October 4: The Seven Hundred Steps

On Sunday, Vex taught him to build a ward, and she taught it better than any book could have.

She came down to the kitchen at nine in a black plaid skirt, torn fishnets, scuffed boots with too many buckles, striped arm warmers, and a band tee with the sleeves cut off and the neckline cut out, her eyeliner already perfect and a dozen silver chains swinging at her throat. She looked as if she were headed to a concert in a flooded basement. She was also, Eli was beginning to understand, the best teacher he had ever had. She never lectured. She asked questions, and waited, and let him fail in small and survivable ways, and then stopped him a second before the failure became large. When he rushed, she put a hand flat on the page. When he got something right, she said so plainly, and moved on. He had read his father's chapter on threshold wards twice the night before and understood perhaps a third of it. Thomas had been brilliant, and he had written for someone who already knew what he knew. Left alone with those notes, Eli was fairly sure he would have burned the house down twice by now, and the first time had nearly been the only time.

"A ward isn't a spell you cast once and forget," Vex said, laying out the materials on the sill of his bedroom window: an iron nail from a coffee tin in his father's study, a thread of salt, a sprig of dried rue, a sheet of paper with a sigil already drawn on it. "It's a promise you keep making. You build it, you anchor it, and then every day, a little bit of you keeps it standing. That's why a ward on a house you live in is stronger than one on a house you've left. The house knows you."

She made him choose the intention himself. He chose I am unseen and unharmed in this room, stripped the vowels, and fought the letters into a shape that looked like a bird caught in a net. She made him lay the salt in a single unbroken line, drive the nail into the frame at an angle, and press the sigil to the glass. Last, she took a needle from a sewing kit and looked at him.

"The anchor," she said. "A drop of blood. Calloway blood, preferably, since it's already tied to the house. It tells the ward whose it is."

He hesitated only for a moment. The needle was quick and cold and surprisingly clean. A single bead of red welled on his fingertip, and he touched it to the corner of the sigil, and felt something in the room take a slow breath and lean toward him.

"There," Vex said softly. "Now it knows you."

She tested it herself. She stood in front of the window with one hand raised, and set her palm against the air where the glass should have been, and pushed. Nothing gave. Her face went still and interested, and she leaned her weight into it, and then she took her hand back and shook it out, laughing. "Like pressing on a wall of cold glass. That's a good first ward. That's a really good first ward." She looked genuinely pleased. "Your dad took two weeks to get one to hold."

They went through the rest of the house after that, checking and mending what Friday night had left behind. The scorched hand on the front sill still showed, a pale blistered print in the paint. Vex scrubbed it with salt and a rag until the surface lay smooth, though a faint ghost of the fingers remained, and then she redrew the line over it, and Eli renewed the ward with another drop of his blood. A scout had tested the house two nights ago. There was no reason to think it would be the last.

What Eli noticed, over that long gray Sunday, was how easy it was. It was not only the lessons. It was the pauses between them. Breakfast was eggs and toast, which she made badly and without apology. Brunch was an argument over whether a certain anime opening was better than another, settled by playing both at full volume on her phone. Dinner was grilled cheese and tomato soup, her one real recipe, and she hummed over the pan without noticing she was doing it. He told her that he had listened to the whole album last night, as promised, and that the third song would not leave his head. She looked at him as though he had given her something. They talked about nothing, and about everything, and she mocked his taste in shoes, and he pretended not to notice how she curled her feet beneath her on a kitchen chair. He was a fairly ordinary kid, with ordinary opinions and a closet full of plain shirts. She was a scene girl through and through, in a dozen small and deliberate ways. And somehow, with all of that, they matched.

It was not until the evening, watching her scrape the last of the soup from the pot, that Eli understood the other half of it. Vex had stopped bracing. On Thursday she had looked like someone waiting for the roof to fall. On Sunday she was cooking, and humming, and laughing at his jokes, and the sound of it filled the house the way the silence had before. He thought about what the last days might have been for her if he had never come. A big old house with his father's coat on its hook, and his father's mug in the sink, and no one to talk to in the long dark hours, only the memories, hanging in every room. Training him had given her something to hold. His being here had filled some of the hollow his father had left, and she had not recovered so quickly from Thomas's death because she was strong, though she was. She had recovered because he was here.

He was glad of it. He was glad that it went both ways.

"Night, Eli," she said, at the top of the stairs, a little after eleven.

"Night, Vex."

She went down the hall to the master bedroom, the one that had been his parents' once, and then his father's, and then his father's and hers for three years. The door closed softly behind her. Eli stood outside his own door for a moment and found that he was thinking, unwillingly, of a different time, when that room had held his mother's perfume and his father's slippers, and a small boy had come padding in at night, afraid of nothing, to climb between them. He thought of the girl beyond that door now, and of the man who was not. Then he went into his room and shut the door.

Mordecai was waiting on the bed.

The cat sat upright in the middle of the quilt with his paws together, and looked at Eli with the particular gravity he used for things that mattered. "You have done well today," he said. "A ward on the first day. Your father would be proud of you, and he would also be irritated, because it took him two weeks."

"Vex said that."

"Vex is correct. It is a bad habit of hers." The cat's ears turned. "Tonight, we begin a different sort of training. The kind that I am qualified to give. I am going to take you to the Dreamlands."

Eli sat down slowly on the edge of the mattress. "The Dreamlands."

"You will have heard something. Witches walk there in their sleep, and have for as long as there have been witches. It is a place that exists beneath the waking world and alongside it, and every dreamer who has ever lived has set foot there, though most forget it by morning. A witch learns to . A witch learns to walk." Mordecai paused. "Your father went often. It is where we met, in a manner of speaking. Much of what you will need to know for the contest, and much of what you will need to fear, begins in that place."

"Is it safe?"

"Not particularly." The cat regarded him. "But I will be with you, and I know the paths. Lie down. Close your eyes. Breathe as Vex taught you, slow, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Do not try to sleep. Sleep will come on its own. When it does, you will find a stair."

"A stair."

"Do not hurry on the stair," said Mordecai. "That is the whole of the first lesson."

Eli lay back on his childhood bed, and looked at the ceiling, where a few faded plastic stars still clung, stuck there years ago by a man who had climbed a stepladder for his six-year-old son. He closed his eyes. He breathed. The house ticked softly around him, settling for the night, and the cat's warm weight pressed against his ribs, and somewhere beneath the sound of his own heart he heard a faint, slow creak, like a loose board under a careful foot.

The seventh stair.

He opened his eyes, and he was standing at the top of a staircase that was not in his father's house.

It was carved from pale stone and it went down into darkness. Torches burned in iron brackets along the wall, each throwing a small, steady circle of light, and between the circles the dark was deep and ancient. Mordecai stood beside him on the first step, and he was not quite a cat any longer, though he had not yet changed. He was larger, and the lines of him were sharper, and his eyes held a faint glow that had not been there before.

"Seven hundred steps of light slumber," the cat said. "They lead to the Cavern of Flame. Count them if you like. Most do. It keeps the mind from wandering."

Eli counted. He lost the number somewhere around two hundred, and found it again, and lost it a second time. The stair spiraled down and down, and the air grew warm and then thick, like the air of a sleeping room, and the torchlight began to turn from yellow to a deep, dancing orange. Somewhere far below, he could hear a sound like a vast breath, drawn and held and let go.

The Cavern of Flame opened at the bottom of the stair like the inside of a lung.

A great fire burned in its center, a pillar of flame without fuel, rising from a stone dais the size of a house. Two old men in robes the color of embers stood before it, with long gray beards and eyes like banked coals. Priests, Eli thought, though he could not say of what. They turned together as the cat and the boy stepped from the stair, and they looked at Mordecai for a long moment, and then at Eli, and he felt each glance settle on him like a hand.

"Nasht," said Mordecai gravely. "Kaman-Thah. I bring the son of Thomas Calloway."

"We see him," said one of the priests, in a voice like paper in a draft. "He is very young."

"He is."

"The gate does not care how young he is," said the other. He looked directly at Eli. "Seventy steps remain, boy. They are steeper than the seven hundred, and they lead somewhere that does not forgive mistakes. Keep your name to yourself, and keep your eyes on the cat."

"Thank you," Eli said, and the old men inclined their heads in unison, and turned back to their fire.

The seventy steps descended from the far side of the cavern, and they were steeper, as promised, and colder. There were no torches. The stone glowed faintly under his bare feet, and the dark pressed at him from both sides, and the air grew fresh and green and smelled, impossibly, of damp earth and leaves. At the bottom stood a gate of ivory and horn, and it swung open as Mordecai approached, without a sound.

They stepped through, and the Dreamlands received them.

The first thing was the light. It was not the light of any sun he knew. It fell soft and green-gold through a roof of enormous trees, and the trees themselves were unlike any trees he had seen, their trunks so thick that ten men could not have circled them, their branches tangled together overhead into a dim cathedral ceiling. The air was cool and sweet and faintly electric, and everything in it seemed to hold its breath, as if it were listening.

"The Enchanted Wood," Mordecai said. He had changed after all, Eli noticed, though not as he had on the stair. He walked at Eli's side on four silent paws, still a black cat, but taller, longer-limbed, moving with a lazy and perfectly balanced authority. "It lies just inside the Gate. Every dreamer who es the Seven Hundred Steps comes here first. Mind the paths. And do not look too long at the dark between the trunks."

Eli looked at the dark between the trunks. Eyes looked back.

There were hundreds of them. Small and bright and round, in pairs, blinking out of every hollow and fork of the great trees. The creatures were small, as brown as the earth, with soft fur and huge liquid eyes, and they pressed together in the roots and the leaves, chattering in thin, high voices he could not quite catch.

"Zoogs," said Mordecai. "They live here. They are curious, and they are gossips, and they are not very honest. They know a great many things and will trade you any of them for a secret. Never give them one." He did not slow his pace. "They also hate cats, for good reason. We have a long memory."

The chattering fell silent as Mordecai ed. Every pair of eyes pulled back into the dark.

"They are afraid of you," Eli said.

"They are afraid of cats in general. I am only a particularly good example."

They walked for a long time, along a path of pale moss that seemed to unroll beneath their feet, and Mordecai told him things as they went, in the dry, unhurried voice of a guide who had given this tour more than once and enjoyed it regardless. How to move: not by walking, ultimately, but by wanting, and the more clearly he wanted a place, the more quickly the land would carry him toward it, though the Dreamlands resented haste and had a way of punishing it. How to dream: how to hold on to the thread, the one thin line of waking awareness that tethered him to his body, and to feel for it whenever the world around him began to blur. How to wake: think of the stair, and climb, and not look back. How to keep his name: not to give it, ever, to anything that asked, and certainly never to anything that smiled too widely while asking.

"And above everything else," Mordecai said, " this. If you die here, you do not wake. Not ever. The body in your bed will breathe for a day or two, and then it will stop, and no doctor will find a cause. The Dreamlands are as real as the waking world, and in some ways more so, and they are not a safe place to be reckless."

Eli swallowed. "Good to know."

"Mind that you do know it."

The wood thinned, and ended, and they stepped out onto the edge of a high green hill, and for a moment Eli forgot to breathe.

The whole of the Dreamlands lay spread out below him.

He stood on a ridge above a wide valley, and beyond the valley the land rolled away in every direction, a patchwork of dark forests and golden fields and shining rivers, under a sky that held two moons. In the near distance, a river wound through low hills, and beside it a small old town of red-tiled roofs and crooked chimneys, wisps of smoke curling from its hearths. Farther away, on the edge of a distant sea, tall white towers and minarets caught the light like frozen flame. Farther still, black cliffs rose up against the horizon, and beyond them, so far that they seemed less like mountains than like the edge of the world, the peaks of something enormous, cold, and white.

"The Vale of Skai," said Mordecai, nodding at the little town, "with the River Skai running through it. That is Ulthar, where we are going. It is the safest place in the Dreamlands for those of our kind, and the oldest, and I am rather fond of it." His tail swept toward the shining towers. "That is Celephaïs. A city of marble and gold, ruled by a dreamer who forgot he was a king. It is beautiful, and it is safe, and you will visit it someday if we both survive the month."

"And that?" Eli pointed to the black cliffs.

"Dylath-Leen." Mordecai's voice cooled. "A harbor town of black basalt. Merchants come there from every corner of the dream world, and some come from places that are not on any map. Black galleys with strange oars put in at its docks, and the traders aboard them do not show their faces, and they are accompanied by something that looks like a great pale toad, with no eyes, that walks on its hind legs. Do not go there. Do not bargain with the toads. The galleys sail for the Moon."

Eli tried not to imagine what that meant. "And the mountains?"

"Leng." The cat did not look at it. "The plateau of Leng, and the cold waste beyond it, where the Unknown Kadath stands. I will not point to it. It is a place of old things, and some of them listen when they are named. A monastery stands on the plateau, and the priest who lives in it wears a mask of yellow silk, and I will tell you nothing more, because nothing more should be told. Of all the places in these lands, Leng is the one you must never enter. Not for any reason. Not if someone begs you to. Not if you believe it will save your life."

"Understood."

"I want you to say it."

"I will never go to Leng."

"Good." His whiskers lifted, just slightly. "There are other places to avoid. The underworld below the Wood, where the ghouls keep their warrens, who are not all hostile but are not to be trusted. The caverns of the gugs, great pale giants who eat what they cannot reason with. The night-gaunts, who are faceless, silent, and merciless, who hunt the unwary and drop them into the dark. They are not our enemies, not entirely, but you will want them on your side or out of your sight." He paused. "And the ones that fly out of the east, from the lands that have no names, I will teach you about later. Not tonight."

Eli looked at the world below him, with its towers and its shadows, and felt, for the first time since the funeral, something that was neither grief nor fear. It was awe. It was the feeling of standing at the edge of a map that had been waiting for him since before he was born.

"It's beautiful," he said quietly.

"It is," Mordecai agreed. "That is how it gets you. Come."

Ulthar was smaller up close than it had looked from the ridge, and older. The streets were narrow and cobbled, winding between crooked cottages with low eaves and small windows glowing gold with firelight. Ivy climbed the walls. The air smelled of woodsmoke and baking bread and rain. And everywhere, on every wall and doorstep and windowsill, on every sloping roof and in every patch of lamplight, there were cats.

They were of every color and every size, sleek and tattered and fat and thin, and they watched Eli with the cool, unhurried attention of creatures who owned the town and permitted its people to stay. At the entrance to the first street, a weathered stone post stood with a line of words carved into it in very old letters. Mordecai did not need to translate them. In Ulthar, no man may kill a cat. Eli ed what the cat had said in the kitchen about the killing of a cat, and about what would follow it, and he understood, looking at the quiet faces on the roofs, that the stone post was not a threat. It was a statement of fact.

Word of their coming traveled ahead of them. Eli could feel it in the way the cats turned their heads, in the way they drew back from the lane and then fell in, silent, behind them. By the time they reached the old square at the town's center, a dozen cats were following them, and then fifty, and then more than he could count.

The square was ringed with age-darkened stone steps, and on the steps sat the cats of Ulthar. They sat in rows, tier above tier, hundreds and hundreds of them, in perfect silence, as if some great court were in session. At the top of the steps, beneath a vast black elm, stood an empty seat of stone.

Mordecai stopped at the edge of the square. "Wait here," he said. "Do not speak, and do not move. This is the court of the Cats of Ulthar. They have not had an audience of a mortal in some time, and they will be curious. I must greet them. It is their custom."

"What do I do?"

"Stand very still. Try not to look like a snack."

He walked out into the square, alone, and the court rose to receive him.

Eli saw it happen, and he would it the rest of his life. Mordecai grew as he walked. He did not seem to swell. Rather, it was as if a veil that had always covered him was lifting, and what lay beneath was far larger than the body it had hidden. His shoulders broadened and rose. His legs lengthened, and his head lifted, and his shadow fell long and dark across the cobblestones, and in his fur, which was black as a moonless sky, tiny lights began to burn, like stars. He was the size of a horse, and then larger. His eyes were two great lanterns of amber fire. When he lowered his head to the court, every cat in the square lowered its head with him, row upon row upon row, in a motion as smooth and silent as wind through wheat.

Sovereign, Eli thought, and did not know where the word had come from.

Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. The great shadow shrank. The stars winked out, one by one, in the dark of his coat. Mordecai turned and padded back across the cobblestones, small and sleek and sardonic, a black cat with a torn ear and a white left forepaw, and the court of Ulthar settled slowly back onto its steps, and sat watching.

Eli found that his hands were shaking. "What was that?"

"A courtesy," Mordecai said. "I am, among other things, a sovereign of Ulthar. I hold a seat in that court, as I have for a very long time, and I answer to a name that I will not tell you tonight." He glanced sideways, and there was something almost shy in it. "I was a good deal more, and a good deal less, when your father called me. I will tell you that story, too. In time."

"They bowed to you."

"They bowed to what I am. They will bow to you, perhaps, one day, if you earn it. They will want to see you. They will want to test you. That is also the custom." He turned his head toward the road out of the town. "Not tonight. Come. There is a place on the moor I want you to see, before the dream grows thin."

The moor lay just beyond the town, a long rolling stretch of heather under a sky now heavy with stars, and across it ran a path of pale stones that led to an old, humped bridge over the Skai. The river made a low, restless sound beneath the arch. A cold wind came off the water, bringing with it the smell of rain and something older, something like crushed leaves and iron.

Mordecai stopped dead.

He did not speak. He lowered himself very slightly, as a cat does before it springs, and every hair along his back rose in a black ruff. Eli followed his gaze to the bridge.

Someone was sitting on the parapet.

It was a woman, perhaps in her late twenties, sitting very straight with her hands folded in her lap and her head tilted a little to one side, as though she were listening to the river. She wore a long white tunic over loose tros, belted with a plain cord, and a pale scarf had slipped loosely down around her shoulders. Her hair, black as a raven's wing, was bound in a single long braid that fell over one shoulder to her waist. Silver bangles circled both her wrists and chimed softly when she moved. She was beautiful in a quiet, unhurried, mature way that he felt in his chest, and her eyes, when she turned them in his direction, were dark and remote and for a moment did not seem to focus at all, as if she were looking at something a very long way behind him.

Behind her, on the far side of the bridge, a stag stood in the heather.

It was the most beautiful animal Eli had ever seen. It was tall and slender and silver all over, as if made of moonlight, and its antlers rose in a great branching crown of frost, each tine fine as a spun glass thread. It was grazing, calmly, among the heather, and it lifted its head as they approached and regarded them with eyes like dark water.

"Eli," Mordecai said, so softly that he barely caught it. "Behind me. Now."

Eli stepped back without questioning it.

"A witch," Mordecai said. "Not a dreamer. A witch. And that is her familiar. I know the silver one." His body had gone stiff with something that was not quite fear. "She is a competitor, Eli. One of the twelve."

The woman on the bridge smiled, a small and unhurried smile. "Peace," she said. Her voice was low and warm and faintly accented, and carried easily across the moor. "I did not come to hunt tonight. I came to walk."

"That is exactly what a hunter would say," Mordecai answered, not moving. He did not take his eyes from the stag. "I will say this once, because it is true, and because my charge is new. If either witch dies in the dream, they do not wake. Not ever. And the witches of this contest have been trying to kill one another since midnight on the first of October. You will forgive me if I take no chances."

"I would think less of you if you did." The woman slid down from the parapet with an unhurried grace, and the bangles sang at her wrists. She did not come closer. She stood at the foot of the bridge with her hands open and empty at her sides. "Dvalinn," she said, not turning her head, and the silver stag lowered its great antlers and stood still. "There. He will not move unless I ask. You may watch him as closely as you like, Mordecai of Ulthar. I would do the same."

Mordecai's ears twitched at the name. "You know me."

"I know of you. Everyone who walks these lands knows of you." Her eyes drifted, unfocused, and then returned to Eli, and settled. "And this must be the son of Thomas Calloway. I am sorry about your father. I did not know him well, but I knew his name, and I knew he was respected."

Eli's voice came out hoarse. "Thank you."

"I am Zara Qadir." She inclined her head. It was a small, formal gesture, and she held it a moment, and a murmur in another language ed her lips, brief and soft, a blessing or a greeting. "As-salamu alaykum. Peace be upon you."

He did not know the proper answer. "Hello," he said, and felt foolish, and she only smiled, as though he had given her exactly the right reply.

"You are young," she observed. She looked him over, with open and unhostile curiosity. "Eighteen?"

"I just turned eighteen."

"I am twenty-seven. Nine years." The corner of her mouth moved. "A long way. I do not think you are my enemy tonight, Eli Calloway. I think you are a boy who woke up three days ago and discovered what he was. Am I wrong?"

He thought of the cat on his bed, the book in the study, the burned hand on the sill. "No," he said. "You're not."

Mordecai had not moved. "What do you want, Qadir?"

"To talk." She sat down on the parapet again, composed and unhurried, her braid across her shoulder. "I have been in the Dreamlands every night for a month, scouting the others, learning who has come to walk and who has stayed away. The contest is deadly, Mordecai. You know that better than I do. But I do not enjoy killing, and I have no wish to begin tonight with a boy and his cat." She turned to Eli. "Do you know why you are here?"

"Because my father died," said Eli, "and I'm the heir."

"And what do you hope to win?"

He hesitated. He had not once asked himself that question aloud. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "When Mordecai told me about the wish, at first I thought I would use it to bring him back. But I don't think that's something I should ask for. And I don't think it works that way." He swallowed. "Mostly, I want to find out who killed him."

"That is a good reason," Zara said gravely. "Better than most." Her gaze drifted again, to the river, and he saw that her eyes were not quite on the water. They had gone distant and dim, as if she were seeing two places at once. "Mine is more selfish. I have not slept properly, or woken properly, in a very long time. I am always a little here and a little there. I would like, one day, to be whole in one world." She blinked, and the focus returned. "That is the wish I would make."

"The half-dream," Mordecai said, with something that was nearly sympathy. "I had heard. It comes from the book."

"It comes from the Necronomicon." She said it plainly, without drama. "Yes. I keep a copy. I read it here, where its words cannot follow me when I wake, and it has cost me a great deal of myself."

Eli ed what Mordecai had said in the kitchen on Friday. Abdul Alhazred's volume tends to make its readers insane, and no one has ever found a polite way to read it. He looked at the woman on the bridge, and he thought that she had found an impolite way, and had paid for it, and was still sitting here in the starlight with her hands folded, calm as a stone.

"That book is a blade pointed at the one who holds it," Mordecai said.

"All good books are." She was smiling again, faintly. "My patron does not entirely approve, but he understands. Nodens is not a god, whatever the old stories say. I pray five times each day, to the One, and I will answer for that. Nodens is a hunter. A very old one. He opposes the things that crawl in the dark and the great powers behind them, and when a mortal dreamer asks for his help, he sometimes gives it. His servants are the night-gaunts. You may have heard of them."

"Faceless," Eli said. "Silent."

"Yes. They do not frighten me. They carry me, sometimes, when I am lost." Her gaze rested on him. "I am telling you this so you will understand that I am not your enemy. Not tonight."

Mordecai finally relaxed, a little. His fur began to settle. "It is a gentle sort of patron, for a witch of this contest."

"As gentle as such things go." She rose again, with the chime of bangles, and Dvalinn lifted his head. "Here is what I propose. A truce, for tonight, between the two of us, and perhaps for longer. There are others in this contest I would not care to meet in the dark, in either world. Some of them are very dangerous. Some of them are hunting even now." Her eyes were steady. "I would rather have you at my side than against me. I think you would rather the same."

"A truce for tonight," Mordecai said. "Nothing more."

"Tonight is enough, for now."

Eli looked at the cat, and then at the woman, and he found, to his surprise, that he liked her. She was calm, and plain-spoken, and carried herself like someone who had seen very bad things and had decided to remain kind. He thought of his father, and of Vex at the kitchen table, and of how many people in this city seemed to have decided not to trust anyone.

"I agree," he said. "A truce. And maybe more, later."

"Eli," Mordecai said warningly.

"I said maybe."

Zara's smile widened, just slightly, and for a moment she looked younger. "Then we are agreed." She stepped closer, and for the first time her voice dropped, and the half-dreaming drift went out of her eyes. "One more thing, Eli Calloway. I am friendly, and I will keep my word. Not everyone who comes to this contest is as I am. Be careful whom you trust."

"I will."

"I hope so." She stepped back. Dvalinn crossed the heather at her side, and the great antlers brushed the stars. "Wake gently. People who rush wake wrong. I will find you again."

She walked out onto the moor with the silver stag beside her, her braid swinging, bangles chiming faintly in the wind, and was gone before the sound had faded, as though the dark had simply closed its hand around her.

"I do not like it," Mordecai said, after a long silence.

"She was kind."

"That is what I do not like. Kindness is a good mask, and a witch who can sit on a bridge in the Dreamlands and read the Necronomicon is not a witch to underestimate." The cat's ears turned toward the dark where she had gone. "But I will grant you this. She was honest about the rest." He sighed, a tiny, put-upon sound. "A truce. One night. We will see."

"And the others?"

"I know a few of them, and I will tell you what I can, in time." He turned toward the town and the long road home, and the stars wheeled slowly overhead. "Now we climb. Think of the stair, Eli. Do not look back."

He thought of the stair. It rose from the moor like a pale ribbon, and he put his foot on the first step and began to climb, and the Enchanted Wood fell silent behind him, and the Cavern of Flame glowed in the dark and let him . Seventy steps. Seven hundred. The numbers blurred, and the cat's warm weight settled beside him, and the air thickened and warmed and smelled of a room he knew.

He woke in his own bed, in the gray light before dawn, with Mordecai curled against his ribs and the faded plastic stars pale on the ceiling.

His left palm was burning.

He opened his hand and stared at it. There was nothing to see. No mark, no scar, only the skin of his own palm, blank and unbroken, and a deep, steady heat in the center of it, like a coal that had begun to wake. In the quiet of the house he could hear, very faintly, the sound of the harbor, and the cry of a gull, and the old pipes ticking as the morning came on.

Somewhere in this city, he thought, twelve other people were waking too.

He lay there for a long time, and watched the light come.