Twenty injured. Three dead. They piled the injured and the dead together against the west wall of the Great Temple. Thus the injured could see their future awaiting them as they died. The soldiers retreated to the mouth of the Street of Flowers, water dripping off their helmets. The rain fell like a wall between them and the crowds. After a long while paused talking, they disappeared into the rain.

Nilesh crouched at the edge of the square. She had seen Lord Emmereth from a distance, talking to his guardsmen, pointing at the Temple, waving his hands. Then someone had recognized him. Pointed. Shouted. A momentary flicker in the crowd. Shouts of “traitor,” “murderer,” “hero.” His guardsmen drawing around him. The people had almost turned on him. Then he fled with his guards. Nilesh had been pressed behind a pillar, hiding from Lord Emmereth’s gaze. This had kept her safe from the soldiers’ swords.

Once the dead and injured had been carried to the shelter of the Great Temple, some of the crowd began to dance in the dark in the rain. A woman came round giving out wine from a heavy clay jug.

Another man Nilesh thought she recognized appeared in the square, grandly dressed, shining with gemstones, flanked by more guards. Soaking wet. He tried to talk to the assembled people. Got shouted down. His voice was weak and frightened, “Your Emperor” he shouted hoarsely, the crowd roared so loud his words were lost, “your Emperor … concern for the city … Great Tanis our Lord … High Priestess … I know … prayer … I know …” Voices jeered at him. The hard-faced street women shouted things Nilesh didn’t understand. “Every night!” voices shouted. “Every night!”

“… Your Emperor … Great Tanis … I … good … city … Emperor … I …”

“The Emperor’s dead!” a voice shouted. “Stop lying to us!”

“Every night! Every night!”

“… not the way!” the man shouted hoarsely. His words were high-pitched and shrill like a child’s.

“The God is angry!” a voice shouted.

“Every night! Every night!”

A stone came flying. Hit the man on the side of his head. Another, harder, drawing blood. The man swayed, staring, panicked. His guards surrounded him in a wall of golden armour. For a moment it looked like the violence would begin again. Then, like Lord Emmereth, he was hurried away. Stones and catcalls showered after him. People began to move hesitantly after where he had gone.

“Coward!”

“Betrayer! Liar!”

“The God is angry!”

“Every night! Every night!”

A cry from the steps of the Temple. Faces whipped around. A woman’s voice screaming in fury.

“They’re bolting the door!”

The great door of the Great Temple. Three times the height of a man. It was never locked. Not in all the history of the city. “They’re bolting the door!” The crowd streamed up the steps, rushed at the entrance. The door held against them, then gave. The crowd streamed into the Temple. Voices shouting. Howls. A while later a man’s body was carried out, held triumphantly aloft.

“They have betrayed us!”

“The God has abandoned us!”

“The Emperor is dead!”

“Every night! Every night!”

Nilesh shrank back in the shadows. Many people like her, gathered on the edges, watching, unsure. This, this, surely, was going too far?

“Tolneurn,” the man nearest Nilesh said. She jumped, stared at him.

“Tolneurn. The Imperial Presence in the Temple. He must have ordered them to bar the door.”

The speaker was well dressed, silvery shirt, green embroidered coat. Nilesh bowed her head to him. “Yes, My Lord.”

“Few will mourn him.”

Nilesh kept her eyes down. “No, My Lord.”

“You were not tempted to take part?”

What could she say? “No, My Lord.”

“You do not think, then, that the God has abandoned you?”

Eyes down at her own dirty feet. “I don’t know, My Lord.”

He snorted, strolled into the square to join the crowd swirling around the Temple. His fine green coat stood out vividly until it was soaked dark like the rest by the rain. Nilesh watched him moving between groups of people. It put her in mind of a leaf caught in the eddies of a flood.

The rain stopped shortly after. The water that ran ankle high across the flagstones began to recede. Wet rubbish and mud. Nilesh almost shivered, cold in the night air. The clouds parted to show a brilliant glittering band of stars. The Maiden, the Tree, beside it the great single red star the Dragon’s Mouth. The stars looked huge. Because there was no dust in the sky after rain, Janush had said. She had never been able to see the Tree as a tree with branches, saw instead Bilale’s hair dressed for a party with a net of diamonds and a single red pearl.

The drier air brought out more people. A flower stall was torn up and turned into a bonfire; it took a long time to light, the wood being soaked from the rain. When it lit it went up in a rush of blue fire and a smell of lamp fuel. Voices cheered. Sang the hymn to the rising sun. The Temple door, Nilesh saw in the light of the bonfire, had been pulled outwards and wedged open. The passageway behind showed black against the black marble wall. The crowd edged round it, not wanting to stand too close.

The violence seemed to be over. The bodies of those injured or killed by the soldiers lay undisturbed in the shadows of the west wall. A woman made her way through the square selling candied roses and cinnamon sweets. A kind of calm over everything. Nilesh went cautiously into the thick of the square into the press of people. The crowd milled aimlessly, gathering around the bonfire, sitting on the steps of the Great Temple, singing hymns, drifting past each other in blurred confusion, moving towards and then shying away from the dead body of Tolneurn the Imperial Presence in the Temple, moving towards and then shying away from the woman who had sacrificed her baby, who stood by the open door of the Temple, face raised to the stars. All directionless, confusion: like a lord’s house must be, Nilesh thought, if the Lord and Lady were to stop giving orders and no one knew any more what to do. Voices shouted occasionally “Every night! Every night!” “The God is angry!” “The God must be appeased!” In the firelight and the light of torches some of them looked flushed and haggard. Feverish. Sick. Yet a voice would start up singing a hymn of praise to the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying and the healthy and the sick would sing together, dance, even embrace. Nilesh moved in their rhythms, confused and in confusion like the rest. The whole night must be passing. In the east behind the domed rooftops the first light in the sky perhaps showed. Her legs felt weak and weary: she found herself near the sweet-seller on the steps of the Great Temple, bought a bag of sweets. The sweet-seller smiled at her with teeth as black as the shadowy passageway of the Great Temple. Her white face was flushed and damp with sweat. She shuddered as she handed Nilesh the bag, winced, bit her lip with a pained grimace. Nilesh dropped the bag onto the wet flagstones. It burst open, spilling out pink crystal petals that winked in the fire’s light. Nilesh stared down at them. Rising rushing fear of the plague.

A man’s shoe trod neatly on the fallen petals. Crushed them into the wet dust. Into little shredded limp pink grey pieces of rag. Firelight winked on jewelled shoe buttons. Nilesh looked up into the face of the man in the green coat.

“That was wisdom,” he said shortly. He ground the petals further into a smear on the flagstones with the toe of his shoe.

“She is sick with the fever,” Nilesh said suddenly. “The sweet-seller. She’s sick.”

The man in green nodded. “Many are sick.” He pointed. “Look.”

A man in the white silks of a knife-fighter was kneeling on the flagstones vomiting. The crowds swirled and moved around him, trying to avoid him, curling round him to include him in their endless movements around and around. Even as Nilesh watched he fell forward slowly on his face, lay still.

“He’s dead?”

“They have made a sacrifice to the God,” the man in the green coat said. “‘Every night! Every night!’ So should the God not now be appeased and stop them dying? Cure all who witnessed it of the plague?”

He spoke like Lord Emmereth sometimes did, in such a way Nilesh could not quite understand what he was saying.

“Look,” the man in the green coat said. Two women lifted the knife-fighter back to his knees. His head rolled upwards, Nilesh saw that he was not quite dead. The women lifted him between them while a third put a cup of something to his lips. Then they let him drop again. He fell heavily, caught himself with his hands, knelt in a crouch. Spewed up whatever they had given him, began to crawl across the square towards the Temple steps.

“But he’s dying?”

“I would think so, wouldn’t you? Unless the God miraculously cures him in the next little while.”

“You’re joking,” said Nilesh awkwardly.

After a while, she said, “There was a man in the Court of Evening Sorrows yesterday who claimed he could cure the plague with the touch of his hands.”

The man in the green coat looked at her. “He’s dead.”

Another bonfire flickered into light in the square. A circle of figures danced around it, dark against the flames, writhing and twisting and jumping hand in hand.

“It’s almost dawn,” said the man in the green coat.

Nilesh turned her face around the square, gazing up at the sky. Her eyes imagined they could see pale faint light. Yes. Dawn.

“You served Lady Emmereth, didn’t you?” said the man in the green coat. “Until you were thrown out?”

“My Lord Emmereth was merciful and generous,” she said stiffly. How good it felt, to hear someone want to speak to her the Emmereth name!

“You are wondering, perhaps, how I know who you are?”

Nilesh looked at him in puzzlement. “All in the city know My Lord of the Rising Sun and his household, My Lord.”

He paused. Nilesh thought that he seemed at a loss. He seemed about to speak, then stopped himself.

After a moment he said, “Your name is Nilesh, I think? Mine is Cauvanh.”

Nilesh bowed her head even lower. “My Lord Cauvanh.”

Laugh. “Just Cauvanh.”

A shout went up in the square. Dawn! Dawn! Voices calling the Great Hymn to the rising sun, the most beautiful of all the songs of the God. Nilesh felt her heart rise in joy. The flames of the bonfires leapt higher, trying to match the light of the sky. The dome of the Summer Palace came alive in a blaze of gold. Even the black marble walls of the Great Temple were softly tinged in dreaming pink.

“Great Tanis! Great Tanis! Lord of Living and Dying! Great Lord Who Rules All Things!” The people in the square began to dance again, embracing and kissing one another, spinning like glorious joyful birds. Nilesh was caught up with them, one of the women who had tended the knife-fighter grasped her hands, pulled her into a circle of women dancing, street girls in sheer beaded dresses, merchants’ wives in billowing satin, a little girl in a foam of yellow lace. “The sun rises! The sun! The sun! The sun!” As if they had all believed, deep in their hearts, that the sun would never rise on them again.

Men in armour appeared again in the square at the mouth of the Street of Flowers. Glittering like the dome of the Summer Palace. Young men, silent, looking fixed straight ahead. Young men with tall barb-headed spears.

The dancers whirled to stopping. The voices singing the hymn died away.

A few ragged shouts and catcalls: “The God is angry!” “Every night! Every night!”

The lines of soldiers opened to let through a man in a fine blue coat. Nilesh recognized him with a start as the man Lord Emmereth had been speaking to the night before. He had come to the House of the East a few times to see Lord Emmereth. Gallan, his name might be. Gallise? Gallus?

“People of Sorlost,” Gallus said loudly. The crowd fell silent.

He knows My Lord Emmereth, Nilesh thought. So surely they must respect him for that, what he said would be worth hearing and give them cheer.

“People of Sorlost. I come to you from the side of the Emperor himself. The Emperor understands your fears. Fears and mourns with you. Like you, he has watched all that has befallen us with grief. Like you, he fears that the God is angry with us, that such strife and fear has befallen our great city. Like you, he feels anger. Like you, he seeks a way to heal our city and placate the God.”

“The Emperor’s dead!” a voice shouted. “He’s dead!”

And a new shout, in a voice rich and tremulous: “We’ll all die!”

“The Emperor is not dead.” Oh Great Tanis! Lord Emmereth himself stepped out from the line of guards to stand beside Gallus. Nilesh flinched, seeing him so close. He must see her, surely, standing only a little way across from him in the light of the morning. Cauvanh, near her, stiffened. She felt him look briefly at her.

Shouts of “traitor,” “hero,” “murderer.” Cheers. Murmuring. Curses.

“The Emperor is not dead,” Lord Emmereth said loudly over the noise. His face was grey, his body was clenched tight. He was shaking. Like a man in the wind. “I have come from his chambers, where he has sat all night awake in prayer. He desires only to come to the Temple to give offering to Great Tanis. But he cannot come, for there has been violence done here. He is not dead, but he is afraid. The priestesses cannot hold the service of the dawn sun rising. So the Emperor implores you to leave and return to your homes and let the Emperor and the priestesses pray for the city, as is their task and their duty.” His face turned to the body of Tolneurn the Imperial Presence in the Temple, then to the dead and injured mixed together against the Temple’s wall. “Enough violence has been done here! The God has surely heard you! The Emperor hears you! He begs you, people of Sorlost the Golden, people of the Sekemleth Empire, the Empire of the Golden Dawn Light, of the Lord of Living and Dying, the richest empire the world has ever known, your Emperor begs you, his children, to return to your homes in peace and let him pray to the God for us all!”

Silence. Murmuring, like birds waking. A few uncertain movements. Catcalls, but quieter now. People’s faces looking almost half ashamed.

Then Cauvanh shifted. Shouted.

“The Emperor is dead! He is lying!”

Threw a stone.

The soldiers moved into life around Lord Emmereth.

The crowd began to run.

People running up the steps into the Temple. Voices shrieking from inside. A child’s scream. The door to the Temple slammed.

The spears came down.