Wolves of the Calla

Roland and his group arrive at the borderlands between Mid-World and End-World after escaping Blaine the Mono and evading Randall Flagg, and they are met by a delegation from Calla Bryn Sturgis. The town expects to be raided by the Wolves, riders in masks who come once in a generation to take its children, and the calla wants the kind of help that only gunslingers can give.

The bargain is what makes the book a self-contained story within a long sequence. In exchange for the town's defence, the priest Father Callahan, who previously appeared in the novel Salem's Lot, offers Roland Black Thirteen, the most dangerous of Maerlyn's magic balls, which he used to travel into Mid-World. The novel therefore works as a western with a deadline as well as a step in the larger quest for the Dark Tower. Part of the danger sits in another world entirely: in the New York of 1977 the Sombra Corporation is plotting to destroy the lot at Second Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, where a rose grows that matters to the Tower as much as the town does. Black Thirteen sleeps under the floorboards of Callahan's church, and using it means trusting something that is, by the book's own account, the eye of the Crimson King.