“Your name doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. You are Dirik’s knife. Or Ky’s. Or Shihjahin’s . . .” He trailed off as the scrap of flame rose and spread, stretching out like a net, floating, Adare realized, for her. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat, opened her mouth to scream, and vomited instead, her whole body trembling and weak. She glanced at the walls, but they looked higher, steeper than they had from above. She might have been standing at the bottom of a well.

“I will cut away the layers,” Oshi rasped, showing his teeth, “strip the skin from your face, flay the muscle from your bone, deeper and deeper, until I find out whose creature you are.”

The great web stretched wide just a pace in front of Adare, swaying like a snake, the strands shifting and flexing. Oshi started to ball his hands into fists. Adare sobbed once, paralyzed, and then Nira was there at the rim of the pit, cane brandished before her as though to beat back the horrible, writhing kenning.

“Roshin,” she snapped, voice laden with anger and grief, but hard, determined. “Roshin! Stop this at once.”

Roshin, Adare thought, a tiny part of her brain still calm, curious, a stone unmoved by the buffeting terror. The fifth of the Atmani, the brother of . . . “Rishinira,” she breathed, turning to the small woman behind her. It was impossible. The Atmani were ancient history, practically myth, destroyed by their own madness and paranoia. The Deaths of the Undying were familiar tales, a favorite subject of painters for more than a thousand years: Dirik and Ky, wrapped in a fatal embrace, a desperate clutch that might have been love, save for his hand on her throat and her fingers gouging at his eyes. Chirug-ad-Dobar impaled on Shihjahin’s lance, and Shihjahin’s own stand, the lone leach atop his rocky hill, land boiling about him as his own armies closed in. They were dead, dead and gone.

Not all of them, Adare reminded herself.

The fates of the youngest of the Atmani—Roshin and Rishinira—were unknown. Some historians claimed that they perished early in the civil wars that rent both the empire and the land itself. Others argued that they fell in the final siege of Hrazadin, their bodies broken and lost beneath the rubble. There were, naturally, a few dissenting voices, stubborn writers who insisted that the last of the Atmani had somehow escaped the violence and destruction engulfing half of Eridroa. Lian Ki’s most famous painting, Flight of the Immortals, depicted two cloaked figures, tiny inside a frame filled with fire and destruction, picking their way across the blasted landscape toward the inky darkness of the horizon. Lian had cloaked their faces in shadow, and Adare stared at the woman behind her, then at the man.

“Roshin,” Nira said again, gesturing to the web. “Put it away. At once!”