The swim was mercifully shorter than Valyn had expected, but the climb above proved brutal—seventy feet of narrow ledges made even more treacherous by the darkness, their sodden boots, and the crumbling mortar of the old tower itself. Three times Valyn trusted his weight to seemingly solid stone only to have it give when he tried to move up on it, ripping clear of the wall to plummet into the lapping waves below, leaving him to cling desperately with one hand while the other scrabbled for purchase.

It was painstaking, difficult work, but Valyn found it strangely calming. There were few decisions to make—this stone or that, this ledge or that—and the consequences of each choice were immediate: the rock crumbled, or it did not. No lies. No deception. No one to kill. His body warmed with the exertion, and his focus narrowed to the vertical swath of stone immediately above and below him. He was almost disappointed when he reached the roof, pulling up and over onto the rough boards, though his forearms ached and the tips of his fingers bled.

For a moment he just laid on his back, staring at the stars, each one a hole stabbed in the darkness. Then Talal’s voice pulled him back to the present.

“Someone’s been working hard,” he murmured, nodding toward the eastern bank of the Black. “They’ve got the place locked up tight.”

Valyn rolled onto his stomach, then pulled the long lens from his oilskin.

“What’ve we got?”

Talal nodded into the darkness. “Looks like the bridge is out, destroyed, like you said. Hard to say in the darkness.”

Between the fires and the stars, the night was plenty bright to Valyn, and when he raised the lens to his eye, the chopped pilings leapt immediately into view, jagged teeth stabbing up from the mud flats on either side of the central channel, a few stray planks strewn about.

“I wonder who warned them?” he said, scanning the town below.

The place was a hive of activity, men and women pushing and pulling all manner of carts, some filled with tools, others loaded high with tables or logs, while children scurried through the streets, shouting messages to the adults. It was chaotic, but after watching for a few minutes, Valyn could start to see a kind of order imposed on the madness: laden carts headed east, toward what appeared to be some sort of barricade on the far bank of the East Island, then returned filled with food and jugs of water, all manner of provisions. Valyn followed the activity to a knot of figures in the small town square, brought the leader into focus, then almost dropped the lens.

“Holy Hull,” he breathed, then found himself laughing, joy and relief washing over him like a cool wave back on the Islands, scrubbing away for just a moment all the doubt and the anger. “Meshkent, Ananshael, and holy black Hull.”