Gyir chose to retain his thundercloud-blue breastplate and his helmet, but left the rest of his armor where it had been thrown. Already the grass seemed to be covering it over. The tall fairy sat behind Barrick on the strange dark horse the prince had brought from the battlefield. The tall Twilight demon Gyir could snap the boy’s neck in an instant if he chose, but Barrick seemed undisturbed to have him so near. Together they looked like some two-headed monstrosity out of an old wall-painting, and Vansen could not help superstitiously making the sign of the Three, but if this invocation of the true gods bothered Gyir in any way, he gave no sign of it.

“Where are we going exactly, Highness?” Vansen asked wearily. He had lost command of this journey long ago—there was no sense in pretending otherwise.

“That way,” Barrick said, pointing. “Toward high M’aarenol.”

How the prince could claim to see some foreign landmark in this confounding eternal twilight was more than Ferras Vansen could guess. Gyir now turned his ember-red eyes toward Vansen, and for a moment he could almost hear a voice inside his skull, as though the wind had blown a handful of words there without him hearing them first—words that were not words, that were almost pictures.

A long way, the words seemed to say. A long, dangerous way.

Ferras Vansen could think of nothing to do but shake the reins, turn his horse, and ride out in the direction Barrick had indicated. Vansen had lost his mind to madness once before in this place, or as near to it as he could imagine. Perhaps madness was simply something he would have to learn to live in, as a fish could live in water without drowning.

3

Night Noises

O my children, listen! In the beginning all was dry and empty and fruitless. Then the light came and brought life to the nothingness, and of this light were born the gods, and all the earth’s joys and sorrows. This is truth I tell you.

—from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

THE FACE WAS COLD and emotionless, the skin pale and bloodless as Akaris marble, but it was the eyes that terrified Chert most: they seemed to glare with an inner fire, like red sunset knifing down through a crack in the world’s ceiling.

“Who are you to meddle in the gods’ affairs?” she demanded. “You are the least of your people—less than a man. You betray the Mysteries without apology or prayer or ritual. You cannot even protect your own family. When the day comes that Urrigijag the Thousand-Eyed awakes, how will you explain yourself to him? Why should he take you before the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone to be judged and then welcomed, as the righteous are welcomed when their tools are at last set down? Will he not simply cast you into the void of the Stoneless Spaces to lament forever…?”

And he could feel himself falling already, tumbling into that endless emptiness. He tried to scream, but no sound would come from his airless throat.