The Port City of Cliffs was waking in a milky haze, lazily rumbling with anchors and bells. Lira, a journeyman wind cartographer, had been sketching currents like vein lines on delicate maps for years. What truly fascinated her, however, were the invisible ones, which were once said to have drawn dragons from their nests above the abyss. Now, in the window of the upper observatory, she was unfolding a fragile map found in her grandfather's chest. Grandpa used to say that some currents awaken and others lead to perdition, silently. Along the margin, someone had burned a scaly mark, and next to it a single word: "Breath". The brass astrolabe she had inherited trembled as she pressed it to the yellowed parchment on the table by the window. Down in the harbour, fishermen shouted to the gulls and the fog bell tolled restlessly. Deep below the cliff there was a low, repetitive rumble, as if someone was breathing down a rock. The mooring hoses moved a hair's breadth, though no one even touched them with a finger. - 'Don't listen to the cliff, girl,' the caretaker Dorian muttered to Lira, sweeping the stairs with a carded broom. - 'The cliff only answers those who come with questions greater than their own caution.' Lira laughed kindly, but her fingers still held the astrolabe as if it were a key. At night, instead of sleeping, she went down to the lighthouse, where traces of an old fire smouldered in the wall all the time. Spiral scales were carved under the parapets, and between them were drawn ships pushed by an absent storm. A stranger sat on the wide sill of the lighthouse, slim, with fingers battered like those of a petty officer. - 'Val,' he introduced himself quietly, as if afraid of waking the bricks in the wall. - 'Did you hear that? The cliff has lungs, and tonight it breathes with a strange pause again. The thumps came again, closer this time, and the silence between them was unsettlingly alert. Val lifted a short bone flute and responded with a dragged note that scratched the air. - A passage opened on the Yew Beach when the bell tolled in just such a measure. Lira counted the intervals on her fingers, glancing at the map, and did not deny a word. They walked down the lighthouse together, passing sleeping boats and chains glinting like wet snakes. The mist parted at their ankles, as if warm trickles ran through it. A dark opening on the beach revealed itself, and salt, iron and ash blew from inside. They descended the damp steps, and Lyra's astrolabe turned its hands towards the warmer and warmer currents. At last they stood before a circular doorway in which a spiral identical to the mark on the map was imprinted. Lira pressed the astrolabe into the centre of the spiral, the metal groaned and the rock responded with a drawn-out exhalation. The air thickened, the floor vibrated, and somewhere behind the door an eyelid parted and a golden eye flashed.