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Instead, I vaulted off the bridge onto the lightning-twisted tree limb and clung for a moment to rain-slick bark before searching out the opening in the trunk that would let me bypass the enemy’s front door. I found that opening, slipped inside. It was dry there. Protected. There was light—animal-made light—from insects that crawled here and there on the rough inner walls. I recognized them as tris, candle-bugs, which are common to dark, enclosed places all over Nyshphal. I’d seen them in sewers before, and in wine cellars.

Tris are not like the fireflies of Earth. For one, they are smaller and flightless. For another, their glow is nearly constant. And they typical live in mats of millions. Here there were only a few handfuls, and I was sure that those had come up from the underground, from below.

The soft turquoise light of the tris revealed a ledge—almost a rind of wood—around a hollow core in the tree. I perched on that rind; a rope ladder dangled down the core. I swung out on it and went swiftly down.

The open space in the tree’s center widened toward the bottom and there were more tris there, clawed feet clicking on and over each other as they moved ceaselessly. I let my boots down on a musty, friable soil, saw before me in the earth the stone Ahrethane had spoken of. It was rounded, gray and smooth, and I thought it not stone at all but some kind of metal. There were no obvious handles or grips so I drew my dagger and dug around the outside edge until I could hook my fingers beneath.

I pulled. Pain slashed through my right arm but my grip held.

The stone didn’t budge.

I tried the lift again. Again nothing moved.

I stood, frowning as I studied the closed portal through which I had to pass and could not. And then Ahrethane’s words came back to me. “This lifts. If you have the strength.”

I had assumed she’d meant those words literally. But I was a strong man and clearly my muscles alone did not seem enough. I doubted even Kreeg, the strongest man I knew, could have hefted this stone by himself. I looked around for something to use as a pry bar, but all I had was my sword and it was far too flexible for this task.

Then I heard the words, like a whisper out of the air: “If you have the strength.”

An electric shiver coursed my spine as gooseflesh rose. That sound had been only the brittle shells of the candle-bugs rubbing together, I told myself. I knew I lied.

My gaze turned back to the gray stone. This barrier, I had to pass. There was no other choice. The lives of those I loved depended on it. And if I could not do it with muscles alone, then I’d have to find something more inside. Was that what the softly murmuring voice had meant? That I could find something more?

Again I squatted, hooked my fingers under the stone’s edge. I closed my eyes.

“You have the strength,” I told myself...out loud.

I locked my arms, pushed down hard against the dirt with my legs. Muscles tensed, drew tight over bones. Tendons creaked. My healing leg ached, my right arm throbbed. I pressed harder with my boots, driving them against the soft soil, feeling them sink in half an inch. An inch. The stone grated. Dust puffed up. I grunted with the strain, feeling my spine curve. The stone fought me, and from somewhere inside a growl bubbled to my lips.

“You will move,” I snarled.

Heat flashed through me, along every sinew, within every cell. Then I stood, slowly, every inch a war, and the stone seemed to tear itself out of the ground to reveal its true shape as a long, gray cylinder.

When my legs were fully extended, the base of the cylinder just cleared the lip of the hole in which it had rested. Dropping the heavy thing to one side, I stood with trembling limbs, sweat soaked and breathing like a bellows. Pain was alive in my body, but the way into “Below” was open. That way was not dark but bloomed with the lurid blue-green of massed tris. Even as I watched, a horde of the small insects began to pour through the