The encampment was in a state of uproar as its countless denizens hastened to take advantage of the remaining daylight. The sun leaned low on Sorweel’s left, spoked the sky with arid brilliance. The Great Ordeal thronged beneath it, a veritable ocean of tents, pavilions, and packed thoroughfares, sweeping out across the bowl of the valley. The smoke of countless cooking fires steamed the air. Zaudunyani prayer calls keened over the roar, high feminine voices, filled with sorrow and exaltation. The Standard of the Scions—a horse rearing through a tipped crown on Kidruhil red—lay dead in the motionless air, yet somehow the ubiquitous Circumfix banners seemed to wave as if in some higher breeze.

“Indeed,” Obotegwa said from his side, “it is a thing of wonder, your Glory.”

“But is it real?”

The old man laughed, a brief husky wheeze. “My master will like you, I am sure.”

Sorweel continued stealing gazes across the encampment as he followed the Zeümi Obligate’s lead. He even stared at the southern horizon for several heartbeats, across miles of trampled earth, even though he knew Sakarpus had receded out of all vision. They had passed beyond the Pale into the Wilds where only Sranc roamed.

“My folk never dared ride this far from our city,” he said to Obotegwa’s back.

The old man paused to look apologetically into his face. “You must forgive my impertinence, your Glory, but it is forbidden for me to speak to you in any voice save my Master’s.”

“And yet you spoke earlier.”

A gentle smile. “Because I know what it means to be thrown over the edge of the world.”

Sorweel brooded over these words as they resumed walking, realizing they inadvertently explained what had pained his eyes when he looked southward. The Lonely City had become an edge. It had been more than conquered, its solitude had been consumed. Once an island in wicked seas, it was now a mere outpost, the terminus of something far greater, a civilization—just like the times of the Long Dead.

More than his father had been killed, he realized. His father’s world had died with him.

He blinked at the heat in his eyes, saw the Aspect-Emperor leaning over him, blond and luminous, a sunlit man in the heart of night. “I am no conqueror …”

These proved long thoughts for the short walk to Prince Zsoronga’s pavilion. He found himself within the small Zeümi enclave before he was even aware of approaching it. The Prince’s pavilion was an elaborate, high-poled affair, roofed and sided in weathered black-and-crimson leather, and chased with frayed tassels that may have once been golden but were now as pale as urine. A dozen or so smaller tents reached out to either side, completing the enclosure. Several Zeümi milled about the three firepits, staring with a directness that was neither rude nor welcoming. Anxious, Sorweel found himself considering the tall wooden post raised in the enclosure’s heart. Satyothi faces, stylized with broad noses and sensual lips, had been carved one atop another along its entire length, stacks of them staring off in various directions. This was their Pillar of Sires, he would later learn, the relic to which the Zeümi prayed the same as Sakarpi prayed to idols.