Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 99 of 150

The wolf led them off the wash and up a shallow rise. Chilly Willy stumbled twice on the climb. Ben caught the crate handle each time to keep the boxes from grinding. Eleven pieces. That was the whole of it. The stone cup he had traded away was gone, and Cage's beads would not fool any buyer who counted honestly. Without a twelfth piece, the purse against his ribs was worthless. Any buyer he approached with eleven would take the coin back and cut his throat for the short count. The wolf stopped at a slumped wooden house at the edge of the pines. Shutters hung crooked. The chimney leaned. A pot sat by the door with cold ash in it. Ben knew the look of a place kept just enough to seem lived in. "Inside," Ben said. Chilly Willy dropped onto the step and stayed there. Ben pushed the door with his shoulder. A boy sat at the table with his head on his arms. Thick dark hair. Gray hood. Sandals wet through. He lifted his face and looked at Ben without surprise, the way a man too tired to be startled looks at anything. "Door was open," the boy said. "I sat down." "Who are you?" "Picabo. Walking to the oracle. Pass shuts in four days." He nodded at the crate. "That hums. I can hear it from here. Like a kettle before it whistles." Ben set the crate down slow. He had thought the sap seal was holding. He put his ear to the wood. A thin note, steady. One of the boxes inside had shifted. He had no wax, no sap, no time. He had a boy who could hear it and a wolf that had brought him to this door. Ben thought about the twelfth piece. He had been chasing one all his life. The truth was simpler than he had let himself say. There was no twelfth. The stone cup had been the twelfth, and he had spent it. He would not find another before Cage's men found him. He made his choice. "Picabo. You know the road up to the pass?" "Every step." "Take the crate over. Whoever the oracle is, she can have it. Eleven pieces. Tell her the twelfth was traded for a tunnel. Tell her a man named Dover sent it." Picabo looked at the crate. "Heavy?" "The wolf helps. He owes me a road." Ben took three coins from the purse and set them on the table. He kept the rest. Chilly Willy watched from the step and said nothing. "Why?" Picabo said. "Because I can't sell eleven, and I won't be caught with them." Ben lifted the crate onto the boy's shoulder and steadied it. "Go before dark." The wolf stood and walked out toward the rise. Picabo followed. Ben watched the crate go until the pines closed behind it. Then he shut the door and sat down across from Chilly Willy with the purse and no set at all.