I can’t hear anything but the sounds we make ourselves. A sick, frightened feeling begins to seep into me. We march through silence, a smell of wet green plants, and something fainter beneath, like rust. The grass and scrub grows thinner as we proceed, and now we are in a place where there are only solitary trees, although the slopes are acrid with rich-looking black earth, packed firm. Where the soil is torn open, pale limestone curds bulge into the air like warts, but the exposed rocks along the path are ferrous, sparsely spotted with lichens and abrasive to touch.

“I wish we had a bit of a breeze. I’m starting to feel stifled,” Jil Punkinflake says.

“As long as it didn’t blow any of this grit into our faces,” I say, and Silichieh nods sagely at me. This brings me back into the circle of his companions, and as I look at them I keep seeing them coming down the declivity to us, kicking out their elegant legs, their heads flung grandly back.

The captain resumes his conversation with Silichieh, now speaking Alak. The lieutenant meanwhile has been asking Thrushchurl something, and now I hear him say “It’s the interior they’re really scared of.”

Thrushchurl turns his head in that direction, away from me. “The interior ...” he says softly.

“What have you heard about it?” Silichieh asks.

“That’s where all the ruins are, and the wilderness and the war. Something else there too, like gods, are there. No one goes in there. The people in town are frightened all this—” the lieutenant makes a vague gesture including us, the war, “—will elicit an answer from it. There’s already stirring inside, and any killing will stir it up more.”

“You really think so?”

“Oh sure,” he says. “How could that not attract attention?”

A cloying, flavorless dampness fills my nostrils. Only now do I notice the fog, dark as twilight, erasing the land. It’s so thick I can’t make out the end of our party.

“I have a riddle,” the lieutenant says. “Want to hear it?”

“I’d like to,” I say.

He bends a little forward, past Silichieh, to have a look at me.

“All right,” he says. He is smirking a little, and now this expands into a proper smile that suits him better. He holds out his hands to the road, and raises his eyes brightly up.

“There is nothing in this world you love like you love me. You would part with everything else you have before you part with me, though you need never worry I will ever forsake you. More than love, more than life, more than death, you love most of all. What am I?”

“Can I ask questions?”

“Until I say stop!”

“All right. Are you always with me?”

“Always, though you don’t always know me.”

“Are you a part of me?”

“You are a part of me, and I am someone else.”

“Are you a spirit?”