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.

They climbed what stairs they could find, up through the remnants of ancient pleasure-palaces. They saw all the same motifs and architectural flourishes, the same crazed density of image, that had so awed them in the galleries below. But for some reason it seemed tragic, pathetic even, exposed as it was by cracked walls and vanished ceilings. The work of a race that had gone insane for staring inward.