The iron-banded doors groaned open, and a column of torchlight swallowed Wrynn Calder whole.
He stood on his own two legs, which surprised him. The bone-cuffs had given him cramp so fierce in the cart that he had assumed they would need to drag him from it. Now the ache still ran from wrist to shoulder, but the cold stone under his boots cut through the fog of the last three days. He blinked, slow, and the world resolved into a long white corridor. Walls of polished limestone stretched ahead, each block fitted so tight the seams were lines drawn in milk. Braziers of pale blue flame hung at intervals on iron chains, their light tasteless, their heat barely a whisper on his skin. The guards did not speak. They walked behind him, two of them, their plate boots thudding in perfect time with his, a metronome counting his steps toward whatever waited at the end of this hall.
A faint smell of salt and old paper threaded through the air. Beneath his boots, the floor was immaculate. He remembered marching through the throne room of Vael when it still belonged to its rightful king, remembered the marble there being imperfect, veined, cracked in corners. This floor had no such mercy. It had been scrubbed of all memory.
A door at the far end opened before the guards reached it, and Wrynn saw the Pale Chamberlain standing in the gap, hands folded at the waist, head inclined a precise two degrees. Wrynn did not know his name. Everyone in the rebellion knew his reputation. He was the man who kept the lists, the man who could make a name appear in one column or another with the flick of a wet pen. His face was drawn tight as a closed ledger. His robes were the color of the walls, bone-white linen edged in thread of the same shade, so that only his hands and head seemed to belong to any living thing at all. He was old, but not frail. He watched Wrynn with the polite attention of a man examining a horse for sale.
"Captain Calder," he said. His voice carried down the hall without effort, as though the stone itself chose to carry it. "Thank the lords of the undercrofts you are well. Please. Step inside."
Wrynn stepped inside.
The chamber beyond was an audience hall reduced to its bones. A long table of pale wood stood at the center, polished until it threw back the light of a single candle set at its head. Behind that candle sat the chair, a tall thing of black oak, and behind the chair, a mural painted in some older age: kings and queens standing in a ring, hands joined, faces worn away by time or intent. Wrynn had seen it before, he realized. In a children's book. His mother had read it to him when he was small. He could not remember the name of the book now.
The Pale Chamberlain closed the door. The guards did not enter. The clop of their boots retreated down the hall, and Wrynn was alone with the steward and the candle and the worn faces on the wall.
"Please," the Pale Chamberlain said again, and gestured to a chair on Wrynn's side of the table. "Sit. You have not eaten in three days. There is broth, if you will have it."
"I will not have it," Wrynn said.
The steward's mouth twitched, the barest suggestion of a smile. He did not insist. He drew his own chair out, settled himself with the careful movements of a man who had learned long ago that the smallest gesture might be read, and folded his hands.
"Then I will be plain," the Pale Chamberlain said. "Your bond has been bought."
Wrynn felt the words before he understood them. His stomach, which had been a hard pit of cramp for three days, seemed to drop away from him entirely.
"Explain," he said.
"Your bond is the last remaining bond of the disbanded royal guard," the Pale Chamberlain said, as though reciting from a book. "By the old law of the realm, a captain's bond is a debt owed by the throne, which means it is now owed by the present throne. Lord Veylan Mourne has ruled that the bond is to be settled, in the form of service. Your service, Captain. To the crown you once served, and to the man who now sits upon it."
"Veylan Mourne," Wrynn said.
The name tasted of iron in his mouth. He had heard it spoken a hundred times in the camps, a hundred and one. The usurper. The man who had put the old king's head on a pike and called it justice. The man who had taken the throne of Vael with twelve iron-masked lords behind him. Wrynn had never said the name aloud. He had not wanted to give it the weight of his tongue.
"The same," the Pale Chamberlain said. "He has been gracious in this. A captain of the royal guard, even a disbanded one, is not a small prize. He wishes your service."
"And if I refuse?"
The Pale Chamberlain tilted his head, the same two degrees, in the same direction. The light from the candle caught his eye and made it look briefly dead.
"Then your bond is forfeit, and the penalty for a forfeited bond is death," he said, as though he were discussing the weather. "The matter is not complicated, Captain. The law is the law. Lord Mourne has been kind enough to keep your head on your shoulders for the time being, out of respect for the office you once held. I would not press that kindness too far."
Wrynn sat down. He had not meant to. His legs had simply folded. The chair was hard, and the wood smelled faintly of beeswax and something older, something he could not place. He stared at the candle. The flame was steady. There was no draft in this room.
"What service?" he said.
"Hunt," the Pale Chamberlain said. "A man has broken faith with Lord Mourne. He was one of the twelve. He took a thing that did not belong to him, and he fled into the mire with it. The lord wishes him brought back. The thing he stole is to be brought back with him. That is the service. In return, your bond is satisfied. You are a free man. You may return to your farm, your fields, your flock, whatever humble life you have made for yourself."
Wrynn had no farm. He had no fields. He had a camp of two hundred desperate souls in the hills above Velmoria, and a girl named Tess who watched the road for him, and a name on the lists that the Pale Chamberlain kept. He said none of this.
"Name him," Wrynn said.
The Pale Chamberlain studied him a moment. He seemed to weigh something. Then he reached into his robe and produced a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and slid it across the table.
Wrynn did not take it.
"Sable Voss," the Pale Chamberlain said. "Lord Sable Voss. Once of the twelve. Now of nothing. He has stolen a grimoire from the private library of Lord Mourne. The Codex of Hollow Kings. A forbidden text. A text whose contents Lord Mourne will not permit to be in the hands of any man living."
Wrynn's throat closed around the name. Sable Voss. He remembered a face, narrow and pale, framed by a fall of dark hair, a man who had stood at the right hand of Veylan Mourne on the day the king died. He had not worn his mask then. He had been grinning.
"Voss is dead," Wrynn said.
"News travels slowly to the hills," the Pale Chamberlain said, without a flicker of expression. "Lord Voss has been reported. He is not yet confirmed. Lord Mourne is generous in these matters. Until a body is brought to the undercroft and identified by the chamberlain of the dead, a man is not dead. He is missing. He is to be found."
"And if I find him dead?"
"Then you bring the grimoire back," the Pale Chamberlain said. "And the bond is paid. And you may go."
Wrynn reached for the folded paper. He did not want to. He did it anyway. The paper was warm from the steward's robe. He unfolded it and saw a sketch of a face, drawn in careful ink lines. The face of Sable Voss. Younger than Wrynn remembered. Less hollow in the cheeks.
"Where has he gone?" Wrynn said.
"The mire," the Pale Chamberlain said. "The Witch-Tower of Velmoria. Beyond the bone-foundries, in the country the old maps call the Ashen Court. You will know the place. There is nothing else like it."
Wrynn folded the paper again. His hands were steady. He had thought they would shake. They did not.
"What is in the grimoire?" he said.
The Pale Chamberlain's smile came back, the barest crease at the corner of his mouth. "Nothing," he said, "that concerns you, Captain. You are not to open it. You are not to read from it. You are to bring it back, sealed, to this hall, and place it in my hand. If you open it, you will be killed. If you read from it, you will be killed, and the killing will be slow. Lord Mourne is particular about these things."
"And Tess?"
The name came out before Wrynn could stop it. Tess. The girl who watched the road. The girl who had carried his messages through the warren districts for two winters now. The girl whose face, when she heard what he had done, would be something he would have to carry.
The Pale Chamberlain considered the name.
"The girl," he said. "The street runner. Yes. She is on the lists, Captain. She has been on the lists for some time. Her position is not comfortable. If you fail in this service, if you betray Lord Mourne, if you flee, her position becomes rather less comfortable still. I do not say these things to threaten you. I say them because I am a record-keeper, and it is my habit to keep the records plain."
Wrynn stared at the candle. The flame held steady. He could hear nothing else in the room, not even the soft breath of the steward across the table. There was only the flame, and his own pulse, and the paper folded in his hand, and the knowledge of what he was about to do.
"I will need supplies," he said.
"Of course," the Pale Chamberlain said, and his voice was warm now, in the manner of a man who has just been handed a small victory. "You will have them. A horse. A blade. A coat that will not rot in the mire. A purse of coin sufficient for three months' travel, no more. You will be released at dawn. The bone-cuffs will be struck from your wrists before you leave this hall. You will be a free man again, Captain, in all the ways the law can make a man free."
Wrynn stood. The chair scraped against the stone. The sound was very loud in the quiet.
"Dawn," he said.
"Dawn," the Pale Chamberlain said.
Wrynn turned and walked toward the door. He did not bow. He did not look back at the mural. He could feel the steward's gaze on his shoulders as he went, a cold weight, like a hand laid on the back of his neck.
At the threshold he stopped.
"The lists," he said, without turning. "When I am dead, will you strike my name from them?"
The steward did not answer at once. Wrynn heard the small click of his rings against the wood of the table.
"No," the Pale Chamberlain said, after a moment. "The dead are not struck from the lists. They are entered in another column. It is the same ink, Captain. It is only the page that changes."
Wrynn stepped into the white corridor. The torchlight took him again. The braziers of pale blue flame did not flicker as he passed. The guards fell in behind him, two of them, their boots thudding in time with his, and the long walk back to the cell began.
The corridor was longer than he remembered. That was the first strange thing, the length of it, and the way his own footsteps sounded thin against the floor, as though the stone itself was sucking the sound from his boots. He counted the braziers as he passed. Seventeen. He had counted them on the way in. Seventeen. So the corridor was not longer. He was only slower.
The guards did not speak to him. They had not spoken on the way in, either. Their faces were unreadable behind the half-masks they wore, iron from the bridge of the nose to the jaw, lacquered black, the color of a beetle's wing. He could see only their eyes, and the eyes were trained on some middle distance, on nothing, on the job.
At the turn where the corridor branched toward the cells, a third guard was waiting. This one Wrynn did not know. The mask was different. No black lacquer. Bare iron, and on the cheek, a small sigil stamped into the metal. A key. A warder.
The warder fell in behind the other two without a word, and the procession grew.
They came at last to his cell. The warder produced a ring of keys, sorted through them with thick fingers, found the right one. The lock turned with a sound like a small bone snapping. The door swung inward on hinges that had been oiled recently, the smell of it still faint in the air, and the cell exhaled at him, the smell of old straw, of the stone sweating, of the close air he had breathed for seven days.
He stepped inside. The door closed behind him. The lock turned again. The footsteps receded. The torchlight shrank to a slit beneath the door and then to nothing, and the dark came back, the good dark, the dark he had learned to sleep in.
He did not sleep.
He sat on the edge of the narrow cot and put his hands on his knees and breathed. In, out. In, out. The bone-cuffs were still on his wrists, and the weight of them pulled at his shoulders in a way that was almost companionable, a familiar ache. He had worn them seven days. He would wear them six more. He could bear six more.
The steward's face came back to him, the way it had looked in the half-light of the mural hall, and the voice came with it, that warm voice, the voice of a man who had just won something small and was pleased with himself.
The heir. The Chamberlain had spoken of the heir. The boy. The prince, though prince was too grand a word for what the boy had been, what any of them had been in those last days. A child on a white horse, a cloak too large for him, a toy sword at his hip, and behind him the last of the guard, thirty men, then twenty, then twelve, then six, then Wrynn alone, the boy still on the horse because the horse would not go and the boy would not get off, and behind them all the sound of the Sundering, the city burning in a long line, smoke against the sky, the sky the color of a bruise.
He put his hands over his face.
The brand was under his shirt, against the skin of his chest, just left of the sternum. He could feel it through the cloth, the raised edge of it, the puckered skin. He had not looked at it in years. He did not need to. He knew the shape of it. A small tower, fallen. A crown above it, broken. The brand of the failed guardian. Every captain of the royal guard had known the brand. Only one of them had ever earned it. Only one of them had let the heir die. Only one of them had come back alive to be marked for it.
The Pale Chamberlain had seen it. That was the thing that had stopped Wrynn at the threshold, the thing that had made him ask the question about the lists. The steward had not looked at the brand. The steward's eyes had stayed on Wrynn's face the whole time. But the steward had known. The steward had known what was under the shirt, the way a man knows what is in a box he has not opened, the way a man knows the weight of a thing he has lifted a hundred times.
The lists. The other column. The same ink.
Wrynn took his hands from his face. The dark was very black, and very quiet, and very cold. Somewhere above him, a pipe was dripping. He listened to it for a long time. Drip, drip, drip. The sound was regular, almost soothing, almost enough to make him close his eyes.
He did not close his eyes. He thought instead about the horse they had promised him, and the blade, and the coat, and the purse, and the dawn, and the long road west, and whether he would take it, the road, whether he would ride it or leave the horse at the first crossroad and walk into the hills on foot, the way he had come in, the way he had always come in, the way he would probably always go out.
He thought about the boy. The boy on the white horse. The toy sword. The cloak. The face, which had been very small, and very white, and which had not understood, even at the end, what was happening, what was coming, what the sound was, behind them, in the city.
Wrynn lay down on the cot. The straw rustled under him. The brand itched, the way it always itched when he thought about the boy. He put his hand over it, through the shirt, and pressed, and the pressing helped, the way it had always helped, the way a man presses a bruise to make it feel more like a bruise and less like a wound.
He slept, at last, and the dark took him, and the pipe dripped, and the cell breathed around him, and somewhere in the upper hall, in the room with the mural, the Pale Chamberlain sat at his long table and wrote, in his careful hand, in a new column, a new name.
Wrynn stood with his back against the wall of the cold little kitchen and listened to the pump in the courtyard shudder through its long, weary stroke. The lantern on the sill guttered in a draft that came from nowhere he could see, and the flame bent sideways like a man bowing under a blow he had not yet been hit with.
He had been awake now for the better part of two days. The small clock on the mantel said half past three in the morning, but he no longer trusted the small clock; he no longer trusted anything that moved without him moving it. The brand on his shoulder had been quiet since the dream of the boy, which meant either that the thing had taken its pleasure and gone to ground, or that it was waiting. He preferred the first reading. He suspected the second was closer to the truth.
The pump finished its stroke, sighed, and was still. The silence that followed was the kind that listens back.
He had not yet decided.
That was the strange part. He had always known how to decide. In the old life, in the long coats, under the green-and-silver standard, a man was given a problem and a rank and a clear set of orders, and the deciding was done for him; all that remained was the doing, which was the easy part, the part he had been built for. Out here, in the thin coat, with the leather pouch under his shirt, the deciding had to come from inside, and what was inside was a hollow that ached when the wind changed.
He poured himself a half-cup of water from the jug by the door. He drank it standing. The water was cold and tasted of iron and old pipe, the way water tasted in this part of the city. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and the hand came away smelling of the candle grease he had been using to blacken the leather of the bridle for the horse he was not yet sure he had.
The door opened without a knock. He did not start. He had been listening for the latch; he had been listening for the latch since he sat down.
The boy who came in was not the boy he had been listening for. This one was older, fifteen, perhaps sixteen, with the long, starved look of the warren districts, and he stood for a moment in the doorway with his chest heaving and his eyes too wide and his mouth working over a shape that would not quite become a word.
"Wrynn," the boy said, at last. "Wrynn, come quick."
"What."
"It's the girl. The one with the quick hands. Tess. They have her."
Something in the word "her" landed in him like a thrown stone.
"Where."
"The old counting house on Candle Street. The one with the green door. She's in the cellar. There's four of them, maybe five, and one of them is not like the others."
"Not like the others how."
"Wrong, Wrynn. Wrong face. He smiles wrong."
Wrynn set the cup down on the table. The cup made a small, precise sound against the wood.
"Go to Maelis," he said. "Tell her what you have told me. Tell her to bring the three with the red scarves, and no one else. Tell her to come by the alley, not the street. Go."
The boy went.
Wrynn stood alone in the kitchen for a long breath. The lantern steadied itself, found a small, upright flame, and held it like a promise. He reached for the coat on the hook. He did not put it on; he slung it over his shoulder, the way he had slung his cloak in the old life, the way a man carries a thing he is not yet certain he will need.
He took the knife from the board. He took the long knife from under the board. He did not take the pistol; the pistol was for ending things, and he was not yet certain he wanted this to end.
He went out into the night.
The streets were quiet in the way that streets are quiet when they have been told to be. The lamps were lit, but the light they gave was the color of weak tea, and the shadows it made were thicker than the light. He moved along the wall, his boots soft on the wet cobbles, his breath a small pale ghost before his face. Twice he passed a patrol, and twice he let them pass, and twice he noted the pattern of their walk, the gap in the arc of their sight, the precise number of steps between the corner of the gin shop and the broken gutter where a man could stand and not be stood over.
He came to Candle Street. The counting house was at the far end, set back from the road behind a low wall of crumbling brick. The green door was ajar. A thin line of yellow light lay along the threshold like a drawn blade.
He listened.
From the cellar, below the floor, he heard a voice. It was a voice he knew. He had heard it once before, in the long hall, at the long table, while it read him a list of the names of the dead. It was the voice of a man who enjoyed his work.
"A curious thing," the voice said, "about the bloodlines of the old coast. So much of it has been spilled, over the years, that one would think there would be none left to spill. And yet here you are. And yet here is the mark on your wrist, which is the mark of the seventh house, which was supposed to be extinct, which is supposed to be a story we tell the new clerks to make them afraid of the ledgers."
A small sound from the girl. Not a word. A breath, perhaps, or the beginning of a word that had been stopped.
"Do not," the voice said, mildly, "make that sound again. It is unbecoming in a person of your lineage. We have a great deal to discuss, you and I, and I would prefer to discuss it with you in one piece."
Wrynn set his back against the wall beside the door. He closed his eyes. The brand was awake; it pulsed in time with the slow drum of his heart. He let the pulse move through him. He let the cold move through him. He let the small, bright hatred he had been carrying for a long time move through him, and when it had moved through him, it was gone, and what was left was something quieter and much more dangerous.
He opened his eyes. He stepped through the door.
The room beyond was a counting room, or had been. The long table was still there, and the high stools, and the racks of bound ledgers, but the floor had been swept clean of paper and the lamps had been trimmed and the air smelled of polish and of something else, something metallic and old, that he could not at first place and then, with a small lurch of the stomach, could.
The staircase to the cellar was at the back of the room, behind a half-door. The half-door was open. The yellow light came up from below.
He went down.
The cellar was one room, low-ceilinged, with a stone floor and a single iron column at the center. The column had a ring set into it at about the height of a man's chest. To the ring was chained Tess.
She looked up when his boot struck the last step. Her face was dirty and one eye was swelling shut and there was a cut at the corner of her mouth that had been allowed to bleed and then allowed to stop on its own, which was a particular kind of cruelty he recognized. Her wrists were raw. She did not speak. She looked at him, and the look was not a plea. It was a measuring. It was the look of a woman deciding, in the space of a breath, whether the man at the foot of the stairs was the man she had thought he was.
At the table, in the far corner, with a cup of something steaming at his elbow and a quill in his hand and a ledger open before him, sat the Pale Chamberlain.
He set the quill down. He smiled. The smile did not arrive on his face so much as it was already there, waiting, the way a trap is waiting.
"Captain Calder," he said. "How good of you to come. I had hoped you would. I have been keeping your page open, all this time, at the top of the column, with the date left blank, because I could not decide on the ink. I am pleased to see that I will not have to decide alone."
Wrynn did not answer. He stood at the foot of the stairs and let his eyes move across the room, counting the shadows that were too dark to be shadows, and finding, in three of them, the particular stillness of men who have been told to be still and are being paid to be still.
"Four," he said. "Three in the room, and one on the street above. You have lost the boy I sent to Maelis; she is bringing the three with the red scarves; you have perhaps a quarter of an hour."
"A quarter of an hour is a long time," the Chamberlain said, "in the right company."
"You have her chained to the column," Wrynn said. "Why."
"Because she is interesting," the Chamberlain said. "Because she carries, on her wrist, a mark that was supposed to have died out with the seventh house in the year of the long frost. Because Sable Voss spent a great deal of money and a great deal of blood, in the last months of his reign, looking for that mark, and did not find it, and would have been very pleased to know that it was here, in this city, on the wrist of a girl who steals apples for a living."
Wrynn's mouth was dry.
"And because," the Chamberlain said, "you are a man who requires a great deal of persuading, Captain. I have tried, in my small way, to persuade you by the offer of a horse and a purse and a clean road west. You have, so far, refused the clean road west. I have now brought a different kind of persuasion."
He lifted one white, careful hand from the ledger and gestured, very slightly, toward the iron column.
"The bone-foundries of the lower city are running, as they are always running, day and night, feeding the forges of the usurper's war machine. They take a great deal of fuel. They prefer, when they can get it, fuel that has been alive. They are not particular about the kind of alive. They have, I am told, a marked preference for the young, because the young burn longer."
Wrynn's hand tightened on the knife.
"You will sign," the Chamberlain said, "the paper that is open on the table, in the ink that is in the pot, with your own blood, which I have taken the liberty of providing in the small vial you see at your left elbow, and which is your own, which I had taken from you, by the physician's art, during your brief stay in our hospitality. And then I will let the girl go. And then I will let you go. And then, tomorrow, you will lead me to the others, and the day after that to the others after them, and so on, until the list I keep in this ledger is at last, and at last, complete."
"And if I do not sign," Wrynn said.
The Chamberlain's smile did not change. It did not need to.
"Then," he said, "I will, with my own hands, cut the chain that holds the girl to the column, and I will walk her, by the arm, through the lower gate, and I will deliver her to the bone-foundries, which will take her, in pieces, over the course of the night, and I will watch the chimney of the foundry smoke until dawn, and I will know, in the small hours, that I have done a thing that was necessary, and that I have done it well."
Tess looked at Wrynn over the swelling eye.
"Don't," she said. "Whatever it is. Don't you sign it."
Wrynn looked at her. He looked at the cut at the corner of her mouth. He looked at the raw wrists. He looked at the mark on her wrist, the small blue crescent, which he had never noticed before, which he would not have known to look for, which was the mark of a house he had been told, in his youth, had been dead for a hundred years.
He looked at the Chamberlain.
"You will let her go," Wrynn said, "when I have signed. You will let her walk out of this room, and out of this house, and you will not follow her, and you will not send your men to follow her, and you will not, at any time, on any day, in any season, in any year that remains to either of us, lay a hand upon her again."
"I will," the Chamberlain said.
"On your mother's name."
The smile, at last, altered. It thinned.
"That," the Chamberlain said, "is an unkind thing to ask of a man in my position."
"I am asking it."
The Chamberlain inclined his head, by a degree.
"On my mother's name," he said.
Wrynn crossed the cellar floor. He did not hurry. He did not look at the three shadows. He looked only at the table, at the vial, at the paper, at the quill that lay beside it, dipped and ready, the ink drying on its point.
He sat down. He uncorked the vial. The smell of his own blood, old and faint, rose to meet him. He wet the tip of his little finger in it. He took the quill in his other hand. He looked once more, over his shoulder, at Tess.
"Hold still," he said.
He wrote his name on the line that had been left for it. He wrote it in his own blood, in a careful, upright hand, the hand of a man who had once been taught, in a long-ago schoolroom, by a master who believed that a man's signature was the only part of him that could be trusted to remain.
He set the quill down. He corked the vial. He stood up.
"Cut her loose," he said.
The Chamberlain inclined his head, by the same degree. He produced, from the sleeve of his coat, a small, bright key. He crossed the cellar, with the unhurried steps of a man crossing his own parlor, and he fitted the key into the lock of the chain, and he turned it, and the chain fell away from the iron column with a small, bright clatter.
Tess did not move at once. She stood, with her arms at her sides, and looked at the Chamberlain, and then at Wrynn, and then at the Chamberlain again, as if she were weighing the two of them on a scale she had brought with her from the street.
"Go," Wrynn said. "Up the stairs. Out the door. Left along the alley. Maelis will be waiting."
She went.
Wrynn stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to her boots on the steps, and on the floor above, and on the cobbles of the alley, and then he listened to nothing, because she had turned the corner, and was gone.
"Now," the Chamberlain said, "tomorrow, Captain, at the ninth hour, you will lead me to the house of the woman with the green door."
"No," Wrynn said.
The smile, this time, did not alter at all.
"No," Wrynn said again, "you will not have the others. You will have me, and you will have my name on your paper, and you will have the knowledge that I signed it for the girl and not for the purse. And that will have to be enough for you, Chamberlain. That will have to last you the rest of your life, which will not be as long as you have been planning."
"You are threatening me," the Chamberlain said, "in my own cellar."
"I am informing you," Wrynn said, "of what is going to happen, which is different. You are going to let me walk out of this room, because if you do not, the three with the red scarves will come through that door, and the boy I sent will bring others after them, and you will lose the page you have kept open at the top of the column, and you will lose the column, and you will lose the ledger, and you will lose the evening."
He turned, and walked up the stairs, and out the door, and into the alley, where the dawn was at last beginning, very faintly, very far off, to consider the sky.