The girl stopped crying well before she and Sly saw their destination ahead of them on the path. He’d trudged for two miles east, but the orc-girl was cheerful, sucking on the paper wrapper of a candy bar Sly had found in his rations. The sandal he retrieved from the trail was ruined, chewed up, so here he was, a crick in his neck from carrying the stout child.

  The girl’s goal was a cluster of buildings on a narrow promontory, separated from the mainland by a tall outer wall and shielded on the other two sides by the spectacular precipice he’d first seen at dawn. The estate’s outer wall was an impressive four metres tall, constructed from irregular chunks of stone and unevenly mortared. Behind the wall a series of steeply peaked slate roofs huddled together, a throng of old gentlemen carrying half open black umbrellas.

  The compound was clearly built for protection. Embedded at the end of the outer wall, the robust wood frame of the only door in sight jutted four feet over the precipice and was topped with glass shards, presumably to make it awkward to circumvent. The door itself was made with defense in mind: it was inset, the hinges covered in metal, and it opened outwards. It would take a while to force, even with a small ram.

  Sly warily considered the evidence before him. If you install a metal door and deadbolts in an apartment, or you live in a gated community that employs security guards, it’s because the locals are rough, your stuff’s valuable, or you don’t trust the local cops – maybe all three combined. In any case, you want to be inside the gate looking out, not outside looking in. That front door isn’t just for the wild dogs.

  He sat the girl down and took another look at the gate. Jumping as high as he could, he caught a glimpse into a passageway formed between the precipice on the right and a high stone wall to the left. Another jump, and he saw loopholes in the stone wall to let defenders use weapons from safety. A poke from a spear might be enough to send a casual intruder over the edge, and the long drop would do the rest. Another formidable door ended the passageway, creating a kill-box between the gates.

  He ground his teeth. If pre-emptive lethal self-defense is an everyday thing, the rule of law is fairly weak. All signs pointed to the area being rough, lawless, and prone to violence.

  That said, the front entrance was proof against casual assault but the compound beyond was no great fortress. Hardy moss and short grass grew from between the cracks of the outer wall and the gates weren’t enough to prevent a prepared enemy: a ram would eventually deal with the doors while shields dealt with the spears. The door was designed for a threat somewhere between wild dogs and trained soldiers.

  Bandits? Or something else?

  Sly didn’t doubt the redoubt was occupied. The first sign was broken shrubbery and trampled grass from where a large crowd recently used the path. The second sign was a rasping voice from behind the door.

  The voice spoke a language Sly didn’t understand but from the angry tone he was being told to leave the child and jump off the cliff. The girl shouted back through the thick door in the same guttural language. She’d been old enough to guide him here, once the chocolate had done its work, but was cute despite protruding lower fangs, like a kitten. He smiled down at her. The door rattled, and to show good faith Sly pulled back, put the girl on her feet and his backpack to one side. He raised his hands but didn’t disarm.

  The door opened a crack. The girl ran over, clutching her ruined sandal, and the door closed behind her. And he waited.

  After a few minutes of silence, he sat near the door. He ate and thought for another hour, hoping patience would pay off. He wanted into the stronghold because it represented food and shelter, and protection from bandits or whatever stalked the woods. It would also give him time to sit still, strategize, and learn about his new situation. But if the doors didn’t open, he was no stranger to sleeping rough.

  After an hour, the door still didn’t open. He eyed it balefully. Rude.

  Sly’s inner eye wandered back to the obelisk. Was the stone significant, the endpoint of the alien technology that had brought him here? Or was it just a monument or a marker? It was nothing like the archway in Area 71, and for an interdimensional crossing the landing point was dangerous: two more steps and four seconds later he would’ve hit the cultivated fields below the cliff.

  The obelisk might have no more significance than the oversized milestone it resembled, but he wanted to examine it again, in more detail.

  Sly hoped Ramirez and the other four hadn’t run off the cliff before he’d arrived. He considered the idea but soon discarded it. While the first person through the portal might have fallen, not everyone would fall, and since no one waited, no one else had come this way. And Gus would know if any of the team was within a kilometre, even if the direction was straight down and the bodies were bloody.

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  For now, he preferred thinking himself alone, with a problem to solve.

  If he were teaching, Colonel Harris might’ve asked the class:

  ‘What must I do to get what I want, given what I know and what I have?’

  While answers would vary, the best students would pose more questions.

  If we want to go home, how do we do it? Who do we ask? What do we have that could be traded for the necessary information?

  From that start, a floodgate would open.

  What were the bridges or portals that brought him here? How did the technology work? Why is the team not here? Where is the nearest portal home? How could he find Ramirez and the others?

  To find answers to the questions, his first step was to survive.

  Sly knocked politely and held his empty water flask upside down.

  “Any chance of a cup of water?”

  Five minutes later the door opened, and a wooden bucket appeared, cold and dewy, possibly drawn straight from a well. Once the bucket was on the floor the door slammed shut.

  He sipped a handful of the water and waited. When he didn’t feel ill after a minute, he drank more. Five minutes later, he drank until sated and filled his water flask by plunging it in the bucket until the bubbles stopped. Then he picked up his backpack and walked away.

  Sly returned to the obelisk on its mound, faster without the chunky orc-child to carry and refreshed by water and rations. He examined the stone again with new eyes. The northern side facing directly away from the terraces was rough, while the other three were the same polished surface he’d seen before, glassy smooth and as hard as diamond. The smooth sides weren’t reflective enough to show Sly’s face, but they caught the sun and shone.

  Initially he saw no writing or carving but, as he stood there the sun gained its zenith and Gus changed local time to midday. Sly couldn’t say if the obelisk reacted to his presence, or if this were a daily or even hourly occurrence, but shining letters chose that moment to float up from the depths on the three reflective sides.

  Sly stared in surprise and fascination. Unless every artifact he met hid alien technology, it was safe to consider the obelisk to be something special.

  He peered closer, a child at a candy store display. On the eastern side, logographic characters like Kanji or Chinese script were interspersed with the odd but now familiar swirling runes from Greyhair’s book. To Sly’s uneducated eye the writing was similar to the ornate style of Arabic used in mosques – he wanted to say kufic, but that probably wasn’t quite right.

  Inwardly shrugging, he hurriedly set Gus to scanning the text, capturing images from his eye’s Clarity feed, as he clambered up to the encircling path for a closer look. As expected, each side of the obelisk showed iridescent silver runes, but they weren’t the same. The side facing the terraces was a different script from the first, all angular and straight hard lines, like questions on a geometry exam.

  He continued walking briskly, trusting Gus to record the scene. The side facing the sun’s direction of travel was unlike the other two sides except that the neat proportional loops and elegant cursive was utterly unfamiliar.

  He didn’t spend too long studying any one side, in case the writing disappeared as quickly as it came.

  And it did. Thirty-six seconds after midday the shining hieroglyphics faded out, and the simple, polished monument to a perfect panorama returned.

  No matter, Gus had it memorized. What a medieval scribe might take a week to copy, with errors, the AI no doubt recorded perfectly first time.

  The obelisk, on the mound at the edge of the cliff, was the intersection of three paths. One went left, east to the stronghold, and one went right, west along the cliff, to the tree where he discovered the orc-girl.

  The final trail came in from the north, ninety degrees to the precipice. That path was lightly wooded, southern temperate or northern subtropical from their look, but the trees were pleasantly intermingled with bright flower meadows.

  Gus’s proximity alert buzzed under Sly’s skin while he looked north, signaling movement in the trees. He hurried into the cover of the obelisk while he stared down the trail. He guessed the shapes might be orcs, returned after fighting bandits or other raiders, but Gus managed to capture, enlarge and enhance an image of one figure as it stepped from the trees.

  Not an orc.

  He was a short and bare-faced human, dressed bizarrely in leather, skins and bone. His naked arms were painted with azure spirals and his hair was matted. On his left arm he wore a small circular shield with a prominent boss, and his right hand dipped under a heavy spear. A man emerging from the trees behind him also had both shield and spear but was bearded and taller, and the next guy could’ve been his twin. The fourth man wore impressive leathers and a braided beard. He carried the front end of a pole on his shoulder. Others followed armed with swords and bucklers, carrying another pole and smaller staves. Between them the men from the forest transported the makings of a long ladder.

  Sly waited until he saw more than ten bearded men in the party, with more to come, before heading back toward the stronghold. It’s true you feel responsible for the lives you save, he thought, beginning to jog in that direction. He meant to warn the orc-girl’s family, but he stopped before he ran too far. He paused a second, turned around and ran back, past the obelisk to the west.