This story arc ended on such a climax that we’re not going to have a long wrapup (though Thulo may write up his experiences after Ashas); it’s my turn now to take Lyse and either Fikmet or someone else to the East.

As we passed the place where we had seen the people under the ground, I took Thulo to see if we could find them. Maha came along, and Nima too — we were really a team now! It was quite some way into the wood. Strange wood, though: we didn’t hear any birds or see any tracks or droppings of animals.

Eventually we stood practically on top of the people but we still couldn’t find an entrance. Maha needed all her tracking skill to find first a discarded snakeskin — there must have been snakes, at least, though we hadn’t seen any actual ones — and then a wooden hatch in a thicket in the middle of a clearing. (Well, clearing — it was under the forest roof, but there weren’t any trees growing there.)

Thulo and I thought at the same time of knocking on the hatch. As soon as we’d done that, there were people around us: dark-skinned, thin, in rags. I thought they’d probably speak the southern language that I knew only a couple of words of yet, but tried trade Iss-Peranian and one man understood me. “Who are you?” he asked. “Are you from the emperor?”

“No,” I said, “we’re going to the emperor! To deal with him. We want to know if we can help you.”

They talked among themselves — indeed in the southern language, I didn’t understand a word.

“The priestess will judge that. One of you may come.”

I asked Thulo to keep a mental eye on me and followed the first man into the shaft under the hatch, with the others behind me. It was a good ten yards deep, with a rope ladder dangling down, and came out in a corridor dug in the earth. In some places earthenware pipes went through the ceiling, held up by wooden supports.

“Can you make a light?” the man asked. I did so — after burning Sidhan’s trap I seemed to have got better at it. The man looked satisfied. “Ah, now I know you’re not a servant of the grand masters. They make only darkness.”

There were passages on the side, possibly to dwellings. A little boy ran up and tried to touch the light, but his finger went right through, of course, and he giggled and ran away again.

We ended up in a larger space, eight-sided. A young woman was sitting by an empty fire-pit in the middle; she was gifted but not spectacularly, and she didn’t look at all trained. She stood up, supporting herself with a pair of crutches — it looked like her legs had been broken and badly set.

“Are you the high priestess who was foretold?” she asked in understandable trade Iss-Peranian.

“I don’t know about it being foretold,” I said, “but I am a high priestess, yes. Of Anshen.” For the first time I noticed that the name came out as ‘spirit of light’ in that language. It figured.

When she saw that I was looking at her legs, she said, “That’s the punishment from grand master Lyase. If she thinks you’re gifted but you’re not gifted enough.”

“We’re trying to get rid of the grand masters,” I said.

“All of them? Are you from the emperor?”

“We’re going to the emperor,” I said.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “We fled from Ashas. The closer to the city, the stranger it becomes, you get strange dreams and if you stay too long it’s not a dream any more.”

“Yes, we’ve already seen a bit of that,” I said. “How can we help you?”

She shrugged. “You can’t. We have nowhere to go where they won’t find us, and many of us can’t walk.”

“How many of you are here?” I asked.

“Thirty-eight, adults and children.”

“There are three thousand of us. We can give you food, clothes, camels, and an escort to go to a safe place.”

I called Thulo to call to the caravan, and the priestess gave me wine and mouldy bread, all they had. Well, I’ve eaten worse; and given to me with much less reverence and attention.

When Thulo said they were almost ready on the surface, we all climbed out of the shaft, the able-bodied carrying the others. The last one out was a pregnant woman who had had trouble with the rope ladder. Thulo was there with some soldiers, and we got everybody to the road where Pesar’s first wife was waiting with the camels. “These are the people I’m going to take to Ghilas, I understand?” she asked. “I see they need clothes. And food.”

“And a doctor, I think,” I said, but she’d already thought of that as well and brought a couple of the former whores.

As I got back to the caravan, I got a surprise — a double surprise. Prince Shab was back, intact as far as I could see; and he had brought Prince Sharab and all the soldiers! I looked Prince Sharab over with my mind, what if he was an illusion of Sidhan’s? But no, it was the man himself, alive, but looking green with misery. “I — we — had a horrible dream,” he said, “that Sidhan was burning us alive on a pyre!”

“That’s what Thulo and I saw when we were looking for you,” I said. “We were convinced you were dead.”

“We were convinced we were dead! They’ve taken our camels, though, not everything was a dream.”

“You know what’s strange,” Prince Shab said, “Sidhan fled when we came along, and she didn’t hide at all, I could see her thoughts. And she was convinced Sharab and the soldiers were dead too, that she’d put them on the pyre alive!”

“I’ve been warned of illusions,” I said, “but I didn’t know they were this convincing.”

That evening, in the service, Anshen was there. And, somewhat bashfully behind me, his brother as well. I acknowledged both of them silently.

“Perhaps we should have the other one in the service, too,” Thulo said. “But how?”

I thought of having both versions of the Second Invocation, but I was hampered by not knowing the right words, and they weren’t in the service book either, of course. “Do the Velihan invocation!” Maha said, “it’s the same for both anyway!” And by now everybody either understood Velihan or would know what we were saying, so from that moment on we sang the invocations in that language.

We were riding through a dry plain now, mostly flat, with some grass and brush and occasionally a stunted tree. The road was clearly marked with stones, some with carving on them — Pesar read a number of miles on one and told me it would be about another week to Ashas.

Then the outriders found two dead camels on the road. Apparently they’d been ridden to death. A bit further along there were two dead people — no, one was still alive, though completely parched. I went to talk to him when he’d had a drink of water. “Are you of Sidhan?”

“Not any more,” he said, “her camel died under her and then she took mine and left me behind.”

“Well, do you want to go north or are you coming with us?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“The same as for everybody else here,” I said, “a fair share of what we have.” His eyes narrowed, then he nodded. “That man over there is a sergeant, report to him and he’ll give you a place.”

I’ll keep an eye on him, Thulo thought to me. Good; saved me having to do it.

And yes, in the evening service Thulo looked up and left the temple with a couple of soldiers. It turned out that the man had been taking his share in advance, from four different tents. They brought him to me, and also the sack they’d taken from him, full of small valuables like purses, jewellery, and even a set of very fine linen underwear.

“Is that how you repay trust?” I said.

I didn’t have anything else to say, really, but the sergeant did. “What shall we do with him?”

“Cut his head off,” I said, disgusted with myself as well as with the thief. I should have known that anything touched by Sidhan would never be clean again.

The man struggled all the time while the soldiers were taking him away. Then there was a shriek at the edge of the camp, and a strong sense of the presence of Archan — I couldn’t see which one it was before it was gone.

Thulo sent everybody to their tent and asked one person from each tent where things had been stolen to come and reclaim them. Nobody would admit to the underwear, so I gave it to Zahmati.

After another couple of days we saw a plume of black smoke ahead. When we got close enough we saw that it came from the top of a green hill — strangely green in this wasteland! On the other side of the road there was a small walled city, all white, which looked deserted at first sight but I could see people with my mind, a good-sized farm full, not nearly enough for the city. It didn’t look plundered, not even damaged, and the only gate was closed and probably barred.

“Over the wall, I think,” I said, and promptly soldiers brought ladders. They reported that the city looked empty, but one climbed down and came back surprisingly soon, grey with shock. “There’s sickness here,” he said, “nobody left alive!” Except those ten or twenty people; perhaps they’d escaped, or recovered. We let down a sack of flour and a sack of onions with a note pinned to it, “we can’t help you more now but we’ll come back after we’ve done our business”. One of the soldiers stayed on the wall for a bit when he saw a woman come out to investigate the gifts and said that she’d told him the sickness was in the water.

We left a company to guard the city and went on to see what was burning on the green hill.

That the hill was so green was because it was thickly wooded. I wondered where the water came from that all those trees must need. A natural spring? But no, someone told me that the water came from the distant mountains through earthenware pipes. “Oh, like the aquaduct in the palace in Tanim!” I said, but these pipes were underground until they came to their destination.

In the wood, we found a palace. It was the emperor’s hunting lodge, I heard. It was empty, had been plundered, both recently and less recently as far as I could see. There were several camels in the first courtyard, some with tack I recognised as coming from our caravan, but we didn’t see any people.

After we’d crossed what looked like a whole deserted palace we got to a park surrounded by a colonnade. There was a small round building in the centre, which was on fire; the fire had almost burnt itself out. There were several dead bodies lying around — it looked as if there’d been serious fighting as well as burning, and in fact only the bodies inside the building were so burnt that they could have died of that.

The building itself was so damaged that it was in danger of collapsing. Someone –I think it was Maha– spotted someone alive on the first floor, a man, not young, wounded. “Come down,” I called to him, “this way is safe!”

He did: it was a man of about forty, dressed in something that must be a military uniform though I didn’t recognise it. He said that he was Donai, colonel of the imperial guard, charged with guarding the lodge of Nemai. They’d tried to keep Sidhan and her troop from entering the lodge, because of the sickness in the city. He told us that Sidhan had come in anyway, a blazing torch in each hand, set fire to the folly (this was probably what the small round building was called) and thrown herself into the flames, “if I can’t burn the others I can at least burn myself!”

Well, so much for Sidhan. Donai was going on and on in a great paean to the emperor, all of it clearly from memory, before entreating us to take the news to the emperor “because I won’t live to relay it”. He showed us where an arrow had pierced his side: he’d pulled it out but the point was firmly lodged in his guts, nothing to be done about that if you didn’t have access to a hospital with skilled and gifted doctors.

“Long live the emperor!” he said, and died.

“I’ll have to be a priestess of Naigha again, I think,” I said.

“Do you want to bury each of them separately?” someone asked, but I didn’t think that was necessary, just drag all the bodies into the building and make it collapse in a controlled way, like the temple in Merom, before it collapsed on its own. I called on Anshen as well as Naigha, and the fire that was still there flared up high.

Now was the time to investigate the water. Beyond the park (which had fountains, but they were dry because nobody was maintaining them) there was more palace, then servants’ quarters which hadn’t only been plundered but had been clay and mud to begin with, so they were completely derelict now. We could still follow the water-pipes, though. We got to a huge basin that had small black fish swimming in it — as far as I knew, if there were fish, the water was clean. But we didn’t know if there wasn’t a dead camel at the bottom, poisoning the water in spite of the fish. It was too deep to see that, deeper than any of us could have dived.

“Can’t we drain it?” one of the sergeants asked, and I thought there should be a gate in the water-pipe before the basin for exactly that purpose. Yes, there was: some way into the wood, and if that was closed the water would flow into the moat around the castle.

“Well, let it do that then,” I said, but of course we knew that the water was all right before it came to the basin so we could just fill our water-bags at the gate.

We made our camp in the wood. Nobody wanted to sleep in the palace, which felt like a house of death. And we had a deer for dinner — my hunters had gone hunting almost as soon as we’d arrived. “There must have been no hunting for hundreds of years!” they said, “the deer weren’t afraid of people at all!”

The next day, Pesar decided to leave most people here or send them back to the north, and to go on to Ashas only with the people who could fight or had business there. The doctors decided who would go back — almost all the children, half of my household including Zahmati, meaning that Aftabi would go back too. I’d miss Aftabi, and I’d miss her two swords! Samada went with her school, of course. I kept Khali and Bhalik, and all the hunters, and somehow Ysella had argued so much to stay that nobody sent her back. The elephants went back, too: there wouldn’t be enough water for them further on.

We had only about eight hundred people left, mostly soldiers, and more than half of the pack animals to carry food and water because we didn’t know if there would be anything at all to be got between here and Ashas.

“I think most of these people won’t reach Ashas either,” Nima said. He was the only one of his caravan who had stayed with us. “Many will have to stay in camp.”

Now it was real desert, the way I’d always imagined it: sandy hills where nothing grew, and burning heat that made me very glad of my Ishey clothes. After a couple of days we came to a small oasis surrounded by a low wall, a masonry basin fed by water by another pipe from the mountains. When we had finished filling the water-bags the oasis was surrounded by people: refugees from Ashas. It was impossible to live there any more, the grand masters were poisoning the wells and destroying the fields.

“Go to the hunting lodge,” I said, “there’s enough water and you can eat the deer in the wood!”

“But that belongs to the emperor,” they said, “it’s not allowed! Have you been there?”

“Sure,” I said, “and the emperor hasn’t, not for hundreds of years, there’s nobody there right now.” In the end Pesar had to give them an escort too, to take them to any place that was safer and more congenial than this place.

Thulo thought of labelling the water-bags so we’d know which water was from where, and we tied coloured threads around the neck of each one, yellow for the well we’d just been using, red for the hunting-lodge well.

The ground was going down sharply now in a chasm between rock walls. The road was still marked with milestones. In the distance we could see an immense city. Ashas! It was burning in some places, and above the city the sky was dark as if it was encompassed in half a dome, open to our side.

We passed a small waterfall coming down from the rock face. It fell into a pool with plants growing around the edge. There had been a stand of trees here too, but they’d been felled quite recently. The soldiers found the body of a man under a fallen tree: sword still in the sheath, axe in his hand. The axe was splendid, with an emerald in the handle and an engraved blade. The man’s head wasn’t on his neck, but lying a couple of feet away. We buried him under a heap of stones far enough away from the waterfall that he wouldn’t poison the water.

After the service, that evening, the dome around the city was closed a bit more. “Would they close it for the night?” Thulo asked, but it had been steadly closing while the service was going on and stopped when the service ended. Apparently something didn’t like us to pray — but we’d pray anyway.

The next day the horses and camels refused go to any further. “We’ll go on foot, then,” I said, but people didn’t make any more progress here than animals. It reminded me of Thulo’s master’s trial.

“Perhaps we should only go in the spirit,” I said. If that was the only way to get into the city…

But before we did that, I wanted a proper temple. There were trees here, stones, enough people to build: poles on the eight corners, stone walls in between, a fireplace in the middle. We put it as far out as it would go. Where did I want the door? One on the north side to go in, one on the south side to go out. It took a day, and another half-day. Then it was finished, and I consecrated it defiantly, very precisely by the book, the appendix of my service book headed To Consecrate A New Temple.

When the temple was finished it was just large enough for four people to stand around the fire. There was power in the walls, like in the temple in Valdis. “This is a safe place,” I said. “We’ll be safe here.”

After I’d consecrated the temple, the dome around Ashas was completely closed.

Anshen was in the south doorway, Archan in the north. We stood in silence. Archan opened his mouth and closed it again, then started to speak. I don’t recall all the words — it must have been mostly or completely in our minds — but the gist was that he, his power, came into the world here, in Ashas. “I and what is in Ashas are one, we are the same, and when I come closer to the city I’ll turn into him.” At one point I heard Anshen clear his throat — do gods have throats? Well, they were in human form, so in this case they must have — when Archan was about to say something outrageous.

Then even Anshen spoke. “There is a temple with four pillars in the city. The source is there.”

Archan said a lot more: the power must be contained, curbed. I must build an Order house on that place. (Archan told me to build an Order house? Of what Order? I might acknowledge him but I still refused to serve him. But it must be an Order house for Anshen, because he was talking about the need for balance now.)

What I knew of Dol-Rayen was that there had been no balance, perhaps because Athal’s sister had disturbed it. What Athal had done was not to make the city fall, but to allow it to fall after he’d held it up long enough for everybody to save themselves. If we could close off the source of Archan here, would that be enough to restore the balance? It had been the mandate of the Order in Dol-Rayen to preserve that — they must have known a lot of secrets that ordinary Sworn hadn’t even heard of. I thought I’d end up commander of an Order house somewhere eventually, but not this!

“We must go into the city,” I said aloud.

“You can’t do that on your own,” Archan said. “Each of us can carry two of you.”

I thought about that for a long time. “You may carry me,” I said. Maha said that there was no difference for her anyway. Thulo was very wary of Archan, and for Nima there was no question, he would let only Anshen touch him.

“Not now, though,” Nima said, “tomorrow at dawn.”

The gods were gone, leaving emptiness.

“Do you trust Archan?” Thulo asked me.

“In this thing, yes,” I said. “Anshen is there to keep him in check.”

I wanted to have a wake in the temple. Nima thought it a good idea, “but we must sleep too, wake me halfway.” And to Thulo and Maha he said, “better find a tent for only the two of you. ” That made me laugh: the married people, or as near as made no difference, in their tent and the celibate people in the temple! Exactly as it should be.

I even slept, the second half of the night.

When Nima woke me and Thulo and Maha were back, I washed, put on my uniform, took care to put all my weapons where they belonged. I suspected that I’d be able to do what I had to do naked and barehanded, but I needed to feel prepared. I think someone pressed breakfast on me, but I can’t be sure.

I asked Shab to keep watch — I thought we’d probably go in the spirit only, and someone had to watch our bodies. “Get us back if we can’t come back on our own, and bury us if we don’t come back at all,” I said, which made him blanch but he nodded. Goodness, Shab isn’t any older than sixteen, why does this war make people grow up so fast?

We entered the temple. I took Thulo’s right hand and Nima’s left hand, and saw Thulo and Nima clasping hands with Maha on the opposite side. The gods came. Anshen took Thulo and Nima’s hands from me, and Archan took mine and Maha’s. Five steps beyond the south door the gods were carrying us each in an arm.

I couldn’t feel whether I had my body with me or not; I felt much more substantial than usually when I’m only in the spirit.

We were going very fast, through the dome of darkness now. The gods put us down, and we were in a city that looked deserted at first sight. The light was blinding. We couldn’t see Archan any more but Anshen was still with us. I don’t know how the others saw him, but to me he looked like a handsome Valdyan, much younger than he’d looked before, perhaps eighteen years old.

We all knew that we had to hold hands and not let go.

Now we could also see people: a small red-haired child running after butterflies without seeming to notice us; more children playing, every one of them alone; a woman who sat on the rim of a fountain and whispered to thin air; a man celebrating on his own, toasting with something invisible.

Anshen led us further into the city, until we came to an immense gateway, the doors covered in gold. The wicket gate was open, and a guard sat next to it, playing dice. After every throw he picked a coin out of the air and added it to a growing pile. He didn’t see us either, or at least paid no attention.

We went through an empty courtyard, then into a room where a young man was sitting on a throne in what looked like a whirlwind of darkness, but when we got closer we could see that it was a cloud of flies converging on him. All he did was snatch one out of the air and pull off its wings, and another, and another. He didn’t have attention for anything else, especially not us.

Next, there was a huge office where a richly dressed middle-aged man was doing paperwork on his own. “This would be the emperor’s secretary,” I said.

“Grand Vizier!” the man said, irritably, and went on with his work.

Then we heard a voice speaking to us, promising us everything we wanted. “Thulo, wouldn’t you like your wife to stay seventeen years old and beautiful forever, not getting old and ugly? I can give you that!” Thulo pointedly ignored it, only squeezed Maha’s hand more tightly.

We were in a library now, where many people were sitting on benches and at tables reading, and the walls were full of books, more books than I’d known there were in the whole world. Now the voice was promising Maha wisdom and knowledge. “The temple first, then wisdom!” I said, and we went on.

Anshen was younger still, barely in his teens. “When I become a small child I’ll turn into my brother,” he said.

“Because that’s when you and he were still one?” I asked, but got no answer.

Beyond the library there was a large garden with a colonnade around it. The marble here was old, yellowed, crumbling in places. In the centre there was a round domed building, also of old marble.

“I think it’s there,” I said, and looked at Anshen for confirmation but he’d disappeared. “We’re on our own now.”

Inside the little dome we found the four pillars: made of greyer stone than the marble, connected by lintels on top. Inside the square there was something that could be a pool or a fireplace, obscured by a column of darkness that went all the way up to the roof and presumably through it. We could just stand around the square of pillars, holding hands. The column seemed to stand still at first, but as I looked at it longer I saw that it was flowing, up from the pool. This must indeed be the source.

“What do we do now?” Maha asked.

It was hard to answer, or even think. “It’s darkness. You beat darkness with light.”

I knew that I could make light. Wait — we could all make light, we were light-bearers! But we should do it together, not each of us separately. We thought a little dome of light into existence at the level of the lintels, and it fractured into pieces like stars and dissipated.

“I don’t have the strength,” Nima said.

“Of course you do,” I said, “in the plain you could help me, now I can help you.”

That made him able to brace himself — I didn’t even have to help him, it was his own confidence.

“Whatever we cover this with should be firm, like a seal,” I said, and Thulo and I could do that, but it was still too small to close the source. “Maha, it should grow.”

Maha concentrated, and the glimmer of light sprouted leaves and then twigs. “Like this?”

“Yes–” and I suddenly realised that we already had something to close, the pillars and lintels made a structure to seal. “We must close the sides,” I said.

“How? Like brambles, a thorn hedge?”

I gave Maha the image of a wattle-and-daub house. “Huh, strange way to build,” she said, but she started coaxing the twigs to braid themselves together. Every space that seemed small enough, we smeared with seal. It was almost closed.

“I can’t go on!” Maha said, but Thulo could give her some of his strength and we did go on, closing the structure completely.

The pillars fell.

And the lintels fell, on top of us.

Thulo was the first one who could put himself out and helped the others. We were exhausted, full of bruises, bumps and scrapes.

In the middle of the dome there was now a heap of rubble with the seal clearly visible under it. A small tree of light was growing from it. “We should make a fire, I think,” Thulo said, and we gathered firewood from the garden and laid a ring of it around the heap. “I even brought a tinder-box,” I said, but Maha thought it would be better to light the fire with our minds. It was surprisingly easy.

When we were all outside again, the tree of light touched the roof and it fell in; the walls stood, and the ring of fire stayed.

Above us, there was bright blue sky with clouds.

We went back the way we’d come. In the library nothing seemed to have changed, but Maha caught my sleeve, “look!” Two young men were sharing one book, pointing things out to each other and talking in low voices.

The office looked smaller and less tidy now, and the grand vizier was at his desk asleep. When three clerks came in, clearly in the middle of a conversation, he woke up and started ordering them around, then saw us. “Who might you be?”

“We’re the delegation from the King of Valdyas,” I said, brazenly.

“Ah! To pay respect to His Imperial Majesty and bring tribute! I fear that His Imperial Majesty is … not as his best today, could you come back tomorrow?”

“Certainly,” I said. The grand vizier walked with us through the throne room. The emperor –it couldn’t be anyone else– was still on his throne, but the flies were gone; he was drooling a little, a vacant look on his face. It wasn’t clear whether he couldn’t see us or just wasn’t interested.

Two women, one middle-aged and one young, came in and took the emperor each by an arm, leading him out of the room while talking soothingly to him, I wondered if he’d ever be at his best at all.

The guard was gone from the palace door. We heard children’s voices. “I can hear Velihan!” Maha said, and we followed the sound and found a schoolyard, full of children of different nations, running, shouting, playing, arguing.

Maha stood in the gate until someone noticed her and said “I’m the princess of Velihas!” and most of the children ran up to her, talking excitedly.

“Yes, she really is our princess,” one of the older Velihan children said. “Have you come to take us home?”

“Yes, I have,” Maha said, and all the children ran to the city gate ahead of us, the larger ones carrying the smaller. I tried to lift a little girl too, but my bruised state wouldn’t let me. An Iss-Peranian man ran after them, shouting “come back, I need you” but he stumbled and stayed behind, fuming.

The gate was wide open. We could see the new temple, but it was very far away. “That’s a whole day’s walk,” Thulo said.

“Then we’ll walk a whole day,” I said. I was confident that we could do anything now. But there was a better way: I called Shab. “Can you send someone to fetch us?”

His mind-voice sounded very surprised. “I see a lot of children, too!”

“Those are the kidnapped children, they’re going with Maha,” I said.

“I’ll have them brought here. And I’ll come to fetch you.”

That was a strange way of putting it. Then I felt something pull at me in the direction of the camp, and gave in.

I woke up on what felt most like a wooden bench. There was a pit dug next to me, the size of the wooden bench. My body felt completely stiff and cold, and my tongue was so thick that I couldn’t speak.

Water? I asked Shab, who was squatting next to me.

He gave me water with some wine in it. “You were dead! Really dead! No breath, no heartbeat, and no connection with your spirit at all! We were just about to say the prayers.”

I noticed that I didn’t have the cuts and bruises I remembered, and I was even cleaner than I’d washed myself in the morning. I could look around now, and saw that the others were in the same state, coming around slowly.

After we’d drunk more water and eaten a little, we were carried to our own tent. None of us could walk yet. I must have been feverish because I saw Anshen, who gave me an inscrutable glance and disappeared, and also Naigha. Perhaps I was dying after all. But Naigha looked at me, right inside me, said “Thank you for your service” and swished her mantle around and disappeared too.

When I woke up the first thing I saw was Nima, sound asleep with his thumb in his mouth, looking young and cute. On the other side of the tent, Maha was asleep and sucking Thulo’s thumb, but Thulo was awake. “I had such strange dreams!” I said, and then it dawned on me what had happened. “Oh!”

I got up, shaky but whole, and found Shab. “We’ve taken the city,” he said. “That was the plan, wasn’t it? There’s a tree of light growing in the palace. We’ve fed the fire around it.”

“Good,” I said.

“And we caught three of those grand masters, I think they were the last. There was a problem with that, because with the darkness gone they were working together, but we did get them, and we hanged them. We didn’t hang all their followers, that didn’t seem necessary.”

“That’s good, too.”

“The emperor doesn’t seem … capable.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “Who will rule Ashas now? You?”

Shab shuffled his feet. “I know how to do it but I can’t. I’m not the high priest. It should be you, Holiness. You’re the regent now.”

“Perhaps I can, but I don’t know how to do it!”

“That’s what a regent has advisors for,” he said.

The next couple of days were a complete blur. Thulo and Maha left, with all the children and what looked like half the army, but that could be because most of the army was in the city, trying to get normal life going again.

“I’ll miss you,” I said. “Both of you. I’m sorry I can’t keep my promise to show you Valdyas, but I seem to be stuck in Ashas for the gods know how long.”

Stuck in Ashas, with an idiot emperor, an officious grand vizier who I still had to convince that I wasn’t going to bring the emperor any tribute from King Athal, and the mandate to build an Order house. Well, that at least was something I knew how to deal with.

Not completely unexpected. But we didn’t quite expect to have it here. (Also, Sedi got even less time to sort things out than usual, but one thing she did may have made things start to sort themselves out.)

I found myself on a sandy plain, bare except for a few wispy dry plants that smelt strongly of brus. I didn’t know they grew like that, I thought, even before I started wondering what in the world I was doing here. In the distance I could see a young man and woman who had much trouble going forward. I felt I ought to know who they were but the smell was making me light-headed.

Beside me a man appeared, his skin dark blue in the harsh light. “We have to go there,” I said to him and pointed to the other people. “But I can’t!”

“You are strong!” he said, with the formal ‘you’ word that I had trouble mastering in trade Iss-Peranian. “Let’s go together!” He took my hand, and it was easier that way though we still weren’t catching up. I tried to get strength from the ground, but it was barren sand, drained of all power.

“Aren’t there any gods here?” I shouted into the air, exasperated. No answer; there was only a wisp of grey on the horizon that could have been the shadow of Naigha’s mantle, or merely a dust cloud.

As we got closer — we really did get closer now — I saw that the young people were standing ankle-deep in mud, no, it looked like dung. The woman was leaning against the man as if she was about to faint; the man drew a knife. Now I recognised him — it was Thulo, and the woman must be Maha. The knife was steel, gleaming with a blue sheen. Thulo used it to scratch lines in the ground, and the ground must be extraordinarily hard because the blade ground down at every stroke. The lines as he drew them started to burn with small yellow flames. When he finished — it was an octagon — the blade was gone and the hilt caught fire and burnt up as he dropped it.

They were singing now, invocations, and I joined in and heard the man beside me sing in a language I didn’t understand. Ilaini, Velihan, Nima’s own language (yes, that was his name, Nima, perhaps he’d told me while we were walking or I’d known it all along), it was all the same in the spirit.

It was a proper service that Thulo was holding. Maha swept dead leaves and debris out of the temple while he chanted: Nima and I had to wade through it, ankle-deep, knee-deep, hip-deep. When it came to my waist I wondered if I had a sword, I’d arrived here in uniform so I must have, and yes, the sword was at my side. It was a bit too short, but it seemed to grow when I held it in front of me, and it glowed brightly and the light cut a clear path through the rubbish to what turned out to be the entrance of the temple.

Nima’s face got grey first, then he blushed. “I wish he was my apprentice!” he said.

“He’s almost not mine any more,” I said, because it was very clear to me now what was happening.

The temple was just large enough for all four of us to stand up in. Maha suddenly had a bowl of incense — perhaps just her hands — that she censed all the corners with while Thulo finished the service.

There was a tiny fire in the middle of the temple. It was very much of Anshen, though he obviously had a hard time being there at all. Thulo took the fire in his hands, wincing, though it didn’t seem to burn him. When little flames jumped up from it and licked his face, he did get burns, but the skin of his hands stayed whole.

“What now?” Thulo asked. “Back to the camp?” (Is the camp even in this world, I wondered.)

“Your way is not back,” Nima said, “your way is forward.” He was still grey and shaky, but he sounded determined.

“I want to go north!” Maha wailed, but on second thoughts she wanted to stay with Thulo wherever he ended up going. Better for both of them, I thought.

“I think we all have to go forward,” I said. The fiery outline of the temple was gone now, leaving only shallow scratches in the sand. Ahead we could see fires and hear music and singing and shouting.

“Those are uncivilised people,” Nima said, “who don’t even know the name of the Nameless.” That made me want to shout the name of the Nameless to whoever would hear me, after all I’d met the Nameless and called him by his name — not the merciless one of the Resurgence, but Anshen’s estranged brother. But I kept that to myself, like a concealed weapon.

“Do you think that this is where Archan — is that what you call him? — comes into the world now, after your king made the other place fall down on him?” Maha asked. “Would that always happen with gods, that they have to come into the world somewhere?”

I could hardly believe that this was all Athal’s fault. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m glad that the Nameless doesn’t come into the world at Dol-Rayen any more, or we’d have this trouble in Valdyas.”

The city was very close now, and it wasn’t hard to walk along the road, though it changed under our feet at every step. I think we got bits of road surface from all our memories, though all of us saw the same things. Some I recognised — a bit of overgrown rutted trail from the farm, cobblestones like in Valdis — and some must come from the others, the mossy lane from Maha, the gravelly path with sharp stones poking through the surface probably from Nima.

It ended, a bit embarrassingly for Thulo, as large paving-tiles made of solid gold. “This is from your city, isn’t it?” Nima asked, beaming.

“No,” Thulo said, “that’s what people say but it’s really only earth. Or stone, or marble, in the rich parts.”

The golden road was barricaded with what looked like a solid wall of gold cartwheel coins. As we got closer it resolved into three piles, like sand-castles, marking the beginning of the city like a wall with gaps. Men, women and children were between us and it, some in a daze, others in ecstasy, coupling in passion without love — so different from Zameshtan! — a man and a woman raping another man, two men fighting with knives in such a state of intoxication that neither of them noticed the wounds.

The closer we got to the city, the smaller it got: a mere toy now, as if I could pick it up and carry it. The fire in Thulo’s hands had shrunk too, not much more than a flame. He blew on it, tried to blow it over the tiny city, but it didn’t take until Maha joined him.

I stood guard. At first I thought I was only Thulo’s guard, but of course I was guarding Maha and Nima just as much. I noticed that the uniform I was wearing was the one I’d been received into the Order with, journeyman’s blue, with a plain blue-dyed leather cap. Nima was wearing only a loincloth, Thulo a long shirt of unbleached linen, Maha breeches and a tunic that looked like deerskin.

It became clear what I was standing guard against, too: there were three young people in front of us, in their teens, the youngest a girl in ragged-looking military clothes, another young woman dressed more provocatively, and a young man in rich silk clothes with what hair he had on his chin teased into a small oiled goatee. They could only be Halla, Sidhan and Orian. I knew soon enough that the military girl was Halla, because the other — who must be Sidhan — addressed her by name, somewhat scathingly.

Orian drew a sword and started to attack Thulo, but I drew mine and caught his attention. “Want to fight, do you?” he asked, and suddenly his silk clothes had been replaced by metal armour, a cuirass and arm and leg plates, and he had a sword in each hand which he twirled annoyingly. I found that I had two swords as well and disarmed him with a quick flick, left, right.

He faltered only for a moment; then his two swords were back. I didn’t have any more patience with him and pressed my swords together hoping to have one long sword instead — and that worked! It was my own bastard sword, sharp and perfectly balanced. I held it in both hands and hit him just under the knee, intending to topple him so he’d have trouble getting up in the heavy armour. I knew that that worked — I’d been on the receiving end of it in training in Solay.

The sword was sharp. His leg plates were imaginary. I cut off his legs at the knee as if they were made of cheese.

One down. Meanwhile, Maha was boxing Halla on the ears, spitting like an angry cat. Halla went down too. Her head hit the ground with a sickening crash.

“I think this one is my enemy,” Thulo said, and faced Sidhan. I was tempted to use the sword on her, too, but he was probably right and this was still part of his master’s trial. I was right when I wrote to Lyse that I expected him to be a master before Ashas.

Though Sidhan was telling him that we were in Ashas, the country of Archan. Perhaps that was the name of the country as well as the city, like Zameshtan. And apparently she did know the name of the Nameless.

“Forget that woman there,” Sidhan said, “I can give you so much more! You are strong, we can work together. Those two” — pointing at Halla and Orian — were just in the way. Kids, they were, sixteen, seventeen years old.” And when he wasn’t forthcoming, “I can teach you so much! You’ve been taught entirely the wrong way.” She was playing the strict schoolmistress now, a bundle of twigs in her hand that looked like willow switches. “Perhaps you need a beating.”

Thulo was still holding the fire of Anshen in his hands. He burnt her twigs. “Ouch! Don’t be like that!”

And she was gone. We were standing just outside a burning city, surrounded by soldiers, children, the young hunters, the rest of our household, and about six hundred onlookers. Two dead bodies were lying at our feet. I was wearing my threadbare nightshirt, the others nothing at all.

“You left the camp!” Zahmati said. “And we couldn’t reach you. There was something wrong with the ground, nobody could move an inch!”

We got breeches and shirts from various soldiers, and Mík and another boy raced to get our own clothes. Thulo was swaying on his feet. “You need to rest,” I said, and immediately some soldiers put up a tent on the spot. I coaxed Thulo and Maha into it and then put a weak seal on it so people would ignore it.

All right, where was Sidhan now? I saw her across the river, to the south, and about sixty gifted people with her. Most or all of them were young. “I want a prince!” I said, and Prince Sharab appeared at my side as if he’d been waiting for it.

I showed him where Sidhan was. “What do you want us to do with her?” he asked. “Catch her? Kill her?”

“Isolate her, to start with. She shouldn’t come back to the city or the camp, or get away.”

“I think I have an idea,” he said, and went to collect troops.

By now many of our soldiers and other people were in the city, and some were already coming out of the city carrying stretchers. The wounded went to the hospital, the dead –several to a stretcher — to a place downwind of the camp.

Groups of soldiers kept passing and greeting me, until I suddenly knew what I had to do. I caught the next squad and asked them to be my escort. “I want to see whether this city has a temple,” I said.

It did: a stone base with a couple of steps, wooden pillars painted red, walls made of reddish wattle-and-daub, a pointy tiled roof. It looked like a temple of Mizran, but I couldn’t sense the presence of any god at all. Inside, there was a wooden statue that just might be Mizran, but arrows and knives were sticking into it as if it had been used for target practice and the top of the head was burnt. “Desecrated,” I said, and the sergeant who was standing next to me said, “The whole city is desecrated.”

“I can’t fix the whole city,” I said, “but we can make a start. I need a team to clean this up, sow the seed and see if it will grow.” The sergeant barked some commands and soldiers went in several directions. The statue was taken away, and I stood thinking while the soldiers demolished the temple around me.

Then a small man was brought to me who I recognised as the smith who had made my new lockpicks. “Holiness,” he said, throwing himself at my feet. “We don’t have a team of oxen, will camels do?” He actually had a plough with him! The sergeant had taken me literally. Well, ploughing the ground wouldn’t do any harm, and perhaps it would do good.

“Camels are perfectly all right,” I said, and sent people to get stones from the river so we could set up a temple as soon as the ploughing was done.

I didn’t know which day it was, and frankly I didn’t care, but I asked the people who opened services for Mizran to come and do that, because the city had to become a trade city again.

Outside the city, a service for the dead was going on at the same time. Cheliân, I thought, but he was back in Ghilas to take care of the surrounding villages. It must be Thulo — and then realised that I couldn’t find Thulo, as if his spirit had gone away. I’d felt a chill wind earlier, but I’d ascribed that to Naigha.

As soon as I could I rushed to the tent. I found several very worried people. Zahmati was wringing her hands, “do you think he’s dead? he’s so cold!” but when I got to Thulo’s side and touched him his spirit came back into his body. Maha, too, stirred and opened her eyes. There was something strange in her eyes — as if she wasn’t the only one in there. And she was saying the same kind of things to Thulo that Sidhan had been saying…

“She’s still inside me!” That was Maha herself, at least.

“Shall I sweep you?” I had the imaginary palm-leaf ready, but she took it from me, “I have to do it myself or I’ll never be sure of it!” She did allow Thulo to help her — it turned out that she’d withdrawn into herself, as she’d done once before, and Thulo’s spirit had been in that private place with her.

Maha vomited a lot while she was sweeping, “that woman makes me so SICK!” and I got some of the worried people, including the ex-whore nurse who had been hanging around Thulo and Maha like a limpet for a while now, to bring water and cloths and clean up. Zahmati came with food, “I’ve made something light, that’s what you need now!” — steamed chicken thighs stuffed with rice, the rice stuffed with a date, and the date stuffed with an almond. I realised that I hadn’t had anything to eat either since last night, and now it was evening again.

When Maha had eaten she was much more like herself. “You’ve slept all day,” she said to Thulo, “now you can sing all night!” She rounded up the Velihan children, and a lot of other children came too, of course. “Who remembers the song of Múzran?”

Some of the older children did, even some who were not Velihan, mostly boys. “I expect I’ll doze off,” I said, “but I do want to be here!”

The wind from the north brought a smell of the jungle, and a slight drizzle. Nobody minded, not even when the drizzle turned to rain. “Rain is of Múzran!” someone said.

I did doze off several times, I think, to wake up to singing every time, and in the morning I felt as if I’d had a whole night’s sleep.

The world was green. Everywhere on the plain, as far as I could see, there was a hazy cover of little blades of grass and leafy sprigs. A boy came from the army with his hands cupped around a tiny three-coloured pansy he’d dug out to show us. The green was even in the city: the ploughed temple ground was a meadow. Unfortunately we trampled it when we used it for the service.

Then we were suddenly travelling again. Part of the caravan went north, lots of animals and few people. Nima came with us, as well as many of the people from his caravan. Also, all three of the elephants, which worried me because I knew by now that they need lots of water and we’d be leaving the river soon. People thought it was sweet of me to be worried, but made it very clear that it wasn’t Her Holiness’ concern.

I could see Prince Sharab in the south, further away than I’d expected, still moving very fast.

After about half a day’s travel the caravan came to a sudden stop, causing some confusion. A soldier came running, “Your Holinesses, you need to come to the front to see something.”

The something was rather grisly: each of a pair of milestones at the roadside had a small pile of corpses next to it, young people, their throats neatly cut. “With a sickle,” a soldier said, “my mate says that you can tell by the way the cut runs.”

“Like harvesting stalks of grain,” I said. The soldier gave me a strange look. “He did use that word. Harvesting. He’s a farmer, or was, before he joined up.”

Between the milestones there was a ditch across the road. It wasn’t more than a hand-span deep, and no wider than my two hands, but it didn’t look as if anything could cross it. The caravan had stopped so suddenly because the animals had refused to cross it.

The ditch was full of power, anea, but it looked like there wasn’t any life left in it. A barrier across the road reminded me of Dadán, but the feel of the power was more like the runoff pit we’d seen in Albetire, as if someone –it must be Sidhan– had killed her companions to take their spirit and used it all up.

Thulo tried to go around the barrier, but got caught in something that showed up like a fishing-line made of power. “Hm, I’d almost think they want us to do that,” he said. “Get caught in their trap.”

I was completely willing to ruin another sword, but I didn’t think that was the answer this time. “Could we build a bridge across it?”

That got the Velihan children enthusiastic at once. “It would have to be a huge bridge! We’ll get everybody to help! Everybody gifted anyway!”

“Lédu!” I called to the ringleader. “Do you think we can build a bridge that can bear an elephant?” Her friend poked her in the back, “no you can’t!” which made her say “Of course we can!”

The problem with having a bridge was that the barrier would still be there. Thulo noticed that the power looked exactly like what Sidhan had used to try to bend him to her will, and called fire into his hands. That worked: it took a lot out of him, but a tiny bit of the stuff in the ditch was burned away. “Let’s all do that!” The children caught on first, then other gifted people, and some people who hadn’t known they were gifted; every one had their own fight against the power, and whoever won that fight could cross. Eventually the ditch was filled with air, then it filled with sand, and everybody else could cross as well, camels and elephants and goats and all.

“We’re all light-bearers now,” someone said, “not just Thulo!”

We hadn’t covered much distance past the milestones when I felt the presence of Sharab disappear.

“Now I’ll teach you to travel out of your body,” I said to Thulo. “On an elephant.” Maha joined us on the elephant, not only because she didn’t want to leave Thulo out of her sight, but also because we needed someone to watch over us.

“Isn’t that what you said I should never do?” Thulo asked.

“You’re a master now,” I said. “It’s still dangerous, but it’s the only way to see what happened, it’s too far away to see just with our mind.”

I didn’t have words in any language we shared to tell Thulo what to do, but I could show him, and then we were soaring above the road in a southerly direction. There was a sprinkling of small minds below us, probably animals, and then a group of gifted people — perhaps as many as eighty — who we didn’t know, and as we got closer I thought they might even be underground. It wasn’t Sharab and his soldiers, or Sidhan, so we weren’t concerned with them now, we’d pass them with the whole caravan anyway.

Further on we did see Sidhan and her crowd. They were feasting. It was hard to see anything in the physical world, but with some effort we could see a large pyre made up of Sharab’s soldiers. It looked like burning corpses, not like burning people alive. I couldn’t see whether Sharab himself was one of them, but I feared the worst.

Sidhan and her companions were eating camel meat, dancing around the pyre, drinking and smoking.

We should go back, I said to Thulo, we’ve seen enough.

We got back to our bodies to find the caravan stopped for the day and not only Maha, but also the limpet girl, and to my surprise Nima, watching over us. “I could have done that,” Nima said, “after all it was our people who taught that to you Valdyans six hundred years ago.”

Were there any Valdyans six hundred years ago? It was probably something like the Ishey claiming they’d invented everything first.

The limpet girl was rubbing my feet. “I know why I don’t do this often,” I said, “it takes ages to get warm!” But the rubbing did its work, and I was only a little stiff when I went to tell the captains what we had seen and to lead the service.

“Could you have a service for the prisoners, too?” a lieutenant asked. “After the usual one? They asked for that.”

It appeared that the captains hadn’t wanted to leave Halla’s and Orian’s soldiers in the city, but taken them along, and made them work for their keep. One of the men came forward, “you see, Holiness, I’m a sergeant of Halla’s, but Sidhan had her under her thumb, and us as well, would you see if — if she’s left something in me? In us? And if that’s so, cut our throats?”

“I don’t think I’ll need to cut your throats,” I said, and laid my hands on each one with a blessing. I sent the ones who were clean — most of them in fact– to one side where they slapped each other on the back in relief, those who had some taint or mark to the other. “Now I’ll give you the means to clean yourselves,” I said, and gave each of them a ryst palm-leaf. Some of them could see it, others only imagine it, but they all succeeded in sweeping themselves clean. “Now if you have a friend with the same problem, you can give them that and tell them what to do.”

When I left the army compound Prince Shab was waiting for me. “Holiness,” he pleaded, “may I please go south?”

Could I send another prince to an almost certain death, the only son of his parents? But somebody had to go, and he was volunteering. “Yes,” I said. “Take at least a hundred troops, and some of the hunters.” I showed him everything we’d seen, and he was gone almost at once.

Thulo had been talking to the limpet girl — her name was, surprisingly, Ysella, not because she was with the Resurgence but because her father had been from Essle — and he and Maha agreed that it wasn’t a bad idea to have her around. She’d been through a lot; a pregnancy when she was far too young had left her barren, and she loved babies and would gladly take care of any that Thulo and Maha had. And before they had any, she could do everything that was needed. “I won’t be jealous of you!” Maha said to Ysella.

I came in just then, and Maha had to tell me that when Sidhan had possessed her she’d been very jealous of everybody who dared even look at Thulo. (Also, when Ysella just got to know Thulo, she’d offered herself as his second wife, but that was cleared up now.) “I do want to learn to defend myself!” Maha said.

“So do I,” I said, “we all need to learn that. It’s not the way we Valdyans use semsin, so not the way Thulo learned from me. I wish we had a dandar, but Biruné is in Ghilas running the hospital.”

“But we do have dandar!” Maha said. “A whole caravan full of Iss-Peranian women!” She ran off and came back with Pesar’s wives, already in the middle of telling them what we needed.

“So,” the first wife said to Thulo, “who would you like most to– no, let’s start from the other side, who would embarrass you most if she got pregnant by you? Her? (Maha), or her? (me) or her? (Zahmati)”

Thulo thought for a while, and he thought it would be me. Then Pesar’s wife said “Excuse me” to me, and did something I could barely feel, as if she touched me under my skin. “What did you do?” I asked.

“Looked at you, so I know what you’re like,” she said, and then did something to Thulo that made him sweat and blush. I caught little bits of thought, but it was hard to tell who they came from, whether she put them in his mind or he thought of it himself. The most flattering was “those will be excellent children”.

In the end, Thulo was strong enough to resist.

“But it’s mostly fear that they use,” Nima said, “and I can help you with that. We know about fear.” It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about himself and his people, or the tradition he’d been taught in. “Are you ready to face your fears?”

“Yes.” Nima put his hands on Thulo’s chest, flat, and then drew them back slowly with a grabbing motion as if he was pulling something out. That gave Thulo even more distress than the dandar‘s doing, but he was strong enough to resist that, too.

“Well done!” Nima said. “I won’t go any further or I will have to see it.” Thulo sat back and wiped his forehead, wincing at the half-healed burns that he’d wear the scars of all his life, a sign of Anshen like the mark on my arm.

“What helps against that?” I asked.

“Nothing. Well, what will shield you is a happy childhood, a harmonious family, work that suits your talents, grandparents who are still alive. But everybody has something they’re ashamed of, that they’d rather not confront again, and it will come out.”

“I have all of those things you mentioned,” I said, “well, only one grandmother who is still alive, but all the rest. Could you please try with me?”

Nima touched me, and I felt him trying, but he couldn’t get hold of me for some reason. He laughed. “You are protected too well,” he said, “it is only Ansen for you.”

Sedi is learning to be the boss!

Sorting out Ghilas was taking a couple of days. I was actually having a rest: apart from the temple services and other things that people need a priest for, and sword training, I had time to write letters and have my hair cut by the army barber. I also found a smith to make a new set of lockpicks. Not as good as Rava’s, but I didn’t expect that, they were good enough.

Thulo had, wisely, tasked everybody in the lockup who could hold a needle with making water-bags from goatskins. When he went to look how it was going –with me trailing along but doing my best not to meddle– he noticed that one lot was much better than the others, using one of the legs as a spout. “Who made these?” he asked, and the guard pointed out a woman of about forty, Zivaya.

“What, aren’t they all right?” she asked belligerently.

“More than all right,” Thulo said.

“Then I’ve made them, otherwise I wouldn’t have. I won’t fill them for you, you need boys for that, us girls can’t manage.”

“Hmm, would you like to come along with us?” She showed him her ankle, fastened to the wall with a chain.

“We might be able to do something about that,” Thulo said, “take you to Ashas.”

“Ashas! No, I’d rather stay here and wait for the king’s man to judge us! Miham was a nasty piece of work but his visitors from Ashas were so much worse! They wanted three of the prettiest girls, there wasn’t much left of them the next day! Selevi, that was the boss, northern name though her skin was a lot blacker than yours or mine, and her two flunkies, children, no more than fourteen or so! I don’t mind young boys, it’s nice to teach them something, but these knew everything already and then some! One of the girls had –spirit, I think you say– and they noticed that.”

“Can we talk to her?” Thulo asked.

Zivaya shook her head. “Nah, had to bury her the next day. Now Miham, what he did, he made sure there was no news going to Ashas.” She finished another water-bag and tossed it on the pile.

Thulo thought of something. “Hm, we’ve got no corks, how do we keep them closed?”

“Strip of skin to tie them up,” Zivaya said. “Cut it from the scraps.”

“How long will that take?”

“As long as it takes, love.”

“But how long is that?”

“Look here, I know how long it takes for a man to get off, I’ve done that since I was a girl, but I’ve never cut water-skin ties before, it’ll be finished when it’s finished. When the king comes, perhaps. Though I’ve heard about the new king and I don’t think he’ll care about us, it may be forever.”

“Did you hear that the old king is back?”

“Oh? Well, the old king’s wife taught me to dance when I was eight, with all the other city girls. Then I went to Ghilas when I was twelve, with a man, and before I was twelve and a half I was on my own again. That’s men for you.”

Thulo grinned. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Take good care of that girlie of yours. The redheads are prized most in the south. Can’t she dye that hair?”

“No, that rinses right off.”

“Oh, then she can shave it off and wear a wig. I can get you one, eight wainwheels,” and when Thulo made a noise that sounded like assent, “Khatiya!”

A girl of about eighteen came from where she was working, and Zivaya yanked the wig from her head. Underneath she was completely bald, with pink circles on the dark skin like the women we’d met in Kushesh.

“That’s an illness,” I said, “someone should get a doctor.”

A soldier went to the hospital and came back with Maha and the hospital matron, a former whorehouse-keeper who knew all about women’s ailments. Maha washed her hands with brandy, and slathered more brandy on the girl’s head, then rubbed the skin with foul-smelling salve.

“Eek! That’s such nasty sickness!” the matron said.

“What causes it?” I asked.

“Worms under the skin. There’s a medicine for it but it takes half a year to clear up. If it’s not gone too far. How long have you had this?”

“Dunno, a year, perhaps two.”

Thulo threw the wig into the fire. “Hey!” Zivaya said. “You still owe me eight wainwheels.”

---

We had a conference with the doctors and the princes: there should be a larger hospital, perhaps more doctors and nurses than only Biruné should stay here, we’d send for more medicine from the city. While we were talking, a messenger pushed through the guards. “Holiness! There are people here who say they have to speak to you urgently! They’re from the south.”

“I’ll see them,” I said, “in the counting-room, I think.” We passed a couple of clerks working, Aftabi among them — clearly she knew about money matters, useful to know.

The people from the south were a man and a woman, not quite in uniform though they were dressed mostly alike. “We were sent with the pay for the regiment,” they said. “Eight of us. But we met the Order of Halla astin Archan on our way, and we’re the only ones left. ”

“And I suppose this Halla took the money too,” I said, and in an aside to Thulo, didn’t I tell you that we’d never get that money?

They were frightened of me being a priestess, and a soldier, and in an Order though not the same one, but before they fled they’d told me that every master of Archan had their own Order, a little kingdom. And that there was famine and disorder in Ashas and the lands around it.

“What about the emperor?” I asked.

“Pray you never meet the emperor! He’s even worse than the king of Valdyas, who has children brought from all over the world to eat them for breakfast. That’s why there aren’t any children in the towns and cities!”

I had a hard time not to laugh. Mild, friendly Athal had quite a name in this country — perhaps because of the earthquakes. “He has a family of his own,” I said “four children and a foster-child last time I was there. And there are plenty of children all over Valdyas! I don’t know who told you those stories, but they’re not true.”

“Of course you would say that!”

I called another conference with the captains, Pesar, the cargo-masters, and the head doctors. Famine in Ashas, disorder, there might not be much opportunity for trade. Perhaps only the people who had other business in Ashas should go on, and the greater part of the caravan go to a place where there was money to be made. Pesar spoke against that, “it’s better that the people follow and obey than be disobedient by coming after us when they’ve been told to stay.”

We resolved to leave most of the trade goods behind so we could carry more food. “We should have a bank,” someone said, and the way he explained it sounded like a cross between a trading-house and the Temple of Mizran: everybody brought in their goods and got a token of their share, so the goods were safe — unless someone else conquered Ghilas again. If the total increased in value everybody shared the profit, if it decreased everybody shared the loss, in proportion to their share.

I heard Pesar talk with the Khas boys later, saying “Of course you may win the war, as long as you’re on our side!” I hadn’t heard what that was about, but I could only agree.

That evening, at the end of the service, I called Ishan and laid my hands on him to ordain him for the temple. As I spoke the words — I don’t remember what exactly I said, the words were just there, like with a marriage — I saw Anshen’s hands on him as well, and he stood up gifted.

We embraced like brother and sister.

---

Three more days moving goods to storerooms in the fort, and a substantial part of Miham’s food and fodder stores to camel packs, and we were away into the grassy plains. The road down the cliff was exactly one elephant wide, with hairpin bends that they negotiated step after careful step. We weren’t taking all the elephants, and would probably send those we did take back from the end of the river because elephants need water every day, and a lot of it, unlike camels.

The grass was dry, yellowish green, and waist-high to most of the people. Thulo spent the travel days practicing with the children: hiding that you’re gifted, which it turned out that they had to teach him, not the other way round.

On the evening of the first whole day in the plain we had a deer for dinner. It looked a little strange, not at all like the deer I was used to, but it did taste like a delicious kind of venison. Zahmati wrinkled her nose at the meat, “you should have given that to me and I’d have stewed it with saffron! It’s not civilised to eat your meat half-raw!” but even Thulo tasted and liked it.

The hunters had seen lions too: about THAT size, Aza and Hemar showed with one arm each because one person’s arms weren’t long enough. “What were they doing?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” Hemar said, “or at least lying about, one lioness saw us coming and woke up all the rest and they went away into the bushes.” Not that there were many bushes: no more than the occasional stunted tree or stand of dry shrubs.

“Still,” I said, “only hunters should leave the group, and not alone. And if anyone gets lost or strays away we should find them at once. If wolves can catch a lamb, I’ll bet lions can catch a child.”

A few days later we camped on the bank of the river — less wide and a bit deeper here than just below the cliff — and we saw yet another kind of strange deer: brown-dappled yellow, with long legs and enormously long necks. “That’s a challenge to catch!” Mazao said, “shall we swim across?” “The current is too strong!” “That’ll carry us south and that’s where we’re going, isn’t it!” But even he had to admit that they’d never get the meat to the other side in time to cook it before it spoiled, even if they managed to catch one of those beasts.

On the fifth day we were now so far away from Ghilas that we couldn’t see the people there any more on our nightly sweep. On the seventh day we saw people south of us. That must be the village that was on the map, But there didn’t seem to be enough people for a village: no more than fifteen people, a dozen of them gifted. Some were very gifted indeed but very young, perhaps still children; one seemed to be a grown woman.

As we got closer to the village we saw that the fields were deserted, ditches with crumbled sides, fields covered in weeds. There was a well with water in it — in fact it stood as high as the river water — but when someone tried to pull up the bucket it stuck behind something that turned out to be an arm, and with some difficulty we pulled up an entire body from the well, a girl in her teens, belly slashed upen.

The first house of the village had writing on its wall: HALLA ASTIN ARCHAN COLLECTS TAXES. READ AND OBEY.

I’d heard of that Halla. It didn’t bode well.

In the village itself most of the houses had been partly demolished, and in the middle there were the remains of a huge pyre where dead bodies had been burnt. Most of the village, by the pile of bones. One house was whole, painted, though in bad repair, and that was where the people were.

Perhaps that woman was Halla. “I’ll go and talk,” I said, and took Thulo and an escort of Khali, Bhalik and two soldiers, and Maha who either wouldn’t leave Thulo or couldn’t curb her curiosity, and Thulo’s errand-boy who had the name Mík now.

An elderly dark woman came out of the house, leaning on a cane. When I came closer I saw that she was younger than I’d thought because of the cane and her bent back, but still about fifty. “Halla?” I asked.

She spat on the ground. “Do I look like that? Caille, formerly Somaya. What do you want?”

“We saw that there were people here and wondered if you needed help.” Close enough to the truth, anyway.

She looked sharply at me. “You’re one of the Nameless, right?” She shook her stick at me and called behind her into the house. “Arash!” A large man in what looked like threadbare uniform came out, carrying a sword the size of mine but in much worse state, and took up position behind her.

“Anshen, yes,” I said. “What happened here?”

“What happened! Halla happened, that’s what. Can’t you see?”

“Yes.” So this wasn’t Halla. “Can we do anything for you?”

She laughed. “And get all the glory of taking my catch to the emperor? After all the trouble I had salvaging them?”

So that was her game. “Seize them,” I told the soldiers, and sent Mík back to the camp for reinforcements, though they probably wouldn’t be needed. And indeed, before he was back Khali and a soldier were holding Caille, and Bhalik was holding the man all by himself.

“You’re not going to have my glory! I was three years collecting this booty! The emperor will cover me with thanks and glory!”

“And what will the emperor do with them, then?” I asked.

“Train them as officers for his glorious army, of course,” she said.

I motioned to the soldiers to take them away and went into the house. There were indeed a dozen gifted children there, Velihan, Valdyan and one from the Far East, the youngest a girl of about six, the oldest a Valdyan boy of about twelve called Leshan. “Where do you come from?” I asked.

“Ildis,” he said, “my father is a day labourer there.”

“And his mother is a night labourer,” another boy said.

“Yours just so!” Leshan retorted.

We took them back to the camp and Zahmati gave them food without being asked, because it was clear that they were famished. It turned out that Halla was not the only one who sacked villages: they’d run into one Orian earlier and barely escaped with their hides. “It was horrible!” Leshan said, “they killed all the grownups and they left the children, and Mother Caille said we couldn’t take them because they weren’t gifted, and they’ll all die now!”

“Hm.” I said, “how far away is it?”

“Eight days walking,” Leshan said, “that way,” and he pointed roughly east.

The hunters looked at each other, and Mazao laid his forehead against Leshan’s and screwed up his eyes. “I think I know where it is now,” he said. “And we can go a lot faster, we don’t have little kids with us.” There was a but more back-and-forth between them. “Better that we all go, we don’t know how many we’ll have to carry on the way back. And better that we go now, so we can run at night, we’ll go faster still.” They stocked up on food and water-bags as night was falling.

“We’ll wait for you at Merom,” I said, “but if you’re not back in, say, fifteen days, we’ll move on.”

Caille and Arash were in the lockup now, and two wounded soldiers — I still didn’t know whose — who had been in the house with the children were in the hospital.

The next morning, Thulo wanted Caille to at least see the service, but she wouldn’t cross the temple entrance. “Well, she’ll have to be outside then, with the elephants,” I said. “The difference is that the elephants want in, but they’re not allowed.” She stood there, guarded by two soldiers, obviously in great distress, too afraid to fume though I could see that she was also angry.

“Let her get used to it,” Thulo said.

Between cursing the Nameless and raving about the emperor, Caille actually told us lots of useful things. All the masters with their own orders were young, still in their teens; the grand masters were in Ashas with the emperor. Sidhan was the one settled in Merom. All of them called themselves ‘astin Archan’. Well! I could call myself ‘astin Anshen’, I suppose!

Just as we saw the city on the horizon, another caravan caught up with us. Somewhat smaller, looking neater, not as sprawling. The master came to visit us, a middle-aged woman with long pulled-back henna-red hair, called Ziba. They were from Ravindar on the east coast. “We seem to have the same problem,” she told Pesar (and me, and the other people Pesar had asked to be present). “We can’t pass Merom with the little masters there. And there seem to be difficulties further on. What do you recommend, try to push through, which we don’t have nearly enough soldiers for but you seem to have more, or turn and take our trade elsewhere?”

“I’d recommend going north,” I said, “there’s famine in the south, we have other business than trade in Ashas but I don’t think there’s much to earn there.”

“I was afraid of that,” she said. “But” — brightening — “perhaps, now we’re both here, we can trade with each other?”

We did still have some trade goods with us, so it seemed a good idea. And if these people were going north or west, anyone from our lot who had second thoughts could join them.

The other caravan’s priest came to talk to me. “Excuse me,” he said, “I am Nima, priest of Ansen.” (He really did say Ansen! It must be how they pronoune it in their country, because he surely looked as if he was of Anshen.) “Would you consider letting me serve with you in your temple this evening?”

“Oh yes,” I said, “that would be a very good thing.”

“I’m mostly the priest for the soldiers, to care for their spirits after they have fought.”

“Well, yes, I do that too,” I said, “but I’m also a soldier myself. Most of the priests of Anshen in my country are.” Yes, even Athal, who was as much a priest of Anshen as I’d ever seen. Thulo wasn’t a soldier, though he could fight, but then he wasn’t from my country, at least not the one I’d grown up in.

In the service there were many people from the other caravan as well, Nima held a speech in the middle, which I didn’t understand a word of — should perhaps get someone to translate if it happens again — but I did get the intention: peace between our peoples under the protection of Anshen. I was all in favour of that!

Afterwards we invited the guests to eat with us, and then it turned out that they didn’t eat meat or drink wine. Zahmati grumbled a little about that but produced pasties filled with really fresh goat cheese; I didn’t get any, because there weren’t enough to go round, but they looked delicious.

At dinner I talked some more with Nima. They had seen the works of the ‘little masters’ too — refugees everywhere, sacked villages with the dead bodies just lying around. “That’s not civilised! Everybody knows that women should be buried in the womb of the earth, and men laid in a high place to let the air claim them. Not left as prey for the beasts!” For such a mild man, he was very agitated. “Those things belong to the one whose name we don’t say. Every one for themself, nobody for each other.”

“I’ve learned to say his name,” I said, “but no, we don’t either, as a rule.”

“We knew what was happening eight years ago and kept diligent watch. They’re not taking children from our country. From Valdyas, Velihas, the Northern Lands,” (I realised that he meant the East, which must be north of their country) “all other countries in the world, but not from Ravindar.”

We talked a lot about power, how to get anea out of the world. “It’s in every part of the world, in every blade of grass, every gust of wind,” he said, and showed us, and suddenly Thulo got it and could draw on the world’s power himself. I’d never been able to teach him that because it comes naturally to me, like breathing; it needed someone from a completely different nation to do that. Maha complimented him about it later, but when he asked why she didn’t do it she said “I don’t have birthright here” and kept silent about the matter afterwards.

We were all camped at the lakeside outside Merom now, the two caravans side by side with a space like a public square between them. I’d already seen people from both caravans talking with each other. The city ignored us. There were several places where smoke rose up, enough to make me think that buildings were burning. Perhaps they were just plain too busy to bother with us.

The armies were fraternizing too: they had a training battle, wielding sticks for weapons, but using ordinary tactics as if they were facing a real enemy. Many people were watching, including Caille, with her ubiquitous guard. Thulo was talking to her, and after I’d seen our army “defeated” in an ingenious pincer movement by the much smaller Ravindar army, I went over to them. It appeared that Caille had thought the battle was real, and protested that we ought to save our soldiers to take on Merom! It confused her no end. When I arrived Thulo had just succeeded in explaining that it was just training.

“I lost most of my escort in Pecham!” Caille was saying, “you don’t want to be in Pecham. That’s where half my catch was pinched by some ship’s captain, too.” I didn’t tell her, of course, who that ship’s captain had been, because I was practically sure that she was talking about the Blue Dolphin’s cargo.

As we walked back to our tent, someone –I think Maha– said “I wish the hunters were back,” and then she saw that they were back. Kisin was carrying a baby, Mazao a small boy, and Guruning, the tallest, a bigger boy. “These are all who were still alive,” they said.

Thulo immediately sent Mík to find a woman who had a baby and more than enough milk. He came back soon enough, grinning, a woman with him whose shirt was wet with milk. She handed her own plump baby to one of the Plains girls without any ceremony and took the other child in her arm. “Goodness! I’ve never seen such a scrawny mite!” she said, and bared her breast, but the baby was too overwrought to drink. Thulo managed to quiet it down enough with his mind.

One of the rescued boys had dysentery — probably eaten or drunk the wrong thing — and Maha and Thulo spent the whole night cleaning his insides. In the morning, children came to help: Leshan and his sister who had already asked about helping in the hospital, and some of the children from Zameshtan. The ones who had helped clean the village recognised something, “it’s like sweeping huts, only inside someone’s body!”

In the morning they slept, and then stayed in bed for some time while not sleeping, all the time with Mík as doorkeeper. When they emerged I was just coming back from the lake, where I’d swum in delightfully warm and clear water. “I think you two need a bath, too!” I said. “But mind the elephants in the water.”

“Can elephants swim, then?” Thulo asked. “Aren’t they too heavy?” But I’d seen all three elephants floating and playing in the lake, blowing water at each other and at the children who were trying to wash them.

I rounded up an escort to visit the other caravan. It had a very different feel from ours: more ordered, very peaceful, no whole families and indeed no children at all, not even as goatherds or messengers. I still don’t know if these people have slaves, but I’d be surprised if they did. They did have women soldiers, which I hadn’t seen in any army that wasn’t Valdyan until now. (I don’t know about Velihas, they probably do, but I haven’t seen a Velihan army yet.)

I heard more about the ‘little masters’ in the city: very young people still, grown up without parents and with the expectation that they could do whatever they wanted. “It’s not good for someone to grow up without a mother!” Nima said, “it’s your mother who teaches you compassion!”

That made me laugh. “My father taught me that,” I said, “my mother taught me persistence and stubbornness!” But yes, I could imagine that someone who had grown up in the Resurgence without anyone to keep them in check would abuse their power like that.

“Would you stay for our evening service?” Nima asked, and of course I would, but I had to call Thulo to take over the evening service in our camp because we’d left all our other priests to serve in other places. We must really train some more people!

The service was much like the whole caravan, very quiet and with much more structure than I was used to. I liked it on the whole, but I think that so much restraint all the time would drive me batty after a while!

The smoke from the fire and the incense rose up, and we watched it make its way to heaven and join with another column of smoke: the one from the temple of our own caravan, Thulo’s service. Nima said some words that I understood as “Anshen is with all of us” — clearly that was exactly what was happening.

Later, back at our own cooking-fire, we saw smoke above the city again: not single fires this time, but a cloud like a pan-lid. “I don’t know what they’re doing,” Khali said, “they’re not drunk, but they must be smoking something very strange!”

“Perhaps they’re easier to bowl over if they’re woozy from brus,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of pounds of that in my pack, come to think of it.”

“You might make them a present of it,” Khali said, “come as an honoured guest!” But somehow that didn’t seem likely…

That was suspiciously easy. Probably my own fault because I chose “the seeds of his own destruction” over “a hard fight”. Either that, or there’s something that the GM isn’t telling us (apart from all the other things he’s not telling us).

When I was at sword practice with Aftabi after the morning service a sergeant came and stood just out of reach, looking impatient, so we stopped to hear what he had to say. “They’re fighting in the town!”

“Who, us?”

“No, among themselves, the market-master’s people against another bunch.”

Just then another sergeant came to say that they’d seen some of Miham’s troops descend into the desert and go south, and they’d put up a blockade there in case anyone else went the same way.

“Well, if they’re fighting anyway we’d better use the opportunity and go in,” I said. Maha promptly went with the other doctors and the new nurses to set up a field hospital.

We found the town in disarray but not much fighting was going on any more. The market-master was lying in the middle of the market, dead of sword wounds. “Good riddance, I must say,” I said, and people around me agreed.

The fort was closed. I hadn’t expected otherwise. Sealed, too, with a freezing cold seal as hard as glass that reminded me of Lydan’s seal in Zameshtan. Perhaps that was something the Resurgence specialised in. Even the grass in front of the doors was frosty, making me a little homesick. The soldiers got one of the pillars from the little partly ruined town temple, making it fall down completely. They started to bash the great doors with it, while I tried to get in through the brothel on the north side.

The house was ruined too, half burnt — some of the soldiers said that there had been an earthquake, though we hadn’t felt anything. My escort cleared some of the rubble away to let me at the door. I picked the lock first, to the amazement of the soldiers. It didn’t go as well as I hoped, because the lock was frozen and I broke one of the picks, and when I got it open the seal was still there, as cold as on the big doors. (Which the ram had got the bronze coverings off by now, but the wooden doors didn’t budge.)

I called for my firestarting acolyte, but he couldn’t do anything to the seal either: any heat that he sent at it was chilled at once, and the only effect it had was to make him very tired. “Thank you,” I said. “I wanted to know that, I’ll find another way.”

The soldiers were already climbing the walls: up to the first row of small windows with ladders –the windows were sealed too — and with climbing irons from there. They got on the roof easily, hands wrapped in cloth against the biting cold of the irons, and stood there triumphantly. One of them pissed against the wall and it froze at once.

“There’s a hatch here!” one of them called. “It’s open.”

No seal on the roof? “I’m coming up,” I said, and pulled on my gloves –lockpicking goes better without– and climbed the icy irons. Yes, the seal ended at the top of the wall. Sloppy, but convenient. We could easily drop through the hatch in the roof and ended up in a corridor with small rooms on both sides.

More soldiers were coming up now. “If you meet any soldiers or officers in white,” I said, “isolate them, don’t let them get to the boss.”

These rooms and those on the floor below looked like barracks, but they were completely empty. Not only of people, but of most of their stuff too. I suspected that the inhabitants had packed up and gone south. I could t see Miham, though, in the tower I could now see was standing alone in the middle of the fort. The very local earthquake had definitely been here: the courtyard contained several collapsed wooden buildings.

In the meantime Thulo was working on the main doors: he’d had people bring buckets of water and throw them against it, and presently the doors creaked and collapsed under a great load of ice.

The tower door was locked with a massive padlock. I realised too late that it was no match for my puny little lockpicks, and I broke them all. I’ll have to get a smith to make me a new set! Strangely, the door wasn’t sealed, though I could see that it had been; as if the person sealing it, who must be Miham, was tired or distracted. Well, all of us trying to get in at once would distract him and wear him out.

The soldiers hauled the temple pillar over the mound of ice in the doorway and broke the tower door open. Downstairs it was completely empty. A huge ostentatious staircase led to the next floor, which contained a common-room and kitchen. The kitchen fire was cold, but the rice in a pot over it still looked edible: abandoned, but not for longer than a day.

The next stairs weren’t as wide, and we ended up on the floor where Miham was. We found his room easily, but before going in I wanted to make sure there were no surprises waiting for us upstairs.

Well, we had a surprise all right, though on hindsight I should have expected it: one floor up was a luxurious apartment. I was longing to search it, but this didn’t seem to be the time for it. It had its own small kitchen, also abandoned.

The top floor was all servants’ rooms, empty at first sight, but I sent two soldiers to look for people anyway. And then there was the tower roof, a nice roof garden in fact, surrounded by a parapet that I could look over but the outer fort blocked my view of the south road. Thulo had gone to look out from the outer fort and had seen the road, now blocked by a barricade where there was fighting going on.

Now I could confront my enemy. The door wasn’t locked, and not even sealed any more — I could sense through the closed door that there was something wrong with Miham. Surely us breaking his seals couldn’t have weakened him that much? Once inside the temple –for that was what it was now, a temple to the Nameless with windows set high in the walls and a fire in the middle, though it had probably been an office before– I saw several dead bodies, all but one dressed in white; the last was Pesar’s physician. All had died from what looked like knife wounds. Miham was lying by the fire with a knife in hs back, barely alive.

I didn’t think he could speak any more, perhaps not even hear my voice, so I asked him mind to mind “Who killed you?” — but he made a small sound and died.

As I was trying to figure out what exactly had happened we heard a sound behind the door on the opposite side of the room. I didn’t have lockpicks any more, but Thulo had one and tried to open the door with it, but there was a key in the lock on the other side. Presently the sound stopped, too. The soldiers broke the door open with a small table and we saw a smlal room full of gold. Full of gold, chests of coins and stacks of ingots. It was empty of people, but we could smell perfume.

In the corner of the room there was a winding stair going up through the ceiling and down through the floor; a couple of soldiers went up, Thulo and a few others down. I was tempted to go with Thulo but I knew it wouldn’t be wise if both of us were away from the fort, through what would probably turn out to be the fabled secret passage. I stayed, fuming a little, waiting for reports.

The soldiers who had gone up were back almost at once. “Storeroom upstairs,” they said, “and a kind of landing on the servants’ floor, nothing interesting.” I dispatched them to take the corpses away so I could clean the temple of any remaining stink of the Nameless. One of the princes had a different idea: all that money would have to be counted, and after some cursory sweeping it was all laid in orderly stacks

I tried to reach Thulo, which was hard because he was far away. I’m under the river, he said, we’ve been to the end of the passage, there’s a watch-house in the woods but the door is barred on this side.

Some time later, Thulo and the soldiers came back and they had a woman with them. About thirty years old, I thought, not unattractive, smelling strongly of the perfume we’d smelled in the treasure room. Thulo was carrying the gold she’d had with her, wrapped in his jacket because the bag it had been in was torn.

I had her taken to the apartments on the upper floor and guarded, while I told various people what we’d found and that it could not be known what exactly had happened because everybody was dead. I also wondered about the woman — was she a local madam Miham had taken for himself?

Suddenly my clerk was at my elbow. “What about the slaves?”

“What about them?” I asked. I trusted Samada to have put copies of the proclamation up and to have it read aloud to people who couldn’t read that particular language or not at all.

“Do they get compensation for their years of slavery? I understand that Queen Raisse did that in Valdyas.”

“We didn’t do that in the city,” I said, but here the situation was different: many of these slaves would end up not only without money, but also without work to earn their keep with. “Talk to Samada about what’s fair and what we can afford, she’s good at that sort of thing and she likes it.”

I went to talk to the woman in the apartment, Shayania. She turned out not to be a local madam at all. “I’m a respectable woman,” she said, “his lawful wedded wife!”

“You’re his widow now,” I said. She seemed more worried than sad. “I helped all the slaves escape,” she said, “and bolted the door from the inside so people wouldn’t find out. And then I came back to save what I could. I wonder what I’ve got left. Are you going to confiscate it all?”

“If there’s anything you have a right to, probably not. I’ll lend you my clerk to work it out.”

“And what will I do now?”

“Well, you can do several things. We can give you an escort back to your family, or you can come with us to Ashas, or stay here and help the town get back on its feet. I suppose you know a lot about the situation here.”

“Not to Ashas,” she said, shuddering. “I have to think about it.”

“All right,” I said, and left her to think. When I came downstairs the young hunters were there with a group of distraught-looking people: the lady’s slaves!

“We found them in the forest,” they said. “There’s really a secret passage! We found the entrance but it was locked.”

“Bolted,” I said, “from the inside. The lady did that to protect her people.”

There was a cook, a cook’s helper, a lady’s maid, two other maids and a young man, and two eunuchs who turned out to be clerks. “May we go to the mistress?” the lady’s maid asked.

“I don’t think there’s anything against that,” I said, “she’s in her rooms, I’ll tell the guards not to disturb you. Oh, and can some of you clean the room that used to be the temple?” But they couldn’t, because the soldiers at the entrance were holding them back: the counting wasn’t done.

Later, I saw Shayania’s clerks help our own clerks sorting and counting the money. When they were done it was all stowed back into the treasure room. “Six hundred and thirty-four thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight wainwheels,” my clerk told me. “And we worked out the slaves’ compensation, each one of them gets forty-eight wainwheels, the same as two years’ pay for a soldier. That will set them up nicely without ruining the town.”

“Thank you — can we clean the room now?”

We could — I was prepared to clean the temple completely with semsin and reconsecrate it, but when Thulo and I had carried out the bronze fire-pot and told a passing group of soldiers to take it to a smith and have it melted down and made into useful things, all the room really needed was a good sweep. Clearly, it had been built as a counting-room and was very glad to get back to that.

The courtyard was serving as temporary quarters for people who didn’t have a house any more. I found Khali and Bhalik, helping with the building. “Did you find your enemies?” I asked.

“They don’t matter any more,” Khali said, and I didn’t ask more.

Now I had to serve as priestess of Naigha. The only prayers for the dead I knew were those at the back of my own service-book, the emergency prayers to use after a battle. But this was after a battle, and nobody would notice if the service wasn’t elaborate, so I used what I had and said the prayers over the fallen. Surprisingly few, considering: a few dozen at most. Naigha approved; after the last prayer I felt her presence like a breath of cool air.

The ground floor of the fort was full of prisoners: men, women and children locked up separately. One of the gifted sergeants explained, a bit apologetically, “we used what you taught us and looked at them very hard, and locked up everyone we didn’t trust.” Some of the people doing that weren’t even gifted, I gathered, but it would have intimidated the prisoners anyway. I didn’t think I would need to sit in judgment this time, and indeed Prince Shab told me he was writing to his father to send a new governor. The town really had enough stores to keep all these people fed until they could be judged.

There were many more wounded than dead. We went to visit the field hospital, where an exhausted-looking Maha was ordering the new nurses around. “They’re doing really well!” she said. “Most of them, anyway. It’s strange to have forty nurses who can all pick pockets. But some of them are gifted, that’s an asset, and some of those might be able to train as doctors.” Some of the nurses were making eyes at the soldiers –after all, they’d only just changed jobs and one couldn’t be too sure– but the doctors didn’t allow that.

Just as we were leaving a six-year-old boy was released from the hospital, “you’re all done, now run back to your parents!”

“Got no parents. Only my aunt and she’s in the lockup!”

He kept trailing after Thulo, so he took him on as an errand boy and told him to go to school with the other children he’d been teaching while we were travelling. “Don’t need to go to school!” he protested, but some of the others took him along. “Do I get a name, too?” he shouted over his shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, “tomorrow morning at the end of the service.” That evening, he was already making himself useful: I sent him to the barracks to fetch a stack of bowls because we were suddenly feeding a lot more people. “What kind of name do you want? Síthi, or Ishey, or Velihan, or Khas?” He thought for a bit, talked to the other children, and decided on a Velihan name.

There were many, many name-givings in the morning. When the boy he turned up I called him Mík at Maha’s prompting. Most people who got a name also got a bag of gold from the clerks, and they were turning away people who tried to come a second time — having a name and money of their own doesn’t necessarily make people honest, and this town didn’t have a tradition of honesty.

When I went back to talk to Shayania, she’d made a plan. “I’ll go to Essle,” she said, “the clerks told me I have my marriage portion, thirty-five thousand, and another thirty-five thousand that Miham settled on me in his will, I’ll manage. My servants are rich as well now, they have forty-eight wainwheels each!”

I tried to make it clear to her that she did have to pay them wages if she wanted to keep them, even though they had some money of their own. “There are more Iss-Peranian people living in Essle,” I said, and promised to write an introduction for her to Prince Uznur. “He’s the king’s man of affairs in Essle, his personal friend, too. He takes care of returning soldiers and such, he’ll take care of you as well.”

She declined an introduction to the Order of the Sworn, “I don’t want to have anything to do with any Order!” Even if it was a very different Order, but I wasn’t sure she understood that. Privately, I wrote a little note to Athal of the Drunken Seahorse so he’d keep an eye on her.

The next day she started out, with her lady’s maid and some more of her former slaves, and the three soldiers we’d caught before the battle as a guard. She handed me a package of paper. “I wrote down everything I know about Ashas for you. My children are there, we weren’t allowed to take them because they’re gifted.” More children to rescue, if they hadn’t been … used. I tried not to think about that too much.

Princess Biruné was staying behind with some of the nurses to take care of the wounded who couldn’t travel yet. Prince Ishan was staying too, with a regiment, until the new governor arrived. “I’m the obvious choice,” he said, “I can do the services, too.” That was true — and I gave him my firestarter acolyte as an aide. Once again, I wondered how nearly gifted Ishan was, and if serving in the temple might make that stronger. If in a couple of years he’d still want to join the Order of the Sworn, perhaps he would qualify!

I caught Aftabi and Zahmati snuggling in front of the tent. “At least we can’t get pregnant from it!” they said when they thought they caught me frowning (though I wasn’t frowning at them, I was only thinking hard about Ishan’s possibly budding gifts).

Maha had heard that, and she said out of their hearing, “they may say that, but Aftabi is pregnant! By the king of Tanim. And it’s a boy, and both his other sons have gone away with the army.”

“So he may want to claim him,” I said.

“Exactly.” Then Maha started making lots of plans to prevent that happening — including having Thulo make love to her and claim the child as his own, but Thulo wouldn’t have any of that. Well, it was still more than half a year until the problem would become urgent, and we’d be far from Tanim at that.

We had another meeting with the clerks and Ishan to determine how much money he’d need for the regiment, how much was needed to rebuild the town, and how much we could take with us to Ashas. We ended up paying all of our soldiers two months’ wages and a bonus for winning the battle, and still needed several camels to carry the gold we were taking with us. And a couple of camels to carry food for those camels and themselves, of course. I must admit that I was leaving all the buying of camels and hiring of camel-hands to Thulo, and I think Thulo left it to his quartermaster, or whatever the title was of the little man with a fondness for gambling.

The GM told me about the point in any narrative where the protagonist can’t do anything else than go along with it. “We reached that point in Zameshtan,” I said. He agreed.

We travelled for a few more days through fields that were mostly planted with a strange kind of grain. “Millet,” Samada said, “that’s for farmers, it makes chickens fat, not for civilized people to eat!”

My apprentices and acolytes were dealing with the village priest and the villagers, I didn’t get into the villages myself any more. On the one hand it was a pity, but I really can’t do everything myself! I appointed the two girls who had wanted to dance for Dayati to organise the bits of service for the various gods, and they were so enthusiastic about having a task in the temple that I trusted it would go right. (Perhaps not as I’d have done it, but right nevertheless.)

On the second or third day of travel Cheliân brought a young couple with a baby. “The baby is ill,” he said, “she has a fever, we don’t know what’s wrong.” I couldn’t see what was wrong either, but I did see that the father and mother were ill too — it was as if something had been taken away from them, like the man who had been “blessed” for marriage. “It’s because of that soldier,” the woman said, “he came into our house and collapsed and died.”

I could imagine that someone already dying of some disease could have infected a whole family, so I took Thulo and Maha along to investigate the house. We passed more millet fields with ditches between them, but they seemed to be to water the fields rather than to drain them, the water coming from a large square pond just outside the village.

The village itself looked deserted — as if daily life had been suspended. There were only a few old people in the fields, nobody tending the vegetable gardens around the houses, no teenagers running errands, no children playing in the streets., though we saw a child’s face peeking out from a doorway.HH

It turned out that a whole patrol of soldiers had come into the village a week or so ago. Usually they got enough advance warning that the young people could flee into the forest, but this time thney’d come by surprise and taken a dozen of them away. For the slave market, I gathered. We investigated the couple’s house — well, first Maha took so much of the baby’s fever away that she was strong enough to cry, and even to nurse. We let nobody into the house, not even the people who lived there or the elderly man we thought was the local priest.

In the middle of the house — one room, whitewashed, very bare, with a veranda on the outside — there was a place where power had clearly leaked into the ground. It did look as if that had stopped, like the place in Albetire that we’d found, only not as extensive. “We should clean it!” Maha said, and made a sweeping motion with her hands. The children immediately took that up and swept the house with palm leaves and whatever else they could find, then went out into the village where we could hear them laughing. Later we found out that they’d recruited all the village children too, and swept all the houses! There wasn’t a bit of bad influence left in any house when they were finished. and some of the gifted children had little eddies of air and small whirlwinds following them. Not exactly creatures, there was no consciousness, just a bit of ryst that was almost anie.

I asked who was their local god — a bit hard, because Cheli&aicrc;n had to translate everything — and the village priest said “we worship Barfi, the forest lady” and took me to a hut that must be a temple because there was a wooden statue in it. I didn’t sense any presence, though. The statue was of a woman with snakes for fingers and toes, snake heads for nipples, and the painted slit eyes of a snake. I paid my respect anyway, but when we prayed later we only called on our own gods.

By now, some of the doctors had arrived. I’d also called Biruné, because we now knew what sickness it was: the silver sickness, where you get spots without any feeling and when it goes too far, or when it gives you a fever, you usually die. The sickness is in the blood, and I knew that Birune’s sister Asa –now Doctor Cora in Turenay — had found a remedy for it by sifting the blood with semsin; perhaps Biruné would have the same talent.

Apart from the baby, the infected were men and women of all ages. An old woman –she turned out the be the priest’s wife — volunteered to have the treatment tried on her, “if I die it’s no big deal!”, though her husband protested at that, of course. Biruné appeared, not convinced that she’d have her sister’s talent, though she understood what the doctors were doing and gave useful suggestions. “They have to be excited for the blood to flow! I can do that.” Well, there are some things dandar do really well.

It took the whole day and part of the night for the doctors to get it right, but then they pronounced the old woman cured. They were learning all the time: it went much faster as they got better at it. The baby was last — “she’s so small! I don’t dare make the cut!” one of the doctors said, but they did it anyway — I think on a foot — and sifted her blood as well.

Then it was the afternoon of the following day, and everybody was exhausted and famished. Even I was, though all I’d been doing was guarding and sending messages between the village and the caravan. There was carpfrom the square pond. as juicy as those from the mill-pond at home, and a grainy kind of porridge that must be the ubiquitous millet. It tasted not at all bad.

At some time people had come from the caravan and built a temple in tphe village; there had to be a service, after all! If I’d officiated I must have done it in my dream, because I didn’t remember it at all. On second thoughts it must have been Cheliân who officiated.

When we got back to the camp our young hunters weren’t there. Gone ahead to scout out Ghilas. Well, they’d probably get into trouble, I knew them too well by now to doubt that, but I didn’t doubt either that they’d get out of ttouble again. What was worse was that Bhalik and Khali had gone ahead too, probably to find their enemies. I didn’t begrudge them their revenge, but after having had bodyguards for so long it I felt strangely unprotected.

Before we went to the village the army had send out some scouts, and we caught up with them the next day. Bhalik and Khali were there too, one with a black eye and the other with his arm in a sling. “We caught a band of Moram’s men,” the scout sergeant said. “Slavers, ten of them. Three are still alive, do you want to question them?”

Yes, I did! When they were brought to me one of the men turned out to be a woman, the only gifted one of the lot. They were all wearing what looked like bits of scavenged uniform, much battered and not only in this fight.

“Well,” I said, “better explain yourselves.”

“What do you want to know? Are you going to mess with my head, too?”

“Who’s been messing with your head?” I thought I knew the answer but I wanted to hear it from her.

“The boss of course. He’d get us all into his special room and then you’d wake up and know nothing except that you want to fight. And he gets all funny from it too, weird-like.” She couldn’t say what exactly was weird, but her spirit had scars all over, of the same sort that Bhalik had but more as if she’d been drained from a lot of small cuts, repeatedly.

I had to suppress a shudder. “So your boss sent you to get slaves from the villages. And then?”

She tried to shrug but a wounded shoulder prevented that. “You get your pay. We only get paid when we come back with slaves. We’re slaves ourselves.”

“Not any longer,” I said, “the king has forbidden all slavery in his country.”

“Tell that to the boss!”

“I intend to do that. Now what shall we do with you?” The sergeant didn’t want to enlist them as soldiers, “they’re rabble! Murderers!”, and I couldn’t use them myself, or rather, I didn’t trust them one bit. But on the other hand, executing them would be too harsh, they’d only been doing the job they were forced to do. I briefly considered setting them free so they could go to the city. But then we’d have to give them something to live on, and they’d go and tell all their companions. A good thing on the one hand –it would leave Moram without most of his soldiers — but on the other hand, frankly, we couldn’t afford it. And if we let them go without pay, they’d rob and murder to stay alive.

I didn’t have an asnwer, and sent them away with their keeper again.

Some of the hunters were here too; they’d found the patrol originally, and alerted our scouts. The others had gone with the freed captives to take them back to their village, and they’d be away for another couple of days. At least we’d be easy to find.

Now I told Bhalik and Khali about their daughter’s decision. They protested — “we don’t really want to get so close to the gods! We serve you, that’s as far as we’ll go, we don’t want to have any more to do with any gods until Naigha comes to get us!”

That was a problem. Zahmati had said that if one or both of her fathers didn’t come back from a fight they’d marry anyway, but I didn’t want to let it come to that.

In the evening service, the two young women I’d appointed had a surprise: several small boys with still-high voices, as well as girls of all sizes, sang the First Invocation. It was still a bit ragged, but moving nevertheless.

I didn’t really get the opportunity to compliment them, because someone came to fetch me to speak to visitors. Two men in rich clothes, who turned out to be His Excellency Bayest, Dignitary of the Realm, and the market master, Rikhi. I knew Khali and Bhalik’s enemies had taken up residence with the market master, so I was very cautious.

Why they were there, of course, was because they’ve heard ‘a rumor’ about the caravan not having slaves. I called for a copy of the king’s proclamation, and Samada came with one in large letters and read it, holding it so the dignitary and the market master could read it too if they wanted. “We were just using it as a writing exercise,” she whispered when she was done.

They were appalled, of course, and left in a huff without another word.

We were camped close to the city now, with three regiments of soldiers guarding one side of our front each. Children came to gawk, and I saw a few get so close that the soldiers pushed them away with the butt of their halberds. One little boy ducked under the halberd and snatched a soldier’s knife away. The soldier started to run after him, but the captain called him back sharply.

Later it was the whores’ turn: most of them young, all of them beautiful. We let them in, but only to have themselves checked by our doctors. There were several men leaning against the closest buildings of the city — town? citadel? mostly a massive castle with haphazard shacks built against and around it — and after a while some of them came sauntering towards the camp. I thought at first that they must be whores too, after all there’s definitely a market for attractive men, but they must be the girls’ pimps, probably their owners.

“Don’t let any of those in,” I said, earning me poisonous looks.

At the morning service there was a group of women in grey who I realised must be the whores. The former whores. Pesar’s second wife came to tell me that they’d all chosen to stay, and to stay together, and the doctors had enlisted them as nurses in the hospital and given them grey uniform cloth to make decent clothes from.

I gave them all names, of course, and later went to talk to them. They knew a lot of things, such as how to get into the fort: the brothel Shenaliya on the north side, where all the soldiers went, had a door that went straight in. “So the boss can come and go without being seen?” I ventured.

“The boss! Don’t make me laugh! He doesn’t fuck. He’s in the Order!”

That chilled me to the bone. “Which Order?”

“Of Archan of course! That’s why he wears white all the time, because he’s one of the Forsworn.”

Forsworn indeed. And I’d seen about a dozen gifted people in the fort while taking a quick look earlier. Officers, or junior members of his Order, or just sources of anea like the woman we’d captured?

Later that day we had a council of war. Each of the princes and the captain from Zameshtan had a different idea about how to go about dealing with the fort. “Burn the whole town to the ground” — that would mean that nobody could take cover, but also kill a lot of innocent civilians. “There are no innocent civilians in Ghilas,” someone said, “it’s all scum, down to the three-year-olds.” But I still didn’t want to be responsible for burning down people’s houses. Fight them, yes, but if even a few were innocent they should at least have a chance.

Any plans to besiege the city were quashed immediately, because the whores and our captives knew that the fort had enough stores to last years. We couldn’t last a week without access to more food.

Finally we parted without a plan, other than “find out as much as possible”.

After the evening service I set out to start doing exactly that. I could see the boss, Miham, in what I supposed was his workroom or even the temple in the main tower of the fort. As I watched him, he became aware of me — or perhaps he had been all the time. “Oh, there’s the little one they’ve sent against me,” he said, or something that meant the same thing, and went on accusing Anshen and all of his followers of being weak, something that doesn’t work on me any more except to make me more and more angry. “Don’t think I’m afraid of you,” I said, earning a mental smirk.

I don’t remember which of us gave up the confrontation first; I certainly couldn’t have fought him then and there, from the tent, while he was in his tower.

“I said I’m not afraid of him,” I told Thulo, “but I am. Very, very afraid.”

It happens every time. EVERY SINGLE TIME. She does what she needs to do, this causes a lot of chaos, and she moves on before it’s resolved. She’s beginning –no, continuing, she already thought it in Kushesh– to think it’s a curse.

And I admit the boots are a running gag now, as inadvertently foreshadowed here.

When I found Maha she was bubbling with giggles. “They were making love!”

“Who?” I asked.

“Aftabi and Zahmati, of course! But you’ll have to talk to her fathers because I’m afraid they won’t like it.”

I promised to do that, hoping I’d find the right occasion before there was trouble. That evening there wasn’t time for anything any more, of course, Two services, more name-givings, though Thulo and the acolytes wouldn’t let me stay up all night.

The next morning a boy came to tell me at breakfast that the market-master wanted to speak to me. “After the service,” I said, but Pesar and the captain of the Zameshtan regiment caught me first. “We talked about staying here another few weeks,” they said, “but would you mind leaving earlier? The caravan is getting larger every day.”

I’m a farm girl. I knew what the problem was. “And the land won’t bear it any longer.”

“Exactly. The day after tomorrow?”

We’d have one day to go to the market and get everything in order for travel. “Yes.” I thought for a moment we could perhaps split the caravan, but that wouldn’t do, everybody would want to be where the temple was. (I resisted thinking they’d want to be where I was, even though everybody could make a temple and the people had seen it done now.) “That will foil my plans for the tailor, though, would there be someone who could sew me a uniform? I don’t seem to have one at the moment. My bodyguard says it’s being sold in the market in tiny pieces for luck.”

That made Pesar laugh. “Of course! I’ll have it taken care of.”

The captain talked about the next stage in the journey: to a garrison town called Ghilas, guarding the border with a commander and a couple of hundred soldiers. “Are they guarding against people coming into Zameshtan, or people going out?” I asked.

“Both? Anyway, this commander is a bad lot, he’s doing things that — well, make a soldier less worthy in the eyes of Mizran.”

“Corruptible?” I asked.

“I’d almost say not corruptible enough! The tolls are high, but it’s the only passage to the road south, and the girls in the slave market cost half of what they cost here.” He clapped a hand over his mouth. “When you could still buy girls here, I mean.”

After Ghilas it wouldn’t be easy with such a large caravan: there were at least two stretches where we’d have to carry our own water, because the river disappeared. Whether it went underground or it went away entirely, Pesar and the captain didn’t know.

As we went on our way to the city we met the market-master. Goodness! I’d completely forgotten the man. “You wanted to speak to me, I gather?” I asked.

“Yes, Your Holiness,” he said, after the obligatory falling-at-my-feet. (I should perhaps go barefoot so they won’t have to kiss the latest installment of my succession of threadbare boots!) “Your inestimable wisdom has seen fit to free all the slaves, and I understand that there is a question of compensation. Businesses are being ruined! Didn’t your Queen Raisse provide for that?” And he called his clerk — who I suspected was still a slave — and had him recite all the owners’ claims!

I stopped him before he was well underway. “You must have misunderstood, master. Queen Raisse’s decree is to recompense the slaves, not the owners. For the years that they worked without pay. But the king has ordered that void for Zameshtan because it’s on a far too large scale here to handle.”

The man crumpled, retching, his face going grey, Maha and Thulo rushed to help him but he was gone before they could do anything.

“Could anyone go to his family? Or get a priestess?” I asked, but his former slaves looked at each other and said “we don’t have to do that any more, do we?” and departed, one by one. We waited for a bit but nobody came, and we went on to town. Someone else would have to take care of this for once.

When we got to the market we saw that the slave side of it was completely empty, but the rest seemed to be going on as normal. Some of our soldiers –I recognised a sergeant who saluted us with a grin– were loading huge bolts of grey fabric on wagons. Surely I could get a uniform from that — and it looked like the whole army was going to be decked out in Order colours!

There wasn’t a single water-bag left to buy in the whole market, but in a corner a small man was sitting in front of a huge stack of goat-skins. I watched Thulo haggle for them for a while, then I took Satta to the spices stall. I’ve never been as good at haggling as Thulo anyway, and I would probably just be a distraction.

I marshalled all my smatterings of languages but the woman at the spices stall spoke trade Iss-Peranian. “Do you have northern silverleaf?” I asked, barely daring to hope. They got out a crate, “this is all I’ve got, Holiness! Would you like one pound, two pounds, four pounds? I’m afraid it’s gone mostly to powder, it doesn’t travel all that well.”

“If you can spare four pounds–” The only thing I was afraid of was that I wouldn’t be able to afford it: the doctor in Samada’s house had said it was as costly as gold. Four pounds was almost all there was, two large linen sacks full, even though a lot of it had indeed gone to powder. We’d have to bind it in a scrap of cloth to brew. I took out my purse, but the stallkeeper said “It’s for the temple! Take it as a gift, please!”

“A royal gift,” I said, “thank you!”

I did manage to pay for the cooking spices: a bag of saffron the size of a well-grown rabbit, sticks of cinnamon tied in bunches like kindling, and several different brown and red and yellow powders that Satta picked out with much glee. “Zahmati will be so happy!” she said. Everybody would be happy, in fact, when things that smelled so nice went into the food.

Thulo, meanwhile, had bought eight hundred goat-skins for, I think, forty-five riders in all. And the two youngest daughters of the goat-skin merchant, not bought of course, but engaged as waterskin seamstresses. Later, it turned out that they’d only seen slaves sewing waterskins, but they knew how to make them waterproof, and could also look after goats, so there was enough for them to do.

We found Samada together with a young man about her age, swapping lines of poetry, it seemed. When we arrived with the wagon they came running, excited. “The paper has arrived! Now we can make notebooks! This is Halik, he’s taking half the class. He used to be a slave and a clerk but now he’s a teacher. Are those goat-skins? Can I have some for notebook covers? We can make four out of one skin, I think.” She negotiated with Thulo for eighty of his eight hundred skins, so they could make a covered notebook for every one of the more than two hundred students that the school had got now.

“There are probably more people who used to be slaves,” I said, “clerks, historians, accountants, map-makers. They could teach what they know.” Halik nodded eagerly, but Samada looked more thoughtful and said she’d think about it.

The captains of the army came to present themselves. And to show off their weapons: Prince Ishan had a larger version of the dart-thrower that Rava had made for me, and Thulo was very interested in that and wanted to get one himself. According to the prince, it could take down a war elephant! I was still against killing any elephants, but if our enemies used them to fight it might be inevitable.

The captains were all wearing hastily sewed uniforms of the grey cloth, each with a different badge. “We picked Valdyan animals,” they said, “the eagle, the wolf, the boar!” The eagle and the wolf were realistic enough, but the boar looked like the toy piglets my eldest brother used to carve from wood for his little siblings, with a tusky grin from ear to ear.

“I’m glad I have so many loyal soldiers,” I said.

“As long as the troops get their pay, yes!” the Zameshtan captain said, which made me worry, so I went back to town with Thulo to talk to the king and queen. They were in the palace, together with the former king, going over papers in a workroom. Exactly the right circumstances!

“Holiness,” they said, but I came to the point without waiting for their deference.

“I’ve come for the soldiers’ pay,” I said. “I’ve suddenly acquired another regiment that used to be paid by you, and now they’re expecting their wages from me. Frankly, we don’t have that much.”

They prevaricated a little, all three of them. Apparently the king had engaged the former king as his confidential clerk! “The problem is,” the former king said eventually, “the money for the soldiers’ pay comes from Ashas, and it will be on its way now. But it won’t be in time for you to collect one-third of it, as you have one-third of our standing army.” (That was straining the truth a little: it wasn’t this king’s standing army, and it couldn’t be the former king’s army any more since he was no longer the king!)

They offered all kinds of schemes, which Thulo questioned so insistently that the kings and the queen were convinced that he was my treasurer. We let them think that. (He’s putting up most of the ready money anyway from Phuli’s legacy, it’s a distinction without a difference.) It all seemed to come down to “we keep all the money we have now, and you intercept the transport and negotiate with them”, to which I said yes in the end, exasperated.

“Did you just say we’d raid the money transport?” Thulo asked when we were on our way back.

“I did, didn’t I? Well, if it comes to that I suppose we’ll have no other choice. Either that, or have no soldiers.”

In the evening I went to sit with Bhalik and Khali, who were drinking something that must be the local anise brandy I’d seen Thulo and the goat-skin merchant seal their bargain with in the city. “Can I have some of that?” I asked, and yes, it was, even stronger than I’d expected. They could tell me more about Ghilas: it had walls twelve yards high, and inside those walls it was like Albetire would be if everybody was as bad as they themselves had been before Mehili got hold of them and employed them.

“The worst are the brothers,” Khali said, “the only people who got away when we handled Zahmati’s house. Clients.” He spat out the word, making it clear that those were the kind of people who had hurt Zahmati so much. If I can burn down all of Ghilas I won’t hesitate to do so.”

I wasn’t sure whether I’d prevent that, either. I made a noncommittal noise. “Have some more brandy,” Khali said.

“Can you tell us what’s up with Zahmati?” Bhalik asked after the second cup.

“She’s in love,” I said.

“What? Who with?”

“Aftabi,” I said.

“Hm. –We don’t want anyone to make our daughter unhappy again!”

“I think Aftabi is making her very happy,” I said.

After a while they went to talk to Zahmati, and then to Aftabi. They offered her brandy and she accepted it. I thought I could safely go to sleep.

In the morniing, when I wanted to find someone to train with, the only one around who didn’t have a huge hangover was Kisin. And the only reason she didn’t have a huge hangover was that she was pregnant: the taste of drink made her nauseous. “And I don’t even know who the father is!” she said. Counting on her fingers, she thought it was likely to be one of the hunters.

“Never mind, we’ll see what colour skin it has when it’s born,” I said. Very likely to be brown, like most people in the world as I knew now, but the exact shade of brown could vary a lot, from barely darker than me like Kisin herself to almost blue-black like Aftabi and the Ishey. “Only it’s probably going to be awkward on the journey.”

“I’ll cope,” she said, and took up a sword to fight.

Plains people fight very formally, almost like a dance, and it reminded me most of the set exercises I’d run my journeymen and craft apprentices through in Valdis. Very useful! “It’s good for me to go back to the beginning,” I said.

“So you think I’m a beginner!”

“No, I feel like I am a beginner again, and that’s good, to get back what I was taking for granted, and remember things I forgot.”

She did make me sweat. And use all my anea. When the service started Thulo noticed that I was completely covered in a sort of cocoon made of threads of power. I didn’t know whether that was an effect of the fighting, the formality of it, or anything else. I felt I should really investigate, but the service came first now, and afterwards we were leaving.

I’d been wanting to form a gifted patrol for a while, an army detail like Vurian astin Brun’s in the civil war when I’d hardly been born, and I invited the princes and some gifted officers to share a howdah with me while we travelled. There was enough room for me, the three princes, captain Fehel of the Zameshtan army and sergeant Felan. After I’d told them what I had in mind they came up with their own ideas about how to tackle it, encouraging, because it would have been too daunting for me to think of everything myself. But the first thing I had to do was to teach them how to do those things — and for these people, that meant very basic things like talking to each other in the mind.

The local captain knew things about Ghilas too: the walls were fifteen yards high! Strange that they get higher every time someone talks about them. But the rest of what he said was much the same as I already knew, making me very glad indeed that I suddenly seemed to have an army more than a thousand strong.

While I was training the officers on the elephant , Thulo had been walking with the children from the palace, doing much the same things, though more in a childish way: songs and semsin games! He was even making friends with the awkward girl from Rizenay, Senthi.

Two girls had spoken to me, asking whether they could dance for Dayati in the service. It was a good idea as such, but the services were plenty long already, so I said “only on the day of Timoine”. And then several other people wanted to sing or dance or play music for their gods, until I had something for each god on their day except the Nameless. Archan. I have to call him by his name. Perhaps Senthi could? But when I asked her, she thought she didn’t even know the right form of the invocation any more, and anyway she didn’t really want anything to do with gods! “If you don’t want to then don’t,” I said, “we’ll have a plain service on that day, no problem at all.” Perhaps some other servant of Archan would come along — as long as they weren’t of the Resurgence, that was all right with me, and as far as I had seen until now with Anshen as well.

(Still, I shuddered to think of this girl growing up into a grand master of the Nameless. Perhaps Thulo would be able to talk some sense into her?)

We were settling into the travel pattern again, though it was only a couple of days. Before I realised that we’d gone so far already the walls of Ghilas loomed in the distance.

I don’t remember who came to tell me, but it almost must have been Maha: “Aftabi wants to marry Zahmati!”

“Well, I’ll marry them,” I said, “it probably wouldn’t be possible in Valdyas but everything’s different here anyway.”

“That’s not the problem! Zahmati won’t say yes until Khali and Bhalik get married too.”

“Well, I’ll marry them too1” But that wasn’t so easy: first we’d have to convince them of it! And I had a feeling that it would have to be resolved before we made any attempt at Ghilas…

We were prepared for an epic fight but got tragedy instead.

It must have been after midnight, but we were still making the rest of the plan. The princes came to show a company of soldiers in the other army’s uniforms: not everything fit and I could also see some evidence of hasty alterations, but they would pass at first sight, and that was all that was needed. “We’ll relieve the dawn watch,” Prince Ishan said, “so we’ll be all ready for you.” We’d go right after the morning service, taking all the temple stones with us, to build our own temple around the city one.

I got some sleep. Not much. The morning service came all too early. I announced the expedition to the city right at the beginning — I was in uniform already instead of the Ishey clothes, sword on my back, so it was likely that at least some people would expect something out of the ordinary — and all we did was ask for the blessing of Anshen and all the other good gods, so we finished early too. I saw the royal family kneeling practically at my feet, and each of them picked up a stone with all the others.

There were about a thousand people from the city — they must have started very early!– and twice as many, perhaps more, from the caravan: a huge procession, with the mixture of anticipation, solemnity and hilarity that seems to go with processions everywhere.

In front of the palace there was a guard of some of the young hunters, along with two palace servant girls we hadn’t seen yet. They saluted us cheerfullly, “the king and the steward are in there, what shall we do?”

“Keep them inside,” I said, “we’ll deal with them later.”

Maha pushed through the crowd to talk to me. “Only Ishey can think of that!” she said with a grin. “They gave everybody in the real watch relief a cartwheel and said it’s a feast of Dayati today and to go and celebrate! I’m afraid it’s probably out of your money, Thulo. But they’re all in the inns and brothels, most likely.”

When we got to the temple we saw that there was a wall around it already, a low one like the wall around a temple of Naigha, only of grey stone, not whitewashed. Should we build on it? Better not — but around it or inside? “Inside,” I said firmly, “but as wide as we can.” And in no time there wasn’t a wall any more either: people were taking the stones to add to our own.

I didn’t know what else to do than to start an ordinary service, to establish it as a temple. I felt power rising above the wall we’d built, almost a seal, stronger than it normally was in the camp. We didn’t do anything special — no marriages, no blessings, no name-givings, everybody was watching me, it was a bit disconcerting because they were waiting for me to take action.

I finished with the soldiers’ blessing, “let’s go forth and fight for Good!” and then went and knocked on the bronze doors. Bronze-covered doors, really, I could hear that. There was no response; not that I’d expected any. They were so cold that the grass in the cracks between the marble tiles in front of the temple was covered in hoarfrost, like the grass at home in winter. That gave me an idea– I called my village acolyte, whose name I know I should know but if I’ve ever known it it hasn’t stuck, and asked him (in mind-to-mind images because we still didn’t have much language in common) if he could warm up the doors.

Yes, that worked. The grass began to smoke, the marble tiles cracked, the bronze warped. Nails shot out and made people in the temple have to duck. There was indeed wood under the bronze and it started to smoulder.

“Thank you,” I said, and tried to pull open the wooden doors, glad of the gloves I’d put on expecting to have to wield a heated sword. It was easy: one door fell away at an angle and the other plummeted straight down beside me.

There was a very high, very wide passage beyond the doors, wide enough for dozens of people to walk abreast. I took Thulo, Maha and the queen with me, and the king wouldn’t leave the queen, and everybody else came after us. I sent Prince Ishan and Prince Sharab back to continue the service — I thought that if it stopped the seal might fail, too. We went into the temple singing.

The walls of the passage were decorated with relief, raised figures painted in colours that were now chipping. The subject matter was what we could have expected — all the figures were different sizes, made to different scales, but no one was apart from another.

In the passage there was a seal, hanging there like a curtain. As we neared, it drew back, until we were in the great hall under the dome, where it settled into a sort of hut made of ryst no larger than one of our tents. One person was inside it. That must be Lydan, then.

The ground had grown colder as we moved towards the dome. I was glad of my army-issue boots –I’ve gone through half a dozen pairs of boots since I left Valdis!– but the queen was barefoot, and halfway through the king picked her up and carried her in his arms.

Everybody was waiting for me to do something.

I drew my sword and tried to hack the ryst hut open, but it was as hard as glass, and while I was doing it I felt something of Dayati in the way it was made.

I paused. “Do you approve of this, Timoine?” I asked the air. I didn’t even know at the time what ‘this’ was — the ryst hut, the way I was trying to break it, the whole situation — but the pigtailed blonde girl I’d seen before was at my side and said, as scathingly as only a ten-year-old can, “Fighting isn’t the way1′

I put my sword back in the scabbard and tried to pry open the seal with my bare hands. Maha saw what I was doing and helped me, and also the queen, and Thulo (though he was mostly busy keeping track of what was happening outside), and the king (though he didn’t know what he was doing at all).

“Strange,” the queen said, “there’s all this talk about child sacrifices but I don’t think there have ever been any, I’d feel it if there were. When someone is sacrificed all the power of their life is unleashed — there’d have to be more power here, Much more.”

I’d expected much more power as well, a stronger seal — no, this one was uncommonly strong — a larger seal, more extensive, with more layers. “Can you see what did happen?”

“No, that needs a high priestess of Dayati. I could do it, I know all the forms, but I’ve never been ordained.”

I’d made priests and priestesses before. “I think I can do that,” I said, and she took all her clothes off and knelt in front of me. I laid my hands on her head. I believed that she knew all the forms already, all she needed was the goddess.

I didn’t know the words, so I had to invent something. That wouldn’t be the first time either. Hardly anyone would understand me if I spoke my own language, anyway. “Dayati?” I asked. “Will you please make this woman yours?”

Well, that worked. I felt a flutter in my belly that I hadn’t had since I’d decided at fifteen that all the rigmarole wasn’t worth the trouble. Even more than that, it felt like there were little feet trampling my insides — goodness, would Dayati be able to make me pregnant without the usual doings? And there was power going into the queen, too, which everybody could see, even those who weren’t gifted. She stood up, looking larger than life, went around to the other side of the seal-hut, and started to dance.

Thulo and Maha and I pulled the seal open. It was easy now.

There was a man inside, gaunt, filthy, looking as if he wasn’t really in the world, with a woman in his arms who must have been dead for years. The high priestess!

The mob was about to seize him but I managed to stop them, saying “leave him, he’s a victim, he’s a slave too.”

“Whose slave?” the king asked.

“Of the one who is responsible for all slavery, of course!” I said. That came out bitterly and without thinking, but looking back I think I meant Archan of the Resurgence. I could see that the king understood it, but would all those people understand it too?

“My wife will take care of that,” the king said. She was still dancing, and I felt that I had to look away if I wanted to keep my vows. Many people were making love now, the spirit of Dayati on them.

This was no place for me, for a troubled man who could only be Lydan, and for a dead body. When I said that someone should carry the dead body out, several people came with spears and parts of railings with cloaks around them to make a sort of stretcher. It was hard to make Lydan let go of the body, and eventually someone allowed him to take hold of the side of the stretcher.

“What do you people do with your dead?” I asked Prince Shab.

“Burn them,” the prince said.

“Is there a special place for that, or can you do it where it’s convenient?”

“Depends how rich you are,” the prince said, “do you want to do it in the temple?”

That threw me for a moment, but I knew what he meant. “Yes, in the temple, but outside the building.” Now I was a priestess of Naigha, too!

There were two convenient charred wooden doors lying just outside the building, and several people started dragging those into a clear space, others brought more wood to make a pyre. When it was shoulder-high the high priestess’ body was lifted on top, Lydan made an effort to climb up, but I caught and held him. Then I called my firestarting acolyte. “Burn this, please,” I said, and pointed.

That made me let go of Lydan with one arm, of course, and he jumped on the pyre at the moment that the flames went up. The acolyte was shocked , it was clear that he’d only meant to light the fire, not to make the whole pyre go up in a blaze that we couldn’t possibly rescue Lydan from. But I suspect that the gods had a hand in it.

There was nothing more I could do here. I tried to find the king, but he’d gone back to his wife. And when I tried to find her, she was still dancing.

We took Prince Shab and Princess Biruné to the palace. Through the back door, the one closest to the temple. Some more of the young hunters were on guard outside, but inside we ran into a guard of real soldiers. “Do you have an appointment for an audience?” the sergeant asked.

“No,” I said, “but it’s vital that we see him right now.” I must have been convincing, because they escorted us to the courtyard where Fahar was sitting. He was looking better than I’d seen him before — no wonder, our doctors had been to see him, I remembered, while I had been swordfighting and sleeping.

“There’s no way to soften this,” I said after a cursory greeting. “The High Priest Lydan is dead.”

All the floridity went out of his face: he was as grey as the ash of a wood-fire, gasped, collapsed. “Quick!” Maha said. “Thulo, help me!” They got his heart going again and he sat up weakly. “What happened?”

I told him a very short summary. “He couldn’t be without his beloved,” I ended.

“Shall I have you impaled now?” he asked.

His description of how impaling worked was … interesting, much like the man in Albetire’s colourful descriptions of torture, but I cut him short. “Shan’t we to go the emperor of Ashas so he can do it himself if it’s necessary?”

“Hmm, that would be an idea. You know, when the emperor was a boy of three years old he was playing with a dog, he pulled his tail, and of course it bit him. Then he had the dog impaled, and the slave who should have been watching the dog as well.” That didn’t bode well for our visit to the emperor, but perhaps he’d learned to be less impulsive in the ten years or so since he was a little boy.

I noticed that we didn’t have our escort of soldiers any more. I hadn’t seen them leaving. I didn’t know whether we should be afraid of a larger troop, or something else had distracted them.

“The problem is,” Fahar said, “that there won’t be news going to Ashas now and then they’ll send an army soon. Five hundred thousand troops, probably.”

“Perhaps you’ll have to continue doing the paperwork,” I said. “That’s what you’re good at. King Mahsab would have you as his confidential secretary, his right hand.”

“I could write the letters, yes,” he said, “but it needs the– well, of Archan, and I can’t do that, Lydan could.”

“Perhaps my mother could do that,” Biruné ventures. “Fake the letters.”

Thulo had a better idea: we had to arrive in Ashas first and keep the emperor from sending troops at all. I’m not sure if this king isn’t a better king than Mahsab, he thought to me. That might even be the case: at least he’d done faithfully what he’d been convinced was good for his people.

A Plains girl came running into the courtyard and pulled my sleeve. “You should come to the temple, something’s come up,” she said. Anyway, Fahar was being fussed over by his attendants –different ones this time– who were coaxing him to bed. “Are you using the royal apartments?” Shab asked. but no, he wouldn’t dare! Anyway, the wall paintings there were too racy, not good for his heart.

The girl –I think it was Kisin– took us to a cellar beneath the temple. It was full of children, about twenty of them. The youngest were about four years old, the oldest. the obvious leader, was a boy in his teens. One girl of about eleven looked particularly Valdyan, northern, pale and weedy with hair like birch shavings.

“You’re from Rizenay!” I said.

“Yes, what of it? You’re of the Nameless.”

“He’s got a name. They both do, and we might as well call both of them by it. I’m of Anshen and you’re of Archan.”

“Neither of them is worth anything,” she said, “one says nothing and the other lies to you.”

“Well, perhaps you should become a priestess of Naigha then, she’s honest at least.”

“I’ve had it with gods. No, I want to go home and cut my stepfather’s throat and get the flock back he took from my mother.”

Nobody seemed disconcerted by that; the eight-year-old twin Khas boys next to her even applauded it. Well! It takes all sorts, I suppose.

“Don’t mind her,” the oldest boy said. “We thought we’d have our throats cut because Vurian told Lydan to do it, but then Lydan cut Vurian’s throat because he didn’t want to cut ours. There were more and more children who came here but he never sacrificed even one, Lydan didn’t.”

“Can we go outside now?” one of the children asked.

“I don’t see why not,” I said. They all looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight or breathed fresh air for ages, but they were well-fed at least.

“Do you want to see Vurian?” the boy asked, and I was suprised that they still had him, but he took us to a side room where there was a rotted corpse. The only thing that was still clear was that he’d been a southerner, with the dark skin and broad nose. “Strange that he’s called that really, isn’t that a name from the country in the north where the king makes earthquakes?”

“My country, yes.” I said, “that’s King Athal, my king. Those people from the south give themselves names from the north. I don’t know why either.”

I was just thinking that I’d recommend the children to the prince and the princess when one of the young hunters came down, a Khas, so I said “Look, here’s a bunch of children, can you lot take care of them?” He took them away, and I was really craving a bath now, especially after being in the room with the long-dead Vurian. We’d have to go and talk to the soldiers first, though: there must be someone there who knew about the children. Not only had they had food and clothes and other necessities, but more children had been brought in, most of them probably bought in the slave market. One girl had told me how she and her friend had been bought when they were four, and they were now seven.

At the barracks behind the temple the situation was tense. Outside the gate there was a captain of our own army, inside a captain of theirs, each with their company of soldiers. They were looking daggers at each other.

I breezed through the soldiers — easy, because they parted before me — and spoke to the captain inside. “I think you are the man I need to see,” I said, “can we speak where not everyone sees us?”

“I will speak with you,” he said, “but I want it where everyone sees us! I don’t trust priestesses of Archan.”

“I’m not a priestess of Archan,” I said, “I’m a priestess of Anshen.”

“Same thing.”

“I’m a priestess of Dayati too,” I said.

“Prove it!”

While I was thinking about how I could prove that, he said, “Where are the children?”

I looked around with my mind and found them in the market, stuffing themselves with sausage rolls. The captain was gifted enough that I could show him. “They’re outside! That’ll give trouble.” I had no answer to that, but he wouldn’t have given me time to give it anyway. “We’ll confer,” he said, “in two days we’ll know whether we’ll have to fight you or not.”

“All right,” I said, “I’m a soldier myself, I understand that.”

Now we could go to the bath-house. We were welcomed by several beautiful and willing young men and women, and I was almost tempted –the spirit of Dayati was still on me– but I wanted to get clean, and perhaps to have my sore muscles kneaded. When I’d found a language to say that in (a mixture of languages, I think) I got a sturdy middle-aged woman who washed me, massaged my back and thighs, rubbed me with oil, and complained about my hair. Priestesses of Dayati should have long hair! Well, I’ll go to the army barber.

When I said I wished I had something clean to put on, several other women were at my side with clothes. A long linen shift, a silk robe in almost the right colours for the Order — blue and grey, but the golden butterflies all over it spoilt the effect a bit. My head was wrapped in a scarf with an enormous bow to hide that I didn’t have enough hair.

I wanted my uniform back, washed if possible but otherwise I’d give it to Zahmati to wash, but it was nowhere to be found. Khali went after it, and came back with a grin on his face, “do you really want your uniform back, or do you want to be remembered forever in this city? Tomorrow every person in this city who can get their hands on it will have a little scrap of grey cloth that will go down in their family for generations. With a story that grows every time it’s told.”

“Like my signature!” Thulo said. “A holy — what was the word again?”

“Relic,” I said, absently. “No, that’s only when you’re dead.”

“Amulet,” Khali said, “it’ll bring them luck and give courage.”

Well, I’d have to find a tailor, preferably a military one or I’d get show clothes again. The washerwomen would probably know where the uniforms came from.

There was one more thing I wanted to do in the city: I took Bhalik with me to the palace and asked the clerks in the writing-room for pen and paper to write a letter. I got a brush, which took some getting used to, and I think those clerks will make fun of me and my writing for years to come, but I managed to write a letter to Mehili to warn about the five hundred thousand troops from Ashas, and would Beguyan have an army that could stand up to that?

When I got back to the camp I found Thulo and Samada just finishing what looked like an argument. Maha was gone, and I gathered that the children had been there when it started but had gone ahead to the camp, possibly with Maha. I didn’t ask what it had been about, and it was impossible to determine now that they were sort of agreeing to disagree.

Samada’s class was suddenly three times as large. “I’ll have a hundred before long!” she said. “But you can’t refuse children who want to learn just because the class is full.” Perhaps she could get some helpers, split the class into beginners and more advanced students, but that was for her to organise, not for me. I can’t do everything any more!

When I got to the temple Cheliân was there already. “Shall I go to the city and hold the service there?” he asked. “Then you can do it here.” Yes, of course, there was a temple of ours in the city now! We’d have to build a new one in the camp. Some people were already bringing new stones, and even when there was hardly more than the suggestion of a wall it still felt like a holy place.

While I was preparing for the service a company of soldiers came from the city. I was apprehensive, but the captain said “We’ve come to join you!” It was the replaced watch, the men who had been paid to celebrate the feast of Dayati! “My army camp is over there,” I pointed, “report to Prince Ishan, he’ll sort you out.”

Between the two services — still enough people here to have two — a messenger delivered a letter from King Mahsab. It was an official-looking document with seals and a little note in his own hand, “if you think it’s all right like this, please read it to your people”. It was a royal edict: all slaves were set free, and never again while this king and his heirs were ruling any person in the land of Zameshtan would be a slave or buy or sell a slave, whether native, foreign or travelling. That was as strong as Queen Raisse’s rules in Valdyas! (Much later I realised that it would also mean that if anyone with slaves travelled through Zameshtan, that would set their slaves free immediately.) The edict didn’t speak of compensation, but the note did: “it’s much too complicated to work out the money, let’s start from nothing.”

I read it, of course, while the people from the first service were leaving and the people for the second one just arriving, so as many people as possible could hear it.

The captain of the company that had joined us wanted a word. I wanted a word with him, too, but we didn’t get round to that, because he asked, “Can a soldier marry a freed slave?”

“Of course,” I said, “er, if you’re not married to someone else yet. Well, in Valdyas you can only be married to one wife, I’m not sure of the laws here, it’s not wrong to have different laws in different countries as long as they’re all fair. Are you married?”

“Well, I have a wife, but she is dead.”

“Marriage ends at death,” I said firmly. I’d go by my own rules, that was simplest.

This second service was long — I was giving names to freed slaves the whole night, and then marrying people well into the morning. The captain turned up with his intended — stout and fortyish, no great beauty as beauty went in Zameshtan, but certainly a woman of character.

It’s now come to Pesar asking me how long we’re going to stay somewhere, instead of the other way round. He did that after the last of the married couples had gone, and I suggested another couple of weeks, so people could at least do some trading. And we could make a plan to face the emperor’s army, but of course I wasn’t telling that to Pesar. I rather thought the emperor would have news of this long before it became clear that there were no more letters from Zameshtan — anyone can take a fast camel and ride south on their own. Fahar’s physician, for instance: Thulo and I realised almost at the same time that we hadn’t seen him this time, and he had made a face at some of the new developments.

Yes, she is learning to be the boss. She isn’t sure if having services for thousands of people is what she intended, but meting out justice seems to agree with her.

Also, apparently you can take the girl out of the farm, but not the farm out of the girl.

In the middle of the city there was a very busy market. I recognised several people from our caravan among the crowd. “I want to go, too!” Thulo said.

Beyond the marketplace we went through a broad avenue with statuary on both sides, people and animals and people riding animals, all larger than life. Like the statues in Albetire, except that here they were still whole. They were of some kind of greyish-white stone, green with moss in places, and some with traces of paint — brown faces, blue eyes. Nakash Bayad, the king’s steward (what the flunky had introduced himself as) apologised for the statues, “these remnants of popular religion, outdated now we have the wisdom of the real gods”.

I made a polite noise at that. “It’s a pity that we will not be able to open up the temple for Her Holiness,” he contiued, “but our high priest was called away, there is a dispute between two villages in the eas that he had to go and solve.”

“That happens,” I said, “I know about being called to a village.” The statues were more elaborate now, not only single figures but also groups, some of people making love, and then they got more and more weird: a man copulating with an ape, a man and a woman doing something to a camel reared up on its hind legs, mating elephants — that wasn’t very weird, only very large.

Eventually we entered the palace yard and were received by rather a lot of soldiers — more than our soldiers, which made me sharpen my officer’s senses at once.

A fat man was sitting on a folding chair, his leg bandaged and on a cushion, leaning against two very attractive women with nothing at all on. “Welcome,” he said, “what a blessing that Your Holiness and your companions could come so soon. My name is Fahar Bahiz. Would you be so kind as to accompany me?” And he was lifted into a litter and carried into the palace. We followed, through corridors with painted murals that were as racy as the statues, perhaps more. Further on, in older parts of the building, the ceilings were lower and the murals less colourful, only in red and black and white, but the theme was the same.

We came to a courtyard full of greenery: palm trees, fruit trees, all sorts of flowers. There were goats and cats and small colourful birds and monkeys. A low round table was in the middle, with cushions around it. Fahar Bahiz let himself be lowered on a cushion, with his bandaged foot on another, and motioned for us to sit down as well. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the fountain In the centre of the table, spouting wine.

It was dark red wine with a rich sweet taste, and I decided not to drink too much of it. In fact I had only one cup, though at some moment there were three in front of me. I think Aftabi relieved me of at least one– she could hold her drink better than any of the rest of us.

Still, I don’t really remember what we had to say to each other, except that most of it was pleasantries and meaningless compliments. He was about as gifted as a boulder, too. If we believed him, there was nothing at all awry in Zameshtan, there was peace and quiet again after years of unrest.

Food was served. Expensive dainties: meatballs covered in actual gold, sugared rose-leaves (which I must admit to liking a lot), a dish of grains of rice and threads of saffron all separately sugared, pieces of chicken in an almond sauce that Zahmati would have given her little finger to know the recipe of. It was all delicious, though a bit too dainty for my taste. And I was on edge, either because my officer-sense was still sharp, or because I was wary of being lulled into complacency.

“It is unfortunate that I’m unable to let you hold a service in the temple,” Fahar Bahiz said, “but the city priest — I hesitate to refer to him as ‘high priest’ in your presence — was called to the west because a sickness broke out there.”

To the west? The steward had said the east. No, I thought the real reason we couldn’t enter the temple was that the priest was holed up there, inside the ‘here is nothing at all’ seal. We had seen two such places: at the back of the palace where the temple must be, and somewhere in the outskirts of the city.

“Very unfortunate,” Fahar said again. “The cupola of the temple is completely painted to the glory of the goddess.”

“Which goddess?” Thulo asked.

“Why, Dayati, of course! She has blessed our city greatly and made us fruitful.”

“How many people live here?”

The steward had to answer that question. “Thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-three at the last census, not counting the unregistered, and not the slaves either, naturally.”

“Slaves are people too,” I muttered under my breath, but I think nobody heard it except Thulo on my left and Aftabi on my right. “How many slaves?” I asked.

“I would have to look that up — there’s a levy to be paid on every slave, of course.” He didn’t go to look it up, though, but went on: “The temple can hold eight thousand people. But you might consider holding an open-air service instead, order has been restored and if we opened it without the high priest’s presence the consequenes would be immense.”

“What would the consequences be, then?” I love Thulo’s innocent face when he asks questions like that.

“Well, the people would insist on restoring the old religion, and that would cause all kind of trouble, the earth would shake, storms would ravish the land, the fertile black earth would be broken–”

He sounded like a prophecy, and I couldn’t help quoting the prayer book: “Wrath, famine, plague, earthquake, flood, fire, the sword, foreign invasion, civil war and sudden death.”

“Exactly!” the steward agreed.

All through this, Fahar was getting paler and paler, sweating more and more, and clenching his hands. I wondered what he was afraid of when I realised that it wasn’t fear, it was pain. “Gout?” I asked. “We have doctors who can alleviate that. If you come with us to attend our evening service they can look you over.”

A gaunt middle-aged man came –clearly a physician, I suppose one of the servants had fetched him– and gave Fahar a draught from an alabaster bottle. He drank it down, made a face, but it did seem to help him. He wasn’t up to travel, though, according to his doctor. (Half an hour on an elephant? Ah, well.) Eventually we agreed to come back tomorrow with the doctors– Fahar had offered to send for them and give us a room for the night but we said we had to be back in time for the evening service.

We collected our soldiers, who looked as if they’d been given wine too, and the young hunters appeared from somewhere inside the palace in time to leave with us. The steward accompanied us on the elephant again; apparently he wanted to attend the service.

As we were about to leave the city I sensed someone trying to reach me. I got the impression that it was a middle-aged woman. Can you come to the city or at least in this direction, tonight? You may bring friends.

Here was someone who wanted to speak with me and not to be seen. Probably much more useful, and definitely more interesting, than this man who played king. Certainly.

The steward noticed that, but thought I’d been in prayer for a moment.

Back at the temple we found that it was now enormous. Cheliân was directing the people to build a temple large enough to hold everybody who had showed up — literally thousands of people from the city as well. They’d built a kind of platform in the middle so whoever was celebrating — me, apparently; “we used the first service to build in prayer”, Cheliân said — could be seen and heard. The fire was very large, too, not our battered little fire-pot with the new fire-pot fxed to it but an eight-sided stone-rimmed pit in the ground.

It was very uncomfortable. We did all the usual things –name-givings were part of the usual things by now– and the gods were there, but not as close as I was used to, and at the end I climbed off the platform and knelt by the fire and prayed, never mind that there were thousands of people who could see me, this wasn’t a public performance. Thulo and Cheliân and the acolytes –there seemed to be more than one, but I wasn’t realy paying attention– kept everybody away from me

Now all the gods were close. All the gods. Anshen, of course, and Timoine, and the Mother, and Mizran, and a bit further away Naigha, and almost imperceptibly Archan, for I must call him by his name if he dared come into the temple. I prayed for strength, much more strength, for myself and all of my household, and then thanked every god in turn for what they had already given me. And every god laid hands on me as I did that and then went away, Archan last. He even stayed to talk for a while, and I’ll probably remember what he said when I need it.

Later I heard from Samada that people had been calling in high Iss-Peranian, “we have a high priestess again! Everything will come right!” How disappointed will they be when I leave Zameshtan for Ashas?

Everybody was leaving now, a huge crowd of people going back to the city with lamps and torches. People crowded around me, but my people pushed them back, “let Her Holiness eat and rest!” And yes, food was what I needed, wholesome food instead of dainty nibbles, though I did tell Zahmati about the almond sauce and got her very interested.

While we were eating I told Thulo and Maha about the woman who had called me. “Only the three of us,” I said, but Khali and Bhalik insisted on coming along, “you are not going to the city without a bodyguard!”

They had a point. When I saw them in their thief clothes I thought wistfully of the black silk that Venla in Essle had lent me. I didn’t actually have any dark clothes with me — but there was something I could do. “Zahmati? Could you lend me something black to wear?”

She gave me a robe and a veil, roomy enough to wear breeches and all my weapons underneath. Maha dressed about the same, and we both blackened our faces with soot. We picked five fast long-legged camels to ride — we tried to leave so late that the city people would be back in the city, but still had to wait in order not to overtake them, and slipped through the gates as if we were the tail-end of the procession.

Then the woman called me again. On the square a bit further along, to the right, there’s a boy waiting for you.

We saw the square soon enough, and there was indeed a young man leaning against the side of a house, cleaning his nails with his knife. It was the very handsome disappearing young man we’d seen the other day — not that i was surprised. “Ah, you’re here,” he said. “Come along with me, please.”

He whistled, and a younger boy appeared and offered to watch the camels. “One Valdyan shilling,” he said. “For each camel.”

“You’ll have it when we get the camels back,” I said, and he nodded and tied the camels to a fence —limping a little, his foot was lame– and sat down beside them.

The young man took us through an archway into an alley, and suddenly we felt protection all around us — we were inside the seal! The houses weren’t by far as neat as what we’d seen when we first entered the city. Clearly they kept up the houses people would see better than this neighbourhood.

We ended up in a courtyard inside a large house, or a block of small houses, where several people were waiting for us. One was the woman who had called me, who must have been stunning when she was young and was still impressively good-looking. Next to her was a somewhat older man, greying at the temples, looking very noble in spite of his threadbare clothes. The young man looked enough like him to be his son. The last was a tall young woman so beautiful that I could imagine most men and many women falling at her feet, and indeed I heard both Thulo and Maha suppress a gasp. They were all gifted, except the man. Very gifted.

The older woman immediately grabbed my arm. “You are Officer Sedi of the Order of the Sworn? Tell me, how is my daughter? Is she alive?”

Everything fell into place then. I knew who these people were.

“I assume that your daughter is–” now get the name right– “Princess Asa? She married King Athal’s younger brother, she’s a doctor in Turenay. She has at least one child, possibly two by now.”

She let go of me, relieved, but then the man got hold of me, “have you come to fulfill my hopes? Are you the high priestess who can regain my throne for me, did King Athal send you to aid me?”

“Well, King Athal did send me,” I said, “but mostly to investigate what was going on, because we get very little news from the South and what we do get is much distorted. At the moment I’m after what’s called the Resurgence of Archan.”

He had obviously heard of that; it made him look very thoughtful. Then it was the young woman’s turn. “But hasn’t Aheste come to Valdis then? When did he leave, Mother, was it two years ago? We sent him to beg King Athal for help. He sent word from Albetire but after that we haven’t heard from him.”

“I haven’t met anyone by that name,” I said, “but of course I didn’t speak to everybody who went north from the south, and my journey wasn’t exactly in a straight line either.”

“Then I’m a widow!” she wailed. “I knew it!”

“I’ll tell you about the situation,” the king said. I had no doubt that he, and not the man currently on the throne, was the real king. “We had a war with the emperor in Ashas. It started as a disagreement about the tribute, but it escalated, as such things do, and the emperor’s armies conquered the city. We were forced to flee, could win the city back, but just as we thought that we could settle down to rebuilding what had been destroyed, the priests with the Valdyan names came.”

I nodded. “They’re not Valdyan at all that I know of, though.”

“I’m aware of that. Most of them are in fact from Ashas itself, though there is at least one real Valdyan among them. They seized control of the temple and impaled the high priestess. Lydan is the priest in charge there now, he’s got his own troops with him.”

“And the man who is on the throne now?” I asked.

“He’s not a bad sort — he means well, he’s genuinely concerned for the welfare of the city, but he is a tool of the emperor of Ashas.”

“The emperor of Ashas may himself be a tool of the Resurgence,” I said. “I understand that he’s still very young.”

“Well,” the king said, “I do hope you can put me back on my throne.”

“You wouldn’t be the first king who got his throne back with my help,” I said, “though the king of Tanim lost it only very briefly.”

“Samada’s father, isn’t it?” the queen asked. “How is Samada these days? She would be a good match for our son.”

“I’m afraid she’s already married,” Thulo said. “To Pesar, the master of our caravan.”

“That’s a pity,” the queen said. “But perhaps something can be done to change that.”

The young man flushed with anger and embarrassment. “Mother!”

“Are you a dandar?” I asked the queen.

“Of course I am,” she said.

“There’s something you should see,” the king said and took us through a passage, down a flight of stairs into a cellar. About a dozen children were there, from babies to about eight or nine years old, the older ones busy with schoolwork and the little ones sleeping. Most looked as if they were from around here, though a boy and a girl looked definitely Valdyan. I was surprised about the schoolwork in the middle of the night until I realised that of course they would swap around night and day if they were in hiding here! The king and queen and their offspring didn’t look as if they were sacrificing their sleep for us, either, though we were sacrificing ours for them.

“They were about to be taken south,” the king said. “I … bought them. It seemed the only way.”

We left them to their work and sleep. When we were back in the courtyard, a dark form came down from the roof– Bhalik, knife in hand. “You should go, right now,” he said. “We’ve been betrayed. There are soldiers coming.” He saw the king and put two and two together. “I think you and your family should leave, too.”

“Is there an exit right out of the city?” I asked. There wasn’t, but there was a shortcut to the market. The king and queen started to order people about as if they’d been preparing for this. Servants appeared: two maids and four fierce-looking armed young men. They had the children in tow, the maids carrying the smallest ones. We filed out of the back door; the king put a shackle on each child’s ankle, and he must have seen my face, because he whispered “It’s a disguise.” He did look for all the world like a merchant with his human wares!

Behind us, we heard Bhalik’s angry shouts. “Don’t you EVER do that to me again!” That probably wasn’t the soldiers, so I went to look what was happening. Our nine young hunters were there, or at least most of them. “We were interested so we came along! We just wanted to see if we could surprise you!” one said. Well, this wasn’t the time and the place to surprise someone!

“But are there real soldiers, or is this the whole alarm?” I asked.

“Oh, there are real soldiers all right. Two lots. But we delayed one lot a bit, led them into an alley with a ditch, and two broke a leg each and the others can’t get past.”

“Go and delay the other lot too, then,” I said, “at least you’ll be doing something useful.”

“Already tried that, they’ve got a sergeant with eyes in his head.”

I sent them away– we’d need to leave the town as if we were ordinary market-goers. Good thing that Maha and I were robed and veiled like many of the women here, otherwise we’d stand out much too much even with our darkened faces.

In a corner of the market, we saw a man selling camels that looked strangely familiar. “Go for it?” Thulo asked, and Maha and I nodded.

Someone was already negotiating for the camels, but Thulo tapped the man on his arm and said “Excuse me, I think I know those camels.”

“Really? They’re the best in the market, I assure you.”

“How did you come by them?” I asked. “Did you happen to buy them from a boy, about this high, with a lame foot?”

“I bought them from a Valdyan merchant, lady,” he said, “Vurian astin Velain, right there on the palace side. Red hair pale skin, freckles on his nose.”

“Hm, I know Vurian astin Velain,” I said. He broke into a grin. “The last time I saw him — yes, he does have red hair and pale skin and freckles. He is also no more than six years old.”

“That will be a namesake, noble lady. Do you want to bid for these camels or can I continue negotiating with this gentleman?” But the other customer had lost interest and left. “You’ve chased my customer away!”

“That’s no problem,” Thulo said, “because those camels are my camels.”

“When you pay for them, sure,” the merchant said. “And if not I’ll call the market watch. You’re chasing away the real customers.”

“Do we really need to go to all this trouble for five camels?” Maha asked, just as the man began to shout for the watch. We fled, catching up with the king and his family in a street leading out of the city.

On the way we saw a patrol of soldiers who looked very much like certain people we knew — all very young, in ill-fitting uniforms, three with black skin, three with light brown skin, three with mud-drab skin. They had two quite pretty girls with them as well, who were not in uniform but in worn work-clothes. I grinned at the ‘sergeant’ and he grinned back, but we didn’t speak to each other.

We took a different route out of the city than we’d taken on the way in. There was still trade going on here, but it was much more shady and furtive, and there were people in the road smoking something that smelt sweet, not the way brus is sweet but more dusky and heady, One man was lying in the road, passed out, and Thulo helped push him out of the way of a hand-cart. “What’s he been smoking?” he asked.

“Opium,” the carter said, and when we looked blank, “poppy.”

“Oh!” I said, “we use that to put people to sleep when they need a leg sawn off or something. Makes you sleep all day and wake up with a headache. But they drink it, they don’t smoke it.”

“Stuff from the south,” the carter said, “don’t touch it myself.”

We got back to the caravan at daybreak, just in time for the morning service. Prince Sharab came up to me, “are you going to take the first service, or shall Cheliân and I do that?”

“I didn’t know you were serving!” I said.

“Yes, Cheliân asked me to help yesterday.”

Well, the more people who could, the better! I’d been thinking of getting more acolytes anyway, men and women who were called and wanted to learn. It was a pity that the elder prince wasn’t gifted — and I didn’t think I could make him so. But perhaps the gods could? — It was almost heresy to even think about that.

After the service it was time to adminster justice.

I used the platform in the temple to sit on — someone had brought a camp chair. Maha brought the girl Dayapati, and two soldiers brought her owner, Iman astin Denesh — strange that he had astin in his name, as if he wanted to make it clear that he belonged to a house — who insisted he had done nothing wrong.

I called Ababe as a witness; the other doctors would perhaps know more but they didn’t have so much standing in the caravan. Yes, she could certainly testify that the girl had been abused. The man wouldn’t admit it, of course. “Do you know this girl?”

“She’s my slave. I paid two cartwheels for her.”

“Two cartwheels. Write that down,” I said to my clerk, and to the crowd at large, “Are there any other slaves here who have been abused in this way by their masters?” I got no response, and hadn’t expected any, but now I’d sown the seed and it would come up in its own good time.

“What is the value of your trade goods?” I asked the man.

“I’d have to ask my clerk that,” he said, and I had the clerk fetched: eighteen thousand cartwheels.

“Write half of that down, under the two cartwheels,” I told my clerk.”Do you have a wife?”

“Yes, in Albetire. It’s because she’s in Albetire that I used my slave for–”

“Silence. The wife gets the other nine thousand.”

Now Iman astin Denesh was starting to look worried, but he still didn’t seem to know what it was about. “Why are you asking me all of this? I haven’t done anything wrong!”

I was running out of patience. “Did you, or did you not, fuck this girl?”

“Of course I did!”

“See, he’s confessed,” I said to nobody in particular, or anyone who would listen. “In Valdyas we hang people who rape children.”

“She’s a slave!”

“She’s a child. A person, a human being. You will be hanged by the neck until you are dead. Half of your property goes to your wife in Albetire, after all it’s not her fault that you are a rapist. The other half is for Dayapati to build a life with. As well as the two cartwheels — someone better give her the two cartwheels in hand now.” The clerk got two gold coins from somewhere — probably his own purse, I’d have to reimburse him from the hanged man’s effects — and gave them to Dayapati, who stood looking at the money a little dazed.

“Take him away,” I said to the soldiers, “I don’t want to see him any more.”

I was completely drained. Around me, the crowd was cheering.

When I was leaving the temple King Mahsab came to speak to me. “Do you need to have me hanged, too?”

“Why, did you rape a slave girl too?”

He laughed wryly. “Not personally, but I sent my daughter to be married to the Enshah when she was seven years old.”

“I have it on good authority that the Enshah was too old to actually consummate that marriage,” I said, not mentioning that the good authority had been Lyse guffawing about it.

“That doesn’t change the fact, does it? I did it to cement an alliance, and when I needed Albetire in the war they didn’t send any help after all.”

That could have been because Albetire itself had been in trouble at the time, but I didn’t know nearly enough of the history of these parts to be sure. “Those things happened before Valdyan law was in force here,” I said.

“Valdyan law is the best law,” the king said.

“It’s not wrong that different countries have different laws,” I said, “but some things should apply to all. Nobody may own another person, and nobody may violate a child, or anyone dependent on them.”

“I’ll promise you something,” the king said. “If you can give me my throne back, no people will be bought or sold in Zameshtan any more, ever. Or at least as long as I and my heirs can enforce it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope the gods will grant me the power for that.”

Now I needed to work off all that tension. I found Khali and asked him to spar with me; he agreed, though he was of course as tired as I was. We were interrupted twice, too: first by some of the young hunters, who I had to tell that there was a time and a place for surprises and that that was not when people were actually working, and then by a soldier who came to ask, bashfully, whether it was really necessary to hang people sentenced to death, couldn’t they behead them next time?

“Sure,” I said, “whatever works, it’s just that hanging is what we do at home, so I’m used to that.” I wasn’t, really; I’d never even seen a hanging, only heard about it from my brother Arin when he was already in the town guard and I not yet in the Order.

Still, it was good to fight when I was tired: it made me find the extent of my ability. At some point, just when I thought I couldn’t last, Khali said ‘Enough!’, and ordered me to go to sleep and wash later. He collapsed in front of the tent and was asleep instantly; I made it to the sleeping mat.

I slept for a couple of hours, washed, and spent the afternoon being the priestess, blessing people, giving advice, looking in at the school. The school had doubled in size with all the children the king had brought. Prince Shab was in the doorway, eyeing Samada. “She is pretty,” he said, when he saw me. “Only a bit…”

“Bossy?”

“Er, yes. I wish Mother didn’t keep throwing brides at me, especially not brides who aren’t really available! But I’ll have to get married soon, I’m sixteen already, I need to provide heirs.”

“You’re the only son?”

“The only surviving son, yes.”

“And what about your sister?”

“She’s a woman!”

I was starting to tell him about King Athal’s mother and grandmother who had both been ruling queens in their own right when Queen Gorbe appeared, pulled him aside and started to talk to him in urgent whispers. I saw him blanch, then blush, set his jaw and stalk away with some difficulty.

“What was that about?” I asked, though I was practically sure I knew.

“My son should start thinking about heirs,” she said.

“I don’t hold with dandar influence in our part of the camp,,” I said.

“It’s all for the good! We worship Dayati, she wants people to be fertile. You’ve seen our palace? The avenue with the statuary?”

“Yes,” I said. “Some of the statuary is … strange, to my eyes.”

“It may offend people from the North, from other nations, but for us all celebration of life is equally sacred to Dayati. You should see the dome of the temple, it’s all painted, there’s no figure on there that isn’t linked to another.”

She was trying to distract me. “I don’t want dandar inflluence in our part of the caravan,” I said.

She kept protesting, in much the same words.

“I forbid dandar doings in my household,” I said, and that finally made her leave.

A man approached me with as many as ten women, all shackled to a chain. I startled, but he gave me a key: “Your Holiness! Please free my women and give them names.” By now I had a short form of the name-giving, introducing people to the gods several at a time, and I went into the temple to do that, asking Cheliân and Prince Sharab to think of names for me because I still didn’t want to give the names I’d grown up with, not even those of my family, until the Resurgence stopped using them too.

Thulo and Maha were nowhere in sight; later I found out that they’d been practicing with Birune and Shab to protect themselves against dandar influence, getting tired and irritable but they said they’d learned a lot, “but not nearly enough yet!”

After tne evening service the young hunters came back from town. The pretty girls were with them and so were five camels we knew! They were heavily laden with something I didn’t recognise immediately. “Have you robbed the robbers?” I asked.

“That, too,” one of the Ishey said. And– well, let her tell it.”

“Well, we are –” she stuck out her hands, which were red and chapped.

“Washerwomen,” I said.

“Yes. We wash the soldiers’ uniforms. And we brought five camel loads of those.”

“Hm, how many uniforms would that be?” I was already thinking of putting some of our soldiers in enemy uniforms so they would be able to infiltrate the city.

“Dunno, fifty?”

We were really making plans now. If we could get into the temple and deal with the priest, the rest might even be easy. I made a seal around our group by the fire — Birune and Shab thought it was too flimsy, theirs were much firmer! But they’d never realised that Iss-Peranian seals gave themselves away by looking like a patch of nothing at all. Like the one on the temple, for one. “I think we can dismantle that,” I said, and showed Birune what the seal on the temple in the palace in Tanim had looked like.

“But that one’s made of dead people! We don’t make our seals of dead people, and the temple seal isn’t either! Even though they have the sacrifices.”

“No– and I don’t know how it is made, we should learn that from you.” Even to make it ourselves, in case we ever wanted to give the impression that dandar were hiding somewhere.

“Oh, I’ll gladly teach you,” she said. She and her brother grinned at each other and Shab posed himself in front of me — he was handsome indeed, with the sweet innocence of a new journeyman, so attractive —

“Hey! Stop that!” I said, and they grinned some more and the feeling stopped. I shook myself, realising that yes, I’d definitely have to learn defense against that too. I’m not usually tempted like that, and if this worked on me…

“What if we build our temple around theirs?” Thulo asked. It would probably be large enough, unless the temple was connected to the palace. I didn’t think we’d be able to build the temple of Anshen around the whole palace compound, even if everybody in the caravan carried a stone into the city!

We called the washerwomen, who were now sitting at the hunters’ fire, one with a Khas’ arm around her shoulders and the other sharing a leg of goat with one of the Ishey. “How many soldiers are there?” I asked. There were five hundred, exactly as many as our own army. “I wonder if we can get some on our side,” I said, but they advised against that, suppose they told the rest!

That was a good point. It wouldn’t be possible to steal all the other uniforms and disguise our whole army as the enemy either. But there were three watches, and Maha suggested to change a whole watch with our own soldiers in the uniforms we already had. If you were in an army with five hundred others, you wouldn’t be surprised if your relief happened to be a man you didn’t know.

We’d have to delay or distract the real watch, of course, but that was a problem princes and soldiers could solve, or our hunters who’d done that to a patrol already. And there were a couple of thousand people in the caravan to enlist as reinforcements: every man and most of the women could use weapons or at least tools.

The only question was when. And knowing what we knew now, the answer would probably be ‘tomorrow’.

GM: “We can’t really call it ‘priest’ any more, she’s in fact a bishop.” And she’s about to be an ambassador, and will be a judge next…

We sat with Pesar’s wives for a while afterwards with food and wine. Pesar himself went back to his meeting, walking much less painfully. Dunya beckoned Maha to follow her into the tent and we heard whispers and giggles. (An experienced woman giving tips to a young woman? Might be useful, and it sounded fun from where I was.)

The children were still running around. “You take those scamps back, please, Samada,” Ababe asked. When she’d rounded them all up and gone off with them, Ababe pulled me closer. “I’d like to say this when she’s not present, and the children either. You see, we like our younger sister a lot, but I am already a lot younger than our husband, twenty-two years, and Samada is more than thirty years younger! It would never have occurred to me before, well, before everything changed so much.”

It’s not an ordinary caravan any more, Dunya had said last time. I’d never seen an ordinary caravan but I was more than willing to believe it.

“She’s still almost a child,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“You see, if Pesar wouldn’t want to marry her now — I think he’s changed as well — we’d still welcome her as our sister, she could stay in our household, or go on and do something completely different. If it’s what the gods made her for, it’s all right wi th us.”

Then Maha and Dunya came out of the tent, still giggling, and we went on to discuss wnat Ababe called “women’s affairs” — mostly to do with health, and Thulo stayed around for it. Ababe knew that there were at least two more dandar in the caravan, both married and not active any more, and probably several others who didn’t want to show themselves. “We’ll have to get together to talk,” I said, and the others agreed and Ababe would arrange it. It would probably be ‘they’, not ‘we’, because I tended to be called away all the time, but Thulo and Maha would be able to handle it without me anyway.

As we got back to our tent there were five women already waiting for us, looking like whores and so they were– but they were all dandar as well. The youngest one, younger than Maha, had been dandar in training when she’d run away from home because she wanted to get pregnant and wasn’t allowed. One of the others hadn’t wanted to make women get pregnant if they didn’t want to, and everybody else had her own story why they’d gone with the caravan and earned a living with the skills they had learned. They had heard of the plan to practise as doctors, and they wanted in.

“Well, come to the meeting,” Maha said, and then, to the girl, “You’re alreaady pregnant! It’s a boy. About halfway through.” And to me, “Don’t you think we need another maid for the household? Zahmati has more work than one person can handle, with all the extra people here.”

“Yes,” I said, “and I can see by your dress that you know about clothes. You’ll need something more practical to wear here, though.”

“Ask Aftabi to raid my kit-bag,” Maha said.

“Or my leather trunk,” I said, “we have plenty of Ishey clothes, and we’ll probably be able to do laundry soon.”

The girl was quick on the uptake. “I heard you’re going to give names– can I have one too? Now they just call me” –she lowered her voice– ‘that one with the narrow butt’.”

“I can do that,” Maha said, and laid a hand on the girl’s face and screwed up her eyes. “Just be in the temple tomorrow. I know what fits you.”

The women went away to talk to Ababe, and Thulo took Maha for a walk. I went through my books, but of course I didn’t have any name-giving services, so I wrote down what I remembered from name-givings in the family so I wouldn’t have to improvise everything. Then I took my sword and went to find Khali for a workout.

Khali had rounded up the most gifted of the young hunters to make light, shifting all the time, so I was tempted to close my eyes altogether and see only with my mind’s eye but that wouldn’t have been wise, not with a sword I wasn’t completely used to and not against Khali. He did hit me a couple of times, but no worse than bruising, and I think I nicked the skin of his wrist. It reminded me a bit of the obstacle course at the Order house in Essle, difficult and unexpected and exhilarating.

Then Khali and I stood back to back and defended against all the young people at once. I was so tired by then that I was holding the sword in two hands and sweeping in long arcs. “Enough!” Khali said, and I collapsed, dripping with sweat.

“Thank you!” I said. “That was the best fight in ages!”

“Thank you! I learned things too. You’re a mean fighter.” He was sweating as badly as I was, and one of the Khas girls handed us a towel and one of the Ishey a pitcher of water.

“You’re good! Aftabi said. “Both of you!”

“Not as good as I’d like to be,” I said. “If you ever become queen somewhere, do get people on your side who are better at some things than you are.”

Thulo and Maha had come back while we were at it, and Maha was insufferably smug and giggly. I didn’t want to know what they’d been talking about!

The following morning we were in the temple early, but the palace children and our new maid were there before us. I started with the naming– the children were small enough to lift, but I let them stand and turned each of them to the west, the south, the east and the north as well as I could estimate, introducing them to the gods by their new name. I said “who was born into this world” rather than “who we have brought forth”, never mind if they had been born six or eight or fourteen years ago. The little girl was Luljhul, the boy Kenemme, the young woman Satta.

It made me feel all light inside, with both brightness and buoyancy, and I thought I saw a pale-skinned girl of about ten with a long yellow-blonde braid somewhere in the crowd, who had to be Timoine because if there had been someone with those looks in the caravan I’d have seen her much earlier. I winked at her, and she winked back. Later I heard that Thulo had also seen Dayati, in the form of a brown boy with a head of curls and an infectious smile.

We were so close to Zameshtan now that Thulo went to talk to his cargo handler. I knew we had one, I’d seen him when we set out — a small man with a nose that had been broken and a cauliflower ear as if he had led a life with much fighting in it, but well-dressed and with a neat goatee now. I tagged along, not because I had any trading to do myself, but because this man probably knew much more about the city than anyone else I had easy access to.

I learned that Zameshtan was a place where people bought food and cloth to make clothes and other things for the rest of the journey, bought and sold camels, and did some trading wth the caravans from Jomhur and Il Ayande and ‘the distant Kushesh’ that met those from Albetire here. They’d have more exotic goods, pearls and whale sperm and other products of the sea. Most trade goods would fetch more money in Ashas, but doing a bit of trading here could be profitable anyway: some people did it for fun, some for practice if it was their first journey, and some to have a better mix of cargo.

We’d also need money for the tolls along the way from Zameshtan to Ashas, and the cargo handler calculated that at a tenth of the value of the cargo. Thulo had one camel laden with gold and one with silver, so it should be enough.

In Zameshtan itself one of the most special things was goldsmith’s work: though it cost five times as much for the same weight in gold as it would in Albetire, it was at least ten times better! And as the noble lord Thulo seemed to have tender relatoins with an exotic princess… Talking of princesses, Zameshtan was famous for having the most beautiful girls in the world, the handler could provide the master with a dozen of them who he could sell in Ashas for a lot of money! (Fortunately, Thulo didn’t take him up on that, not even to test him.)

At least it was quiet again here, a couple of years ago there had been a war between the people of Zameshtan and “the foreigners from the south”. They’d even succeeded in driving the king away, he’d come back, and had been driven away again.

The cargo handler had been a trader himself, but he had an unfortunate habit of gambling and lost all of his money and, as I understood, at least two of his wives. Trying to interest Thulo in gambling didn’t work, but Thulo offered him a hundred cartwheels as a loan to trade or wager as he saw fit, and give the hundred back intact, keeping any profit or shouldering any loss himself. The man thought that was a good plan and called his slave-boy, who brought pen and paper to write the contract, and a hefty book to keep the contract in. The cargo handler wrote it, Thulo read it and agreed and signed it with his name.

When the boy put the contract between the pages of the book, he quickly tore off the bottom with Thulo’s name and slipped that under his gold collar. The boy’s stolen your signature, I warned Thulo.

“Could I see the contract again?” he asked. “Just to make sure we got it right?” The handler agreed readily, but the boy was gone, book and signature and all.

I was worried that the boy would forge Thulo’s signature, or give it to someone else to forge it. When the young hunters heard what had happened they divided into three groups, one from each people in each group, and disappeared into the caravan to search. We didn’t see them all day while we were travelling, but when we were making camp they came back, dragging the boy with them. “But we don’t have the paper with your name on it! It doesn’t exist any more.” It turned out that the boy had been boiling the paper in water, to make an infusion– holy name tea! And selling sips of it to other children for coins, food and other small things. Those other children had come along, a dozen or more of them.

We couldn’t get the boy to explain himself, but a slightly older girl volunteered, “It’s a magic draught! From the Holy Name! It makes you free and you get a name of your own!”

Oh, gods.

It was very hard to explain –and I still don’t know if they all got it– that soaking someone’s name in water didn’t make it magic, that that wasn’t what made you free, though people ought to be free and it ws asn’t right that they were slaves and that people had slaves at all. I could give them names of their own, and would do that if they wanted, but it was their masters who could make them free. We probably had enough money to buy all those children, but that wouldn’t solve the problem: buying slaves in order to set our own slaves free felt just as wrong. And if we did get these children free in some way– we couldn’t very well free every slave in Iss-Peran, every slave in the world!

It was clear that Thulo didn’t know what to say either, but Maha prodded him in the side and said “If you don’t do something right now it’s over between us!”

One boy said, “you should talk to my master! Roushan, she has the green tent, over there.” Then he went back to the other children who had already gone off with Samada and Zahmati and Satta to run around playing tag.

‘Over there’ there was indeed a green tent where a middle-aged woman sat, talking with a younger woman who I recognised because she’d asked me for a blessing. “Mistress Roushan?” I asked.

“Holiness! What gives me this honour? Will you take some wine?”

“No, thank you, not before I have said what I came to say.” I needed all my wits about me, and moreover drinking wine with someone I’d come to castigate would give the wrong impression.

That was hard. I didn’t have the words. I’d grown up in a world without slaves. Some of the people at the farm were servants, of course, but they could leave and take another job, they didn’t belong to us. And children owed obedience, and we did get beaten if we broke the rules — I remembered the incident with me and Arin and a neighbour’s peach tree — but we weren’t our parents’ property. But these people were convinced that the gods made some people into masters and other people into slaves, and that that was the divine order of the world that mere mortals shouldn’t mess with, Or perhaps that was what they thought because it was convenient to them, or merely what they had grown up with, but that didn’t make it any easier to explain.

That the queen of Valdyas forbade slavery was one thing, and her husband was the king who made earthquakes so the gods must listen to them, but what was her reason to forbid it?

Then either Thulo or I stumbled on the right phrasing: if you owned a slave, you were in fact stealing their life and their choices. That hit home with these merchants! It worried them, too: wouldn’t the god who makes lightning take revenge, now that they knew they’d done wrong? The gods don’t punish those who do wrong out of ignorance, but now that they were no longer ignorant…

“The gods won’t punish you for ceasing to do wrong,” I said, “nor for having done wrong when you were still ignorant.” I couldn’t speak for the Nameless, of course, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. They still weren’t completely convinced, “so who does all the work in Valdyas?” — I could hardly explain everything about work and money and employment in Valdyas, when I knew only a little bit myself! But at least they were willing to make amends. A friend of Roushan’s had come along with a jug of wine, and when he saw me gone back to get better wine, and yes, now I could accept a drink, and also his offer of a clerk to sort out how much compensation to pay the slaves when they were freed.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll pay him, of course.”

“You can pay me,” he said, “he’s my– Oh!”

“I’ll pay him,” I said with a smile.

The evening service was full of people who all wanted names. I still refused to give anyone a Valdyan name, but Thulo had a Síthi name for almost everyone, and I think I gave some Ishey and Khas and Plains names too. Not only the dozen children who had drunk the magic tea, but also lots more children and some adults, and the very last ones were a young couple hand in hand. “I suppose you’ll want to get married too,” I asked, and yes, indeed! I expected that they weren’t the only ones either. “Tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’ll need running water for that.” It was probably too much to hope for a spring, but I thought someone who knew this country better than I did would find me a spot by the river.

“But can you at least bless us now so we can make love?” the young woman asked. “Sure,” I said, and gave them my blessing, and they went away blushing and giggling.

The second service –the last today, the other one had been long and exhausting– was full of soldiers, so I ended with the Soldiers’ Song of Praise that I knew well enough but had only ever sung on the Feast of Anshen, never on an actual military occasion.

Prince Ishan, the elder one, stayed behind after the service. “We have a lot of recruits,” he said, “more than a hundred men.”

“Who used to be slaves?”

“Yes, and also from the villages. Some of them are hardly more than boys. Would it be possible to have some kind of special blessing for them?”

“I’ll come to your camp tomorrow,” I promised. Blessing soldiers, yes, receiving recruits, that was something I had been trained for. I might even do it in uniform, if it was in any kind of presentable state.

Zahmati had made a huge cauldron of porridge, and all the children were eating when I came out of the service. I sat down next to Thulo and ate my own porridge, thinking, before I could talk.

“Did Maha blackmail you just now?” I asked Thulo.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “just stated the obvious.”

Then, of course, some of the children wanted to know what blackmail was, and I tried to explain as best I could. That led to a general airing of grievances, most of them child-sized ones but no less important for that, and they were talking about how to settle those. “Let’s all forget everything you’ve done to each other,” I said, “when you have a new name you can be a new person!”

“Do I need to forget what my master did to me, too?” a girl asked. Maha took her in her arms and put a hand on her head. “No,” she said, “we’re not going to forget that. We’re going to do something about it.” And she told me silently what exactly the master had done. I’ll have to start administering justice next. In Valdyas we hang people who rape children, and I don’t rule out that it will come to that.

Then there was another thing: it’s all right that children work, after all they’ll have to keep earning a living, but they do have to learn, too. We’d have to have some kind of school. We were already thinking how to do that, Thulo teaching while I held a service and vice versa, when someone thought of Samada. “Oh! May I really do that?” she asked when we posed the question. “Teach everybody to read and get to tell them what to do?”

“Only when it’s about learning,” I said.

“That’s all right.” Mornings and evenings during the service, then. Only one service — I’d said at the beginning that I’d only do one morning service, but we now seemed to have two services after all — so Samada and the children could also go to the temple if they wanted.

Eventually, we got all the children off our hands, and could do our nightly sweep. The city was very quiet, with much fewer gifted people than I expected in a place of that size — would they all have gone south or been taken south? There was one person we couldn’t pinpoint though we kept seeing him: clearly a man, when we briefly saw him, appearing and disappearing and slipping through everything, not affiliated with any god we knew, but so gifted.

I’d expected someone to show me a place by the river for the marriages, but we did it in the temple: my village acolyte had filled a large jug with water and poured that over each couple’s hands as I said the words. I don’t remember what words, I said what came to mind, and the Mother must have been there because it made everybody happy. Each bride and groom drank the water from each other’s hands, which I don’t think is the Valdyan way –but I don’t know, of course, never having seen a marriage– but it was a great image.

After half a dozen couples had come to be married a richly-dressed man came up to me with a young man on one hand and a young woman on the other. “Would you marry these people too? I offered them their freedom when they’re married, provided their children will belong to me.”

“I don’t marry slaves,” I said.

“But I’ll free them!”

“They are not free now, and I won’t marry the future parents of slaves either. Anyone who comes to me of their own accord and asks me I’ll marry, that’s a different thing.”

He went away in a huff, but the young people stayed behind and said “We don’t want to marry anyway, we’re brother and sister! Slept in the same cradle!”

“The queen of Valdyas doesn’t permit that either, not at all!” I said.

Marrying people is exhilarating, almost as much as giving names to children, and though I knew I was tired my spirit felt full of vigor.

It was only half a day until the outskirts of Zameshtan, along a river that was now running south from the mountains, and we made a somewhat more permanent camp because we were going to stay for several days. When we were just settling, a woman came to our tent who turned out to be the madam of one of the caravan brothels. “Would you bless my girls?” she asked. “And tell them how to be healthy? There are so many soldiers now, they’ve got much more work. Not that they mind, it brings in loads of money, but we do want to be careful.”

Maha, Thulo and I went with her and found about a dozen women, from just a bit younger than me to middle-aged, and Maha and Thulo looked them over in a tent while I stood outside with Khali and Bhalik –who had said that we shouldn’t go to that part of the caravan without bodyguards– and blessed each one as she came out. I talked to the madam about justice, and law, and told her that I had a book written by Queen Raisse herself with an overview of the laws of Valdyas. It was time to have laws for the caravan, and I’d have my clerk translate the parts that applied into a language that people here could understand. There were at least two women among those who were listening who I could feel thinking about magic tea from the pages– I’d have to keep the book very safe!

Maha and Thulo came out of the tent, looking tired. “Well, six of them have the harbour sickness,” Thulo said, “and we can hardly check all five hundred soldiers for it!” (But perhaps we’d have to…) “Six hundred soldiers,” I said, and that reminded me of my promise to the prince. “I’d better go to the army camp for the recruits’ service!” I said. They took one of the women to the hospital tent, because she needed more than a bit of copper salve. And after that they’d be working on the little girl, too. Both the woman and the girl had to learn to trust men again, to know that there were men in the world who wanted to help them, not to hurt them.

There was an impressive-looking little fort in the army’s area. “As we’re staying here for a bit we wanted to do it properly,” Prince Ishan said. I regretted that I hadn’t put on my uniform after all, but I’d only thought of blessing the women. Nobody seemed to mind that I was in not quite clean Ishey clothing, though, least of all the recruits. A hundred earnest young men, who I treated almost like new journeymen in the Order, except that there were so many that I could only repeat each one’s name as they told it to me, and not remember them to use in the prayers.

The prince thanked me warmly. “This means so much to me,” he said. “to fight for the good god, to lead my people. It’s such a blessing to see the world that the gods have made, in the night, under the stars– I can really sense the presence of — Anshen — then.” Clearly he’d only just learned the name, it was still awkward on his tongue. It was such a pity that he wasn’t gifted, because otherwise I’d have suggested that he join the Order in Albetire — he had everything else that it took. Perhaps I could find some gifted pious soldiers and train them to hold soldiers’ services, and then Ishan could have a post as “protector of the temple” or something like that and use the gifts that he did have.

Back in our tent I called for the clerk who Roushan’s friend had lent me, and showed him the law book. “This book should stay here, nobody is allowed to touch it except you and me and Thulo,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s a holy book.”

“Not so holy that it’s useful to soak it in water and drink that!” I said. “It would be a hassle to lose it, I’d have to write to Valdis for another copy and that would take a year or more, if my letters even arrive.”

“Magic potions are a superstition of slaves,” he said, but he did kiss the book reverently. He proposed writing a summary of each chapter, so I could decide which laws were relevant for the caravan and had to be translated in full. He started right away, with the book on a cushion and the stack of paper he was writing on on another. Later, when I saw the summary, I couldn’t read it at first, until I discovered that it was in trade Iss-Peranian but written with Valdyan letters: when I read it aloud I could understand myself.

Just as I was taking my sword and trying to find Khali to have another training bout, Kenemme came running to say there was someone to see me. Priestess work, I thought, but it was a man from the court with a bevy of soldiers on camels as well as a fairly large elephant with an uncovered box on its back. He had come to invite me “and my entourage” to take the evening meal with the ruler of Zameshtan. (Who couldn’t be the king, because the king had been driven away! Well, we’d see.)

It was clearly part of this man’s job to wait, so I could make him wait for me without any qualms! I called Thulo and Maha who were just finishing the healing, and sent Kenemme to fetch Aftabi, and found my uniform and shook it out and dressed in it and armed myself carefully, while the court flunky was cooling his heels.

Eventually not only the four of us went, but also all nine of the young hunters who wouldn’t be left behind, and I asked both of the princes to come along with a company of soldiers, so we were a good thirty people. Apparently the court flunky thought that was normal, at least he didn’t show any surprise or disapproval.

We rode through the outskirts of Zameshtan: it was a lively neighbourhood, with children playing in the streets, trade going on, not the bitter poverty of the shanty-towns of Essle: rather like the north side of Valdis, but flat and white and extensive. And there, Thulo saw the man we’d seen in our sweep, the furtive one, just for one moment but long enough to notice that he was a very attractive young man, even to Thulo who usually looks only at pretty girls.