At first he saw nothing but the boulder on the path leading up to the mouth of the cave, and was sickeningly sure his mother’s voice had told the truth. Then he looked left and saw Eddie ten feet away, at the end of the narrow path and tottering on the edge of the drop. His untucked shirt fluttered around the butt of Roland’s big revolver. His normally sharp and rather foxy features now looked puffy and blank. It was the dazed face of a fighter out on his feet. His hair blew around his ears. He swayed forward…then his mouth tightened and his eyes became almost aware. He grasped an outcrop of rock and swayed back again.

He’s fighting it,Callahan thought. And I’m sure he’s fighting the good fight, but he’s losing.

Calling out might actually send him over the edge; Callahan knew this with a gunslinger’s intuition, always sharpest and most dependable in times of crisis. Instead of yelling he sprinted up the remaining stub of path and wound a hand in the tail of Eddie’s shirt just as Eddie swayed forward again, this time removing his hand from the outcrop beside him and using it to cover his eyes in a gesture that was unmeaningly comic: Goodbye, cruel world.

If the shirt had torn, Eddie Dean would undoubtedly have been excused from ka’s great game, but perhaps even the tails of homespun Calla Bryn Sturgis shirts (for that was what he was wearing) served ka. In any case the shirt didn’t tear, and Callahan had held onto a great part of the physical strength he had built up during his years on the road. He yanked Eddie back and caught him in his arms, but not before the younger man’s head struck the outcrop his hand had been on a few seconds before. His lashes fluttered and he looked at Callahan with a kind of stupid unrecognition. He said something that sounded like gibberish to Callahan: Ihsay ahkin fly-oo ower.

Callahan grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “What? I don’t understand you!” Nor did he much want to, but he had to make some kind of contact, had to bring Eddie back from wherever the accursed thing in the box had taken him. “I don’t…understand you!”

This time the response was clearer: “It says I can fly to the Tower. You can let me go. I want to go!”

“You can’t fly, Eddie.” He wasn’t sure that got through, so he put his head down—all the way, until he and Eddie were resting brow to brow, like lovers. “It was trying to kill you.”

“No…” Eddie began, and then awareness came all the way back into his eyes. An inch from Callahan’s own, they widened in understanding. “Yes.”

Callahan lifted his head, but still kept a prudent grip on Eddie’s shoulders. “Are you all right now?”