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Gannet’s tone was factual, as if we were discussing the weather or were bent together over a map, plotting an obvious course. “Re’Kether is in ruin because of Theba’s wrath, the dead buried without the comforts of visits from their descendents, without offerings. We shouldn’t have come this way.”
    I laughed. Perhaps I was scared still or perhaps I had been driven mad, but Gannet’s words seemed to me a weak interpretation of what had happened at the wall. I wanted to believe that it had been my imagination, but just as I knew he was telling the truth as he saw it when he told me that I was Theba, I knew that he was just as adamant now.
    “That you can laugh while a man is dying is the reason you are not welcome here,” Imke said, her words snatching the air from my lungs. Being a little less in control of my mind made it easier to pierce hers, like fingers of torchlight in the dark. The howling we had heard had come from a man, one of the guard, and he would be dead soon, if not already.
    “I want to see him.”
    Triss only just caught the cup of tea I discarded as I rose, Gannet and Morainn quick to follow even if their posture told me they meant to dissuade me. They shared a look whose depths I knew, that everything that had happened since we had been forced to camp in the ruins was exactly what Gannet had hoped to avoid.
    “And why shouldn’t you?” Antares stood in the entrance to Morainn’s chamber, sweat and ash a grim veneer on his features. He strode forward, cutting through Gannet’s resistance like a sharpened stone through sand. Antares was a soldier, but not a fool, inclining his head in a gesture that encompassed Gannet and Morainn both. “You should see him, as well.”
    We were not a merry party that descended from the barge. Though steadier than I had been a few moments before, my footing was lost as we approached a low fire where several armed guards stood watch over a prone figure, his own spear driven into the sand out of his reach. Triss had elected to remain on the barge, but Imke had walked with us, and was first into the circle of light to see the howling man. There was a flicker of something familiar in her, and I wondered if someone among her father’s father’s party had suffered a similar fate on their passage through Re’Kether. That would not have been worthy of boasting.
    What thoughts I had for Imke were dismissed in confronting the sickness of the man on the ground. A blanket was tangled in his legs, though I suspected his shivering had nothing to do with the evening’s chill.
    “He stopped screaming less than an hour ago,” Antares explained. It was as though he were giving her some tactical update, an appraisal on how we might proceed forward from such tragedy. “I found this among his things.”
    Antares produced a cloth pouch, but when Morainn lifted it to peer inside, Antares lowered it gently away from her face. “Not too close. It’s poison.”
    The word seemed to have as much power over the man as the substance, and he writhed in the sand, coiling like a snake that had gorged itself. Gannet knelt beside him and eased one of the man’s hands away from his chest. I could tell he did not want to be touched, but whether it was because of his sickness or because it was Gannet, I didn’t know.
    “He administered it to himself,” Gannet observed, a note of grim surprise in his tone as he uncurled the man’s fingers, displaying an ochre stain on his fingertips.
    “It is well known that many lose their minds so near to Re’Kether,” Imke said, shooting me a look which I caught and wanted desperately to crush, as though I were near the wall again and in the thrall of something outside of myself. I had more questions instead of answers, and reason to trust my company even less. The howling man had been a distraction, but I did not know if he had meant to free or condemn me by allowing me to escape into the ruins so near the ancient city.
    “What is his