Ramus levered himself up, swung a leg and climbed. He moved quickly and methodically, breaking the movements down into parts and naming each. The lean, the lift, the swing, the roll, the stand, the step, the lean . . . He made six steps this way before glancing back again. He was pleased that Lulah had also climbed two more steps, but now she was down to her last arrow. Another creature lay dead below them, but the others came on, and some were now slipping around the building to the left and right, climbing over carvings and protuberances and disappearing from view. They would be scaling the sides he could not see.

I have those words, he thought. The presence in his mind seemed to swell as he thought of the curse. I have them, at least. But there was Lulah. She would know what he was thinking, and yet she fought hard to give him time to reach the top. He felt sad for her—so near and yet so far from her God—but if she turned to run as well, they would both be dead. She was being a true warrior to the last.

And what does that make me? he thought. There was a trail of bodies behind him that clouded his true name.

The next step was broken, left and right, with an elaborate stone carving, reaching out past the edge and hanging over the steps below. There were various creatures mixed in there—faces and wings, legs and claws—and he could not identify any of them. They were all fierce.

Lulah grunted behind him. Ramus saw that she had dropped her bow and was now weighing a throwing knife in her good hand. She had already thrown one, and a creature three steps below her was clasping its chest, leaning left and right as though deciding which way to fall. She threw again, grunting with the effort, and the knife glanced off an enemy's shoulder and spun away.

Ramus went on, step after step, sweat soaking his clothing, blood running down his arms from where his fingers and forearms were scratched and scraped, passing more carvings and the cool weight of precious metals inlaid into the structure, and even through the panic his explorer's mind sprinted, trying to take in what he was seeing and find explanations for it all. There were words and symbols here, some familiar, others nothing like those on the parchments. There were images of things he did not know, and illustrations of things he was not sure he wanted to understand.

Surely this is a gateway, he thought. This must be a way to somewhere! The fear came that they had somehow missed an entrance, either on the ground or one of the stepped levels they had passed below, but he could not worry about that now. With the creatures closing in and Lulah's weapons rapidly dwindling, defeatism would be the end of him.

And I always have those words. . . .