The new world has found the old one, and wants it.

A king who believes everyone can be interested sends his velvet into Orenthal. A church built on certainty sends something colder. In the mountains, the dwarven tribes of Doloriä weigh an offer no chairman should have to weigh alone, and in the deep galleries under the city, miners break into a corridor that the maps of five eras insist cannot exist.

Patrick, keeper now in fact as well as name, descends further into the city’s archives than any holder before him, into the language of an old compact that every era has read wrong in the same direction. What he finds beneath the ninth ring does not want to be freed.

It wants to be witnessed. And that is a far more dangerous request.

The room was older than its cargo.

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