The undercroft went down before it went anywhere else, and Kael went with it, one hand dragging along a wall he couldn't see and the other still locked around the shard like it had fused to his palm, which, he would realize in a few more minutes, he very nearly had.Behind him, the Judge-God's voice had changed shape. It was no longer reciting; it was calling, and a god calling for help was a sound with a texture Kael had never once imagined having to learn, a low, resonant pressure that moved through the stone under his boots rather than through the air. He didn't know how far that sound carried. He didn't know if it carried up through the temple floor to whatever priests were still awake at this hour, or sideways through the earth to something else entirely, something with a domain that bordered this one and ears built to hear exactly this kind of alarm. He only knew that every second he spent finding out was a second he wasn't spending putting distance between himself and the room

By midday, Kael's name was worth money.He found this out the way most fugitives find out anything useful, sideways, by accident, standing in the back corner of a tavern he'd used a dozen times before to sell things he shouldn't have owned. The crier's bell had gone up and down the street twice already that morning, which wasn't unusual in itself; town criers rang for tax notices, for missing livestock, and for the ordinary small emergencies of an ordinary city. What was unusual was the particular hush that fell over the tavern's common room when this one started reading and the way every head in the place turned, not toward the door, but toward him or rather toward the general shape of a man matching a description that was, Kael had to admit, uncomfortably accurate.By order of the Sanctified Court of the Third District, in the name of the Judge-God's own law, one Kael Ashworn, formerly of the border levies, is named Heretic of the First Degree, having committed trespass against a se

They left the granary before the town properly woke, and it took most of the following day's walk before Serai finally answered the question Kael had been turning over since the loft."You want to know why nobody warned you this was possible," she said, without preamble, somewhere around midafternoon, as if she'd been having the conversation with herself for hours and had simply decided to let him hear the second half of it. "Why there's no line in any sermon, any scroll, or any child's catechism that says do not speak a god's true name. You'd think that would be the very first rule. The kind of thing carved over every temple door.""I'd assumed it was forbidden.""It isn't forbidden. It's unaddressed." She said the word carefully, the way a physician names a symptom she doesn't like the shape of. "Forbidding something means acknowledging it's possible to do. The temples never forbade it because the temples never believed it needed forbidding, the same way nobody writes a law against

"We should go back for him."Kael looked at Serai like she'd suggested walking directly into the temple district's front gate. "You want to go back into the lower city. Toward the man who just threw me through a tent.""I want to go back for the man who just threw you through a tent, while he's still alone, still disoriented, and hasn't had time to report anything to anyone yet." She was already checking the angle of the sun, calculating something Kael hadn't caught up to. "Right now he's an isolated data point. Give him an hour, and he'll be a report sitting on a magistrate's desk, and every temple in the district knows exactly what we look like, which direction we ran, and that there are two of us instead of one. We have a narrow window where capturing him costs us less than letting him walk."Kael didn't love the plan. He loved even less the alternative, which was running blind from a threat that would only keep multiplying the longer they let it operate with better information tha

It happened two nights after the Hollow Crown, without warning and without anything resembling permission.They'd made camp in a fold of dry hills well off the road, no fire again, the shard resting on the flat stone between them the way it had most nights since the granary, a small ritual neither of them had named out loud but both of them kept anyway, as if setting it down in the open between them made it easier to trust than keeping it hidden in a coat. Serai had been staring at it the way she often did, the old habit of an oracle's eyes still reaching for a sight that wasn't there, and Kael had learned not to comment on it anymore.This time, something reached back.She made a sound he'd never heard her make before—not a scream, nothing so clean, more like the involuntary gasp of someone who'd been struck somewhere the body doesn't have a name for, and her eyes rolled white before he could catch her, and he had just enough time to get an arm under her before she went rigid against