They gave it three days before anybody said anything, and the three days were worse than the argument.
There was nothing to do. That was the trouble. They had food for eleven days if they were careful, and a green bowl with a stream in it, and twelve sheep, and a temple that none of them would go back into. They had a week to wait. And they had four people who each knew exactly what they wanted and had all independently decided to be reasonable about it for as long as they could stand.
Adam cooked. Kael went out every morning and walked the rim of the valley and came back at dusk and reported, in four words, that there was nothing. Lyssara took the high ground above the temple twice a day and lay up there for hours with her chin on her arms, watching the pass they had come in by, which was the only way in and the only way out.
And Elliot went back to the ruined footings by the stream, because it was the only thing in the valley he could think about that was not the wall.
Adam joined him on the second afternoon and solved it in about an hour, which Elliot thought afterward was the single most Adam thing that had ever happened.
"There's no hearths," he said.
"What?"
"In the houses. Look." He had been crawling along the footings on his hands and knees for most of the day and had turf all down his front. "Twelve houses. No hearthstones, no chimney bases, no ash pits, no middens. I've looked. There's nothing. And they're all the same size, and they're all the same shape, and they're in a straight line."
Elliot sat up.
"Nobody lives like that," said Adam. "Villages aren't straight. Hollowmere's a mess. Every house is a different size because every family built their own and then argued about the boundary for forty years." He waved at the neat row along the water. "This, somebody laid out. All at once. Same day."
"For who?"
Adam pointed up the valley, at the grey face in the rock.
"How long do you think that took?" he said.
Elliot looked at forty feet of unmarked dressed stone, and the two hundred feet of shaped chamber behind it, and did not have an answer.
"Years," said Adam. "Years and years. And you'd need a hundred people up here doing it, and they'd need somewhere to sleep, so you'd build them a line of identical huts with no hearths, because they'd eat together in a hall you'd put up in timber and then take down again." He sat back on his heels. "It's a work camp, Ell. They didn't abandon this place. They finished, and everybody went home."
That, said Etreuf, is the most frightening thing anyone has said to me in this world.
Why.
Because it means that door was not left here by gods, or lost in a war, or forgotten in a ruin. It was commissioned. Somebody wanted it, and paid for it, and hired men, and fed them for years, and when it was done they walked away and left it standing. A pause. And whoever they were, they never came back to use it.
The argument started over something else entirely, the way they do.
Adam had been rationing, and on the fourth evening he said, mildly, that if they were still here in six days they would want to take one of the sheep. Kael said they should take it tomorrow and start the smoking now. Lyssara said they should not be here in six days at all.
And there it was, sitting in the middle of the fire, where it had been all week.
"Say it properly," said Elliot.
"All right." Lyssara put her bowl down. "We should leave tomorrow."
"And go where?"
"Down. Out. The Ladder if we have to. The Brack, if he's taken the walker far enough north." She said it steadily. She had clearly been building the sentences for days. "Elliot, we are in a bag. One way in, one way out, no cover, no people, and a paper with my face on it that has been moving through broker houses for three weeks while we've been walking. There are nine of them on it. Kael said nine, at least, and that was at Hallow Deep."
"That's still true wherever we go."
"It's true faster here." She leaned forward. "Everywhere else I'm a girl on a road. Here I'm a girl in a valley with one door, and anybody who works out we came up the Brack has four miles of gully to sit in and wait. I've been up on that rim twice a day for three days, and do you know what I've been doing? Working out where I'd put myself if I were them. There are four good places. Four. I could do it alone."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"And the second thing," said Lyssara, "which nobody's going to like."
"Go on."
"He told us to come here." Her voice did not change. "A man who has brought down four mountain ranges to make us walk one road stood in that gully and invited us to a valley with no way out, and said he'd rather we arrived rested." She looked round the fire. "We keep talking about him like he's a problem we're deciding whether to solve. He decided about us weeks ago. We're already in the place he wanted us."
She is completely correct, said Etreuf, and it does not matter in the slightest, and I want you to say that out loud.
Elliot did not.
Kael spoke next, which surprised everyone, because Kael had said perhaps forty words since the Brack.
"I'm not going," he said.
"Kael."
"You asked me for terms at a fire, and I gave you three, and the second one was that when we found it I would be there." He had not moved. The mask was down toward the flames. "It's two days north and it's coming here. I've been eleven years. I'll not walk down a mountain because the ground's bad."
"The ground is bad," said Lyssara.
"I know what the ground is." His voice stayed absolutely level. "I chose a graveyard on an open plain and held it for eleven years against men who wanted it, and I did that by never once being anywhere I hadn't picked. I know exactly what this valley is." He lifted his head. "And I'm staying in it. Those aren't the same argument, and you know they're not."
"Then say the real one."
"The real one," said Kael Morvaine, "is that I've got nothing else."
The fire popped.
"That's it. That's the whole of it." He said it without any weight, the way he had said everything since the gully. "I sold a town for this. I've got no trade, no family, no ground, and a bundle of maps that are worthless now, because the thing on them turned out to be a man with a fiddle. If I walk out of this valley I'm a masked idiot in his thirties with nine coffins and nowhere to be." He shrugged, very slightly. "So I'll stay. It isn't courage. Don't give me any."
---
Adam said, "I want everyone to stop."
He said it into the gap and it came out louder than he had meant, and he flushed.
"I'm serious. Look at us." He was gesturing with the ladle, which undercut him somewhat. "Lyssara wants to run, which is sensible. Kael wants to stay, which is also sensible if you've had the eleven years he's had. And Elliot's sitting there not saying anything, which means the thing in his head is talking and he isn't repeating it." Elliot's face must have done something, because Adam pointed the ladle at him. "See. You've been doing that for four days. You go quiet and your jaw does a thing."
"Adam."
"No. I've watched you do it since we were nine." Adam put the ladle down. "So that's four people, and three of them are being reasonable, and I still think all of it's mad. Here's my go, and then I'll shut up."
He took a breath.
"The old man's a week away. We don't know what he's going to do. We don't know what's behind that wall. We know he can stop a thing under the Brack in eleven seconds without putting the fiddle on his shoulder. We know he walks a ninety-foot piece of a god about like a dog. And we know he sat down in front of four armed people and none of us moved." He looked round at them. "We are not going to beat him. Not in a week, not in a year. Whatever happens in this valley happens because he lets it."
"Then what's your suggestion?" said Lyssara.
"That's the thing," said Adam miserably. "I haven't got one. I just think somebody should say it out loud before we all decide something."
He is the only honest person here, said Etreuf, and it is a great pity that honesty has never once opened a door.
And then the demon made his case, and Elliot had to decide whether to be his mouth.
It came fast and quiet and extremely well organized, the way everything Etreuf had ever wanted came. Elliot sat by the fire with his bowl going cold in his hands and listened to it.
The girl is right that this is a trap and wrong that it matters. The masked one is right that he has nothing else and wrong about why that means he should stay. The large one is right about everything and has offered nothing. A pause. Here is what is actually true, and I will say it once, and then you will do whatever you do.
Say it.
That man is the only living person who has ever told you the truth about what you are.
Elliot's hands tightened on the bowl.
Not kindly. Not for your benefit. He told you because he has been alone with it for forty years and wanted to hear himself say it. Etreuf's voice was absolutely level. But in one hour on a rock he told you more than every hunter, king, clerk and old man you have met in two months put together. He told you what the coin was doing. He told you what your blades are. He told you what I am and did not even bother to be pleased about it. And he is the only one who will ever explain what came out of that sky, Elliot, because everybody else in this world is going to see the light and the daggers and the boy, and want something.
And you want the door.
I want the door, said Etreuf. I have never once hidden it and I will not begin now. If he opens it, I will take it and go, and I will not be sorry, and I have wanted nothing else since the night I arrived. And then, after a moment, in a tone Elliot had not heard from him before: And if he opens it and tells you nothing, you will have lost a week. If you walk down this mountain tomorrow, you will spend the rest of a short life being hunted by people who know more about you than you do.
Elliot sat with it.
"What's he saying?" said Lyssara.
And Elliot, who had not lied to any of them, not once, except in a gully four days ago about a girl he travelled with, opened his mouth and found that he was not going to repeat it.
"He's arguing for the door," he said. "Same as he's been arguing for eleven days."
Which was true, and was not the truth, and Lyssara looked at him across the fire for slightly too long.
---
He gave it until the next morning. Then he stood up at the fire and told them.
"We stay," he said. "And when he gets here, we don't stop him."
Kael's head came up.
"Say that last part again."
"We don't stop him." Elliot made himself say it slowly. "He's going to do whatever he came here to do. We're not going to be able to prevent it. Adam's right. We're not in that contest, not in a week and not in a year. So I'm not going to stand in a valley pretending. We stay, and we let him work, and we ask him everything we can while he does it."
"And if what he came here to do is bad?" said Adam.
"Then we're four people who couldn't have stopped it anyway," said Elliot, "and at least we'll have watched it happen and we'll know what it was."
"That's not a plan," said Lyssara. "That's a shrug."
"Yes." Elliot looked at her. "It is."
He had been up most of the night getting to it, and it was worse out loud than it had been in his head, and he made himself go on anyway.
"I've been doing this all wrong since Serenia," he said. "I've been going at things. Kael's cemetery. The Bull. The marsh. You go at it, you get hit, something comes out of you, it falls over. That's the only thing I know how to do, and it works on things I can reach." He turned his hands over. "I can't reach this. Nobody in this valley can reach this. And I've been lying awake for three nights trying to find the version where I'm clever, and there isn't one. So I'm going to do the other thing instead, which is stand still in front of the one person alive who knows what I am and listen to him until he stops talking."
Nobody said anything.
"And if the door opens," Elliot said, "then it opens."
Thank you, said Etreuf.
Elliot did not answer him.
Kael left that afternoon.
It was not a storming off, and it took Elliot most of an hour to understand that it was happening at all, because Kael simply got up and began packing in his methodical way and did not say anything until Adam asked him what he was doing.
"Going up the rim," he said. "The eastern shoulder. There's a shelf about four hundred feet up with a view of the whole valley and the head of the pass."
"For how long?"
"Until he's come and gone."
The fire went out of the afternoon.
"Kael," said Elliot.
"Don't." He went on packing. "It isn't what you think. I'm not going after him, and I'm not sulking, and I'm not leaving." He straightened up. "I'm removing myself, and I'd ask you not to make a thing of it, because it's taken me three days to be able to say it and I'd rather say it once."
"Say what?"
Kael Morvaine looked at him through the eyeholes of a plain cracked mask.
"If I am standing in this valley when that man walks into it," he said, "one of two things happens. Either I go for him, and he kills me, and probably two of you in the tidying up. Or I don't."
He let it sit.
"And I've thought about it a great deal," he said, "and I don't know which. And when I try to work out which I'd rather, I can't do that either." His hands had gone still on the pack. "Eleven years. Four hundred graves. My mother's name cut in stone by an eight-year-old. And I stood twenty feet from him in that gully, and he asked me for the date, and something in me went out."
He stopped.
"That's the only way I can put it," he said. "And I have no idea whether it's coming back, and I'll not find out standing next to him with a coffin over my shoulder and three people I've started to be fond of in the blast."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"You'll be four hundred feet up," said Lyssara eventually, "with a view of the whole valley and the head of the pass."
"Yes."
"And nine coffins."
"Eleven," said Kael. "I've been busy."
She nodded slowly. "Then that's not removing yourself. That's taking the overwatch."
"I'd rather you called it the first thing," said Kael Morvaine. He shouldered his pack and went up the eastern shoulder alone, and by full dark there was a small hard point of light four hundred feet above them that stayed up all night.
"You should go too," Elliot said, after dark.
Lyssara, who had been sharpening something, did not stop sharpening it.
"No."
"You made the best argument anybody's made in four days. You're right. It's a bag with one door, and there are nine of them on that paper, and you've already picked out four places you'd sit if you were them." He was looking at the fire. "And I've just stood up and said we're staying, which means I've made the decision for you, which is exactly the thing Adam took a strip off me for in the mountains. And I did it anyway."
"You made it for you."
"You know what I mean."
"I do," said Lyssara. "And you're wrong, and I'd like to only say this once."
She put the stone down.
"I'm staying because somebody has to watch that pass," she said. "Kael's four hundred feet up and he's watching the valley, which is not the same job. Adam can't do it. And you'd be useless at it, because you'd fall asleep and then feel terrible about it for a week. I've spent three days learning that rim. I know where the dead ground is. If anything comes up the Brack I'll see it an hour before it gets here, and that hour is worth more than any of the rest of it." She picked the stone back up. "That's why. It isn't complicated, and it isn't about anybody."
It was a bad lie.
It was a very bad lie, and Elliot, who was a poor liar himself and had spent his whole life being unable to fool exactly one person, recognized every part of its construction. The reasons in order of strength. The small insult in the middle, to make it sound spontaneous. The flat closing sentence that dared you to answer it.
He looked at her across the fire.
He thought about a girl who could take the south road and had never once taken it, and a rope cut in a barn, and eleven stitches put in his arm by hands that were steady while her voice was not.
"All right," he said.
And Adam, on the other side of the fire, who had opened his mouth, shut it again. He looked from one of them to the other, and made a small noise like a man setting down something heavy, and went back to the pot.
Nobody called it.
Three hours before dawn, the light on the eastern shoulder went out and came back on twice.
They had agreed the signal on the first evening and never expected to use it. Lyssara was awake before the second flash finished. She had been half up already, on the rim, and she came down the slope fast and quiet and dropped into the hollow beside Elliot with her hand already on his shoulder.
"Up."
"What is it?"
"He's seen something in the pass." She was pulling her coat on with one arm. "Not the temple side. The Brack side."
Elliot was on his feet. Four hundred feet above them, the little hard light went out and stayed out.
"It's too early," he said. "He said a week. It's been four days. He said a week."
"Yes," said Lyssara. "He did."
She went up the slope toward the rim, and Elliot went after her, and behind them Adam scrambled out of the blankets swearing and put his hand in his coat pocket without noticing that he had done it.