We reached the fortress by a sinuous succession of posterns and steep paths, a worn road, embedded in the rock. The night fell quickly on the massif, each fortified barricade was illuminated of a unique flare which crackled under the moon. Between the cold and crumbling arches, the shadows were twisted on stones hardly less opaque, and lower, in the twin valleys, a mist with an unearthly thickness took shape, beading from the wet ground, pale and downy. The peak soon turned into a black island shrouded by limbo. Miles away, but on all sides, the white peaks of the mountains surrounded us like a sharp palisade. We climbed, our boots firm on the weathered shale, circling the dark rock prominence one and a half times.

On the road, lurking in the cracks of the rocks, appeared roofs of cut lauze, small and grey and perfectly invisible from the valley. Wrapped around the mountain, there was a village, a whole village, which was unveiling itself little by little like a twisted spiral in the gloom. A strange atmosphere reigned, a feverish silence that I didn't quite understand. One could hear the bleating of the cattle and sometimes the clash of an axe or a hammer, but the rumor of human life seemed to have been sucked out of the houses. No cries, no music, no crying infants. No drunks. No arguments or laughter. I felt as if I were walking in the wake of death. From time to time we passed bearded Ceras with their long skirts of braided leather, and also wrapped up women and children, who watched us from the darkness, pale and motionless. Words were exchanged with those who occupied the fortifications, and then the passage revealed other low and ungrateful hovels and new inhabitants with pale eyes whose reserve, and silent restraint disturbed me deeply.

Eventually we reached the walls of the fort, thick, rustic masonry, some of which had been replaced by dry stone chips. We passed under a guardhouse covered with slates and thatch before emerging on the other side into a dark courtyard. Having seen a number of strongholds in my lifetime, the design of this one intrigued me greatly, and then I remembered where I was, on the side of an escarpment several hundred spans above the valley. The Ceras who lived here had nothing to fear from a siege engine, and besides, the idea that an army could cross the surrounding mountains seemed unrealistic to me. There was a small turret at the back, but it wasn't really of any defensive interest, and I thought it was mainly used as a lookout. What I took at first for the main body was a sort of big elevated pillbox, but then I saw the openings made in the rocky sides of the massif itself, and the wide flight of steps leading up to it, framed by dark colonnades and faded statues. The real stronghold was embedded in the mountain.

When we arrived, there was little light but the moon and the constellated sky. Our footsteps and sniffs and even our whispers set off a deafening din, amplified by the night and the shape of the enclosure. While the other Ceras with whom I had traveled quickly slipped away, carrying equipment, spears and shields, Forcas the scarred and Urixx the studded remained with me in the courtyard. They exchanged short, guttural phrases with the pair of warriors who were watching the entrance. I could make out the shine of tarnished armor under the furs of these two watchmen, who wore heavy conical helmets whose solid iron visors showed only their eyes. I tried to get more information from Forcas, but he grunted and pointed to the cobblestone floor with a firm hand. We had to wait. The cold had eased in the last few days, but that didn't stop me from stomping and rubbing my hands in the dark. After a while, Urixx started to do the same, mumbling to himself until the scarred man ordered him to be quiet.

Finally, just as I had resolved to make my bed in a damp corner of the courtyard, we heard a loud squeal. A large reinforced wooden door opened above, at the end of the black staircase. Forcas and Urixx stood up from the shadows. Three men appeared on the threshold. The first was Dorl, who carried a crackling torch in his hand and had left his traveling skins for a colorful gambeson. Behind him came a warrior completely covered in shiny mails and armed with a large scythe, followed by an older but powerfully built individual with greying temples and beard. This one was dressed in a well-made ring armor and a golden torc was wrapped around his neck. The embroidered shawl he wore over the armor was fastened with a fibula of the same material, hammered in the shape of a lightning. It was to the latter that Dorl spoke as they walked down the steps. The man with the shawl, who seemed in good shape for his age, glanced at me from time to time, his eyes diaphanous in the glow of the torch.

They stopped high up a few spans from the courtyard. Dorl raised his voice. Forcas and Urixx flanked me and we advanced to the light that shone around the first steps. There, my guides bowed their heads to the man with the gray hair. I hastened to imitate them. The one to whom our courtesies were directed didn't react to my reverence any more than to that of the two Ceras. From his overhanging position, he studied me for a long time, as one studies a wild animal in a cage. His eyelids were half-closed, but underneath sat the keen and somewhat haughty gaze of those who are used to command. The man asked Dorl a question without taking his eyes off me. The latter shook his head. "Do you speak the language of the Brownians?" he asked me in very good brownian. I nodded, not really daring to answer. Another question came in the same imperious tone. "Are you Brownian, then?" I coughed and stared at the ground, in as respectful an attitude as I could muster, because I was well aware that with this question my fate was at stake. "No," I said softly. "I have the blood of a Fyss from the Stone Forest." My interlocutor raised his eyebrow. "I don't know the Fysses. My son tells me that your weapons are carmian." With his left hand he pointed to Dorl.

I took a deep breath and stepped forward. My foot landed on the first step, but I didn't try to go any further, because I didn't think they would let me and I didn't want to lose face. At the same time, my mind was racing with details that I didn't want to give away. I raised my face to the man and placed my index finger under the triangle. "I was a slave of the Carmians," I explained. "I escaped from a mine near Ifos, carrying the weapons of one of the supervisors. I crossed the mountain and landed here". The man wrinkled his forehead and said a few words to Dorl, who nodded, while Urixx whispered behind my back.

The attention of the Cera lord - for he was a nobleman, I had no doubt - turned back to me and I thought the discussion was about to resume, and then suddenly the large door above us flew open again. A young woman stepped out, dressed in a long fur cloak. A wrinkled grandmother followed in her footsteps and I could hear her grumbling from where I stood. The men standing on the stairs turned around. The young lady walked straight towards them without missing a step, all the while speaking in a lively, authoritative voice. Her eyes swept over the courtyard as she delivered her tirades and her insistent gaze pinned me repeatedly. She had a very white face, long braided auburn hair and features that were both hard and mutinous. Her lips were pinched and thin, and her cheeks were sprinkled with freckles. Her tone sometimes trembled like that of a child struggling to contain his anger.

She called out to Dorl and the lord, and the three of them quibbled for a while on the stairs, gesturing and hissing impatiently. When the voices finally calmed down (I had the impression that the older man had conceded some ground), the lady turned on her heels and went back to where she had come from, her bearing excessively imperious. Urixx laughed a little nervously as she slipped away on the doorstep. The lord silenced him with a single gesture. His irritation seemed obvious, but there was something else too, a kind of slightly surly satisfaction that gleamed in his eyes. "We'll talk again tomorrow," he told me bluntly. "I have to talk to my son." I nodded wordlessly, because there was nothing else to do.

Urixx and Forcas escorted me to the pillbox, whose dreary and half-abandoned premises seemed to serve mainly as a garrison. We passed through the main body, which was deserted, except for a few men gathered around a chimney in the large room. I was led through a maze of narrow corridors to an equally narrow room, isolated from the wing of the building that still seemed occupied. It wasn't quite a cell, but it looked enough like one to displease me immediately: a musty, dusty mat lay in one corner, and a rickety shelf was affixed in the other. I set up my belongings under the watchful eye of Forcas, then Urixx returned with a stock of candles, a pot of hot soup and slices of dry bread. I ate in silence while the two Ceras mumbled to each other at the entrance.

Another man at arms finally arrived, obviously to replace Forcas, since the latter took the opportunity to disappear. With an attentive eye, braiding his beard and quietly nodding to Urixx's incessant murmurings, the newcomer watched me eat my soup. Compared to the other Ceras I had met until then, Urixx seemed to be a real chatterbox, and I liked him, not only because he seemed to be well-intentioned towards me. He often made the others laugh and also, he didn't seem to be much older than me. It seemed to me that, despite his sharp tongue, his companions enjoyed his good humor, and respected him for it. I reluctantly waved to him as he retrieved the still-steaming pot and let me know that he was going to close the bedroom door for the night.

There was no sound of a bar, no scraping of metal or rattling of a lock, and yet, finding myself like this, in the cold depths of the foreign fortress, I had the same feeling as years before, when the gate of the gaols in Brown-Horn had squeaked behind me. Unable to pace in the darkness - as my body craved despite the fatigue - I stirred until I found a comfortable position on the mat, took a deep breath and tried to assess my situation. My conclusion was clear: I was walking on eggshells.

I knew the tragic history of the Ceras, as did everyone my age who had grown up in Brown country, but little more than that. I knew that they had been defeated by the armies of king Ab, that their lands had been conquered and that the survivors of the massacres had been scattered in the mountains. That some had thought them extinct, until the revival of skirmishes and banditry in the foothills of the carmian Wall. I could only imagine the hatred they must have felt for the Brownians, whose language I spoke and among whom I had grown up, but they didn't seem to like the Carmians any better, whose clothes and weapons I wore. I had broken into one of their shelters where I had stolen food and equipment and in the process may have desecrated one of their sacred places. I was now in this hidden village, locked up and unarmed, entirely at the mercy of people I knew almost nothing about except that they had far too much to blame me for. There was one man to whom I could talk and be accountable, but it would not be as equals, and I was going to have to adjust some parts of my story to protect myself. Any mention of the markian plague could result in summary execution by fire, if I were suspected of being contagious. Similarly, it was hard to see how I could tell them about my childhood: after all, I had been a mercenary in the pay of a brownian primate.

Puzzled, I sneezed in the dark and the foreign scent of mold. I tried to get some sleep, knowing that the next day I would need a sharp, rested mind. As I closed my eyes, no matter how much I turned the situation over, I wasn't really thinking of running away anymore, and not just because things had just gotten a lot more complicated. The truth is that I was tired of running, tired of living among enemies. I needed a place to rest, to regain my strength and confidence before venturing further, and this seemed as good a place as any. I kept wondering what fate the Ceras would have in store for me, but if they let me do as I pleased, I hoped I could negotiate for lodging and a little food. If insomnia could be a measure of my innocence, I hoped that the next day the Ceras would notice my dark circles and yawning.

I remember very well the dream I had that night. My dreams were sewn with perplexity and strangeness, and a great black and roaring bear came spinning into the confined space of the room. The room turned into the tower of the master surgeon Narsilap, in which I had spent so many moons studying Rajja's medicine. The beast sniffed the air in my wake, always about to flush me out but never quite succeeding, knocking over furniture and staining books and scrolls with great spurts of black urine. Finally someone knocked on the tower's trap door. I wanted to slip through to warn the people in the castle not to go inside, because of the man-eating bear. I muttered my warnings, but the trap door opened anyway. The bear sat down quietly on its huge rump. It was Brindy who stood at the entrance, with the long, braided hair of her childhood, but a large female body, and a buckskin clan dress. She smiled at me, and I opened my eyes because there was a commotion in the corridor and I understood that the night was over.

Still dazed by fatigue, Urixx - who looked as well rested as me - and Forcas escorted me to the basic refectory that I had seen the day before. From the loopholes, which struggled to illuminate the room, the light filtered through in straight, white lines. Steaming gruel waited for us on a long table, stained by wax and wine. Some cera warriors were eating there too, others were loitering by the clogged fireplace, or elsewhere, in the corners, in the smoke and the heavy gloom. Heavy glances accompanied our arrival. Rumors about me must have circulated during the night. Halfway through our meal, a young Cera with dark hair and a fierce expression came and sat down quietly on the opposite bench. The discussions in the room had gradually died down, and now all eyes were on us, curious about what was to come.

I didn't look up. I knew what was going on because I had seen it a hundred times before. The bravado and warrior arrogance that cemented the positions in fierce little groups like this. Maybe I would have strutted the same way, if I had been surrounded by companions to impress, if I had steel at my belt and another man at my mercy. Since this wasn't the case, even if it meant looking like a coward, I simply swallowed the gruel, one spoonful at a time. I didn't flinch, I didn't look up, not even when I saw the metallic glint in the corner of my eye and when, bare blade forward, the Cera put his war scythe on the table that separated us. He said a few words to me in a clearly challenging tone. Urixx dropped his spoon and replied in a calm voice. The man spilled my bowl with a sharp gesture. Urixx stood up abruptly and spat on the scythe. I saw the man shrink, shuddering with rage, then our bench cracked and Forcas stood up too. He made the table tremble with a violent blow, delivered with the flat of his hand. The young warrior hesitated, changed his mind, then slipped away into the shadows. I swallowed discreetly. Less than an hour later, I was standing in front of the cera lord, without really understanding why I was still alive.