn't, but he nodded, just the same. His stomach rumbled.

"In truth, I am about his business," Walter said, and gave his most charming smile (spoiled somewhat by the peanut butter on his teeth). He had once probably known that any statement beginning with the words In truth is almost always a lie.

No more. Too old to know. Too vain to know. Too stupid to remember. But he was wary, all the same. He could feel the child's force. In his head? Rummaging around in his head?

Surely not. The thing trapped in the baby's body was powerful, but surely not that powerful.

Walter leaned forward earnestly, clasping his knees.

"Your Red Father is …  indisposed. As a result of having lived so close to the Tower for so long, and having thought upon it so deeply, I have no doubt. It's down to you to finish what he began. I've come to help you in that work."

Mordred nodded, as if pleased. He was pleased. But ah, he was also so hungry.

"You may have wondered how I reached you in this supposedly secure chamber," Walter said. "In truth I helped build this place, in what Roland would call the long-ago."

That phrase again, as obvious as a wink.

He had put the gun in the left pocket of his parka. Now, from the right, he withdrew a gadget the size of a cigarettepack, pulled out a silver antenna, and pushed a button. A section of the gray tiles withdrew silently, revealing a flight of stairs.

Mordred nodded. Walter-or Randall Flagg, if that was what he was currently calling himself-had indeed come out of the floor. A neat trick, but of course he had once served Roland's father Steven as Gilead's court magician, hadn't he? Under the name of Marten. A man of many faces and many neat tricks was Walter o' Dim, but never as clever as he seemed to think. Not by half. For Mordred now had the final thing he had been looking for, which was the way Roland and his friends had gotten out of here. There was no need to pluck it from its hiding place in Walter's mind, after all. He only needed to follow the fool's backtrail.

First, however …

Walter's smile had faded a little. "Did'ee say something, sire? For I thought I heard the sound of your voice, far back in my mind."

The baby shook his head. And who is more believable than a baby? Are their faces not the very definition of guilelessness and innocence?

"I'd take you with me and go after them, if you'd come," Walter said. "What a team we'd make! They've gone to the devar-toi in Thunderclap, to release the Breakers. I've already promised to meet your father-your White Father-and his katet should they dare go on, and that's a promise I intend to keep. For, hear me well, Mordred, the gunslinger Roland Deschain has stood against me at every turn, and I'll bear it no more. No more! Do you hear?" His voice was rising in fury.

Mordred nodded innocently, widening his pretty baby's eyes in what might have been taken for fear, fascination, or both.

Certainly Walter o' Dim seemed to preen beneath his regard, and really, the only question now was when to take him-immediately or later? Mordred was very hungry, but thought he would hold off at least a bit longer. There was something oddly compelling about watching this fool stitching the last few inches of his fate with such earnestness.