paving stones, running out before him as if his passage were corrupting
the city rather than revealing the decay already there.
He and Vanjit carried a history together. They had known each other, had
helped each other. She would see that it was the andat's intervention
that had turned him against her. The palaces of the Khai Udun grew
taller and taller without ever seeming to come close until, it seemed
between one breath and the next, he stepped into a grand courtyard. Moss
and lichen had almost obscured the swirling design of white and red and
gold stones. Maati paused, his lantern held over his head.
Once, it would have been a breathtaking testament to power and ingenuity
and overwhelming confidence. Columns rose into the black air. Statues of
women and men and beasts towered over the entranceway, the bronze lost
under green and gray. He walked alone into a welcoming chamber too vast
for his lantern to penetrate. There was no ceiling, no walls. The river
was silent here. Far above, wings fluttered in still air.
Maati took a deep breath-dust and rot and, after a decade and a half of
utter ruin, still the faint scent of smoke. It smelled like the corpse
of history.
He walked forward over parquet of ebony and oak, the pattern ruined and
pieces pried up by water and time. He expected his footsteps to echo,
but no sound he made returned to him.
A light glimmered high up and to his left. Maati stopped. He lowered his
lantern and raised it again. The glimmer didn't shift. Not a reflection,
then. Maati angled toward it.
A great stone stairway swept up in the gloom, a single candle burning at
its top. Maati made his way slowly enough to keep from tiring. The hall
that opened before him was not as numbingly huge as the first chamber;
Maati could make out the ceiling, and that the walls existed. And far
down it, another light.
The carpets underfoot had rotted to scraps years before. The shattered
glass and fallen crystal might have been the damage of the elements or
of the city's fall. The next flight of stairs-equally grand and equally
arduous-could only have been a testament to that first violence, long
ago. A human skull rested at the center of every step, shadows moving in
the sockets as Maati passed them. He hoped the Galts had left the grim
markers, but he didn't believe it.
Here, Vanjit was saying, each of these is a life the soldiers of Galt
ended. They were her justification. Her honor guard.
He should have guessed where the candles were leading him. The grand
double doors of the Khai's audience chamber stood closed, but light
leaked through at the seams. After so long in the dark, he halfexpected
them to open onto a fire.
In its day, the chamber must have inspired awe. In its way, it still
did. The arches, the angles of the walls, the thin ironwork as delicate
as lace that held a hundred burning candles-everything was designed to
draw the eyes to the dais, the black lacquer chair, and then out a wide,
unshuttered window that reached from ceiling to floor. The Khai would
have sat there, his city arrayed out behind him like a cloak. Now the
cloak was only darkness, and in the black chair, Clarity-of-Sight cooed.