There’s a small building made of metal plates down by the base of the crag, mostly buried in the talings. I wander in as the carts are being let down. A steel implement a little like a can opener hangs from a peg on the wall trembling in the wind without stopping, still glinting. A skeleton lies on the floor. I brush dust from a long bone uncertainly. Do I cover it up, or uncover it? The metal implement taps irregularly on the wall as I think ...

Makemin has already ordered camp to be set, but he paces up and down, hands behind his back, at the far edge of the circle of light thrown up by our fires, barely able to contain his impatience to go on. The night is completely silent, but there’s no peace in it.

I see Pepedora preparing the charm, filling the bottle with lymph from his sores—but that’s all right, the charm works.

The next day I am jangled awake by Silichieh’s hand on my shoulder. My head feels lead heavy. I can barely drag myself upright, blinking in pain at the insipid, fog-watered light. Silichieh tells me we are two hours past dawn. And here the light is no more intense than in the wan blush before sunrise. Everyone is oversleeping. I can hear Makemin snapping at someone somewhere.

*

We move along a stretch of bare white land, and there in front of us is a wall of trees, a little arched with the rise of the land. The treeline stalks out of the fog, which is thin lower to the ground but smotheringly heavy overhead. The column slows, cowed by the sight. The trees are uniformly huge, thrown up in a black wall across our path, but there is a break ahead and to the right like a colossal, shallow furrow gouged across the woods, its mouth angled away from us. The trees resume on the far side, across the oblique opening. I know what’s coming, so I head off to mime urination in a knot of bracken a few dozen yards from the column, take the opportunity to consult Pepedora’s charm. It points toward the gap.

As we close on the furrow, a long white regularity becomes visible inside it, raising at an angle into the air. It’s something like a huge stone rail, flat and broad, maybe fifty feet across. To our right, it vanishes into the mound displaced by the furrow dug for it; to our left, it vanishes in the distance, driving a straight line through the trees like a wide avenue. While its course is straight, the rail isn’t level—it looks as though a great hand had pushed the far side down deeper into the ground, tilting the near side up. It is however not so slanted we couldn’t use it as a road. Makemin peers out at the black woods. Then, with a sharp draw of breath he turns and gives the order, walking away calling out instructions.