"First door," Adrian said. "Eight meters ahead of you, on your left. There's a pressure plate three meters short of it — pale stone, a shade lighter than the rest, you'll never see it. Stop before it."Cole walked into a hall he could not read, on the word of a man he could not see, and stopped where the voice told him to stop, in front of nothing, over nothing, three meters from a death he had to take entirely on faith.This was the whole trial, and he'd understood it in the first thirty seconds, and understanding it had not made it any easier to do: to give up, completely, the one thing that had kept him alive for eight months. Cole Mercer survived by seeing — by reading the room faster and colder than anyone else in it, by never trusting a thing he hadn't worked out himself. The floor had taken his eyes and handed them to the one person in the world he'd decided he could trust, and then it had stood back to watch whether he actually could."The plate runs the trap in my hall, not y

They went into the moving hall on a count, and they did not flinch, and it nearly wasn't enough.It was the hardest thing Cole had ever made his body do, and his body had done a great deal. To walk forward at speed into a corridor he could see was empty — his own bright half, the one he himself was crossing, showing him nothing, no blade, no drop, safe — while every nerve screamed that empty was the lie, that the danger was here, was now, was the thing his eyes weren't showing him; and to keep his eyes instead fixed across the dark on Adrian's hall, on the blades sliding at Adrian, and to move not to save himself but to keep walking the count so that Adrian, watching Cole's hall, could move Cole's body for him through the deaths Cole couldn't see —— it was a kind of falling. It was stepping off a roof every single stride and trusting the voice in the shell to have built a floor where the ground should be."Left," Cole said, fast, flat, watching a blade scythe at where Adrian's hip wo

There was a sky, and it was wrong, and it was the first thing Cole understood about the world below the gate.It was not black. He'd braced for black — for a cave, a vault, more of the dead dark. Instead the doorway let them out onto a hillside under a low burnt-orange ceiling of cloud that went on past seeing, lit by no sun, glowing faintly of its own accord the way the inside of a banked fire glows. There was weather. There was a wind that smelled of cold water and old smoke and something underneath both that Cole's animal brain read as people have lived here a very long time. And there was light — everywhere, in the valley below them, a thousand small warm points of it, steady and yellow, strung along streets and bridges and the flanks of a city built into the far hills.Candlelight. A whole world lit by flame, because it had never had a sun to lose."The Underfolk," Adrian said quietly, beside him, the giant-killer's stillness in him gone soft with something Cole didn't often hear

They took the two of them to the Pale King.He held no court that Cole would have recognized as one — no throne, no guards, just an old, old Underfolk in an unlit hall at the top of the city, sitting among a thousand cold candles he would not allow to be lit, because, the Lamplighter murmured, the King kept his dark on purpose: he was the one who remembered, and a man who remembers does not look away from the dark to make himself comfortable.He looked at the two of them a long time, his great sunless eyes moving over the space between them the way every Underfolk's had since they'd come down. Then he said, in the doubled half-beat voice, "You let it go. The grieving one. Nine hundred years we could not, and you did it in a night, by being the thing it could not be." A slow blink. "So I will pay you in the only coin my people have left. I will tell you the truth about the thing you are climbing. No one above the Pale has ever been told it. Sit."They sat, on the cold stone, in the dar