Curses filled the silence, some murmured, others spoken quite out loud. Such was the monumental delicacy, the profusion of figure and detail, that the forms seemed more revealed than rendered, as though the sheeted cliffs were naught but mud rinsed from the stone of ossified souls. Even half-ruined, there was too much, too much beauty, too much detail, and certainly too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacted on simpler souls. It was a place that begged to be challenged, overthrown.

For the first time, Achamian thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol’s betrayal.

“What are we doing?” Mimara whispered from his side.

“Recalling ourselves … I think.”

“Look,” Xonghis said in his deadpan accent. “The other companies …” He nodded to the left serpentine pillar: Various symbols had been scratched into the lower coils, childish white slashes across weathered scales. “Their signs.”

The Skin Eaters gathered round, careful to heed the invisible line that marked the entrance side of the pillar. Xonghis knelt between two of the rattle tails, which rose like roots, each thicker than a man. He ran his outstretched fingers and palm over each mark, as though testing extinguished fires for heat. Different Skin Eaters called out the names of the companies they recognized as he did so. He lingered over the sign of a weeping eye. “This one,” he said, looking back significantly, “was marked the most recently.”

“The Bloody Picks,” Galian said, frowning. “They left, when?”

“More than a fortnight ago,” Pokwas replied.

The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was heartbreak in these furtive marks, a childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of fortune.

“See,” Achamian heard Kiampas mutter to Sarl. “There …” He followed the direction of the man’s finger, saw what looked like a Galeoth kite-shield chalked long and skinny across the lower coils of the serpents.

“The High Shields, as I said.”

“It can’t be their sign,” Sarl snapped, as though assertion alone could make things true. “Their bones lie on the Long Side.” Even as he said this he stooped to fetch a stone from his feet. Everyone watched as he began scratching the mark of the Skin Eaters across one of the serpent’s backs: a mandible with gumless teeth.

“What I would like to know,” Sarl said, the gravel of his tone rendered thin and abrasive by the soaring works of glass and stone, “is how we could have gone so long without coming here.”

His meaning was plain. The Skin Eaters were a legend, as was this place, and all legends were drawn together sooner or later—such was the song that decided all things. Such was the logic.