Ramus picked up the charm, his eyes never leaving the man's vague face.

Lulah stood back, eye wide and hand closed around the handle of her sword. “Is this what Konrad became?” she said.

Ramus felt the dead Serian's finger hanging against his chest, a guilty weight. “Maybe,” he said. “They're words I learned, but I don't really know how to wield them.”

“Someone here does.”

Ramus turned from the petrified man, weighing the charm in his hand. It was a piece of hardwood, hewn into a horn or tusk and holed through the heavy end for the leather cord. Words had been carved into it, but he could not make them out. He was not even sure whether he knew the language. But he knew the intent.

“This is Noreelan,” he said, and his heart sank as he vocalized his thoughts. “I've seen charms like this for sale in Long Marrakash, imported from Pengulfin Landing. Carved from the wood of the wellburr tree, because it's the hardest wood they have. Heavy.” He could not stop staring at the charm. Someone was here before us, he thought. And if one, perhaps many. What's the chance of us coming across the only other person who has ever climbed the cliff?

“Those bodies we saw,” Lulah said. “On the way up. Maybe they didn't fall at all. Maybe they were thrown.”

Ramus looked up at her without really understanding what she was saying. His mind was on the Sleeping God, and if that meant the God knew how close he was and what he was thinking, so be it. Fallen, he thought, ignoring the throb of pain behind his eyes. If you fell, how far up do you have to rise? And now that he knew others had been here before him, it was not the fact that discovery no longer tasted so sweet that troubled him so much. It was the God, and only the God.

But Ramus's fascination was wearing down his caution. Always something more to discover, something more to explore . . . and he remembered the warning on the first page of his journal: Never wake the fallen.

The agony punched at him then, a pain like he had never felt before, pulsing in his head and driving him to the ground. He passed out before he struck.