DARK TOWER 8: The Drawing of The Ka-Tet by Brent Lee Sohlden

PART 1: The Gunslinger

                                                                               

                                               1
 
The Man in Black fled through the desert and Dathan Winthrop followed. He crested a dusty hill, and leant his ear to the ground. He heard faint rumbling. He mentally kicked himself. He had felt an inner-prompting to load and oil his sandalwood pistols this morning but had ignored the prompting as a false premonition. Now he hurriedly did so. Fortune favored the prepared, while death favored the ill-prepared.
      Just as he finished the task, the rumbling reached a crescendo as seventy riders on harseback (called razor-horses by the local folken) armed with machine pistols all aimed at him surrounded him.  The first nineteen of them were dead ere they got within forty feet, as Dathan steadily fired, loaded, reloaded and fired with all the expertise of Clem Essenwood of eons ago. 

       His name had not always been Dathan. In another world it had been Alain. How he knew this he did not know. He just knew he must pursue something, the Dark Tower, he knew not why. He knew that since he was born, this had been his goal, what he had been trained for all his life. He had a mission from Gan, a commission from God. He had a key. He guarded it with his life. Around his neck,under the folds of his jerkin and shirt. When he was in real danger it would burn hot against the skin of his chest.

                                         Now it felt like it was singing all his chest hairs as if they were ablaze as he sought cover in the scant bramble bushes he had been able to make it to as he had finished oiling and loading his pistols. Down they went, rider and razor horse, one by one, the sand turned to glass as the laser sights tracked their quarry and the jet fast bullets sent sand spraying every which way. As Dathan scambled and ducked from bush to bigger bush to smaller bush, sometimes firing rapidly, sometimes intermittently. When the last five harses and riders were left, they fled. Let them go, an inner voice told Dathan. So he did.

He took three big swigs from one of his two waterskins, then closed it up. He continued to pursue the man in black.

Who was the man in black? Some knew had known his near-immortal father as Walter O'Dim, some as Martin, and some knew his as The Man Without A Face, some as The Ageless Stranger, some as The Walkin' Dude, but many had known him by his "Christian name", Randall Flagg. But his father had met an untimely end at the hand (or maw) of the son of Deschain. 


   Dathan knew that pursuing this demigod was dangerous, fraught with peril, yet it was the only lead he had at the present to find his quarry-The Dark Tower. Was this Man in Black the only son of Walter? There had been many, Dathan knew, one on each world Walter had visited, but some had been killed before they could be born, by their mothers committing suicide in various ways. But there were three, The Sons of Walter, they were called, who were now alive. And this one was the Cheif of them. The others had died, or had been killed, one way or the other.


Yet this was a different desert than the famed Roland Deschain had once traveled, thousands of miles away from it, in fact. Roland had done much for the cause of the Tower. His path would be different than Roland and his ka-tet's had been. Dathan had come from a land called Kanda, from a region known as Jezreel. He had always done and stood for what was right, had desired to marry, had waited for her, but she had jilted him, marrying another man, who had more wealth than his family had. He carried that heartache with him as he journeyed, ever onward. His journey had taken him through many a field and wood, across many a river and wild, and through many cities, towns and villas. And he had beheld beauty, O so much beauty, everywhere he had gone. Alone. Once more he had thought he had found love, but she too found another man's charms more appealing than the meager life of a Gunslinger.

    He traveled on.