It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.

“Mother,” she gasped.

The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. “Be still, child,” it said in a voice that crawled like beetles up out of the heart of things. It seemed that she would crack open, that her marrow would climb out and wrap her in a newer skin.

“Your brother has finally arrived. The White-Luck Warrior has come.”

The hand leaned down upon her, a sun-swallowing mountain.

“So soon?”

“No, my love. On the anointed day.”

Her body was but a string tied about an infinite iron nail, woollen tailings that trembled in an otherworldly wind.

“And the D-D-Demon?”

“Will be driven to his doom.”

Then the roar vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl. The blasted streets became a wall of onlookers, peopled by vendors, teamsters, harlots, and soldiers. And the shadow became a man, a Nansur caste-noble by the look of him, with concerned yet gentle eyes. And the hand was his hand, rubbing her poxed cheek the way you might massage a sleeping limb.

He does not fear to touch—

“It’s okay,” he was saying. “You were seized, but it’s passing. How long have you suffered the Falling Disease?”

But she ignored him—and all the others. She clawed aside his hovering hands. She fairly beat herself a path with her cane when she clambered to her feet.

What did they know of giving?

The city of Iothiah was ancient. Not so old as Sumna perhaps, but certainly older than the Thousand Temples—far older. As was the Cult of Yatwer.

The recently built Chatafet Temple in the northeast of the city was where most of Iothiah’s faithful congregated to worship, mourn, and celebrate. By all accounts, it was one of the most successful Yatwerian temples in the Three Seas, bolstered by the ever-growing number of converts among what had been, until the First Holy War, a largely heathen population. But for those initiated in the greater mysteries of the Cult, it was little more than a point of administrative pride. The true importance of Iothiah lay in the funerary maze of the Ilchara Catacombs, the great Womb-of-the-Dead.