The city unfurled, dark and spattered with flickering lights like globs of red and gold paint. They bled on the waters, dancing in the wake of boats, ferries, and little skiffs rowing the canals. Sorasa got her bearings as they walked, resetting the points of her internal compass. Corayne tromped at her side, doing her best to gawk and walk at the same time.

“The Konrada,” Sorasa said, gesturing to the tower before Corayne could ask. It spiked up from the center of Ascal, black against the stars, windows glowing from within as if fire burned deep in her spine. “A cathedral to every god of the Ward, all twenty, built by Konrad the Great.”

Behind her, Dom did his best to smile. The look seemed foreign on his face. “For someone who hates traveling companions, you make a talented guide.”

His steady voice and superior tone split Sorasa’s head. “The tower is open inside, two hundred feet from dome to floor,” she continued, glaring at him. “Do you know what happens to a man’s skull when he falls that distance?”

The Elder soured. “Is that a threat, Sarn?”

“Just sharing happy memories,” Sorasa replied. “I have many in this city.”

Next to him, Corayne’s eyes nearly rolled out of her head.

They tried to avoid the main streets, sticking to alleys. The avenues connected the bridges like veins through a body and would have been easier, but more obvious. Even at night, market stalls and performer pavilions crowed, fountains choked with people washing clothes and filling buckets. Carts wheeled; dedicant priests walked in their rows; dogs nosed for scraps while cats shrieked. The city garrison patrolled, lanterns raised and faces slack beneath their helmets. Children laughed or wept around every corner.

Where Corayne gaped, Dom glowered in disgust. Sorasa could not help but agree. Ascal is a foul place, she cursed, stepping over a black puddle. Between the bridges, the stinking canals, and the many hundreds of thousands of people who lived within the walls, the capital was an experiment in how not to plan a city. Everything was infinitely more chaotic than any city of the south or west.

But chaos makes ease, she knew. In a crowd, on a street, in a city’s foundations.

They rejoined a grand avenue to cross the Bridge of Faith, its length set with great iron torches like spears. In daylight it would be rammed rail to rail with pilgrims seeking the Konrada and the blessings of the gods. Now it was all but empty, scattered with a few errant priests mumbling to themselves or preaching to beggars.

They stepped off Faith and onto the plaza, wide and round. Sorasa fought the familiar urge to run. She felt exposed, a hawk reduced to a mouse in the field. The cathedral tower loomed, watching over them with proud indifference.

Though she despised Ascal, even Sorasa could not help but admit the city was grand in every sense of the word, for better or worse. Such was the way of the northern kings, who saw themselves as emperors, burdened and blessed to rule from every corner of the horizon.

The New Palace was no exception, a giant hunched beyond the cathedral.

Corayne breathed a sigh, the gasping sort. Not in awe, but in fear. “I had a picture of it in my head,” she murmured as they walked. “What I thought the palace would look like.”

“And it came nowhere close,” Sorasa answered. I know the feeling, she thought, remembering the first time she saw the sprawling palace. The great seat of the Gallish kings, the fist of this land. It stole her breath then. It almost did now.

The palace rose at the city’s heart, walled on its own island, its towers and keeps a soft gray that flickered gold under the flaming braziers upon the ramparts. Galland’s lion snarled from a hundred green banners, streaming like emerald tears. Gargoyles and spires clawed the sky from the rooftops. Torches flared on the ramparts of a dozen towers. Lights pulsed behind gleaming windows of stained glass. There was another cathedral on the palace grounds, the Syrekom, monstrous in size, with a rose window like a gigantic jeweled eye. Parts of the palace were brand-new, the stone almost white, the architecture flamboyant and daring, a stark contrast to the rest. The gate was a mouth of iron, jaws wide at the end of the Bridge of Valor.

Two dozen knights lined Valor, armed with spears, their helms donned. They wore green silk over their armor, each embroidered with a roaring lion. At night they looked inhuman, unfeeling, in service to their queen and country.

“That is too many guards to bribe,” Dom said dryly from beneath his hood.

“I don’t plan to use a bridge,” Sorasa replied with equal bite.

“Do you intend to swim in that . . . substance?” he said, sneering at the fetid canals.

Before she could spit a retort at the Elder, Corayne did it for her. “Clearly there’s some kind of tunnel,” she said softly. Her eyes darted to the Konrada, then the palace. “There’s more below us. In the Old Cor ruins.”

“Yes,” Sorasa replied stiffly.

She glanced at the girl, looking her over again. In Lemarta, Corayne had seemed unremarkable, another daughter of the Long Sea, with a sun-kissed face and salt-tangled hair. Smart, curious. Restless, maybe, but what girl of seventeen is not? There’d been only a flicker of something in her. It burned now, a candle catching light. And Sorasa could not say what it meant.

“There used to be a stadium here, where the Cors raced their chariots on sand, or staged navy battles on the flooded grounds,” Sorasa explained in a low voice. “Only a sliver remains, at the east end of the palace. But the foundation, below us—below the canals, even—it’s a maze of tunnels, some decades old, some two thousand. Many burned when the Old Palace fell; others have collapsed or flooded since the days of Old Cor. But not all.”

Corayne narrowed her eyes at the Konrada again, looking to its roots rather than its pinnacle. The wall dedicated to Immor faced them head on. The great god of time and memory held the moon and sun in his hands at equal height, with the stars like a halo behind his head. In his chest was a rose window, burning with blue and green light. A doorway arched between his feet, one of twenty, spilling the sound of evening worship.

Sorasa beckoned them both toward the cathedral, a smile on her lips. “The Konrada vaults hold nothing of value anymore, but they do go deep.”

“That will suffice,” Dom said grimly.

Corayne could only nod. Her eyes went wide again, and she seemed once more the girl in Lemarta, not the daughter of a dead prince, with the realm’s fate laid between her hands.