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...stupidwas the word which first came to Eddie's mind. The second wasunimportant. 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 f**king 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?"