His memories of the city, sketched in his young mind before he’d ever heard of the Shin or the saama’an, were bright but static: the looming red walls of the Dawn Palace, the crystalline spike of Intarra’s Spear, the pale green of the copper roofs and the dark green of the canals, the white of the statues along the Godsway, and the bottomless blue of the Broken Bay, stretching away to the east. The shapes, too, he remembered, a jumbled geometry of warehouses and palaces, straight streets and crooked alleyways. Everything else, he had forgotten: the noise, the smell, the press of bodies. The heat.

Even in the relative tranquillity of the graveyard, he could feel the city moving around him like some great, feverish beast, and when they slipped through the gate and into the streets, he felt as though Annur had swallowed him whole. The clatter of carts over the flagstones, the clop of hooves, the shouting of drivers and pedestrians jostling for space on the surrounding streets all but obliterated the rustle of the wind-tossed leaves.

Kaden half-expected everyone they passed to stop, stare, exclaim. After all, the three of them, though mostly dry, were still wearing the same mismatched, tattered garb in which they’d fled the Ishien. In Ashk’lan, someone would have noticed instantly, but Annur was not Ashk’lan. This city of a million souls threw her own cloak over them, an anonymity thicker than any wool, while she veiled the eyes of the passers-by in their own busy indifference.

Eyes safely hidden inside the hood of his cloak, Kaden walked through the streets as though in a dream, a stranger exploring the maze of his own memories. After the vast, cool emptiness of Ashk’lan, where half the world was sky, the city felt almost unbearably present. The reek of sizzling oil, of garlic, of peppers and frying fish made him feel as though he was half choking, while the constant tolling of gongs and bells made it hard to sort his thoughts into any type of order.

For a while he just followed Kiel, keeping his eyes down to hide his gaze and to limit the riot of color and motion battering at his mind. Outside the vaniate, he could feel for the first time what had happened back in those final awful moments in the Dead Heart. That Rampuri Tan was dead or a prisoner of the Ishien there could be no doubt, and yet questions and doubts, like so many carrion crows, circled and circled. Had Kaden himself, through some idiotic slipup, caused the attack? He went over the events again and again, studying in his mind the scenes in his cell, in the corridors beyond. Had he made too much noise? Had he botched the timing? There was no way to know. There was only the fact: Tan was gone while he, Kaden, was free, walking the streets of Annur.