Before their tired muscles and sore joints could put up too much of a fuss, they emerged into an open space near the top of the cliffs above the lake. To the north they had a clear view across Lost Lake and the Bewilderment, which, according to the map, extended all the way to the distant northern rim of the Land. This was pretty enough with its colorful trees sprinkled across rolling hills, and blue water pooling in the bottomlands, but they had already heard enough about it that they did not gaze on it longer than it took to take some pleasure in the prospect. Then they turned their backs on the Bewilderment and looked south.

For some while it was impossible for them to look at or care about anything other than the storm that, seen from here, constituted most of the southern sky. In that quarter of the world there was no horizon, since the boundary between the sky and the Land was hidden behind gray curtains and skirts of rain, wreathed in mist and bejeweled with silent flashes and twisting whips of lightning. The under-surface of the Evertempest was flat, though here and there, whirling convolutions above resolved into spinning formations below that extended, slowly and inexorably, until they punched into the ground. Those would scour the surface of the Land for a while, rooting around like pigs in the dark, then grow narrow and frail before dissolving. The main body of the storm was a stacked, churning architecture of wind-driven cloud, black and silver, riven with long horizontal bolts of lightning that could not but remind them of the angel’s sword. At its top—which according to legend was of equal height with the Palace of El, hundreds of miles to its south—the storm extended a long sharp horn like that of an anvil. Cloudbursts heavy enough to inundate any city in the Land fell from high shelves of cloud only to be swallowed by lower parts of the storm before they could get within miles of the ground.

The Calla people, as well as Querc and Fern, had been reading or hearing of this thing their whole lives but had never seen it. So there was nothing to be done for a while but let them drink it in, much as they had earlier sated themselves with lake water. Then, however, they began to lower their gaze to examine the territory ahead.