Ramus saw this as partial proof that these pages had come from the Divide. And whoever had written them had acknowledged one of the elemental aspects to their existence: the cliff. One side, there was life; the other side, only open air.

He looked at the curled figure at the bottom edge of one page, like a serpent twisted into an egg. You know what that is, Nomi had said. He had seen and read much about the Sleeping Gods, and though descriptions of those mysterious deities varied hugely, this was a recurring image he'd seen in a handful of texts.

Usually, the gods were drawn as beautiful winged creatures.

Not lizards or snakes.

He stood and went to one of the shelves, glancing around to make sure nobody could see the parchments. A sudden sickness rumbled in his stomach, and he recognized this for what it was: fear. Because as well as words and texts, he thought that much of what appeared on these parchment pages was more literal.

Part of it, including the curled image of a Sleeping God, seemed to be a map.

THE FIRST BOOK he chose was a heavy tome, loosely bound with twisted gut ties and covered front and back with thin wooden covers. It had no title or name, and there was no indication anywhere inside about who had written it, nor when or where.

Ramus guessed it was maybe five hundred years old. Some of the glyphs used were similar to those in other volumes from around that time. He had referred to this book several times over the years, and there was one page in particular that had jumped into his memory.

It took a while to find the page he wanted, inked on a rough sheet of layered silk-grass. The image there was, as he remembered, quite similar to that on the wanderer's parchment: a curled, serpentlike creature, only this one had a larger head, several limbs and hands. Each hand had six digits, and each digit was a person. Every person was screaming.

Ramus tried to read some of the glyphs around the image. He had never translated this page, though he had seen the glyphs used before, and it took him a while to edge his concentration in the right direction.

Fallen one put down, he read. Down is the fallen one. Deep is the God that fell. All saying the same thing in differing ways—and the more he read, the more he imagined a sense of panic overwhelming the writer. There was no information here; it was more like a statement of belief, a desire that would become more real the more it was written.