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The slow, colorless dawn revealed a city of tombstones. Its outer walls were broken apart like a jumble of loose teeth, and its spires and structures were canted, their windows and doors shattered and empty. Dougal could make out the sites from his map and his earlier visit. There was the Sunrise Tower of the palace, its spire rising above all others. The royal treasury was within the palace complex. There had been a central tower, but that had fallen, taking King Adelbern and his curse with it. There was the hall of records, now roofless, its contents rotted by time and weather.

And there was the central plaza, where he had to shoot Jervis. His heart sank at the sight. The others came up behind him, but for the longest moment, no one spoke.

“It’s a wreck,” Riona said. “A horrible, terrible ruin. I—I knew the stories, of course, but I never …”

“It’s worse on the inside,” said Dougal.

“So,” Ember said, looking to Dougal, “what is our plan of attack?”

Dougal turned to look at the other four. All were armed and waiting for him. There was no question of turning back now, even if they wanted to. They had paid too high a price to get this far.

“This way,” said Dougal, although as he spoke he felt he was condemning all of them to their deaths.

Dougal led the others down to the city’s crumbling outer wall and followed it around to the right, away from the gaping maw of the main gates. “This is how we entered the last time,” he said.

“And we all know how well that went,” said Kranxx.

“Why don’t we march in through the front gates?” said Gullik.

“Every ghost in the city would come to meet us,” Dougal said. “They’re mostly mindless monsters, but they remember being charged with protecting that gate—and then watching it fall. They have watchers there. Nothing—and no one—ever gets through it.” He pointed to a hole in the collapsed wall wide enough for even Gullik to fit through. “Besides,” he said, “I’ve been this way before, so I know what to expect.”

Riona looked at the wreckage of stone and mortar around her. “I never imaged it would be this bad.”

“Steel yourself, then,” Dougal said as he climbed over several feet of rubble to reach the back of an alley on the wall’s other side. “There are worse things in here than ghosts.”

“Bear’s bones!” Gullik said. “What could be worse than an army of ghosts?”

Dougal led the team to the mouth of the alley, which opened up on a wide street that had once been a center of commerce in the city. As he reached the street, Dougal stepped back and waved his arms to present the scene to the others. “What’s worse?” he said. “All the bodies from which they came.”

The bones, armor, and weapons of the soldiers that had been fighting at the time of the Foefire littered the streets. Most of the skeletons lay there still intact, having had to endure only a couple of centuries of weather and sun. Unlike on other battlefields, birds and other animals refused to pick at the flesh here, the ghosts and the Foefire itself keeping them far away.

The first bodies lay at the mouth of the alley, and as Gullik brushed past one of them, it fell to pieces. The bones clattered and the armor clanged on the cobblestones, startling them all. Gullik cursed his clumsiness, then withdrew behind Dougal again.

“Nothing is holding those bodies together but memories,” said Riona.

“Those memories are fading fast,” said Dougal. He pointed at a small square that the street opened onto. “That’s the way we’re headed.”

“And where are we going?” asked Ember.

“Ultimately, to the royal treasury, beneath the palace. Finding a way down once we reach it is another challenge. When Adelbern set off the Foefire, the buildings were shifted, and some of the lower stories were crushed by the upper. The king’s chamber, atop the Sunrise Tower, was mostly unscathed. It should have some access.”

“You say ‘should’ like you do not know,” said Kranxx.

“We never got that far,” said Dougal. “But then, we broke into the city at night.”

Dougal crept up the street slowly, picking his way past the bodies and struggling to find