The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (2)

 

BOOK II

 

 

 

MEORAQ

 

In the city of Xheoth, in the state of Yroq, in the world and the hour of Gann, a pillar of fire rose up in the east, reaching like a desperate hand to heaven. It was a cool night, but not a cold one, and rainless although the wind was strong over the city, and so there were many who saw this miraculous sight. Uyane Meoraq, Sword of Sheul and well-honored in His sight, was one of them.

He supposed that was a smallish sort of miracle in itself. He spent enough time under the open sky that, given his leisure, he preferred a closed hall for his evening meditations. But the hall was engaged this night for the young initiates of Xi’Xheoth to take their oaths of ascension and so Meoraq took himself to the rooftop courtyard instead. He saw the fire that he might otherwise have never seen and therefore, there must have been some significance to the vision meant only for him. He meditated upon that as he watched it burn.

The sky had been filled with omens for many years, they said, but this was the first Meoraq himself had seen and he was a Sheulek—God’s Striding Foot—who had spent most of the past twelve years in the wildlands. And this, this was far more impressive a sign than the occasional glimpses of light or colors that some claimed to have seen behind the ever-present clouds. For hours, that blazing arm strained upwards and its many fingers grasped at salvation, but though it fell with each strong gust of wind, it always rose again.

Behind the low walls that separated the temple’s courtyard from those of the city’s ruling Houses, Meoraq could see smaller flames spark to life as braziers were lit, until it seemed all Xheoth had come out to see. As a man who often went many days without seeing another living man or hearing any dumaq voice but his own, sights such as these still had power over Meoraq. He admired the city as he admired the fire in the sky. Walls a quarter-span thick, now alive with lights, formed a perfect ring around the protected fields where cattlemen and farmers labored. In the daylight, from this same vantage, he would be able to see the lush colors of living crop against the dead wastes of the world outside the city walls. But at night, on this night, the fires of so many braziers seemed a wondrous proof of life, a miracle in itself, and as precious as any burning pillar Sheul had sent to be seen.

Meoraq bore it a reverent witness, keeping his own company as the rooftop over the temple-district filled with on-lookers. Although they kept a respectful distance, every backwards glance showed Meoraq more priestly robes: acolytes, monks, scribes, oracles and even the young candle-wards came to stare until it seemed there could not be a man left in the rooms beneath his feet.

Hours passed, each one marked by the tolling of bells throughout the city, not quite in sync with one another. It began to rain, dampening not only the fields below—the sweet, green smell of freshly-wetted manure billowed up at once and Meoraq breathed it in, still thinking of fields, of farms, of life—but the enthusiasm of many of those watching. Braziers all across the city roof began to gutter and die, breaking the perfection of the ring they had so briefly formed, but some stayed regardless of the discomfort. Meoraq was one of these. There would always be rain and he would always have days when he had to walk through it and nights when he had to sleep in it, but this fiery arm might never come again and he still had not determined its meaning.

As he meditated, one of the acolytes was jostled suddenly forward by the crowd, stumbling hard against Meoraq’s back. Meoraq spared his immediate bows and apologies a distracted grunt, but the damage was done. With a few shouts and clapped hands, the courtyard was cleared of all but the highest members of the priestly caste. The next man who drew near to speak apology was the abbot, whose name escaped Meoraq for the moment, but who seemed an amiable sort, for one of his caste.

They watched the fire together in comfortable silence. The rain and the wind both grew stronger, making the gesticulations of the flame wilder and more desperate even as it began to die down.

“It seems to be beckoning,” the abbot remarked.

Meoraq acknowledged him with a grunt, but his interest intensified. It did look like a beckoning arm now, less like the clutching one he had first imagined it to be.

“How far away would you say the fire burns?” asked the abbot.

It was a fair question. Meoraq was one of perhaps a hundred men in Xheoth this night who had ever been beyond the city’s walls. To speak in measurements of distance had only the most abstract meaning to most citizens, but this man had surely made pilgrimages in the past to be in a position of such authority now and so Meoraq considered the question fairly.

“The shadow of the Stepped Rise stands before it,” he said at last. “And is not illuminated by it. It could not be less than thirty spans.”

The other man grunted thoughtfully. “To see a flame at thirty spans…What city lies in that direction?”

“Tothax,” Meoraq replied at once. He knew every city that fell within his circuit well, and quite a few others that did not. Tothax, he knew better than most. He had received an urgent summons to that city half a year back, a summons not merely for a Sheulek but for Meoraq himself, and refusing to name the charges. This had so annoyed him that Meoraq deliberately made Tothax his last stop upon his circuit and he made certain the courts of Tothax knew it. Indeed, upon his arrival in Xheoth, he had found another summons waiting for him, even more tersely worded than the last. And if there was a reason why he had perhaps overstayed himself in this city many days after the last dispute had been heard and the last trial judged, there it stood. He was a Sword of Sheul, greatest of the warrior’s caste, a Sheulek. He took orders from his father and from God and no one else. He would move on in his own time, and he fully intended to make himself obnoxious in the House of whoever wanted him so damned badly right up until the last lick of autumn.

Ah, but then it would be home, home to Xeqor and House Uyane. Familiar faces. A bed more myth than reality. His father’s company in the evenings, and perhaps his brothers’ as well, if they were home from their own duties. Well…Salkith would be there; he was a governor’s guard and entitled to a room in their barracks, but he preferred to sleep at home where he could punish those who joked about his infamously slippery brain instead of force himself to laugh along. Nduman was a Sheulek with his own circuit and his visits were infrequent enough, but he was also keeping a low-born woman and several children in Vuluth, outside of conquest and without formal marriage, although he thought it a great secret. Thus far, their father had seemed strangely inclined to tolerate this, but Rasozul was lord of Uyane and steward of the bloodline and could not ignore the scandal forever. As for Meoraq himself, he was what he was: the eldest son of a legendary man, the heir to a glorious name and a proud House of Oracle Uyane’s own lineage, a servant in the favor of great Sheul, and a man who was perhaps not as humble as he’d ought to be. He was working on that.

“Tothax,” the abbot mused, bringing him roughly back to himself.

“If somewhat to the north.”

“So it is not Tothax that burns.”

“No.” Regrettably. “There is nothing there that should burn for so long.”

“Without moving,” agreed the abbot, tapping the back of one hand broodingly with his fingertips. “A plains-fire would move in this wind.”

“And swiftly die in this rain,” added Meoraq. His clothing was now plastered unpleasantly to his scales. “And no plains-fire would ever burn so tall.”

“Yet still it burns. And beckons.”

Meoraq grunted.

“It is a true sign of Sheul, then.”

“So it would seem.”

They watched. Another hour was tolled and the fire waved, feebly but still with some life, as it slipped lower and lower.

“He has set a mighty banner,” the abbot remarked. “But for whose eyes, I wonder?”

Meoraq flattened his spines. The elderly priest gazed benignly straight ahead and did not acknowledge his narrow glance.

“I should have journeyed on to Tothax many days ago,” Meoraq admitted at length.

The abbot bent his head at a polite angle, flexing his spines forward with interest. “Perhaps the message is meant for you.”

“Perhaps.” But now he felt certain it was. Meoraq had trained a lifetime to hear Sheul’s voice and feel His touch. Now he saw His waving arm. It would be a foolish thing to pretend he did not know what it meant.

Or what he had to do.

“I leave for Tothax immediately,” he said. And naturally, it was raining. “I require provisions for the journey.”

“Name them and be met, honored one,” said the abbot mildly. “Shall you take a bed until the morning?”

“No.” Meoraq turned away as the burning arm, its work done, finally slipped behind the horizon and returned the night to uninterrupted black. “Sheul has lit His lamp for me at this hour. I can only trust it is the hour He wishes me to follow. It would seem I have lingered too long already.”

“We shall pray for you,” said the abbot, bowing. The other priests remaining on the rooftop bowed as well. “Go in the sight of Sheul and serve Him well.”

 

* * *

 

Meoraq descended the stair and beckoned indiscriminately to the crowd of youths and low-born priests still clustered in the upper halls hoping for a glimpse of the miraculous fires. Several came forward at once. He took the first to reach him for his usher, made his few demands to the others, and allowed himself to be led back to the room he had been given for his own upon his first night’s arrival. He did not have many preparations to make, but it was the polite thing to give the temple’s provisioner time to arrange his supplies so that they would be at the temple gate when he did leave. Rushing out at once only to wait around where all could see him would only embarrass Xi’Xheoth and those who lived there. Meoraq knew he was not always as patient as he ought to be, but he tried not to be rude. Sometimes he tried.

The boy bowed in ahead of him and lit the lamp, then waited, his small head pressed to the floor and back stiff with pride at being made usher for so prestigious a guest. Meoraq dismissed him with a silent tap to the shoulder and, knowing that little eyes would be on him and little ears listening, kept his back to the door until he heard it shut and catch.

He was alone.

“Fuck,” said Meoraq, and gave the cupboard where he ought to be sleeping even now a solid kick. He hit the supporting framework rather than the lower door as he’d intended, so that instead of a resounding thump as his boot struck home, he damned near broke a toe. He swore again, limping over to the simple chair provided for his simple needs.

It was raining. It would be raining. Thirty days he’d passed in Xheoth and it had not rained once in all that time. Thirty days, but now he was leaving and the water poured out of the sky as from a cattleman’s pump.

He sat there in his soaked leather breeches and the city-soft tunic the priests had given him while his own was laundered, dripping puddles on the floor, and cursed the rain, which did no good. He had dry clothing in his pack, but could see no point in donning it only to have it drenched ten steps out of the city gate. The rain fell and he would just have to walk in it as just punishment for staying so long in Xheoth.

“A refinement to my sense of humility, I suppose,” muttered Meoraq, glancing heavenward. “And I thank You for it, O my Father. It is so comforting to know that You take so personal an interest in the improvement of my character.”

Sheul did not reply. Not here, at any rate, although it might be raining even harder outside.

Meoraq tightened his bootstraps and loin-plate and finally glared at the table where his weapons awaited him. The abbot had requested, as all of them did, that he not go armed within Sheul’s House. Meoraq’s usual reply to this was that all the world was Sheul’s House and he went where directed ever-ready to do Sheul’s work, but having the right to be an arrogant ass whenever the whim took him did not make it an obligation and this abbot was a better man than most.

He put his travel-harness on over his wet tunic and clipped the great hook of his beast-killing kzung at his hip. Its weight was an immediate comfort to him. Next came the long, wide samr, sheathed and slung across his back to be drawn against those whose crimes either did not merit or could not wait for trial. Last of all, his honor-knives, the slender sabks, buckled high on his arms. They were meant only for the arena in the sight of Sheul and frequently used in the wildlands for all manner of menial work. If his years of service had taught Meoraq nothing else, it had taught him that one could not skin a saoq with a blade as long as one’s arm. If Sheul saw it as disgrace, He had never let Meoraq know.

A soft knock upon his door. A familiar sound these past many nights. Not a priest.

“Enter,” Meoraq called without turning. “And stand.”

She had already taken her first steps toward him. Now they faltered to a stop. Her voice was as hesitant as her footsteps. “Sir?”

“Sheul calls and I go to answer. You have done well in your service to me,” he added, damned generously. “Go in my favor.”

She retreated one step, but only one. Her hands clasped, trembling, at one another. “Have I offended you, sir?”

She had not. Nor had she gone to any great effort to please him. Indeed, she had done little to make any impression on him whatsoever. She hadn’t even told him her name.

Nor should she, in all honesty. She was not a friend to him, only one of the many women who came to the temple after being turned away by their husbands for want of children. They haunted the halls of the temples in every city, veiled shadows in the shape of women, offering themselves in solemn rituals in the hopes that Sheul’s sons would heal their wombs. She did not come to him for pleasure and he should not expect to find any in her.

She was neither young nor beautiful, but Meoraq had been compelled to have her all the same when he had passed her in the hall, returning from his first judgment in this city. As Sheulek, he had the right to any woman he was given to desire, but it was this one who lit the spark in him that night and every other night that she came to him. The marks of many Sheulek before him scarred her from neck to mid-arm, but she had not burned for Meoraq and his own did not stand among them.

He had not decided yet how this made him feel. His masculine pride was, in truth, somewhat insulted, although he knew it was Sheul who had the ultimate judgment over each mortal coupling and therefore His will that she not conceive of him, but only receive Meoraq’s fires. If that was enough to heal her barren womb, so be it. If not, well, Meoraq didn’t particularly want her haunting the halls at House Uyane anyway. Sheul had blessed him at each coupling, sometimes twice, but the sex itself had been as unpleasant as sex could be. Her way of bending silent and motionless beneath him disturbed him. He had given her permission to move, to speak, even to struggle, but she did nothing except to whisper her prayers and drift away when it was over.

Now she seemed dismayed at his leaving, as if it were some failing of hers that drove him out from the city in the dark hours of night. That if she had been more winsome, or if her worn flesh had just been fresher, he might stay and give her the children Sheul had thus far denied her. That she had displeased him, shamed herself, failed God.

Meoraq understood the situation well, but he knew no better how to extract himself from it than he ever had. He finished securing his travel-pack and slung it onto his back, then turned to face her at last.

She bent her neck at once, hiding her eyes from him as a proper woman learns early to do, but her hands grasped anxiously at one another, never entirely still.

Meoraq started walking, but stopped at the door. He sighed, rubbed once at his brow-ridges, then came back to her. He stood awkwardly before her while she cowered, then reached out and brushed the back of his hand gently across her well-scarred shoulder. Her short spines only flattened further, uncomforted.

“I thought surely it would be you,” she whispered.

“Mine is the same clay as any other’s. Look to no living man for your restoration.”

“He has forsaken me.”

Meoraq gave the door a glance, wishing it would be miraculously filled by a priest who would know better how to handle this. It remained shut. The woman before him continued to stare at the floor between her bare feet, even as silent tears welled in her eyes. He was Sheulek, a true son of Sheul, and he had felt His touch and heard His voice all his life, but for the sake of that same life, he could not think of a thing to say to her.

“We are all tested in our time,” he said at last and immediately regretted it. It was precisely the sort of lame and obvious non-answer that priests liked to give and which Meoraq himself had always found simply infuriating.

But she only brushed at her eyes and made a quiet sound of wordless acceptance. Living here, no doubt she’d heard such answers too many times to be moved by them any longer.

“Forgive me, honored one,” she said, sinking to her knees. “I have delayed you with a foolish woman’s unhappiness. Go your way in the sight of Sheul, I pray, and good journey to you.”

All spoken as heavy as the eternally overcast skies. He found himself wishing she would look at him, as wildly inappropriate as that would be, to show him her naked eyes and let him see some glimmer of a future in them.

But the burning arm beckoned. A Sheulek answered to God above his brothers, his teachers, even his own father. He could not spurn Him to linger with this woman, particularly since he could be of no comfort to her.

He touched her again, actually gripping her shoulder this time in a more direct farewell than he had given anyone else in Xheoth, but she cringed beneath his hand, understandably confused and dismayed by this intimacy. He left her, shutting the door behind him to give the first of her soft, broken tears some privacy.

 

* * *

 

His usher was waiting in the hall to lead him to the temple’s gate, trying—and failing—to disguise his curiosity at the sexual mysteries he knew to be unfolding behind the door once the woman entered. He seemed very surprised to see Meoraq so soon emerged and it took him some little time to remember the proper genuflections. Meoraq, brooding, waited out about half of them and then set off without him.

He regretted it within a few moments, knowing it was only the difficult scene with the woman and the prospect of walking in the dark and the rain that fanned the impatience in him, and knowing also that the boy would suffer the kind of poisonous insinuations that only one’s young peers are capable of making for his perceived failure to perform this very simple task. He’d been a boy once. He’d heard those insinuations. Hell, he’d made them.

When he reached the gate and the cluster of priests waiting to see him off with the right chants and prayers, Meoraq made a point of tapping the boy on the shoulder. “I have left my bedroll. You may have it, if you like.” And to the smiling abbot, ignoring the boy’s immediate outcry, “I leave Xi’Xheoth to you.”

“We thank you for your service, honored one, and pray we shall not soon require your return.”

His provisions were presented, exactly as he had demanded: Two waterskins sized for long travel, bread enough to see him to Tothax and cuuvash enough to see him right through and on to Xeqor, a fresh bedroll, and a good thick blanket to hold back the growing chill at night. Of his own will, the provisioner had added a candle-brick and a small pot of honey, doubtless from the temple’s own waxbeetles. Meoraq would not have asked for these things. He was entitled to whatever he was moved to demand, but Xheoth’s usual prosperity had been hard-tested this past year and he was loathe to take away even its most frivolous resources. Besides, he had every intention of making outrageous demands when he reached Tothax and the House of whoever dared to summon him without giving cause. Oh yes. Then, he meant to replace his tent, his travel-packs, his boots, his harnesses—both travel and battle—all his buckles, his various tools for skinning and scaling, and he thought he might even be up to feeling a strong need to acquire a mending kit with metal needles and every grade of stitch from sinew to fine thread. And a tea box. A nice one, not just another clay pot with pouches. He wanted to see some inlay after half a year of summons.

The abbot began to pray as Meoraq made himself ready, and since it was the custom for the prayers to continue for so long as the honored visitor was there to hear them, he did it quickly and moved on before the elderly man’s voice could tire.

Beyond the temple gates, the city moved and breathed. At this hour, on any other night, the inner passageways of the city would have been empty, save for the watchmen on their patrols and the beacons with their lumbering carts, measuring out dippers of oil to keep the lamps lit.

Now the walkways were choked with people and most of the food-stalls in sight were opened as merchants took advantage of the crowds. Looking around at all this activity, anyone would think it was full day outside.

A shifting beside him. The temple had sent for watchmen to escort him out of the city and they waited nervously for his acknowledgement, looking at him with eyes that said they knew as well as he did for whom the message in the sky had been written.

Meoraq beckoned and started walking for Southgate. He was recognized—in his battle harness, with blades hanging off every side of him, he was damned hard to miss—and hailed in many voices all at once. Each had a different turn of phrase, but it all came to the same question: What was the meaning of the fire?

As if any man could know the mind of Sheul. The fire had been for him, and even Meoraq did not know what it meant.

He kept moving. The temple watchmen fell in close beside him, warning back the crowd when they pressed too close, lest some overenthusiastic fool catch at Meoraq’s arm and earn himself a cut across the face from a Sheulek’s samr, or worse, catch at the samr itself and earn himself a cut across the throat. Such things happened far more often than Meoraq ever would have imagined in the days before his ascension. Fools forgot themselves easily. And thus there would always be a need for Sheulek.

It was a long walk to Southgate. Meoraq’s clothes were nearly dry when he arrived, having just reached that damp, clinging stage where they pulled at every scale. The doorkeeper was expecting him and, by the flat-spined sour-faced look of him, sorely offended by this upset to his routine.

“On your way,” he said, indicating the watchmen at Meoraq’s flanks with two fat fingers in a lofty wave. “To your work and leave me mine. Go on, I say! What are you waiting for?”

“My word of release,” said Meoraq.

The doorkeeper stood back, his head twitching downward with flustered ill-humor he tried to hide, and waited.

So did Meoraq.

One of the watchmen shifted, but only once.

In the stretching silence, the doorkeeper’s discomfort grew until it finally burst out of him in a grumbling, “Do you wait on something, honored one?”

“I do. I wait on your salute.”

For the second time, the doorkeeper gave ground, this time enough to bump his backside against the heavy door he guarded. His neck bent. He made a surly genuflection, and another, more formally, when Meoraq continued to wait. Then and only then did Meoraq dismiss his escorts. He didn’t look to see if they saluted before they went. He was not a man who cared about salutes; he cared about being pointed at by some unwashed doorkeeper as if he were a servant.

‘Patience,’ he thought, watching the doorkeeper work his keys in the impressive lock of Southgate. ‘Sheul, O my Father, give me patience, if not enough to get me through this life, at least enough to get me out of Xheoth without disgracing the name I carry.’

“Fire in the sky, they tell me,” grunted the doorkeeper.

Meoraq did not reply. Doorkeepers were born of the warrior’s caste, like watchmen and the slightly higher-ranked sentries and, for that matter, butchers and smiths and fleshers and even the lowly handlers whose job it was to stand watch in the kitchens and see that no man took up the bladed weapon in defiance of Sheul’s law, but instead used only those poor tools built for them. Yes, this man had been born in God’s favor, and Meoraq supposed they must have at one time stood some of the same training, but he was not a warrior, he was not a brother, and he was not a friend.

‘I am in a truly piss-licking mood tonight,’ Meoraq thought in a faintly wondering way.

They walked together down the long, damp passage through the wall of the city, feeling its colossal weight and age bearing down from every side. The doorkeeper, well accustomed to this walk and perhaps annoyed at Meoraq’s silence, lit no lamp. They walked in darkness until Meoraq could feel the cool air of the outside world blowing against his eyes and hear the rain above their own echoing footsteps.

The doorkeeper stopped. So did Meoraq, and he heard a low, irritated sound escape the man beside him, cheated of the peevish pleasure of hearing the high-born Sheulek walk into a gate. Meoraq smiled to himself in the dark.

Keys rattled. The scrape of metal in a lock. The heavy creaking of weathered hinges. “Stands open, sir,” said the doorkeeper sourly. “Watch your footing.”

Meoraq opened his mouth to demand a parting salute that he wouldn’t even be able to see, but made himself bite it back. A truly piss-licking mood. He deserved a long walk in the rain in which to meditate upon the Prophet’s many sermons on the subject of emotional restraint.

There was silence behind him as he went on ahead, out of the last length of the tunnel and into the full storm Sheul had waiting for him.

“Who walks there?” someone called. One of the sentries, huddled against the wall to wait out the last hours of his patrol.

“Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor,” he said, making a final adjustment to the many straps of his packs. “A Sword of Sheul. Challenge me or cry surrender.”

“I cry,” the watchman said, wiping rain from his face, and, the last formalities dealt with, added, “First rain of the season is treacherous enough without flying thunder and fiery towers. So good journey to you, honored one, but mind your footing as you go. A man can see a thousand miraculous things in his life and still be washed away by one bad turn on a stretch of bad road.”

Good advice. Meoraq raised him a brother’s hand in farewell and walked on as the gate of Xheoth slammed behind him and all the empty world of Gann waited in darkness for the dawn.

 

2

 

It stopped raining a quarter-span outside of Tothax, with the city walls looming black and tall before him and his clothing as heavy as another damned man riding about on his back. Meoraq cast a surly word of gratitude upwards, accepted the final mutter of far-away thunder for the rebuke it surely was, and walked the last length of road ankle-deep in mud. At least, it seemed mostly to be mud, although Meoraq knew the road could not possibly be so softened, even by days of rain, unless some prospering cattleman had driven his herd out to graze beyond the walls very, very recently.

“Perhaps I will demand my boots cleaned once I have answered my summons, eh?” Meoraq said to himself, spines twitching in a grim, self-indulgent sort of humor. “And once I am satisfied that they are clean enough for a Sheulek’s feet, by Gann, I’ll demand them replaced. I never much cared for these boots anyway.”

“Hail and stand fast!”

Meoraq halted and raised one hand in acknowledgement. He had been aware of the sentry circling him for quite some time and suspected he was being hailed now only because the man had finally met up with reinforcements. Tothax was hardly a city teetering on the undefendable frontier, but every city raised out of Gann’s flesh knew violence. Meoraq stood with his arms raised and hands empty, waiting for the sentries—and yes, now there were three of them—to nerve themselves for a cautious approach.

“I see Uyane, a Sword of Sheul,” said one of the sentries, bending his neck in swift apology.

The face was familiar, but Meoraq couldn’t scratch up a name, so he merely grunted and tapped at the man’s shoulder in what he hoped came across as casual and forgiving as well as wet and entirely out of patience. “Uyane Meoraq stands before you. I come to take Tothax. Challenge me or cry surrender.”

“We cry to you, conqueror.” The sentry raised his head, frowning. “Exarch Ylsathoc requests your audience immediately.”

A name at last. And an exarch, no less. Highest of the governing caste, they followed circuits of their own, moving from city to city to oversee the legal affairs of the most eminent Houses. This one was probably here about some oversight in the records of one of his recent trials, and wasn’t that just like one of the governing caste to sit around half a year sending summons just to have a handful of questions answered? Meoraq grunted again, less politely, and walked on toward the gate.

Behind him, the sentries conferred in uneasy mutters. The one who had called him by name now called out again, saying, “Have you a message for me to carry, honored one?”

“I do not ask my brothers under the Blade to carry my messages,” Meoraq replied, still walking.

It was a rare thing for a sentry to hear himself addressed as brother by a Sheulek and it gave these three pause enough that Meoraq had nearly reached the outer gate before they tried again.

“When shall I tell Exarch Ylsathoc you will see him?”

“Name any hour that pleases you,” said Meoraq, drawing his kzung to strike against the gate. “But any lie is a lie before God and you must answer for it. If I choose to see this man you speak of at all, it will be in my own time.”

“I mark you, sir. “The sentry sighed, rubbing at the bony ridges over his brows in a dejected manner. “I only give the message I am given.”

The sentries retreated and Meoraq was given a few moments in the relatively dry pass-way to kick the worst of the mud from his boots while the gatekeeper finished locking them in and turned around. He made an offensively cursory salute, which Meoraq immediately forgave since he also offered both a flask of twice-brewed nai and to carry Meoraq’s pack. The drink was hot and strong and good—Sheul’s love in a swallow, as his father often said—and it was difficult to bear in mind that he would have as much nai as he wished once he was settled, but this flask would be all the gatekeeper could claim until the end of his shift. A Sheulek had the right to seize whatever goods he desired of any man he wished, but Meoraq did try not to be an ass.

“Suppose I should ask your name,” grunted the gatekeeper, striking a lamp. “See your bands and the seal of your blades and all the rest of that ribbony shit, but I’ve had that over-groomed slaveson bleating in my face six times today alone and if you aren’t the Uyane he wants, by God and Gann, you’re still the man he’ll get.”

Meoraq grunted, flexing his spines forward to show some degree of acknowledgement, but he had no intention of seeing anyone until he’d had a bath and a hot meal.

The rest of the walk through the pass-way was comfortably quiet. The gatekeeper made a mutter when the urge came on him, but like Meoraq’s own mutterings were so often apt to be, they were not made in expectation of answers. The flask passed back and forth between them freely, and Meoraq never refused it, although he did limit himself to sparing sips. By the time they had reached the inner gate, it was down to the dregs and bitter with coarse, smoky grounds.

“Keep it,” grunted the gatekeeper when Meoraq tried to return it. “I see you’ve not got one and that’s a hard lack when the weather turns.”

“I do not ask the gate to make provision when the temple summons me,” said Meoraq, and firmly held out the flask.

The gatekeeper snorted humor as he brought out his keys. “Ask for a flask from that crowd and they’ll bring you the finest jeweled cup your eyes will ever clap to. Priests. They think worth is in riches, not use. Hear me and mark well,” he went on, just as if he were a training master and Meoraq a boy on his field. “A thing is not what it looks like, but what it does. Finest priestliest cup in the world won’t keep nai hot in its belly on a long walk in the rain.”

“I mark,” said Meoraq, amused.

The gatekeeper grunted again, swinging the door wide open. He bellowed for an usher then turned in the same breath to give the proper formal farewell, since little ears were around to hear them: “Tothax is yours, honored one. Show mercy to us.”

Meoraq raised the flask as he would raise his sabk in the arena, then slung its strap around his neck and walked on, smiling.

 

* * *

 

One city was very much like another, each one being made after Oracle Mykrm’s design at the Prophet’s direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the busy streets of the inner ring with his usher hurrying to keep ahead of him.

This was the living body of any city: the inner ring, where farmers and cattlemen met abbots and oracles, where merchants ruled over lords and the taxman ruled over all. Voices struck out on every side—hailing friends, hawking wares, protesting price—until they all came together in a great cursing, laughing, chanting wave of chaos. After so many days alone with nothing to see but the rain and the empty road, the thousand sights and sounds and smells of the city were both welcome and abrasive. They were close enough to the terrace that the grey shine of true light could be seen if Meoraq looked to his left down the long rows of shopfronts, but if he looked to his right, orderly rows of hanging lamps burned a far brighter path deeper into the protected city and that was how he turned as soon as he reached the wide archway that led to Xi’Tothax—heart of Tothax—the Temple district.

Gradually, the crowds loosened and the clamor faded. The many noisy bodies became a few strolling priests and even fewer scampering boys. Meoraq slowed his long strides to let his particular boy take a proper place before him.

The Temple gates were closing as he neared them, but the watchmen posted there gave the sabks riding at Meoraq’s arms a glance and opened them right up again.

“Exarch Ylsathoc—” one of them began, bowing, but shut his mouth at Meoraq’s upraised hand. He basked in the warmth of their uncomfortable silence as his usher exchanged himself for one of the temple’s own boys and then he walked on.

“I will meet with the abbot,” he said to his new boy, making certain the watchmen at the gates could hear. “And him alone.”

The usher, oblivious to everything but the naked blades adorning Meoraq’s harness, gave breathless obedience and set off.

Meoraq followed, thinking pleasantly vindictive thoughts of the faceless Exarch Ylsathoc pacing himself into a frothing fury in some priestly corner of the temple, and it was some time before he realized he was not being led to the cloister, but to the stronghold. He started to say something about it being the custom to show a Sheulek to his chambers before all else, but turned the half-formed sound to a wordless grunt instead. He had said he would meet with the abbot, so the boy was by-Gann taking him to the abbot and if he went there tired and wet and muddy as a cattleman, he had only his own peevishness to blame for it.

‘Life is filled with small lessons,’ thought Meoraq, casting a dour eye up at the soot-black ceiling and through it, to Sheul’s ever-watchful gaze. ‘I hear You, O my Father, and I am humble at Your instruction, but just once I would like to indulge a mortal failing without having to learn from it.’

Sheul did not reply.

The boy brought him into the hold as far as the doors to the Halls of Judgment and there delivered him with great importance to an amused council guard. They waited, showing each other the proper motions of dominance and submission with one eye on the boy until he was entirely gone. Immediately after the closing of the door, the guard dropped his arm mid-genuflection and gave Meoraq a slap to the chest.

“Ssh, you’re wet!” he said, shaking out his hand.

“It’s raining. Or has been. Ten days and nights. Here.” Meoraq thrust his damp, muddy pack maliciously into the other man’s arms. “You can carry that.”

“You are a low man, Raq.”

“The man who walks in the sight of Sheul walks the high path at every hour,” Meoraq replied piously and walked around the low wall separating them to help himself to the guard’s cup. Also nai, but quite cold. Meoraq drank it anyway, fingering thoughtfully at his new flask. “How are you, Nkosa?”

“Walking, working and getting dipped. Guess that means I can’t complain.” Nkosa folded his arms and watched as Meoraq forced the last bitter swallow down and turned the empty cup over on the wall.

They were somewhat related, Nkosa’s mother having been a servant in a house where Meoraq’s father had once stayed on a circuit. She claimed him for the sire, and even though she carried no scars to prove it, when the baby opened up male, Rasozul had paid for the boy’s placement at a training hall (or whatever passed for one in a city like Tothax). Of course, the woman had been swiftly married to one of her own caste, the man whose name Nkosa carried. Meoraq had known nothing of this until their first meeting, when Nkosa rather shyly asked if he was by chance related to Rasozul and the whole story had come out. Meoraq had seen no reason to query his father for confirmation. The Uyanes were Sheulek all the way back to the founding of the House; it was inevitable that he should find blood-kin. Really, it was a wonder he didn’t find more of them.

“You’re late,” Nkosa said now, cocking his head to a censuring angle.

“Impossible.”

“You come through twice a year, early sowing and second reaping, regular as a cattleman bathes or an abbot shits. Last harvest was a quarter-brace ago. You’re late.”

“A Sheulek moves at God’s hour.”

“Mm. Was it a woman?” Nkosa asked, with just a hint of wistfulness. During their infrequent and much-enjoyed chats together, he had confided that he had stood twelve years of the seventeen required of a Sheulek’s training before he had been culled, but he was still a bastard, even if he was one of Rasozul’s, and there never was much hope of him being called higher than he stood now. “It was my mother’s doing,” he liked to sigh at the end of this confession. “If only she’d been presented to him as a daughter of the House instead of some linen-girl who helped him rumple up the sheets before she changed them, I’d be wearing a set of my own blades.” Such things were not supposed to factor in a Sheulek’s selection, but of course they did. Politics had no place in Sheul’s sight, but this was Gann’s world.

“There was no woman,” said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul’s granting and never entered his mind.

“Was it two women?”

“No.”

“Ten?”

“No,” said Meoraq, grinning. “Although I appreciate your high opinion of me.”

“I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night,” sighed Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.

“And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right,” said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, “but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best.”

“I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten.” Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. “I suppose you heard I married.”

“No. It was only rumor when I was here last.”

“Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something,” he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. “It’s been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead.”

Meoraq frowned.

Nkosa noticed and snorted. “It’s not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it’s just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we’re kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?”

Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he said merely, “How does she suit you?”

“Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father’s wife and the servants. I hardly know her.”

“Your women share rooms with the servants?”

“We don’t all have Houses, Raq,” said Nkosa with a snort. “Some of us just have homes. But she’s all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her.”

“Your father really should have explained that to you years ago,” Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave Nkosa a comradely tap and said, “Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—”

“You are such an idiot,” snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.

The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles. Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn’t hot enough to steam. “What did you say?”

Nkosa opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.

“How could you—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!” Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, “This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!”

Meoraq kept his hand on Nkosa’s shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, “You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself.”

He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it. Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man’s name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature…but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn’t.

Meoraq released him. Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. “I should tell someone you’re here,” he said, not looking up. “Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days.”

“Exarch Ylsathoc.” Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. “So I hear. Do you know why?”

“You have to be better than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job,” he added at a mutter. “But if you want to hide from him, there’s a petition in the hall right now.”

“A Sheulek doesn’t have to hide from anyone,” said Meoraq. And frowned. “A dispute at this hour?”

“They’ve been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn’t hear the charges.”

Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment’s thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the warrior’s caste.

“I suppose I should put my name in,” said Meoraq, heading for the door. “It was good to see you, ‘Kosa.”

“Think of me tonight when you’re making free with all your conquered virgins,” Nkosa said morosely.

“I sincerely hope not. But think of me while you get dipped with your wife.”

“I always do.”

They both laughed, but it wasn’t quite the same laughter as it might have been.

The clerk, or whoever he was, was in the hall just outside, gesticulating wildly as he hissed to a whole crowd of solemn-faced men, some of them robed as judges. Civil judges, perhaps, but a very bad thing to see. They all looked at Meoraq.

Nothing he did now could possibly be the right thing to do. If he said nothing, Nkosa was sure to be punished, which could mean anything from the loss of his post to a public whipping. If they waited to bring their charge against him until Meoraq was gone and another Sheulek heard that he had put his naked hand on Meoraq, Nkosa could easily be exiled to the wildlands or even executed. But if Meoraq did speak in Nkosa’s defense, he would make a public issue out of what still might be a private one, humiliating not only his friend, but the man whose name he carried. The taint could reach as far as his household’s master, the steward-lord of House Kanko, who might take the view that House Uyane had dishonored him personally. For that matter, the governor of this piss-miserable little city might raise formal charges against the governor of Xeqor, since House Uyane was that city’s championing House.

The only reasonable response was silence.

Meoraq twitched his spines…then flattened them and strode purposefully over to the watchful crowd. “Twice a year,” he said over their bowing heads, “I have the pleasure to see my cousin.” It wasn’t entirely untrue. They were blood-kin, anyway. “We have precious few moments together and you—” He leaned close, staring furiously into the top of the clerk’s bent head. “—have robbed me of three of them. One for the interruption I might have forgiven. Two for the threat you had no right to make. And three that I find you so soon smearing the tale out into the hall. How say you, man?”

The man could not seem to say anything. Meoraq was not entirely certain he was breathing, although he did appear to be trembling very slightly.

Meoraq gave him a quick count of six to feel the weight of all these staring eyes and then he straightened up and drew his samr.

Everyone took a long step away, save the clerk, who dropped with a wheeze of terror to his knees. He stared up at him, his eyes in the lamp-light like daubs of jelly, like something already dead that only glistened.

“Uyane Meoraq stands before you,” spat Meoraq. He was calm, quite calm despite the venom in his tone and the shine of his naked blade. “And with the right to carry this weapon comes the right to use it however I will. You offend me.”

From the kneeling man’s motionless, open mouth came a series of soft, dry clicking sounds. After a moment, Meoraq decided he was trying to say, ‘I cry,’ but managing only the first glottal before his strength failed. His bladder, Meoraq noticed, already had. A twinge of disgust flexed through his spines, seeing that. He did not expect every man to face death as a warrior, but he should at least face it as a man.

“I have not decided to forgive you,” he said, sheathing his samr and stepping away before he got piss on his muddy boots. “But I will think about it and let my judgment be known when I return in the sowing season.”

He left unspoken but very clear the understanding that if he returned to news that Nkosa had been punished, his judgment would be severe.

“Thank you, honored one,” breathed the man on the floor, still without moving.

Meoraq turned his eyes on the best-dressed of the men still clustered to witness all this nonsense. “Where shall I find the abbot?”

“I don’t…In the quorum?”

“He might be in sequester,” another man offered. “I think there was a vote tonight.”

“A sequestered vote?” asked the first, clearly surprised.

“One of the oracles died.”

“Orved,” said a third, timidly nodding in Meoraq’s direction to excuse himself for speaking. “He was on the roof when the fire went up and he fell down the stairs.”

“Oh. I heard about that but I didn’t know it was Orved.”

“Where do you think he’s been all this time?”

“The Halls of Judgment don’t exactly drip oracles,” said the first crossly. “I don’t see any number of people for days on end, but I don’t assume they’re all dead!”

Meoraq folded his arms and gripped his biceps very close to the hilts of his sabks, waiting.

He had their attention again at once.

“If he is not sequestered, honored one, then he should be in the quorum. There is a dispute in session…ah…Are you here for the dispute?”

Meoraq turned away without feeling any strong urge to answer, although he did spare a last glance down at the floor where the kneeling man still knelt. He had recovered only enough to close his eyes and that was just as recovered as Meoraq wanted to see him. There was a great rustling behind him as men made their salutes and bows, but Meoraq didn’t stay to witness them. He knew where the quorum was. It abutted the arena.

 

* * *

 

There was a man posted outside the quorum doors, swordless, with a brutal-looking hammer at his side. Not one of the warrior’s caste. A bailiff, then, and not one Meoraq knew or at least not one he remembered. He gave his name and went into the arena hold to wait. It was his right to hear any dispute where he might be called to challenge or champion, but he wasn’t in any kind of mood to hear the bickering that invariably accompanied legal disputes.

He was not alone in that, it would seem. There was a man in the arena hold already, sitting on the altar and leaned back against the wall, by all appearances asleep, except that no sleeping man’s breath was so precisely even. He wore nothing but a battle harness and a loin-plate, cinched tight over a ridiculously young and unscarred body. His sabks were metal and shiny, as young or even younger than he was. He rested one finger lightly on the hilt of each.

Unwilling to interrupt a brother’s meditations, Meoraq gave no greeting. He set his pack down and opened it, working quietly through his supplies until he came to his spare clothes, which were not much cleaner and not much drier, but some of each and worth changing into. He began to undress.

“I had a bath brought,” the other man said without opening his eyes. “Water’s cooled, but not too murky.”

Meoraq located the basin in an unlit corner of the hold and went to use it, grunting appreciatively. The other man acknowledged this with a grunt of his own, but that was all.

The water was indeed cool where it lay in the basin, but there was more in a closed pail and that warmed it some. It made for rather a deep bath, but Meoraq didn’t mind sloshing over. He didn’t have to clean the floors. There was soap in a sachet and several grades of brush and the bath was quite pleasant even if he had to do it himself. Oh, he could have sent for a servant, and really preferred to use one, but they always sent women and that was too distracting before a trial. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his clay and impervious to all temptation, but Meoraq had found that having a woman rub oil into his naked body had a tendency to arouse him regardless of how inappropriate the place or time might be. He was working on that.

Bathed and dried, Meoraq briskly oiled up and made ready for trial, if it came to trial. The other man finally slid his eyes open toward the end and watched as he whetted his sabks. Meoraq let him watch. They were good knives, made in the age before the Fall of the black, stone-like substance called qil, which no man could now duplicate. The knives had served his bloodline since the founding of his House and he never drew or sheathed them without this hot, fierce leap of pride, remembering how it had felt to take their weight for the first time and feel his father’s hands binding them to his arms. In all his lifetime, including his years of service as Sheulek, Meoraq had never seen a more intimidating set of honor-blades.

The other man hardly cowered at the sight, but he did tip his head and flare his spines forward in respectful admiration. “Ni’ichok Shuiv stands before you,” he said, and glanced down at himself, still very much seated on the altar. “Metaphorically. Sheulteb in service of House Arug.”

Ah, Sheulteb. If a Sheulek was the Striding Foot, then the Sheulteb were God when He stood. Only one short year of training and one degree of rank separated them, and they shared many of the same duties, save that Meoraq served every city on his circuit and the Sheulteb were called to only one House, to act as champion if it had no lord born to the warrior’s caste. There were more of those every year, it seemed. Even Uyane’s line in other cities had Sheulteb now. The Age of the Warrior was ending, men said, and perhaps it was true. Too many of the old blades were broken.

Meoraq sheathed his sabks and went over for a brother’s tap—his open palm to Shuiv’s chest, Shuiv’s open palm on his own. Their hearts were already in sync.

“I do not recall the privilege of meeting one of Ni’ichok’s sons, but I know House Arug well,” said Meoraq when it was done. “He has had more than his share of troubles in recent years. What curse has he brought upon himself?”

“A curse of daughters,” said Shuiv, wryly smiling. “And neither wealth nor name enough to sell them all off. ”

“Sell them?”

“Not so boldly as to be criminal.” Shuiv flicked his spines forward carelessly, then leaned back against the wall again and closed his eyes. “But I had one waiting in my chambers the day I took oath for him, before any blade had been drawn on his behalf. And as soon as I had made her belly round, I found another.”

Meoraq recoiled with a disgusted hiss.

“My samr and I explained together to her father the laws against incest.” Shuiv flared his mouth briefly, showing the tips of his teeth in idle expression of meditative contempt. “But he has had one catastrophe after another ever since, it seems, and he tries to solve every one of them with the offering of marriage.”

“A foolish way to empty one’s House.”

“Oh, he’s emptied it,” said Shuiv with a snort. “The mediators have cited him for frivolous intent eight times this season alone, and each fault doubles his fine. He’s sold two fields already to pay them, not to mention his sovereignty over two hundred households, and low though it may be to repeat rumor, I could not help but notice that two of his creditors forgave his debts after a speedy marriage to his daughters. But he has a legitimate complaint this time,” Shuiv admitted, opening his eyes.

After so many years of judgment, Meoraq rarely bothered to hear complaints. They had a way of prejudicing a man’s mind and when he stood in the arena as an instrument of Sheul, his own will could only prove a distraction. Besides, the grand trials that pitted righteous but wronged men against corrupt and cunning powers that he had read about in his boyhood were just that: stories told by priests to impress and excite young minds. Men did not need reasons to indulge in acts of evil, just as they did not need evil enacted against them to send them crying to the courts for justice. Still, Meoraq tipped his head to an inviting angle, showing interest he did not particularly feel, and the young man before him sat up a little straighter.

“Arug’s debts have been such this year that he sought to squeeze in an extra harvest between riak’s reap and sweet-pod’s sowing. He couldn’t afford to compensate his farmers with coin, so he promised those who met his demands that they would have one-half the final crop of the year rather than the customary quarter. For a surprise, he held to his word. But one of the farming households under his sovereignty went out to find that most of his share of the field’s crop had already been harvested. He suspects a certain farmer, a man who had suspiciously great yield in his own rows, but there is no proof. Both men claim to be wronged, one by theft and one by slander.”

“And as Arug is lord over both, he cannot find for either man without appearing to show favor,” finished Meoraq. He glanced heavenward through the ceiling and sighed.

“Glamorous, I know.” Shuiv gave his spines a rueful flick. “He brought them both here so that they could see how assiduously he serves the interests of his protected, but really, he wants the mediators to make a ruling for him that neither man can hold against him. And probably offer them each a daughter in commiseration, ha. I know he’s brought a few.”

Meoraq grunted his disapproval, but felt his belly warm.

“They’ve made him sit all day in the antechamber while they heard every other dispute in the logs,” Shuiv went on, “but he’s refused to leave and now that you are here, the mediators will surely take it for proof that Sheul has a will in this matter and send the whole stupid thing to trial.”

“Surely. Yet trials have been called over smaller disputes.”

“Not a spear of grass grows save by His design, so my training master told me. And even Arug must serve Him in some way, I suppose. Yet I wonder if I see no more omen in you than a Sheulek coming in out of the rain.” Shuiv settled back against the wall once more, letting his eyes slide shut. “What did bring you, brother?”

“I received a summons. Many summons, to be precise. Commanding me by name. May I be safe in assuming they do not come from House Arug?”

“I shouldn’t think so. If secrets were teeth, Arug still could not keep them in his mouth and I would remember if I heard him utter your name.” A sly peek beneath heavy lids. “It is rather a well-known name.”

“It is not the sword, but the hand that wields it,” Meoraq replied, just as if he were not flattered. “I have been half a year ignoring these summons and so Sheul sent me one of His own.”

Shuiv did not ask his meaning, but studied him with new interest. “I was in meditation that night. I never saw it. They said it filled the sky.”

“I would not say so, but it was tall enough at its first rising to touch the clouds, to pierce them.”

“And you think it was set for you? Truth?”

“I think it was set by Sheul. I think it was tall enough that there might be a thousand men who saw it and believed it for their eyes alone.”

Shuiv waited, faintly smiling.

“It was mine,” said Meoraq.

Shuiv grunted, closed his eyes, and quite some time later said, “The man who has been summoned by Sheul’s own torch must have further to go than Tothax.”

“Then there will be some other sign to lead me on, if it was indeed for my eye. All things indeed serve Sheul, but I can’t think how the squabbles of two farmers and a few rows of riak could be dire enough to warrant a tower of fire on a rainy night.”

“It was gruu, actually.”

“Ah, well that makes all the difference then. For gruu, I should be surprised there wasn’t a hammer of ice to go with it.”

Shuiv snorted.

“I hear,” mused Meoraq, “there is also an exarch who wishes my audience.”

“An exarch in Tothax is rare enough that word has even reached lowly House Arug,” Shuiv replied, eyes shut. “But as he only arrived twenty days and some ago, I can’t think how he could have been sending summons half the year, as you say. As for the exarch himself, I hear nothing save that he has a scandalously gilded taste for drink and a free hand with the abbot’s coin, but there may be more envy in that than truth.”

Meoraq grunted, inviting the conversation to continue if it was the other man’s wish, although the politics of priests and farmers and the eternal rift between them were of no interest to him. Perhaps it would be different if he were a Sheulteb, shut up every day of the year in that common House with its common problems and common tongues forever flapping, but he was not.

“I used to wish for exciting trials when I was young and stupid,” Shuiv said after a companionable silence. “Well, younger. And less stupid. Then I had my first trial…” Shuiv hesitated a glance at him, seeking censure, but Meoraq merely waved at him to speak on. “And as proud as I was to burn with Him, I found myself wishing afterwards for a long, boring post. Which was given to me. And on the way here for—I don’t even know anymore—the sixth time? The tenth? I wished again that something real would happen, something meaningful. And here you are.” There was quiet between them and then Shuiv laughed a little. “It does not bode well for me in the trial to come. May I ask you a brother’s consideration?”

Meoraq tipped his head, knowing what was coming.

“My woman bore my child near the freshening of the year. If it opens a son, will you see him taken to my father? Knowing Arug, he’ll have married its mother off again before my bones are even black and I don’t think I can die completely if I have to worry over another man raising my son. Especially the sorts of men Arug’s been hawking daughters to.”

“My oath is yours, brother. If I stand in Sheul’s favor, I shall pass through Tothax in the early spring.”

“It should be proved by then. My thanks.”

The door opened. Not the door to the hall, through which Meoraq had come, but the door to the arena. The bailiff entered, bowing low. “Honored ones, the court of Tothax under High Judge Sen’sui requests your judgment at trial.”

Shuiv pushed himself off the wall, his smile broad and guileless, eager as only a young man could be. He offered his arm and they clasped shoulders, then left the hold. The bailiff lowered the stair for them. Meoraq descended first—the Swords were equal in the eyes of Sheul, but he reasoned that he had more years of service and if he didn’t take the initiative, they risked standing in the doorway saluting each other like idiots while everyone watched—and Shuiv came after, but they went together to the center of the ring and bent their necks.

It was not a large room, really. They never were. A man could count off fifty paces if he crossed at its widest point, but only if he was sparing with his stride. The corners were rounded; the floor was bare stone, sloping toward its center where the drain was set, to make cleaning easier; the mediators and witnesses had no access to this level, but watched from behind a screen from the floor above. There were no furnishings, no banners, no embellishments. The one indication of this room’s singular importance was the window set high in the ceiling, round as an open eye and stained with colors. In the right hours of day, the light that fell through that window seemed to pour fire itself over the arena floor, but it was growing late now and the arena was mostly dark.

One panel of the enclosing screen slid open, revealing the witnesses’ box. Meoraq knew Arug by his garish clothing and the frantic way he was hissing at his manservant, who then left at a run. He could guess the reason easily enough, but did not dwell on it. What happened after the trial was not important. All his mind and body now belonged to God.

The high judge raised both hands, although there was only solemn silence around him to begin with, and said, “The trial of Ezethu, a man of House Arug, against Mihuun, a man of House Arug, is hereby brought to light before Sheul.”

The men were not identified, but Meoraq knew them for their staring faces, where horror painted itself as thick as awe. Simple farmers with a petty squabble, neither man could have possibly foreseen this dispute going to trial and both clearly feared the consequences—a sure sign that both carried some measure of guilt.

The bailiff came while the high judge read the formal charges, to paint the sign of the Sword in white upon Shuiv’s chest. Somewhere behind the high half-wall, one of the farmers was marked in the same fashion, just as the other would be wearing the hammer now being painted in red over Meoraq’s own heart. He acknowledged the bailiff’s murmur of apology for taking such liberties, but scarcely felt the touch. His muscles were tightening, anticipating. He had fought three hundred battles and more; they were all the first and only one.

“—and submit ourselves before You, great Father. We await Your judgment. Do the Swords of Sheul stand ready?”

Meoraq saluted. Beside him, Shuiv did the same.

The bailiff retracted the stair and shut the door to the arena hold. The high judge brought his hammer down against the top of the half-wall with a flat, unimportant rapport and closed the screen. He could see shadows moving as Arug and his farmers drew slightly back, unsure what to expect, and hear the stern rumble of a judge’s voice warning them to be still. He closed his eyes as Meoraq the man to clear his mind of these distractions and opened them again as Meoraq the Sword.

As the ranking warrior between them, Meoraq began, drawing his sabks. “I do not spill my brother’s blood,” he said, facing Shuiv. “I do not bare my blades for men. I am not Uyane Meoraq within this ring.”

“I am not Ni’ichok Shuiv.” Shuiv smiled as he drew his new, shining knives. There was already color coming in at his throat. “I have no heart and no will in this hour,” he said, now in unison with Meoraq. “I know no fear and no vengeance. I am no more than a sword in Your hand, O my Father. Let them behold me, drawn. And let Your will be done.”

Shuiv began with the same ritual movements they had been taught as children, stylized expressions of balance more than battle whose familiarity helped to focus and center him. Meoraq’s body knew just how to meet him; his mind drifted, counting breaths while he watched his hands work. Their blades clashed and scraped, clashed and fell, clashed and whirled. He knew no urgency, no fear, nothing but the heat rising in his throat and belly, and the simple pleasure that could always be had from indulging in something fine after a long and difficult day.

How long that first, formal stage of battle lasted, he could not say. Shuiv’s movements became steadily more ragged as the color at his throat grew stronger. Meoraq could hear his breaths falling roughly out of rhythm, see the fires burning high in his eyes. He knew the moment that Shuiv let go and became the sword in Sheul’s hand, but he did not soon follow. So perhaps it was not for him after all, he mused, parrying the younger man’s increasingly savage lunges and thinking of the tower of fire. Or if it had been, strange that it should have been all to bring him this far to Tothax only to end him in the arena over a few rows of gruu and some bitter words. Perhaps it was Shuiv who was meant to go on. For a young Sheulteb to take victory over a veteran Sheulek of so grand a House as Uyane was certainly the start of a damned good story.

But his own breaths were coarsening now, his thoughts becoming more difficult to grasp even as they slipped through his mind. He was aware, vaguely, of that curious blankness stealing in while he pondered Shuiv and whatever fate awaited him, replacing words he knew with timeless stretches of empty heat. He stood against it for as long as he could, because the struggle was as glorious as the burning, but his world became a blackness.

He burned.

Fire. He felt it every time, but this time, disturbingly, he saw it. It spilled upwards from the heart of the black, filling his vision and searing at his soul’s flesh, brighter than it had been that night on the rooftop of Xheoth. Not beckoning. Demanding. And in that endless moment between Meoraq the man and Meoraq the Sword, there was only stillness and his heart beating and that tower of fire burning his eyes, and he said or heard or perhaps only imagined the word, “sukaga.”

It caught in him like a fishing hook, almost familiar…

And then the blackness slipped away again. Weight and substance fell back onto his bones; he staggered, catching blindly at a man’s shoulder to steady him until he could see Shuiv’s face through the flames that still coursed through him. He looked down, confused, and saw the black blade of one sabk deep in the younger man’s chest. He had no idea where the other one was.

The high judge’s hammer struck twice, invisible. Meoraq leapt back with a mindless hiss, slashing at the empty air before he could master himself. The fire rose again, but this time, he closed his eyes and made himself breathe until it cooled. Shuiv was dead and Sheul’s judgment, known to all. He was Uyane Meoraq once again; the Sword of Sheul was sheathed.

He closed his eyes, counting his breaths the way every boy born to his caste was taught, with the primary verse for the Six. A slow count, they called that. Slow and calm and even. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay and so, ‘One for the Prophet, the wide open eye…Two for his brunt and the sign of the fist…’

He couldn’t believe he was standing here. His palms ached, but apart from that slight pain, he didn’t think he’d even been scratched, although he felt worn enough that surely the battle had been a long one. Shuiv had started to burn so quickly…but not for the honest man, it seemed. And now House Arug had his widow to care for, at least until her infant had opened and Meoraq could judge it for a son or daughter and see it placed accordingly.

‘Three for Uyane, the unclad sword…Four for Mykrm, the hammer of his law…Five for Oyan of the ash-stained leaf…’

Ashes…Fire…Like the tower he had seen from Xheoth and followed to Tothax. Like the tower he had seen in the blackness of his burning, where he had never seen anything before. And the word, sukaga…a name, perhaps, but not one he immediately knew. Why was it now so maddeningly familiar?

‘Six for Thaliszar and the healing hand…’

It went on from there, but Meoraq started over at one (they only named the low castes to fill out the numbers from seven to ten; the Six were the only verses that mattered) and let his mind wander. By his third slow-count through, he was completely cool and lucid enough to really wonder what he’d done with his other sabk. He cast about for it on the floor while the high judge finished the trial’s closing prayers, then went to see if he’d left it buried in the body anywhere odd. He was careful with his brother’s body as he turned it. Shuiv’s blood was slow, his life gone, but he would not truly be dead until his funeral pyre had been consumed. While he could still feel, he deserved no less than the highest respect.

“Honored one.”

Meoraq looked up to see that the bailiff had lowered the stair and now stood before him, offering his sabk. Bloodied.

Meoraq took it and pinched the blade to clean it. “Where was this?” he asked curiously.

The bailiff bowed. “By Sheul’s judgment, through the throat of Mihuun.”

Meoraq looked up, startled, and saw that the screen wall above him had indeed been battered open. A great deal of blood stained what he could see of the narrow chamber beyond. He looked at his hand, turned it upwards, slowly flexed his fingers. Splinters.

“Having seen that, I think…Ezethu?…will not be quick to bring future disputes to his lord’s attention,” he remarked, sheathing his sabk to pick them out.

The bailiff bowed again. “Ezethu was first to fall beneath Sheul’s judgment, honored one.” He paused, clearly wondering if his next words were in bad taste, then lowered his voice and said, “But I think we have finally seen the last of Lord Arug.”

Pity it took a man’s life to stop a greedy lord from abusing the law, but he was so seldom called to court for good reasons.

Meoraq glanced back, then went and knelt by Shuiv again. He pressed his palm against the still chest and bent his neck in a warrior’s bow. “I will envy you, my brother, when you behold our Father’s face tonight,” he said, and looked up through the high, colored window to the heavens. “Take him, O my Father, and receive him well. He is a good man.”

The bailiff grunted approvingly. Not every victor of the arena gave respect to a fallen Sword, but Meoraq did not do it just because it was the custom. Not this time, anyway. He often felt strange in his own skin after a judgment, but this was different. The vision of the burning tower; the word, sukaga; and Shuiv, falling into God’s fires right in front of him—everything seemed braided, bound to him, impossibly heavy.

He felt a sudden restlessness, an urge to call for his pack and just leave. Never mind the exarch and never mind whoever it was that had been summoning him half the year. He knew what awaited him in the next room and there was a time when he would have been eager to go to it, but not tonight. Sheul was calling him. Meoraq wanted nothing in this world more than to answer.

But he could not answer from the arena and men were surely waiting to bear Shuiv away for his final rites, so Meoraq finished his respects. He found Shuiv’s shining sabks and broke the blades, placing the hilted halves carefully at his feet. He said the Prayer For the Fallen and the first three verses from the Book of the Sword. Then he let the bailiff lead him back into the arena hold.

 

3

 

They had cleaned away the bath and his pack, but the room was far from empty. The high judge was there, of course, with another bailiff, the court scribe, and two lesser mediators. At their center stood Lord Arug in his grossly inappropriate finery and baubles, along with the servant he had sent running from the court at the trial’s beginning. And behind them all, bowing, motionless, scarcely visible in the shadows, was a woman.

‘A girl,’ Meoraq thought, trying to be severe, to be scornful even. Not a woman at all, but hardly more than a child, to judge by the narrowness of her build and the grey tint to her immature scales. One of the many curses laid upon House Arug. Nothing but that. Nothing worth noticing at all.

And as restless as he was to be gone, he could not stop staring at her.

“My daughter, honored one,” said Arug, bowing almost as low as the girl. “Tem.”

Meoraq flared his mouth in annoyance, but could not quite pull his gaze from the curve of her bent back. His heart, raised in combat, did not slow. A second pulse began in his belly, building to urgent harmony where his cock was contained. She wasn’t pretty, wasn’t the sort who would ever catch his eye if it were his own will, but there must be something in her that appealed to Sheul, because the fires burned in Meoraq and the urge to take her became as violent and undeniable as the urge to burn in the arena.

“Leave us,” he said, drawing a sabk.

Lord Arug and the mediators made their salutes and withdrew. Tem, well-coached, did not.

She bent lower, her hands trembling on the tiles, as Meoraq came toward her and did not move until he stood over her with blade in hand. “This is the blade of conquest.”

“I am a virgin of my father’s House,” she replied.

He stared at her, frowning.

In a moment, she’d realized her mistake. Her eyes flashed wide and she fumbled at her wrist, stammering out breathy apologies. Soon, she had her wristlet off—a shiny thing of woven metal wires, perhaps purchased earlier this day for just this moment—and held it out to him in a shaking hand.

He took it, feeling his spines flex and flatten outside of his control. ‘Breathe,’ he told himself, stabbing his sabk through the delicate band at the nearest exposed wooden beam in the wall. ‘She’s young. She’s nervous. She’s probably fragile. Just breathe.’

He turned around, already reaching to unhook the fastens of his loin-plate. “I am Uyane Meoraq,” he said as he swept his belt away and his cock came thrusting furiously past his armor. “House Arug stands in the shadow of my blade. I am a Sword of Sheul and I demand the right of conquest.”

Tem started to bow again, of all things, only to straighten up fast with both hands raised in frantic supplication. “No, I—Wait! I was meant to run!”

Meoraq managed not to hiss at her, but it was a near thing. Yes, she was nervous, but he was Sheulek and the fires were upon him. He had little patience for these female rituals under the best of circumstances and now that patience was all but gone.

“Run, then,” he said tersely. His toes flexed, ready for the chase, and he had to remind himself that she was no true opponent, only a girl, and easily hurt. He must be the master of his flesh even now, with his cock aching in the open air and every thought his mind could make coated in Sheul’s flame, and he must not harm her.

She rose, sending anxious glances in all directions, as if the empty arena hold were a thicket filled with obstacles that needed navigation. Her roving eye came to him, touching his cock with the weight of a living hand, and she seemed to shrink within herself. She did not run. She did not even appear to be breathing.

So be it. Meoraq strode forward and caught her by the girdle.

She screamed in his face, then clapped both hands over her snout and looked properly appalled with herself. “F-Forgive!”

He was beyond forgiving, beyond offense, beyond caring. Meoraq swung her around and put her firmly against the wall beside the beam where his sabk impaled her wristlet.

“I am a virgin of my father’s House!” she babbled, clutching at the bricks.

“You are permitted to fight me,” he told her, raising her skirt in a fist-hold and pinning it at her back.

She didn’t, either because she feared another insult to the ritual or because she didn’t know how. It made no difference in the end. Conquest, such as it was, was over.

Meoraq wedged her legs apart and fit himself to her opening. She was sealed fear-tight, but arousal made him slick and he pierced her as easily as his sabk had pierced Shuiv.

She screamed again, this time with pain. She did not struggle, but her body, his enemy, tightened at once, working to push him out. He knew by many conquests that speed was the key now, or this muscular sleeve would clench too tightly to penetrate at all without tearing her. Meoraq put a steadying hand on her belly, rocked onto the balls of his feet, and thrust hard.

The girl’s cry swept up into a shriek and then broke into sobbing, incoherent pleas that were only partly directed at him. The rest, as so often was the case, were hysterical cries for her mother. But he was in, his oiled shaft fighting past the constriction of her sleeve until he pushed free into her soft well. There, the grip of her body became a seal at his narrowed base, holding him in even tighter with every futile effort to expel him.

Now that the initial difficulty of sex had been overcome, Meoraq made some deference to the girl, slowing to give the hurts of this first invasion time to ease. She was struggling now, but she was trapped and as he continued to move inside her, the ferocious grip of her body was made to relax by the slow knead of his. Her tears became sniffles and then soft panting. Soon she bent her neck to press her sloping brow to the bricks, arching her back in such innocently lascivious pleasure that he almost forgot himself, that just for a moment, it was almost fun.

Meoraq savored it as long as he dared, then reluctantly brought his mind to focus and began his prayers: “Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy.”

The girl interrupted with a moan, her hips bucking back in unskilled, spastic motions. He was briefly overcome by his clay’s carnality, and lost several minutes to mindless, fiery fucking before he regained a hold on his conscious thoughts. Somewhat dazed, he forced himself to a stop, which was not easy to do with the girl thrashing back at him. She was fully open now, and each movement of her hips made the sleeve of her female sex slide along his full length as she rocked back and forth—still a squeeze, but certainly not an unpleasant one—begging him in a largely incoherent way for more. Her hand reached back to catch at his hip; his first instinctive response to this fetching gesture was a fighting hiss, but he shook out of it almost at once. He knew where he was now, and he began again with strong, purposeful thrusts.

“Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit and Yours.” His head swam. He closed his eyes to concentrate. Through the fires of Sheul, each word seemed alive with significance and nuance, like the girl herself. He could feel her hands pulling at him, lost in her own fires, and his heart swelled with sudden affection for her. “If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life,” said Meoraq, and found that he meant it, which he very rarely did these days, a subject of much meditation when he was at his prayers.

Sheul heard, and perhaps His mortal son’s sincerity pleased him, for He blessed her. She flung her head back in a silent, eerily graceful arc, the top of her head slapping home against his chest and pressing hard, outwardly motionless in the grip of Sheul’s blessing while her small body bloomed with exquisite heat. Meoraq cupped her jaw and breathed into her gasping mouth just as his own fires overwhelmed him. He came, offering his seed and spirit for Sheul to do as He willed.

The moment could not last, and when it ended, Meoraq nuzzled her head aside and made his mark upon her. She flinched, which made the bite quite a bit deeper than he otherwise would have wanted, but the marks of his teeth were distinct and that was what mattered.

“Now you are mine,” said Meoraq formally and licked the wound to stop its bleeding.

Her answer was a wordless mewl—the sort of soft, feminine sound that girls are coached early to make when their man requires no special reply, and which Meoraq had always found personally to be repulsive, a cringing animal sound that did not belong in any person’s mouth, much less the mouth of a person he had just been joined to sexually.

Meoraq resheathed himself and stepped back, holding her arm until she steadied and seeing to it that her skirts fell properly. He’d had more than one conquest wander out into the hall with her skirts tucked into her girdle and her freshly-opened slit exposed and glistening for all the world and her own father to see.

“Thank you, honored one,” said the girl, bowing. “May the House of Arug be strengthened by the blood of conquest.”

‘That is a flat head,’ thought Meoraq, studying it with a weary eye as he dressed. A churlish thought, unworthy of a Sheulek. Oh, she was polite and earnest—not that earnestness was a particularly desirable trait in a woman—and pretty enough from the brows down. If she struck him as a bit vapid, that could be just her youth and the sheltered life of any high-born girl (and if not, well, most men found a streak of stupidity a charming quality in a woman. Many women actually feigned it whenever circumstance forced them into a man’s company, often to such a degree that Meoraq couldn’t stand to be around them at all).

They were waiting in the hall and all made the appropriate sounds of subdued respect to see the mark upon the girl’s shoulder. Her father took her back with pride and perhaps even a gleam of avarice, and why not? If she did nothing else in her life, still she had received Sheul’s fires and her womb would be strengthened immeasurably. In fact, it was not impossible that she might conceive of Meoraq, even from just this one encounter. And if the child opened up male and Meoraq had no wife, Arug had every reason to expect his daughter to be taken in, flat head and all, and installed in House Uyane where she would give glorious birth to the sons of one who would be that bloodline’s steward in his own time. If the father of such a woman were the doting sort, he certainly had the right to visit her in her husband’s House…where he could expect rooms and servants and other such amenities…for however long he chose to stay…for years, if the lord of the House were not so vulgar as to throw him out.

Meoraq was not a vulgar man, but he did have every intention of dying long before he was made to assume his father’s place. Ha. Let Arug call on his House all he pleased. Rasozul would throw him out on his snout without a moment’s regret.

“House Arug thanks you for your service, honored one. Let me extend the humblest and most sincere invitation of hospitality. Please, come to my House tonight,” said the steward, actually patting at his daughter’s bent back as he made the offer. Meoraq thought it very likely that if he accepted, he would find Tem tucked away in his cupboard like a spare cushion. Perhaps she had been a virgin—maidenly panic could be contrived and he was experienced enough in the ways of women to know that he had surely been deceived before—but her virginity had served its purpose and now it seemed Lord Arug was eager to see it well and truly rubbed away.

“I understand Ni’ichok Shuiv leaves his woman and a child to your House,” Meoraq said bluntly. “You will keep them.”

Arug hesitated, his smile fading before he forced it broadly back. “House Arug is honored to care for the mother of her champion’s son.”

“I will return to see the child placed at the appropriate time.” Meoraq inclined his head toward heaven. “If Sheul wills that I should return. If not, I suppose I must trust you.” His gaze shifted to the bailiff. “I require a witness.”

The bailiff bent his neck briefly and produced a tablet and stylus.

“I want the woman’s rooms inspected,” said Meoraq, his eyes back on Arug. “Regularly. She is owed the respect of a Sheulteb’s wife. She is also owed a widow’s stipend. See that it is not misplaced into her father’s coffers.”

Lord Arug kept smiling, but his spines were very low, visibly shaking with the effort not to flatten them completely. “She shall be kept as one of my greatest treasures,” he said. “You may see her chambers for yourself, if you like.”

“I prefer to stay in the Temple,” he said. Which was true enough, and also more tactful then commenting aloud on the man’s perceived willingness to turn his daughter into a common dip for the first Sheulek who came along.

Arug bowed to conceal his obvious disappointment—that’s rather a flat head as well—and withdrew with Tem. She looked back once, shyly seeking his eye until her father hissed and yanked her hood down. Then they were gone.

“You may show me to my room,” said Meoraq, prodding at his wound. The edges had sealed beneath his scales, but it still ached abysmally and would probably swell and bleed again by morning if it were not properly cleaned and tended. He was tempted to neglect it. Shuiv had seemed a good man and a brave warrior; Meoraq was not ashamed to wear his last scar.

The bailiff merely bowed, rather than walking ahead of him down the hall. “Forgive me, honored one, there is a dispute awaiting your judgment.”

Of course there was. Tothax was not the most remote city in the world, but it was easily the most remote on Meoraq’s circuit. On his last visit, there had been four disputes awaiting his judgment, one of them half a year old and so entirely irrelevant by the day of Meoraq’s arrival that he had been divinely compelled to slap both parties across their petty-minded faces before walking into the arena. But however many disputes there might be awaiting him, it was customary to separate them over the course of many days. To judge two trials in a single night, so soon after his long journey, bordered on insult.

His temper flared, but six breaths brought him reason. Just because the first of their disputes had been a paltry one did not mean they were all so. And besides that, Meoraq’s blood was still warmed by battle and a second fight had its appeal (as well as the promise of a second conquest once the fight was done, perhaps even with a pretty woman, or at least one who had a properly-shaped head). In either case, he was Sheulek, and it was his duty and his privilege to serve Sheul, no matter the hour or the inconvenience to his mortal clay.

“Then I will hear it,” he told the waiting bailiff, but he took six more slow breaths before he followed. He loved God and would never question His commands, but there were times he wished he was not quite so often in His eye.

 

* * *

 

Back they went to the mediation chamber, which was again filled with spectators disguising themselves as witnesses. One of the galleys was curiously empty, he saw. The other was occupied by another man dressed as a warlord and the kneeling figure of yet another woman. The man was only vaguely familiar, although Meoraq noted that his lordly garb was, unlike that of Arug, functional rather than ceremonial, and he carried several admirable scars prominently across his powerful body. The woman, however, he recognized at once despite her bent back and ducked head.

Meoraq glanced again at the empty galley and snorted. He folded his arms, resting his hands close to the hilts of his sabks. “Where is the baby?” he asked, interrupting the high judge mid-prayer.

“If you had come when I first sent word to you, you could have seen it born,” the lord said, also interrupting the judge, who was attempting to both apologize and reprimand Meoraq at the same time.

“Why would I want to?”

“Honored one, please!” snapped the high judge. “This is a formal matter!”

“I am not in the mood for formalities,” said Meoraq.

“So be it.” The lord stepped forward, beckoning behind him to one of his many men. “I am House Saluuk,” he said, for the benefit of the court’s scribe. “Once Saluuk Tzugul and a Sword of Sheul. This is my daughter.”

“I remember,” said Meoraq. And he did, although the fires had burned hot in him that day. He remembered her not because she was pretty, which she was, rather, but also because she had been particularly tiresome in conquest—breaking the ritual after only a few stammered lines and then trying to flee the arena hold. He’d been forced to pursue and to hold her down, neither of which he minded much in the burn of Sheul’s fires, but she’d also screamed all the way through the sex, and afterwards, just lay there in a heap, sobbing. A bad night, and one that had a way of slipping back into his thoughts when he was alone and his mind unquiet. A Sword of Sheul knew no remorse for the things he did in the grip of holy fire, and yet…she had been so small beneath him, so small as she lay weeping on the floor…

And now there she knelt, and there indeed was the infant, carried in a servant’s arms to be displayed before the court. It was the right size; he wondered whether she had been corrupted after his conquest or before.

To think he’d lain awake so many nights, haunted by her tears.

“I remember,” Meoraq said again, coldly. “And I remember that Sheul’s blessing was for myself alone. I do not acknowledge that child. Its blood is the blood of Gann.”

Shocked gasps met this accusation and then whispers flew. Lord Saluuk’s throat began to pale in streaks of color, but he betrayed no other sign of emotion as he reached down, took a fist-hold of his daughter’s wrap and yanked it open, revealing her scarred shoulder as she twisted her face away.

Meoraq had been many years a Sheulek and knew it had made him cynical. He was used to expecting the worst of people, but this, he never anticipated.

“Lies!” he roared, at once full in the grip of Sheul’s killing fires. It was his training alone that kept his blades in their sheaths; every bone of him wanted to draw and paint every damned wall of this room with blood.

Breathe. A Sheulek is a master of every impulse.

“Lies,” he said again, hissing but at least not shouting. “She may have been virgin—I will not say otherwise—but she did not burn and that is not my mark!”

“I stand before you, judges, in the sight of Sheul.” The steward released his daughter to her huddle and faced the tribunal. “Every servant of my household is present and able to swear that this woman has been in proper confinement every hour of her life, save that when she was last in this arena.” He swung to stab at Meoraq with his stare, saying, “Or do you say House Saluuk allows its daughters to rut wild in the alleys?”

“I do not,” said Meoraq, just as coldly. “Whether she goes out or her bulls sneak in should concern House Saluuk, but it is no matter to me.”

“You come very near to making a personal insult, honored one,” one of the judges said with a respectful nod.

“I do not come near,” snapped Meoraq. “I make it boldly! Your daughter has gone to Gann and that is not my mark upon her.”

Before Lord Saluuk could make his snarling reply, the woman flung out her bare hands and cried, “I have been with no man but you!”

The whole of the tribunal stared at her.

Her father was first to recover. In two swift strides, he had returned to her side and slapped her to the ground.

“Oh yes, she knows her place well,” another judge remarked, but Meoraq killed what little humor that stirred up with a glance. The woman’s tears as she knelt at Lord Saluuk’s feet were too much as they had been a year ago when she had been huddling at his own feet. The sound woke the infant, who added its own wails until the servant holding it was ordered to take it into the hall. Meoraq found himself scowling suddenly into its little face as it was carried past him; it flinched away as from Gann Himself, clutching at the servant and renewing its cries, now with terror.

As soon as it was gone and the door shut against its noise, the high judge rose and raised his hand. “Stand the girl up.”

Lord Saluuk obeyed, and none too gently. The girl sent a wet-eyed, imploring gaze at Meoraq, who folded his arms against her and refused to look away. She was a good one for heart-stirring looks, it seemed.

“Steward, it is your duty to make those of your House aware that what is said before this tribunal is said in the sight of Sheul. A lie spoken to Him is a wound to one’s very soul.”

“She knows,” said Saluuk, giving his daughter a glance as hard as a second slap.

“So be it. Girl.” The high judge leaned sternly over the tribune wall, addressing himself to her directly while the lesser judges struggled not to react. “Before Sheul, who do you name as the father of that child?”

“Before Sheul, I swear that I have been with no man but Sheulek Uyane.”

Meoraq flared his spines, but that was all. One embarrassing outburst was enough for this tribunal and it would be hers.

“Before Sheul,” the high judge went on, narrowing his eyes, “who put that mark of conquest upon your flesh?”

Meoraq’s spines flared again as his hands drew into fists upon his biceps in anticipation of the lie he must endure…but the lie never came.

The girl bent her neck and did not answer.

The high judge leaned back in his chair and stroked at his throat.

“Why do you waste our time interrogating a woman?” Lord Saluuk demanded. He unsheathed his sabks in a swift hiss. “If this man will not acknowledge his seed as the Word itself demands, I will challenge him and let Sheul be our judge!”

“This man,” said Meoraq with contempt, “will meet you, steward, and Sheul will end your lying bloodline.”

“Enough! How dare you draw a bladed weapon in this hall!” The high judge struck his hammer on the tribune wall, and again, until Lord Saluuk grudgingly resheathed. “There is no need for bloodshed! You! Fetch a wax tablet from the archivist’s stores! If the honored one will make his mark, a simple comparison shall be enough to determine the truth here.”

Meoraq grunted approval, eyeing Lord Saluuk, whose expression had taken on a narrow, calculating stare. The servant was dispatched to the stores, but he had been gone only a moment when the steward suddenly turned and caught his daughter by the throat.

“Will the marks match?” he demanded. “Answer, girl!”

His grip made any verbal reply impossible, but her choked wails held such hopeless despair that no words were necessary. Lord Saluuk released her with a shove and said, “I have been deceived and so wasted this tribunal’s time. I shall pay whatever fine you deem appropriate.”

“I have been with no man but you!” the girl blurted. “Please, you must believe me! I did not burn, I admit that, but even without His fires, I was blessed! Oh, hear me, honored one, will you not hear me? This is your child!”

Spectators exclaimed amongst themselves in gleeful shock at this blasphemy. The high judge struck his hammer upon the wall, but silence was not forthcoming, and though Lord Saluuk seized hold of his daughter’s arm, she did not go quietly but instead increased her struggles, actually reaching out to try and catch at Meoraq’s arm.

“Everything you say is truth!” she cried. “My only lie was the mark that—”

Lord Saluuk’s arm swung and ended whatever she meant to say next, a slap no longer but a fist that broke the delicate upper bone of her narrow snout and sent her crashing to the floor. “Bridle her!” he roared, and no less than six of his servants leapt to obey. “I will hear no more lies spoken through that poison tongue! Remove her!”

Meoraq’s disapproving hiss earned him half a pulled knife before Lord Saluuk shoved it back into its sheath.

“Go on with you, sprat!” he spat. “Go back to Xeqor! I knew your father and don’t you just fill his fucking shadow! He’s bred his House nothing but lack-wits and bastard-makers since he took the blade! Be damned to him for pissing you out and be damned to you—”

The hand of Sheul touched his heart; Meoraq’s own flew out and caught Lord Saluuk by the wrist. In a moment, the warlord was on his knees with his face mashed against tiles still wet with his own daughter’s tears and Meoraq was on him, trying to think through the haze of Sheul’s fire and unsure, for an eternity of moments, whether it were an enemy beneath him or a woman.

The pounding of the judgment hammer cleared his head some. He shook himself, focused on the body twisting and hissing in his grip, then pulled his hooked kzung—a hunting blade, and still more than this particular animal deserved—and put it to Lord Saluuk’s vibrant throat.

“Hold, honored one.” The high judge struck his hammer a final, deliberate time. “This tribunal has not been concluded. If you have offense, you have the right to seek redress, but only at the proper hour.”

Truth. Meoraq closed his eyes, breathed himself calm in the cooling grip of Sheul, and then released Saluuk with a contemptuous shove and stood away.

“How do you speak, lord?”

The steward of House Saluuk fought himself to his feet and turned a perfectly murderous glare on Meoraq. After several deep breaths of his own, he pressed his empty hands together and bent his stiff back in a bow. “I have offended,” he hissed. “My accusation stands false in the sight of Sheul. I will make whatever reparation this tribunal demands for bringing her lies to this hall. My daughter—” His flat spines made a dry, scraping sound as they tried to flatten further against his skull. “—has gone to Gann. Uyane Meoraq stands acquitted of her and her bastard.”

The judge raised his hammer, but Meoraq halted him with a raised hand. He cocked his head meaningfully, waiting.

Lord Saluuk glared at him, color throbbing in his throat. One moment became many, but it finally came: “Forgive me, honored one. I have offended you and your House.”

Meoraq’s head canted further. “And the father who pissed me out?” he prompted blackly.

Lord Saluuk’s spines ticced. Breathing hard, all but stinking of hate, Lord Saluuk knelt. One knee first, then both, and then he bent to touch his head to the floor and turn his naked palm up beside Meoraq’s boot. “Forgive.” He managed this time to say it without hissing, although the effort clearly came at a high price. “It is Saluuk Tzugul before you, son of Ulhathev, son of Shagoth, son of all my fathers before him. I am my House and the bloodline of my fathers and I have offended. I bend before you, Uyane. Forgive me.”

Meoraq grunted and stepped back. He did not make an answer, but then, the law demanded that pardon be asked of him, not that he give it.

“You are perhaps too quick to remove evidence from this tribunal, Lord Saluuk,” said one of the judges after a moment. “An impression could yet be made of the girl’s scar and compared to those men of your household whom you suspect—”

“She’s gone to Gann,” the steward spat, already back on his feet and just as furious as he had been before his showing of humility, if not more so. “Why should I care who sired her bastard?”

“Forgive, lord, but it is the matter of who put a Sheulek’s mark upon her that concerns me.”

Saluuk continued to glare at Meoraq for a breath or two, but then slid his cold stare up at the tribune wall.

“The girl’s corruption may be a sin,” said the judge, “but the forging of that mark is a crime. If these witnesses you bring before us can truly account for every hour of the girl’s life, then one of them surely aided in her deceit. She did not bite her own shoulder.”

The other tribune judges grunted solemn agreement. The spectators eyed one another and whispered.

“I will hold interrogations,” Saluuk said at last, visibly struggling with his temper. “I will find the man responsible and send him over the wall with his lying poke.”

Meoraq frowned. It was customary to exile those who had been corrupted beyond redeeming—giving to Gann those who had given themselves to him—and only after they had served a certain time of imprisonment under the Temple’s watch. Only when the priests had declared her unforgiveable would she be sent out to wander in the wildlands until Gann took her into darkness. She would never be burnt, never truly die, and Meoraq supposed she would come to this fate whether she walked out the Temple gate or fell from her father’s rooftop, but still it troubled him.

And he was not alone, for one of the lesser judges hesitantly said, “Would it not be better to place the girl in Temple custody until her guilt is proved?”

“Her guilt,” Saluuk hissed, “is biting at her teat! I will not be dishonored in my own House!”

As all the judges bowed, Meoraq said, “You have been too long within walls if you can think to preserve the honor of your bloodline only by exterminating it.”

Saluuk’s neck stiffened, the marks of his anger visibly throbbing in time with his heart. “If she cannot behave herself as a proper woman of my House, better she be dead. Her and her bastard both.”

“Honored one,” said the high judge reprovingly. “Your opinion is not asked. You stand acquitted and your part in this tribunal is done.”

Truth, and if he could not get clear of Lord Saluuk’s presence, he knew it would end in violence regardless of all the training in the world. Meoraq bent his neck briefly and received the bows and salutes of all those who shared the hall with him. The high judge beckoned to an usher and Meoraq left, feeling Saluuk Tzugul’s eyes burning on his back all the way out into the hall.

 

* * *

 

The Halls of Judgment were empty enough to echo beneath Meoraq’s feet. The sound worked on him like the hammers of a headache, adding to his black mood instead of easing it. A bad business, Saluuk, and he could have handled it better but it should have waited until the morning. He had always been too eager to see blood spilled after a battle and he knew it.

‘I thank You, Father, for Your temperance and restraining hand,’ Meoraq thought sourly. ‘Without which, I would surely have slaughtered a man with much disgrace and deep satisfaction.’

Sheul did not receive his prayer.

“I do thank You,” Meoraq said again, aloud this time, and with the proper gravity. The usher did not look around; a Sheulek speaking to God could hardly be a singular occurrence. “O my Father, I am ashamed that I require Your hand upon my heart to hold me from brawling, even with so low a man as the steward of Saluuk. Gann’s touch stains more than the daughter, I think,” he added with a scowl. “It would not shock to me to learn he put the scar on her himself.”

It would shock him, actually, but it was also disturbingly easy to visualize. Lord Saluuk learning of his daughter’s pregnancy and, knowing Gann’s taint would soon be visible to all, making certain she carried an honorable scar. He had been a Sheulek once, and doubtless knew how the women of a Sheulek’s many conquests melted together over time. Perhaps another Sheulek would have accepted his responsibilities without contest, and who knew? If the girl had not been so memorable in her tears, Meoraq might have been fooled. She was so very skilled an actress (I have known no other man but you) that a part of him was tempted (those pleading, tear-filled eyes) to believe her even now.

There were men in the world who actually envied a Sheulek the liberty to take whatever woman Sheul moved him to take, not realizing that so many of those women were sired by men like Arug or Saluuk, that the women themselves were largely forgettable, and that years of exposure to all of Gann’s carnality and deceit made a man see it everywhere. In everyone.

Meoraq walked, lost in brooding thoughts of conniving fathers and flat-headed babies, as the usher escorted him to the outer courtyard of the shrine. The priest waiting to admit him offered prayers, which Meoraq, in his black mood, felt strongly compelled to accept. His meditations were lengthy and fruitless, scored through by disruptive visions of Saluuk’s Gann-lost girl and her baby, and he did not end them so much as abandon them for another night. He did not notice that they were not taking the right way to the garrison until he followed the usher through a door and found himself in the holy forge at the shrine’s heart.

A white-cowled priest stood before the eternal fires, his hood pulled low over his eyes. His robes were richly trimmed, the hem weighted with gold plates and cut to glide just above the floor rather than pick up even a trace of dirt. Each finger was armored to the tip with delicate bands of fine metal. His color was so heavily crusted with jewels, it was a wonder he could breathe. He did not bother to acknowledge Meoraq, although he had surely heard him enter.

“You wished to speak with me?” said Meoraq after a few calming breaths. He would have liked to demand that he be shown a Sheulek’s proper respect and damn well be left alone, but he’d indulged in enough shameful behavior for one night. He would show his divine Father repentance with patience and respect, even if it was a damned inconvenience.

The priest turned, pushing back his hood to get a better look at him. “Sheulek,” he said, eyeing his sabks. “You are Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor?”

Obviously. How many other Sheuleks do you have in your damned city tonight?

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience,’ Meoraq thought. He said, politely, “I am.”

“I am Exarch Ylsathoc Hirut.”

Meoraq waited.

The exarch frowned, clearly annoyed that he did not fall back cowering at the name. “Surely you were told that I wished to speak with you as soon as you arrived, as I was told the moment that you passed the gates of this city. But that was more than an hour ago. And here I have been. Waiting.”

I am a Sheulek and I go where I fucking well will.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “It is my duty to attend Sheul’s judgments before attending to my own personal audiences,” Meoraq said.

“I see. So be it. At least you are here now. I had begun to think you had forgotten this stop upon your circuit, although I can easily see why you would. Sheul the All-Father surely knows that it is only my love for Him that holds me in this pisspot, but then, I was born in Gedai and know better how a city ought to be. You, now…” The exarch cast a disapproving look back at him over his shoulder. “Where have you been?”

Engaged in the duties I am sworn to and the privileges I am owed, one of which may include putting a knife in that eye if you roll it at me again.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “I was detained at Xheoth.”

Ylsathoc grunted, then turned all the way around. He held out a long, pale object which Meoraq actually needed in his hands before he recognized it as a thigh bone.

Its meaning stabbed into him like a knife’s blade. And twisted.

“Your father is dead,” said the exarch without further preamble. “Sheul has named you steward of House Uyane. Xeqor awaits her champion.”

 

4

 

The exarch wanted to read him the oaths immediately, but Meoraq refused to hear them. He was given the use of the temple’s finest room for his bedchamber that night, but he didn’t use it save as a place to store his pack. He went instead to the innermost cloister and there knelt at a firelit shrine with the knife of his fathers heavy over his heart.

The holy smiths of Xi’Tothax executed their craft well; his father’s thigh bone had been expertly cut and carved to make the hilt which the reforged blade so perfectly fit. It was not quite the knife he remembered hanging from his father’s neck, but he was proud to carry it, as proud as he was reticent to claim it.

His feelings had no bearing on the matter. In accordance with the law, it was his own, and unless it passed to the hand of one of his brothers before the turning of the year, it would be his forever. Or at least until his death, when it would be broken, the hilted half burnt with him upon his pyre and the edge sent onward to his future son. This was House Uyane, ever-changing and eternal as this knife, and he should be honored to take his place in that endless line.

He should be.

And yet…

Meoraq knelt, sleepless, for all the hours of the night as priests and other residents of the temple district came and went. He made all the appropriate prayers, but he didn’t feel the bereavement he felt he’d ought to and the psalms tasted of lies in his mouth. Eventually, he gave them up and fell silent, although he remained bent before the fires, brooding.

He wondered if it marked him for a bad son for thinking more of the House he was doomed to inherit rather than the man he had inherited it from, but he couldn’t help that. He’d loved his father, in the same way and at much the same distance as he loved Sheul, but he didn’t know him well. Why shouldn’t the legal problems of the House weigh on him in his first hours of mourning? He knew the law better than he’d known Uyane Rasozul.

He had left home at the age of three to begin his training, like all sons born under the sign of the Blade, and although he had wintered each year at home in Xeqor, he had seen little of its lord. Since taking his oaths, it seemed Meoraq had even less time at Uyane, although he stopped in whenever his circuit brought him near enough to make such a diversion possible. Rasozul always made time to receive him if he was in, but he was much withdrawn since the death of Meoraq’s mother and there weren’t many pleasant times to recall now.

Here in Xi’Tothax, many days distant from Xeqor and the House he must assume, Meoraq brooded. He was proud of his father, proud to wear this knife and touch the smooth, solid bone of its hilt, but all his pride seemed to spring from other people’s memories. Meoraq didn’t know the hero of Kuaq, who had climbed the walls when raiders held that city’s gates and cut through a hundred and eleven men alone, one of them the Raider-Lord Szadt, the most evil man ever gone to Gann. He didn’t know the Sheulek who had, in the course of his service, emerged the honest victor of more than one thousand battles, better than twice the account most Sheulek could expect. He had never seen the man his training masters remembered, never knew the reasons men invariably paused when they heard Meoraq’s name and came back to say, “Uyane of Xeqor? A son of Rasozul?”

No. Meoraq knew no hero, but only the man who sat in his rooftop garden in the evenings, preferring to sit on the tiles with his back propped against his chair as he read. He knew no warrior, but only the father who sometimes tapped at Meoraq’s door if he saw a light beneath it, bringing hot tea on cold nights and trading tales of roads they had both traveled, each in his own time. He knew no Rasozul, but the husband who showed altogether too much attention to the woman who wived him and who had mourned her with embarrassing steadfastness for seven years now. And that was still a good man, surely, but no man to inspire a full night’s worth of prayer. He prayed anyway…yet his mind wandered, and eventually he cried surrender and let it.

He still thought of his father some—vague impressions at the very fringes of far more trivial memories—but when his mind finally seemed to settle, it did not bring him to House Uyane at all, but to Tilev, where he had stood his training. He could see its halls in his mind as clearly as the cloister of Xi’Tothax would be now if he only opened his eyes, and this unexpected clarity so surprised him that he did open them.

The fires burned low in the holy forge before him. It would need its keeper to fuel it soon. Sheul’s forges must never be allowed to grow dark.

Glancing aside, Meoraq counted three priests among the few men come at this early hour to make their prayers. None of them seemed in the least otherworldly. As he watched, one of them stole a hand into the side-pocket of his robe and scratched at his groin. Hardly the act of some divine vision. No, he was awake and his mind, though far from quiet, did not ring with the voice of Sheul as He lent a needful son His guidance.

Well, he was done here, wasn’t he? He’d run out of prayers long ago, even after repeating several of them. He hadn’t paid an ear to the ringing of the hours, but judging by the people around him, he would put it at three. Nearly dawn. If he left now, he could catch almost a full hour’s sleep before the meal was called at four and be on the road again right after.

The road home. To Xeqor. To renounce his oaths as Sheulek and take up the stewardship of his bloodline.

Meoraq shuddered, then hissed annoyance because he had shuddered, and finally bent and pressed his brow to the cold tiles because he had startled several people around him with the hiss. A Sheulek must be his own master at all times, over his flesh and over his emotions. He breathed deeply. He found calm. He closed his eyes.

And was again in the halls of Tilev. Vaguely at first, but soon with the same surprising clarity as before, until he felt almost as though he could reach out his hand and touch the door that stood ajar before him in his imaginings.

It was a door he knew, a memory he had often revisited, and he was comfortable watching it all play out again in the quiet of his meditations. Gradually, the sounds of praying worshippers and groin-scratching priests faded out until this memory became a kind of reality. Between one slow breath and another, Meoraq slipped away from his true self and became the boy he had been at fifteen, his considerably smaller body drawn tense with apprehension as he stood outside Master Tsazr’s door.

 

* * *

 

He’d been Master Tsazr’s brunt that year. A boy of fifteen and a brunt. Not the youngest ever to hold that rank, but two full years younger than most. Then again, Meoraq was the son of a Sheulek, and more, a son of House Uyane, the championing House of all Xeqor. So it did not wholly surprise him to receive a brunt’s tabard on his return to school, and it would not surprise him three years later to hear that Nduman had received his, or six years after that, when even Salkith had one (although he recalled that it did surprise Salkith). They were the sons of House Uyane and, for good or ill, there were expectations.

Perhaps because of this, Meoraq had been assigned to serve Tsazr Dyuun, the weapons master, who was notorious for his physical approach to discipline when it came to dealing with high-born students…and their fathers, when necessary. It was true that Meoraq had received many slaps as Tsazr’s brunt, but not undeservedly and never for trying to hide behind the shield of his father’s reputation. And Tsazr had never sought to provoke him on the subject, or even indicated that he knew Meoraq’s father, although Meoraq knew he and Rasozul had shared the same circuit in their years of judgment. He was a hard man, Tsazr, and he had a hard hand, but Meoraq had served him half a year and could say honestly that he was much improved for it and hoped to be brunt to him again the following year (if he was called, he supposed he should say, although there was no real doubt. His were not the highest marks, but there were few boys of his age who knew the Word better and none at all who could best him in the ring).

The brunts enjoyed a fair amount of celebrity among the other students for the very few privileges afforded them along with innumerable additional responsibilities. The position was, of course, in reference to Prophet Lashraq’s own brunt, who had set the highest possible standard for devotion and piety while in service to another, but who had not (as was often bitterly remarked at the brunts’ table) been asked to make top marks in school at the same time. Meoraq’s duties were possibly even more strenuous than the others, with Master Tsazr to judge them, but they had been greatly diminished in the sixty-some days prior to the moment when he stood before this open door. Master Tsazr had been away, and not just away, but away on a pilgrimage. As his brunt, Meoraq had harbored secret hopes that he might journey along with his master, and he yet remembered the acid disappointment with which he had watched Tsazr walk away through the gate, leaving him behind with little to do but run errands for the watchmen and bully his younger brothers around in front of their age-mates. Still, to have a master away on a pilgrimage was a point of pride to any brunt, and this pilgrimage even more than any other because Master Tsazr had gone to Xi’Matezh.

Xi’Matezh. Spoken one way, it meant Forge of the Soul; with raised inflection, it became All-Beginnings; solemnly and with proper pitch, it was The One Heart. All names were truth.

Xi’Matezh had stood since the Fall of the Ancients, and although it had done so well beyond the reach of any city and without a steward of any kind to care for it, it had not fallen into ruins. Nor would it ever, it was said, for Sheul dwelled there as tangibly as any mortal man. It was well known that the doors of Xi’Matezh’s inner sanctum stayed fast against the vast majority of those who sought entry there, but the doors did open for some. And while rumor made many claims after that, upon one point all tales agreed: those judged worthy to enter heard the voice of Sheul. Not in prayer, not in dreams, not in the quiet reaches of their conscience, but the true voice of the living God.

So it was to Xi’Matezh that Master Tsazr traveled in the first year of Meoraq’s service to him and it was from Xi’Matezh that he had returned. That was the word awaiting him when Meoraq emerged from lessons and so he had raced across the whole of Tilev and up three flights of stairs to find that indeed his master’s door stood open.

All of this ran once more through Meoraq’s meditations, bringing fresh color to old memory until it was nearly with the same sense of excitement that Meoraq the Sheulek watched the brunt that he had been raise his hand and push his master’s open door further open. And it was new all over again—to see the man who had been so long absent sitting on the ledge of his window as though he had never left. Just sitting there, motionless, watching the wind blow clouds across the sky.

Meoraq’s first thought was that he didn’t look as if he’d been gone sixty days, even sixty days walking across the wildlands. He looked older. Not just tired or travel-worn, but older. By years.

Master Tsazr had not seemed to notice him yet. That didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t, but Meoraq knew he ought to leave. Being Tsazr’s brunt did not give him the right to come so far into his master’s private chambers and he knew it. Still he lingered, not quite daring to intrude but hesitant to retreat.

There was mud on Tsazr’s boots. Wet, black mud on the soles, fresh from the world just without the walls of Xeqor. Black mud, yes, but under that, caked high on the leg and staining the laces, was older mud, as red as rusted iron and proof of a far larger world…a world that only the Sheulek could wholly claim.

When Meoraq raised his eyes from this enticing sight, he found Tsazr gazing back at him. He managed not to flinch, but it was a clumsy salute he finally gave and an even clumsier excuse for his presence: “I’ve come to clean your boots, sir.”

Tsazr’s spines flared. He shifted his legs slightly apart and leaned forward to look down at his feet. He seemed to stare for quite some time. When he looked up again, he was frowning. “I know you. You’re one of Razi’s sprats. Nduman, is it?”

That cut at him. Yes, it had been sixty days and some, but he had been in service to Tsazr half the year before that. “Meoraq,” he said, as neutrally as possible. “Your brunt.”

“Ah yes. So I recall. Well, I knew it wasn’t Salkith, so I think I can count that half a stroke in my favor.” Tsazr rubbed at the side of his snout, studying Meoraq’s face intently. “You look very much like your father. Have you ever been told?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll only hear it more as you get older. Striking man, your father.” Tsazr leaned back again into the curve of the window and looked out. “The stuff of bad poetry. Handsome as hell, but a hard-cut face and a stare like the edge of a knife.” He glanced idly back at Meoraq and grunted, then returned his gaze to the sky. “Pity there’s not a mark of your mother on you, boy. At least Salkith got her eyes.”

He didn’t know how to answer that, so he said nothing. Whatever first spark of pleasure there had been in receiving so direct a conversation from his normally-taciturn master was now entirely turned to ash. Even the compliment of this comparison to his father (even if it was only to his looks) added to Meoraq’s growing unease.

“I saw your mother once,” Tsazr was saying now. “Pretty eyes. They don’t do much for your brother, but you can’t blame Yecedi for that. The finest windows in the world can’t improve the view and Salkith’s brains are no stronger than his bones. I know what you want to ask me,” Tsazr said without pausing or changing his mild, musing tone.

“Sir?”

“And it ought to be something along the cut of, ‘Where the hell did you see my mother?’ but it isn’t.” Tsazr glanced back again, but his eyes stayed far away. “So cough it up. You’ve got me in a rare mood, boy, but I don’t mean to make it easy for you to take advantage of me.”

Meoraq’s breath caught in his throat, so that he very nearly did cough. His feet took him forward, however unwisely, until he was not merely intruding upon his master’s private room, he was actually in reach of him and the slap he probably deserved for this outrageous impropriety. Even knowing that, he couldn’t stop himself. “Did you reach the temple, sir? Did you stand at Xi’Matezh?”

Tsazr’s head tipped past humor to sarcasm, but his eyes stayed sharp. “If I choose to answer only one question tonight, is that really the one you want to ask? If I reached it? If I stood?”

“Did the doors open?” Meoraq asked. Demanded, almost. A part of him remained lucid enough to be appalled at the tone he took, but all the rest of him was lost to fever. A Sheulek must be the master of his impulses, but Meoraq was not Sheulek yet. “Did you enter?”

Tsazr gazed at him a long time without moving, without even blinking. “Yes,” he said at last and looked back out the window.

Meoraq’s hand twitched, but he kept them both at his sides. “Did you hear Him?” he asked hoarsely. “Did Sheul speak to you?”

Tsazr was quiet, but his eyes moved constantly, shifting from cloud to cloud as the skies rolled endlessly onward. When he finally spoke, it was not in answer. Or at least, not in any answer that made sense.

“There used to be lights in the sky at night.”

Meoraq drew back, slapped somewhat from the curiosity that had gripped him, although not so much that he made his proper apologies and left. “Sir?”

Tsazr gestured upwards. “Long before my time, of course, but it is truth. You can read it in books. You can even see pictures if you know where to look. They had a name, but I don’t remember what it is. You can’t see them anymore, but I suppose they’re still there. The only lights we have left…Here, what would you call that?” he asked suddenly, pointing out at the sky.

Meoraq looked, hesitated, and ventured, “The sun, sir.”

“Would you indeed?” Tsazr snorted, then laughed boldly. “Lies.”

The thought of retreat finally raised itself in Meoraq’s baffled mind. One foot even eased backwards, but that was all. Tsazr had never been a talkative man before this night and might never be again. “What is it then?” he asked uncertainly.

“It is the light,” said Tsazr, with startling force and venom, “of the sun. And you might think they are one and the same, but you’d be wrong, Uyane. It may be proof that the sun stands behind it, but it is not the sun and it is neither honest nor right to let others say that it is, and even less so to let them believe it when you know better. Having said that…” Tsazr paused and rubbed at his snout again, rubbed hard enough that Meoraq could actually hear the tendons in his master’s hands creaking. It had to hurt, but if anything, Tsazr only rubbed harder. “Having said that,” he said again, quietly but with the same force. “I must also tell you that the doors of Xi’Matezh did open and I did go inside and yes, Uyane, Sheul spoke to me. Why not? The light is not the sun, but it is proof undeniable that the sun stands behind it and so I say I heard the voice of Sheul. His words were not a comfort to me. Do you say truth or lie?”

Meoraq’s mouth dropped open for possibly the first time in his life, aghast at the notion of daring to pass judgment on his master at all.

Tsazr took his hand away from his face. “I said, what say you?” he hissed. “Don’t you stand there and gape at me like your idiot brother or I’ll knock the teeth right out of your head! Answer!”

“Truth!” he blurted.

Tsazr snorted again, but it was an angry sound and not a laughing one at all. “And why is that, brunt? Because I am Master Tsazr, once Tsazr Dyuun in the sight of Sheul, or because you suddenly realize you are in the easy striking reach of a madman?”

Meoraq answered without thinking, which was never a clever way to answer a training master, but all his training seemed to have left him. “You are not a madman, sir.”

“Ha! You sound pretty damned sure of yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tsazr continued to glare at him for a time, but it ended with another snort of humor. He looked back at the sun. “I used to be pretty damned sure of myself once, too.”

That was all Tsazr seemed inclined to say and it would have been a good time to leave, but Meoraq stayed and eventually Tsazr heaved a sigh and looked at him again.

He wanted to ask. He even opened his mouth a few times, but he couldn’t quite dare to speak, not with the man looking at him this way. He wasn’t a madman, Meoraq was sure of that (however unreasonably), but he was still a dangerous one and Meoraq had done enough this night to earn six sound beatings. At last, in defeat, Meoraq bent his neck and made a salute.

“Fuck it,” Tsazr said, under his breath but quite distinctly. “Do you want to know what I heard in Xi’Matezh, boy?”

Meoraq shut his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“Why? What could it possibly mean to you?”

“I don’t know,” Meoraq admitted.

“You want to come up with a better answer than that, Uyane. My patience is right at the last grains.”

“I have never heard His voice,” said Meoraq, again without thinking. A very bad way to answer, but so too would be any hesitation to think up something good. “I know only what I have read in the Word.”

“Isn’t that enough for you?” Tsazr asked, with surprising acid.

Meoraq resigned himself to the sure knowledge that he was not getting out of this room without a slap and there was no point in prolonging it. “Was it enough for you?”

Tsazr snapped himself to his feet so fast that Meoraq flinched, even though it had been better than three years since the last time he’d shied away from a punishing hand. But although Tsazr loomed over him with the yellow coming out strong on his throat—and he’d never seen that, not on Master Tsazr—the slap never came. Ultimately, Tsazr’s scales faded back to black and several minutes after, he uttered a low, sour grunt.

“You had the juice to ask,” Tsazr said, reseating himself in the window. “I suppose I should have the juice to answer. It was enough…until about eighteen years ago. My last circuit as Sheulek, in fact. Something happened that made me think I could actually open the doors at Xi’Matezh if I ever went. It’s been itching at me ever since, the idea that there could be something more than the Word…something just for me. And there was. And it was terrible to hear. Do you still want to know what He said, boy?”

Meoraq opened his mouth and made himself close it. He thought long enough that Tsazr turned away from the clouds and the light of the sun that shone through them to look at him.

“Yes,” said Meoraq slowly.

“Why?”

“Because…Because they were His words.”

Tsazr’s expression shifted somehow, but in a way difficult to define. “So?”

“In school, they taught us—”

“If you give me a schoolroom answer, I’ll crack your bones for you, sprat,” Tsazr said. “I don’t care who your father is and in this moment, I don’t even care what it will do to your mother. I will snap something fresh for every word you are about to utter and make you count them off when I do.”

Meoraq hesitated, then plunged on ahead with a kind of despairing courage. “In school, they taught us that truth is only truth when everything is heard. Every word of the Word changes all the rest of them. So whatever He told you…it changes the truth in the Word.” He paused, but Tsazr only watched him, frowning. “And I want to know how,” he finished lamely.

Tsazr just looked at him as Meoraq’s heart hammered against his as-yet-unbroken ribs.

“Not so much a schoolroom answer,” Tsazr murmured at last. “You did all right by this one, Razi. At least you gave him all the brains you scooped out of Salkith.”

Meoraq waited, not entirely confident that he had escaped.

“Truth,” said Tsazr after another minute or two.

“Sir?”

“You want to know the truth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course you do. That’s your blood-right talking to you, boy. Your history. Your destiny. Because that is what we do, Uyane.”

“We, sir?”

“You’ll be Sheulek at the end of all this,” Tsazr said with a cross, dismissive wave. “We all know it, so shut your mouth and mark me, because this is important. The other boys here, they think being Sheulek is about glorious battles and walking freely through any gate they please. To them, the call to carry the honor-blades is nothing but a writ of privilege over any man they meet. Or any woman.” Tsazr snorted and looked out the window. “Is that about what you think, Uyane?”

Meoraq stifled a premonitory cringe and said, “All these things are the right of a Sheulek, sir.”

“Not your best answer tonight,” Tsazr said wryly. “I’ll let you try again out of respect for your father before I knock you down. Is that what you think being a Sheulek is? What it means?”

“What something is and what it means aren’t always the same.”

Tsazr looked at him sharply, his spines flat. “Example?” he inquired in a low, dangerous voice.

“Being a brunt,” said Meoraq.

His master stared, his expression growing slowly more thoughtful as his spines came forward. “Truth,” he said after a very long time. “You really are doing very well tonight. So let me tell you about women, brunt. I have had more of them than I can count. I mean just what I say. More than I can count. But I remember only three…and one of them is your mother and I never laid a hand on her. What does that tell you?”

It told him that sex probably wasn’t very memorable and if that was the truth, Meoraq wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. He wasn’t a child; the last of his scales had turned black before he’d received his brunt’s tabard and the incident that had led to the metal loin-plate he was now wearing (and would wear for the rest of his life) had been dimming in the back of his mind for two years now. No, there were no women in Tilev and none at home, excepting servants glimpsed as they went swiftly and silently about their business, but there would be women someday and after two years wrestling with Gann’s temptations, he’d hoped the wait would be worth it. Now his master was staring him down, so Meoraq groped for an honest answer and finally managed, “I know nothing about women, sir.”

Tsazr heaved a short, impatient sigh and cut his hand through the air. “Fine. We’ll have to talk again someday, but for right now, we’ll stick to truth. That is the true work of a Sheulek. Never mind what they tell you in school about law and government or even about the Word itself. When we step into that arena, it is not for glory, not for women, not even for God, but for only truth. We accept that we may die and we embrace that death if it means the truth is exposed. Do you hear me, Uyane?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tsazr grunted and eyed him for a moment before looking back out the window. “And do you understand me?”

Meoraq braced himself once more for that slap. “No, sir.”

But Tsazr pointed two fingers at him and said, “Truth. I don’t know if you mean it, but that doesn’t matter. You spoke and I judge your words to be true ones, regardless of your motives. That’s my whole point, boy. Why does not matter to us. Only truth.” He fell quiet for a time, then said, “And truth does not care if it comforts you.”

Out in the greater hall, the bells rang for the mid-day meal. Tsazr stirred himself, glanced at Meoraq and then swept a hand over his snout.

“So here it is,” he said. “The truth that changes everything. Prepare yourself.”

Meoraq bent his neck and took several deep breaths, forcing his muscles to unlock and his heart to beat slow. Nothing he was about to hear could be a good thing, but he meant to meet it fairly. At last he looked up, calm. “I mark you, Master.”

“The truth,” said Tsazr, “is that if you want to know what I heard in Xi’Matezh, go there.”

Meoraq’s breath fell out of him in a disorienting rush that was part relief and part disappointment, and for the life of him, he couldn’t have said which was the larger part. “Sir?”

“I can read the Word to you, Uyane. I can’t read it for you. Go on.” He rubbed at his snout some more. “Get out of my room. I’ll put my boots in the hall for you when I’m damned good and ready.”

Meoraq turned around at once, but paused after only a few steps. He told himself he was not defying a direct order as he had every intention of obeying it…right after he asked one thing. “Sir?”

“I ordered you out, brunt.”

“Yes, sir.” But his feet wouldn’t move.

“I give you a choice, Uyane, because I’m in that sort of mood, although not for much longer. Here it is. You can walk out of here right now without getting hurt, or you can stay and say what you want to say. I’ll let you and I may even answer, but I absolutely will beat you down for it.”

“What happened that made you think the doors at Xi’Matezh would open?”

Silence. It grew at his back until he was forced to turn around and face the slap.

This time, Tsazr gave it to him. Hard. But as Meoraq unsteadily straightened himself, Tsazr said, with singular bitterness, “Nuu Sukaga.”

And after everything he’d heard, that was still bizarre enough to make Meoraq forget the immediate pain throbbing through his snout. “Sir?”

“Nuu Sukaga. I waited eighteen years to say it and you are exactly right, Uyane. Those two words changed all the others. Now get out,” Tsazr said, sitting back down in the window. “Or you’ll be cleaning my boots from the infirmary.”

Meoraq went and since nothing more happened that day (it remained the longest and strangest conversation he was ever to have with Master Tsazr, who never mentioned it, or the name, if it was a name, of Nuu Sukaga, again), he let the memory go and brought himself gradually back to the present to think about what it meant.

Because each word did change the truth in all the others, and this memory did present an entirely new alternative to his present situation. Surely that was why Sheul had brought it to his attention so vividly.

“Honored one?”

Meoraq stirred and opened his eyes. He gazed into the light of the holy forge (which had been renewed at some point during his meditations, he saw), before turning an expectant eye upon the nervous usher who bowed beside him. “What is it?” he asked.

“The abbot sends his apologies for this intrusion on your prayers, honored one, but requests that you send your demands to the provisioner as soon as possible.”

“A reasonable request,” said Meoraq after a moment. “Have you the means to make a list?”

“Yes, sir.” The usher produced a wax tablet and stylus from the inner fold of his robe.

“Very good. Write small,” he advised. “And see to it my demands are sent specifically to Exarch Ylsathoc, for I know it was he and not the abbot who sent you to me, although I believe it is only the abbot who apologizes for it.”

The boy’s first mark in the soft wax was a meaningless gash of guilt. “Sir?”

“Foremost, I require a tea box,” Meoraq began in a musing way. “A nice one…”

 

5

 

Meoraq woke at the sound of voices while they were still in the hall. He raised his head without opening his eyes, listened until he had identified one in particular, and settled back into his bedding.

His door crashed open. “I don’t care if I wake him up!” Exarch Ylsathoc Hirut shrieked to someone in the hall. “I want to wake him up! I want him to explain himself and this…this insult!”

Meoraq smiled sleepily into his cushion.

Expensive-sounding slippers slapped rapidly across the room. A soft fist struck the mantle above his cupboard in the fearless manner of a man who has never challenged a Sheulek. “Insult, I call it! Do you hear me, you…you…”

“Honored Sword of Sheul?” Meoraq suggested, still smiling.

“You get out here this instant!” the exarch screamed. “I demand to know the meaning of this…this…extortion! A new samr and kzung! I can see your old ones right there! There is nothing wrong with them! What is this? Boots! Buckles! A new tent! A quilted mat! Blankets, cushions, a new pack…and a full mending kit! What could you possibly need to mend when everything is new?”

“I like to be prepared for every eventuality.”

“Is that a joke? Are you joking at me? No, no, this must be the joke! An inlaid tea box?!”

“I trust you also received my list of favorite teas.”

“This is an outrageous abuse of power and I will not honor it! I refuse! You will have a brick of cuuvash and a change of clothes and nothing more from me! I am a son of Ylsathoc!”

Meoraq slapped his palm flat against the cupboard door and shoved it open. He leaned out, no longer smiling, and yanked the exarch down by the neck of his fine white robes until their eyes were on level. “And I am a son of Sheul,” he said quietly.

The exarch glared, breathing hard and fast, the color strong at his scrawny throat, but he said nothing.

“Honored one…” Unnoticed in the doorway, the abbot of Xi’Tothax now came into the room and bowed again, both arms open. “Please, the temple is proud to make provision for you.”

“But I do not ask the temple.” Meoraq released Ylsathoc with a shove and swung himself out of the cupboard to stand in the exarch’s place, naked and damned glad he was naked, just to see Ylsathoc flinch. “I ask the man who gave my name at the gate—what did I hear, six times?—and who ordered the sentries of my conquered city to carry me in to him as if I were his errant cattle! Do not speak to me of insult, priest. You will meet my demands and you will thank Sheul at every one that I ask only your material goods and not your fucking hand!”

He made himself stop there and take a slow count of six breaths before he really lost his temper. He’d had too little sleep…which was a poor excuse and he knew it. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his emotions at all times, even when dealing with insolent, self-important bureaucrats. If he had to wake up to someone this early, why couldn’t it be a woman?

‘And now I want a woman,’ he thought, striding to the table to reclaim his clothing. He didn’t mind being naked in front of another man as long as he looked intimidating while he did it. He minded very much being extruded and undignified.

“If the temple wishes to show its obedience, it can bring me hot nai and a meal,” Meoraq said, strapping on his loin-plate and cinching it biting-tight. “The exarch here shall see to my rations for travel, but he had best be quick about it. I mean to be on my way by fifth-hour.”

The abbot gave his assurances and bowed his way out. Ylsathoc watched him go and then watched Meoraq dress. His spines were stiff enough to quiver slightly with his pulse. The scales at his throat were still striped with yellow as bold and bright as paint.

“Have you something more to say?” Meoraq asked.

“Forgive me,” said the exarch, sounding anything but apologetic. “But how does the honored one expect me to meet his demands before fifth-hour? I did not come to Tothax with a tea box.”

“Inlaid,” Meoraq reminded him. “And I expect you to purchase whatever you do not have, the same as any other man must do when a Sword of Sheul takes his conqueror’s privilege. If I learn that you have turned my list into your own and demanded it as gifts from this city, I will see you judged for theft.”

The exarch was quiet for a time, although Meoraq could see the yellow patches at his throat moving with unformed words. At last, in a voice as edged as any blade Meoraq carried, Ylsathoc said, “I will have to purchase several things on credit to meet your demands.”

“So?”

More silence. More hard, hoarse breathing. More yellow.

Meoraq put his boots on and pretended not to notice or care. He waited, grimly enjoying himself and reminding himself to meditate on the cause of that enjoyment because it really was a terrible sign of his true character.

“My father will have to pay those notes.”

Meoraq finished buckling the last strap on his boot, then straightened up and looked the exarch directly in the eye. “You have your orders. Leave me.”

Ylsathoc managed half a stiff bow and then burst out, “This is spitefulness and nothing else! What did I do but my given duty in informing you of your House’s need?”

“You did not inform me,” said Meoraq. “You summoned me. And then you stood me in your borrowed chamber and dared to interrogate me, much as you are daring to protest to me now.”

“I am an exarch over all the eastern lands! My father’s House stands as champion over Chalh, the city that champions all Gedai! I had every right to—”

“I do not care if you are the high chancellor over all the city-states of Gann,” said Meoraq, folding his arms. “All men bend before the honor-blade.”

Ylsathoc looked at those blades now and at Meoraq’s hands so close to them. He lowered his voice before he used it again, although he still spoke with an indignant hiss. “You cannot need half these ridiculous things for your journey!”

“You sound very sure.” Meoraq leaned forward, holding the other man’s stare. “Where is it you think I am going?”

“Why, to—” Exarch Ylsathoc frowned. The yellow stripes at his throat finally began to fade, just a little. “To Xeqor,” he said after a long, puzzled pause to search Meoraq’s eyes. “Your House requires a steward.”

“And if that is Sheul’s will, it will be me,” Meoraq agreed. “But first I will know that it is Sheul’s will.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is not necessary that you do. Your role in this is ended, or will be as soon as you have met my demands.”

“But…” Ylsathoc retreated a step, then appeared to suddenly notice the tablet still in his hand. He looked at it as if reading it for the first time. “But all these things…Where are you going?”

Meoraq smiled faintly. “Xi’Matezh.”

The exarch rocked back and stared at him with such astonishment that Meoraq could not resist twisting the knife. He leaned in even closer, close enough to be threat as much as insult, and smiled. “Seen in that light, I haven’t asked for too damned much at all, have I?”

“That will take…days!” Ylsathoc sputtered, backing away again. “A brace of days! Two braces at the least!”

“Three is far more likely.”

“Winter is all but at the gate! The cold season—”

“I know about cold.”

“You will never make it there and back across the mountains before the snows!”

“I do not expect to.”

“You cannot mean to leave your House empty so long!” Ylsathoc grappled visibly with the humility he had been warned to demonstrate, but outrage soon defeated him. “It is the founding House of Uyane’s bloodline, the line of that great oracle’s descent! Its steward champions all Xeqor, who champions all Yroq, who sits at the very heart of all that is left of this land! Where is your sense of duty?”

“I have a duty to more than one father,” Meoraq replied. “He who sired my clay would surely understand that I serve He who hammered my soul first. Sheul has called me to a pilgrimage. Have my things waiting at Eastgate by fifth-hour and if you dare to protest just once more, I swear to you here in the sight of Sheul that your father will receive a note for the cost of your funeral along with the rest of your expenses.”

Ylsathoc looked down at the list and up again. He opened his mouth.

Meoraq waited, ready to draw. He was well aware of his own propensity to be impatient, particularly with those of the lesser castes, and he would even admit to the spitefulness Ylsathoc had alleged (although never to the other man’s face), but in spite of his divine right and his frequent threats, he had never killed anyone just for rudeness. Scarred a few, though. And he’d by-Gann be scarring this one if he said one more word.

But Ylsathoc only sighed and shut his mouth again. He bent his neck in a sullen sort of bow and swept out past the returning abbot, reading his list and muttering about impropriety to himself in much-offended and very soft tones.

The abbot waited in the doorway while the boy he’d brought labored his food-laden tray over to Meoraq at the table and poured the nai. Then he said, without reproach, “It is a mark of great favor to be born under the sign of the Blade, honored one.”

Meoraq grunted and broke open his bread. It had been stuffed with gruu, fried in fat to a crunchy paste and should have been very good, but Meoraq could not eat without thinking of the previous night’s trial and how a few rows of gruu, more or less, had killed a Sheulteb. All things served God and Meoraq knew he’d done His work well, but still it made the bread bitter this morning.

“Fewer yet are called to be Sheulek,” the abbot continued.

“No one feels that privilege more deeply than I, priest.”

“But do you feel the privilege, honored one, that He continues to show you? Not one Sheulek in sixty will ever stand as steward of his bloodline or Lord of his House. You are the Sword He raises highest.”

“No,” said Meoraq, tossing his inedible bread down on the tray. “I am the Sword He has sheathed! And if that is His will, I accept it, but before I submit to that end, I will hear it in His own voice.”

The abbot’s boy gaped at him. The abbot himself merely bowed.

Meoraq looked at his untouched food, then drank off his nai and banged the cup down empty. “I am done with this,” he said brusquely. “I am taking the rooftop. See that I am not disturbed.”

“Yes, honored one.”

“I want to wash first,” said Meoraq, which was not the truth. He did not want the bath; he wanted the woman whose task it would be to bathe him and he didn’t care who knew it.

The abbot bowed again, silent in his assent. He gestured to his boy, who took up the tray. They left, shutting the door softly behind them.

Meoraq sat alone, staring at the ceiling and counting his breaths.

“Fuck,” he said, and went to the roof without his bath. He still wanted the woman, but he suspected he needed to pray.

 

* * *

 

Somewhere between the third hour and the fourth, the rooftop door scraped open.

Stretched out on a bench to watch the clouds roll by, Meoraq raised the samr he had been idly tapping against his boot and called, “I do not wish to be disturbed.”

“I know.”

Meoraq sat up and sheathed his sword. “Nkosa,” he said, surprised.

“I shouldn’t be here,” his blood-kin admitted, still lingering by the stair. “And if you don’t want to see me—”

Meoraq gestured at the bench beside him, his spines forward in invitation. “How did you get up here?”

“I relieved the guard below,” said Nkosa, settling himself uncomfortably on the very edge of the bench. “And as soon as his real relief shows up, he or I or all three of us are probably going to be whipped. I just…I heard about Rasozul.”

Meoraq grunted and looked inanely at the rooftop wall, which had nothing at all to show him. “I envy him,” he said. “He sees our true Father’s face tonight.”

“Well…I’m sorry anyway. I know you were looking forward to seeing him at home.”

Meoraq glanced at him and frowned at the wall some more. “I will see him in the Halls of Sheul.”

“Until then,” said Nkosa quietly, “I’m sorry.”

The wind blew.

Meoraq’s stiff spines lowered some. “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t sure that was the thing to say, but he didn’t know what was. He’d killed many men in his time of service, but he had never had to suffer a loss of his own.

Nkosa tapped at Meoraq’s knee with the backs of his knuckles, awkwardly proving his sympathies, then took his hand back. “Everyone’s talking this morning. They said that exarch was here to appoint you steward?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t let him?”

“I had to pray.”

“About what?”

Meoraq flicked his spines and stared at the wall.

“Now they’re saying you’re leaving for Xi’Matezh?”

“Yes.”

“Xi’Matezh?”

“Yes.”

Nkosa waited, his head tipped to encourage further explanations that never came. At last, he blew out a rude breath and said, “Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, O mighty Sword of God, but if you want to kill yourself, you can just jump off the wall.”

Meoraq tried and failed to catch the laugh that coughed out of him. He eyed his cousin, rubbed his snout, and sighed.

“Marriage isn’t all bad,” said Nkosa.

“That would depend on who you get,” Meoraq muttered.

“At least you’ll have a choice.”

“For all it matters.” Meoraq sat up straighter and looked at his blood-kin. “I don’t want a choice, ‘Kosa. In fact, you could say that I am going to Xi’Matezh so that the choice is made for me.”

“I could.” Nkosa flicked his spines in polite incomprehension. “And why in Gann’s grey hell would I say that?”

“Sheul lit that fire in the sky for me,” Meoraq said, stating it as plainly as such a statement could be made. “I thought it was to bring me here, but even when I first saw it, I knew it didn’t lie directly in the line of Tothax. It was further east.”

Nkosa frowned, uneasy. “In the line of Xi’Matezh, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t possibly know that. You can’t sit on the roof in Xheoth and know where Xi’Matezh is.”

“I know,” Meoraq insisted.

“Fine, then point to it.”

Meoraq looked out at the wildlands, his spines low, scowling. “I can find it.”

Nkosa snorted. “So could I. East to the mountains and over into Gedai, then east to the Ruined Reach and up along the end of the world until you trip over the shrine. That’s the thing about legends, everyone knows how they go. But don’t sit there and tell me the burning tower was pointing the way to Xi’Matezh because you can’t know that.”

“It was.”

Nkosa slapped a hand over the end of his snout and rubbed it, hard. “I really hate talking to you when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“A fucking Sheulek.” He dropped his hand. “You’ve been a good friend to me and I’m proud to hear you call me cousin like it was truth, but ‘Raq, are you sure you aren’t looking for reasons to do something you already want to do?”

“Why would I want to walk across the whole damned wildlands this close to winter?” Meoraq asked reasonably. “Why would anyone?”

Nkosa shrugged his spines, still looking troubled.

“For twelve years, Sheul has spoken through me,” said Meoraq. “Now He is finally calling me to Him. I have to go. My father’s…My House will wait.”

“What are you going to do when you get there and He tells you to go home and get married?”

“If that is what He has called me to Xi’Matezh to hear,” said Meoraq with confidence, “then I am sure He has a particular woman in mind.”

Nkosa looked at him for a long time before saying, quite matter-of-factly, “That sounds like you expect God to provide you the woman.”

Meoraq thought about it, then shrugged his spines.

“That is the closest thing to true blasphemy I think I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

“’Kosa, he summoned me out of Xheoth with a pillar of fire. Does that sound like He wants me to go home and take the first woman I see?”

“How many women do you expect to see in Xi’Matezh, you idiot?”

“One,” said Meoraq. “The one He means me to marry, if He means me to marry.”

Nkosa rubbed at his brow ridges, plainly choosing his next words with great care. He settled on: “I hope this isn’t what you told the exarch.”

“I don’t have to tell him anything,” said Meoraq, dropping back against the bench with a dismissive wave. “I have a whole year before Uyane has to present a steward. I could crawl to the Reaches and back in that time.”

They sat, Meoraq watching the clouds and Nkosa watching him.

“You’re going to make me say it,” Nkosa said finally.

“Say what?”

“Sheul is not going to give you a woman.”

“So,” said Meoraq, untroubled. “That will be a sign of something too, won’t it?”

“Did you sleep through the lesson the day they were supposed to teach you about sophistry?” Nkosa demanded, still trying to laugh as if this would all turn into a joke if he just believed in it hard enough. “What makes you think you’re even going to get through the doors?”

“Nuu Sukaga.”

Nkosa leaned back, his spines flaring all the way forward. “What’s that mean?”

“I have no idea,” said Meoraq and smiled.

Nkosa stared at him some more, then grunted and heaved himself up on his feet. “All right, please yourself. Give me a tap, crazy person,” he ordered, palm out.

Meoraq smiled. Ignoring Nkosa’s outstretched arm, he rose and put his hand against his blood-kin’s heart like a brother, then pulled him close in a rough embrace. It didn’t last long and wasn’t entirely comfortable, but he was glad he did it, if only the once.

“Come back before the year is up, if you can,” said Nkosa, slow to back away. “I know you won’t be able to after you take your House and I’m going to want to see the man who walked all the way to the ends of the world just to get dipped.”

“I’ll be back in the spring,” promised Meoraq. “I’ll even stay with you and do you the honor of sharing your wife.”

“Ha. Only if you share yours.”

“Done. Now get out of here,” he said gently. “I can’t stop them from whipping you every day, you know.”

“Well, in that case don’t bother coming back at all.” Nkosa raised his hand, hesitated, and then curled it into a fist and touched his heart in a real salute. He turned his back at once and went quickly to the door, checking the stair with a look of resignation, then slipped through and was gone.

Meoraq stretched back out on the bench and clasped his hands behind his head. The clouds above him blew eternally onward. To the east, he noted. Toward Xi’Matezh.

His destiny.