Fiona opened the door to the craft while the pylons were still horizontal. The twisting wraiths of mist beat against Kiera's wind barrier, vanishing aft. A second, larger barrier prevented the sound of the propellers from escaping, so the large camp of souls on the Western Face could not hear them approach. The air was positively dripping with dream-ether, a familiar and welcome sensation that allowed Kiera to maintain both weaves with ease.

The early morning sun illuminated the nearby fog, giving it a slight golden glow, but down and away the gold surrendered to gray darkness. They were nearing the escarpment.

Slowly, the pylons began to tilt upright. The black-white escarpment appeared like a ghost in the fog, and just as quickly vanished below. The snow-clad surface of Sasha's Landing came up to meet them. The propeller wash kicked the snow up into shining rainbow clouds, and by the time the landing gear touched down the bedrock had been laid bare.

Fiona stepped out first, her bright blue hair drifting slowly in the airy river of the suppressed propeller wash. Claire Aden followed the witch, looking regal in her bright red dress and ebony fishnet shroud. Kiera remained in the cabin long enough for the oculomancers to fix her porcelain mask in place, hiding her too-red eyes from the world. Parts of her cheeks were still visible, revealing the molten gold brands in her flesh, but that alone would not be enough to implicate her as being the Remembrancer.

Even as Kiera walked toward the nearby pylon, the engines were beginning to spool down. The squad of oculomancers left the cabin and followed them onto Sasha's Landing. They spread out around the tilt-rotor with their rifles held across their chests.

"Wait for us," Fiona commanded. The oculomancers saluted.

Beyond the edge of Sasha's Landing, the arid woods closed in around a dusty path lined with old railings. The plant life was shorter, pasty, and waxy. Some of the flowers looked hard and crumbly, colored brownish-red like dried blood. Kiera recognized a few of the plants from the shores of Lake Rath.

"I recognize some of these plants," Kiera said. "From the Sister World."

"I brought them here," Fiona said. "Centuries ago. The Western Face is relatively isolated, like a tiny island. It lies in the rain shadow of the Spine Range to the east, and the escarpment to the west is inaccessible from below. Even with the fog the weather here is dryer on average. I wanted to see if the plants from Lake Rath could survive."

"I've always thought the plants out here were strange," Claire said.

As they hiked away from the craft, the sound of whirring propellers was replaced with the music of singing birds. There were hundreds of birds of all different types and colors. Some of them were big and mean, obviously fat bullies and the petty masters of their tiny corner of the Western Face. Some of them had strange beaks, as if they specialized in eating one specific type of insect or tree nut. All of the birds had one thing in common: their wings were generally shorter, ending in long finger-like feathers. This, Kiera knew from her time hiking with Vincent, was because these birds did not need to glide very far.

They came upon a clearing in the woods guarded by two Aden family soldiers in black uniforms. Tents had been erected beyond the barricades, and in spite of the fog Kiera could clearly see the soldiers drinking and gambling around their campfires.

"What are you doing here?" Claire demanded. "This forest belongs to my family!"

"Princess Claire!" one of the soldiers managed. "We have been sent away! We were ordered to camp here!"

"By who?"

"By the Vjiskaldi king!" the soldier explained. "The city has fallen. The Vjiskaldi marched up the White Chasm and kicked us out!"

"And where is my brother? Where is Edwin Aden?"

"Nobody told you?" the soldier asked. "My apologies. Princess Claire, your brother is dead. The Knight of Summer executed him. Then, he lowered the boom and allowed the imperial troop transports into the harbor."

"Damn," Fiona said. "We're too late."

"Sir Zachary is here?" Kiera asked, suddenly excited. I hope he is doing well.

"Yes, great witch," the soldier said. "The captain has the Aden family autocar. You can use it to go straight to the palace."

It turned out that the Western Face was quite a bit bigger than Kiera had imagined it, and the autocar certainly helped them get to the palace in a reasonable time. Fur-clad northmen stood guard on the road, but when they caught sight of Fiona at the wheel they bowed and cleared the way. The road led right into a huge crack in the mountainside, rising up into the fog and out of sight. Deep within the darkness ahead Kiera could make out two torches glowing like fireflies. Between those torches there was a huge stone gate, flanked on either side with the bright red black-swan banners of House Aden.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

More Vjiskaldi soldiers stood guard, once again wearing furs splashed with burgundy, white, and navy blue. They were all armed with short-handled ethersteel axes. Their blood-red hair and eyes betrayed an inhuman ancestry, and the tallest among them was a pure-blooded Red Dragon whelp, as indicated by the shiny red scales on his face. The whelp wore a bear's head helmet that could only have been crafted by a taxidermist, and his huge battle axe looked too heavy to carry with one hand.

Claire Aden walked straight up to them, put her hands on her hips, and said: "This is my house! You will open the gate for me right now."

"Sorry kid," the whelp growled. "King's orders, nobody in or out."

His eyes flashed toward Fiona.

"I can make an exception for the witch, but nobody else. I promise, you don't want to be in there right now. The Knight of Summer has made a huge mess and it ain't proper for a lady like you to see it."

"You open that door or I'll melt the stone myself!" Claire announced.

"Ethermancy doesn't work near the palace," the whelp said.

"Good thing I'm not an ethermancer!" Claire said.

The man regarded Kiera for the first time. He suddenly seemed to be deeply disturbed by something. He slammed the butt of his battle axe into the ground and the stone door began to creak open.

"Princess Kiera," the man said. "I did not recognize you because of the mask."

"Have we met before?" Kiera asked.

He shook his head. "The daughter of the Blade of Empire is known to us even in Vjiskald. It is spoken that, during the campaign to recover the Blue Wolf, you brought a thousand men back from the brink of death, by yourself."

"Seven hundred men," Kiera corrected. The man bowed to her.

Claire Aden marched forward and slipped into the gap between the doors. When Kiera passed the threshold herself, she immediately gagged. The air reeked of blood, death, and bile. It was as if she had been transported back to the battlefield outside that old castle in the Theocracy. With remarkable speed and skill, Fiona created a new barrier around the three of them, a sophisticated wind-aspect weave that Kiera did not recognize. The smells went away.

But the sights did not go away. The soldier at the door had been correct. The place was a mess.

The throne room was filled with corpses, piled up on either side of the central aisle. Directly under the Hanging Throne, there was a pyramid of severed heads, slack-jawed and sightless. The fine red rugs were soaked with old blood. Two Vjiskaldi men dragged a screaming middle-aged woman down the aisle ahead, before violently discarding her at the feet of a familiar behemoth of a man. Sir Zachary, the Knight of Summer, looked down at the woman with contempt.

"I don't want to die!" the woman pleaded. "Somebody help me! Please! HELP!"

"Stop!" Kiera bellowed.

She marched forward and stopped just short of the man. He regarded her, then shifted uneasily in his heavy plate armor. He held the oversized hilt of a huge sword in one hand, resting the blade against the bloody carpet. Where the hilt met the blade, there was some sort of steam-powered contraption which housed a beating heart. It was, Kiera realized, the artifact that Fiona had mentioned.

"What are you going on about?" Zachary asked.

"I don't want to die," the woman sobbed.

"Leave her alone!" Kiera demanded. "Can't you see? She's begging for her life!"

Sir Zachary yawned, and, without fully closing his mouth, he used his tongue to clean something from his back teeth. Then he looked Kiera straight in the eye and said: "No."

His arm moved with inhuman speed, most likely empowered by a life-aspect weave. The blade flashed in a pale cyan arc, clean through the woman's neck. Her head fell to the floor, and the meaty stump of her neck continued to spew pulses of blood with each heartbeat. Instant death. Impossible to heal.

She wanted to attack, to suppress his powers and seize his arm. She wanted to incinerate him with lightning and freeze his blood with ice. But she froze, wide-eyed and speechless. He grinned, nodded, and then kicked the corpse away.

"You got business here, woman?" he asked.

"This is my house!" Claire announced. "Where are the servants? I demand you clean this place up immediately!"

"You're Lucia's baby sister," Zachary observed flatly. "Your sister has already been crowned. She has delegated stewardship of the palace to me. In the meantime, there are some people that need killing."

"Why?" Kiera asked. She turned away, refusing to look at the corpse on the floor.

"Because I know their secret and the oculomancers are not allowed to know," Zachary said. "They were using dice and cards and long lists of random instructions. The whole palace staff was quietly replaced with Theocracy invaders and we need to make an example of them."

"You can at least keep the place clean!" Claire protested.

"That's enough," Fiona snapped. "Sir Zachary, this is important. You killed Heritor Edwin, right?"

"I did," Zachary said.

"Did you talk to him first? Did he say anything?"

"He warned me not to free the Bloodraker," Zachary replied. "I don't think he was in his right mind when he said that though."

"No, that's good," Fiona said. "Thank you. Where is Heritor Maxius?"

"Not here. The Eyes of Flame told me Maxius fled the palace before I arrived. My niece Alyesha wants his head."

Fiona turned to face the south, with her eyes upraised toward Spire Lyn. Claire mimicked the motion. They both stood perfectly still, silent, with a matching determination.

"So that's what happened."

"I saw the flashes," Claire said. "What do they mean? What did they say?"

"The White Chasm Aviation Club is disbanded," Fiona said. "Seth flew into known icing conditions and got himself killed. Quinn was thrown in the dungeon but Heritor Edwin pardoned him. He is traveling south with Heritor Maxius the Younger. My oculomancers are tracking him."

"When I am finished with my work here," Zachary said, "I shall give chase."

"No, you must leave now. And Sir Zachary, I would ask a favor."

"I live to serve."

"If Heritor Maxius is travelling with a young man named Quinn, I want you to kill him."

"As you like," the knight said. "I shall begin my quest at once."