Istori Agnostus stands among the tomb-cities of the Wastes of Al G'hesh, and it is the only one there that was never built to hold the dead. The dynasty that raised the Wastes went outward into death on purpose, mortaring ossuaries and god-courts as a matter of faith. Istori Agnostus was a living city. It had granaries, a fish-market fed off the Syvern, a council that argued about taxes. Then it emptied, and no one buried it. That is the difference the gravekeepers of Al G'hesh will point out if you ask them, and the reason they will not spend a night inside its walls.
The city died the way the Ianovko leave cities. An account survives, kept by the tomb-wardens who watched the whole of it from the necropolis next door. First the bells rang strange. Then the looms and the singers lost the thread of their own work. Then a winter passed with no birth set down in the temple rolls, and then another. People began to travel and not return. They were not taken. They walked out under their own power, cheerful, carrying with them a brighter Istori Agnostus than the one they were leaving, and they went off to live in it. Within thirty years the bricks were empty. The wardens recorded the last departure and sealed their own gates against whatever had done it, by which time the pixies were long gone.
What remains is a city in good repair and wholly uninhabited, which unsettles visitors more than rubble would. The roofs hold. The well-houses stand. At dusk the central market still sounds like a market, the murmur of a crowd, a vendor calling a price, the scrape of a cart, all of it pitched just below the level where you could make out a single word. No one is there. The sound has run unmaintained and undimmed for the better part of three centuries, and it is the Ianovko's signature on the place. They time the collapse of a thing to fall after they are gone. This one they set never to collapse at all, and left it playing to an empty square like a receipt.
Stand in the Istori market at dusk and you will hear the price of barley called in a tongue two hundred years dead, and the laugh of someone agreeing to it. Step toward the voice and it is always one stall further on. The wardens say the trick is never to step toward it.
Treasure-hunters come for the intact houses and leave them intact; the silence discourages better than any lock. The wardens of Al G'hesh keep Istori Agnostus on their rolls as a warning rather than a tomb. Nothing was ever buried there.