Isabelle sent a runner back to warn Similce’s party about the side roads, and then pressed on. Over the next several hours the world flickered again and again. There seemed to be no pattern to the timing of the appearances, but each event was growing longer, the smoke images lingering until they seemed to be running through a haze of half-seen other places.

“Capitaine!” Rebecca’s voice raced ahead of her as she swooped in under the canopy. “We found it!”

“The Vault?” Isabelle asked. “How far ahead is it?” They might survive this yet.

“Ah. Not the Vault exactly, the flower.” She held up a Saint’s Promise flower, only slightly crushed by its hectic flight.

Isabelle took a deep breath to stop herself from howling in thwarted hope. “Good job,” she said. “How far ahead?”

“Not … too far,” Rebecca said uncertainly. “There’s a lake that’s on fire. Major … my father is looking for a way across it.”

“Father?” Jean-Claude asked.

“Later,” Isabelle said. “Any sign of Travers?”

“Not a sniff or a sneeze,” Rebecca said, which meant le comte had taken one of the many side paths they’d encountered.

Isabelle and her vanguard picked up the pace again. They tromped over a muddy hill drooping with tangled vines, and along a track that twisted around trees as big as castle towers. Time constricted around Isabelle’s throat, making it hard to breathe. Her timepiece seemed to run fast and slow at the same time.

At last they humped it over a rocky scarp and gazed down a long smooth slope. It was absolutely covered in Saint’s Promise flowers, white blooms laid out in a vast field leading down to the edge of a lake.

The Temple’s Instructions and the tales of Legend contained no detailed description of the Vault of Ages, but in the centuries since it had been abandoned, a variety of artistic traditions had taken to depicting it as a huge mausoleum either built into or resting atop a steep-sided mountain. Most had depicted it as being made of some kind of marble or granite, though Isabelle would have placed her bet on any surviving structure being made of impervious quondam metal.

She had not anticipated a burning lake. Black water with an oily sheen spread out through fractured canyon land like a many-tentacled kraken. A heavy cloud of sulfurous vapors hung close to its surface and crept onto land. Even standing on the ridge top, the stink of it made her throat bind and her eyes water. The empty carapaces of many beetles along the water’s edge warned of heavy poisonous air. All along the surface of the lake fires burned, red and angry, filling the air with columns of soot that smudged the surrounding lands to black.