“I myself am somewhat amazed, and cannot give sure answers,” said Corvus. “But I have known that Cube and key were here for longer than you, and so I have had a little more time to ponder such questions. Suppose that the other plane of existence is real, and that it was preexisting. Which is to say that the Land was born out of it, much as you were born out of Eve. It follows that in that other plane are powers or faculties of creation that somehow account for the whole story of the Land’s coming into being, and underlie every aspect of what we take to be real. Moreover that plane is populated by souls who know of us and our doings, and who from time to time may for reasons we cannot even speculate on choose to effect changes to the Land—but to do so without violating what makes the Land coherent. If you accept those premises, can you not accept that an object that once existed in the Land, having been crafted to a purpose by El, and used and then utterly destroyed by El, might be brought into existence again? Not by any craft of any soul who dwells here, but by one on the other plane of existence, wielding powers the nature of which we cannot begin to understand? The only way that I can explain the existence of this key is to suppose that all of those things are the case. And moreover that my purpose in crossing over from that plane into this one is to see that key being turned in the lock on the Fastness.”

At a certain point the key simply toppled over, forcing Mard and Querc to jump out of the way. It was entirely free now of the matrix of rock in which it had been embedded. Some of its crannies were still plugged up with adamant, but Mard, having got the hang of this, could melt that away easily enough. Edda walked to it, bent down, hooked both arms under the shaft of the key, and tried to move it in an exploratory way, getting a sense of its balance. At Mard’s request she rolled it over to expose a part of it that needed his attention. One by one, though, he polished off those lingering traces. A few clots of adamant clung to the decorative work of the key’s handle, where presumably it wouldn’t make a difference. But the part that was meant to go into the lock seemed perfectly clean. It was the most complicated object any of them had ever seen, like a hundred mazes made out of smaller mazes, wrought in solid iron and brazed together. Encircling the delicate and complicated parts was a protective shroud of thicker metal—this explained why nothing important had been damaged when the key had fallen over. The shroud would have served its purpose perfectly well had it been square or cylindrical in cross-section, but of course it had innumerable grooves and protrusions, clearly meant to go one way, and only one way, into a matching keyhole.