The landing stage of the Isle of Defaulted Kings was paved with massive slabs of black red stone, each stone carved with the funerary seal of a different extinct noble house.
Ren stepped off the iron barge, his boots crunching on layers of desiccated tomb-lichen that had grown undisturbed for four hundred years. The air on the island was noticeably colder than on the river. It carried the dry, preserving chill of high-sky vaults, smelling of refined white thick tar, cold silver plate, and ancient embalming wax.
Behind him, Marshal Ren and the Ash Emperor secured the barge’s heavy mooring hawsers to a huge bronze bollard shaped like a coiled sea-serpent, while Vane Vale stepped onto the pier, using the tip of his ivory cane to test the solidity of the flat stone slabs.
“Solid red stone,” Vane observed, his eyes scanning the stonework with skilled test. “Quarried from the Northern Crags and hauled down through the deep shafts at ruinous expense. It would have taken twelve thousand indentured stonemasons three years just to cut the foundation blocks. A monument to uninhibited, uninsurable vanity.”
“And the tomb of the man who stole our city’s future,” Ren said. He looked up at the huge bronze-and-lead portals that barred the entrance to the palace-tomb hall.
