Chapter 24

Celcha halts on the slope from the library as yellow fog belches from the wolf-mouth vent. Assistants flood the entrance platform in impossible numbers. One male assistant rants at the city, points at Hellet, and Hellet collapses. The male and a female assistant then tear off their own flesh, revealing two small, matte-white human children who descend toward the city, ignoring Celcha.

Torn between checking on Hellet and following the children, Celcha chooses pursuit. She tracks them through silent mountain streets toward the grand plaza, noting the city’s emptiness and fearing the gas plan may unravel before the ganar can respond. She suspects the male child might be Yute in some transformed state.

In the plaza, Celcha glimpses spectral figures: Hellet’s ghosts, Maybe and Starve, now seen clearly as a canith and a human woman. They dance and laugh above the temple steps, apparently celebrating. Seeking answers and allies, Celcha slips into a service alley behind the temple and enters via the ganar door, passing unconscious humans and a canith guard felled by the gas.

In the temple’s underways, the air burns with chemicals and a heavy taint. Forcing a blocked door, Celcha discovers ganar bodies piled behind it, faces contorted, foam-dried mouths, and rigor-stiff limbs. Panic rises as she realizes the gas—meant to incapacitate—has killed the temple’s slaves, and likely many others. She flees upward into the vast nave, reeling at the thought that humans, canith, and ganar have died alike.

At the temple doors, Celcha again sees Maybe and Starve, the very ghosts who guided her and Hellet to this point. They kiss and vanish through the iron leaves as Celcha charges too late. Overwhelmed by guilt and fury at their manipulation and the carnage, she hammers the doors and vows to find them.