Thrushchurl gasps at my side, gazing at it. He kneels, taking up a stick, and cudgels some of the loose stone aside. The pull strengthens so that I double forward—then fling myself back and push with my legs. It’s the metal I’m carrying that is pulled. Thrushchurl’s tentative digging has exposed a thicker limb of that same blue silver from which the forks emerge. It looks like the blades of ice that are first to form on still water in winter. Thrushchurl carefully extends his stick to prod the thicker limb, and to my amazement the metal yields like water. Thrushchurl makes a strangling noise, and I take hold of his shoulder and start dragging him away. His astonishment seems to have made him inert as a doll. I don’t like this blue silver’s unwholesome aura or its insistent appetite for my metal. I tell him and myself that we ought to find Silichieh, but the way is clear now and we are brusquely ordered to fall in.

*

After a time, walking mechanically forward with my eyes on the ground, I glance up and stop so abruptly that Jil Punkinflake collides with my back. A shiver transfixes my whole body from the top down, and my jaws clench so hard I can feel the muscles on my skull push out. A hollow in the mist, like a floating tunnel, drifts past, and through it I see the blue slopes of the mountains, blue as cobalt, seeming as though simply standing there were a shimmering action they took.

“The interior,” Thrushchurl grins at me, nodding, passing, his hands thrust in his pockets and his carbine high on his back.

Jil Punkinflake is shoving me forward high-handedly, as though Saskia were watching.

The sight is gone, and now fog and swaying backs fill my eyes again. I breathe out through my mouth; the mountains I saw there, so briefly, were the mountains of home.

*

Dark bluffs of that iron rock lift up above us and boulders line the road. The rocks are fanning our line out and Makemin is concerned; he is continually calling to his officers to keep everyone together. The bluffs seem to wall off some of the mist.