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into the soil bared by the dying grass.
    Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge. He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods …
    But Rudy’s instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn’t know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped his hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer’s works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol—sulfuric acid—and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.
    “Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold—the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra—might holdsome clue about the slunch?” Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.
    “It might.” Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. “Ingold and Gil haven’t found zip about slunch in any archive they’ve searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley’s going to look up at me and say, ‘Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it—shriveled it right up.’ And that’ll be that.”
    Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, “But we better not count on it.”
    The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass: Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees: a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.
    Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough.
    Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives—and we all starve to death
.
    It figures
.
    “The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North.” TheIcefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. “Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch.”
    Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards’ watchroom. Most of the Guards’ allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors—Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres—through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars. Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys’ wickedly