Anton felt that familiar tug, the desire he’d wrestled with for two months, to go to a scrying pool and cast a stone and whisper the name Jude Weatherbourne into the ripples. To know where he was, to see it on a map and draw his fingers across the distance between them. But the temptation would be too strong. He had to stay focused on the journey ahead. On the impossible task before him.

When he felt he could put it off no longer, Anton rose to get dressed. As he pulled on his worn riding leathers and a rough-hewn shirt, the tent flap fluttered open and a familiar chiming esha filtered over him.

“If you came to fetch me yourself, I must be really late for breakfast,” he said, spinning around to face the Wanderer.

“You need your energy,” she said. “We’re headed through the Black Snow Pass today.”

Once they made it through the pass, they would reach the Bay of Tarsepolis, where a ship waited to take them across the Pelagos, back to Kerameikos, the former stronghold of the Order of the Last Light. It was not a place Anton was particularly thrilled to return to, but it held the key to his plan.

Anton followed the Wanderer out of the tent and toward the smell of cooking meat. Ziga and Tomo waved Anton over to the firepit. The two of them, along with three others from various Inshuu tribes, had agreed to guide Anton and the Wanderer over the Inshuu Steppe.

After the destruction of Behezda, when the Wanderer had found Anton crouched in the rubble of the tomb, they had sailed up the River of Mercy to the Inshuu Steppe where they had taken refuge in a place that Anton thought only existed in legends.

The Wandering City.

While there were only six Prophetic Cities, this place belonged to the Wanderer. It was where she had hidden after the other Prophets turned their backs on her. Pallas had made sure that no monuments would be built in her honor and no city would bear her name, but there was still this—a city that wasn’t a city, a city that existed in the hearts and minds of thousands of different tribes in the Inshuu Steppe, carried with them wherever they went. A city that came into being when they put the call out to the steppe.

It had been centuries since the last time the Wandering City had gathered. They hadn’t needed it, not until now. Not until the destruction of Behezda, the resurrection of the ancient god. The Age of Darkness.

Anton had needed it, too. The Wandering City had sheltered him, given him a place to regain his strength over the past two months, and offered time for the Wanderer to make good on her promise to train Anton in how to wield his powers as a Prophet.