“Please, Lulah. Let me talk it through with you, and that will illuminate it for me as well.”

Lulah sighed and dragged her saddle closer to the fire. She took one more look around before sitting down, and Ramus noticed that she kept her sword-hand free, her bow and quiver within easy reach.

“See here,” he said, leaning toward her and revealing one of the first parchment pages. “The imagery is so literal that it took a while for me to see. Here's the cliff—the Great Divide. This much I know already. There are images of the sun and moons, and people dancing or paying homage to one or the other or all three.”

“What's that?” Lulah asked. She pointed to the curled image of the Sleeping God, surrounded by a clear space on the page.

Perhaps she knows more than she admits, Ramus thought, panicked. “Sleeping God,” he said, trying to sound casual. “See the space around it on the page? They shun the cult of the Sleeping Gods and worship the heavens.”

Lulah nodded, and glancing sidelong at her Ramus could see that she was scanning elsewhere on the page.

“I thought these were the words of a story,” he said, pointing at some of the lettering surrounding the more literal imagery. “I was searching for a link between the images and the words, but now I think they're more than a story. I think some of them form a spell.”

“A spell?”

“A curse,” Ramus said. “Maybe a warning against . . . something.” “Why do you think that?”