Nikhinoch informs me—as I am one of the officers, I keep forgetting—that our route will take us through the foothills, skirting the mountains, round to the sea and Port Conget. Silichieh estimates the journey will take us less than a week. There’s a brief slow down where the road was washed out by a slide some months ago, forcing us to climb for a bit. Jil Punkinflake stretches out his leg spinning his foot in the air feeling gingerly for a foothold; Silichieh powering up the slope, his body bunching, unbunching, rebunching; and Makemin’s indefatigable ascent, one steady planted step after another. We camp that night well into the mountains, in a series of clearings strung along the way, ledging out into the valleys and commanding enormous views. Jil Punkinflake is gazing abroad wondering at the landscape. He’s never been in the mountains before. The slopes are bare white rock, dark vegetation spatters them like ink spots, and in the light of the full moon that white stone phosphoresces a wan blue both pale and warm. The path is a bright streak in a luminous field dappled with dimly waving, fragrant shrubs.

The next day, at dawn, I want to be a naked and tender-fleshed young gargoyle, perched up on high, the bottomless wind sliding deliciously over me and I am blank, hurtling from on high coming to rest again in all this rustling quiet. I want to linger over the fantasy, but the story won’t let me. The column is moving.

The second day passes much as the first. Did. Luckily the path, high in the mountains, is more or less level.

The third day, we come to a broad place with many roads. The signpost lists nearly to the ground, peeled battered and useless, but there are characters carved into the adjacent rocks.

“Interpreter!”

I come forward.

“Lulom, isn’t it?”

“Low.”

Makemin points to the stone—“Anything?”

“Is it in Lashlache?” Nikhinoch asks.

“I think not,” I say, stepping up.

I examine the inscription.

“It’s Wiczu!” I say this in astonishment only because I hadn’t expected to recognize the language at all. “It says Ciawixde is ten miles down that road”—I point the way—“through the hills and over a bridge. Then that way goes to the sea.”

Makemin has pulled out his waterproof map and is scanning it intently. Evidently his ordained route is marked there—I can see red lines.

“They’d have us go through Ciawixde,” he says in a moment. “But an old bridge is liable to turn up wrecked after so much time. And there are Wacagan in the area.”

I hadn’t known that. I look around me, trying to see menace in this unchanged scenery.

He goes on peering. Now he dashes the map into his lap.