Rampuri Tan hadn’t told them shit about the place, which was probably a good thing, since Valyn was having trouble believing the little he’d already heard. Evidently, the kenta was down there, somewhere. Evidently Kaden and Tan could use it to travel halfway around the world in a single step. The whole thing sounded ludicrous, but after eight years training with leaches, after seeing what Talal and Balendin could do with their strange powers, after Valyn’s own experience in Hull’s Hole, he was less ready to dismiss Kaden’s story of the gates out of hand. Still, it would have helped to know what the ’Kent-kissing things looked like.

Valyn had hoped he might get a description of what they were searching for—dimensions, features—but Kaden didn’t seem to know much more about the gates than the Csestriim bit, and all the monk would say was, “You find the city, and I will take us to the kenta.”

“Well, here’s the city,” Valyn muttered, flexing his freezing sword hand to regain some motion while checking over his straps. He flicked a little hand sign at Gwenna: aided dismount, short perimeter check. She nodded impatiently, already loosening Triste’s buckles for the drop. Valyn signaled to Laith with a few tugs on the straps, and the flier banked Suant’ra slightly to bring her down right at the base of the cliff, a few dozen paces from the stairs and windows.

This place had better be dead, Valyn thought, as the cracked stone loomed up beneath him.

The drops went better than he could have hoped. Both monks followed instructions perfectly, as though they’d spent days memorizing them; Triste was almost light enough to catch; and Pyrre, who looked like she was going to bust her head open, tucked into the fall at the last minute and rolled to her feet chuckling. Annick and Gwenna didn’t wait for the others to regain their balance before darting off, blades out, to check the perimeter, one outward into the high grass, the other, after lighting a storm lantern, into the gaping mouth of the city itself.

“As I often say after a night of drinking,” Pyrre remarked, glancing over to where Laith and Talal had landed the birds, “I would have enjoyed that more if we had done less of it.”

“Long flights take a while to get used to,” Valyn replied, careful to hide the fact that he, too, felt stiff and sore from hanging in the harness, wind-chapped and cold right down in his marrow. The assassin claimed to be on their side, but so far, the people who were supposed to be on their side had proven astoundingly eager to kill them, and Valyn had no desire to reveal more to the woman than he had to. He turned instead to Rampuri Tan.

“Tell me this is the place.”

The monk nodded. “It is farther north than I realized.”