The city of Fenward, perpetually storm-blasted on the edge of the Great Salt Desert, passes into a season of curses. It begins as a wandering blacksmith arrives out of the sea of dunes. The only work he will take on is the forging of chains, linked into a web-work map of the city, which he carefully cuts apart like a slow torture as Fenward devolves into carnivals of violence and rebellion. No sword-girt hero arises to end the storm, so who else is left to handle the mystery of the hammer-wielding sorcerer except Fenward's beggars led by Tenna the Blind, with their ancient tradition of solving riddles and their strange game called chlab? But no rest for Fenward as the second curse begins work, this time not through an external entity but now a monster taking shape from the city's own chain of sorrow and guilt, a thing that slips through the cracks between bricks and the gaps between cobblestones to reach and slay. Rilla, the young prophetess whose home is the hard stone chair in the Square of Truth, and her unlikely ally, a broken, cynical soldier, will have to pool their strength to cut the final links of the curses. Their way leads to a shunned house whose history no one can quite recall, as if it hid a crime willingly erased from memory.