“She’s gone,” Tan said. If he felt at all sorry for the girl’s annihilation, he didn’t show it. “See to your own.”

Then the monk rose into the smoke, stepped forward, and vanished.

Gone. The two monks and Triste. The Emperor was safe.

Valyn spun back to face the attacker. So all the Flea’s offers of talk had been bullshit, a ruse. Valyn drew his second blade, ready to hurl himself at the attacker, then paused. There was something about those boots; Pyrre’s boots.

“Wait, Gwenna,” he shouted, rolling away from the gate. “They’re not . . .” Too late. The charges were already exploding, sharp cracks followed by the deafening rumble of stone folding in on itself. Valyn took a bearing on the location of the hole, cursing to himself as he slid into a crouch, readying himself to jump as soon as the rumbling ceased. If they’d had any hope of talking their way free, it was over now, or as good as. The only thing now was to get out, to get clear.

Only, the rumbling didn’t stop. The whole building was shuddering beneath him now, stone falling from the ceiling at the same time as the floor dropped away. He couldn’t see a ’Kent-kissing thing, shrouded as he was in smoke, but he could hear the structure protesting. He took a tentative step backward, away from the source of the explosion, and then, with a sickening lurch, the stone beneath his feet gave way.

9

Go over it again,” Nira said, prodding Adare in the gut with her cane.

Adare tried to swat it away, but the old woman was too fast, swinging the stick clear in a wide arc, then swatting her across the backside. The treatment was infuriating, humiliating, and terrifying all at once, but somehow Nira had ferreted out her identity, which meant that, until Adare found a solution to the problem, she had no choice but to endure the endless cursing and the welts crisscrossing her ass.

“Again,” Nira insisted.

The second morning of the pilgrimage should have been pleasant—the air was cool and damp, the sun warm overhead, the reek of the city giving way to the smell of grass and dirt and growing things. The buildings were gone, replaced by wide fields, open sky, and the green-brown thread of the canal flowing out of the south, bearing colorful, narrow boats loaded high and bound for Annur. Adare couldn’t see all the far-off details through her blindfold, but she could make out the colors, the generous contours of the countryside, the space.