Red walls, dark as blood, stretched away in both directions. Aside from the crenellations and guard towers punctuating their length, they might have been some ancient feature of the earth itself rather than the work of human hands, a sheer cliff thrust fifty feet into the air, impassable, implacable. Even unguarded, those walls would pose a serious problem to any foe, and yet, it was never the red walls that drew the eye, for inside them stood a thicket of graceful towers: the Jasmine Lance and the White, Yvonne’s and the Crane, the Floating Hall, any one of them magnificent enough to house a king. In another city, a single one of those towers would have dominated the skyline, but in Annur, in the Dawn Palace, they looked like afterthoughts, curiosities, the whim of some idle architect. The eye slid right past them, past and above, scaling the impossible height of Intarra’s Spear.

Even after twenty years in the Dawn Palace, Adare’s mind still balked at the dimensions of the central tower. Partly it was the height. The spire reached so high it seemed to puncture the firmament, to scratch the blue from the sky. Climbing to the top of the Spear took the better part of a morning provided you started well before dawn, and in years past, some of Annur’s aging emperors had been known to take days to make the trip, sleeping at way stations set up inside the structure.

The way stations were a later addition. Everything inside the tower—the stairs, the floors, the interior rooms—was an addition, human cleverness cobbled onto the inside of a tower older than human thought. Only the walls were original, walls cut or carved or forged from a substance clear and bright as winter ice, smooth as glass, stronger than tempered steel. From the chambers inside, you could look straight through those walls, out onto the streets and buildings of Annur and beyond, far beyond, well out over the Broken Bay and west into the Ghost Sea. People journeyed from across the empire, from beyond her borders, just to gape at this great, scintillating needle. As much as the legions or the fleet, Intarra’s Spear, its presence at the very heart of the Dawn Palace, drove home the inevitability of Annurian might.

And it’s all just a few hundred paces from this, Adare reflected as she turned her back on the palace.