He sat down on a rock next to the gate and stretched his legs out.
"So," he said to the little man. "Do you get a lot of visitors?"
...
On the other side of the wall, Finn was running uphill with his sword out, looking for something to be a hero at.
The path went up between big grey rocks, and it was hot, way hotter than it should have been on a mountain. Jake jogged next to him with his tongue out. They had been going for maybe ten minutes when they heard it.
"Help! Help us! Oh, please, somebody!"
Finn was already going. Around the next rock the ground dropped into a pit, and the pit was full of lava, bubbling and orange and popping, and right in the middle of it, on a little rock that was getting smaller, were three gnomes. They had pointy red hats and long white beards and they were all hugging each other.
"Hold on, little guys! Jake!"
Jake stretched one arm out over the lava, real careful, and Finn climbed along it and grabbed all three gnomes at once and climbed back. It was hot enough to make his eyebrows feel crispy. He set them down on the path.
"There you go! You're safe!"
"Thank you, hero," said the first gnome. "Thank you so much."
"Now that we're free," said the second one, "we can do what we've always wanted."
"Kill old ladies," said the third one.
Finn laughed, because that had to be a joke. Then the gnomes ran off up the path, and around the corner there were two old ladies sitting on a bench knitting, and the gnomes jumped on them.
"NO! No, no, no! STOP!" Finn's sword was shaking in his hand. "I did that! I saved them and now they're... Jake, I DID that!"
Jake grabbed all three gnomes by their hats in one big paw, walked them back to the pit, and dropped them in. Plop, plop, plop. Then he came back and put his other paw on Finn's head.
"Buddy. Hey. Look at me." He turned Finn's face toward him. "It's a trial. It's fake. The mountain's testing you, man. Making you feel like a bad guy to see what you do about it."
Finn looked back at the bench. The old ladies were gone. There wasn't even any knitting.
"...So I passed?"
"You looked like you were gonna barf. That's a pass if I ever saw one."
Finn wiped his nose on his arm. He felt about a hundred times better, and also a little bit like barfing, but Jake was right about that being a pass.
...
The little man's name was the Key-per. Ray found that out around lunch, about two hours into a story about every hero who had ever tried the mountain.
"...and then there was the one with the three heads who couldn't agree on the riddle, and the one who brought his mother, and the one who tried to pick the lock with a fish, which I still don't understand, and he didn't either..."
"Was any of them human?"
"Human? Oh, I couldn't tell you. I don't look at faces much. I look at hands, mostly, to see who can turn a key." The Key-per patted Ray's knee. "Have you eaten? I have crackers."
Ray had candy shrimp and the Key-per had crackers; they had a pretty good lunch on the rock. Ray was starting to think this was the best trial on the whole mountain.
Then something roared on the other side of the wall.
It was a deep, big sound, the kind that made the rocks under his butt hum. Ray was on his feet before he decided to be. There was a boulder next to the wall, half as high as the wall itself, and he went up it on his hands and knees and got his chin over the top.
There was an ogre in there. It was the size of a house, grey and lumpy, with a little vest and a face like a potato somebody had sat on. It was standing in the middle of the path with its mouth closed and its cheeks puffed out, and Finn was standing in front of it looking up.
"I ate your dog," the ogre said, with its mouth full. "He's dead now."
"You give him back!" Finn's voice cracked all the way up the cliff. Ray looked for the orange and didn't find it anywhere.
'He's fine. He's fine, he's a dog made of rubber, he's in there doing the thumb thing or something.' His heart didn't believe any of that.
The ogre was reaching for Finn. Finn had his sword up and was backing toward the cliff, and there was nowhere to back to.
Ray grabbed a rock off the top of the boulder. It was about the size of a grapefruit. He threw it as hard as he could, and it bounced off the back of the ogre's head with a sound like a coconut.
"HEY! HEY, UGLY! Up here!"
The ogre turned around, very slowly, looking for whoever was yelling. Ray threw another rock. This one missed by a mile.
"Yeah, you! The potato! Your vest is ugly!"
"You can't do that!" The Key-per was hopping at the bottom of the boulder. "That's cheating! You're not in the trial!"
"I'm outside!" Ray threw a third rock. "Technically!"
It was only a few seconds. That was all the ogre spent looking at the wall, squinting and confused. But Finn had seen something in those few seconds, Ray could tell from the way the kid's whole face lit up, and then Finn was running straight up the ogre's leg.
He went up its pants, up its vest, and into its back pocket, and came out holding a dollar bill. It was the biggest dollar Ray had ever seen, about the size of a bedsheet. Finn grabbed the two top corners, jumped off the ogre's shoulder, and caught the wind like a kite.
"Holy shit," Ray said quietly.
Finn swung around in a big circle and came back, feet first, right into the ogre's stomach. The ogre folded in half. Its mouth opened, and Jake came out of it in one long, sticky, orange rope, and hit the ground, and sat up, and said, "Gross."
Ray's knees went loose on the boulder, and he had to grab the top of the wall. 'Oh, thank fuck.'
The ogre didn't fight anymore. It sat down on the path and started to cry, big wet sobs, and pointed at Finn.
"That's my dollar! You stole my dollar! I'm gonna have you arrested!"
Finn looked at the dollar in his hands. He looked at the ogre. Then he walked over, folded it up as neatly as he could, which wasn't very neatly, and gave it back.
"Sorry," he said. "You shouldn't have eaten my brother, though."
The ogre sniffled and put the dollar in its pocket.
Ray slid back down the boulder and sat on the bottom of it. The Key-per was still glaring at him, with his little arms crossed.
"That's going in my report."
"Put it in. Put it in big letters." Ray couldn't stop grinning. "You see that? With the dollar? That's my little brother."
By the middle of the afternoon the Key-per was yawning so hard his helmet creaked. He got up and brushed off his robe.
"Well, it's nearly my bedtime. I go to bed early. Gatekeeping is very tiring." He pulled a little key out from somewhere in his robe and let himself through a tiny door in the side of the big gate. "Don't touch anything!"
...
At the very top of the mountain there was a tower, and in the tower there was a Magician.
He was tall and skinny, in a dark robe with stars on it, and he had a long face and long fingers, and he wiggled them at Finn before Finn could even get his sword up. Then the tower was gone.
Finn was standing somewhere pink and squishy. The ground went up and down a little under his feet, like it was breathing.
"Welcome," said the Magician's voice, from everywhere, "to my brain."
"Ew!"
Something came out of the squishy pink. It was a big red beast, shaped like a heart, with arms and teeth, and it was mad. Finn fought it. That part was easy, actually, because it was big and slow and evil, and evil things were easy. He chopped it right down the middle, and it fell over.
"Very good," said the voice. "Now. One more thing."
Something tiny was walking across the ground in front of him. Finn crouched down. It was an ant. It was a regular little brown ant, minding its own business, carrying a crumb.
"Smash it."
Finn looked at the ant. The ant didn't look at him. It just kept walking with its crumb.
"Why? What did it do?"
"Does it matter? Smash it, and the book is yours."
Finn thought about it, really thought about it, the way Jake had said to. The heart beast had been evil. The gnomes had been evil, or pretend evil. The ant wasn't anything. It was just going somewhere with a crumb.
"No," he said. "It's not evil. It's neutral."
"It's an ant."
"Yeah! A neutral ant!" Finn stood up. "I'm not smashing it!"
The pink went away. He was back in the tower, and the Magician was standing right in front of him, looking surprised, with his robe hanging open a little at the bottom. Finn kicked him as hard as he could, right where it counted.
The Magician made a noise like a stepped-on accordion and went down, and kept going down, and turned into smoke, and the smoke went out the window.
"YEAH!" Finn spun around with his sword up, still all fired up. "Who's next? Who wants some?"
A little figure in red came around the corner, with horns and a pointy tail. Finn punched it in the stomach.
"OOF! Ow! Ow, no! They're my pajamas!" The Key-per was lying on the floor holding his middle. He had on red devil pajamas with a little hood with horns on it, and slippers. "It's bedtime! I always wear these!"
"Oh no. Oh no, I'm so sorry!"
"Dude," Jake said, from the doorway, "you punched the doorman."
Then the wall at the back of the tower opened up, and the biggest guy Finn had ever seen came through it, ducking. He had the head of a bull and the body of a guy who did a lot of push-ups, and he was flexing even while he walked.
"CONGRATULATIONS!" he boomed. "I'm Mannish Man! You did it, kid! The book is yours! Come on, come on!" He turned around. "And somebody go get the tall guy from the gate. He can come up now. He threw rocks at the ogre."
...
The picnic was on a flat rock at the very top of Cragdor, with the sun going down orange behind everything. Ray sat with a plate of spaghetti that the Key-per had made one-handed, his other hand still on his stomach. There were also two old ladies knitting at the end of the rock. Finn kept pointing at them with his fork and whispering "That's them, that's totally them," and they didn't explain anything.
Finn sat in the middle of all of it, holding the Enchiridion in his lap like a baby.
It was a big book. It was old and heavy, with a gold clasp, and Finn kept running his hand over the cover like he couldn't believe it was real. Ray didn't blame him. The kid had earned every page of it, and he had done it with a dollar and a refusal to kill an ant, and Ray was going to bring that up at every dinner for the rest of his life.
"Open it," Jake said. "Come on. Chapter one."
Finn opened it somewhere in the middle instead. He read the title out loud before his brain caught up with his mouth.
"Chapter Five. How to Kiss a Pr..."
The glass ball that Mannish Man had brought up the mountain lit up. It was sitting on the rock next to the spaghetti, and suddenly there was a face in it, pink, with a crown.
"Finn? Is that you?" Bubblegum leaned closer to her end. "Did you get it? What are you reading?"
Finn slammed the book shut so fast that his hair went up.
"NOTHING! Nothing! Rules! It's rules!"
Mannish Man laughed so hard that his arms flexed by themselves.
They left as it got dark, Ray and Finn riding on Jake. Finn didn't put the book away. He sat in front of Ray with it open on Jake's head, turning pages by the last of the light, slow at first and then faster.
"What're you looking for?" Ray asked.
"Lightning." Finn turned another page. "Or breathing. Or, like, swords that go fwoosh." He turned another. "There's monster stuff. There's princess stuff. There's a lot of princess stuff."
He got to the end. He went back to the start and went through it again.
Then he closed it, and twisted around on Jake's head, and looked at Ray with his whole face.
"It's not in here," he said. "So you're gonna teach me."