The Brack was four miles long and no wider than a street, and the floor of it was loose stone all the way.
They went in at first light with a mule they had bought at Brackfoot for eleven coppers and a bad conscience. It was the last thing that village would ever sell them, pressed on Adam by a woman who would not meet his eyes. They were half a mile in before any of them spoke.
The walls went up two hundred feet on both sides, wet and dark, close enough in places to touch with both hands. The light came down in a strip. And the floor moved. Not scree shifting, not the ordinary sliding of loose ground, but a long slow settling, a few stones at a time, ahead and behind, like something turning over in its sleep under a blanket.
"Walk on the rock," said Kael. "Where it's bare. Not the loose."
"There isn't any bare."
"Then walk on the least loose, and walk quickly."
Hesta said it takes the mules, Elliot thought.
Hesta said it takes the mules and leaves the men, Etreuf agreed. Everyone in that town repeats it as a comfort. It is in fact the most alarming sentence anybody has said to us since we left the plain.
Why.
Because hunger is stupid and I understand it, said the demon. A thing that eats takes whatever is nearest. A thing that takes the four-legged and leaves the two-legged is not eating, boy. It is choosing. Something has been standing in this gully choosing, in the dark, since before an old woman's mother, and nobody in ninety miles has ever asked what it is choosing for.
It took the mule two miles in, and it took about a second and a half.
There was no warning. Adam had the lead rope in his left hand and was talking about nothing. Then the stone under the animal opened, a circle of it six feet across going down like water out of a basin, and the mule dropped into it to the chest and made one short astonished noise and was gone.
The rope went out of Adam's hand and took a strip of skin with it.
And the stones closed.
Not fell in. Closed. The whole surface flowed back level in about two seconds and lay still, and there was no hole, and no mule. The only evidence that anything had happened at all was a lead rope lying in the scree with its end chewed flat, and Adam standing there looking at his own bleeding palm.
"Run," said Lyssara.
They ran.
They got perhaps two hundred yards.
It came up in front of them, not out of the ground but as the ground: a wave of loose stone rising in a long ridge across the gully floor like a wake, moving toward them at the speed of a trotting horse. Elliot understood in a horrible flash that the thing was not under the scree. The scree was what it wore. They had been walking on it for two miles.
Kael threw a coffin at it. The coffin went through the ridge and the ridge closed.
"Back."
"There's more behind us."
There was. A second ridge, coming up the gully from the way they had come, and the walls two hundred feet of wet rock on both sides with nothing on them to hold.
Elliot got the fire dagger in his hand and drew back to throw it at the wall, high, forty feet up, the only thing in sight that was not moving. He had no idea what he would do when he got there and no time at all to work it out.
Then the music started.
It came down the gully from the north, quite close. It was the same unhurried patient line they had heard from a mile above the Cauldron, and in that narrow place it was appalling, because the walls took it and handed it back doubled.
Both ridges stopped.
They held. Two long waves of standing stone, four feet high, the nearer one close enough that Elliot could see individual pebbles trembling on its face. Then the music went down half a step, and took a turn, and did something his ear registered as a question politely asked.
The ridges sank.
The whole gully floor went slack the way a tensed muscle goes slack, and settled, and was stones again. Somewhere underneath, receding, Elliot felt rather than heard a long grinding withdrawal, going north, going deep, going back to whatever it did when it was not doing this.
The music stopped.
"I'm terribly sorry," said a voice from up the gully. "That should not have happened. It doesn't take people. I've never known it take people."
---
He was sixty feet away. He had come round the bend on his own two feet while they were busy, and he was perfectly ordinary.
That was the first thing, and it never stopped being the worst thing. Elliot had spent weeks building something out of other men's dread. Something tall. Something wrong. Something that made the air heavy the way the old man in Serenia made air heavy. What stood in the gully was a slight, neat, weathered man of about sixty in a good grey travelling coat, with white hair cut short and a face like a country doctor's, holding a violin in one hand and a bow in the other as casually as a man holds a hat.
The violin was down at his side. He had not raised it to his shoulder to do what he had just done.
"It sorts," he said. "That's all it does. It takes what walks on four and leaves what walks on two, and it has been doing that for a very long time, and nobody alive knows why." He looked genuinely regretful. "It shouldn't have taken your animal out of your hand. That was clumsy. It's very old."
Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.
The man tipped his head, and every hair on Elliot's body stood up, because it was the exact gesture from the Cauldron road. The small precise tilt of a man listening to a room he thought was empty.
"You're the four from the ridge," he said. "I thought so. Good. I'd hoped you would take the Brack." He smiled. "May I sit? I've walked since dawn and my knees are a disgrace."
He sat on a boulder by the wall, laid the violin across his knees, and put his hands on it. They stood in a ragged half circle twenty feet off with their weapons out and did absolutely nothing, for reasons Elliot could only reconstruct later.
Because he was sixty. Because he had said sorry about the mule. Because he had stopped the thing under the Brack with eleven seconds of music, and every one of them had already done the arithmetic on what happened if they moved.
"My name is Nadrath," he said.
He said it pleasantly, the way you do, and waited. Elliot watched the name go round the four of them and land nowhere at all.
Kael Morvaine made a small sound.
"That means nothing to you." Nadrath sounded, for the first time, faintly disappointed. "No. Of course not. It was forty years ago and it was only ever a court matter." He shook his head at himself. "Forgive me. I don't get much practice. I've spoken aloud to eleven people in nine years and nine of them were asking directions."
"You killed my mother and father," said Kael.
It came out flat, and cracked in the middle.
Nadrath turned to him with complete, courteous attention.
"Probably," he said. "When?"
Elliot had spent four weeks building this man out of eleven years of somebody else's imagination. He had built a monster, then a schemer, then, after the ridge, something colder. A mind that saw people as notes to be played.
He had not once considered that the man might simply want to get the record right.
"When," Kael repeated.
"Yes. The year, if you have it. The season is better. A day would be best of all." Nadrath had come slightly forward on the boulder, hands off the violin, real interest in his face. Warm, engaged, the interest of a scholar handed a document. "I keep a fair account, but there are gaps in the middle years, particularly between the Sarrow work and the second eastern passage. If you can give me a place and a day, I can close one of them. I'd be grateful."
"Grateful."
"Very," said Nadrath.
Kael went for him.
It was not a plan. It was eleven years coming out of a man at once. Elliot saw it start and could not have stopped it with two working arms, and Kael got perhaps four steps before Nadrath lifted the bow off his knee about three inches.
He did not draw it across the strings. He simply had it up, quite still, the way a man holds a finger to his lips.
Kael stopped.
"Please don't," said Nadrath. "You'd force something we would all regret, and then I'd have to be sorry about it for weeks, and you'd be dead, and nobody would get what they came for." He lowered the bow. "Sit down. What's your name?"
"Morvaine."
"Mr Morvaine. Sit down. You may certainly hate me. You've every right, and it's an entirely reasonable use of your time. But do it sitting, because I have about an hour, and I have waited nineteen years to talk to somebody who might follow it."
"Nineteen years," said Lyssara.
"About that." He glanced up the gully, mildly. "That's when I became sure. Before that I merely suspected, and a man who merely suspects can still talk to people. So I did. It went badly. I stopped."
Elliot found his voice.
"You brought the mountains down," he said. "Four valleys. You closed every road but this one."
"Yes."
"Why this one?"
"Because I wanted you to come the way with a very old made thing in it," said Nadrath, "and to see how you dealt with it, and whether you noticed what it was." He glanced at Lyssara. "And you did. Or she did. She has been looking at the ground since I sat down. She has worked out that it is the same kind of work as the marks on my walker. She did that on the ridge as well. That is twice."
The bottom went out of Elliot's stomach.
"You did hear us," he said.
"I heard something answer," said Nadrath. "It was very brief and very far up, and it was the loveliest thing I have heard in forty years, and I have thought about it every day since." He leaned forward. "May I ask you about it?"
That was the hour.
Elliot tried to describe it afterward, twice, to two different people. He failed both times and eventually stopped trying. Because the shape of it was this: a courteous old man sat on a rock in a gully and asked questions, and Elliot answered them, and nobody made him.
Nadrath asked about the marsh. He knew there had been a marsh. He did not say how. What he wanted was the sound. Not what Elliot had done, but what he had heard. Whether it came from outside or inside. Whether it had a direction. Whether it was one note or a chord. When Elliot said one note, he shut his eyes a moment, like a man tasting something.
He asked about the coin.
"It went warm before things," Elliot said, and did not know why he was saying it.
"Before which things?"
"Before the light came down. Before the note in the marsh. Near the daggers." His mouth had gone dry. "Never when I wanted it to."
"No. It wouldn't. That isn't how they answer." Nadrath turned the bow over in his hands. "And when it broke?"
Elliot said nothing.
"You needn't. I can guess, and I'd rather have your account than my guess, but I'll take the guess." The old man's eyes were very steady. "It knew you. And it went somewhere that surprised you. And this is the part I should like most in the world to hear, and have no right at all to ask. It went to him as well. Didn't it."
The gully was very quiet.
Do not answer that, said Etreuf.
"Who?" said Elliot.
"Ah," said Nadrath, and smiled, and let it go, which was worse than pressing.
---
Then he asked about Lyssara.
He did it the same way, in the same mild tone, with no change of register at all. That was the whole thing about him, Elliot realized later. Everything was the same size. A dead mule. A dead mother. A note heard at a mile. A girl's face.
"And you," he said, looking at her. "You're the one there's paper about."
Lyssara did not move.
"I've seen it on three boards. An unusual commission. Very careful language." He tilted his head. "Forgive me. It isn't the money that interests me. It's that there is a great deal of noise around you and none of it is yours. On that ridge, everything answered the music except you. You were a hole in it." He considered her with frank curiosity. "Is there something in you, or has something been taken out?"
Elliot heard himself say, "She's just a girl I travel with."
It came out fast and flat and obviously wrong. It was the worst lie of his life. He heard it leave him, and heard how bad it was, and could do nothing about any of it.
Nadrath looked at him for a long moment.
"Yes," he said gently. "All right."
And he moved on, courteously, to something else. Elliot stood with his ears burning and did not dare look to his left, where Lyssara had gone absolutely still and had not said one word.
---
"Now," said Nadrath. "I've had my hour, and I've been greedy with it, and you were more patient than I deserved. Let me pay for it. I'd rather not be in debt."
He set the bow across his knees.
"You've all been calling it a demigod," he said. "That's the halls' word. It isn't wrong, but it's a word people made to avoid a bigger one. What walks behind me is not a god and not a beast. It is a fragment. A chip. Something came off the thing that sleeps under Zyrion a very long time ago, and I found it, and I have been walking it about for nineteen years."
"A chip," said Adam.
"About that. Ninety feet." He said it with no weight at all, which was how they all understood it. "The body it came off is three weeks' travel wide, and it is under your feet whenever you are anywhere in that empire, and it has slept longer than there have been people to count the years. And it is beginning to be less asleep, which is the only reason any of this matters."
Nobody spoke.
"Do you know what a Song is?" said Nadrath.
Boy, said Etreuf.
"No," said Elliot.
"Neither does anybody." The old man's voice did not change. "Here is the whole of it, and I am the only living person who will say it to you plainly, so listen once. Everything is a note. Every stone, every animal, every man, every demigod, every god there ever was. All of it is one long piece of music. It has been playing since before the first thing was made, and the reason any of it holds together is that it is in tune."
He lifted the violin an inch off his knees and set it down again.
"Magic is nothing but that," he said. "You have fire in you, and it isn't yours, and it works because it sits on a note that agrees with you. Your blades went quiet in your hands because you and they are the same interval. Your coin warmed when the music moved. The thing under this gully sorts because somebody, once, cut an instruction into it, and it has held that phrase ever since, the way a string holds a note if nothing damps it." He smiled slightly. "Nobody wants it put like that. They want it to be power. It's much worse than power. It's arithmetic."
"And forty years ago," said Lyssara, "you heard it."
Nadrath went quiet.
"Yes," he said.
For the first time something in him moved. Not emotion, exactly. More like a man checking a wound out of habit, long after it has stopped hurting.
"I was one of three," he said. "We were young and extremely arrogant, and we went into a place we should not have gone, and the other two heard a sound and thought it was wind. I heard what it was." He turned the violin gently on his knees. "And you cannot stop. That's what nobody understands. Once you know everything is a note, you hear the notes. You go on hearing them, and after enough years you find you can't hear anything else. A man's face is a note. His grief is a note. I know these things are supposed to be more than that. I remember that they were. I simply can't get back to it."
He looked at Kael.
"That is what I am, Mr Morvaine," he said. "I am not sorry about your parents. I would like to be. I remember quite clearly what being sorry was like, and I have tried to do it deliberately, several times, and I can't, and I've stopped pretending, because pretending is worse." He said it without a grain of self-pity. "You should kill me. I mean that as a practical observation and not an invitation. It would be a reasonable thing to do, and you would be right to do it."
In the whole hour, Etreuf said three things.
The first was: do not answer that.
The second came when Nadrath said that everything is a note, and it was not words at all. It was a long, cold, total silence of the kind Elliot had felt twice before, after a marsh and after a tomb, and it went on so long that he said the demon's name inside his own head and got nothing back.
The third came at the very end, and came quietly.
A bolt came out of a sky that was not there, Etreuf said. It did not come from the one I was fighting. It put me inside a boy with a coin round his neck, on the other side of the wall of the universe. And I have spent two months telling myself it was an accident.
A pause.
If everything is a note, he said, then nothing is an accident. It is either in tune or it is not.
And then nothing, for a long time.
---
Nadrath stood, brushed off his coat, and put the violin into a case that had plainly been repaired many times.
"You'll want to come north," he said. "Two days up, then east into the high valley. You'll know it. There's a temple in it, and I imagine at least one of you has been extremely keen to get there." His eyes went over them, mild and unreadable, and did not rest on Elliot any longer than on anyone else. "I'll be there. I've work to finish. It will take about a week."
"Why tell us?" said Lyssara.
"Because you'd come anyway," said Nadrath, "and I would much rather you arrived rested."
He picked up the case.
"One more thing, and then I'll leave you to a bad night," he said. "You're going to sit at a fire and ask each other what I want. It's a natural question and you'll go round it for hours." He tucked the case under his arm. "I want to be finished. That's all it is. I have been holding one phrase for forty years and I am extremely tired. There is a thing in that valley that has been waiting since before your people had a word for waiting, and when it's done, I will put the violin down."
"And the walker?" said Kael. "The fragment. What happens to it?"
Nadrath paused.
"It goes home," he said.
He went north up the gully at an unhurried pace. A hundred yards on, the music started again, mid phrase, exactly where it had left off an hour before. And under the loose stone of the Brack something turned over, and settled, and let him pass.