"Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten ... or Maerlyn ... or whoever you call yourself now..."
"Flagg, actually," the man on the throne said. "And we've met before." He smiled. Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted Flagg's features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. "In the wreck of Gilead. You and your surviving pals - that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made another - were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake's world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well."
"And will again, I reckon," Roland said. "Unless, that is, I kill you now and put an end to your interference."
Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in the waistband of his jeans - Jake's Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps immune to this creature's enchantments - with his right. And he was fast as he had always been fast, his speed blinding.
The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and the glass ball - once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland himself - slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he had made a clean draw. He didn't, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the quarter-second he had needed. He pumped three shots into the billowing smoke, then ran forward, oblivious of the shouts of the others.
He waved the smoke aside with his hands. His shots had shattered the back of the throne into thick green slabs of glass, but the man-shaped creature which had called itself Flagg was gone. Roland found himself already beginning to wonder if he - or it had been there in the first place.
The ball was still there, however, unharmed and glowing the same enticing pink he remembered from so long ago - from Mejis, when he had been young and in love. This survivor of Maerlyn's Rainbow had rolled almost to the edge of the throne's seat; two more inches and it would have plunged over and shattered on the floor. Yet it had not; still it remained, this bewitched thing Susan Delgado had first glimpsed through the window of Rhea's hut, under the light of the Kissing Moon.
Roland picked it up - how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his palm, even after all these years - and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. "You always did have a charmed life," he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as he had seen her in this ball - her ancient, laughing eyes. He thought of the flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.
Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly . . . the tears of all those you've put to ruin.
And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn't believe they actually needed it. He thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to Mid-World ... and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.
But you can't go yet, gunslinger. Not until you've finished your story, told the last scene.
Whose voice was that? Vannay's? No. Cort's? No. Nor was it the voice of his father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore's bed. That was the hardest voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.
This time what he heard was the voice of ka - ka like a wind. He had told so much of that awful fourteenth year ... but he hadn't finished the tale. As with Detta Walker and the Blue Lady's forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden thing. The question wasn't, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find their way out of the Green Palace and recover the Path of the Beam; the question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he had looked into the wizard's glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them -
No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.
Yes. He knew better.
"Come," he said, turning to them.