"It doesn't matter," he said softly, "now."
The man in black shuffled the cards with flying, merging rapidity. The deck was huge, the design on the backs of the cards convoluted. "These are tarot cards," the man in black was saying, "a mixture of the standard deck and a selection of my own development Watch closely gunslinger."
"Why?"
"I'm going to tell your future, Roland. Seven cards must be turned, one at a time, and placed in conjunction with the others. I've not done this for over three hundred years. And I suspect I've never read one quite like yours." The mocking note was creeping in again, like a Kuvian night-soldier with a killing knife gripped in one hand. "You are the world's last adventurer. The last crusader. How that must please you, Roland! Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, how close in time. Worlds turn about your head."
"Read my fortune then," he said harshly.
The first card was turned.
"The Hanged Man," the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his hood. "Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength and not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over all the pits of Hades. You have already dropped one co-traveler into the pit, have you not?"
He turned the second card. "The Sailor. Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake."
The gunslinger winced, said nothing.
The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly astride a young man's shoulder. The young man's face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the ba boon held a whip.
"The Prisoner," the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.
"A trifle upsetting, isn't he?" The man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sniggering.
He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger's dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.
"The Lady of Shadows," the man in black remarked. "Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. A veritable Janus."
"Why are you showing me these?"
"Don't ask!" The man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. "Don't ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church."
He tittered and turned the fifth card.
A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. "
"Death," the man in black said simply. "Yet not for you.
The sixth card.
The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnamable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
"The Tower," the man in black said softly.
The gunslinger's card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.
"Where does that one go?" The gunslinger asked.
The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.
"What does that mean?" The gunslinger asked. The man in black did not answer.
"What does that mean?" He asked raggedly. The man in black did not answer.
"God damn you!" No answer.
"Then what's the seventh card?"
The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it
"The seventh is Life," the man in black said softly. "But not for you. "
"Where does it fit the pattern?"
"That is not for you to know," the man in black said. "Or for me to know." He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.
"Sleep now," the man in black said carelessly. "Perchance to dream and that sort of thing."
"I'm going to choke you dead," the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor filled with obsidian pylons. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
He dreamed.
The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
"Let us have light," the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that the light was good.
"Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below." It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly.