Page 65 of The Sunlit Man

“So that greatly narrows down the area we have to search,” Nomad said.

Sorry, my dutiful valet, the knight intones. I still don’t follow your scattered logic. Is the elevation getting to you?

“Right, let me explain it this way,” Nomad said, swerving around a large rock formation. “The Cinder King made no regular excursions—he wasn’t flying out somewhere to study the entrance. Someone would have noticed if, each rotation, he mysteriously left the city.

“Yet we know that the Cinder King has been trying to get into the Refuge for years. Everyone agrees it was an obsession of his, and some few have even seen the door. So he had to study it in the normal course of their journey, during one of their regular stops to grow crops.

“Since Union always flies in a straight line around the planet, the entrance is somewhere in that specific latitude. In the direct path of the city. A place he can periodically land and study with his closest and most trusted officials, while everyone else grows food.”

Right, then. So…that’s still a huge area. Somewhere on a longline rounding the planet? It’s a small planet, yes, but that’s too much ground to search while being chased. We need to know where on that line the entrance can be found.

“Actually we don’t need to know that,” he said. “Not right now. Because the Cinder King knows it.”

Alas, the knight thinks, my sleep-deprived squire has finally lost his mind and is speaking complete gibberish.

“Trust me on this one,” Nomad said. “Finding the Refuge isn’t going to be difficult. Neither is opening it. Those will be two of the easiest parts of our task.”

Then what is the hard part?

Nomad didn’t reply. He leaned down over his cycle, checking the time. By everyone’s best guesses, he should be over halfway up his climb. Indeed, his speed was decreasing as the conventional engine slowly lost the ability to propel him. He left a melted trail behind him in the ice as he dipped lower, but he waited to engage the new engine. He needed to get as far as he could with the regular one to conserve propellant for the new one.

So…let’s assume we get over the mountain, the knight muses. We somehow don’t run Beacon out of energy. You work whatever magic you’re planning, and we locate the door and get it open. What then?

What happens when Rebeke and the rest discover that the gate the Cinder King has been trying to open doesn’t lead to some mythical, idyllic cavern and utopia of sun-free living? What happens when instead they discover it leads to some small, offworlder research facility?

“Congratulations. You’ve identified the hard part.”

Ah. Right.

“I said I’d get Beacon’s leadership through that door,” he said. “Thatwas my oath. I never said I’d solve their problem with the Cinder King or their bigger problem—the sad fact that it’s unlikely their planet hasanytrue refuge from the sun. I warned them. They’re committed anyway. So it’s not my problem.”

That doesn’t make you sad?

“I can’t help everyone. I can barely deal with my own issues. I just have to keep moving forward.”

Yes, but…isn’t there another way? More we can do?

Once, instead of questions, Auxiliary would have given him a lecture. They’d both been through a lot since those days. Nomad sensed no condemnation in those words. Just sorrow.

He made no response, because the air was well and truly giving out now, and he doubted he could fill his lungs sufficiently. Instead he exhaled and let his body do what it did, protecting him with a little bubble of invisible pressure, a leftover from his old powers. He’d use up Investiture, but this wasn’t a major drain.

Beneath him, the engine labored, but the cycle barely stayed in the air—and his progress up the slope had slowed to a crawl. So he engaged the new engine—really just a complement to the old system.

It worked perfectly, shooting down a jet of superheated steam and lifting him a good ten feet higher above the frozen landscape. He’d gotten above the perpetual cloud cover here, so he could finally see the stars. He took a moment to admire the rings—which, unless he was remembering wrong, were another oddity. The few other planets he’d visited with rings always had them at the equator, but not these. Strange rings, strange gravity, strange sunlight. What a bizarre planet.

Unfortunately, the rings reminded him of the ship up there, newly arrived. No. He couldn’t think about how close the Night Brigade was right now. He focused instead on the path.

His eyes adjusted, and he dimmed the floodlight. The snow had fallen away also—not enough atmosphere. Now it was just him and the grey stone, like a ramp up toward the cosmere itself. These scattered peaks weren’t high, around a thousand feet, despite their steep incline. But just because this peak was relatively low didn’t mean it wasn’t worth climbing, and he still felt proud as he neared the top.

He cut the engine at the summit, settling down gently. His feet were silent as they touched the stone. There was no appreciable atmosphere here to carry the sound waves. He enjoyed the moment, parked at the very top of the world, surveying the curvature of the small planet and looking out over the smoldering clouds. The sun was still a ways off, not even illuminating the horizon.

Higher mountains rose to either side of him. He couldn’t spot a lower pass the city could sneak through. The fugitives would have to come all the way up this slope. On the back side, the slope was even steeper—cutting downward in a way that would have been improbable in a normal mountain range. Weathering below would not have needed long to collapse this higher section. But here, the peaks only had to last a day until they were remade.

He turned toward the stars again. They’d always seemed so friendly to him. So full of stories. How many of those stars had he visited now? Just a fraction of them, and yet the cosmere had begun to feel like a small place. Instinctively he tried to find Taln’s Scar, but the patch of red wasn’t visible from this angle.

Do you remember, the knight asks, when you first realized the Night Brigade was chasing you?

Nomad sent annoyance through the bond.

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