They did exactly what Nadrath said they would. They sat at a fire and asked each other what he wanted, and went round it for hours, and got nowhere.
Kael said almost nothing. He had said almost nothing since the Brack. He sat with the mask on and his back to a rock and looked at the fire, and when Adam finally asked him, carefully, the way you would ask a man about a limb, whether he still meant to kill him, Kael took a long time answering.
"He told me to," he said.
"That's not..."
"He told me it would be reasonable and that I'd be right to." Kael's gloved hands hung loose off his knees. "I've had eleven years of a man in my head who did it. Who wanted it, or enjoyed it, or needed the road clear. Something. Anything." He shook his head slowly. "And it's a tired old man who'd like the date for his notes."
"Does that make it better or worse?" said Adam.
"It makes it nothing," said Kael. "That's the problem. You can't do eleven years of hating at a thing that agrees with you."
Nobody had an answer for that. They went north in the morning.
The high valley took two days, and it was the strangest country Elliot had ever walked through, because nothing in it was wrong.
That was the thing. After the Brack he had expected wrongness. What he got was a wide green bowl above the treeline with a stream in it and grass and little yellow flowers he did not know the name of. And sheep. Twelve of them, wild or gone wild, watching the four of them go by with the total indifference of animals that have never been hunted.
"There should be people here," Adam said, halfway up. "Look at it. This is good ground. There's water, there's grazing. If this were anywhere else there'd be a village."
"There was," said Kael.
He pointed with two fingers at what Elliot had taken for a line of rocks. Once it had been pointed at, it stopped being rocks and became what it was: the footings of houses, a dozen of them, in a rough row along the stream, worn down to knee height and furred over with turf.
"How old?" said Lyssara.
"Older than the Kelmark charts." Kael crouched by the nearest and pushed the grass aside with the edge of his hand. "The stone's dressed. Somebody cut this. And there's no burn, no bones, no broken doors."
"So what happened to them?"
"They left," said Kael Morvaine. "Everything. Tidy. Ask your friend why a whole village walks away from good water."
I have no idea, said Etreuf, and for once in this benighted country I find that I do not very much care, because you are going the wrong way. The valley head is there.
That was the fourth time since dawn.
The temple sat at the head of the valley, and Elliot understood two things about it in the first ten seconds.
The first was that it was not ruined.
Everything else they had seen from before the memory of anyone living was a heap. Odile Ferrin's grandfather's piers were the oldest intact thing Elliot had ever touched, and they were two centuries old. This was older than the language they were speaking, and it was whole. A single face of grey stone set into the rock at the valley head, forty feet high, with a square opening in the middle of it and no door in the opening.
No steps had worn. No lintel had sagged. Water came down off the mountain on both sides of it and had done so for an age, and had not marked it anywhere.
The second thing was that he wanted to go in, and that the wanting was not his own.
Yes, said Etreuf.
The demon's voice had changed. Elliot had heard him contemptuous, and furious, and frightened, and silent. He had never once heard him like this, and it took a second to identify it, because the last thing he expected from a thing that had toppled towers and burned kings was a man's voice thinned out by hope.
Go in, said Etreuf. Please.
It was the first time in two months he had used the word.
Inside, the sound stopped.
Not the way the Calamity in Serenia had stopped it. That had been a pressure, a bubble, sound taken away. This was the opposite and far worse. Elliot's boot came down on stone and made a noise, and the noise went out into the room and did not come back.
No echo. In a stone chamber a hundred feet across.
Adam said, "Oh, that's horrible," and the sentence went away from him into the dark and was gone, and he said, in a much smaller voice, "Why is it doing that?"
They lit two lamps, and the shape of the room came up around them.
It was one chamber, and it went back further than the light. The walls were not flat and were not carved. They were shaped, in long smooth curves and flutes running floor to ceiling, swelling and narrowing like the inside of something. The floor was dished, very slightly, so that standing in the middle of it you could feel yourself at the bottom of a shallow bowl. There were channels cut in the stone, hand deep, running in from the walls in great sweeping arcs that met and crossed and parted.
Nothing in it was decorated. There was no writing, no figure, no god, no altar. In a room that size, built by people who could build a thing like this, there was not one single mark of ownership anywhere.
"Kael," said Lyssara. "Runes."
"There aren't any." He had been round half the room already with the lamp up. "Not a scratch. Not on the walls, not the floor, not in the channels." He sounded, for the first time in days, almost interested. "Everything I've ever found that did something had an instruction cut into it. Every coffin. That thing in the Brack. His walker. Somebody wrote on all of it." He turned. "Nobody wrote on this."
"Then how does it work?"
Adam had crouched by one of the channels and was running his hand along the inside of it, the way he would run his hand along a rope.
"It's not a room," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"I don't know how to say it." He gestured, frustrated, at the curves of the walls, at the dished floor, at the long arcs in the stone. "Look at it. Nothing in here is straight. That's hard. That's the hardest thing there is to cut. You don't do that by accident, and you don't do it for looks, because nobody put any looks in here at all." He sat back on his heels. "The curves take the sound somewhere. All of them. The floor puts you in the middle of it. It's shaped the way a..."
He stopped. He was frowning at his own hand in the channel.
"It's shaped like the inside of a fiddle," he said.
The far wall was two hundred feet in, and Elliot walked to it without being aware of deciding to.
It was a smooth face of the same grey stone, seamless, perfectly flat, running the width of the chamber and up out of the lamplight. There was no frame, no join, no hinge, no keyhole, and nothing whatever to suggest that it was anything but the back of a room.
Elliot stood in front of it and felt the pull in his chest that he had felt on the plain outside Kael's cemetery, and knew exactly what he was looking at.
There, said Etreuf.
I know.
Open it.
I don't know how.
Touch it.
He put his palm flat on the stone. It was cool and dry and entirely ordinary. Nothing happened.
Fire.
He gave the demon the hand and let the black and red come up and pressed it to the wall. It burned against stone the way fire burns against stone, and did nothing at all, and Etreuf pulled it back at once, as though embarrassed.
The dark.
The dark came easier than it had ever come, which frightened Elliot on its own. It came up the backs of his arms almost before he asked, and pooled against the wall, and found nothing to do there, and thinned away.
The blades.
"Etreuf."
The blades, Elliot. Now.
Elliot unwrapped both daggers, and only then noticed the thing he had been failing to notice since the doorway.
They were silent.
Not quiet. Silent, utterly, in a way they had never been since the moment he lifted them off a grave. There had always been something. A hum under the teeth, a pressure behind the sternum, a sense of two held notes waiting to be needed. In this room there was nothing at all. Nothing in the place behind his ribs where the marsh light lived. Nothing where the dark sat. Nothing of the low world undertone that had been under everything since a bolt came down in a valley.
For the first time since he was sixteen years and four days old, Elliot's head was completely quiet.
He hated it more than anything that had ever happened to him.
He put the fire dagger against the wall anyway. Then the void. Then both, crossed, the way he had driven them into Korran Uldar's chest.
The stone did not care.
It was Lyssara who found it, and she found it by being annoyed.
She had come up behind him and stood watching for a while with her arms folded, and then she said, "Move," and when he did not move fast enough she rapped her knuckles against the wall beside his head, hard, the way you knock on a door to make a point.
The room answered.
It came back out of the dark behind them. Not an echo, because an echo is the same sound arriving late. This was bigger, and it was a different shape, and it came from everywhere at once: the walls, the channels, the dished floor, all of it taking two knuckles on stone and giving back a low soft sustained note that hung in the chamber for four full seconds and faded out from the edges inward.
Everybody froze.
Lyssara, very slowly, knocked again.
The same note. The same length. The same fade.
Adam let out a breath. "Fiddle," he said, to nobody.
"Do it on the floor," said Kael.
She crouched and rapped the stone at her feet, and a different note came back, higher and shorter. Kael tried the channel wall and got a third. Adam, with the face of a man conducting a religious experiment, hummed one long flat note into the chamber, and the room took it and gave it back doubled and went on giving it back for six seconds after he had stopped. Then all four of them stood in the ringing dark with their skin crawling.
"It's not a temple," said Lyssara.
"No," said Kael.
"It's a machine. This whole thing is a machine, and the wall." She turned and looked at two hundred feet of seamless grey stone. "That's not a door you open. That's a door you play."
Elliot knew what was coming half a second before it came, because he felt Etreuf understand it.
It was not like hearing a thought. It was like standing next to a man when a letter arrives.
Etreuf.
Two hundred miles, said the demon.
Etreuf, wait.
Two hundred miles. And a village I helped to ruin. And eleven days of asking you nicely. To arrive at a door that opens for a tune.
And then he lost it.
Elliot had wondered, once or twice, in an abstract way, what Etreuf would do if he ever genuinely lost his temper. He had imagined fire. He had imagined the body being taken.
What actually happened was that a creature with no hands, no voice, no body and nowhere in the world to put three hundred years of rage had all of it go off inside the only room it had.
Elliot went down.
He did not feel himself fall. He was standing in front of a wall, and then he was on his side on the dished stone floor with his cheek against it, and something enormous was happening behind his eyes. A pressure. A heat. A sound that was not a sound. Blood coming out of his nose and running sideways across his face, and every muscle in his back locked hard as wood.
He heard Adam shouting from somewhere very far away.
It lasted about two seconds.
Then it stopped. Not faded. Stopped, cut off the way a door shuts, so abruptly that the absence of it was its own shock. Elliot lay on the floor of the quiet room with his ears ringing and his nose bleeding and his hands shaking, and in the middle of him something ancient and furious held perfectly still and did not move at all.
I am going to be silent for a while, said Etreuf.
His voice was very careful.
Yes, said Elliot.
I did not intend that.
I know.
I stopped it, said the demon. And there was something in it that was not pride and was not apology, something Elliot had never heard and could not name. I want that noted. Whatever else is said afterward about what I am. I stopped it.
It's noted.
And then nothing.
Lyssara got him up. Adam got the blood off his face with his own sleeve and was nearly crying and shouting at him at the same time, which was very Adam. Kael stood a little apart with the lamp and watched the dark at the back of the room and said nothing.
They got out of the temple and did not go back in that day.
Outside, in the green bowl with the twelve indifferent sheep and the yellow flowers, the world came back. The hum under the teeth. The pressure behind the sternum. The low undertone. Elliot stood in the grass and let it arrive and had to put his hands on his knees.
"What happened in there?" said Adam.
"He was angry."
"That's angry?"
"He's never been angry before," said Elliot. "Not really. He's been everything else. Not that."
He looked back at the square opening in the grey face of the stone.
"He's been trying to get through that door since the night he arrived," he said. "The whole way. Everything he's ever asked me for. And he can't open it, and I can't open it, and the only person in the world who can play it is walking here with a mountain behind him, and he'll be here inside a week."
---
She found him after dark, sitting on the footings of somebody's house.
She sat down on the next stone along. Not the same one. The next one, a foot and a half away, which was where she sat now. Neither of them said anything for a long time. The stream went on. The sheep had come down to it.
"That room," Lyssara said eventually.
"Yes."
"It was the quietest place I've ever been."
"Yes."
"I hated it." She was looking at the water. "And it took me about an hour to work out why, and it's stupid, and I'm going to say it once."
Elliot did not move.
"When I was small," she said, "there was a woman who did my hair."
The stream ran.
"Every morning. Before anything else, before food, before the day started. I'd sit and she'd do it, and it took about a quarter of an hour, and she never talked and I never talked, and it was the only quarter of an hour in the whole day when nobody wanted anything from me." She turned a bit of turf over with her thumb. "Nine years. Every morning, nine years."
"What was her name?"
"I don't know," said Lyssara.
She said it quite calmly. Then Elliot watched her hear herself say it.
"I never asked," she said. "Nine years, and I never asked her name once, because in that house you didn't, and I didn't know you could, and by the time I was old enough to know better I was..."
She stopped.
She stopped hard, all at once, like a door going shut, and Elliot felt the whole shape of the evening change around it.
"That's all," she said. "That's not anything. Forget it."
"All right."
"I mean it. That's nothing. That's a thing about hair. I don't know why I said it."
"Lyssara." Elliot kept his eyes on the stream. "I'm not going to ask you anything. Not now, not in the morning, not in a week. I said that in Hallow Deep and I meant it and it's still standing."
She did not answer.
But she did not get up either, and after a while she pulled her knees up and put her chin on them. The two of them sat on the footings of a house that somebody had walked away from before either of their languages existed, a foot and a half apart, and watched the water.
Some distance away, in the dark, Adam sat with his back against a rock and his hand in his coat pocket, and did not know how long it had been there.
He had put it there in the temple. He remembered that much. At some point between the singing wall and Elliot going down, his hand had gone into his pocket and closed around something, the way a man's hand goes to a thing when a room turns strange.
He took it out and looked at it in the dark. A small worn coin, pale metal, markings round the rim he could not read and had never tried to.
It was warm.
He turned it over twice.
Then he thought, without any distress at all, that it was warm because it had been in his pocket, which is what happens to things in pockets. He put it away, and thought about what they were going to eat tomorrow, and went to sleep.