Our descent, the next day, is steady and swift. We make our way down the slope toward a foaming ocean of clouds. By midday we are already on gently declining land, the foothills, and the tepid, seeping fog has covered us over. The ground is littered with lumps of broken mortar, evenly laced with fine slivers of rusted metal like long grains of red rice. We pass something like a massive stump, but, examining it, I find it’s the severed end of a cable, ten feet across, protruding from the ground. Hairlike wires festoon the disrupted earth at its base, as if they had sprouted and grown down into the soil like vines.

A wind blows back the fog. While it hangs in a sheer wall ahead of us, the sky over and behind us is clear, silky blue. Again I see the rare sun, slipping along the edge of that cloud wall, wisps passing invisibly between us causing its light all but imperceptibly to vary. The ground is levelling out more and more, and we are approaching a low flat space that is weirdly colored, all pale green with a little blue, and glinting sharply. It’s like a field of translucent, thin-hued gems. We will have to cross it.

Now it’s only a few hundred yards away and the words of the man in the house begin spelling out in my head just what there is to be frightened of as I get a smell of something rancid. The charm seems a very distinct shape in my pocket. For a moment I clutch it surreptitiously, and then nearly drop it, afraid to crush it, afraid to drop it. I peek at it hastily, a feeling of unaccountable terror welling up in me because I can sense yawning beside me the empty forsakenness I will feel if it’s a cheat—but the small man inside turns and points away, very deliberately, back toward the road. As if it understood my confusion and wanted to explain, the figure turns and points to the east. I follow its pointer, and for an instant I see a remote cloud of churning, shimmering motes, which fades at once. The air formed a lens there for a moment. Now the pointer again turns to point away up the road where we came. Shaking, breathing with gratitude, I hide the charm and run up to Makemin. I repeat what I was told, as though I were the man who spoke.

“After the mountains you will come to the Lake of Broken Glass. There’s only one path through, and its location changes with each storm—without warning, terrible winds gush down from the mountains and stir up a blizzard of glass shards that can mince a man bones and all in the blink of an eye.”

Then I revert to my own voice again.

“Sir, there’s a storm coming,” I point to the east. “We must pull back until it passes.”