The far side of the mountains took them through a thick forest of bamboo. They rode hard, switching horses and pace to keep their mounts fresh. Budding trees blanketed the hills. For three days they saw nothing but wind-washed grassland. Lightning streaked between mounded black clouds. Hailstones popped from the grass, salting the road and stinging Dante's hands. The towns were small things, a few dozen houses at the crossroads, the green fields speckled with white sheep, gray goats, and black crows.
For a morning and an afternoon, they passed nothing at all. Yellow grasses and graying stone. The road stopped as if erased. To the west, a black line lay along the horizon, thick and unbroken.
"What the hell is that?" Blays said. "Looks like Taim took a great big quill and tried to scratch out the end of the world."
"So the legends say," Dante said.
"Wait, he did?"
"Yeah. Right after he beat Gashen in a mountain-throwing contest and then baked a potato so hot even he couldn't eat it."
Blays scowled. "This is why no one takes priests seriously. The stories you make up as jokes aren't any crazier than the ones you worship in your books."
"They're cliffs," Lira said.
Dante turned in the saddle. "Cliffs?"
She nodded, looking him in the eye. "Tall, rocky slopes. Typically vertical."
"
What
are cliffs?"
"Tall, rocky slopes—"
"That!" Blays pointed at the thick black line. "We're here!"
"So can we finally know what brings us here?" Mourn said. "Besides our horses?"
Dante quickly explained Gask's history of failed invasions. "The People of the Pocket have been protected by more than cliffs. We're trying to figure out why no one can get in or out."
"They get out when they want," Lira said. "But few recognize the People when they see them."
"What makes you so sure?"
"They sail south sometimes. We saw them in the Carlon Islands every few years."
The black cliffs rose three hundred feet from the plain, perfectly sheer, unclimbable. A shallow scree of broken stones rested at their base. Dante halted to consult the maps copied from Cally's library. The originals were poorly scaled and very old, but they indicated a pass through the cliffs not far to the south. Some five miles later, dusk forced them to encamp. There had been no breaks in the rock nor any gentling of the slope. The vertical black stone was striated like gills, blocking off the heavens.
"Question," Blays said around their fire. "If no one can get in, why do we think there
is
a way in?"
"Because the maps say so," Dante said.
"Those things are older than Cally's balls."
"I'm pretty sure
those
aren't any older than Cally himself."
"Then thank Arawn you've never seen them."
Dante blinked. "When did you—?"
"Anyway," Blays went on, "if they came from the kind of books Cally reads, they're automatically suspect."
Dante unrolled one of his parchments and held it to the firelight. "Look, the road ended here. Just north." He tapped the map, then another spot below that. "One of the passages is supposed to be here, right before this Blackcairn place. That should be less than a day's ride."
"Sure, we've already wasted four. What's one more?"
"We're not
wasting
anything. We're not the only ones working on this, you know. Cally's got a squad of diplomats in Setteven. He and Olivander are probably working out how to levy an army for Narashtovik right now. Scores of different clans are plotting how to fight back on their own." Dante paused to accept a hot heel of bread from Mourn; the crust was lightly charred, the white steaming and fluffy, gooey with butter and speckled with fresh-picked lowleaf. "All those people are making the normal preparations for war. We're out here to bring back something
strange
."
They kept the fire lit that night. The light and smoke would carry far across the grassland, but they were at the edge of the world, a step beyond the map. There were dogs to keep at bay, too, wild things with howls like sobbing mothers. Despite their yips, Dante slept well, the fire's warmth easing the stiffness from his legs and back. In the morning, he brewed tea as the others woke. They rose easy, as if revitalized by more than the tea: but by the knowledge they were in a nowhere-place, a realm where nothing could help them but themselves. That knowledge was bracing, a kick to the heart that could last the whole day.
They rode out with the light, skimming the face of the cliff. Small black birds burst from the brush. The sun surged across the grass and died on the black rock wall. At noon, they stopped to eat dried beef and bread. Dante's border-world energy had left him. The cliffs were featureless, unchanging, as if the gods had hacked them into a rough idea in the early days of creation and forgotten to ever return and finish the fine details.
With the sun sliding down the sky, a black mound rose from the grass. Broken stones sat in a forty-foot mound. Time-tarnished bones poked between the rubble.
"Well, I see a black cairn," Blays said. "Now where's the way up?"
Lira frowned at the cliffs. "Maybe we haven't gone far enough."
Dante reached for his pack. "There's another map, too. It agrees with the first. The passage is north of Blackcairn."
"Perhaps they were once right and are now wrong."
"Then there should be
something
. A cave-in. A rockslide that buried the trail. I haven't seen anything but blank walls."
Mourn scratched his beard. "Maybe we don't know what to look for."
To mollify his doubts, Dante headed south past Blackcairn, riding with Lira at a distance of two hundred feet from the cliffs while Blays and Mourn rode right beside the looming stone. After two hours and ten miles, Dante turned around and headed north again, passing Blackcairn. Cally had advised him to expect missteps, to do what he could and move on without allowing the weight of failure to sap his resolve. Yet Dante couldn't help the bitterness he felt, the inward-pointing knives, the hard knowledge he might have done more, and better. The trip started with such promise. After their success in Tantonnen, every day since felt squandered, a drunken chase after things beyond his understanding. How large was the world that so much of it felt like a foreign place?
"Here's something," Mourn called from beside the rubble of loose rocks footing the cliffs. "I mean, here are a lot of things. But here is something new to us."
Dante drove his horse through the grass and jumped to the ground. Mourn knelt, pointing at a clear print in the dirt, its edges rising from the hardened mud as steeply as the cliffs.
"You're sure that's not us?" Dante said.
"Not unless one of us snuck out here while the rest of us were on the road. This track is at least three days old."
"Can you say where it leads?"
Mourn shrugged at the slumped stones skirting the sheer face. "Not without lying to you."
Blays swung down from his horse. "Here's a question. We're what, twenty miles from the road? What kind of idiot would come that far for nothing?"
"A very clever one." Dante slid into the shadows of second sight. Nether gleamed on the underside of leaves, winked from the gaps in the splay of broken rocks. Slowly as a flower follows the sun, he scanned the cliffside, feeling its silent face. Southward toward Blackcairn, at the edge of his vision, a deeper blackness rippled from the slaty rock.
"What?" Blays said. "You've got that look."
"What look?"
"Like you just heard Lady Swellchest has been widowed."
Lira turned from the cliffs. "Lady Swellchest?"
Dante slung himself atop his horse and trotted south. The nether set into the cliff was rectangular, dark as moonshadow. The size of a doorway. He dismounted and walked up to the shadows. He let his focus fade. The rectangle of nether disappeared, replaced by solid stone. He reached for the cliff. His hand disappeared into the wall.
Lira gasped. Blays laughed. Dante peered at the nether set into the cliff. The rectangle of false rock hung like a tapestry from three strands of shadows. He snipped them—one, two, three—and the nether collapsed like a watery blanket, oozing into the clutter of real rocks below. Where it had hung, a narrow staircase gaped from the face of the cliff.
"I'll stay with the horses," Mourn said.
Blays snorted. "Bravely volunteered."
"I'm not going up those stairs. My shoulders will get stuck. Along with all the rest of me. Then you'll have to cut off my arms, and I won't be able to do anything with the horses at all, except watch sadly as they flee into the wild."
"You're staying with the horses," Blays said.
Dante didn't bother asking Lira what she wanted to do. From his horse, he grabbed his sword and shitsack—which was not at all what the word suggested, but rather a highly portable bag of dry rations, extra waterskin, flint and steel, bandages, and other small necessities, a bundle Blays had named based on the word you'd yell while grabbing it up and running away—and made sure Mourn still had his loon.
"Speak up if anything strange happens," Dante said to the norren. "We'll let you know when we're on our way back."
"And just how fast we're retreating," Blays said.
The stairs were so narrow Dante's heels stuck past their edges. On the second step, he threw out his hands, convinced he was falling, then leaned forward and started up. The staircase turned 90 degrees, leaving him in encased in dazzling blackness. His breathing echoed from walls which sometimes brushed both of his shoulders at once. Tingly heat flowed from his stomach. It smelled musty, dusty. It was perversely warm and humid. He fumbled for his torchstone. White light spilled over the darkness. The stairs seemed to widen, to fall away from his shoulders. He could breathe.
"Lost already?" Blays said behind him. "I suggest trying 'up.'"
Dante grinned. His nausea faded. He continued up. The stairs switchbacked every thirty vertical feet, each flight identical to those before and after. Was he certain the shroud of nether had been nothing more than an illusion of rock? What if it housed a doorway into another world composed entirely of this stairway? What if he lifted his foot from the final step and found himself back on the first?
A draft tickled his nose, wet and salty. He cornered another switchback and blinked against the faint light. He rubbed his thumb across the torchstone, extinguishing it; Blays yelped, then emerged into the diffuse sunlight, swords in hands. Around another turn, Dante faced a rectangle of gray light. He edged forward, shielding his eyes with the blade of his hand. He emerged from a massive black boulder onto a high, misty plain. Streamers of fog coursed between irregular pillars of black stone. Moss and short green shoots clung to ledges and faults. Water trickled down the weathered pillars, pooling in algal puddles. A frog sprung from Dante's path.
"We didn't just die, did we?" Blays said. "This is how I always pictured the fields of Arawn."
Dante shook his head. "The fields of Arawn have no sun. Only starlight."
"Remind me to die in another country," Lira said.
Somewhere above the mist, the sun hung in the west, reorienting Dante after the twisting passage up the steps. He headed the direction of the murky sun, keeping the nether close. Water dripped ceaselessly. Thumb-sized black birds flitted through the mist-scoured boulders. As Dante passed beneath a lintel of shrubs strung between two pillars, a centipede as long as his arm unspooled from the waxy leaves. He dropped back with a strangled gasp. Blays whacked it in half, leaving one end metronoming from the high shrubs while the other half smacked the ground and wriggled sinuously.
Blays wiped off his sword. "Maybe it's never been conquered because nobody wants the damn place."
"Remind me to never close my eyes again," Dante said.
Lira considered around the writhing carcass. "When I signed on to protect you, I didn't imagine it would lead me to realms like this."
"Turn back whenever you want," Dante shrugged.
With a thick crunch, she stepped on the centipede's head. "Did I say I was scared?"
The going was hampered by puddles and slick rock and sudden bogs of mud. After an hour's travel, they might have made three miles. The flat highlands slanted down into slick soil loosely bound by flatulent-smelling clumps of kelpish plants. Dante's boots pulled and squelched. Despite the chill, a thin, clammy sweat glued his shirt to his back. A hundred feet downhill, more boulders loomed in the mist.
The shadows flickered. Mud slurped beneath Dante's foot. He stopped dead. "Run!"
He charged downhill, muck yanking at his feet. Blays and Lira smacked along behind him. The ground quivered, rumbling; uphill, a shelf of mud dislodged like a god slurping a crater of pudding. At first it flowed slower than their heavy, slogging steps, but soon gathered speed, a semi-solid tumble of mud and vines and death.
Dante stumbled, pitching forward, clawing at the mud while his momentum carried him forward. Somehow, he found his feet. The slope flattened. Pillars poked through the muck, misty and mossy. He dodged through the first line. A thirty-foot-high blade of rock stuck from the ground. He leapt against its face, palms tearing as he pulled himself up the slippery stone, muddy boots kicking for purchase. Ten feet up, he rolled onto a broad ledge and reached down to pull Blays up. Together, they hauled Lira up behind them.
With a deafening gurgle, the wave of mud hit the flats. Sludge poured between the boulders. Dante forced himself higher, nails scraping through the cushy moss. A stench of cold, damp rot engulfed him. He reached the crest of the ridge and flopped on his side, panting, feet dangling from the other side. Blays and Lira followed, soaked and muddy.
Mud burbled among the boulders, swallowing some whole. Stones ground and groaned. Dante wiped his hands on a patch of fuzzy green lichen.
"Gashen's bursting hemorrhoids," Blays said. "Got out of there just in time, didn't we?"
"Too soon for the liking of some," Dante said.
"Like who? The centipedes?"
Dante stood, wincing at the pain in his elbows and knees. The spar of rock was nearly four feet wide, but in the breeze-blown mist, he felt like he could fall at any moment. He cupped his hands to his mouth. "I know you're there!"