sand. The gorge narrowed and sharpened. The sun rose behind them; all morning their shadows stretched long and dark before them.
The hills on either side of the gorge were purple with heather and sage. Round rocks—strange molten shapes, the rock of ancient fires and eructations—swelled up out of the purple—like an army of trolls out of the myths of old Koenigswald.
At midmorning, Creedmoor—who was in fine form—called a halt to their progress. Two beautiful birds—white breasted, golden crested; powerful, regal, remote—circled and swooped across the valley. Creedmoor said that he wanted to watch them, for a moment, only for a brief moment. He seemed sincere. To Liv’s surprise, he did not kill them. At first she watched, skeptically, Creedmoor’s face; soon she, too, was watching the birds.
When she returned her gaze to the earth, Liv shrieked and put her hands to her mouth in shock.
The hunched rocks on either side of the river had faces and glittering red eyes; and they were looking coldly down on her.
Their shoulders were covered in long black hair that fell to the ground. Beneath the hair the rock was now bone-pale skin. They hunched and crept forward on through the heather. Their legs were too long, overarticulated, which should have made their gait awkward; somehow it was not. They carried stone spears, stone axes.
There were a hundred or more of them; their ranks stretched up into the distant hills.
Creedmoor put a hand on Liv’s shoulder and said, “Steady.” He drew his weapon. She flinched to cover her ears, expecting the flash and the thunder; but he did not fire. Instead he held the weapon by its barrel, at arm’s length, as if it was a talisman.
Creedmoor called out—and now Liv did cover her ears, because his voice was impossibly, inhumanly loud—“We do not dispute your ownership of this valley. We do not wish to challenge its spirits. We are passing through. We do not want to do you harm. But if you try to stop us, we will surely destroy you. My demon is stronger than any of yours.”
Creedmoor’s voice rose in volume throughout this speech; by the end, it boomed and echoed off the rocks like an avalanche.
He spoke again, in a different language, guttural and choking; and again, in a deeper and harsher tongue that Liv recognized as Dhravian, and he boomed out the words yet again in the nasal Kees-tongue. Liv turned away, her hands clamped over her ears, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the rocks were only rocks and the valley was still and quiet, save for the wind and those circling distant birds.
Creedmoor was staring darkly into the middle distance.
“Were they really here or was that a trick of the valley? Will they let us pass?”
Creedmoor said nothing. She approached carefully.
“Creedmoor. Will they let us pass? Creedmoor—if they will not let us pass, we must go around them—you cannot take the General into—”
Creedmoor shook himself. His eyes cleared and he smiled. He gave her shoulder an avuncular pat and said, “They’re only playing a game with us. I wouldn’t worry yourself overmuch.”
—The First Folk. These lands are not ours yet, so they’re theirs still. I have never seen so many free and wild. If they decide to make themselves our enemy, it may go badly for us. Their powers will be terrible here, where things are loosely made already. The earth will serve them.
There was no answer.
—Listen. If they decide we are an enemy and they should decide we are an enemy if I were them I would decide we were an enemy then we are likely dead or dead if we are lucky; I hear tell that when they torture a man they have it in their power to keep him alive for eternity as his entrails are wound on a spear; they are very curious about our workings. They want revenge. I know you understand revenge. They will drag us down under the red rock where there is no time and no dying. They are before us and the Line is behind. What shall we do?
He waited.
—Your deliberations cannot take this long, or consume your attention so fully. You are not deliberative creatures. You lied to me. You cannot reach out here. Or you have abandoned me.
He was alone in his head.
—Well, then.
He reminded himself that he was happy to be alone.
There were no further incidents that day, or the next. Sage gave way to shimmering terraces of ash-white leafless aspens, then to