Hadrian woke with a bright light in his eyes. He suspected it might be morning, but it turned out to be the dazzling brilliance of the moon. He was facing up, dangling from a rope that was pulling him upward at the waist with short unpleasant jerks.

"You awake?" Royce called from somewhere above. His voice was strained and out of breath.

"I think so."

"What do you mean by you think so? You're talking."

"Maybe I'm dead."

"I wouldn't bother pulling you up if that were the case. Now, grab hold of that line and pull yourself the rest of the way. I'm tired."

Hadrian caught hold of the rope attached to his waist. As he did, he noticed a ringing in his ears, and his head was throbbing. Reaching up, he felt bandages.

"Can you climb?" Royce called.

Hadrian pulled and found nothing wrong with his arms, back, or legs. "I think so."

"Okay. See if you can get up. I'm gonna rest a bit."

Hadrian gritted his teeth against the pounding in his head that only increased as he exerted himself. Using feet wrapped around the rope and the old-fashioned hand-over-hand method, Hadrian scaled the twenty or thirty feet to where Royce waited on a broad ledge of rock.

"By Mar, you're heavy," Royce said.

"What happened?"

"I didn't cut the rope."

"I didn't say you did." Hadrian was rubbing the back of his head where a big bump had grown.

"If I had wanted you dead —"

"I'm not accusing you, Royce."

The thief scowled at him with angry eyes.

"I'm not," Hadrian insisted. "But what did happen?"

"The anchor on my side came free the moment you started your swing. You fell and the other rope caught you. Then you swung back and clapped your head on the wall. You've been out ever since."

"How did my head get wrapped?"

"I did it," Royce said, his voice still irritated. "You were bleeding. Skull wounds are nasty that way. What else was I going to do?"

"I'm not complaining."

"Sounds like it."

"I'm just confused. How did you wrap my head before pulling me up?"

"I didn't. I had to climb down, swing over to where you were dangling like a fish on a line. Then I had to stop the bleeding. I wrapped and cleaned you up — all while the two of us dangled in midair. I now know how a spider feels wrapping a fly. Then, because you were still breathing but not waking, and we have a schedule to keep, I used that dwarven pulley system to haul you."

"How far up did you . . . " Hadrian looked around.

His first thought was about the luxuriousness of the ledge they were sitting on. An instant later, he knew it couldn't be a ledge. Too big, too broad. Leaning back, Hadrian looked past Royce and saw a span of rock that ran all the way to the South Tower. "We're on the bridge?"

"Just so you know," Royce said. "I was using that same anchor for support when you pulled it. I fell, too. I was able to catch myself, so you weren't the only one to take a spill."

"It's okay, Royce. Really."

Royce glared. The man was angrier than Hadrian had seen him in years.

Hadrian couldn't understand it.

"It's not okay."  Then his eyes focused on the bandages around Hadrian's head. "It's not all right at all."

Hadrian found it a bit hard to believe that he was standing on the bridge. After three weeks of looking up at it and framing that seemingly thin span as an impossible goal — here they were. In less than two days, he and Royce had done what — after weeks of trying — a city full of some of the most capable people in the world were unable to achieve.

Tur Del Fur lay below them, dark and empty. Hadrian could finally see the entire story revealed. From the flat and barren tabletop of the West Echo plateau, the pale white of the cliffs appeared as a violent gash cutting down through the wall of rock. Zigzagging to and fro across the cliff, the greenery of the many tiers dressed the wound, giving it color and life on its journey to the sea. More than that, Hadrian could see the pattern left behind by the towers' creators. Circles, invisible from the ground, radiated out from Drumindor's base as if it were the center of a great quarry. Hadrian had assumed the cliffs were natural and the tiers added to them. Now he saw that the bluffs had been created when the whole of the point had been mined away, leaving the two towers at the bottom. The tiers were merely extensions of the road. Berling's Way was just that, the route Berling and his workers took to get to the bottom and back out. Tur Del Fur wasn't a natural paradise. The whole of  Terlando Bay and the cliffs that surrounded it were the dressed-up remains of a construction site. The rolkins, temples, mansions, and shops were merely added afterthoughts.

They now had access to both towers but stayed with the north one, as they were already there and crossing the bridge was an unnecessary risk, not to mention the distance between the two wasn't insignificant. With the moonrise, the open span felt as exposed to watching eyes as a barren field was to a pair of deer.

"Well, at least I can see it; that's something," Royce said as the two approached the place where the bridge met the tower. At the intersection was an elaborate sheltered porch created from three recessed openings that nested one within the next. Each was decorated with dwarven symbols etched inside squares. At the center of them was a thin grooved outline of a rectangle that indicated the presence of an entrance.

This was no ordinary door. The thing was made of stone, lacked hinges, and had no massive nails studding its face, and most terrifying of all: no keyhole, latch, knob, or handle.

Royce studied the threshold for a long moment, then placed his hand at the center and pushed. Then he pushed again. Then Royce did nothing for a long time, and Hadrian felt his heart sink.

Eleven hours later, they were still on the bridge.

By then, the sun was high, and Hadrian sat inside the porch. He opened his little pouch to search for more to eat. They hadn't brought much. Food and water were heavy, and they had needed to be light. The climb was only supposed to take a few hours. As the night had dragged on, the excitement and fear of discovery faded into boredom. Hadrian had walked the length of the bridge several times. When morning came, he slept in the meager shade of the multi-tiered entryway that the door allowed. Royce, who was back in his cloak and hood, had stood, sat, paced, and examined the door at the other end of the bridge. The two were identical, right down to their impenetrability.

"Want a jerky stick?" Hadrian asked, holding one up as if Royce were a dog.

Royce, who sat across from the door, glared at him.

"You know, a little nourishment might help. I personally can't think on an empty stomach. Can't do much of anything on an empty stomach, really. It's probably why you haven't gotten anywhere."

"I'm not hungry."

"Thirsty? We have a little water left."

"I'm not thirsty, either."

"You've got to drink, Royce. You're sitting in the sun in a black cloak. That's how they make game pies, you know. They cover a bunch of songbirds with a blanket of crust, toss in a few mushrooms, carrots, and onions, then bake. And up here, you do sort of look like a blackbird."

"That's not how they make game pies," Royce told him. "If you did it that way, there'd be feathers. The meat is pre-cooked into a stew, then added to the pie."

Hadrian nodded. "You might be right about that."

"Will you please shut up; I'm trying to think."

Hadrian took a bite of the pork jerky, which had been spiced with pineapple juice, brown sugar, and rum. It tasted wonderful, and he suspected it would have even if he hadn't been trapped with a limited amount of food. If push came to shove, however, he'd have traded it for a game pie. "You've been thinking for nearly half a day and haven't gotten anywhere. You realize we've only got about ten hours left to get away."

Royce faced him with a look that explained in painful detail that he knew all this and did not appreciate the recap.

Hadrian took another bite: a small one. He needed to make the meal last. He sat with his back to the door, his legs stretched out. His feet were now in the sun and getting hot. The never-ending wind helped, but the constant burning light was bothersome when he couldn't escape it. Also distressing was that he was able to eat in peace. Hadrian had never been to a coast where gulls did not fill the air with their constant caws and squeaky-door squeals. Normally, he'd be fighting them off in order to have his meal, but not today. And it wasn't like he was sitting too high. The birds used to be there — the face of the bridge had plenty of white splotches. Now there was only the constant howl of the wind. The silence was absolutely creepy.

What do the gulls know that I don't?

"And I have gotten somewhere," Royce said.

"You have?"

Royce waved an arm at the entirety of the nested porch. "Come out here and look."

Hadrian stood up, walked out from underneath the overhang, bending over until he was free of it. Then joined Royce's study of the doorway.

"This is a combination lock, and the symbols around the doorway are tumblers. Each one is carved into identically sized squares. I'm guessing if you press on them, they'll slide in. If you engage the right ones, the door will unlock. So, the question is which ones to push."

"You read dwarven runes?"

"I don't need to because the code is just a date. I only need to figure out which one, and how to indicate it."

"And what makes you think that?"

Royce looked over with the face of a card player who'd had his hand called but wasn't bluffing. "A date would be easy to remember. It could be the year of their first ruler's coronation, or something far more obscure, but still a date every dwarf would know but no one else would." He indicated the smallest threshold. "Drumindor is purged of pressure once every full moon, putting it on a lunar schedule. So the first two thresholds are easy. This frame has twelve symbols etched in it, and there are twelve lunar cycles in a year." He pointed at the middle one. "This one has twenty-eight, the number of days in a lunar cycle. And the big one has ninety-nine symbols. Which I am guessing somehow indicates the year, but last I checked, there are more than ninety-nine years of recorded history. So I don't know why there are —"

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"Dwarfs have ninety-nine individual numbers. I remember Auberon saying something about that."

"Okay. Still doesn't solve the issue but good to know."

"So, we need to figure out the most significant date to the dwarfs or at least to the builders of Drumindor and —"

"No," Royce shook his hood. "The combination has been changed."

"How do you know? What makes you think that's even possible?"

"You can't build something that has a combination and expect it to stay the same for thousands of years. Someone is going to tell the wrong person, then it becomes useless. So the lock must have the ability to be changed from time to time — either when the current date is discovered, or on some regular basis. But it certainly isn't the same one as when the tower was first built. When Gravis entered, he closed the door, and since no one else knew how to open it, he must have also changed the locks."

"That means we need to figure out what date Gravis would have used."

"Exactly." Royce nodded. "And we also need to determine how to enter it. As for possible dates, I've limited it to three possibilities: Gravis's birthday, the date Drumindor was completed, or the day he was fired. Do you know when Drumindor was finished or Gravis's birth date?"

Hadrian shook his head.

"Neither do I, nor can we find out, so we might as well ignore those. As for when he was fired, we can take a stab at that. We got the job three weeks ago, so let's work backward from there. Given that Albert already had the coach waiting when we got to Medford, he must have commissioned it the day before, so let's add a day for that. Now, it would take time for a courier to deliver any message from Lady Constance to Albert. Assuming the messenger took the conventional route, that would add another eleven days. The difficult question remaining is, how much time was there between the day Lord Byron fired Gravis and when he hired Lady Constance? Albert mentioned the Triumvirate weren't going to do anything, which forced Lord Byron to hire us, so we can assume he met with them prior to speaking to her. That means he probably didn't hire Constance the day Gravis was let go. In fact, I suspect it took several days. Let's say, I don't know, about a week?"

"Sounds reasonable."

"So what does that add up to?"

"Forty."

"Okay, that's more than a month, which would put it in last month's lunar cycle."

"I still wish one of us could read dwarven runes."

Royce shook his head. "Not necessary, but we are missing some pieces to this puzzle, like whether a dwarven lunar cycle starts with the full moon or when there is no moon at all."

"I can answer that for you."

"You can?" Royce looked shocked.

"Do you remember Sloan? The bartender at that hidden dwarven pub? She said we were reaching the height of the Wolf Moon, so we're at the halfway mark, meaning it doesn't start with the full moon; it starts with the new moon."

Royce nodded and frowned. "That makes perfect sense."

"You're upset because you didn't think of it, aren't you?"

"Less upset and more surprised." Royce thought a moment. "Okay, since we're at a full moon now, the start of the last moon's cycle would be exactly six weeks ago. So forty-two minus forty is two. If we were trying to indicate the first day of the cycle, we would use the first symbol. If we add two to that, we'd use the third one."

Royce studied the symboled frames. "Assuming the numbers are presented in order from lowest to highest, we can just count starting at one side or the other. Do you know if they read left to right or right to left?"

"Does it even matter? You could try it from each direction, right? If you had started pressing random squares when we arrived, you probably would have it opened by now."

Royce shook his head. "There are millions upon millions of possible combinations, so probably not. Sure, a typical lock is forgiving in that it relies on frustration to make you give up before you get in. But this is a dwarven door, which means it's anything but ordinary. If you go through enough trouble to use a combination, it's a safe bet that there will only be a certain number of attempts before punishing the forgetful or the uninformed. And who knows what that might be."

Royce looked up at the tower as if it was watching them. "It could be a stone that falls and crushes us. Maybe there's a hidden trap door that looks like you're standing on solid stone until it opens and —"

"Or the whole bridge might collapse." Hadrian looked down at the stone beneath his feet. He imagined the entire span slipping free of the towers and falling as one piece, or maybe the whole thing would be rigged to shatter into tiny blocks.

Royce nodded. "In theory yes, but I doubt it. Destroying this bridge would punish more than the idiot at the door who didn't know they changed the lock. Most likely, too many failed attempts will disable the mechanism for a period of time — could be hours, could be days." He looked up again. "Or it could still be a block of stone to the head."

Royce returned his attention to the doorway and pointed at the first set of markings. "And there's another thing. It's not just whether you count from the left or right, but you have to know which month comes first."

"The first month follows Wintertide," Hadrian said. "The rebirth of the sun."

"For us, yeah, but dwarfs might have picked their first month based on the day one of their kings was born. When you think about it, there's no reason for us to mark our years starting at Wintertide. Why not Summersrule? It's a much better time to celebrate than a cold, dark day in winter."

Hadrian shrugged. "Hope, I suppose."

"Hope?"

"Be pretty pessimistic to start your calendar looking ahead to diminishing days and the cold bleak of winter."

Royce considered this, and as he did, Hadrian stepped closer and studied the twelve symbols. They weren't entirely abstract; each was a little stylized picture. He spotted a dog symbol third from the end and next to it was a snowflake. He grinned. "Dwarfs read right to left, and they do start their calendar on Wintertide just like us."

Royce stared at him skeptically. "Why do you say that?"

Hadrian pointed at the snowflake symbol. "Last month was the Snow Moon."

"Did Sloan teach you the entire dwarven calendar?"

"Only those two, but because the dog — or wolf — is to the left of the snowflake, they read right to left."

Royce smiled at Hadrian. "You're not nearly as useless as everyone says."

"You're welcome."

"Okay, now comes the hard part. The year. How can you specify a particular year — that runs into the thousands — with just ninety-nine symbols?"

Hadrian added, "And that number would always be increasing, I doubt they add symbols, and at some point you'd run out of room on the lintel."

Royce nodded. "They must have come up with another way to indicate years." Royce touched the door frame sliding his fingers up the stone. "Whoever designed this lock wasn't a poet. He was an engineer. To work, this thing needs to be simple and logical." Royce thought a moment, then turned to Hadrian. "Why didn't you bring a chair up here to sit on?"

"You need to sit to think?"

"Just answer the question."

"Because it would have been stupid."

"Be more specific."

"Why do you need a chair, Royce?"

Royce shook his head in irritation. "Just answer the question. Why didn't you haul a chair up here?"

"Because a chair is too big, heavy, and cumbersome to carry up this tower and we don't need it."

"Exactly," Royce grinned. "A practical mind abhors waste. If you don't need it and you're short on space, don't bother with it. Everyone knows this is the year 2991, and if I said remember back in '88 when Essendon's castle burned down, you wouldn't need me to explain it was 2988, would you? That makes the first two digits a bit unnecessary. So what if this outer frame is just for the last two digits in the year?"

Hadrian was unconvinced.

Royce waved at the doorway. "It's the only way it can work."

Hadrian shrugged. "Well, we have to try something. So why not?"

"Okay, this is the year 2991, so let's count back nine from the left."

"Wait!" Hadrian said.

"What?"

"It's not 2991."

"I'm pretty sure it is."

"No, that's the year in Imperial Reckoning. For dwarfs, it is the year 777,745."

Royce stared at him for a long moment as if unable to decide which question should come first. "Let me guess, Sloan again?"

Hadrian nodded. "Yeah, she told me the dwarven year differed from Imperial Reckoning. Theirs is based on the day Eton first shone on Elan."

"What is Eton?"

Hadrian waved a hand dismissively. "Doesn't matter."

"And you remembered the exact number?"

Hadrian thought about it and shrugged. "It's strange. I usually can't keep track of the number of drinks I've had, but well, you don't spend as much time in bars as I do. I've learned that knowing bits of otherwise useless information comes in handy. And dates are usually worth remembering. One day some fella is going to wager a round on that very number and be devastated when I know it. So, my mind stores stuff."

"You live in a completely different reality, don't you?"

"Compared to yours? I certainly hope so."

Royce looked back at the symbols. "Okay, let's do this. We'll start with the year then the month; if we can't get those, the city is doomed — unless Gravis pops his head out to see who is messing with the door and we manage to trap it open with a toe. Honestly, as far as I see it, that's our best chance. The choice of day is more than a bit of a guess, but we might get enough tries to vary that a couple times. Hopefully we'll get lucky."

Royce counted to forty-five starting from the right. Before he pressed it, Hadrian verified the spot with his own count. It did, indeed, push into the frame and stay. Hadrian hadn't a clue if the sliding block was good or bad. It was, however, something, which was oh-so better than nothing. Royce moved to the set of twelve and pressed the snow symbol. It, too, stayed in, and Hadrian thought it was a positive sign that the first one hadn't popped out.

"Okay, here we go," Royce said. He hesitated with his finger over the third symbol from the right, then pressed. The moment it slid in, all the symbols, including the last one, popped back out, and there was a noticeable clap.

Royce pushed on the door, but it remained immovable. "Okay, that wasn't right. And I didn't like the sound of that clap."

"Try a different day," Hadrian suggested.

This time Royce pressed on the second symbol. Again, the pieces of stone snapped back and once more came another clap.

"How many more guesses do you think we have?" Hadrian asked.

"Not sure."

"Considering all the estimates and speculation we used, I hope it's a lot."

Royce pondered his next choice. As he did, Hadrian began to have second thoughts.

"Then his wife died, and now he has nothing to live for. Many say there's nothing to stop him; he's got nothing to lose."

Royce was about to try again with the fourth symbol when Hadrian stopped him. "Wait, I think we have it wrong."

Royce almost chuckled, "I'm guessing we're wrong about a great many things, but what specifically are you referring to?"

"Think about it. Gravis is about to destroy Drumindor. But you don't destroy something you love."

"You do if you don't want anyone else to have it."

Hadrian rocked his head considering the thought. "Maybe, but let me ask you this: if Gwen ran off with Dixon, would you kill her?"

"No, but Dixon might want to watch his back."

"Exactly!" Hadrian said.

"Why are you always talking about Gwen and Dixon?"

"It doesn't matter. Just shut up and listen. This isn't about Gravis's job. He wants revenge for the loss of what he loved most. So the date that has become most important to him is the day he lost his wife!"

Royce looked at Hadrian, appearing perplexed. "You could be right. Strange."

"What is?"

"That you figured that out, and I didn't."

"Because you think I'm stupid?"

"No, I've never thought that. Intentionally naïve to a fault, sure, but not stupid. No, it's just that revenge is my language, not yours. Okay, so when did she die? Did Sloan mention that, too?"

"She died the night of the full moon, and he was driven from that shack about a week after Ena's death."

"No, Auberon did. He said Gravis's wife died on the night of the full moon."

Royce smiled. "That would have been last month's full moon, so no change there." He kept the year and the month the same. Finally, he held his finger over the fourteenth symbol. "Ready?"

Hadrian nodded. "Let's hope Gravis loved his wife."

Royce pressed the symbol.

Nothing happened.

They both waited for several seconds. There was no snapping back of symbols, no clap. Nothing.

"Did you miss one of them?" Hadrian asked. "Are they all in as deep as they should be?"

Royce looked. "Yes, they're all in." But he pressed each one again to no avail.

"Try the door."

Royce placed his hands in the middle of the outline cut in stone and pushed.

Nothing.

"Now what?" Hadrian asked.

"Give me a minute," Royce said. "Let me think."

A minute turned into another seven hours.

Royce was certain they were close. In fact, he was positive the door was unlocked. The symbols he had used must have been correct or they would have popped out just like the other two tries. All he needed was to turn the knob, but he had no idea how to do that. The knowledge was beyond infuriating. The answer had to be a simple thing, and yet it left him utterly defeated.

"Royce," Hadrian said, "the sun is going down. We're almost out of time. If we go right now, and jog all the way, we might make it to the top of the cliff."

"I'm so close!"

"You tried your best."

"Bastard dwarfs! By Mar, I hate them!" He kicked the stone.

Click.

"You want to go down first or —"

"Quiet!" Royce said. He listened. "Did you hear it?"

"Hear what?"

Royce studied the entrance. "Look, you can see a seam now. This is a double door."

Hadrian stared. "You managed that by kicking it?"

"I'm too tall. I'm not a dwarf. I was pressing too high earlier."

Royce felt the surface of the stone at dwarf level, letting his fingers examine what his eyes couldn't see. He found two indentations, one on each of the double doors. He pressed one. It clicked but then popped out such that it was once again flush with the surface.

"Okay, I heard it that time," Hadrian said and joined him. "Door still doesn't open?"

"Not yet," Royce said.

Using both hands, Royce reached out, located the two triggers, then pressed them at the same time.

Click-clack.

"What does that mean?" Hadrian asked.

Royce grinned. "It means I have it."

He placed his palm on the center — of what had been, for the last eighteen hours, a solid stone wall — and pushed. A pair of double doors swung open.

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