The landing lay hundreds of miles south of seaway's end. Its shoddy old pier half sunk in the bright turquoise surf and its new one of rough planks tied to joists made from the long and mostly straight trunks of gray-barked rubber trees that bled white sap like cream from their cuts. It rolled up and down in the gentle swells on hollowed coconut shells that were almost black where the waves broke over them. At the head of the old pier stood a collection of small thatch-roofed huts that looked like they'd fallen over every night for a century only to be put back together every morning. Fibers peeled off of their walls and roofs. Their window frames held neither glass nor screens against the prodigious number of flying insects zigging and zagging at the edge of their tiny clearing. At the head of the new pier a wall of green vegetation as wide as the horizon and taller than the tops of the ship rose from the glittering yellow sand into the flat blue sky. An impenetrable canopy of reaching branches and broad leaves and hanging vines and red birds and purple and orange and white and yellow flowers, some of which turned out to also be birds, and brown and black primates sitting in troops between them. A cacophony of rising whoops and piercing calls and a garish vibrancy that delighted her eyes, all overhanging and overflowing itself onto the clearing where the rude huts waited. It looked like they'd been waiting a long time.

Khaz climbed out the hatch and walked across the deck and stood beside her at the gangplank.

"Where we at?" he said.

"One of the men called it the sea of suns. The armiger just went ashore."

"What for?"

"I aim te find out."

"Ye want me te come?"

"I want ye te stay and keep an eye on this lot. Don't let em leave without me."

"Fine."

"I don't see any right stones ashore anyway."

"Well if ye meet any be sure te tell em Khaz o Naz says hello."

"I'll do that."

She edged down the gangplank then walked up the pier. It kept rising to meet her and falling away. She watched its planks to keep from tripping over her own feet.

"Oy," he called.

She turned and saw him pointing away north.

"Ye can see the massif!"

She looked where he pointed but saw only treetops.

Ashore she put her nose into the largest of the huts. Its floorboards had gone to rot and its inside smelled like it. Some barrels in a corner. Some sacks bigger around than Khaz stuffed with moldy flour. An old oil lamp. The sounds of the jungle pressing in.

As she turned to the next hut she bumped into an elderly woman who'd appeared near the head of the old pier. She was so wizened and bent that she wasn't much taller than Mym.

"Oy, sorry."

"That you Sass?" said the woman.

Mym looked up at her. Glazed over eyes and wrinkles and brown spots on fair skin from the sun and the reflection of the sun on the sea. White head covered in a faded and fraying bandana. Shirt and long skirt of old sailcloth cut and sewn back together and their patches from the cloths of other sails so that she wore the mode that propelled her kind's conquest of the world. Her ropey and calloused hands clutched the handle of a bucket of darting silver smallfish and a pair of simple bamboo fishing rods.

"No maam. I'm Mym."

"You're off the ship come in."

"Aye maam, that I am."

The woman peered at her then peered out along the old pier and the new one. She squinted against the heat of the sun but she couldn't see the light of it. "You see my Henry out there?"

"No maam."

"One of these days he'll slow down for me."

"Aye maam. I best be gettin on."

"We'll be married seventy years this solstice."

"Oy, that's a long time."

"It is. Never feels like it in the ways that matter. Never quite feels long enough. How old are you young lady?"

"I'll be forty by yer countin."

"You married?"

"No maam."

"It's never too late. We came down here on a ship like the one standing there. We was fifteen. Him from a family better than mine, but they'd never have me. Spent two weeks just getting here. The captain married us and off they went. Never seen my mama or sisters since. Ain't used a toilet since. Ain't had a bite of proper meat neither since you dwarves shut the passes. Just the salt stuff the ships bring in, and the fish of course. They fry up nice in whale lard. Don't get much of that either nowadays."

"Aye. I best be gettin on."

"We were too young to be married. But seventy years is plenty of time to grown up. I thank god every day for him. Never known what I done to deserve him."

Mym looked down the sandy coast and back down the piers. "You need help findin him?"

"I'll manage dear. You get on after whatever you're chasing."

"Yes maam."

"Don't blink or you'll lose a decade."

Mym nodded politely though the woman never saw. She walked to the other huts and put her head in. They were empty, but a dirt path ran between them into the jungle's interior. Fifty paces on she passed a very old man heading down to the beach with a spool of lines over his forearms and a heavy hemp net over his shoulders. He nodded at her and she felt the embarrassment of knowing a stranger she'd never met.

The trail opened to a wide clearing around a long wooden hall. Gray smoke rose in a thin column out of its crown. An unfinished mural of jungle and ocean things was carved into its wall: barebacked humans working amid curling banana trees and birds of paradise and a panther sleeping on a limb and a long adder slithering from the jungle into the sea with salmon swimming up its back and flying fish soaring above. A [woodcarver] holding a hammer and a chisel knelt and surveyed a blank space. The [armiger] stood behind her.

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"Oy," she said.

The [armiger] turned around. "Good morning."

"How's yer king's business comin?"

"Always there is more to do than there are reliable men to do it."

The [woodcarver] raised her chisel and tapped her hammer against its strike plate. Mym watched her technique.

"Ye expect we'll be leavin soon?"

The [armiger] nodded. "We hope to. You are in a hurry."

"Aye."

"Then Waz is no better?"

She looked at him. "Ye know Waz?"

"No, we have never met. But we know of him. Last father to the last daughter. Brother of Barzun who departed, who we do know. Or did before the Madlands took him."

"Ye know more than I expected."

"One must maintain the highest expectations. We know of all the dwarves yet living under the mountain, and a fair amount about those who do not. Always we have admired your achievements. In warfare, in construction, in metallurgy, in memory. Your monuments around the world are unparalleled. Such admiration led to a special interest in your welfare. So we know of Waz and of the Old Serac and Thayne. Of Khaz. And of Mym."

"That's more about the delvin than that what leaves it. How do ye come te know so much?"

"One recalls our men visiting over the years. Just some weeks ago our messenger nearly spent a night there."

"Aye and I nearly pitched him over the flume."

He smiled at her and his eyes reminded her of Daraway's and she suddenly felt things she'd rarely felt for the last two decades.

He said, "Walk with me Mym so that we might expedite our departure and return you to your father."

"Alright," she said.

He led her along a well used path out of the clearing and into the jungle. He raised his [long spear] and used it as a staff to push through huge bright green leaves overgrowing the path and to cut spiderwebs spun across it. Their way sloped upward as it wound around massive smooth barked trees and the higher it climbed the more sunlight filtered onto the floor.

"What's up this way?" she said.

"A project of ours."

"What sort of project?"

"Progress." The path flattened then sloped downward so steeply it had to turn back and forth across the slope and the massive roots of diverse flora were visible and twisted over and against themselves and held the slope in place for hundreds of feet, as if the canopy above was mere decoration for a community of beings who held the world in place from its inside out.

At a switchback he saw her staring into the understory. "There is more wealth herein than under your mountain, if one can believe such wonders persist in the world."

"Delvin's not worth as much as ye think. Not te ye and yers anyway."

"We know of the precious veins running down the great walls of your valley."

She laughed. "Gold and silver? Ye may like the way they look and shape, but minin and meltin em has a cost."

"Your kingdom sleeps in the cradle of the largest lodes ever struck, yet you speak of cost."

"Aye those lodes have memories more valuable than any trinket made from their obliteratin. Yer messenger tell ye all that?"

"No. He is better used for particulars. Dwarfdom's lodes are well known among our kind. Ever since men first visited during the great scourge. And, of course, the king's emissary. You might recall him. He and his wife lived under the mountain for years until they were ejected. They had a daughter about your age."

"Aye, I know her."

He nodded. "As do we. Here we are."

The path opened up suddenly and he stepped up onto a black slab far older than the jungle that had risen around it. She climbed up after him and saw the vastness of it. It was wider than the chamber of the delving's forge. She followed him toward its center. She saw the artificiality of its flatness and of the way it laid in the bottom of a round and steep walled basin whose tall rainforest made it feel all the deeper and flatter and barer. After twenty paces the sun appeared from behind the rim to beat upon her and its heat rose in waves from the surface, and after another twenty paces the saw the tip of the white mountain's massif appear like a tooth from behind the treetops. She'd never seen it from this angle. Its color and details were flattened by distance but there was no mistaking it.

At the center of the black slab lay a white block of granite that had been dragged there long ago and stood like a table or an altar. The marks made by its dragging were still visible northways upon the surface of the slab.

"Curious, is it not?" said the [armiger] as he walked around it. "Look here."

She looked where he pointed and saw rustlike round stains varnishing the face of the stone, and the long and thin marks of a blade, or several, thatched over and over into its surface.

"Do you know what this is?" he said.

"Can't say I do."

"Perhaps the stone remembers."

"I'm sure it does."

"Will you ask it?"

She looked at him, but he still looked at the stains of ancient blood.

"Don't think I need te."

"Please? We are very much interested in listening."

"Ye won't hear anythin."

"Watching then."

"Why do ye care?"

"Barzun never showed us. There is power in knowledge of all kinds, especially those we cannot replicate."

"Well by the look of it it's a memory I don't much care to hear and wouldn't trouble the stone te recall."

"You act as though it has feelings."

"Course it does, and I don't care te trouble em any more than I care te trouble yers."

"Pity. It shaped the history of the world."

"Then ye already know it’s history."

"Yes. This is where your ancestors slew their gods."

She balked. "What?"

"We speak truth."

"Dwarves don't worship any sort of gods."

"Not anymore."

"Not ever," she said.

"One wonders how the lore of dwarves could lose such a tale." He smiled wistfully at her then turned to the block. "We have tried to imagine it. Tens of thousands of years ago, upon the last conjoined eclipse of sun and moons, in this very spot, dwarves like you bending their gods' necks upon the stone and hacking them apart. Can you imagine? Laying your female deity there as the sun passes from one black disc to the next, and at the moment it stands between them, the moment its own face is doubly cleft like a twin headed ax of fire ruling all the heavens, icon of the executioner's triumph over all life in this world, at that very moment dropping your blade through her neck. Then forcing her mate down beside his peer, his beard sopping her blood, his breath rippling it, and as totality begins again and the dark disc transforms into a ring of fire, ending his reign. Can you imagine?"

Horrified she watched the [armiger] kneel before the granite with both of his palms up to the sky as if placating it, then he leaned forward onto the block and laid his cheek on its weatherworn surface. "Imagine," he said, and he closed his eyes.

"Yer off yer damned head."

"Clean off," he said.

For a moment neither spoke. A light breeze rustled the treetops in a slow moving wave across the northern rim of the basin. The jungle's calls and songs carried on indifferent to the memories of the world.

"If this is all ye wanted te show me I'll be gettin back."

"A moment," he said. He straightened off the block to stand beside her. "When first we came here no one knew what it was. Two men and two mules couldn't move it. Over the years we tried other methods, but never could we alter its form or position. We still come down here every time we pass through the sea of suns, but it has never changed."

"Ye have a question in there?"

"It is said only a dwarf can move it."

She didn't say anything.

"Will you try?"

"Don't think I will."

"It is just a small thing. An experiment. A way to verify the tale."

She said, "No," and she turned to retrace their path back to the ship.

He grabbed her hand in his. His grasp was much stronger than she expected and through a clenched jaw he muttered, "Try," as he forced her hand against the block. The sudden gravity of the stone overwhelmed her and she staggered forward and the [armiger] bore down on the rest of her and she raised her other hand to it to keep from falling and her forearms weighed heavily against it and her chest and stomach and hips and thighs and she felt his hands against the back of her head pushing her cheek against the smooth and weathered surface with the bloodstain all around her and the cleavings from the ax just before her eyes and the fine particles of grit and bone seized in their bottoms.

She never felt his hands leave her body. Her entire being was pulled and being pulled into the block as if the entire world was pulled and being pulled into it. Her throat formed the question but she never heard it as it too was pulled and being pulled.

A shadow fell across her face. Out of one eye she saw him blocking the sun and saw his face closing to hers. She heard him say, "One wonders what other art of dwarves have been lost to time and decadence," but the sound of it seemed to accelerate past her face and into the block like the roar of a coming then going avalanche.

She told him to release her but she never heard the words.

"We cannot free you. We already told you the block will not move. And it seems you cannot move it either."

She tried calling to Khaz.

"Perhaps he could help. He will not, of course. We thank you for your assistance. Goodbye Mym o waz."