She shook her head and turned away from the steep drop at the roadside. The wind tugged at her cloak with icy fingers, and would have whipped her hair into her eyes if it had been longer. Another reason to be glad that sigrir wore theirs short. "Wondering what we will find when we arrive."

"Prayers, prayers, and more prayers." His blue-green eyes twinkled above the scarf he'd wrapped around his face. "Under the circumstances, however, I can't complain."

"No," Asharre agreed. Colison had wanted to give them another full wagon of supplies. It was only after both Falcien and Evenna insisted that his men needed them morea"and demonstrated that they could purify the springs of Duradh Mal into safe watera"that he'd begrudgingly settled for giving them a few extra water casks and bundles of fodder, taking Evenna's cartload of plants and drawings back south in return.

Wet snow sifted down as they came to the end of the mountain. The flakes beaded on Asharre's gray-green cloak and the bullocks' heads with melting droplets. By the time they reached the valley, the snow had shifted to rain, and all the world wore a silvery veil.

The fog was thicker on the vale's northeastern wall. It rose in serpentine blue coils, like the fragrant bundles of sweetsmoke burned at the Celestians' purification rituals. They had burned that incense at Oralia's formal funeral, too, though there was no body for the pyre at the Dome of the Sun. Asharre gazed at the swirling haze, remembering, while the misty rain gathered on her cloak and wept quicksilver.

"That's Devils' Ridge," Evenna said, following the direction of her stare. The Illuminer was walking between the wagons to stretch her legs. She wore no hood in the rain. Ringlets of glossy black hung around her ears where her hair had come loose of its haloed braid. "The stones are scalding all the way to the crest. In winter, when snow hits them, it's said to become a white wall of steam that rises high enough to hide the stars."

"What causes it?"

The younger woman shrugged, quirking her lips in a one-sided smile. "Some say the souls of all the Rosewayns' victims lie under those rocks, and that smoke is really their spirits trying to break free so they can cross the Last Bridge. Others say it's the souls of the Rosewayns themselves, burning in torment for the evil they did when they lived. I think it's just a vein of fire under the earth. Ang'duradh was built upon a volcano, if you believe the legends. The Baozites forged their swords in its heart and built the Shardfield from the stoneglass that the mountain flung out when roused."

Asharre held her palm up to the rain. "If the water carries madness, and the rocks turn it to steam, are we not in danger if the wind blows it our way?"

"I shouldn't think so. If that were true, the rain would already have doomed us." Evenna's smile turned wry. "Falcien spent more time studying theology than I did; I was more interested in herbs and healing. So the best I can offer is a guess. But I think the corruption has to be swallowed to take effect. The act of knowingly accepting it is important. Accidentally touching it, or breathing in vapor that fills the air, does nothing. The choices we make matter to the gods, even when the choices aren't quite what we think they are."

Asharre was still considering that when they came, at last, to the gates of Carden Vale. The town seemed even lonelier up close than it had from afar. A high wall curved around its southern side, but it was badly neglected. The crenels were clogged with mossy dirt, and the iron spears on the merlons were jagged, rust-gnawed stumps. Rain brought the night down early; it was full dark by the time they reached the gate.

It must have been a fearsome sight when Carden Vale was young. The southern wall was built of tree trunks, each one thicker than a fat man's waist and bound to the next by spiked iron bands. Crimson runes tattooed the metal between the spikes. There must have been some magic in their making, for the sigils shone like new-spilled blood after six hundred years.

Bronzed skulls leered atop the gates. Some were human, while others were strange and hideous. Serrated ridges crowned the brows of one; the next had five nose holes in an arc above a fang-filled grin. At first Asharre took the monstrous skulls for sculptures, but when they stopped before the gate, she saw that those, like the human ones, showed bone where the bronze had worn away.

"What sort of beasts are those?" Heradion wondered.

"Ansurak," Falcien answered. "Not beasts. Those were men, once. They gave themselves to one dark god or another, letting their bodies be shaped along with their souls, until they turned to monsters."

Asharre studied the skulls. There was something human about them. It was a faint and fleeting resemblance, but it was there, in the curve of an eye socket or the joint of a jawbone never made to hold fangs. She could believe that they had once been men.

"But why?" Evenna asked. "Why would anyone choose that?"

"Power. Punishment. The Baozites considered it both a blessing and a curse to become ansurak. For some, it is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to their god. For others, it is the price of disobediencea"being transformed into a brute with no purpose but to fight and die on the field."

"And the other gods?"

Falcien shrugged, sending a cascade of droplets rippling down his cloak. "Maolites seldom choose it, though they suffer that fate more frequently than any other deity's servants. The madness of the Four-Armed Beggar finds expression in their flesh whether they will it or not. The Maimed Witches might mortify their bodies to honor Kliasta, or those maimings might be the marks of ansurak. We don't know enough about them to say. The Nightingale's faithful choose undeath rather than becoming ansurak, and we know too little of Anvhad's ways to say what his servants do."

Asharre frowned, puzzled. Even in the bones, she could see the strength that those creatures had possessed. "Why does your goddess not make ansurak?"

"She did, once. During the Godslayer's War." Falcien's eyes glinted in the depths of his rain-sodden hood. "After the slaughter on the Field of Sorrows, when the war was ended and Maghredan slain, we forswore the rituals that made them. Ansurak lose what makes them human. Ours lost the ability to understand weakness, to see sins and forgive. They became terrible in their righteousness. There was, as well, a danger in their pride. The Blessed already stand outside ordinary society; the ansurak of Celestia were feared and worshipped as gods. We did not want that. Our duty is to serve, not rule. Once we saw where that road would lead, we chose to walk away. The Bright Lady has no ansurak. The Blessed are enough."

"Enough to counter the others' monsters?"

"We've done well enough against them so far." The Illuminer shrugged again. "What good is a weapon if its use defeats the purpose of the fight?"

"What good is standing out here in the cold?" Heradion interrupted. "I'm wet and tired and hungry. As fascinating as these skulls are, I'm more concerned about my own soaked bones. I'd like to find a nice warm inn where I can put my feet up by the fire and maybe have a bit of roast mutton."

"You won't find it here," Asharre said, surprised he hadn't already realized that. "Look at the houses. The empty wharves. This rain has softened the road, but there were no tracks on it before ours. No one lives here."

"It looks like a plague town," Evenna agreed.

"Well, if no one lives here, there'll be no one to complain if I lay a fire in their hearth," Heradion said. "Staying cold and wet doesn't help anything."

Evenna wiped away a raindrop trickling down her cheek. "Should we leave the wagons outside?"

"Why?" Heradion asked.

"If they try to close us in a" The young Illuminer said no more, but no more was needed. Asharre thought of the bone-stripped corpse in the snow by Laedys' cottage. Whoever had done that might be in the towna"might be all that was left of the town. The notion of being trapped inside Carden Vale's skull-mounted walls with such madmen was not comforting.

If it came to fighting among the streets and empty buildings of an unfamiliar town, however, the odds would be against them with or without the wagons. And leaving their oxen outside the walls made them easy prey for wolves or feral dogs. She hadn't seen any of those beasts in the valley, but if they were here, they'd be hungry and bold enough to attack the wagons with all their other meals gone. "Better to bring them."

They found an inn near the gate. A sign over the door named it the Rosy Maiden. The specks of red glass in the common room's window, representing the five crimson jewels stolen from Baoz's crown in the age of myth before the Godslayer's War, suggested that once the place had borne a different, grimmer name.

Nonetheless, it was in good repair, and that was what mattered. The Rosy Maiden's stables were empty and the hearths cold, but there was firewood stacked under the eaves and water in the well. Heradion drew buckets for their animals and Falcien prayed to purify them, while Evenna went inside to build a fire and Asharre stalked around the inn's perimeter, checking for danger.

She saw none. There was no indication that anyone had been anywhere nearby for days. The kitchen garden was overrun with weeds, as were those of neighboring houses. The market square, which should have been littered with wilted cabbage and the feathers of unlucky chickens, was clean and bare. Even the town's cats were gone.

The emptiness added to her apprehension even as it deprived her of any solid cause. Defeated, she returned to the inn. The night passed quietly, and the next morning she went out again, ranging farther afield. Still she saw no one, apart from Falcien and Heradion on their own wanderings.

Many of the houses bore a peculiar sign carved or drawn in charcoal on their doors: a sunburst with four arms over four, identical to the ones she'd seen on Bassinos' chapel and Laedys' scribble-covered cottage. Its placement was random, as best she could tell; the marked houses didn't seem any more or less dilapidated than the others, and there was no pattern to where they stood. Both Evenna and Falcien recognized it from Balnamoine, and were disturbed to see it repeated in Carden Vale, but neither of them knew what, if anything, it meant. All they could say was that the suggestion of reaching arms and open palms, in this place, echoed the four grasping hands of Maol.

"It's eerie," Heradion said when they reunited in the Rosy Maiden's common room. Evenna had a fire going in the hearth and a kettle over the flames. The fire was a blessing: it banished the chilla"the strange, senseless feara"that had settled into Asharre's bones.

Heradion took a cup of tea from the Illuminer gratefully. "There's no sign of fighting, no indication of pestilence or plague. The doors are locked, the curtains drawn, the doorsteps swept and tidy. It's as if everyone in town decided to go on holiday a and never came back."

"Not all of them left so peaceably," Falcien said. He paced moodily across the room, crossing before the fire every five steps. "I went to the gaol, wondering if I might find some record of violence or madness similar to what we saw in the mountains. If a man went bloodmad, as that ferret did, he should have hung and burned for his crimes."

"Did he?" Evenna asked, offering the other Illuminer a cup of tea.

Falcien held the cup without drinking as he continued his pacing. "They did. Near twenty of them. I'll spare you the recitation of their deeds. But they had a pattern: the killers extracted the victims' bones after every slaying; sometimes that was what caused the death. Cannibalism appears repeatedly in their crimes, and almost all of them attacked children in preference to other victims. They were mostly people with no history of violence, and many had become religious shortly before the killings. Several complained of bad dreams, and some wrote complicated rune circles or prayers in languages they had no way of knowing. Protective prayers," he finished. "Like Laedys'."

"How do you know so much about them?" Asharre asked. The few gaolers she'd known had been an uncouth, illiterate lot. They considered themselves put upon if they had to list their prisoners' names and crimes. Not one would have kept such detailed records.

"The town gaoler was one of the first to go mad. He murdered every prisoner in his charge. After his execution, the solaros took up his duties. He knew something inhuman was at work, if not what, and wrote down all he could about the killings as they happened. He was trying to puzzle out the why behind the slaughter, just as we are."

"Then we should go to the chapel," Evenna said. "If the solaros was struggling to piece together the mystery, he might have left something useful there. We'll go after dinner."

No one objected, although no one looked enthused by the prospect. Their meal was short and somber. Heradion tried a few jests, but stopped when the others refused to laugh. At sunset the two Illuminers prayed together, moving through the graceful sequence of the dusk ritual with fluid synchronicity. Asharre practiced the Sun Knights' prayer on her own; she had no use for the invocation, but her muscles needed the work.

When the prayer ended, Heradion strapped on his sword, Asharre swept her travel-stained cloak back over her shoulders, and the four of them went out to the chapel.

Carden Vale's chapel was neither large nor rich; the town had worshipped another god in its youth, and the Celestian chapel had been built well into its decline. Taller buildings surrounded the plain stone dome, but it was set to catch the lighta"if any had broken through the day's gloomy graynessa"and it was favorably situated at a crossroads near the town's heart. No matter where they started, the convergence of the roads would have brought them to its doors.

Those doors were marred with gouges and blunt, splintered dents. The entablature was chipped; the windows nearby were broken. Those that remained whole were crudely daubed with the sunburst she'd seen on houses elsewhere: four arms over four, rendered in thick red strokes that strangled the light falling through. Rubble was piled knee high before the door, and some of it was stained with blood.

It unsettled her to see such brutal scars on this holy place. Other than the marks on their windows, the other buildings in Carden Vale were undamaged, but here the memory of rage hovered like a living spirit in the air. There had been hatred here, hatred as strong as if the long-dead Baozites had risen to find their ancient enemy's temple on their land.

"Who would do this?" Evenna asked softly, to silence. The young Illuminer stepped forward, picking her way carefully over masonry and fallen blocks. She laid her hands over the damaged wood, as if she could heal its wounds, then pushed inward gently. The door gave way with a shudder.

Inside, the devastation stopped abruptly. It was as if the invaders, having forced their way in, immediately lost interest. The only damage Asharre saw was a series of scrapes on the floor where some barricading object had been forced back by the hammered doors. The barricade itself, whatever it had been, was gone.

The rest of the small antechamber was undisturbed. It held pegs for cloaks and benches for aged worshippers to rest while they waited. An ever-flowing bowl, enchanted so that water flowed in equally from all sides of its rim and created the illusion of stillness in the center of perpetual motion, stood on a pedestal to one side. The bowl was a common symbol in Celestian temples; it invited visitors to wash the dirt from their hands and the weariness from their bodies, ritually purifying them before they proceeded into the sanctum. Straight ahead, a low arch, wide enough for two men to walk abreast, led to the main prayer hall. Rows of pews waited in dusty silence there.

"This place is desecrated," Evenna whispered as she led them in.

If it was, Asharre could not feel it. There was a coldness in the air, and a whiff of rot, but it was nothing compared to the ugliness she'd seen in Laedys' cottage.

The other Celestians, however, seemed to agree with Evenna. Even Heradion, never the most pious of souls, frowned and ran a thumb over his sword's pommel as he stepped across the threshold. He eyed the ever-flowing bowl as if he expected the water to turn to lye at any moment, and he kept close to the two Illuminers. Both of them made ritual obeisance at the bowl, dipping their fingers into the water and touching it to brow and heart, but neither Asharre nor Heradion did.

"There's no holiness here anymore," Heradion said when the Illuminers looked at him. "No point in being purified for it."

"This temple is laid out in the traditional pattern," Evenna said, pointedly ignoring his comment. "Patients' rooms and healing garden to the east, to draw upon the dawn light. The solaros' private chambers to the west, where the long sun sets. The library, if he had one, will be to the west as well."

They went to the library first. A quiet air of loneliness hung over its cozy clutter. An overstuffed armchair, its once-red leather worn to a frayed pink, sat in the room's center with a round table at its elbow. Small, empty bottles dotted the floor at the chair's feet, along with a clay mug and a stack of well-thumbed books. Asharre leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. She understood the need to investigate, but nothing in this room seemed significant, and it felt ghoulish to pry into the details of someone else's life.

The others did not seem to share her compunctions. Heradion picked up a book resting beside the armchair. "The Thousand Journeys of Shalai the Wise," he read aloud. A loose button dangled from its pages, held by a knotted thread that served as a bookmark. He set it down and examined the next book. "The Garden of Perfumed Delights. I remember this one. Racy reading for a country solaros. Badly treated, though. Almost all the pages are torn out. Maybe he wanted to keep the good bits by his bedside?"

"Shouldn't need to tear a book apart for that. Why not just take the whole thing?" Evenna picked up the mug and held it to her nose. She paused, then sniffed again, frowning. "Dreamflowers? Was he having trouble sleeping?"

"The Garden of Perfumed Delights can be quite rousing," Heradion said. Evenna shot him an acid look, and they moved on.

A door on the far side of the library opened to the priest's private chambers. These rooms, too, had an air of comfortable, bookish poverty. More leatherbound volumes, and more tiny bottles, covered the lone table in the solaros' sitting room. They looked older, and grimmer, than the texts in the library. A plate and jug were pushed an arm's length from the table's only chair, allowing the books to be brought closer.

"A man who put writing above eating," Evenna observed.

"He'd have made a good Illuminer," Heradion agreed, leafing through the books. "Curious choices for dinner reading, though. Eristhei on the Twelve Corruptions. A Codex of Curses. A Life of Halivair Rosewayn. I rather preferred the books in the other room."

"So did he, I'm sure." Evenna lifted the Codex and riffled through it. Papers covered with hasty, smudged writing were tucked between its pages. Some were homemade rag papers, clumpy and matted. Others, Asharre realized, were the missing pages from The Garden of Perfumed Delights and the other torn books, their margins and the spaces between their lines filled with scribbles. The man must have been desperate for notepaper.

"This wasn't pleasure reading," Evenna said. "Look at these notes. Every page. He annotated every page. I can barely read this, the script's so small and shaky." She waved a hand at one of the empty bottles. "And do you smell that?"

Heradion sniffed at the greenish residue inside. "Burned cat hair?"

"Close. Tincture of vigil's friend. Burned cat hair would probably taste better. He must have been drinking it straight, or near enough to make no difference. It's a wonder he could keep his hands steady enough to writea"and no wonder he needed dreamflowers to sleep. Our solaros was drugging himself for alertness and concentration, then drugging himself to sleep when he couldn't hold off exhaustion any longer." Evenna clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "A man could kill himself doing that."

"Seems a bit excessive just to take some notes," Heradion said.

"He was looking for a cure." Falcien glanced up from the book he held propped against one knee. "He knew there was some dark magic at work in Carden Vale. With the passes frozen and the river trade stopped, where could he hope to find answers except in his books? A shame his library wasn't equal to the task. The Codex of Curses is more fairy tale than fact, and while Eristhei collected the best information available in his time, much of what he wrote was badly distorted or untrue. But at least we know our solaros was working on the problem."

"We also know he failed," Heradion pointed out.

"But not why." Asharre stepped through the next door into the solaros' tiny bedchamber, leaving the others to their reading.

The blankets on the bed were knotted and untidy. Wrinkled starbursts showed where they'd been crumpled in sweaty fists. The stench of fear lingered on them, rank and bestial, and something else as well. Asharre had never smelled it before, but she knew at once what it was: bad dreams. Many nights of bad dreams.

A forest of burned-out candles sprouted from the bedside table. More lay in a box at the table's feet. On top of the boxed candles was a book with dated entries. It looked like a diary, but Asharre couldn't begin to decipher the crabbed writing, so she carried it back to the Illuminers. "This was in his bedroom. Nothing else."

"I'll start work on it tomorrow," Falcien said, taking the diary and tucking it into his satchel. "We'll need more space to sort through all this, and I can't say I'm eager to try squinting my way through the man's handwriting by candlelight."

Evenna glanced at the windows. Azure twilight was rapidly fading to black. "Neither am I. The reading can wait until morning. Let's collect whatever else there is to find here and go back."

Each of them lit a candle from the solaros' stockpile, and Evenna led them to the chapel's east wing. The curved hallway ended in a door of goldenwood and dark windows: the entrance to the glassed gardens, where healing herbs could be cultivated when snow mounded the fields and the earth was frozen to icy rock.

The next door, Asharre guessed, would be the drying room, used for the preparation and storage of herbal medicines, bandages, and other tools of the healer's trade. Carden Vale might have had a real physician or two when the Baozites ruled Ang'duradh, but the poor town it had become had little to attract, or hold, such a man. Good doctors were nearly as rare as Blessed, and had no holy strictures preventing them from catering exclusively to the rich. The village solaros was probably the only healer in Carden Vale, whether or not he actually knew anything about the art.

Evenna bypassed the garden and the drying room to try the patients' rooms. The first two were unremarkable. Clean, airy, scented with a lingering hint of wintermint and wormwood. One had a wide, slanted table for women who preferred to give birth in a holy place, under the Bright Lady's gaze, rather than in their own homes.

The third room was a cell. It had been hastily built: the floor stones had been pried up to drive iron bars into the earth, and only ash-smeared wood replaced them. The stones lay jumbled behind the door, caked with crumbling earth. The cell's bars were plainly scavenged from other places; though all of them looked sturdy, no two matched, and several had been crudely sawed off to fit. Decorative whorls swirled up and down one brass bar, dull between the bright toothmarks left by saws all along its length. The next bore a verdigrised lady's face in profile. The others, newer, showed no such artistry.

In the corner of the cell was a millstone with a chain looped through its center. The ends of the chain were linked to a man-size leather harness. Rawhide mitts dangled from the harness; rather than shackling the wearer's wrists, the restraints had been designed to immobilize his hands entirely. The mitts were frayed and spit stained, as if wild dogs had been at them.

There was nothing else in the cell. No dishes, no chamber pot, not so much as a blanket to ward off the cold. Its only adornment was a massive iron lock dangling from the door.

Papers covered in the same scratchy hand as the solaros' diary lay scattered across a rickety table facing the cell. Evenna set her lantern on the table and examined the pages.

"Anatomical diagrams," she said, holding one up.

It looked like a child's drawing of a half-remembered nightmare. The creature sketched on the page was impossible. Twisted limbs sprouted from its body at odd, useless angles; misshapen mouths broke through its skin like gaps in the seams of a rag doll. The solaros had drawn a stream of wavery black lines behind it, as if the creature left a trail of slime in its wake. Asharre couldn't imagine how it walked. She couldn't imagine how it lived. "What is that?"

"*Vordash of Knight's Lake,'" Evenna read. She looked up, doubtful. "A mercenary. The occupant of this cell, I believe."

"Maelgloth," Falcien said. "He was one of the Malformed. Not ansurak."

"What's the difference?" Asharre asked.

The olive-skinned Illuminer pointed to the drawing's jumbled limbs and drooling mouths. "Power and intent. Maelgloth are warped by the power of Maol coursing through their flesh, but they do not have the strength of ansurak. The transformation is just the last stage in their corruption; there is only enough magic in them to break their minds and turn their bodies into a misery, and they die soon afterward. This creature was not meant to live long. He was maelgloth."

Evenna squinted at the pages next to the grotesque drawing, rummaging through them until she came to some that were more text than pictures. "This Vordash came to the temple in early winter, complaining of inflamed scratches on his hands. Something he'd been working on for his employer a a visiting scholar? I can't quite make this part out. Later he was tormented by bad dreams. The solaros, treating him, worried that the dreams might be a contagious? Not sure about that bit either. He advised Vordash not to return to his company and to remain here for observation. Over time, the man's demeanor changed. He became violent, delusional. The solaros had him confined for his own safety while he sought a cure. The physical changes began while Vordash was confined. It's possible that the other killers in Carden Vale might have become something like this, if they hadn't been executed, but Vordash was the first to live that long."

Asharre wondered how the solaros had faced that horror. He'd been an old man, ready for retirement. A country priest lived a quiet life, dealing with farmers' mishaps and colicky babies. He might have seen the occasional broken arm or knifing among merchants' guards, but real magic, real danger, was something for tavern stories.

Until it wasn't.

How would he have dealt with it? How could he? A solaros in this backwater village, lacking Celestia's Blessing or any real knowledge of magic, would have been helpless before such a threat.

It seemed that he had tried, though. She admired the courage in that, even as she wondered why he had not gathered his people and fled. "What happened then?"

"The solaros built this cell." Evenna folded the papers and tucked them away. "He believed he could cure it, or treat it. In the end, however, he failed. Vordash died and was sent to the pyre. By then the priest was overwhelmed, so he sought a stronger cure."

"What?"

"He never says outright. *A sword like a sliver of the blue dawn. A blade sharp enough to cut darkness from the soul.' He thought he could find it in Shadefell. That's all he wrote."

"Aurandane," Falcien breathed. Awe shone on his face. "Of course."

"Aurandane?" Asharre asked.