As the boat leaves the transmuted camp, Din, Malo, and the wardens sit in grim silence with their wounded prisoners. Malo warns that everyone will be placed under containment on returning to Yarrowdale because of possible contagion exposure, so Din pushes to question the smugglers before they are taken away. First, Tangis administers blotley larvae tests to Din, the wardens, and the prisoners; all of them pass, confirming that the titan's-blood exposure did not infect them, and they are finally able to remove their warding helms.

Once one prisoner is strong enough to speak, Din questions him through Malo, who translates from Pithian. The man calls himself Latha and says he is a dead man. Latha explains that he and the other survivors were away on watch when they returned to find the camp already transformed, so he does not know exactly how the horror happened. Latha believes the disaster was the work of a mysterious “pale king,” a masked figure his clan served for over two years, who wore a white skull-like helm, spoke perfect Pithian, and seemed to know everything about imperial shipments before they were attacked.

Latha describes how the pale king first hired the Kachu clan to steal a shipment of reagents, then repeatedly guided them to rich plunder with impossible precision. According to Latha, the pale king could learn a person’s history and secrets at a glance, and he had a habit of tapping on stones, trees, and other objects. That detail strongly reinforces Din’s suspicion that this figure is the same extraordinary enemy tied to Sujedo’s disappearance. Latha also says the pale king had previously “blessed” the smugglers with smoke-delivering devices like the percolator, so Din concludes the gang likely trusted him before he destroyed them.

Latha leads the group to the Midlow, a flooded jungle strewn with old filyra-stone dam ruins, where the pale king sometimes received visitors at a shrine. There Din and the wardens find a hidden island sanctuary with a shallow cavern, many carefully balanced cairns, offerings, charms, and a central stone throne, making clear that the smugglers revered the pale king almost as a god. Nearby, the search turns up dead rats, fish, and a snake in the reeds beside a cauldron full of boiled shelled nuts, suggesting the pale king had been preparing a toxic substance or otherwise leaving behind something lethal.

Din notices that one cairn alone has no vines and appears recently built, so he has Malo fetch a spade and digs beneath it. Buried in the mud is a small wooden box containing a single Yarrow oathcoin. Din compares it to the oathcoin given to him earlier by the noble Darhi and finds the two identical. Because oathcoins are extremely rare and normally come only from Yarrow’s courtly elite, the discovery suggests that the pale king had some direct connection to a Yarrow noble. With that troubling clue in hand, Din and the wardens end their search and prepare to leave.