Dorian glanced at Ashaiah Vul. The man, of course, had his eyes averted. He wouldn’t dare to disapprove of a Godking’s decisions, or to even look at a Godking’s woman. “I’m afraid I’m going to go see something remarkably unpleasant. You don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it. You should probably wait in the throne room. I’ll be back shortly.” Dorian turned.

“I do want to see it,” Jenine interjected. Ashaiah Vul gasped at her audacity, then studied the floor once more as both of them looked at him, his face going red.

“A thousand pardons, my lord, I spoke hastily. Forgive my rudeness,” Jenine said. She chewed her lip. “I—My father never looked at things he didn’t want to see, and it got him and my whole family killed, our country laid waste. Dealing with things we don’t like is part of ruling. My father refused to do it because he was weak and venal. How else am I to learn if not from you?”

“What I’m going to see is beyond anything your father had to deal with, real or imagined,” Dorian said.

“Even so.” Jenine was unmoved, and Dorian couldn’t help but smile. He loved her strength, even as it surprised him.

“Very well,” he said. “Ashaiah, show us what you were going to show me alone. All of it.”

Ashaiah Vul said nothing, pretended to have no opinion—and maybe, in fact, had no opinion. A God-king’s unwelcome order was like a day of unwelcome weather. You might not like it, but you didn’t have any illusions that you could change it, either. So Ashaiah took them deep into the bowels of the Citadel, and then into the tunnels of the mountain itself. Dorian could smell vir on the man, though not much. He was at best a meister of the third shu’ra.

Finally, Ashaiah Vul stopped in front of a door that looked like any of the hundreds of others this deep in the Citadel. The dust in this hall was so thick it was more like soil, and it was plain that this room hadn’t been visited any more recently than any of the others. He unlocked the door and opened it.

Dorian held his vir as he followed the Lodricari into the darkness. His first sensation was that this room was huge, cavernous. The air was musty, thick, fetid.

Ashaiah mumbled an incantation and Dorian snapped three shields into place around both himself and Jenine. A moment later, light coursed up the arch where Ashaiah held his hand against the wall. It spread from arch to arch, across a painted ceiling over a hundred feet above. In a few seconds, light bathed the chamber.