By late afternoon on the day they returned to Tidemark Anchorage, Edrien Valemere, Brammok Blackbraid, Liora Silverbell, and Vashara Redthorn had learned only how little they understood. They had survived the Far Horizon's disastrous inland search and carried their Auralith samples back to the sea, expecting ships and the people who had remained behind. Instead, the harbor was wrecked. Its inhabitants were gone, their fates uncertain, and no sound ship remained to carry the expedition home. There were questions enough to occupy a lifetime, but evening was approaching, and the four survivors still needed clean water, food, and somewhere to sleep.

The cooking pot had one hole in it, and Brammok held it up to the light as though he had won it at a fair.

"Practically a sieve," he announced. "Wonderful for draining things, if we had any things."

Vashara huffed a breath through her nose, which was all the afternoon had earned him. She was crouched in what remained of the second workshop, sorting a drift of splintered slats and torn canvas, and even that small sound felt strange in her chest, like a tooth she hadn't known was loose. Where the seaward wall should have stood, the harbor lay open to the sun. Shallows glowed turquoise, the channels ran ink-dark, and across the water lay the ships, or what the sea had left of them. One hull rested on its side against the reef. A mast had snapped cleanly and trailed its rigging in the swell like a drowned hand. Nothing she could see had burned. Timbers were cracked, pressed and flung, and Vashara, who had walked more than one battlefield, could not fit the shapes to any weapon she knew.

Count first. Wonder later.

Out in the lane, Edrien was pacing slowly, the way a man paces a room in a dream. He stopped over a row of post-holes in the packed earth and stood looking down at them.

"The cook tents ran along here," he said, to no one in particular. "You could smell the bread from the slip. I used to complain about it." His thumb found the wooden vial at his belt and rested there, not opening it, just checking it was still real. "The rope walk went down to the water. There was a bench just there, with a bad leg, and everyone propped it with the same flat stone."

"Edrien."

Liora knelt among a row of staved casks, her notebook open on her knee and ink drying on her thumb. "I would rather have the cook tents as they are than as you remember them. I can count what is here. Three of these still hold, I think, and two of those smell of brine, not rain. Water first. Memory after."

It was not cruel, exactly. It was precise, which in Liora could be the same distance from cruelty as a hand's width from a blade.

"Of course," Edrien said quietly. He crouched and began prying slats from the nearest cask to find which were sound, and Vashara watched Liora watch him do it. Whatever she meant to say next went back into the notebook unwritten.

A shadow fell across the slats. Brammok pressed a strip of dried fish into Vashara's palm before she had asked, then folded her fingers over it.

"Eat. Then tell me what's bothering you."

"Nothing is bothering me."

"Your jaw is doing the thing."

She chewed, and swallowed, and looked past him through the gap in the wall, to where the beach curved south toward the reef channel. "The gulls," she said. "The tide's been in and out since morning. That wrack line ought to have a hundred of them working it. They're all over the reef, but there's a stretch down past the slip where they go around."

"Around what?"

"I haven't looked yet."

Brammok set the ruined pot carefully on a crate. He did not draw the axe, but his hand settled on the haft, easy and unhurried. "Then we look."

They went down through the grass above the landing, with the wind combing it silver and the sea breathing steadily against the sand below. It was obscene, Vashara thought, how lovely the place still was. Light dropped through the shallows in loose coins, the gulls wheeled and complained over the reef, and the air smelled of salt and weed and warm timber. Behind her Liora said, low, "Slowly. Whatever frightened the birds frightened them for a reason."

"Or the reason is someone sitting very still," Vashara said.

"That is also a reason."

Then she saw it, at the wet edge of the sand where the channel met the shore. It was not wreckage, and not driftwood, and it was not moving. Her stride shortened without her telling it to.

Please. Not another one.

She slowed further and lifted both hands, palms out, the way she would have for a spooked horse or a frightened child. Behind her the others fanned out. Brammok drifted left and up the slope until he stood between the figure and the dark line of the forest, a placement that could have meant protecting them or guarding against them, and she suspected he hadn't yet decided which. Liora stopped at the top of the beach. Her eyes went past Vashara to the tideline, the dunes, the trees, and back again, filing everything.

"If they're hurt," Edrien said, close behind her, "don't move them until you know where. Let them tell you, if they can."

"I know."

"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway."

She almost smiled. She crossed the last few strides slowly, the wet sand cold through her boots, and lowered herself to a crouch an arm's length from the figure. Up close, the tide had left small ridges and bubbling holes in the sand, and a skein of weed curled near the water. The sun lay warm on her shoulders. The sea went on pulling at the shore as if nothing here had changed.

"Hello," she said, in the clear, level Common she kept for frightened people. "Can you hear me?"

Nothing answered. A wave slid up, thinned to lace and drew back.

"My name is Vashara. These are my friends. The big one looks like trouble, but he cooks." Behind her Brammok made an offended noise, softly, for effect. "We're not here to take anything from you. We came back from a long way off and found this place broken, and then we found you."

Still nothing.

She let her hand drift forward until it hovered a hand's breadth from the figure's shoulder, close enough that she could have touched them and far enough that she hadn't. Her mind ran over what she might have to do in the next few breaths, and what she might find if she did it. She kept her voice quiet and steady, as if there were all the time in the world.

"I'm going to put my hand here," she said. "Only that. If you'd rather I didn't, tell me. Any way you can."

Behind her, nobody spoke. The tide kept working at the sand, and somewhere over the reef a gull finally gave up its complaint. Vashara held her open hand where it was and waited for an answer.

Three days have passed since the four survivors of the inland expedition limped into Tidemark Anchorage and found their harbor in ruins. They understood many of the Far Horizon losses well enough—illness, predators, ruined routes, and decisions still too raw to discuss—but they knew almost nothing about what had destroyed the harbor. They had learned the shape of the place instead: where the sound timber lay, which casks still held, how slowly the seep above the landing filled a bucket. A lean-to of sailcloth and surviving workshop wall has become a camp, and small routines have taken root around it, a fire at dusk, a rotating watch, one pot passed from hand to hand. Someone unfamiliar has been near the edges of those routines. Nobody has decided what to make of them, and what the survivors have not said to one another is louder than what they have.

The spoon had been a good spoon. Now it was a patch over the hole in the pot, hammered flat and fastened with two stubby rivets cut from tent-pegs, and Brammok turned the whole contraption in the firelight like a man inspecting his firstborn.

"Hasn't leaked since noon," he told it. "Not a drop. Marry me."

Nobody answered, and he didn't mind. Three days of Tidemark had taught the camp its habits. The sailcloth was pegged against the one workshop wall still standing, the fire sat in a ring of ballast stones, and Liora's chalk marks ran along the casks in her tidy hand: boiled, brine, unknown. Vashara sat cross-legged near the light, gutting the afternoon's catch from the tidal pools. Edrien knelt across the fire with a nail, scratching a long curve for the reef and a squat box for the hull into the dirt.

"Low water is a little after dawn, the day after tomorrow," Edrien said. "The stern locker sits clear of the surface at ebb. If the coil's where I put it, I can have it free in an hour. A proper still, and we stop begging that seep for every cup."

"The seep gives us two casks in three days," Liora said, without looking up from her notebook. "Boiled, that is enough for four. Your still gives us more water and burns more wood, and we have perhaps a wall's worth of wood that isn't rotten."

"Then we find more wood."

"Which I will happily count once I've finished counting the first lot." She turned the notebook around and tapped a column. "The hull has moved. This morning's mark against the reef is a hand's width from yesterday's. You are still drawing it where it lay the first day."

Edrien's nail stopped. "Then it's moving. That's an argument for going sooner."

"Or for not going at all."

"I laid that keel myself, Liora. I know every—"

"You also knew the road."

She said it quietly. Quiet was worse. Brammok, who had been tilting the water jug over the patched pot, found that he had kept pouring and the water was at the rim. He set the jug down with great care.

"That isn't fair," Edrien said, and it was not an angry thing to say, only a tired one. "A road moved. A hull is a hull."

"A hull that is moving." Liora's pencil had begun to tap. "Orren Larkstone asked you the same question, in nearly your own words, whether you knew or only hoped, and you—"

She stopped. Nobody had told her to. Her mouth closed on the rest like a lid on a box.

The fire popped. Edrien's thumb found the wooden vial at his belt and rested there, not opening it, just checking it was real.

"I remember," he said.

Vashara's knife had gone still in the belly of the fish. "Is this still about the coil?" She looked from one to the other, and her voice stayed light enough that it was almost a kindness. "Because I'd planned the north slip tomorrow, before the tide, and I would like to know which of you I'm listening to."

Neither of them answered. Brammok watched how it would go, because he had watched it before on the mountain. Edrien would go quiet and find some small repair for his hands. Liora would correct her figures until her handwriting slanted. Vashara would keep her smile up for three more sentences and then put it down somewhere out of sight. Nobody would say the thing, and the fire would burn lower, and in the morning they would all be a little further apart. He had one tool for that and had always had it.

"Tell you what," he said, loud and bright, and brandished the ladle. "Tie a rope round my ankle and lower me off the reef at low water. If the coil's there, I fetch it. If the sea eats me, you'll have your tide table, your hull, and whatever's been breaking harbors in one tidy afternoon, and Liora won't have to argue with anyone ever again." He patted his belly. "I'm well seasoned. Tough bite. It'd take it a good while."

Nothing.

A gull complained somewhere out on the reef. Liora laid her pencil down along the spine of the notebook as if it might go off. Vashara looked at him the way she might have looked at a man who had dropped something heavy beside a sleeping child.

"Don't," Edrien said. Not angry. Worse.

It had sounded better in Brammok's head. In his head it had been a plank laid across a ditch. Out loud it was a tree trunk dropped on the supper table, three days of everyone stepping around the ones they hadn't found, and here he was, volunteering to be the first one eaten. He kept the grin on a heartbeat too long, which was the true mistake, and then let it go.

Spectacular. Truly. A new low, and in front of the fire.

"That isn't funny, Brammok," Liora said. Her voice was not unkind, and that was the part that stung.

"No," he agreed. "It wasn't. That one wanted a longer run-up."

He had always known when to stop. He simply was not always quick enough. Edrien scrubbed out the little hull in the dirt with the flat of his palm, and the three of them sat in the particular silence of people who loved each other and had run out of words that did not cost something.

That was when he saw {{user}} at the edge of the firelight, a few strides from the lean-to. He could not have said how long they had been there.

Don't ask. Whatever you heard, whatever you didn't, please don't ask what we were talking around.

"Ah," Brammok said, and found the grin again, smaller and more honest this time. "There you are. Come in out of the dark. There's stew, or there will be once this pot decides to behave itself. Sit anywhere. Not by Liora's notebook, she bites."

He held out a dented tin cup, steam still lifting from the first ladle, and kept his arm steady. Behind him nobody looked up and nobody moved to fill the silence. The question hung between them with the cup he held out.

"Hungry?"

Six days after the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, the dried fish is running low, and fish alone will not keep four exhausted bodies on their feet. The camp has a fire, a careful count of water and the first stubborn routines of people who mean to go on living, but not one meal that wasn't pulled from a tidal pool. So they have come to the western edge of the Green Hell, where the grass gives way to enormous trees and the wind smells of leaf rot and rain. None of them has hunted this continent's animals before. What they know of Green Hell fieldcraft is a week of guesses, a notebook of sketches and Vashara's stubborn certainty that every forest eventually explains itself.

Vashara drew the bowstring to her cheek, held, and let it ease. It sang a thin, honest note, and she decided it would do.

"It's fishing line," Liora said, without looking up from her notebook. "Braided, waxed, and tested against twice your draw weight. I measured. You can stop looking at it as though it insulted you."

"It's lovely line. It isn't sinew."

"It is what we have."

It was the salvage-chest bow, found three days ago under a collapsed rack, its limbs sound and its string long since rotted. Six arrows lay in the crook of Vashara's arm, two of them straightened that morning by Edrien with a patience she had not asked for and had not refused. The trail ahead sloped from sunlit grass into green shade, and beyond the first line of trunks, the forest rose in vast, hushed ranks, wreathed in vines, laced with mist, humming with insects. It was shamefully beautiful. She had begun to feel that was the Green Hell's first trick.

"Here is my plan," Brammok said, shrugging the pack higher. "Send me in from the downhill side, loud as a festival. I walk the whole herd up the slope and straight into your arrow. Everyone dines. Nobody has to be clever."

"You'd walk them into the next valley. And take every other animal within half a mile with them."

"I can be quiet."

Three faces turned to him.

"I can be quiet for a deer," he amended with great dignity.

"I could bring the pistol," Edrien offered. He had been standing at the tree line with Liora's sketch in his hand, looking from the paper to the dark between the trunks. "One shot, and it's meat instead of a hope."

"One shot you can't depend on, that tells everything in this forest where we are." Vashara kept her voice gentle. "Keep it dry. If I need it, I'll say."

He nodded, and the flicker that crossed his face was gone before she could decide what it was. Then he lifted the sketch again, and the brightness crept back in. "These horns. Straight as reeds, no branching at all. Are they hollow? Do they grow like that or—"

"Ask it when we've fed it to you."

"That is a very fair answer."

Liora tapped the page. "I've watched them twice from the ridge. Five or six animals, always the clearing east of the creek, always near this hour. I called them Reedhorn Deer because I needed to call them something. Their path runs along the creek bank under that fallen trunk." She hesitated. "I have only seen them from a distance. I don't know what they do when something frightens them."

"Then we find out gently," Vashara said, and went in.

The forest closed over them like a hand. Light came down in long slanting columns, gold where it touched the leaf litter and green where it didn't, and every sound seemed to arrive from a little farther off than it should. Vashara moved at a stalking crouch, reading the ground. Small split prints, neat as a thumb's width. A browse line on the low shrubs, bitten clean at the height of a slender animal's head. A narrow path worn between the roots. The ordinary signature of an ordinary herd, and she felt the knot in her shoulders ease for the first time in six days.

Good. Good. Something simple, finally.

Then she saw the print, and the easing stopped.

It lay in a patch of dark mud beside the path, wider than her spread hand: four lobed toe-pads around a broad heel, no claw marks in the soil. Where it pressed down, it had partly erased the edge of a hoofprint. The deer had come first. Vashara crouched and touched the rim with one finger. The mud had begun to crumble, but there was still damp in the bottom of the hollow.

"Cat," Brammok murmured, close at her shoulder. "A big one."

"A day old. Maybe two." She looked up. A trunk beside the path was scored with four long furrows, set at the height of Brammok's chest, the bark peeled back to pale wood. Along the edges of each furrow the sap had hardened to amber, but in the middle it still beaded soft. "Or three. I can't read this forest well enough to promise."

Liora had come up on her other side. She did not touch anything. "Is it hunting this path?"

"It has crossed it. That's all I can say honestly. A cat that size might use the same trail every night, or it might have walked through once and be a day's travel north." Vashara straightened slowly. "I assumed the deer path was safe because it was a deer path. I'm revising that."

Edrien had gone very still, and Vashara knew without looking that his hand had drifted toward his belt. "We could go back."

"We could."

Nobody did. The silence stretched, and under it the forest went on with its work, a drip of water somewhere, a faint rattle of seedpods in the canopy, a far-off call she couldn't name.

They crept on for another hundred strides, slower, and the trees thinned, and she lifted a fist. The clearing opened ahead of them, a shallow bowl of long grass dotted with white flowers and cut through by the creek. Six animals grazed at its far side, slender and dun-colored, their horns rising straight and narrow as river reeds. One young buck had waded up to his knees to drink. Two does grazed shoulder to shoulder. A third stood a little apart, and every few breaths she lifted her head and looked, not toward the four of them, but toward a tangle of thorn and fallen timber where the creek bent out of sight.

"We're downwind," Vashara breathed. "She isn't watching us."

"Perhaps she smells something sweet," Edrien said, very quietly.

"Perhaps," Liora said, in a tone that did not believe it.

Vashara watched the doe lower her head, graze three mouthfuls, and lift it again, the same slow turn toward the same dark thicket. Forty paces of open grass lay between the tree line and the nearest animal, and ninety to the thorn. A shot from the roots of the fallen trunk would be clean. Dragging a carcass back through that undergrowth with a cat's scent on the bark was another matter.

She's afraid of the thicket, not of us. Or she's just a nervous doe. I can't tell which, and it will be too late to tell once the arrow's gone.

"Meat for a week," Brammok said, soft as a man at prayer. "Dried, a fortnight. I'm only saying."

"Meat for a week with a cat in the thorn, and Liora's arithmetic is quite clear about how many weeks we have." Vashara's mouth quirked, and she could not decide whether it was a smile. "I know, Bram. I want it too."

She turned her head, finally, and found {{user}} a few steps behind them in the dappled shade. She kept her voice at the bare edge of sound.

"I'm going to circle to the fallen trunk, low and slow, and take one animal if the doe stays calm. If she bolts, I take nothing and we leave quietly. You can come along and keep your eyes on the thicket for me. You can stay here with Liora, where the roots are thick and the view is good. Or you can head back toward the shore, and I'll think none the worse of you." She tightened her grip on the bow. "Only choose quietly. The doe's still looking."

Across the clearing, the doe lifted her head again, and held it there.

Eight days have passed since the four survivors returned to Tidemark Anchorage. The camp has begun to keep small rhythms of its own: water counted at dawn, fish salted at dusk, the Far Horizon losses spoken of less often and felt no less keenly. Today they have turned south, past the sheltered harbor, to cross the continental coastal dunes beneath the eroded cliffs. Liora hopes a firm route lies along the far shoreline, one that would let them haul salvage without fighting the forest edge or wading the drowned reef channels. Fishing has kept them fed, but nothing yet has told them whether this coast is merely empty or only quiet. An unfamiliar figure, {{user}}, is also within sight of the survey route. Why they are here, what they want, and whether they have any intention of accompanying the survivors remain unestablished.

The iron rod went in to its third red thread and stopped. Liora counted the strokes it had taken, eleven, drew it out, wiped the grit from the tip with her thumb and wrote the number beneath the others.

"Eleven," Brammok said over her shoulder. "Is that good?"

"It's higher than nine."

"And nine was?"

"Thirty paces back." She did not look up. "Sand packs differently depending on moisture, grain and what's beneath it. If the number climbs, the ground is looser, and I would like to know why before Edrien drags a sled over it."

"You've been stabbing that dune for an hour. It's sand, Liora. It has one personality."

"It has several, and I want to know which one I'm standing on."

Edrien, holding the other end of the knotted measuring cord, laughed through his nose, a small, real sound she hadn't heard in days. The wind came off the cliffs in long, dry breaths and combed the dune crests into fine ripples, all running the same way like the grain of a board. Beyond them the sea glittered, turquoise and distant, and gulls wheeled over the water. They did not come inland.

That was the first thing she wrote down, before she knew why: "Gulls: shoreline only. None over this stretch."

"Liora." Vashara had gone ahead along the slope and now crouched at the lip of something, one hand flat on her knee. She did not raise her voice. "Come and look at this, and put the rod down while you do."

There were three hollows set in a shallow arc across the slope, each as wide as a cartwheel, round and steep-sided as the inside of a bowl. Liora knelt at the nearest and her trained eye supplied the first fact before her mind could argue it: the walls stood at the steepest angle dry sand can hold, the exact angle at which a single grain more would send the whole face sliding. They were not wind-made. Wind made ripples, not bowls.

"Wind scour," Edrien offered, crouching beside her with the cord still wound round his fist. "The cliff turns the gusts, an eddy hollows the sand. It could make a pit like this, couldn't it? I've seen something similar behind a breakwater."

"You've seen a pit." She tilted the notebook toward him. "There are three, spaced the same, and the angle is perfect. Something is keeping them tidy."

"Tracks," Vashara said. She pointed with her chin. The ground around the hollow's rim was stitched with the small hand-prints of shore crabs, a dozen of them, every line running toward the edge. "They walk up to the lip. Here, here, here. I can't find one walking away." She lifted a fragment of pale shell and a single gull feather bent at the quill. "And the birds won't cross this stretch. I'd thought it was only the wind."

Brammok had stopped joking. He stood a little behind them with his boots planted wide, scanning the dune crest in a slow arc, and the axe had somehow come into his hand without anyone seeing it move.

Liora set the rod across her knees. The tip had been resting against the sand while they talked, and it was trembling.

It was not much. A flutter, as faint as a pulse through a wrist. She watched the red thread shiver against the grain, and her mouth went dry as she understood. She had been driving the rod into the same slope in the same slow rhythm for an hour.

I've been drumming on it. Every stroke, every step, for an hour.

"Everyone off the loose sand," she said, and heard how level her voice sounded, the way it went when she was most afraid. "Slowly. Do not run, and do not stamp. The rock shelf at the cliff foot, twenty paces, upslope, that way. Or the wet line, at the channel. Anywhere firm."

"Which is better?" Edrien asked.

"I don't know yet."

The nearest hollow shifted. No wind moved it. A thin ribbon of sand slid down the far wall and vanished into the center, then another, as though something below were drawing breath.

Brammok's hand closed on her belt and hauled.

She went backward off her knees, the notebook flying from her lap, and where she had been kneeling the slope detonated. Sand blew upward in a roaring sheet and out of it rose something low and broad and the exact color of the dune, a plated back as wide as a cart bed, two forelimbs like mattocks hooked with comb-edged spurs, a mouth cracking open beneath. One limb came down on the iron rod and snapped it like a twig. Grit hissed against her teeth. For one frozen breath she saw the pale underside of the creature's body, wet and glistening, and eyes that gave back nothing at all.

"SANDBURSTER!" Brammok roared, because in a crisis he had to call things something. "Write that down, Liora!"

A spider. Burrowing, vibration-led—probably. It had struck upward when the rod disturbed the sand. Not magic. An animal using its own ground against them.

The creature did not follow. It stood half out of the pit with its limbs raking the sand, and then slid back down the funnel wall in a long, grinding pour, and the surface closed over it like water.

"It went home," Vashara said, rising slowly beside her with her sword out. "Strike and withdraw. It wants the burrow, not us."

"Then the burrow is the center, and everything we've walked on is its reach." Liora pushed up on her elbows. Her hand was bleeding where the snapped rod had bitten her palm and she hardly felt it. "The hollows are twelve paces apart. If it hears through dry sand we are standing in the middle of a drum. Firm ground. Rock, packed wet sand, anything it can't tunnel."

Edrien was already moving. He drew the pistol with his left hand and thumbed back the hammer with his right, and she saw his mouth press into a thin line. "One shot," he said. "I have one. I'll want a joint, not armor."

"Then don't waste it," Vashara said. "Wait for the opening."

Brammok planted himself between the dune and the rest of them, and the next step, when it came, shook the slope. The sand around his boots gave way in a long, soft sigh. Between one heartbeat and the next he was knee-deep and sinking, the whole face of the dune pouring toward the nearest hollow. The creature burst out under him, one hooked limb reaching, and the axe came round in a short flat arc and bit into the joint with a crack Liora felt in her teeth. Dark fluid sprayed the sand. The limb snatched back into the pit.

"Bram!" Vashara had him by the pack strap, boots braced on a ridge of firm gravel, and she heaved with a grunt that rang down the slope. He came free of the sand with one boot missing.

"I liked that boot," he said, hoarsely.

"Rock," Liora said. "Now. The shelf, there—"

Then she saw what she had counted wrong. She had counted three hollows, and a fourth was opening across the route to the shelf, sand sliding into a new center so swiftly that she could watch the shape of the bowl form. It lay directly between them and the slab. Either the burrow extended farther beneath the slope than she had reckoned, or there was another hunter somewhere below.

I was certain. I was certain, and I was wrong by one. What can I still test? What do I actually know?

She forced the thought into order. The shelf was across the new hollow and the wet line was thirty paces to the right, a longer run across worse sand, but at least it lay behind them. The thing seemed to follow vibrations through loose sand. Rock should stop it from burrowing, and packed wet ground might at least slow it. Those were useful possibilities, not guarantees. Its lunge came from the burrow center, and the damaged limb hung half-out of the pit, bent at an angle, the joint exposed where Brammok's axe had gone in.

"It's hurt at the elbow joint," she called. Brammok and Vashara turned toward her. Somewhere near the edge of the disturbed sand, {{user}} was close enough to hear her warning, though Liora had no way of knowing what they might decide. "The left foreleg won't take its weight. Edrien, if it lunges again, that is your opening. Shelf on the left, past the new hollow, or the wet line on the right, behind us. Either one is firm. Don't cross the middle."

The new hollow deepened. The sand along its rim began to run, a slow, hungry slide spreading outward across the dune toward every boot standing on it.

"Choose," Liora said looking at {{user}}. "Now."

Twelve days have passed since the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, and the camp has begun to resemble a place where work can be done. The sail-cloth lean-to has grown a roof of salvaged boards, the water is counted at dawn and mostly trusted, and the ships remain wrecks on the reef. Edrien has not spoken of the Far Horizon voyage in days, but this morning he unwrapped the tin of Auralith samples for the first time since they were carried down from the mountain. No route home has been found. No one has agreed to hope for one. Someone unfamiliar still moves at the edges of the camp's routines, and he has not asked their opinion of anything until now.

The chip of Auralith was no bigger than a lentil, and Edrien held it in the tongs as if it were the last egg in the world.

Beneath it the spirit lamp burned low and steady, its flame trimmed to a blue-edged bead. Above it hung a small bladder of oiled sailcloth, sewn by Liora at midnight, sealed along its seam with pine pitch, and tethered by a single thread to one end of a reed balance. A shallow pan holding a pinch of lead shot from the fishing kit hung beneath that same end; a counterweight balanced it from the other. The workbench was a hatch cover laid across two barrels, scratched all over with his nail drawings: a cross-section, a column of figures, a tidy little diagram of the bladder with an arrow pointing hopefully up.

"Steady," he murmured, to the chip or himself. "Steady, steady, steady..."

The glow began at the heart of the crystal, as it always did, a faint milk-white luminescence that spread outward through the translucent grain like dawn through ice. The chip dimmed at its edges. Something thin and pale and unhurried began to rise from it, a ghost of light, drifting up the neck of the bladder. The cloth shivered, then drew taut, and the balance arm trembled.

The pan of lead shot lifted off the bench.

It did not leap. It rose the width of a fingernail, hung there, and the whole workshop went quiet around it. Edrien found that he had stopped breathing, and that his face ached, and that he was grinning like a boy at a fair.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, look at that."

"I am looking," said Liora, from the end of the bench, with her notebook open and her pencil already moving. "Do not move the tongs."

"I'm not moving the tongs."

"Your elbow is moving."

He locked the elbow. Across the bench Vashara had abandoned the net she was mending and leaned in with her chin on her fists, amber eyes bright in the lamplight. She watched the glow thin inside the bladder, and then, as he had half expected, she did not look at the Auralith at all.

"Why does the oil do that?" she asked.

"Which?"

"The wick." She pointed. "The oil is down in the bowl and the flame is up on the top. Nothing is lifting it. I've watched it all week and never wondered until now."

He opened his mouth to say 'it's only capillary action' and shut it again, because that was not an answer. It was a name for one. "It climbs by itself," he said instead, and his hands were already sketching. "The cloth is made of fibres, and between the fibres are gaps narrower than a hair, and the oil likes the fibre better than it likes itself. So it clings, and the part that clings drags the next part up behind it, and that one drags the one after, all the way to the flame. Nothing pushes. It's just..." He gestured, and the tongs wavered, and Liora hissed, and he steadied them. "It's simply a thing wanting to be close to another thing, a thousand times over, in the dark, where nobody sees."

Vashara looked at the wick with new respect. "That is much more romantic than I expected."

"It's rather romantic, yes. Most of engineering is, if you hold it right."

"Don't tell him that," Liora said. "He'll start writing poetry on the casks."

From the doorway came a rumble of laughter and the smell of something frying. Brammok stood leaning on the frame with a plate of fish in one enormous hand and a look of immense thought on his face.

"Question," he said. "Does it do it to a stew?"

"Does it what to a stew?"

"Go up. Float. If I put a chip in the pot, does the stew rise? Because the way I see it, we've been looking for a way home for two weeks, and a floating supper would be a very good start."

"No," said Liora.

"You haven't tried."

"I do not need to try. It would be a waste of Auralith and an even greater waste of fish."

"I'm hearing that you don't want to know."

Edrien did laugh, then, a short helpless breath, and felt something in his chest unclench that had been clenched since the coast. Above him the bladder shivered, and the balance arm began, very gently, to sink. The glow within thinned and faded and was gone. The pan of lead shot settled back onto the bench with a small, anticlimactic click.

Ninety breaths. Perhaps a hundred. And it's gone.

He lowered the tongs. Liora was already beside him with the chip, turning it in the light with the care of a woman examining a wound. "It is not spent," she said, slowly. "Look. The edge has gone dull, but the heart is still lit."

He bent over it. She was right. The outer skin of the crystal had clouded, like a pebble left too long in the tide, but at its core a thin white ember still burned, steady and undiminished.

"It gives up its gas in layers," Edrien breathed. "Or from the surface inward. Or only as far as the heat reaches, which would mean—" He stopped, grabbed the nail, and began scratching a new line across the hatch cover. "If the heat is the limit, then the chip isn't used, it's only been warmed through to a certain depth. A bigger flame, or a longer one, and we'd—no. No, wait. That's guessing. We have one trial."

"We have one trial," Liora agreed. "Which shows that a fragment lifts a fragment, once. The seam leaked. I saw bubbles in the pitch at the third stitch. The lamp flickered at least twice. Your lead shot was weighed by eye. If you present these figures to me as results, Edrien, I will check every weight myself."

It stung. Under the sting was the old pleasure of her precision, the very quality that had made her the person he trusted most at a workbench, long before the Far Horizon. He knew which of the two she was offering him.

"Please do," he said. "Check them all. Break the seam, if you like. I'd far rather you found the error than the sea did."

Something in her face loosened a fraction, so slightly he might have imagined it. She did not smile, but she pushed her pencil behind her ear, which was as good as one. "Then bring the lamp closer," she said, "and we will do it again."

For a moment the workshop held all of them: Vashara frowning happily at the wick, Brammok chewing and pretending he was not listening, Liora tapping the margin of her notebook, and the dim glow of the stubborn little crystal between them. Edrien turned to reach for the second pair of tongs, and a name rose to his tongue, someone who used to hold them, someone who was not any of these four. He let it fall unsaid. His thumb found the wooden vial at his belt and rested there.

Then he saw {{user}} standing just inside the doorway, in the pale light from the harbor, and the grief went where he put it, and he straightened.

"There you are," he said, and held out the tongs, steady now, the chip still faintly glowing at their tip. "Come and look, before it cools.Liora's already found three problems with my measurements, and I've enough theories to fill the rest of her notebook." His smile widened. "Tell me what you see. Another pair of eyes might notice the very thing we've missed."

On the bench, the lamp burned blue, the bladder hung slack on its thread, and the little white ember waited.

Two weeks have passed since the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, and with the camp's water counted and its salvage sorted, they have begun to look inland. A day and a half up the forest track, the trees give way to black terraces too vast for any road. Liora's notebook calls them the Hollow Steps, for the way footfalls ring under them. Higher ground might show a route home, and the ruin might offer shelter, metal or answers. They carry the last of the Auralith samples, tinned against damp. They carry the last of the Auralith samples, tinned against damp. Above them the wind moves through the ancient terraces, and the forest below gives no indication that anyone else has taken an interest in their arrival.

"Up," said Brammok, and Vashara went, one boot in the cradle of his laced hands and the other on his shoulder, and the riser slid past her face like a cliff being lowered in the wrong direction. She caught the lip, hauled, and rolled onto the terrace on her back, laughing breathlessly at the sky.

"Eight feet," she called down. "At least. Whoever built these either hated stairs or had very long legs."

"Two and a half Brammoks," Liora said from below, paying out her measuring cord along the riser.

"I'll take that as flattery."

"It was a unit."

Edrien hadn't answered. He stood with one palm flat on the carved edge of the step, tracing a pattern of interlocking leaves, each as long as his forearm. The chisel marks under the lichen were still crisp. "Look at the undercuts," he murmured. "Nobody cut this to be walked on. Somebody cut it to be looked at."

Vashara left them to it. The terrace ran away from her wider than a parade ground, cracked and tufted with grass, with the forest rolling out beyond it in every shade of green. The wind off the sea was a faint cool thread in the heat. It was a beautiful, pointless place, and for the first time in two weeks no part of her was counting casks.

So she noticed when something went wrong, and it was nothing she could have pointed at.

She walked the lip slowly, as she would have walked a game trail. A curtain of creeper hung off the buttress wall, and one strand had been cut, not torn, slantwise and clean, at the height of a knee. Beside it the dust lay in a long, even smear, as if a cloak-hem had been dragged and then brushed over. Along one stretch of wall the swifts that had been scribbling the air all morning swung out in a wide arc and did not come back. The flowering moss twenty paces on hummed with bees. The moss here had none.

Then, behind her, one small dry tick, wood on stone. Everything else on the terrace came back late and softened, her own bootscuffs, a pebble, Liora's cord ringing against the riser. That sound did not echo at all.

Someone is being careful. Someone who knows how this place carries sound.

She came back to the edge and dropped to a crouch where Brammok could hear her. "We're being counted," she said, quietly and without expression.

His eyes didn't move from the cliff of the next riser. "By what?"

"Not a what."

His hand went to the axe, easy and unhurried. Behind him Edrien had found a cleft where the terrace stair cut deep into shadow, a carved channel running into the dark. He had the tin open already.

"The lamp oil is two nights from gone," he said apologetically, "and a chip in the palm will give me enough to read the carving. It's only for a moment."

The glow came up pale and milky between his cupped hands, and it lit his face from beneath and caught in the creeper and in the black stone. In the seam of the wall opposite, a shadow that had been grey a moment ago went black, as though something had stepped back to let the dark close.

"Edrien," Vashara said. "Shut it."

He looked up. He saw her face and closed his hands, and the light was gone.

It was too late. The silence that followed was a different kind from the one before it, and she stood and set her feet.

"Stop where you are," said a voice above them, calm and unhurried. "Weapons stay where they are. Nobody here wishes to bleed today."

He stood on a ledge twelve feet up the buttress, a lean figure in layered hunting leathers, long dark hair bound back, a bow in his left hand strung but held low. His skin was a deep, dark brown. His eyes were silver, and they moved across the four of them and rested last on Edrien's closed hands.

Then the terrace woke up. They rose from behind a fallen lintel, from the broken edge of a staircase, from a curtain of creeper that had been only creeper a breath ago, a dozen lithe, dark-skinned figures with composite bows and quiet faces. Vashara counted without turning her head. Nine bows. Eleven. Not one of them stood in the open, and every one covered the angle another one could not. She had fought beside disciplined skirmishers before, but she had rarely seen a perimeter close so quietly or so completely.

Not Wood Elves. Wrong colors, wrong cut of armor, and nothing like the tales. And not one of them has drawn.

"I am Vaelion Thessar, pathfinder of the Veyrath Outer Watch," the man said. "This is Veyrath ground. You've walked a long way onto it. Names."

*"Vashara," she said, evenly. "Brammok, Liora, Edrien."

"Four of you." His eyes moved on. "Five. The fifth may give a name when they wish. It is of no matter. You are going to speak to her." He turned back to Edrien. "You, with the light. Open your hands, slowly."

Edrien opened them. The chip lay in his palm, dull in the daylight. Vaelion looked at it for a long moment, and something passed across his lean face that Vashara could not read and did not like.

"Close it," he said. "Put it away. You will be asked about that. Not by me."

"By whom?" Liora said.

"That is not mine to say." He sat down on the ledge, bow across his knees. A dry humor touched his mouth. "We wait."

They waited. The shadows crept across the terrace in long, sliding sheets, and no one drew a bow and no one gave an order. Brammok made it as far as forty minutes before he tried a smile. "Does your people do this often?"

"Only for guests," Vaelion said.

It was nearly a joke. Vashara filed it away.

The sun had dropped to the treetops when they came, a file of Veyrath rounding the end of the great buttress at an unhurried walk. Twelve guards flanked a single figure, and the Outer Watch stood as one, and Vaelion rose from his ledge and bowed from the waist.

She was taller than the others, and perhaps the most beautiful woman Vashara had ever seen, in a way that was no kindness. Her skin was the deep umber of old wood, her face fine-boned and still, and her silver-white hair was braided in coils that took more skill than most armor. She wore black and silver, close-cut. Her eyes were silver shot with violet, and they went over the four of them once, quickly, and rested a moment on {{user}} before returning to Edrien's belt.

"I am Thalira Vaereth," she said. Her voice was low and smooth, without any edge. "My people call me Matriarch. Show me what you carry."

Edrien glanced at Liora, and some silent professional argument passed between them and ended. He opened the tin. The chips lay on their bed of wool like stars in a small black sky, and in the shadow of Thalira's escort their light came up pale and sweet. Nothing moved in her face but her eyes. Vashara had seen that look on starving children passing a baker's window, and on generals. The hunger was held in a very tight fist.

"You have a name for it."

"Auralith," Edrien said.

"A plain word. Plain words last." She did not touch the tin. "Where did you find it?"

"A long way from here," Liora said, flatly.

"Far is a distance, not an answer." A small, composed smile. "I won't press today. I will make an offer instead."

She spoke it as a list, easily, a woman laying cards. "A guide through the western forest, from dawn tomorrow. Protection from my Watch on my ground. Food and clean water for your camp while you work. And what my people know of this coast, which is more than you might think. My scouts have walked it far longer than you have."

"In return," Liora said.

"You bring me more of this."

"How much? By when? What do we receive first, and who judges the quantity?"

"Good questions." Thalira inclined her head, a courtesy that cost her nothing. "The guide, first. The quantity, I judge."

"And if we say no?" Brammok's voice had gone very low.

"Then my courtesy ends at the edge of this terrace. You leave what you carry as the toll for your crossing, and my Watch sees you to the forest. You will be unharmed." She said it gently. "You will simply be poorer. And I will remember who refused me."

"That's robbery with good manners."

"Manners," Thalira said, "are why you're all breathing."

Vashara put her hand flat on Brammok's forearm, where it rested on the axe. She felt the muscle there, tight as a drawn rope.

Eleven bows, and every one has a better angle than ours. If this goes wrong, Bram dies on a stranger's terrace over a handful of crystal. I hate this. I hate every word of this. And it still isn't a reason to start.

Edrien was looking at the tin. His thumb had drifted to the wooden vial at his belt and rested there. "Where it came from," he said slowly, "it cost us dearly. I don't know that I can ask that of anyone again."

"I didn't ask you to ask it of anyone," Thalira said. "I asked you to bring it."

Vaelion shifted. It was a small movement. Anyone who hadn't spent the afternoon watching him would have missed the tightening along his jaw.

"Matriarch. We don't know where they found it, or what lies between here and the source. A month may not even carry them halfway there." His voice remained respectful. "Set a term for what they can establish, not for a journey we cannot measure."

Thalira considered that without turning toward him. She let the silence last long enough for everyone to notice. "A month to return with a credible proposal, then. A route, an estimate, evidence that you can accomplish what I am asking. If we reach an agreement, the time required to bring more will be determined by what the journey actually demands."

Her gaze returned to Edrien's tin. "I have no use for promises that die in the forest."

She lifted her open hand, and the evening light lay in her palm. The tiny chips in Edrien's tin would have vanished in it.

"What you carry would not fill my palm," she said. "I expect you to bring me more."

Her silver-violet gaze passed over the four of them and rested a moment on {{user}}. Then she waited, and the whole terrace waited with her.

Five weeks after the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, their search for a way home has carried them deep into the interior, to a ruin built at a scale no mortal hand could have managed. Within the Sundered Atrium, in galleries once walked by far larger feet, General Velisra Thane holds Ashfall Redoubt with the stranded remnant of her reconnaissance force. Her way home has collapsed, her rations are failing, and the Silkfiend hunger patrols return thinner each week, when they return at all. Today, unfamiliar travelers have been seen on the western approach.

The third barricade had been a fallen cornice before anyone made it a wall, one slab of black-veined stone taller than three demons standing on one another's shoulders. Velisra stood in its shadow with her palm flat against a crack that had not been there at dawn. She could slide two fingers into it. Four days ago, the last assault had leaned on this stone, and a Gorehulk had leaned back.

The Gorehulk was still there, sitting against the base with its shoulders bowed, bleeding slowly from a dozen small cuts it had not yet bothered to notice. It had held the approach alone for the better part of an hour. It had held the approach alone for the better part of an hour. She had recorded that fact in the ration ledger, under the heading of things that could not be replaced.

"General Velisra Thane," said Captain Marrask, and the formality told her he had rehearsed it. "The east gallery. I have forty fit soldiers who want it back. Two hours at dusk and we hold the long colonnade again."

"Do we hold it again, or do we visit it?"

His horns tilted. He was a good officer, broad-shouldered, scarred along the jaw, and he had not yet learned that being right about the objective was only half of a plan. "It is ours by right, General. We built the first line there."

"We held the first line there until it killed sixty of us." She did not look away from the crack. "Two hundred paces of open floor, and every balcony above it high enough to drop a column drum from. You will retake the colonnade. By dawn you will have lost half of those forty, and you will be holding a hall you cannot hold. Then we will have fewer soldiers and the same problem." She turned. "Pull the line back to the fourth barricade. Shorten it. Give them a wall they can see both ends of."

"That surrenders a third of the western galleries."

"It surrenders ground we have been dying to keep. I would rather lose a hall than a company, Captain. Halls cost us nothing to leave."

Marrask's jaw worked. Behind him a healer's lamp bobbed along the wounded line, and the smell of scorched cloth and boiled root drifted up the gallery. "Yes, General."

She let him go. Eleven days of rations at half portions, and she had been counting that number in her sleep. Across the court a handler was crouched over a Silkfiend that had dragged itself in through the south gap, long limbs folded, its eight dark eyes dull. One foreleg had been torn halfway through at the joint. Silk crusted its flank, and that silk was not its own. It was a different color, finer and paler, and she did not recognize it. In its jaws it held a small furred thing no bigger than a hare.

"First back in three days, General," the handler said. "Of the six we sent past the creek."

"Do not send them past the creek again." She looked at the bundle of silk a moment longer. Whatever had done that to a Silkfiend lived in the forest, and the forest was the only thing she had to eat. "Feed it first. Whatever it carried is hers."

The handler bowed. Velisra turned back toward the line and found a scout standing at the corner of the barricade, one of the young ones with the soot still ringing his nostrils from the climb. He saluted too quickly.

"General. Travelers on the western approach. Four, perhaps five."

She waited. He seemed to understand that she was doing so deliberately.

"Three Dwarves, General. Two bearded males, one broad enough to carry a gate on his shoulders. He's armored and carrying an axe. The other has an expedition coat. Third is a smaller, auburn-haired female, dressed much the same. A notebook in her hand." He swallowed. "And an Orc. Tall, gray-green, tusks, sword on her hip. There was someone else near them, but I couldn't make out anything useful at that distance."

Marrask, who had not gone far, stopped.

"Dwarves," he said. "With an Orc. Mortal coalition. They are scouts, and there will be more behind them."

"There were not more behind them at the last bend," the scout said. "I looked twice."

A Dwarf company walking the west court in daylight. Either stupidity or a gift, and I have not been given a gift since the Scar closed.

"Captain." She spoke quietly. "They crossed the western approach, past the creek, through three of our sentry positions and the court where the long scrape runs, and every one of those sentries is still breathing. I would like to know how."

"Kill them quietly, General, and we will know by tonight what they carry."

"And lose four, and learn that they carried nothing. Or that they carried a map." She was already walking. "Send a runner to the overlook. Twenty bows, and nobody to loose until I say. We will not bring them into the Redoubt."

The overlook was a balcony cut into the western wall, wide enough for a company and high enough to crush anything below it. Below, among the fallen columns, the travelers had stopped.

She took her time. It was a habit, and it was also a weapon. They stood in the broken sunlight with their weapons visible and unsheathed only in part, very still, and she counted them as a commander counted, by posture first. A Dwarf with copper-brown hair and a braided beard stood a little forward with empty hands held away from his sides, looking up at her with a curiosity that did not look like fear. Another, barrel-chested and black-bearded, had his axe in a loose, comfortable grip and was watching the bows, not her. A third, small and auburn-haired, was writing something in a notebook. The Orc stood straight as a spear, one hand closed on her sword hilt, and the muscles of her jaw moved once. Velisra knew the expression, though she had seen it mostly on prisoners. It was the face of someone holding something down.

A fifth presence, {{user}}, was visible near the four. Nothing from this height told Velisra who they were or what connected them to the travelers. Her gaze rested there briefly before returning to the Dwarves.

"That is far enough," she said, and her voice carried down the stone without effort. "The ground above you is mine, and I have twenty bows trained on it. I would like you to understand that before anyone does anything brave."

"Understood," the black-bearded Dwarf called up. His tone was cheerful and entirely without warmth. "Does the rest of the welcome stand behind it, or is that all of it?"

"The remainder is a wall, a Gorehulk and eleven days of rations. It is a poor welcome, but an honest one."

The auburn Dwarf's pencil stopped. "You are Veilborn," she said, in the precise voice of someone confirming a measurement.

"I am General Velisra Thane of the Veilborn Host, and you are standing in my gallery." She let the title sit. "Which makes you trespassers, and I think you know it. Say who you are."

The Orc spoke before any of them could. "We know what you are."

It was not loud. Velisra turned her head to her. "Orc. We have established what we are."

"Redwater," the Orc said. "I remember it."

"Many people remember Redwater. I do not suppose any of us remember it fondly." She said it without heat, and watched it land. "You are not here to settle that. Neither am I."

"We didn't come to fight," said the copper-bearded Dwarf, quickly, as though he had been waiting for a gap. "We didn't know there was anyone here. We were looking for a route."

"No one comes to the Atrium to fight. They come for something, and then they fight." A dry note slid under her voice. "You are a long way from the sea, Dwarf. Whatever you want, it is not a ruin."

Nobody answered. Down in the court a gust turned a drift of ash along the foot of a column, and above her the bowstrings made their small, patient sounds. Marrask, at her shoulder, did not speak, though she could feel him not speaking.

They could be bait. They could be a company's advance, or hunters walking blindly into my gallery. Or they could be the first four people in this ruin since the Scar who might know what is beyond that creek. I cannot afford to kill them until I am certain which.

"Here is what I will allow," Velisra said. "Speech. From where you stand, to where I stand, across a drop that does not suit climbing. No escort and no safe passage. No one inside the Redoubt. No new weapons drawn, and nothing already in hand gets raised against my soldiers. Anyone who threatens this position ends our conversation." She paused. "That is not an offer of peace. It is the interval before I decide whether you are worth a company's arrows."

She leaned on the balustrade, and the stone was cold under her armored forearms.

"So tell me. You reached my western approaches alive, through ground my patrols no longer travel lightly. You're far from the coast, and plainly looking for something." Her eyes moved across the strangers. "What do you have—or what do you know—that makes speaking to my enemies worth the risk?"

She waited. Beneath her the four stood in the slanting light, and the fifth beside them, and every bow on the balcony stayed where it was.

A month has passed since the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, and the last ten days have been spent among the Broken Ways, where roads built for hands far larger than any mortal's climb the forest on stone arches and end in open air. Liora's survey book now holds eleven junctions, each measured twice. Her notebook has given the road's stranger habits working names, the Three Motions: Preservation, Unmaking and Renewal. They are descriptions, not explanations, and Edrien has three theories for every one she will accept. No pattern has been proved. The sun is low in the west, and {{user}} is also near the ancient junction. None of the survivors knows what brought the stranger here, or whether their paths will continue in the same direction.

The eleventh measurement agreed with the tenth, and that was the problem.

Liora stood at the head of the maintenance ramp with the sighting rod planted at her feet and her notebook open against her forearm. Beside her the great stair fell away in treads cut for feet the size of rowboats, and the ramp ran down alongside it, a gentle incline of fitted honey-gray stone worn smooth by something that was not carts. Forty-one paces. One rise in nine. She had written it nine days ago in her own square hand, and the numbers stood on the page as steady as a wall. At the foot, the ramp ended in a landing, and the landing ended in a wall.

Her notes said that at the foot of the ramp a lower concourse opened, with a dry basin and eleven fluted pillars.

"Is it wrong again?" Brammok asked. He sat on a fallen block with his boots stretched out and half a strip of dried meat in one fist, the picture of a man who had stopped being surprised before lunch.

"The ramp is correct. Every figure I took of the ramp is correct." She tapped the page. "The split pillar behind us, split along the grain with the spiral chipped on its east face. The drain-ring with three nicks in the rim. The lintel with the double scroll. They are all here, all where I put them. The landing is where I put it. Only the concourse is not."

"You're not lost," Brammok said, with enormous gravity. "The road is in the wrong place."

"I was going to say that myself, and now I will have to say something else."

Edrien had gone down the ramp already. He knelt at the landing with his palm pressed flat to the blank wall and his head tilted, listening to stone. "Mechanism," he called up. "I'd put money on it. These builders loved a counterweight. A bulkhead dropped across the landing, the concourse still behind it, and the whole thing is simply shut—"

"Then where is the groove?" Liora came down after him, her boots loud on the slope. "Where is the sill? A slab that size needs a shaft above it and a track below."

"Perhaps it runs deeper than—"

"Look at the lichen, Edrien."

He looked. It lay across the wall in the same pale gray-green crust as on the blocks to either side, thick in the joints and thin on the faces, one continuous growth from the wall into the stair-cheek and up. No seam interrupted it. No scrape marked where anything had slid. He drew his thumbnail along a mortar line and it ran straight through, unbroken, to the corner.

"It isn't new," he said slowly. "It looks as if it has always been here."

That was what she could not accept. Not that something had moved, but that nothing had. The wall was as old as the rest of the junction and sat where her notebook claimed a room.

The numbers are right. All of them. Then the world is what's wrong, and I cannot survey something that edits itself behind me.

"The concourse is not gone," she said aloud, because saying it made it a hypothesis and not a fear. "I will not say it is gone. It is not reached from here. The ramp, the landing, the landmarks hold. That is Preservation. The connection that used to carry us from this landing into that room has been severed. That is Unmaking. And you are about to ask me for the third."

"Renewal," Edrien said hopefully.

"I am not calling anything that yet. I'm calling it 'the wall is where the room was.'" She snapped the notebook shut on her thumb. "We named those words because they were easier than saying 'the road did a thing.' I will not pretend they are a theory."

"If it can swap out a floor," Brammok said, from the top of the ramp, "can it swap out my sore feet? I'd welcome that."

"No. Nothing we carry changes. Your blisters are the one record the road cannot revise."

"Comforting."

*"Liora." Vashara's voice, from above. She had climbed onto the base of the split pillar and stood there in the amber slant of the sun, one hand shading her eyes, not looking at the wall at all. "Never mind the wall. Come up and look at the stones."

The south faces of the junction had been alive that morning with small blue-tailed lizards, dozens of them, pressed flat to the warm masonry like scattered coins. Liora went up the ramp and saw none. Not one stirred on any stone she could see.

"They went into the cracks about the time you were measuring," Vashara said. "All at once, not one by one. Animals leave before the ground does." She lowered her hand. "And it's evening. You noted the hour on that survey?"

"I did. Midday."

"Then perhaps not midday is the point."

Brammok, grumbling, clapped his hands once, hard, to settle the matter. The sound went out across the junction and came back, and then came back again from the wrong side, late and a little flat, as though it had traveled a longer way home. He lowered his hands. Nobody said anything.

Liora felt it a breath later, a hum rising through her boot-soles, low enough that she took it for her own pulse. Then her pencil began to dance in the spine of the notebook, a small, dry rattle, and the pillar-rows at the junction's edge, which she had paced herself at thirty paces apart, began to close. It was not movement. She could feel her own feet standing still. It was alignment: three pillars, then five, stacking into one narrow shadow as though someone had folded the land, until the far colonnade lay in a single line against the sky.

"That's an alignment," Edrien said, behind her, very softly. "Liora, are you seeing—"

"Yes. Do not speak. I am drawing."

She drew. Her hand shook and her line was true. When she lifted her eyes the pillars had slid apart to their proper distance, and the hum had thinned to a trembling at the edge of hearing. Vashara said, "Down there," and pointed.

At the foot of the ramp, the wall was a wall. The lichen lay as before and the mortar ran straight. But in the middle of it stood an arch.

It was tall as a house, plain and unadorned, and its jambs were crusted with the same gray-green growth as everything around it, as if the wall had always held an arch and she had merely failed to write it down. Nothing had opened. Nothing had slid or swung. The landing simply led, now, to a long passage of paler stone that climbed gently into low gold light, and from its mouth, a breath at a time, drifted cool air that smelled of rain on old rock.

Liora wrote the hour. Her pencil did not tremble.

"The air is moving out," Vashara said. "Cold air, from the other end. It's open at the far side, or open in some way we have no word for." She dropped lightly from the pillar-base. "The hum is fading, Liora. That's what I'd watch."

"It changed twice," Liora said, mostly to herself. "Once since I surveyed the concourse, when the ramp stopped reaching it. And again just now." She looked at her page. "The first change happened sometime in the last nine days. I don't know when. And I don't know whether this new connection will remain for nine minutes or nine more days."

Edrien had come up beside her. His eyes were bright, and he held his hands carefully at his sides, which she knew was the effort of a man not reaching for a tool. "It's a connection," he said. "A real one. We can't—"

"We can do nothing yet." She turned the notebook to a clean page. The hum was nearly gone, a faint pressure behind her ears. "A single test. Edrien, your cord, and one of the lead weights. We pay out line to the threshold and lay the weight through it. If the floor is a floor, if the line runs free, if the weight returns the way it went, we know something before anyone sets a foot on it. If any of that fails, we know that too."

"And then?" Brammok had stood. He was not joking now.

"And then we decide. All of us. I am an engineer, not a gate." She faced {{user}}, because she had been staring at the same page for an hour and she wanted a pair of eyes that did not already know what her notes said. "Before I tell you what I think I'm looking at, tell me what you see at that threshold. Whether I'm missing anything. Or if you'd rather test it a different way, say so now."

Behind her, the arch breathed its cold, rain-scented breath into the dusk, and the last of the hum slipped quietly out of the stone.

Five weeks after the four survivors reached Tidemark Anchorage, their search for a way home has carried them to a high shoulder of rock above the Ashen Causeway, an ancient raised road that runs across the interior toward the Sundered Atrium. The ruin is so vast that its fallen columns could pass for hills. They have followed the Causeway for two days, sleeping cold and speaking little of what the silence at Tidemark might mean. The Demon Wars are no stranger to any of them. Somewhere in the Atrium's western galleries, behind barricades they cannot yet see, lies Ashfall Redoubt. {{user}} is beside them, and the horns have only just begun.

The horn came again before Vashara had finished hauling herself over the lip of the rock, one long falling note and three short, and her body understood it before her mind did. She was on her feet with her hand on her hilt and her stomach turned over, because the last time she had heard that call, it had been across the water at Redwater.

"Down," she said. "Everyone low. Now."

Brammok dropped without a question, which told her how she sounded. Edrien went to his knees at the edge of the shoulder with one hand clamped on the vial at his belt. Liora crawled forward on her elbows, unslinging her sighting glass, and pressed her cheek to the cold stone.

Below them the Causeway ran away across the green, a broad pale road on arches, and at its far end the Atrium rose out of the haze like a mountain range built on purpose. Walls stood where no walls had a reason to be that tall. Colonnades marched across a courtyard wide enough to lose a city in. Smoke leaned from a dozen places along its western face, and under the smoke, thin and very clear on the wind, drums were beating.

"That's a lot of ruin," Edrien said quietly. "Half a mile to the near wall. More. Whatever it is, it was built to be walked through by something that..." He stopped, as if the end of the sentence had moved.

"Orders," Vashara said. She had her head tilted, sorting the sounds as she would have sorted hoofbeats. "Hear that? A harsh tongue, short words. Close. Hold. Second line. Someone is screaming at soldiers to stay where they are."

"Whose soldiers?" Liora said, not lifting her eye from the glass.

Vashara did not answer. Then Liora's breath went out of her, slowly.

"Veilborn," she said. "On the western gallery. Gorehulks at the breach, and bowmen above them on the balcony stair. They've blocked the gap with a fallen block."

Vashara took the glass. It was heavy, and her hands were steady, and she hated that they were. She found the breach, a slot between two colossal pillars choked with a slab of black-veined stone. Gorehulks stood braced against it, three of them, shoulders down and horns lowered. Behind them a second rank had formed on a staircase with their bows nocked. A runner sprinted along the balcony, trailing a banner. An officer with a scarred jaw stood on a broken cornice, bellowing, and the line turned when he turned his arm. It was clean and practiced and desperate, and she had seen it done worse by better-fed armies.

They're good. Damn them, they're good. And they are very frightened.

"Do I want to know why they're frightened?" Brammok murmured.

"Something is coming over that wall."

It was not what she saw. It was what she did not see. The shadow of the nearest colonnade lay across the courtyard in long pillars, each as thick as a house, and one of them was not a pillar. It had been still. Now it was not.

She lowered the glass and looked with her naked eyes, and the shadow stepped.

A sound followed, a hush as much as a thud, stone settling under a weight set down with care. Then a hand appeared on the top of the barricade wall, and she had no word for it. The hand was broad as a cottage door, pale and fine-grained as marble with veins in it the color of smoke, and it rested on the stone lightly, as a person rests a hand on a gate.

"That is a giant," Brammok said, flat and soft.

"Quiet."

The bowmen loosed. A volley went up and a good half of it struck, and Vashara watched a black-fletched shaft hit a forearm the length of a longboat oar. It skittered off with a bright spark. Another bit in and stuck, and a chip of pale stone fell away, a fragment the size of a roof tile. The hand lifted from the wall, turned, and a shoulder came into view beyond it, draped in dark cloth fastened by an intricately worked clasp larger than a shield. Then came the line of a jaw. Something above the stone ledge tilted down to look at its own forearm, and held there a moment, as one might look at a splinter.

It can be hurt. It feels it. And that is all it did about it.

Edrien's breath was a thin thread. Liora had stopped writing. In the glass, a Gorehulk lunged against the slab and roared, and its fellows threw their weight behind it, and the slab, which had not shifted for any of them, shifted a hand's breadth toward the courtyard. The enormous palm settled on its upper edge. It leaned.

It did not heave or strain, and nothing in the posture was effort. The Gorehulks' boots cut furrows in the flagstones. The one at the front, the largest, planted a knee and snarled and the stone gave a finger's width, then another, and then a whole arm's length in one sliding groan. All three went down and rolled, scrambling clear, scattering the second rank. The slab came free and was lifted aside, and set down on the paving beyond like a chair moved from a table. Dust drifted. The figure straightened, and Vashara saw how much of it there was to straighten. The top of the wall had come to its waist.

Brammok said something under his breath in the old tongue. Edrien said nothing at all.

On the high gallery above the breach, a tall, lean demon stood against the smoke, its ridged skull crowded with bright eyes. A Dreadeye. Vashara recognized the kind, and the way it fixed those eyes upon the enormous figure was no ordinary observation. Below, the pale head tilted upward. For a moment, through the glass, she saw them looking directly at one another.

Then the demon recoiled.

Its body stiffened, as though something it had reached for had slipped violently from its grasp. It dropped to its knees with both hands clawing at its face, and the horn on its belt rolled off the balcony and out of sight. Vashara could not tell whether she had witnessed terror, pain, or something for which she had no name.

The enormous figure lowered its gaze toward the second line again.

A bolt of black fire left a demon's palm and burst against its chest, and the pale surface there blistered and cracked, and the great head turned a little toward the source. It considered the demon without haste, the way her grandmother used to consider a fault in a weaving, one hand lifting to the crack and the other falling idly to its side. Then it stepped over the wall into the courtyard. It stepped over an entire barricade, past a dozen shouting soldiers, with no more urgency than a man crossing a hearth, and the stone rang under its heel.

"It isn't even angry," Liora said. Her voice was thin and very precise. "Look at the way it walks. It isn't hurrying."

"Neither does a farmer," Vashara said, and heard her own words.

The drums broke. They did not stop, but they changed, the long steady beat dissolving into a ragged, urgent hammering, and the horn gave a single high note that she did not need translating. Down in the court the scarred officer was waving his arm in great, hard arcs, and the line was folding. Banner-runners poured out of the gallery arches. Soldiers dragged the wounded. They were not routing. They were falling back by sections, a rank and a rank and a rank, every one covering the next, and a column was already forming at a gate in the western wall where the Causeway came in.

The Causeway, which ran straight up the valley beneath the rock where the four of them lay.

Redwater. I wanted every one of them to feel what I felt. I thought I knew what that would look like.

She found that she was gripping the stone, and made her hand open.

Down in the court, the figure had halted. The head came up, slowly, to follow the line of the retreating column, along the arches of the Causeway, down the road, toward the ridge, not at it. She told herself that, and watched the spot where its eyes would be, and counted her own breaths.

"They're coming this way," Liora whispered. "Not toward us deliberately. Along the road. I can't tell how quickly they'll get through those ruins, but if they keep that direction, they'll pass beneath this rock." She watched the retreating formation. "Sooner if the withdrawal breaks down."

"The north gully," Brammok said. "It's narrow, and it gets us off the skyline, and we can be at the lower ford by dusk."

"Or we stay here," Edrien said, so quietly that Vashara almost did not hear him. "On our bellies in the rocks, and watch it." He sounded like a man who knew he was asking for something unwise and could not stop. "We don't know what that thing is, or why it's attacking them. We may never see anything like this again. If we leave now, we leave knowing almost nothing."

"Edrien," Liora said.

"I know."

Vashara turned from the glass and from the court and put her back against the stone, so that the retreating drums fell behind her. She found {{user}} in the shadow beside her. Her voice came out very low, steady, the voice she kept for the minute before a fight.

"I need you to decide with me, and fast. We can go back down the gully now, quietly, and be gone before the road is full. Or we stay low and watch, and trust that nothing down there is looking up." Her mouth went tight. "If anything changes, the choice goes with it. What do you want to do?"

Below them, across half a mile of morning air, the pale figure stood in the middle of the courtyard with its hands at its sides, and nothing in its stillness hurried.

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