Xonghis raised a blood-dirtied hand against the glare. “That way …” he said without emotion. He pointed over the bottomless plummet of the Screw to the crater wall behind them, to where the line of the rim rose like a shark or Sranc tooth. “I recognize that from when we first approached the mountain … That way is home.” He turned back to the direction they had faced when they first ascended. “That is the Long Side.”

Achamian caught his breath.

He had not forgotten his dream in the bowel of the mountain, the dream he had sought in vain for so many years. But he had not remembered it either. Circumstances can blot the significance of our revelations as easily as otherwise. What did it matter, the realization of ardent desires, when all was death and damnation?

“Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret …”

But circumstances had changed. They had escaped Cil-Aujas, and the revelatory memories now glowed through the fog of his privations. He had dreamed it! On the very threshold of hell he had dreamed his long-sought answer. A map, two thousand years old, slumbering beneath ruin and wilderness. A map to Ishuäl, and to the truth of the Aspect-Emperor.

“Bury it,” the ancient High-King had said. “Bury it in the Coffers …”

In Marrow, Achamian had mentioned the Coffers the way a trapper baits his snare, as a crude goad meant to drive crude men. But now …

His lie. Fate was making his lie true.

The surviving Skin Eaters glanced at Xonghis, then surveyed the competing distances. But this moment, Achamian knew, had already been decided: There were no forks in the road before them. The Whore was driving them like slaves beaten toward a captor’s capital.

“Yes …” Sarl coughed and laughed. “Yesss! The Coffers, boys! The Coffers-yes!”

And there it was. Somehow they were content to let a madman sound and settle the issue. Gazing through shanks of steel-grey hair, Lord Kosoter took the first downward step.

Mobbed beneath the heat radiating from the crimson glow of the Huiritic Ring, the company followed him, trundled down a slope of snow-packed ruin, onto the flat expanse of the frozen lake. A thin carpet of snow covered its nearer reaches, so they didn’t see the ancient dead frozen beneath its surface until they had travelled a good portion of its length. Some were little more than shadows, either because the ice was clouded or they lay so deep. Others hung mere inches below the surface, strangely chapped and withered, like dead wasps in cocoons. The eyes looked like the pads of severed fingers. The mouths were all pried open, as though still, after all these ages, trying to draw air from the sky. The limbs were frozen in innumerable poses of falling. All of them were women and children.

No one spoke as they limped and tramped across them. Whatever curiosity they possessed had been beaten from them, and dread had become a constant companion.