Achamian pursed his lips, shook his head in a way that made him feel campfire wise and mountain sad. “The King of Cil-Aujas was not so discriminate in his dying,” he said, staring into the pulsing coals. “According to the legends, all Men bears this curse.

“We are all Sons of Nostol. We all bear the stamp of his frailty.”

The following morning revealed cloudless skies, the clarity measured in the concave spine of the mountains fading to purple as they reached into the horizon, the cold measured in the white that capped their ragged heights. Sunlight glared nascent from hanging fields of snow, flashed gold and silver. It sharpened the breath, simply staring.

The company loaded their mules with little or no conversation, then set out toward the Ziggurat. What Lord Kosoter had called the Low Road seemed anything but. Not only was it little more than a track, it climbed far more than otherwise, following the course of various ridges, before dropping into some gullied interval to scale higher courses. But always, however circuitous its route, it stalked the great fissure that hoofed the Ziggurat’s knuckled base. No matter what earth-and-rock enormity the Low Road placed before them, the fissure inevitably climbed back into view, larger, darker, more sinister for the concentration of detail.

The mighty oaks and elms of previous days had yielded altogether, giving way to scrawny poplars and twisted screw pine where trees could be found at all. Most of the time the company scuffed and clopped across expanses of bare stone, surrounded by the wind-combed remains of the previous year’s bracken. Everything seemed to shiver. Everything that had once lived.

It was long past noon ere they descended into the delta of gorges at the base of the great fissure. The Ziggurat, by this time, occupied the whole of the sky before them, cowing them into consensual silence. They tramped onward in a kind of stupor. The Coffers were forgotten, as was the distraction of Mimara’s hips. Perhaps it was the humility of seeing fundamentals upended, the very ground wracked and beaten, hauled into scarps and slopes, heaved to heights that could defeat sun and clouds let alone the aspirations of mere men. Perhaps it was the weight of the inexpressible, the hard bone of the world rearing into horns that hooked the skirts of heaven. The titanic precipices, the pulverizing leaps, the distances ramping into the clouds. The Skin Eaters, each in their own way, seemed to understand that this was the prototype, what tyrants aped with their God-mocking works, mountains into monument, migrations into pageant and parade. This was the most primordial rule—the world itself—too vast, too elemental, to be called sacred or holy.

And it weakened the knees, as all true spectacle should.

The Ziggurat had become as much argument as mountain, posed not in claims or premises, but in immensities, in features that encompassed experience, saying, murmuring, You are small … So very small.