“This is much more than either of us!” he hissed. “This is about the whole of Noreela, all of it—the Noreela you know, and here, and whatever may lie beyond. The God . . . can you possibly imagine? Can you even attempt to think of what that thing is, when the power of all the Sleeping Gods combined could only manage to put it down to sleep? Something that can't be killed. Something so wrong . . .” He trailed off and looked past her at the floor of her pit, and deeper still. She wondered what he saw.

“Is it buried?” she asked.

“Of course. A cave. An abyss, deeper than anyone knows.”

“You've been in?”

“No one has been in. No human, no Sentinel, no one and nothing since it was put down. But now the Sentinels panic, and if they panic like this, it's because someone has approached closer than ever before.”

“Ramus,” Nomi said.

Sordon stared at her, sober and serious. “Can you stop him? I'm here to let you out, but can you stop him from doing whatever it is he intends?”

“I don't think so,” she said. “He can turn people to stone.”

Sordon Perlenni had started working at the ties locking the grating, but now he stopped and stared down at her. “He knows that?”

“He does. He's used it.”

Sordon frowned, his old man's face wrinkling even more.

“We have parchment pages found on a body at the base of the Divide. Ramus . . . he's an academic. He must have translated the words.”

Sordon nodded, his face suddenly slack and eyes dark. He was fumbling at the ropes holding the grating down, his breath coming faster. “An old Sentinel weapon,” he said. “They had many, once, bestowed upon their ancestors by the Sleeping Gods. So much to protect them other than just tooth and claw. I'm not sure any of them can even speak them anymore, but if your Ramus knows the curse . . .”

“You'll have to tell me the way.”

Sordon nodded, gasped and lifted the cover from the pit.

Nomi jumped and held on to the pit's lip, struggling to haul herself out. Sordon did not help. He could not, because he seemed to suddenly be his true age, sitting aside like a dying thing bleeding its last into the ground, face sagging, breath light. But his eyes were still strong, and filled with reflections of calamity.

“You must stop him,” Sordon said. “The sleeper cannot be woken.”

He told her the way. Without a backward glance Nomi left Sordon Perlenni, the First Voyager, sitting beside the pit that would have become the site of her violent death.

In a way, perhaps Ramus really had saved her.