believing the Manni were Christians. They might look like Quakers or Amish with their cloaks and beards and round-crowned black hats, might throw the occasional thee or thou into their conversation, but so far as Jake knew, neither the Quakers nor the Amish had ever made a hobby
of traveling to other worlds.
Long polished wooden rods were pulled from another wagon. They were thrust through metal
sleeves on the undersides of the engraved boxes. The boxes were called coffs, Jake learned. The Manni carried them like religious artifacts through the streets of a medieval town. Jake supposed that in a way they were religious artifacts.
They started up the path, which was still scattered with hair-ribbons, scraps of cloth, and a few small toys. These had been bait for the Wolves, and the bait had been taken.
When they reached the place where Frank Tavery had gotten his foot caught, Jake heard the
voice of the useless git’s beautiful sister in his mind: Help him, please, sai, I beg. He had, God forgive him. And Benny had died.
Jake looked away, grimacing, then thought You’re a gunslinger now, you gotta do better. He forced himself to look back.
Pere Callahan’s hand dropped onto his shoulder. “Son, are you all right? You’re awfully pale.”
“I’m okay,” Jake said. A lump had risen in his throat, quite a large one, but he forced himself to swallow past it and repeat what he’d just said, telling the lie to himself rather than to the Pere:
‘Yeah, I’m okay.”
Callahan nodded and shifted his own gunna (the half-hearted packsack of a town man who
does not, in his heart, believe he’s going anywhere) from his left shoulder to his right. “And what’s going to happen when we get up to that cave? If we can get up to that cave?”
Jake shook his head. He didn’t know.
THREE
The path was okay. A good deal of loose rock had shaken down on it, and the going was arduous
for the men carrying the coffs, but in one respect their way was easier than before. The quake
had dislodged the giant boulder that had almost blocked the path near the top. Eddie peered over and saw it lying far below, shattered into two pieces. There was some sort of lighter, sparkly
stuff in its middle, making it look to Eddie like the world’s largest hard-boiled egg.
The cave was still there, too, although a large pile of talus now lay in front of its mouth. Eddie joined some of the younger Manni in helping to clear it, tossing handfuls of busted-up shale
(garnets gleaming in some of the pieces like drops of blood) over the side. Seeing the cave’s
mouth eased a band which had been squeezing Eddie’s heart, but he didn’t like the silence of the cave, which had been damnably chatty on his previous visit. From somewhere deep in its gullet
he could hear the grating whine of a draft, but that was all. Where was his brother, Henry? Henry should have been bitching about how Balazar’s gentlemen had killed him and it was all Eddie’s
fault. Where was his Ma, who should have been agreeing with Henry (and in equally dolorous
tones)? Where was Margaret Eisenhart, complaining to Henchick, her grandfather, about how
she’d been branded forgetful and then abandoned? This had been the Cave of the Voices long
before it had been the Doorway Cave, but the voices had fallen silent. And the door looked . . .
stupid was the word which first came to Eddie’s mind. The second was unimportant. This cave had once been informed and defined by the voices from below; the door had been rendered awful
and mysterious and powerful by the glass ball — Black Thirteen — which had come into the
Calla through it.
But now it’s left the same way, and it’s just an old door that doesn’t —
Eddie tried to stifle the thought and couldn’t.
— that doesn’t go anywhere.
He turned to Henchick, disgusted by the sudden welling of tears in his eyes but unable to stop
them. “There’s no magic left here,” he said. His voice was wretched with despair. “There’s nothing behind that fucking door but stale air and fallen rock. You’re a fool and I’m another.”
There were shocked gasps at this, but Henchick looked at Eddie with eyes that almost seemed
to twinkle. “Lewis, Thonnie!” he said, almost jovially. “Bring me the Branni coff.”
Two strapping young men with short beards and hair pulled back in long braids stepped
forward. Between them they bore an ironwood coff about four feet long, and heavy, from the
way they carried the poles. They set it before Henchick.
“Open it, Eddie of New York.”
Thonnie and Lewis looked at him, questioning and a little afraid. The older Manni men, Eddie
saw, were watching with a kind of greedy interest. He supposed it took a few years to become
fully invested in the Manni brand of extravagant weirdness; in time Lewis and Thonnie would
get there, but they hadn’t made it much past peculiar as yet.
Henchick nodded, a little impatiently. Eddie bent and opened the box. It was easy. There was
no lock. Inside was a silk cloth. Henchick removed it with a magician’s flourish and disclosed a plumb-bob on a chain. To Eddie it looked like an old-fashioned child’s top, and was nowhere
near as big as he had expected. It was perhaps eighteen inches long from its pointed tip to its broader top and made of some yellowish wood that looked greasy. It was on a silver chain that
had been looped around a crystal plug set in the coff’s top.
“Take it out,” Henchick said, and when Eddie looked to Roland, the hair over the old man’s mouth opened and a set of perfect white teeth displayed themselves in a smile of astounding
cynicism. “Why do’ee look to your dinh, young snivelment? The magic’s gone out of this place, you said so yourself! And would’ee not know? Why, thee must be all of . . . I don’t know . . .
twenty-five?”
Snickers from the Manni who were close enough to hear this jape, several of them not yet
twenty-five themselves.
Furious with the old bastard — and with himself, as well — Eddie reached into the box.
Henchick stayed his hand.
“Touch not the bob itself. Not if thee’d keep thy cream in on one side and thy crap on the other. By the chain, do’ee kennit?”
Eddie almost reached for the bob anyway — he’d already made a fool of himself in front of
these people, there was really no reason not to finish the job — but he looked into Jake’s grave gray eyes and changed his mind. The wind was blowing hard up here, chilling the sweat of the
climb on his skin, making him shiver. Eddie reached forward again, took hold of the chain, and
gingerly unwound it from the plug.
“Lift him out,” Henchick said.
“What’ll happen?”
Henchick nodded, as if Eddie had finally talked some sense. “That’s to see. Lift him out.”
Eddie did so. Given the obvious effort with which the two young men had been carrying the
box, he was astounded at how light the bob was. Lifting it was like lifting a feather which had been attached to a four-foot length of Fine-link chain. He looped the chain over the back of his fingers and held his hand in front of his eyes. He looked a little like a man about to make a
puppet caper.
Eddie was about to ask Henchick again what the old man expected to happen, but before he
could, the bob began to sway back and forth in modest arcs.
“I’m not doing that,” Eddie said. “At least, I don’t think I am. It must be the wind.”
“I don’t think it can be,” Callahan said. “There are no flukes to — ”
“Hush!” Cantab said, and with such a forbidding look that Callahan did hush.
Eddie stood in front of the cave, with all the arroyo country and most of Calla Bryn Sturgis
spread out below him. Dreaming blue-gray in the far distance was the forest through which they
had come to get here — the last vestige of Mid-World, where they would never go more. The
wind gusted, blowing his hair back from his forehead, and suddenly he heard a humming sound.
Except he didn’t. The humming was inside the hand in front of his eyes, the one with the chain
lying upon the spread fingers. It was in his arm. And most of all, in his head.
At the far end of the chain, at about the height of Eddie’s right knee, the bob’s swing grew
more pronounced and became the arc of a pendulum. Eddie realized a strange thing: each time
the bob reached the end of its swing, it grew heavier. It was like holding onto something that was being pulled by some extraordinary centrifugal force.