Chương 200: CHAPTER TWO HUNDRED: THE THIRD RIDGE

They went north on the eleventh of May. Marcus, Danny, Mensah, Okafor. Old Stone and two elders coming up from the interior to meet them. Twelve of Sera's people who would stop at the third ridge and go no further and who had been told so twice. They rode out at first light.

Half the town was at the east gate anyway, because it had got out by the seventh hour on the tenth exactly as Marcus had known it would, and there is no version of a town of twelve thousand where the Warden and the physician and the boy from the school all ride north on the same morning and nobody notices. Marta was at the gate. She did not say anything. She put a hand on the horse's neck for a second and took it away again.

Briggs was there, which took him twenty minutes to get to on those knees and which nobody mentioned.

"You'll be back for the eighth," he said.

"What's the eighth?"

"Lena's indexed block. First cut." Briggs squinted up at him.

"You said nine months and she said eight and I have three coppers on it with Aldric."

"I'll be back," Marcus said.

"Don't say that. Say you'd like to be."

"I'd like to be."

"Better," Briggs said, and thumped the horse's shoulder and went off to the forge. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. They made the boundary on the second afternoon. Old Stone was there ahead of them, which should not have been possible from the interior in the time, and Mensah asked him about it and Old Stone said something short and Mensah did not translate it.

"What did he say?"

"He said he left before your message came." Marcus looked at him.

"Ask him how." Mensah asked. Old Stone answered at some length. Mensah listened, and asked a second question, and listened again.

"He says the stone was set at the eleventh hour on the ninth," Mensah said.

"He says the clans knew before that. He says they knew on the seventh of May, two days early, because the guardians told them."

"The Tamagami," Okafor said.

"There aren't Tamagami here. That's the Demon Realm word — different thing entirely." Mensah rubbed his face.

"He means whatever the First Ones use. He says the clans have always been told before a stone is set. That's the arrangement. It's older than the before-memory."

"How much older?" Mensah asked. Old Stone said one word.

"He says: older," Mensah said. They came over the third ridge at the fourth hour. Sera's twelve stopped there, as instructed. Sera did not like it and said so once, at the appropriate volume, and then set her people and shut up about it. Marcus went forward on foot with the other three and the elders. The Ironfen fell away north into a shallow bowl he had never seen, and the bowl was full of light — not fire, not any colour he had a word for, just the air over four hundred yards of ground being more than air.

Confluix was on the northern rim, enormous and still. And in the middle of the bowl, alone on the bare ground with the light standing up all around it, was a single dressed stone about the height of a man. Nothing on it. Nothing near it. Danny stopped walking.

"How long has it been open now?" he said.

"Fifty-four hours," Mensah said. Old Stone went past all of them. He did not hurry. He walked down into the bowl to the stone and stood in front of it for a long moment and then put both hands flat on it, and left them there. Then he turned round and said something across the four hundred yards, and Mensah did not need to be asked.

"He says come down," Mensah said.

"He says it's warm."