We left the next day, a little before dawn. In the early morning darkness, I was freed from the bonds that bound my hands, and the man with the bone studded ears handed me the red cloak murmuring. I quickly put it on, massaging my numb wrists. But the rope around my neck remained where it was. The other end was untied from the flare by the scarred man, who had been appointed to keep me on a leash. We ate, the same meat as the day before, with mashed peas heated over the fire, and the ram-faced man allowed me to feed myself. I emptied my bowl with my fingertips under the watchful eyes of the others, then I was told that I had to get up, and we left the shelter in single file. The wick finished burning in the flare. There was only a small amount of oil left in the cup. The smell that came from the combustion was pungent and unpleasant. Despite the bitter cold, I was glad when the door closed behind us.

To come, the Ceras had taken the path that I had spotted earlier, and they took it again when we had left the tunnel. The road was framed by two distinct blacknesses: the opaque ridge of the massif that dominated the landscape on the left, and the frozen abyss that stretched to the right. Fortunately, there was plenty of room between the two, and the gentle slope was pleasant to walk on, even in the dark. Our footsteps crunched in packed snow as high as my boots, but the men leading me knew the way. No one used a pole or other instrument to probe the powder. The group walked in a fan pattern with me in the middle. The Cera with the javelins, who seemed to be some kind of scout or guide, would walk ahead until his silhouette faded intermittently into the night. He was small and stocky, but his eye seemed to me as keen as his movements, and he was sure-footed as a chamois. The others moved nonchalantly. They didn't expect to encounter any danger on the road, and I think the scout had taken this position out of habit.

The scarred man left me several spans of slack, which was fortunate because we both stumbled at times. When he pulled on the rope to guide me, he did so without brutality, in calm, calculated impulses. So far, despite the way they sometimes ignored me, the iron of their weapons, and the capture itself, I felt that the Cera warriors had treated me with surprising civility. Having been a beggar, several times a prisoner on the primacies' land, then a war trophy and a slave among the Carmians, I had long considered myself a regular subject of petty tyranny, and I had expected to be bullied, at least a little. From the beginning, however, they had not done anything abusive to me. I didn't know if that was a good sign in the long run, since their restraint had been the same when I had almost lost my mind, but it didn't change the fact that they could have mistreated me with ease, and I was grateful that they hadn't done so.

We walked along the ridge for about an hour, then the slope climbed back up toward a narrow gorge lined with sharp, shiny rocks. Above, the stars had disappeared, the sky was just beginning to turn a dark blue. The scarred man stopped at the behest of the man with the ram's face, and I stopped too. The one who had searched me - who seemed to me to be the youngest of the group and whom the others treated as such - had inherited my pouch and the rest of my belongings, which he had complained a lot about when we left. He was walking behind me and almost knocked me over when he accidentally bumped into me. He cursed and stepped aside, which made the scarred man snicker, and then the leader turned back and spoke in a somewhat loud voice. At first I thought he was lecturing the youngster for his inattention, but then I suddenly realized that he was talking to me. I shook my head, because I didn't understand, but he grabbed me firmly by the arm, and forced me to turn around.

At first I was worried. I kept my eyes on the long shaft of the war scythe that he carried slung over his furs, and then, as he always spoke in a low and calm tone, my attention was finally captured by his gestures and I finally looked up at the massive contours of the glacial cirque that we were leaving behind, and the high peak from which we had come. There, nestled in the heights of the mountain, a glint of light shone. I was puzzled for a few moments before I realized that it was the shelter's canopy, set among the snowflakes and frosted rock. I nodded, thinking that he only wanted to show me how I had signaled my presence to them, but the leader reached out again and pushed me, so that I looked at the panorama once more.

The faintly shimmering wall of the peak now stood out against the sky, in the same way that a painter's stroke would have stood on a canvas. I took a sudden breath. A face, a huge face appeared in the interlacing of the peaks. The oval canopy turned into a flaming eye, while the peak itself and the shattered contours of the stone merged in the backlight of the halo. A titanic profile emerged, its appearance both severe and majestic. But just as the light of the rising sun was still uncertain, the features of the figure remained blurred and shifting. It was finally impossible to establish a precise face, for there were rather a thousand faces that came and went according to the torment of the shadows.

At my side, the man with the ram's face was also absorbed in the silent contemplation of this marvel which shimmered on the peak. The scarred man joined us, blowing on his fingers, looking straight ahead. I didn't need to turn around to know that all faces were pointed in the direction of the canopy's colourful eye. Suddenly I was overcome by a curious sensation, a vibrant fullness such as I had not experienced in a long time. Even though I didn't know what the Ceras intended to do with me, in their company it was easy for me to realize how much I had missed the human presence. To contemplate this incredible and mysterious monument, to be able, above all, to share a moment of beauty and poetry with other men, resounded in me like an old melody, which I had forgotten how necessary it was. Even if I didn't fully understand what I was seeing, even if I didn't speak their language either, there was a form of communion that suited me.

We stayed for a while, until the sky lit up for good and the illusion faded with the onset of daylight, and then the leader grunted a few words and the others hoisted their packs. I stretched my finger back as the scarred man stomped around, fidgeting with his boots. "Cercché?" I asked, pointing to the peak and the man nodded. "Eti fanari hune vaés cercchesé," he added, before turning his back on me. The rope tightened. I followed his lead and we skated down the slope toward the gorge. I was ruminating on perplexing thoughts. If the Ceras had indeed built this place, as the scarred man seemed to indicate, then I figured it must have had great significance for them. Perhaps it was even one of their sacred sites. I thought of the carved ice works, the garden of the great cold monoliths, and gradually I began to wonder if I had unknowingly desecrated a place of worship or a hidden shrine. Perhaps this was even the reason for the summary execution I had escaped. Worry throbbed in the background, and came to wrap its barren rings around the place that wonder had occupied shortly before. For the first time, I wondered where the Ceras were leading me.

The rocky passage that followed was challenging in every respect, a narrow gully that led to the heights for nearly a mile, surrounded on all sides by hostile-shaped ridges. The gradient was ferocious in places and our progress was slow. Moreover, the path was so enclosed that the journey was mostly made in darkness and cold, and when the light of the zenith finally came to warm us, the sun didn't linger for more than two hours. In the middle of the afternoon, we reached the top of the gorge and a halt was necessary. In front of us, below us, incredible landscapes, peaks devoured by whiteness and sometimes even snowy pine forests. Wide open and bright spaces, frozen bulges with a practicable aspect were waiting for us. Weary from the climb, I took a long breath. The Ceras did the same. I didn't envy them. Even though they were probably used to moving around in the mountains, and most of them had the shaft of a spear to help them, they also had to bear the weight of weapons, shields and bundles.

Exhausted, I sat down in the powder a little way back, and some of the Ceras followed me. After relieving himself of his belongings, the man with the studs and the bronze sword, who had slung my crossbow over his shoulder along the way, distributed dry rations to each of us. The scarred man entrusted my rope to the stocky scout, wandered a little further to urinate, then returned to converse with the ram-man who was finishing his meal, leaning on a rocky concretion flattened by the weather. An occasional breeze came from the abyss and scratched the ridge, ruffling my cloak and the furs worn by the Ceras. I ate in silence, curled up on the slope to protect myself from the cold.

A few spans below, the young man knocked over his wineskin and swore loudly. My pouch added to his layers and he fidgeted for a while before throwing it off in a huff. The bag bounced against the wall of the gorge a little further on, opened up, and a handful of my patties fell into the powder. The sixth man, a tall, lean, grizzled man who had carried the light into the tunnel, unfolded his legs to pick one up where it had fallen. He sniffed the patty without much curiosity before attacking it with a blackened set of teeth, chewing with difficulty and pouting. He finally spit it out, under the scout's jeers. My cooking wasn't to his taste. The young man took the opportunity to complain again in a loud and indignant voice, gesturing at me and then at the pouch. His beard gave him the appearance of an adult, but looking at him in the light of day, he was no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. I stepped in and reached for the pouch. "I can take care of it if you want," I said to the two men. Behind me, the scout tightened the rope without violence, while the other two stared at me coldly. I mimed the act of carrying the bag before pointing at myself, then the scarred man stepped forward and grabbed the pouch, shoving it into the young man's arms. A vigorous lecture followed. I lowered my head so as not to arouse anyone's anger or resentment.

When we set out again, we had to go down first, a big, slippery hill that glinted in the sun, into which we had to dig our heels deeply so as not to go down it in one dizzying slide. The scout turned quickly to the right, and turned into an arc that went around the massif we had come through. To my astonishment, we followed him. The open ground in front of us, that welcoming expanse of snowy dunes, was abandoned in favor of a new slope, rocky and frozen. We were soon walking in the shadow of the cracked peak we had climbed earlier, and moving toward the nearby mountain. On the side of one of the more distant peaks, the thick cloud of an avalanche appeared, before rushing with a roar towards an invisible valley. The roar echoed wildly between the peaks, and the Ceras whispered among themselves long after the reverberation had ceased. I began to worry again. There were only a few hours of light left. On the glacier, it wouldn't be long before I started digging.

The tangle of rocks and frost now stretched far upward, water and rock welded in a chaotic embrace while ahead, the carved silhouette of a great peak drew inexorably closer. The polished cliffs and rocky gray mountains peaked out here and there, their hue darker than it really was because of the contrast with the snow. Suddenly, the escarpment around which we were walking disappeared to make way for the sky. We had reached the trench that separated the two peaks. The wind whistled sometimes, sometimes meowing, sometimes snorting, both mournful and wild. We moved forward again, bent by the gusts, and changed course once more. The beards of the Ceras whitened. The slope ended up softening. A breathtaking abyss appeared on the left, several miles wide, and we followed this titanic chasm in the direction of the north. I kept expecting the snow to disappear and give way to the void, yet the guide's silhouette swayed ahead, an unreal but tangible landmark in the monochrome landscape, which at times lost all perspective. After walking for a while on the edge of the ravine, we finally reached an outgrowth, a junction point, a narrow tongue of stone that connected the two massifs.

The scarred man briefly drew my attention to a bright, tiny spot. In the distance, the canopy sparkled in the afternoon sun. The distant peaks of the glacial cirque cast torn shadows of a length I dared not measure. We set out to cross the ravine. From the snow, carved angles sometimes appeared and I understood that it was a bridge, or at least that the hidden rock had been carved in the shape of a road. Overshadowed by the impossible volume of the mountains, the structure seemed ridiculously narrow, whereas, in good conditions, three men could have walked abreast. I dared to glance over the edge, but couldn't make out anything but a blurred, distant pallor. The ravenous gusts were screaming in my ears. We proceeded cautiously to the other side, where spurs of sharp rock protected us from the wind for a while.

A new ascent followed, a narrow path cut into the side of the cliff, from which it seemed easy to fall if one walked too close to the void. The sun was beginning to decline and the cold was oozing from the mountain like venom. At a sharp turn, the scarred man stumbled and I rushed to grab him by his furs. I don't know if the man would have fallen or not without my assistance, but he grumbled a few brief words to me that had the tone of thanks. The darkness increased by the moment. We passed in a sinuous path, then the trail widened and sank under a series of monumental arches of polished stone. Under their shelter, we stopped for a moment because the scout wanted to light a torch before continuing. The curve of the arches was fading into the darkness, devoured by long stalactites of ice. I ran a numb finger over ancient carvings, shivering under my felt cloak. I wasn't as well equipped as the Ceras for the mountains.

The scout was still struggling with his scraper when the studded man, who had noticed my shivering, approached and handed me a small flask. He mimed the act of drinking. I took the flask to my mouth without question. A burning alcohol with an aggressive taste of licorice and mugwort poured down my throat. I had never drunk anything so strong, and from my throat to my guts I felt as if my body had just caught fire. I coughed, bent over and nearly suffocated. The scarred man gave me two big slaps on the back, before claiming the liquor for himself. I passed him the flask, but the man with the bone studs wasn't done, and he patted my chest to get my attention. "Urixx," he said, pointing to himself. I nodded, spitting into the snow, my face burning. "Fyss", I finally croaked, pointing at myself. He pointed at me in the gloom. "Fis," he repeated awkwardly. I nodded, then the ram-faced Cera talked to the one called Urixx, a short and dry statement that sounded like a reproach. The man with the bone studded ears shrugged his shoulders and turned away from me.

The flame finally appeared despite the wind and cold, and two more men carried their torches to set them ablaze. I thought we were going to continue on the wide, snowy road, but a few dozen spans further on, between two black arches, the front of the group vanished into a new, slippery maze that I wouldn't have guessed existed had I been walking alone. Since the beginning, the paths of the Ceras had been like this: the obvious route was never the right one, and the practicable passages were counter-intuitive. I had no doubt that this was not by chance. I had heard that the Ceras had inhabited these mountains long before the Sarpian settlers set foot on the Peninsula, that their ways were ancient and their manner cunning. I exhaled, my fingers buried as far as possible under my clothes, harassed by the falling temperature as much as by fatigue.

The leading torch suddenly vanished at the turn of a wall. The scarred man guided me to the narrow mouth of a cave. We descended carefully down a steep slope in which holds had been carved, where the frost blossomed in unusual buboes, even after the shaft had flattened out and then widened a little further. The others waited in this strange hall, sniffing and stamping. The rope around my neck tightened. At the far end of the cavern, a passage snaked downward until it disappeared into the darkness, and healthy gusts of warmer air rose from the depths. The scout stepped in when we were all gathered. We followed, and were swallowed up in the bowels of the Wall.