This was uncharacteristic. Not the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry’s expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, “apocalypse” was a word with a different meaning.

Achamian nodded in Seswatha’s slow and deliberate way. “You mean the No-God,” he said with a small laugh—a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving, more abstraction than catastrophe.

How did one relive such ancient ignorance?

Celmomas’s long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The totem braided into his beard—a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in gold—seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.

“What if this … this thing … is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?”

“We are not too late.”

Silence fell upon them as in a tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick the decorative plaster, no matter how bright the paint or gorgeous the tapestries, the lintelled ceilings hung just as low, humming with the weight of oppressive stone.

“You, Seswatha,” the High-King said, returning his gaze to the plate. “You are the only one. The only one I trust.”

Achamian thought of his Queen, her buttocks against his hips, her calves hooked hot and hungry about his waist.

The High-King moved a stone, a move that Seswatha had not foreseen, and the rules changed in the most disastrous way possible. What had been opportunity found itself twisted inside out, stamped into something as closed and as occluded as the future.

Achamian was almost relieved …

“I have built a place … a refuge …” Anasûrimbor Celmomas said. “A place where my line can outlive me.”

Ishuäl …

Sucking musty air, Achamian shot upright in bed. He grabbed his white maul, pressed his head to his knees. The Long-Braid Falls thundered beyond the timbered walls, a white background roar that seemed to give the blackness mass and momentum. “Ishuäl,” he murmured. “A place …” He looked up to the heavens, as though peering through the obscurity of his room’s low ceiling. “But where is it?”

Whining ears, sorting through the fibres of sound: laughter from the floor, breaking like a bubble in boiling pitch; shouts calling out the streets, daring and proclaiming.

“Where?”

The truth of men lay in their origins. He knew this as only a Mandate Schoolman could. Anasûrimbor Kellhus had not come to the Three Seas by accident. He had not found his half-brother waiting for him as Shriah of the Thousand Temples by accident. He had not conquered the known world by accident!