The thing behind them followed for two days and never once got closer, and on the second night Elliot worked out why he could feel it.
He'd been lying awake with his back to a rock and the wind coming over the ridge, trying to hold the sensation still long enough to describe it, and somewhere around the middle of the night he got it.
It wasn't on the road.
It was under it. Or beside it, or through it, down in the scree and the frost-cracked rock, moving the way water moves through gravel, and there was more than one of them, and every one of them had the same taste as the marsh-light behind his sternum. Power that had been worked. Power somebody had put runes on.
He sat up.
"Lyssara."
She was already awake. Of course she was.
"I know," she said. "Two hours. It's stopped moving."
"It's not a Calamity."
"I know that too." She was looking at the dark above the camp, where the slope went up into scree and nothing. "It stopped at exactly the range a person stops at. Whatever it is, it's got manners."
It has been travelling under the ground, said Etreuf, in the tone of a man doing sums he doesn't like. Which is a thing I have now heard of exactly once, in a fog, in a graveyard, from a man who let us walk away.
Elliot got up and put more wood on the fire so it threw light, and sat down where the light would be on his face, and waited.
He didn't have to wait long.
The coffins came up out of the scree at first grey, five of them, sliding out of the loose rock without a sound and settling into the air at the edge of the firelight in a loose arc, and there was something almost polite about the arrangement, the way they hung there, not advancing.
Adam came awake shouting. Lyssara was on her feet with a knife before Elliot had turned his head.
And Kael Morvaine walked up out of the dark below the camp, on foot, leading a horse that had been ridden a very long way.
He was thinner than Elliot remembered. The black robes had been mended in three places by somebody who wasn't good at it. The mask was the same, plain, no face cut into it, cracked from left brow to jaw, and behind the eyeholes the grey eyes went over the camp once and found what they were looking for.
"Elliot of Hollowmere," he said.
"Kael."
"You printed your name in a newspaper."
"Yeah."
"In a newspaper," Kael repeated, and there was something almost wounded in it. "I sat in a coffee house at Ostbridge for five weeks going through every sheet that came in from three directions, looking for a rumour, a hedge-word, anything. And then a boy sold his own name to a printer." He shook his head slowly. "Do you know what it cost me to find you? Eleven years and everything I own. And in the end I paid two copper for a page and read it twice."
"Then you know what the Open Hand is."
"I know what it says it is." The grey eyes flicked to the others. "I know it has four founders and one of them is a clerk, which is the only part that gave me any confidence at all."
Lyssara had not lowered the knife.
"Girl," said Kael.
"Don't."
"I had you tied to a post in a barn," he said. "I've no interest in pretending otherwise, and if you want to open me for it I'll not stop you, and I'd rather it were now than in three weeks in a bad place." He didn't move his hands from his sides. "But I'd ask you to hear the boy first, because he's about to say something you don't know, and you should have it before you decide."
Lyssara's eyes went to Elliot.
"What's he talking about?"
Elliot had known this was coming since Serenia. He'd rehearsed it about nine times, in the way you rehearse a thing you're hoping won't be required, and every version had gone better than this one.
"In the cemetery," he said. "When I took the daggers. I made him a promise."
"You made ", Adam's voice cracked upward. "You made the Coffin Master a promise?"
"The thing that killed his parents is the walking mountain. It's the same thing Korran saw." Elliot kept his eyes on Lyssara, because she was the one holding a knife. "He'd been sitting on those blades for eleven years waiting for them to answer him and they never did, and then I walked in off the plain and they went quiet in my hands and I took them. Off his mother's grave." His throat had gone tight. "And I couldn't put them down, and I couldn't give them back, so I gave him the only other thing I had. I told him whatever's in them is his. That when we find the mountain, he gets what they're for."
The fire popped. Nobody said anything.
"That's it," said Elliot. "That's the whole promise."
Lyssara lowered the knife about four inches, which from her was an earthquake.
"You promised a warlord who kept a village under his thumb," she said slowly, "and had me held in a barn, and buries the dead for free so their children owe him, you promised that man a share in the only real power you've got. In exchange for a graveyard you'd already walked out of."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I took something off a man's parents' grave," Elliot said, "and he let us live."
"He'd have killed you if he could!"
"Probably." Elliot looked at the coffins hanging in the firelight. "He couldn't, and then he didn't, and then he asked me the only thing he wants in the world and I said yes." He shrugged, and it came out more helpless than he meant. "I don't know how to explain it better than that. It's not clever. I know it's not clever."
Adam stepped in front of him.
It was the second time in three weeks and he did it exactly as badly as the first, no plan, no weapon, just interposing himself between his friend and something he couldn't possibly have stopped, and something in Elliot's chest hurt at the sight of it.
"He doesn't get anything," Adam said. "Not from you. You don't owe him, Elliot, he tied a girl to a post"
"Adam."
"No! You do this!" Adam turned on him, furious, wet-eyed. "You do this constantly, you walk into the crater, you go into the reeds, you give away the only thing you've got because somebody was sad at you, and every single time it works out worse for you and better for everyone else and you never once notice." He was shaking. "Somebody has to say it. So I'm saying it. You're not being good. You're being easy, and every person we meet from now on is going to work it out in about ten minutes."
The camp was very quiet.
He is right, said Etreuf.
Elliot said nothing at all for a moment.
"I know," he said.
Adam blinked. "You"
"I know he's right." Elliot rubbed his face with both hands. "I've known since Serenia. Korran told the whole town he ruled through fear and I stood there thinking at least fear's a plan." He dropped his hands. "But I'm not going to lie to a man about his mother's grave to be less easy. If that's the price of being clever, I'd rather be worked out in ten minutes."
Lyssara made a small sound. It might have been a laugh.
"You're a disaster," she said.
"Yeah."
"An actual, walking" She put the knife away. Not sheathed neatly; shoved away, like something she was angry at. "Fine. Fine." She turned on Kael. "You. Terms. Now, out loud, in front of all three of us, because he'll agree to anything and I won't."
Kael Morvaine considered her for a long moment.
Then he did something Elliot had not expected: he reached up and took the mask off.
The face underneath was ordinary. That was the shock of it, Elliot had built up, over two hundred miles, some idea of a ruin under there, and instead there was a tired man of about thirty with a broken nose and a sunburnt neck and eleven years of not sleeping around his eyes.
"You'll want to see who you're bargaining with," Kael said. "That's all. I'll put it back on after. It's not for hiding, it's so the men who bury their families in my ground never have to look at the same face twice."
He set it on his knee.
"Terms," he said. "I want three things and none of them is the daggers."
"Go on."
"One. I come with you. Not behind you, with, in the camp, at the fire, and you tell me what you know when you know it." He counted it on his fingers, flatly, a man who had thought about this on a horse for four hundred miles. "Two. When we find it, the mountain, and whatever's walking in front of it, I'm there. Not held back for my own good. Not told about it after. There. Even if it kills me, which it will."
"And three?"
"Three." Kael's grey eyes came up. "If I fall before it's done, the boy finishes it. Not for me. Not out of a promise." His jaw worked. "Because if it goes on walking after I'm dead then eleven years was a hobby, and I'd rather have been a man who buried people."
Nobody spoke.
"What do we get?" said Lyssara.
"Everything I have." Kael reached into his coat and pulled out a bundle, wrapped in waxed cloth, thick as a Bible and tied with cord. "Eleven years of it. Every sighting, every rumour, every road it's crossed and every road it hasn't. The dates. Ten of them are wrong and I've marked which. I've got four maps of the Kelmark passes and three of them disagree, and I know why they disagree, which is worth more than the maps." He set the bundle down by the fire. "Nobody else in the world has this. Not Zyrion. Not the guilds. I paid for it in coin and men and the only years I had."
Elliot looked at the bundle.
"You'd give us that before we agreed?"
"I've just given it to you," said Kael. "It's on the ground. You could put a boot on it and tell me to walk." He put the mask back on. "But you won't. Which is what your friend was shouting about, and he's right, and you'll get killed for it eventually, and it's the only reason I'm sat at this fire instead of hunting you."
Well, said Etreuf, after a moment. That is the single most dangerous compliment I have ever heard a man pay another man, and I do not believe he knows he paid it.
They took him. Of course they took him.
Lyssara insisted on conditions of her own, and got every one: he camped ten feet out, he handed over the coffins' rune-work for her to look at (she couldn't read it; she looked at it anyway, for an hour, and Kael let her), and he did not walk behind her on a slope, ever, for any reason. He agreed to all of it without argument, which Elliot noticed and Lyssara noticed and neither mentioned.
The bundle turned out to be the single most valuable thing anyone had given them since Serenia.
They went through it that night by firelight, all four heads together, and Elliot understood within twenty minutes that Kael Morvaine had spent eleven years becoming an expert in something nobody else on earth was studying.
"Look at the dates." Kael had the pages spread on a flat rock, weighted with stones. "Here's the year eleven, the Sarrow bend, eleven miles, Dell and Little Hask and the mill road. Everyone knows that one." His finger moved. "Here's a herd gone in the Ashe country nine years back with the ground beaten flat in a circle, which nobody connected to anything. Here's a quarry road in the desert seven years back where four men died and the county wrote it up as a rockfall. Here's a well that came up salt in a village called Hesk's Bottom six years ago, which sounds like nothing, except the water only ever goes salt out there when the ground's moved."
"You've got fourteen years of it," said Adam, staring.
"Nineteen. The first four are hearsay." Kael sat back on his heels. "And here's the thing I'd never have got without the newspaper, and it's why I nearly fell off my horse in that coffee house."
He put one finger on the sheet-man's column, the paragraph Doryn Vask had printed because he hadn't understood it.
"A man was walking in front of it," Kael said.
He looked up.
"Nineteen years of records," he said, "and in every single sighting I have, the thing is described alone. A mountain, a walker, a hill that moved. Alone. Nineteen years." His voice had gone strange. "And a drunk plainsman tells a sheet-man there was a man in front of it, and the sheet-man prints it as a curiosity, and it's the first time in nineteen years that anybody has put a person in the story."
"So?" said Adam.
"So it isn't a beast," said Lyssara quietly. She'd got there first, the way she did. "That's what he's saying. Nineteen years of it being weather, and it turns out somebody's been driving."
"Nineteen years," Kael agreed. "And nobody looked for a driver, because you don't look for a rider on a landslide." He began, carefully, to gather the pages back into order. "I've been hunting an animal since I was eight years old. Two copper for a page told me I've been hunting a man."
The fire had burned down. Up beyond the camp the Kelmark range stood black against a sky going white in the east, and somewhere in it, eleven villages were waking up.
Boy, Etreuf said.
Yeah.
I want to point out something, and I want to do it before anyone says anything hopeful. The demon's voice was level. Nine strangers went north in seven weeks, past a woman who has counted everything for twenty-two years, and none came back down. Something set a foot down twice in one night hard enough to be felt through four hundred feet of stone. And there is a man up there who has spent nineteen years walking a mountain about and has never once been noticed by anybody. A pause. We are not sneaking up on him. Whatever we are doing, it is not that.