The Dreamless—Barrick shivered at the name. Will we have to cross their lands, too? he asked.

At some point, all who go to Qul-na-Qar, the great knife of the People, the city of black towers, must cross their lands. For a moment, there was something almost like kindness in Gyir’s thoughts—almost, but not quite. But don’t fear, boy. Many survive the journey. He considered for a moment; when he spoke again, his thoughts were somber. Of course, none of your kind has yet tried it.

11

A Little Hard Work

The three children Oneyna birthed were Zmeos, the Horned Serpent, his brother Khors Moonlord, and their sister Zuriyal, who was called Merciless. And for long no one knew these three existed. But Sveros was a tyrannical ruler, and his true sons Perin, Erivor, and Kernios made compact to dethrone him. They fought courageously against him and threw him down, and then returned him to the Void of Unbeing.

—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon

THE SKIES OVER HIEROSOL were bright on this mild winter day, clouds piled high and white as the snowfall on the distant summit of Mount Sarissa and its neighbors. The thousand sails in the huge Harbor of Nektarios seemed a reflection of those clouds, as if the bay were a great green mirror.

The small inspector’s boat that had tied up beside the much larger trading vessel now cast free, the rowers ferrying the petty official back to the the harbor master’s office in the labyrinth of buildings behind the high eastern harbor wall where all legitimate business of the mighty port was transacted (and a great deal of its shadier workings, too). The trading ship, having duly submitted to the official’s inspection—a rather cursory one, noted Daikonas Vo—was now free to move toward its designated harbor slip.

Vo did not think much of the harbor master’s defenses against smuggling, and thought it likely that the lackey’s visit had been more about the ceremonial exchange of bribes for permits than any actual search for contraband, but he could not help admiring the city’s fortifications. Hierosol’s eastern peninsula, which contained most of the anchorage, was as formidable as its reputation suggested, the seawalls ten times the height of a man, studded with gunports and bristling with cannon like the quills of a porcupine. On the far side of the Kulloan Strait stood the Finger, a narrow strip of land with its own heavy fortifications. Modern planners, reexamining the walls in this new age of cannonfire, had realized that if a determined attack should overthrow the much more thinly defended areas along the Finger, the heart of Hierosol would then be vulnerable to the citadel’s own guns. Thus, they had mounted smaller guns in those forts on the western side of the isthmus facing the city—cannons which could reach the middle of the strait, well within the compass of the eastern guns, but could not themselves reach the eastern wall.

Vo respected that in his cold way, as he respected most types of careful planning. If, as rumors suggested, Autarch Sulepis truly intended a conquest of Hierosol, Xis’ ancient rival, the Golden One would have hard work laid out before him.