In the dark and the cold the bitter grin on my face goes unremarked—they aren’t they.

We close on them carefully.

“They’ve carried their bodies off with them,” Saskia says hoarsely.

There are no bodies, no arms to carry bodies.

I hop up on a stone and see it, wave Makemin up to this higher vantage and show him the chasm standing there hidden by bracken and heaped scurf. Chasing “them,” we’d have plunged right into it.

Three of the “enemy soldiers” stand there between us and the gap, all their impersonated Wacagan lightness gone, staring coldly back at us their eyes like stars shine with piercing light.

“Those aren’t people,” I say. I sound like a boy.

Silichieh half raises his rifle jerkily—

“Don’t shoot them,” Thrushchurl says without taking his eyes away, and Silichieh looks, and seems to understand, lowering his gun again.

The figures turn together and calmly walk over the chasm’s brink, dropping out of sight.

*

I listen carefully to the slightest motions of the air in the branches, the sifting noise it makes as it slithers along the ground. My every spare moment is spent like this, in a painful effort to hear the music. Saskia tramps by making an enormous racket; drawn as she is, she never seems to get tired. I wish she’d tire right out into thin air, and wishing tires me. They created those vast buildings, that are musical instruments, to sing a neverending spell over all the land here. The soldiers we found hanging from the trees in mineral varnish were the “rests,” I suppose. The song is performed by all those dead musicians, and its notes are also moments in our story, like that bit of improvisation with the counterfeit soldiers. The hares and the birds, their Predicanten, are conducting. It’s so tidy I can’t quite believe it. But it couldn’t possibly be as quiet as this if there weren’t some great booming sound shoving the quiet down into our ears. The music shakes its vast body of wind over me, and the quiet between us only intensifies until my breathing interferes with my hearing. The musicians must be dead, with no breathing or pulse, to be able to hear what they play. The soldiers hanging in the trees, or lying smashed at the bottom of that chasm, so far down we couldn’t see them, are all listening to the music now.

Sometimes I think Thrushchurl hears it. He loves it here.

Dusk coming on. A Yeseg corporal near me gives a sudden yelp and snatches his gun from his back—I follow his eyes to iron wings high in a tree. The wings gape apart and the shape leaps aloft. The corporal starts blasting at it wildly, gibbering curses. I only watch him do it with cold curiosity. Silichieh rushes up, slows as he approaches the corporal from behind.