The plan, Sarl announced after conferring with Lord Kosoter, was simply to continue with all possible haste. Odds were, he told them, they would encounter nothing at all, given the vast extent of Cil-Aujas. Odds were, whatever destroyed the Bloody Picks had withdrawn to the depths to lick their wounds and to count their spoils. Nevertheless, they were to march “on the sharp,” as he put it, which meant without undue noise and with eyes and hearts and weapons held ready. “From here on in,” he ground out, “we’ll be the only ghosts in these halls.”

These words, Achamian was quite certain, had been directed at him.

They resumed their march, skirting the flanks of the enormous collapse, walking for the most part beyond the tailings thrown by the catastrophe. The twin lights soundlessly mapped the tangle of debris, painting this or that clutch of monolithic stone, throwing double shadows that here and there resembled wings. The ancient slaughter, or whatever it was that had scattered so many dead across these reaches, continued to choke the floor, but the bones were so reed-brittle that the scalpers kicked through them the way they might humps of grass. With every step, Achamian saw knobs and shards of mouldered bone thrown free of the dust. He found himself wondering if this was the place …

The place where grief had burned through the rind of worldly things.

“How?” Mimara whispered in Ainoni from below his shoulder, her tone such that he immediately knew she referred to the dead scalper. “I saw no sorcery, and neither did you—I could see it in your face. So how could a heart have an eye in it?”

He found himself glancing to either side, counting those who might overhear. “Has anyone told you what happened when the First Holy War camped on the Plains of Mengedda?”

“Of course. The Battleplain. The earth began vomiting the dead within it. Mother told me that bones choked the grasses.”

He swallowed rather than immediately reply. There was much he had intended to say, but a chorus of unwanted memories knelled through him, of how he and her mother had fled the Plains of Mengedda for the mountains, of how they had loved between sunlit trees …

And declared themselves man and wife.

“This is like that.”

He could almost taste the sourness of her pause. “I feel enlightened already.”

She had a Gift for smacking the generosity from him, he would grant her that much.

“Look,” he said. “The boundaries between the World and Outside are like those between waking and sleep, reason and madness. Wherever the World slumbers or goes mad, the boundaries break down, and the Outside leaks through …” He glanced about to make sure no one was listening. “This place is a topos, like I already said. We literally walk the verge of Hell.”

When she failed to immediately reply, Achamian congratulated himself on having silenced her.