The Hall

The vast stone-and-bone pavilion at the centre of The Wheel — the Veykar's mobile camp on the Deyune Steppe. Half-sunken into rock, lined with fire-pits and smoke channels, the Hall transformed raw slaughter into something that could pass, by lamplight, for civilisation. The hierarchy of food and the hierarchy of power were the same hierarchy here. The Draethan ate at the inner tables; the kitchen-girl who would become The Girl With the Scar served from the outer ones. The Hall is where the Veykar took most of his meals, where Morran's severed hand was nailed to the wall, and where the Veykar himself was finally poisoned. The site is still locatable on the Steppe by a circle of fire-blackened stone the grass has not reclaimed.