The Dark Tower

I need you. If you want to be warm again, you settle my hands so I can shoot straight.

And the ceaseless shivering of her body stopped. As the herd of deer burst out of the trees—not a small herd, either; there had to be at least eighteen of them, led by a buck with a magnificent rack—her hands also stopped their shaking. In the right one she held Roland’s revolver with the sandalwood grips.

Here came Oy, bursting out of the woods behind the final straggler. This was a mutie doe, running (and with eerie grace) on four legs of varying sizes with a fifth waggling bonelessly from the middle of her belly like a teat. Last of all came Roland, not really running at all, not anymore, but rather staggering onward at a grim jog. She ignored him, tracking the buck with the gun as the big fellow ran across her field of fire.

“This way,” she whispered. “Break to your right, honey-child, let’s see you do it. Commala-come-come.”

And while there was no reason why he should have, the buck leading his little fleeing herd did indeed veer slightly in Susannah’s direction. Now she was filled with the sort of coldness she welcomed. Her vision seemed to sharpen until she could see the muscles rippling under the buck’s hide, the white crescent as his eye rolled, the old wound on the nearest doe’s foreleg, where the fur had never grown back. She had a moment to wish Eddie and Jake were lying on either side of her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she was seeing, and then that was gone, too.

I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.

“I kill with my heart,” she murmured, and began shooting.

The first bullet took the lead buck in the head and he crashed over on his left side. The others ran past him. A doe leaped over his body and Susannah’s second bullet took her at the height of her leap, so that she crashed down dead on the other side, one leg splayed and broken, all grace gone.

She heard Roland fire three times, but didn’t look to see how he’d done; she had her own business to attend to, and she attended to it well. Each of the last four bullets in the cylinder took down a deer, and only one was still moving when he fell. It didn’t occur to her that this was an amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger, after all, and shooting was her business.

Besides, the morning was windless.

Half the herd now lay dead in the grassy valley below. All the remainder save one wheeled left and pelted away downslope toward the stream. A moment later they were lost in a screen of willows. The last one, a yearling buck, ran directly toward her. Susannah didn’t bother trying to reload from the little pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of buckskin but took one of the ’Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding the dull gripping-place.

“’Riza!” she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing buck at mid-neck. Droplets of blood flew in a garland around its head, black against the white sky. A butcher’s cleaver could not have done a neater job. For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless, blood jetting from the stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats. Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red.

The previous night’s long misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands. There was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder and blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world’s sweetest perfume.

Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms, Roland’s pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.

FOUR