“What is it?” Trey asked. His eyes were wide open now that the sun had gone down, and Alishia saw him stare in wonder at clouds silvered and smudged by starlight.

“I don’t know. Something. I had a crumb of your fledge. I hope you don’t mind, but I was curious and . . . I wonder if it may be because of that. Maybe I’m imagining things.”

“You had fledge?” Trey asked. Alishia found his tone disturbing, and she stepped away. Here was a stranger she had found on a mountainside, alone with her in the dark. Her knife felt even more ineffectual than ever.

“Only a little.”

“What do you sense?”

“I don’t know. Something in the shadows.”

“Nax,” Trey said, so softly that Alishia was not sure he had actually spoken at all. The horse whinnied as if in response. “It’s the Nax,” he said again. “Now that it’s night they’ve come up! Nothing left for them down there. They’ve come up to put right what woke them in the first place!” He was raving now, fear given voice, and in the deepening darkness his shout was louder than ever.

“I haven’t seen anything,” Alishia said, not entirely sure if that was true.

Perhaps the fledge miner’s fear translated to the horse. Or maybe the horse itself sensed something then, the watchful thing Alishia had known in her dreams and which she now sensed in the surrounding shadows. Whatever the cause, the result was inevitable. The horse bolted. Alishia ran after them, mindful of the uneven ground and the holes she had seen, but desperate not to lose her horse, and with it the saddlebags and all her belongings. Trey fell and rolled across the ground, and the horse ran on, galloping into the night until it was little more than a shadow itself.

Alishia shouted in frustration. And then she heard the sickening sound of breaking bones, something big hit the ground, and the horse cried out in agony.

She tripped and struck her head on a rock. She was sure, even as pain took sensation away into unconsciousness, that she had tripped over nothing but shadow.

THE SHADE REDISCOVERED the mind down in the real world, still possessed of dregs of the freedom that had attracted the shade so much. It hovered for a while, noticing the passing of time purely via the changing of the mind it focused upon. The mind soared and dreamed and traveled in a rich vein of knowledge, opening itself up more than any the shade had yet encountered. It had been drawn back here by that openness, and the fact that such simplicity would surely be receptive to any signs of magic, hints that things were not quite as they had been. And it was this that the shade’s god sought.