It was a hundred paces straight down to the courtyards, gardens, and temples of the Dawn Palace, but she didn’t look straight down. Instead, she stared north, eyes wandering over Annur’s roofs of copper and slate and teak shingle. Morning fog off the Broken Bay still filled the streets and alleys, and though Adare could make out the sounds of the city stirring—curses of carters and canal hands; the rattle of merchants opening their shops; strident cries of grocers and fishmongers hawking fruit and flowers, the day’s fresh catch—she couldn’t see anything in those streets but the still, white fog. The morning was all noise and no motion, as though the living had abandoned Annur to the ghosts. The balcony easily overtopped the masts of the tallest ships, the gulls wheeling above the harbor, and yet from that balcony, even when she tipped her head back until her neck hurt, she could not make out the top of Intarra’s Spear. That other, greater tower’s wall rose like a curtain of slagged glass barely a hundred paces away, but the top was lost in the clouds.
