He descended the ridge with the economy of someone who'd spent a year learning that the terrain could kill as easily as the things living on it. The grey figure was gone. The gate remained, still humming, still catching the dying light in a way that made his eyes want to slide off it.
Halfway down, the Hound's cold recognition eased. Not because the wrongness had faded. Because he was walking directly into it, and the Hound had decided that if he was going to be this stubborn, the least it could do was stop ringing alarm bells and start paying attention to the details.
The details were these: the gate was a ring, roughly three metres across, set into a frame of the same dark stone that formed the ridge. The stone had been worked. Not machined. Shaped by something that understood the mate
