They heard it before they saw anything, and the sound was the worst part of the whole day.
It came up out of the head of the Brack at first light. A grinding, tearing, enormous noise with no rhythm to it, going on and on, and stopping, and starting again. Elliot lay on the rim beside Lyssara in the wet grass and could not place it against anything he had ever heard. It was Adam, arriving late and out of breath and lying down on Elliot's other side, who got it in one.
"It's coming through," he said.
"Through what?"
"The pass." His face was grey. "It's ninety feet. The Brack's twenty at the widest. It isn't coming up the gully, Ell. It's making the gully bigger."
They lay in the grass for two hours and listened to a mountain being edited.
---
Nadrath came out of the pass first, on his own feet, about an hour after full light. He stopped at the top of the valley and looked round it with the mild proprietary satisfaction of a man arriving at a house he has rented before.
Behind him, at two hundred feet, the walker came out of the Brack.
It had to turn sideways to do it, and the turning took a long time, and when the last of it came clear the whole head of the pass was simply wider. A raw new notch of broken stone forty feet across where there had been a gully, with the rubble spilling down the slope in a fan and the dust still going up off it.
It came six hundred yards into the valley, and stopped where Nadrath stopped, and stood.
Grass grew on its shoulders. Elliot could see it from the rim: green, ordinary grass, and gorse, and a rowan sapling about four feet high rooted somewhere near the top of it, moving in the wind. Nineteen years of the thing standing still between walks, and the world had started using it.
"That's a tree," said Adam faintly. "There's a tree on it."
Lyssara said nothing at all. She had her chin on her arms and her eyes on the notch in the pass, and Elliot could see her doing the arithmetic she had done for three days. Four good places to wait, and now a forty-foot gap where the four good places had been.
Well, said Etreuf. He has removed your only exit and improved the road for everyone behind us, and he did it in two hours, before breakfast, without hurrying.
Four hundred feet above them on the eastern shoulder, Kael Morvaine's light did not come on and did not go off. It stayed dark all morning, and Elliot did not look up at it once, because he had agreed not to.
Nadrath waited in the grass by the stream until they came down, and he apologized for the noise.
"It's the only way," he said. "I'd rather not. It takes days to settle, and the whole valley smells of broken rock for a fortnight, and honestly it's rather rude. But I couldn't leave it in the Brack, and I couldn't leave it below the treeline where somebody might walk into it." He glanced back at ninety feet of standing ground with a rowan on its shoulder. "It's very patient. It doesn't step round things."
"You said a week," said Elliot.
"I said about a week, and I said it four days ago, and I'd assumed three more days of preparation." Nadrath looked genuinely apologetic. "It turned out to be ready. I'd been putting it off, I think. Forty years is a long time to be about to do something."
"Ready for what?"
"I'll show you," he said. "I'd like to, actually. Nobody has ever seen it."
He took them into the temple, and he was different inside it.
That was the thing Elliot had not expected and could not stop watching. Out in the valley, Nadrath had been a courteous tired old man with bad knees. Ten feet inside the doorway, in the silence that ate sound, he went quiet in an entirely different way. The way a craftsman goes quiet walking into his own workshop.
He put a hand on the wall as he passed it, absently, the way you would touch a horse.
"You've been in," he said.
"Three days ago."
"And you found the wall, and you did everything to it, and it did nothing." He was walking down the length of the chamber, not hurrying, his boots making no echo. "Of course. It isn't a lock. There's nothing to force. You could stand there with an army and a century and you'd wear your hands out." He stopped in the middle of the dished floor and turned round. "It's a phrase. That's all it has ever been. The whole of it, the curves and the channels and the bowl in the floor, is one instrument built to hold one phrase for long enough to say it properly. The phrase is nine minutes long, and no room in the world will hold a note for nine minutes unless you build the room to do it."
"Nine minutes," said Adam.
"Nine minutes and a little over. I have four of them." Nadrath said it perfectly levelly. "It took me twenty-two years to get four minutes. I have had the rest for eleven, and I have spent them finding out whether I could play it, which is not the same as knowing it."
"And you can?"
"Since the spring," said Nadrath.
He looked round the enormous shaped dark.
"You'll want to understand what this place is, because you're standing in it and I'd rather you weren't ignorant," he said. "It isn't a temple. It isn't holy. Nobody worshipped here. It's a door. Somebody paid for it, and the men who cut it lived in a line of huts by the stream and went home when it was finished."
"You know about the huts," said Elliot.
"I've had nineteen years and nothing to do in the evenings." He almost smiled. "Whoever commissioned it never came back. That's the part I'd give a great deal to understand. You do not spend two generations and a fortune cutting a nine-minute door into a mountain and then decline to open it." He turned. "Unless somebody, somewhere between the first stone and the last, found out what was on the other side."
"Then don't open it," said Adam.
"Yes," said Nadrath. "That's the difficulty. That's exactly the difficulty, and it's why you're here."
He came back down the chamber toward them and stopped a courteous distance off, and put the violin case down on the stone, and did not open it.
"I'm going to ask you for something," he said to Elliot, "and I want to do it properly. I've thought about how to do it for a long time, and I've concluded that the only decent way is to tell you the whole of it first, and then ask, and let you say no."
Here it is, said Etreuf.
"Go on," said Elliot.
"I can play the door," said Nadrath. "I could have played it in the spring. I have not. I have sat in this valley three times since and not done it, and walked away each time, and I want you to understand that a man who is tired of holding one phrase for forty years does not walk away from the end of it lightly."
"Why did you?"
"Because I cannot hear what's behind it," said Nadrath.
He said it without any drama at all, the way he said everything.
"I can hear that there is something. I've been able to hear it since I was thirty-one. It's on the other side of that wall, and it has been there since before the room was cut, and it is." He paused, and Elliot watched him choose the words with visible care. "It is enormous. It is held. And it is not asleep."
"And you want to open it anyway," said Lyssara.
"I want to know what it is," said Nadrath, "and I am the only man alive who can open the door, and I am the last man alive who should decide whether to."
He sat down on the edge of a channel. An old man with his hands on his knees, in the middle of the largest instrument in the world.
"I told you what I am," he said. "In the gully. I don't think any of you believed the size of it, so let me be exact, and then I'll ask, and then you can refuse me." He looked up. "I hear everything as notes. That is not a figure of speech and it is not a gift. When I look at that young man," a nod at Adam, "I hear a warm steady fourth that has not changed since he walked in. And I know, because I remember knowing, that the correct response to that is fondness. I remember what fondness was like. I can describe it. I cannot do it."
Nobody spoke.
"Mr Morvaine's parents are a date I don't have. That's all they are to me, and it isn't callousness. It's absence. And the thing behind that wall is a magnitude, and I can tell you how large it is, and what it is doing, and whether it is in tune." Nadrath spread his hands. "And I cannot tell you whether opening it would be a beautiful thing or an atrocity. I have no instrument for that. I used to. I gave it up to hear the other, and I did not know I was trading, and there is no exchange going the other way."
He looked directly at Elliot.
"You can still hear both," he said. "That's what was on that ridge, and in the marsh, and in the coin. You have the ear, and you have the rest of it. You have the thing I can't do any more, and you have it at the same time, and as far as I have ever been able to discover, you are the only living person who does."
"So what do you want," said Elliot.
"I want you to listen," said Nadrath. "Once. Deliberately. Open yourself to it. Not to the door. To the thing. Hear what it is, and tell me, and then I will decide whether to play."
It hung in the quiet room.
"That's it?" said Adam. "Just listen?"
"Just listen."
"That doesn't cost anything."
"It costs everything," said Nadrath, "and I am about to tell him so, at length, because I would be ashamed otherwise, and shame is one of the two or three I have left."
He turned back to Elliot.
"You have done it three times by accident," he said. "The marsh. The tomb. The coin. Each time, something came through you, and you did not open the way. It was opened for you, briefly, by something that wanted in. That is survivable. People survive lightning." His voice did not change at all. "What I am asking is that you open it yourself, on purpose, and hold it open while you listen to something the size of what is behind that wall."
"And?"
"And you will not close it again," said Nadrath. "Not all the way. Nobody ever has. That is what happened to me forty years ago in a place I should not have gone. I was arrogant and young and I had no idea. You will have every idea, because I am standing here telling you."
The silence took his words and gave nothing back.
"You will hear the notes for the rest of your life," said Nadrath. "Every one. In everything. It will be the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to you, and you will not regret it for perhaps three years." He folded his hands. "And then one morning somebody you love will be unhappy in front of you, and you will hear a minor interval where the unhappiness should be, and you will know exactly what it means, and you will not be able to reach it. After that it goes fairly quickly."
Elliot stood in the dished floor of a nine-minute door and wanted to say yes.
That was the thing he told no one afterward, not even Lyssara, for a very long time. He wanted it. Not the way he wanted food, or wanted to live. The way you want to put your hand in water. Two months of not knowing. Two months of a coin that warmed for no reason, and a bolt that came out of a sky that was not there, and a demon who had stopped saying the word accident. And here was an old man offering to open the whole thing, honestly, with the price itemized.
Elliot, said Etreuf.
Not now.
Yes, now. The old man is honest and I am not, and you should have both. The demon's voice was very fast and very controlled. He is telling you the truth about the cost. Everything he has said is accurate. And I want you to say yes, and I want you to know why. He will open that door either way. If you have listened first, there is a chance, only a chance, that the thing behind it is a road. And a road is what I have wanted since the night I fell.
And if it isn't a road.
Then at least we will have known, said Etreuf, which is more than the men who built this room managed.
Elliot closed his eyes.
He thought about a bakery in Hollowmere and a boy called Perrin who slept with the shutter open. He thought about Adam sitting down next to him on a cot without being asked. He thought about eleven stitches put in his arm by somebody whose hands were steady and whose voice was not.
And he thought about Nadrath saying that he remembered what fondness was like, and could describe it, and could not do it.
"No," he said.
Nobody moved.
"Say the reason," said Nadrath. "If you would. I'd like to have it."
"Because I'd stop wanting things for other people." Elliot's voice came out steadier than he expected. "That's all I am. That's the only thing I've got that isn't borrowed. The fire is his. The dark came out of a coin somebody gave my mother. The blades chose me and I still don't know why." He opened his eyes. "The only part of this that's actually mine is that I mind what happens to people. And you're telling me, honestly, that if I listen I'll keep everything except that."
"Yes," said Nadrath.
"Then no."
The old man was quiet for a long moment.
"That's the correct answer," he said. "I want you to know that I think so. I'd have given it myself once, at thirty. And I have spent a great deal of the last forty years wishing somebody had stood in that room and asked me the question out loud, so that I would have had to hear my own answer." He got up off the channel, slowly, using his hand. "Thank you. I mean that. I've not had a decent refusal in a long time."
He bent and picked up the violin case.
"Right," he said. "Then I'll open it blind."
Elliot's whole body went cold.
"What?"
"I'll open it without knowing." Nadrath said it in exactly the tone he had used about the mule, and the noise in the pass, and the date of Kael's parents. "I'd have preferred not to. That's the entire reason I asked. I have been trying for eleven years to arrange not to do this, and you were the last arrangement available, and you have refused, quite rightly, and that's that."
"Then don't open it."
"I've been holding the phrase for forty years."
"Then let it go."
"I can't," said Nadrath.
And for the first and only time, something came into the old man's voice.
"You think that's a figure of speech," he said. "It isn't. I have been holding four minutes of a nine-minute phrase in my head since I was thirty-one years old, and it does not stop. It is there when I sleep. It is there when I eat. Every other thing I have ever known has thinned out and gone. My mother's face. My own village. The names of the two men I walked into that place with. And the phrase has not lost one note in forty years, and it will not, and I will die still holding it." His hands were quite still on the case. "I am not opening that door because I want to know what's behind it. I stopped wanting things a long time ago. I am opening it because it is the only way to put it down."
He unlatched the case.
Let him, said Etreuf.
Elliot's head came round.
What?
Let him, the demon said again. He is going to do it regardless and you cannot prevent it. On the other side of that wall there may be a way out of this world. I have been in a cage for two months, Elliot. I have been patient, and I have been useful, and I have asked for very little.
He doesn't know what it is.
Neither do you. Neither does anyone. That is the condition of everything that has happened to either of us since the night I fell out of the sky.
He can't tell if it's an atrocity, Elliot said. He just told us. He stood there and told us he has no way of knowing, and he's going to do it anyway, and there are four of us in this room and a valley behind us and a hundred miles of villages behind that.
The silence in his head was total.
Then we are on opposite sides, said Etreuf.
It was the first time either of them had ever said it.
Yes, said Elliot. I think we are.
---
Lyssara had moved up beside him while none of it was happening out loud.
She did not say anything. She reached over and took the strap off her own shoulder, the short leather one she had been using to keep the wrap tight on his left forearm since Brackfoot, the arm that still would not close properly. She pulled it snug, two hard tugs, the way she had done every morning for nine days.
Then she did not let go.
Half a second. Maybe less. Her hand stayed closed around his wrist over the leather, and she was looking at the old man and not at him, and her jaw was set. Then she let go and stepped back and put her hand on her knife.
"Right," she said.
---
Nadrath took the violin out of the case.
He did it the way a man handles the only thing he owns: carefully, with both hands, without ceremony. He tucked it under his jaw and turned his head against it and stood for a moment in the middle of the dished floor with his eyes closed, at the exact centre of a two-hundred-foot instrument built to hold one phrase.
"I really am sorry about this," he said. "You're four people who have behaved very well, and none of you deserve to be here for it."
"Nadrath."
"You'll want to get behind me," said the old man. "It doesn't matter for the door. It will matter for the other thing."
"What other thing?"
Nadrath lifted the bow.
And outside, six hundred yards down the valley, the ground answered.