Two nights later, Arcolin and Dattur rode north out of the winter quarters and met their guide on the first ridge. By dawn, they were high on another ridge, with fog in the valley below and the flank of the great mountain in front of them.

“It will not be as with your captain,” their guide said. “You travel with a gnome of your princedom, and though you are human … I have been told not to cloud your memory. For that reason, the prince has commanded that we enter the mountain in a different place and travel to the main passage along a new one that closes behind. Though if this frightens you, you may sleep and not know.”

“I am not frightened,” Arcolin said. “Or not enough to wish to be asleep.”

Nonetheless, when they rode up to a vertical face of rock and it opened silently before them, Arcolin’s belly tightened. The night had been dark, with rising fog dimming the stars, but the dark they rode into was darker yet. His horse balked at first, but their gnome guide laid a hand on its neck and muttered something; the horse relaxed and plodded into the dark without resistance.

All Arcolin could tell of the first part of that journey was clopping of the horse’s hooves on stone and the echo of that sound off the walls of the passage. He knew the passage climbed steeply because of the horse’s grunts of effort. He had the uneasy feeling that they traveled in a moving hole in the rock, but in the blackness he could not see rock opening and closing. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to. Finally he saw a dim glow ahead, and they came out into a level passage wider than the one they’d been in. Arcolin looked back in time to see the rock flow together like mud and stiffen again into stone. He shuddered and did not look back again.

Light grew as they moved along the level passage; they emerged in a wider one in which it was light enough to see the expressions on faces. More gnomes waited there: a small troop Arcolin chose to consider an honor guard. From there the journey resembled what the two veterans had told him about except that they did not come out of the mountain before arriving in the great hall. Arcolin dismounted; one of the gnomes took his horse and led it away. Selfer had remembered this: the carved screen with its patterns that caught and confused the eye, the dais, the gnome prince. Arcolin bowed.

“You speak kapristi?” the prince asked.

“Poorly, as yet, but I do.”

“It is not known before in all time that a man was prince of gnomes. It is not good.”

“It is not good that gnomes die naked in the snow,” Arcolin said.