“I didn’t go immediately back. Not being sure I could find them again was the cause of that, if I left. I had only the marble-semiprecious abutment to guide me, but I didn’t dare to try to walk even with caution because we knew on it that after us would come you. So I took to the stone woods, and stopped here myself.

“That we came here at all,” and here his voice grows bitter. “Without the moment of uncertainty, but flew here by the straightest of ways, shows that we also are as insane.”

“Were you trying to reach the cemetery, too? The spirits?”

Now he stares pale blue eyes at me, light lashes in blanched face.

“They’re utterly insane,” he says quietly. “They think the disembodied spirits will give them an invincibility.”

The expression on his face seeps around and alongside his features like a vibration, blurring them.

“Your bloodthirsty men have had that very dream themselves.” His voice seems to come from deep underground, humming up a long dulling tube.

Something subsides, caves in, inside me. “How do they know where to—”

The narrator’s face coils in a brief, mirthless smile. Bending toward me, his hand unerringly seeks out and thumps the charm through my tunic.

“Pepedora?” I ask. “He gave you one?”

He moves his head, and his face droops again. He sighs, so that his head drops and stays lower than it has been.

“They set great store by it,” he says.

“Do you have it?”

“I never was entrusted with that.”

Getting a new idea, he points his finger shakily at the opposite side of the clearing.

“Just in the trees there, wholesome mushrooms can be found, and a pit of nonvenomous serpents. These people resignedly dig out and eat them every now and then.”

“Aren’t those the same wild men that attacked you though?” I ask.

He shakes his head looking older and older. “I call them vomiters. They constantly, they vomit. They are as notably thin as they are for that reason. Their jaws and chins get warts over them, and their teeth are nothing to see, meltings.”

I look out at the people, sitting on the ground, and plants thrashing in the wind beyond them. One, sitting with his legs outstretched, puts his hands to his head and drops onto his back, rolling to and fro on his shoulders in intense pain.

“What’s wrong with them?”

The narrator’s mouth is slack. He’s looking out at them with an alarming dullness in his eyes. Then he seems to recover.

“The grey light from the ruins does that to them,” he says without looking at me. “It appallingly fouls their insides and they never can be well again. Why they don’t leave it, I don’t know. There is water here, maybe that’s their better reason for staying.”

“Are the ruins far?”

He shakes his head, looks at me the whites of his eyes showing all around the iris. “Not far, but you will be killed if you draw too near to the gloomy light and the bad air off-given-off by them.”