The bones spoke clearly enough. Skeletons littered the wide hallways and narrow rooms of the orphanage, skeletons of children, hundreds and hundreds, some on the cusp of adulthood, others no more than infants, their ribs narrower than Kaden’s fingers. The grinding passage of years had dismembered most, but enough of the tiny forms remained intact—huddled in corners, collapsed in hallways, clutching one another beneath the stairs—to speak of some horror sweeping down upon them, sudden and unimagined.

Kaden had tried to ask Tan about the city, but Valyn was pushing hard for them to get upstairs, and the older monk, after the strange diversion at the entrance, seemed just as determined to reach the topmost floor and the kenta that waited there. When Kaden posed a question as they climbed, Tan had turned that implacable glare upon him.

“Focus on the present,” he’d said, “or join the past.”

Kaden tried to follow the advice as they mounted the stairs, tried to watch for hidden dangers and unexpected threats, to float on the moment like a leaf on a stream, but his eyes kept drifting back to the skeletons.

Half-remembered stories of the Atmani bubbled up in his mind, of the bright empire founded by the leach-lords, then shattered by their insanity and greed. According to the tales, they had razed entire cities as they descended into madness, but if Kaden’s childhood memories served, their empire had been almost entirely confined to Eridroa. It hadn’t come within a thousand miles of the Bone Mountains, and besides, the Atmani had ruled millennia after the Csestriim. He stepped over another sprawled skeleton, staring at the tiny, grasping hands.

It could have been a sickness, he told himself, some sort of plague.

Only, victims of plague did not retreat into closets or try to barricade doors. Victims of plague did not have their small skulls hacked in two. The bones were ancient, but as Kaden stepped over skeleton after skeleton, he could read the story. There had been no attempt to move the bodies, no effort to lay them out for burning and burial as one would expect if anyone had survived the slaughter. Even across the still chasm of time, he could read the shock and panic of the dead.