The north side of the Ladder was worse than the south, because it faced away from the sun and kept its winter.
They came down through old snow in the shadow of the ridge, in a cold that got into the seams of things, and the ground under the snow was a lie in nine places out of ten scree, or ice, or the mouths of gaps you couldn't see until your leg was in one.
Adam went out in front on the second morning, because Adam had rope and a talent for it and had spent four days becoming the only person in the group who understood anchors.
That was the reason he was thirty feet ahead when the cornice went.
Elliot heard it before he saw it: a sound like a sheet being torn very slowly in another room.
Then a hundred feet of the snow shelf they'd been walking along the path, the thing that had looked like ground for two hours leaned out over the drop and separated from the mountain with a kind of terrible leisure, and Adam went with it.
He didn't shout. That was the thing Elliot could never get out of his head afterward. Adam went off the edge of the world with a coil of rope over one shoulder and made no sound at all, because there hadn't been time for his body to decide to.
"ADAM"
Elliot was already running and it was already too late. He hit the new edge and went flat and got his head over it, and forty feet below, Adam had stopped.
Not fallen. Stopped.The slab had broken up as it went and left a ledge at forty feet, a lip of black rock a yard wide with a cornice of snow still on it, and Adam was on his stomach on it with his legs over the drop and both arms flung out, scrabbling and the snow under him was moving. Slowly. A half-inch at a time, in a sheet, going over.
Below that there was nine hundred feet of nothing.
Lyssara arrived beside Elliot and went straight for the rope, and there was no rope, because the rope was over Adam's shoulder.
"Kael"
"Coming." Kael was thirty yards back and running badly on the snow. "Thirty seconds"
Adam didn't have thirty seconds. Elliot could see it from the top: the whole sheet under him was going, and his hands had nothing to hold, and he'd worked that out too, because he'd stopped scrabbling and gone very still and was looking for something to grab in the rock face and not finding it.
And Elliot thought, with complete and stupid clarity: he needs an anchor.
He didn't have a rope. He had two blades that went into anything, and one of them was already in his hand.
What are you doing, said Etreuf.
Elliot threw the fire dagger at the rock face beside Adam's head.
It was a good throw. That was the only reason he survived it.
The blade went down forty feet and took the rock two feet from Adam's left shoulder and went in to the hilt with a sound like a stone dropped into deep water a solid, final, entirely satisfying chunk and Elliot had one half-second of triumph and opened his mouth to shout GRAB IT
and the world folded.
There was no sensation of moving. That was the part that made him sick, afterward, every time. He didn't travel. He was on his stomach at the top of a cliff with his arm still out from the throw, and then he was not there, and then he was standing on a one-yard ledge forty feet down with his right hand closed around a dagger hilt that had been in his hand a second ago and was now buried to the guard in a rock face.
His balance arrived about half a second after the rest of him.
He went over. His feet went out from under him on the moving snow and he swung out into the open air on one arm, hanging off the buried hilt, nine hundred feet of nothing under his boots and his shoulder shrieking and his other hand came down and closed on the collar of Adam's coat as Adam's legs went over the edge.
The whole sheet of snow went out from under both of them and fell away and took four seconds to stop making noise.
They hung there.
Adam was looking up at him with an expression Elliot had never seen on his face in seventeen years, which was the face of a man whose mind has simply stopped offering suggestions.
"Hi," Elliot said. It came out as a wheeze.
"How are you here"
"No idea. Stop talking. Foot. Ledge. Now."
Kael got a rope down to them in about a minute and a half, which was fast, and hauled them both up in one lift, which was terrifying.
Elliot got to the top and made it four steps and then went down on his hands and knees in the snow and was extremely sick.
It came on like a wave, not from the fall, not from the fear. It was the arriving. His whole body seemed to be about a quarter of a second behind him and arguing about it: his stomach, his ears, the fluid in his skull. He knelt in the snow shaking with his head hanging and could not have stood up if the mountain had asked him to.
Lyssara crouched in front of him.
"Look at me."
He looked at her.
She held up three fingers, then two, then four, and he got all three right, and something in her face unlocked about half a notch.
"He teleported," Adam said. His voice had gone up an octave and hadn't come back. "He -Lyssara, he was up there, he was lying next to you, and then he was down there"
"I know. I was standing next to him." Lyssara didn't take her eyes off Elliot's. "How?"
"I don't" Elliot spat, and wiped his mouth. "I threw it and then I was where it was."
"Where you aimed it?"
"Where it went." He was surprised by how certain he was of the distinction. "That's I think that's the thing. I didn't go to the spot I was looking at. I went to the blade."
Yes, said Etreuf.
The demon's voice had an edge on it Elliot had not heard since the reeds, and it took him a second to place it, because he'd never heard it pointed at something good.
Say that again, boy. Slowly. I want to be certain I understood it.
I went to where the dagger landed.
Not where you intended it to land.
No.
Then listen to me very carefully, said Etreuf, because this is the first genuinely excellent thing that has happened to either of us since I arrived in this world, and you are about to kill yourself with it inside a fortnight.
They made camp early, in a hollow out of the wind, and spent the afternoon finding out how it worked.
Etreuf ran it. Elliot let him, because within about four minutes it was obvious the demon was better at this than any of them that three hundred years of working out exactly what a thing could and couldn't do had produced a mind that asked the right question first, every time, and never once asked an interesting one.
"He wants to know the *limits,*" Elliot reported, sitting on a rock with his head still swimming. "Not what it can do. What it can't. He says anyone can find out what a new weapon does and the ones who live are the ones who find out what it doesn't."
"I like him better every day," said Kael.
They found seven things before dark.
One: he had to throw it. Kael put the dagger in a crack in a boulder himself, twenty feet off, and Elliot pushed at it with everything he had and nothing happened at all. Lyssara handed it to him and he dropped it at his own feet nothing. Adam, being Adam, insisted on trying to throw it for him, which produced nothing except a dagger in the snow and a long silence.
"It's the throwing," said Elliot. "It's it's mine when it leaves my hand. Like the cutting."
Two: it had to land. He threw at a tree and went after it and arrived fine; he threw at nothing, out over the open hollow, and stood there feeling perfectly ordinary while the dagger sailed out and dropped into the snow forty feet away, and only when it *stopped* did the pull come — a soft insistent tug behind the sternum, like a held breath asking to be let out.
"There's a gap," Lyssara said immediately. "Between the throw and the go."
"About a second."
"Then that's the hole," she said. "That's where somebody kills you. You throw, and for one second you're a boy who's just thrown away his weapon." She said it flatly, without cruelty, the way she said everything about fighting. "Never throw at somebody who's already looking at you."
Three: one at a time. He threw the void dagger, then the fire, and the pull came only from the second — whichever had left his hand last. Which meant, as Kael pointed out with grim satisfaction, that throwing both was just throwing away both.
Four: the two blades did it differently.
The void dagger's jump was nothing. No light, no sound, no wind. He simply stopped being in one place. Adam, watching for it, swore he'd blinked and missed it; when Lyssara held her eyes open and watched properly, she said there hadn't been anything to see.
The fire dagger's jump made light. A soft burst of it at both ends a flare where he'd been and a flare where he arrived, gone in half a heartbeat, bright enough at dusk to throw shadows.
"Loud," said Lyssara.
"Not always bad," said Kael.
Five, six, and seven came at once, and they came because Elliot did it eleven times in an afternoon.
The sickness got worse each time. Not much a little more each throw, the way a bruise builds. The fifth left him dizzy. The eighth put him on his knees. On the eleventh he arrived, stood up perfectly straight, said "fine, that one was fine," and then his legs stopped working from the knee down and he sat down in the snow very suddenly and stayed there for twenty minutes.
"Right," said Lyssara. "Ten."
"I can do more than"
"Ten," she said, "is where you are now, and you were useless after eight, so the number's eight, and you'll pretend it's five in front of anyone who might want to know." She stood up. "And you'll get better at it, and it'll go up, and you'll stop telling me the real number the first week you think you can handle it, and I'll find out anyway. That's not a guess. That's how everyone does it."
The stupid one happened two days later, and it was nobody's fault except that it was entirely his.
They were working east along a high shoulder with bad ground below and worse above, and a run of rock came down the slope not an avalanche, just a rope of stones the size of fists, the mountain shrugging. Kael shouted. Everyone moved.
Elliot moved first, which was the problem.
He threw the void dagger without deciding to. His body did it: threw it clear of the fall line, across a gully, at a patch of clean rock on the far side, and went after it, out of the path of the stones, before he had any thought at all about the gully being forty feet wide and eighty feet deep and having no way back across it.
The rocks finished falling in about four seconds.
He stood on the far side in perfect safety with a dagger in his hand and watched his three friends come out from under the lee of a boulder unhurt, a gully's width away, and understood exactly what he'd done.
"I'm fine!" he called, uselessly.
Nobody answered him.
It took Lyssara eleven minutes to get to him, and she did it by going up, up the loose slope the rocks had just come down, across the head of the gully where it narrowed, and down the other side, over ground that had been falling apart four minutes earlier, alone, fast, and without waiting for anyone to talk about it.
She came down the last of it in a controlled slide and hit the flat and crossed to him and Elliot opened his mouth to apologize.
She hit him in the chest with the flat of her hand. Hard.
"*What is the matter with you."
"I"
"You went *alone.*" Her voice was shaking, and it was shaking with something that was doing a very poor impression of anger. "You jumped across a hole. Out of a rockfall. To a place with no way back and you didn't look, and you didn't count, and you didn't know there was a way round, because there nearly wasn't, and if there hadn't been you'd have stood there on that rock for two days while we walked ten miles round to find you."
"It was four seconds, I didn't"
"That's what I'm *saying.*" She stepped back and pushed her hair out of her face, and Elliot watched her get hold of herself by main force, and fail, and try again. "You've had that thing for two days and your body's already using it. Do you understand what that means? It means it's faster than you are. It'll get you out of things, and one day it'll get you out of something and put you somewhere alone, and we won't be able to come."
"Lyssara"
"Don't." She'd gone flat now, which was worse. "I've spent two days watching you be sick in the snow and telling myself it's a good thing, because it is, it's the best thing you've got. And then you do that." She turned and looked back across the gully, where Adam was waving both arms in a broad idiot semaphore of relief and Kael was standing with his arms folded. "Rule. New one. You don't jump anywhere you can't walk back from. Not once. Not to save time, not to save me, not for a good reason."
"What if it's a very good reason?"
"Then you ask," said Lyssara, "and one of us says yes."
She started up the slope.
She is correct, said Etreuf, and she is not angry.
I know.
You know she is correct.
No, said Elliot. I know she's not angry.
The demon was quiet for a moment.
Ah,he said. Yes. Well. A pause. You will want to be careful with that piece of information, boy. It is worth considerably more than the dagger.
The funnel showed itself on the fifth day, and it was Kael who named it, because he had the maps.
They came down out of the high shoulder into the head of a long valley that should have taken them north-east into the high country, and it was gone.
Not blocked. Gone. The valley's mouth had been a narrow gorge with a river in it, according to three of his four charts, and what was there now was a slope of raw broken stone four hundred feet high and half a mile wide, with a new lake behind it already a third full and rising, drowning the trees standing upright in it.
"That's fresh," said Adam. "That's Kael, that's weeks old, the trees are still green."
Kael didn't answer for a while. He'd got the bundle out and was going through it with his back to them, and when he turned round the mask was tipped slightly, the way it went when he was thinking.
"Six weeks ago," he said, "something set a foot down twice in one night, four hours apart, and a woman at a bridge felt it through four hundred feet of stone and an old woman in a shed said it sounded like walking."
He held up a chart.
"This is the fourth valley in eleven days where the way through has come down," said Kael Morvaine. "Ashgate gone, we went round it, I assumed a slide. The Kell notch gone, I assumed a slide. The east fork under the Brack gone. And now this." He folded the chart along its creases, carefully, the way he did everything. "Four. And every one of them on the eastern side of the range. Every one of them a route that goes north-east."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"He's closing doors," said Lyssara.
"He's closing ,those.. doors," Kael agreed. "There were five ways through this range to the high valleys. There's one left."
Elliot already knew what it was. He'd known since the word east.
"The Brack," he said.
"The Brack." Kael put the bundle away. "Which has a thing in it that takes the mules and leaves the men, and has had, since before an old woman's mother."
Well, said Etreuf.
He sounded, for the first time in a long while, almost cheerful, in the way of a creature recognizing an old and familiar shape.
Now we know something extremely useful,the demon said, and I want you to hold it, because it is worth more than every map that man is carrying.
Which is what?
*He is not hiding from us,* said Etreuf. *A thing that hides does not build walls, it goes quiet. He has spent six weeks bringing down mountains on the eastern approaches with a piece of a god, which is an enormous amount of work, and there is only one reason in any world to do that. A pause. He is not keeping us out, boy. He is choosing which door we come in by.