“The... duh... what are you blathering about?”

“Oh. We haven’t talked about any of that yet, have we?”

“Any of what?”

“I really thought you’d figure most of it out by reading between the lines. The Companies had to come from somewhere and it would be hard to scratch out a living on a tabletop of bare stone. So they must have come from somewhere else. Somewhere very else, since the plain isn’t so big you can’t walk around it and discover that there’s nowhere for armies to come from. The land just gets colder and more inhospitable.”

“I’m real thick, boss. You should’ve drawn me some pictures.”

“I wasn’t keen on having anyone outside know. I didn’t want anybody getting scared to come get me.”

“You’re my brother.”

He ignored me. “I haven’t slept here, so I have a lot of time on my hands. I’ve used some of it exploring. There are sixteen Shadowgates, Sleepy. And fifteen of them open onto places that aren’t our world. Or did at one time. Most of them are dead now and in my state, I can’t see what used to be on the other side without actually going out there. And I don’t have the eggs to do that, because I like my own world just fine and I don’t want to take a chance of getting trapped any farther away from it than I already am.”

“Only four of the gates are still alive. And the one to our world is so badly hurt that it probably won’t last many generations more.”

I was lost. Completely. I was prepared for none of this. And yet he was right when he hinted that there were bells I should have heard ringing. “What does all that have to do with Kina? It isn’t in her legend anywhere. In fact, what does it even have to do with us? It’s not in our legend anywhere.”

“Yes it is, Sleepy. The truth is just so old that time has totally distorted it. Examine Gunni mythology. There’s a lot there about other planes, other realms of reality, different heavens and whatnot. Those stories go way back before the coming of the Free Companies, a thousand years or more. Near as I’ve been able to find out, when the first Free Company came off the plain, almost six hundred years ago, that event marked the first time our Shadowgate had been used in at least eight centuries. That’s a lot of time for truth to mutate.”

“Whoa. Whoa. You’re starting to imply things I can’t quite get my mind around.”

“You’d better open it up and spread it out wide, Sleepy, because there’s a whole lot more. And I doubt I’ve discovered even a tenth of it.”

I have a dark, cynical, untrusting side that at times even doubts the motives of my closest friends. “Why is it that none of this ever got mentioned until now? This isn’t fresh news to you, is it?”

“No. It isn’t. But I told you, I want out of here. Badly. I chose not to pass on any information that might handicap you.”

“Handicap me? What the heck are you talking about?”

“Kina and the Captured aren’t the only things sleeping up here. There’re also a lot of truths that would shake the foundations of our world. Truths I have no trouble imagining wholesale slaughters and holy wars arising to suppress. Truths I have no trouble seeing getting my family and the Company obliterated, they’re so threatening.”

“I’m trying to open my mind but I’m having trouble. I feel like I’m about to plunge into an abyss.”

“Just hang on. I’ve been out here forever and I still have trouble with it. I think the way to start is, I should outline the history of the plain.”

“Yes. Why don’t you do that? That might be interesting.”

“You still have that edge on your tongue, don’t you? Maybe Swan is right and what you really need is a good... all right. All right. Listen closely. The plain was created so far back in antiquity that nobody on any of the worlds has any idea who built it, how, or why, though you have to believe that it was meant to be a pathway between the worlds.”

“Why the shadows and standing stones and-”

“I can’t tell you anything if I’m not the one doing the talking.”

“Sorry.”

“In the beginning there was the plain. Just the plain, with its network of roads that have to be walked a certain way to get to other worlds. For example, every traveler has to enter the great circle at the center of the plain before he can leave the plain again. Back then there were no shadows, no Shadowgates, no standing stones, no great fortress inside the great circle, no caverns beneath the stone, no sleeping gods, no Captured, no Books of the Dead. There was nothing but the plain. The crossroads of worlds. Or possibly of time. One rogue school of thought insists the gates all open into the same world but at times which are separated by tens of thousands of years.”

“At some time still in unimaginable antiquity, human nature asserted itself and would-be conquerers began to charge back and forth across the plain. During a period of exhaustion the wise men of a dozen worlds combined to make the first modifications to the plain. They built a fortress in the great circle and garrisoned it with a race of created immortal guardians whose task it would be to prevent armies from passing from world to world.”

“Then we pass to the edge of proto-history, the age now recalled poorly as it is distorted in Gunni myth.”

“Those driven to conquer will try to do so, whatever the obstacles. Kina apparently started out as your run-of-the-mill, dark-lord type that arises every few centuries, as Lady’s first husband was, only she was another in a line and association of many such, some of whom are now recalled as gods because of the impact they had on their times. The whole cabal decided to beef Kina up until she could overcome the ’demons’ on the plain. In the process she did become what, for want of a better descriptive, we would have to call a god. And she behaved every bit as badly as her associates should have expected, with results more or less like those recalled in the mythology. Once Kina was asleep, her associates opened the maze of caverns under the plain and buried her way down deep somewhere. Then they created Shivetya, the Steadfast Guardian, to keep watch. Or they conscripted a surviving demon of the same name and strengthened him and bound him to do the job, if you prefer a less common version of the story. Then, apparently too exhausted to recover their greatness, they faded away. So Kina came out on top even if she ended up imprisoned.”

“Why didn’t they just kill her? That’s something I’ve never understood about these squabbles amongst the gods. There’s only one version of the Kina myth where her enemies do anything but just tuck her in. And in that one, even after she’s all chopped up and scattered around, they leave the pieces alive and trying to get back together.”

“My guess would be she had some kind of deadman spell that entwined the fates of the other gods with her own. Those people wouldn’t have trusted one another for a second. All of them would have had some protective mechanism like Longshadow used when he tied his fate into the well-being of the Shadowgate.”

“But the Shadowgate doesn’t depend on his health anymore. Not as long as he stays inside.”

“I was just posing an example, Sleepy. Let’s stick to the history of the plain. What followed Kina’s downfall isn’t documented at all, but more conquerers came and went and further efforts were made to dissuade them while keeping the plain open for commerce. The gates and Keys were created. One world gathered its sorcerers and had them steal the souls of millions of prisoners of war, creating the shadows and endowing them with a bitter hatred of everything living. They meant to close down the plain entirely. Which naturally led some other race to create the shields that protect the circles and roads. Nobody knows for sure how or when the standing stones began to appear but they’re the most recent addition to the plain, probably put out by the precursors of the multiple worlds’ religious movement that produced the Free Companies. I understand that the stones aren’t quarried, they’re created things. They’re immune to the shadows and indifferent to the protective shields but they’re attuned to the various Keys carried away during the Free Companies’ age.”