But there was one thing El could do that would rid him of Egdod once and for all, and that was to lock Egdod inside. So El made a great forge out of a volcano that stood not far away, and there caused prodigious amounts of iron to be brought together from all parts of the Land by armies of Beedles. He rebuilt the bridge so that it could be reached from the north. He summoned hill-giants to serve as his smiths and made for them a stone anvil by cutting down a mountain and flattening its stump. On it, the giants forged bands and chains of iron. The bands were as thick as roads and the chain links as big as houses. These they wrapped and bent about the Fastness. The windows they covered with iron plates and the doors with slabs of stone. Over its top they fashioned an iron dome of great curved plates joined together with rivets as thick as tree trunks. El in the meantime was fashioning a lock to fit in the hasp that joined all of the bands and chains together. When every exit—even drains and sewer holes—had been sealed, he locked it up, imprisoning Egdod there forever. El withdrew, and broke the bridge, and dropped its rubble into the Chasm. Then to his Palace El returned. Egdod had never since been seen abroad in the Land.

Weaver trailed her fingers across the strings of the harp and let its tone slowly fade away. The song, it seemed, was at an end.

Lyne was ready for it. “Hang on,” he said, “you can’t just stop there and not say what El did with the key.”

“On his way out, after breaking the bridge, El flung the key in after it,” Weaver returned.

“That seems like an incredibly careless way to treat the one object capable of releasing his most feared enemy from his imprisonment,” Lyne pointed out.

Weaver wasn’t having it. As she knew perfectly well, Lyne had heard versions of this story many times during his young life and was only feigning surprise. “The Chasm is a crack in the world. It has no bottom. The key tumbled into chaos and was unmade. It ceased to exist.”

“Still, the sheer carelessness of it—” Lyne sputtered.

“The key was a piece of solid iron the size of an oak a hundred years old,” Weaver said. “Taking such a thing to the top of the Pinnacle would have been a stupefying feat unto itself, and all to no purpose. He destroyed it.”

“Locks can be picked!”

“Not this one. El saw to that.”

“You’ll know,” Corvus announced, “that across the water, less than a day’s sailing, lies East Cloven. Now, many of its people never set foot outside of its wolf walls, but those who do are walking right into the Bewilderment.”

The mere utterance of this word caused Mard and Lyne to make that little bow in the general direction of the center of the Land: an invocation of El, just in case El happened to be listening and cared about them.