He shuddered. “That is the most profane thing I have ever seen,” he told her. The front of his loin-plate was bulging.

“Please,” said Amber.

“You never should have bartered with me, little one.” Zhuqa got to his feet and pulled her up beside him, grimacing his lizard-grin at the world. “Because now you are going to have to buy everything.”

But he took her out, up ten flights of stairs, past dozens of saluting, well-armed guards. He did it without any suspicion. He did it with a smile on his face. He did it without ever thinking in any way that she could sense how vulnerable that one little vein might be and how readily he’d put her on her knees before it and then closed his eyes. He just took her out.

It was hard to be outside. She hadn’t thought about how it would be to actually see the sky again, feel the wind, taste the freshness after the deep, stale air of the underground ruins. It had just been something to ask for, something she’d known he would believe. She thought she’d be able to take a few deep breaths, maybe gaze intently into the clouds, and her only concern had been how she was going to make that look convincing when she didn’t really care.

But the wind was cool and wet with the promise of clean rain. There was a greenness to it, some springtime flavor that she caught on her tongue when she breathed, and for a while she forgot about Zhuqa entirely, even as he stood watching her.

She did all the same things she’d planned to do after all, although she didn’t think about that until later. She took those deep, shaky breaths. She tipped her head back and stared at the grey smudge that marked a full moon’s light behind the ever-rolling clouds. She didn’t speak and didn’t move until Zhuqa put his hand on her shoulder and said, with that hateful gentleness he so often had, “Enough, little one. You’re shivering. Come inside.”

Then she began to cry, sort of. There were no sobs, no ugliness, no lump in her throat that needed choking out. There were just tears, pouring out of her one after another, so quiet and easy that if it weren’t for the heat of them, she might not have known she was making them. She looked at Zhuqa and he reached up to wipe at her cheek with the back of his hand. She realized that she’d made up her mind already, that the fish hook was not a possibility, but a plan. Tomorrow’s plan.

“Ah, Eshiqi, hush,” he said, brushing at her other cheek as the first trickled more tears. “Zhuqa’s woman does not stay forever in his lair. One day, all the world will be your House.”

“You said the same thing to Zru’itak,” she said and turned toward the stair.

“And I would have kept my promise,” he said evenly, “if she had remained loyal to me.” He studied her as she stared at him, then smiled very slightly. “That was a good guess, I think,” he remarked to himself. “But I’m not guessing at every word, believe that. You are losing your secrets, Eshiqi, a little more each day. One day very soon, you will have to be honest.”

She heard herself laugh without feeling it. “Not today, I hope. And not tomorrow.”

He frowned, capturing each word as it left her mouth for further study. He waited a long time after her last word, as if to be sure she was done talking, but when her gaze wandered back to the sky, he grunted and took gentle hold of her arm. “We have a meal waiting for us,” he said, leading her in their descent. “It will be cold now, but you will sit on my knee and hold my cup and show me your gratitude, and tomorrow, perhaps, you will see the sky again.”

And the tears kept coming, because Amber knew she was never going to make it that far out, and she’d already had her last look at the sky.

11

Sixteen spans, the boy had said. Meoraq had always felt he had a good grasp of distance, even in the wildlands. Years of travel and Master Darr’s notorious book of maps burned into his brain combined to keep a subconscious tally wherever he went. It was not infallible—all things mortal succumbed at times to deception or delusion—but it had served him well and he had every reason to put his faith in it as much as God. He began his hunt for ruins at an estimate of fourteen spans and when he reached eighteen without finding them, he stopped, turned back alongside his trail, and sought them further south.

Back and forth he went in this fashion, waking before dawn to make use of each second that God gave him light. He stopped at every stream to scout for boot-prints among the animal tracks. He knuckled through the gnawed leavings of each carcass for signs of butchery. He searched each promising thicket or valley deep enough to hide a nest, climbed each hill that might show him a better vantage.

He found everything—muddy tracks, blade-marked bones, discarded scraps of cured leather, broken sleds, ashpits—but none of it was fresh and in finding everything, he found nothing. As for ruins, he knew the signs well enough in Yroq, but in this land of hills and valleys and chokes of trees, anywhere he aimed his eyes showed him signs. And yet he found no ruins.

He told himself he would finish out one more day southward and then turn around. He would run through the night back to his first trail, roughly, and begin a northerly search in the morning.

Good. Sound. Sensible.

But when night fell on the fifth day of futility, Meoraq camped. He didn’t really know why. He hadn’t found anything (two separate heaps of half-burnt branches, a rotted harness, a dead man tied to a hsul tree and left to be eaten alive a brace or so ago: nothing) and his last glimpse of the landscape before the sun fell showed him nothing worth exploring further, but he camped all the same. He lit no fire, just sat in the dark, trying to meditate while his nerves gnawed at him.

When he slept, he dreamed in confusing tangles of his father returning from Kuaq, of silver shards in the shape of a ship flying through broken tiles, of thunder and rain and the stormway tunnel collapsing around him. He did not dream of Amber.

He woke just at dawn feeling that scant minutes had passed since he’d shut his eyes, and yet he felt…not invigorated, really, but awake. Like the stinging sensation that comes to a numbed arm or leg when it is first moved, it was not a pleasant feeling, but ominous, a sign of something greater still to come.

He prayed at least an hour, largely without words, as the morning moved on ahead of him. At the end of his prayers, he started walking south again.

He had always had a good sense of time as well as distance. Today, although painfully aware of direction (and it was pain; he could feel Praxas like a fish hook in his flesh, tied to a line that threatened with every step to snap), he had no grip at all on the hour. The sun moved overhead and if it were not for the fact that he could see it (not the sun, but the light of the sun, and there was another fish hook), he would have no sense of time at all.  To judge by that light, it was near eighth-hour—almost the whole day walked away—when he came to the top of the hill that had the tree.

It was the only tree left on the hill, of some kind unknown to him. Its body was very tall and straight, burnt black by some misfortune in the far past. Its single surviving branch had broken close to the trunk, half-fallen, but sprouted new life at its tip, so that the whole thing took on the appearance of a fish hook, and why in the two names of God and Gann was he so obsessed with fish hooks? He didn’t think he’d ever in his life seen one except in shops or pictures. But there it was, this ruin of a tree, this monument to all fish hooks of the world, an obvious landmark for even a boy to find and follow, and so Meoraq put down his pack and climbed it.

At the top, just where the branch hung down, Meoraq looked out over the furthest ridge and saw dark shapes too perfectly squared to be natural, set in patterns only men could design.