But it quickly became clear to him that even the throat-burning sparks and the smoky gray winds of the Field of the Nameless would not be lowly enough for him: His guards passed the Fields and continued to descend, escorting him down, level by level, into the most profound depths. He thought he had been prepared for shame and execution, but it seemed the soldiers were leading him, not to the simple, swift ignominy of a disgraced noble’s death, but toward something altogether more disturbing.

Is it to be the Chamber of the Well, then? Viyeki felt his knees go weak at the thought of that ominous place, a vast natural vault of naked stone hidden deep in the heart of the mountain. The infamous chamber contained both the Well and the Breathing Harp, objects of terrible, legendary power. It was all he could do to stay upright.

Trust the Queen, he told himself with more than a touch of desperation. Remember the Garden. Trust the Way. But the old, reassuring refrain now felt as hollow as the ageless and unknowable mountain deeps that were slowly enfolding him.

Lower and lower they guided him, by stairs so infrequently used that they were completely dark and the soldiers had to hold his arms as they all inched down the steps together. Viyeki felt as though he climbed down the throat of some vast, impossible beast, and it was more than just frightful imagining: with each step the air was growing steadily warmer and thicker, and the very stones around him seemed half alive.

Once, as a young acolyte, Viyeki had been lowered by harness into one of Nakkiga’s deepest interior chasms. That throat-clutching, disorienting darkness had felt a little like this, but the smothering air here seemed to quiver to some slow, heavy pulse, a vibration he had never felt before, like the beat of a giant heart.

Remember the Garden. It was all he could do, all he could afford to think. Trust the Way.

•   •   •

The fear Viyeki had been trying to suppress since the dragon-helmeted soldiers first appeared at his door eased fractionally when they reached the convergence of stairways known as the Hawk’s Path. Several sets of stairs entered the wide, helical stairwell from different levels, and for the first time he could see that he was not the only well-dressed figure being escorted down the spiraling steps to the Chamber of the Well. Viyeki could not yet recognize any of his fellow nobles because of a curious thickness to the air here, as though they all swam through brackish water, but he counted at least a dozen different escorts winding their way downward. Was it possible that so many important Hikeda’ya would be brought together all at once for obliteration? That seemed too reckless for a planner as careful as Akhenabi.

At the base of the Hawk’s Path the different groups crowded together, waiting to enter a single narrow doorway, from which light of several unusual colors played across their faces—sickly yellow, deep crimson, and cadaverous gray-blue. Viyeki’s guards urged him forward, and for the first time he could see that his fellow guests (or prisoners) were not only magisters like himself but also lesser officials, dozens of clan leaders, influential clerics, and other important members of the ruling caste, both male and female. If Akhenabi intended to imprison or execute them all, Viyeki thought wonderingly, it would mean the destruction of nearly the entirety of Nakkiga’s ruling elite.

Then Viyeki saw that one of the others being led toward the arch by a troop of Hamakha guards was High Marshal Muyare sey-Iyora himself. Muyare was one of the most respected nobles, leader of all the queen’s armies, and though he was certainly one of Akhenabi’s chief rivals, he was also far too powerful to be led meekly through Nakkiga as a prisoner: Viyeki felt certain the marshal’s soldiers would never have let him be taken against his will from the order-house of Sacrifice. But even though the marshal must have come willingly, there was a deep bleakness to the commander’s expression that left Viyeki uneasy.

The crowd surged forward. As Viyeki and the other high officials and soldiers crowded through the archway and onto a single wide staircase leading down into the Chamber of the Well, the heat and the sense of smothering seemed to close in on him. When he put his foot on the first step, it felt as though he stepped not simply into another chamber in great Nakkiga but out into pure space, some absolute emptiness that could not be understood. For a moment Viyeki could not tell down from up, and he wavered in something close to blind terror until he felt someone take his arm and heard a quiet voice.

“Are you well, Magister?” It was Luk’kaya, leader of the Harvesters and one of Viyeki’s few allies among the ordinal elite.

“I thank you, High Gatherer, but it is nothing,” he said, although secretly he was grateful for her presence. “A misstep, that is all.”

Despite the many nobles and guards descending together, the narrow stairwell was nearly silent but for the feather-soft rustle of their footfalls. The smothering air seemed to grow even thicker and closer, but Viyeki found as he descended that with self-control he could breathe normally, if more shallowly than usual.

Viyeki had never entered the sacred Chamber of the Well in all his long life, and as he emerged from the last stairwell into the cavern he could not help staring around in fearful fascination. Arched galleries ringed the chamber both at the bottom and higher up, but what drew his eye was the hole in the center of the cavern floor, a ragged gouge surrounded by a circular lip of carved, inlaid stones—the mouth of the Well. The radiance that oozed from it seemed like something heavier than mere light, lying close along the stony floor while leaving the reaches above the upper galleries lost in shadow. By its dull ocher gleam, Viyeki thought he could see faces gazing down from the dark openings in the walls above him—or at least things that looked like faces.

The Well itself blazed like the maw of one of the mountain’s flaming crevices, but its thick light seemed to come from a source even older than the mountain’s internal fires—a bleak, yellowish glow that might have lit the world before even the stars first began to burn, and which made everything in the great chamber seem to lean and loom. A shape hung in the column of wavering light above it, something real as blown glass yet insubstantial as smoke, an object Viyeki could not entirely understand or even completely see. This was the Breathing Harp, a sacred object brought to Nakkiga from lost Kementari when the immortals had fled the sudden ruination of that great city. From some angles the harp seemed near enough for Viyeki to touch, but even a slight tilt of his head reduced it to vanishingly faint scratches on the air, lines that were barely there at all, but with spaces between them that seemed to open onto limitless vistas and made his eyes ache. When Viyeki finally pulled his gaze away, the Harp seemed to linger before him like a shadow wherever he turned.

But even the Well and the Harp could not hold his attention for long, because like any of his people, when Viyeki saw the slender, silver-masked figure sitting still and pale as a statue on her great chair of black stone, he found it nearly impossible to look at anything else.

Mother of All, give strength to your servant. The sight of the queen brought old words of worship to his mind. My life is yours. My body is yours. My spirit is yours.

If this is an execution, Viyeki thought then, even a wholesale destruction of the noble caste, then at least my death will be at her command. It was a strangely reassuring idea. Dying, he would at least know that order prevailed—that the Mother of the People, not Akhenabi, still ruled in Nakkiga.

The Lord of Song was present, of course, standing to one side of the queen’s throne, facing the Well. Its weird pulsing light, which painted Utuk’ku’s white mourning garb with earthy yellows and strange blues, fell onto the darkness of Akhenabi’s hooded robes and vanished, so that the powerful Singer seemed to stand in his own shadow, only his mask of dried flesh and painted runes clearly visible.