Carefully, Mammon reached out and took the card, and, as if in answer, an unseen door behind the young man cracked open in the darkness, spilling a column of soft light into the hallway.

“Lord Dantalion will see you now,” said the young man.

Mammon took a deep breath and pushed his way through the door. Yehuda Leib leaned forward to try to see around the jamb, but all he managed to perceive before the door swung shut was the sense of a very large room.

The young man let out a little sigh. “Ah,” he said, straightening the ink pen on his desk, and he settled into his chair once more.

But he didn’t resume his reading. Instead, he looked directly down at Bluma and Yehuda Leib and folded his hands, as if waiting.

Softly, from behind him, Yehuda Leib heard Bluma speak.

“The question,” she said. “I wish to hear the question.”

A tiny smirk creased the young man’s face. “Very well,” he said. “But once it has been put, an answer must be given.”

“I understand,” said Bluma.

With a smile, the young man stood, shut his eyes, and in a singsong tone, as if praying, began to speak.

The one true secret that you know—

I brought you to this place.

I am the way that you must go;

I wear your frowning face.

I am the fountain of your fear,

The secret of the cold;

I’m whispered into every ear,

Yet I am never told.

—

Yehuda Leib’s mind was racing.

The one true secret that you know.

The examinations at the two previous levels had taught him to understand how rare a true secret was: something that only he knew and no other.

I brought you to this place.

Swiftly, as if flying in reverse, Yehuda Leib retraced his path, up through the yeshiva, back out through the Dead City, the Gallows, and the Cemetery, through Zubinsk and the Treasure House and the cold, dark night to that terrible moment in the forest:

The stillness of squirming legs. The reddening of the snow.

I am the way that you must go.

His father, just like him in so many ways—strong, sharp, dangerous.

I wear your frowning face.

What would he look like once his beard came in? Once it began to gray?

I am the fountain of your fear.

His father’s grasping hands.

The secret of the cold.

His father’s freezing corpse.

I’m whispered into every ear,

Yet I am never told.

All the adults in Tupik must’ve known who his father was—it must have been whispered into every ear.

Could that be it? Could his father be the answer?

But no—no, his father’s identity had been told. He’d known it in the end, no true secret.

So what then?

And then he saw it, standing there in the shadows, just behind his father all the time.

The Answer.

—