Nine-Maps of the Hollow Passes

Straton Ilvenos once mapped the safest road through any mountain in the Myrren Dominion — until one survey too honest cost him his rank, his order, and his name. Now he sells what he still does best: maps of places people would rather keep dark.

A killing wind ahead of its season drives him to the Aekelion, a lone inn on the Skorrhas Pass whose stone walls have held back worse storms than this one for three generations — for a price nobody who shelters there is ever told. When the old keeper dies holding that price back with her own hands, Straton finds himself trapped for the length of the storm with the very Order that ruined him, and with raiders who'd just as soon put a knife in everyone under that roof.

He came to read stone and get paid for it. He's about to learn what happens when the thing keeping you alive is quietly, patiently eating you instead — and that the only way out might be to break the one shelter for a hundred miles in either direction.