CHAPTER V

…early spring, the night after the full moon

Cloud was gathering on the mountains, threatening to hide the stars and the moon, only a day past its full, all the light Nikeh needed. She could pass as Westron—which she was—and as an initiate or even a priest. She knew the prayers of the lower circles. Languages, history, arithmetic, the nature of plants and the movements of the stars, Teacher had taught her these things and many more. Sword and knife and bow…All that, given to her. She had wanted only to grow in knowledge and in skill, to become what her Teacher was. But there was no wizardry in her.

And Teacher had abandoned her, once she had gone to take the prisoner to the city, to the wardens or whoever had had need of him. Yesterday a letter had come, carried by a messenger of the Nabbani ambassador’s house but penned by the Northron wizard who guarded the god, an unfamiliar hand. It made it far more final, somehow, to hear Teacher’s words—Tiypurian words and script, which she was surprised the Northron knew, save the joke about grammar, which was in Nabbani syllabics and the ancient characters at the centre of the joke. It was proof the Northron, who looked a shabby mercenary, was a scholar of surprising knowledge, and proof moreover that the words in the letter really were Teacher’s own. Hateful though they were to read.

She was loved. She was never to forget that.

She would rather have had not the words, but a summons to join Teacher wherever it was she went.

But that, like so much else, was apparently now beyond wishing for. No one even knew where or when Scholar Jang had gone.

It did make this night’s work easier. She felt guilty, to be grateful for that. Nikeh’s intention had formed when first they learned the name of the general commanding the desert army. Dimas, Prince Dimas. Lord of Emrastepse, wherever in the cold hells that might be, the Warden of the Western Wall had said.

“On the coast,” had been her answer, from her place at Teacher’s side, startling him. He had not truly meant a question. “A little place of no account. You would call it a village.”

There had been something hot and hard growing within her chest. A hunger that had been in her nearly all her life, unfolding like a chick from the egg. In Marakand, all the long years—not so many at that—it had stirred, wanting to live, and she had kept it balled up tight. Not yet, she had told it. Not now. Not safe. Marakand was a city of law and of scholar-wizards, and even strangers who were not citizens could rely on the protection of the street-guards, the justice of the magistrates, the services of diviners of the ward-courts to seek out their murderers.

She never confessed this desire to Teacher. Nor to her friend, her best and only comrade her own age since the days when Teacher had been tutor to the son and daughter of a queen in the north.

Lia Dur had been a street-guard, a patrol-first. They had met when Nikeh was out wandering long after the last curfew-bell had rung, which should have cost her a fine, but she was the apprentice of Scholar Daro Jang and Lia had a fascination with travellers and travellers’ tales. Which had grown into a fascination with Nikeh, or a friendship, or—it was hard to know how to be herself. She had been other people so long. Teacher’s little girl, Teacher’s apprentice…but a new person every time Teacher changed her own name. She was always Nikeh, her own name, but who, underneath, was that?

Someone who walked the streets of Marakand at night, stalking, lying in wait, for the priests she had never killed.

But now they were at war, and the red priests who had lived in the mission-house in the Suburb and strutted the city streets in arrogance, enemies and spies under the shield of the law and the god they plotted to destroy, had fled before they could be arrested, west into the arms of Prince Dimas’s advancing army.

Priests of the third circle. Mere teachers.

They no longer interested her.

And Lia Dur, a soldier now, had listened to one more of Nikeh’s traveller’s tales, and had said, not, “You can’t,” or “Don’t,” or “The captains of the towers and the Warden of the Wall have to decide that sort of thing,” and most of all not, “Your mistress won’t allow it.” She had said, “I’ll do what I can.”

The camp seemed almost deserted, but it was only sleeping. Few fires. Fuel was precious, rationed, their spies said, like grain, which followed the Westron army in camel-caravans from the Western Grass. The patrols through the laneways carried mutton-fat lanterns, dim yellow lights drifting in orderly lines, few and far between, easy to spot. People crowded together for warmth under makeshift tents. A blanket was almost worth killing for in this place, but, Nikeh guessed, there were more to go around than there had been. Winter on the caravan road had winnowed the folk.

Too many, still.

Like any town, the camp had its better neighbourhoods. Proper tents where she passed now, orderly. The priests of rank, the diviners and knights, those who could command the use of the camels of the baggage train, those who hadn’t shivered with cold in the desert winter and watched their friends lose fingers and toes to it, or cough their lives away. Not a neighbourhood where a mere fourth-circle priestess and a first-circle convert, a ragged camel-driver of the baggage train, should have any business. Heads down, no haste. Istva bumped her shoulder and they turned into a narrower way. Less open, darker…no one had seen them. They moved slowly, wary of unexpected obstacles, guy-ropes and the like, came out behind a guarded tent, larger, grander than the rest. From the wall it could be identified by the pale banner drooping from the peak, but the camp was out of range of the trebuchets on the tower platforms.

Nikeh sank down to one knee, waiting, watching. No need for speech. She felt Istva’s tension as he crouched beside her. Shivering. She didn’t want him here, didn’t need a guide any farther. No getting rid of him, though.

Four sentries guarded the sleep of Dimas. False prince, risen to his false god’s esteem through being merely the foremost of those who licked the All-Holy’s boots, or perhaps his backside.

She spent too much time with street-guards. Their vulgarity was contagious.

Four sentries. Two at the front, Istva had said, by the door, where torches burned against the night. One at each back corner.

Istva was trembling. Not fear, she thought. A hunting dog, eager to be unleashed. She herself, as well. Not fear. The guards were only an obstacle to be gotten past, as the priestess who had provided her robe had been. A woman brought by Istva into the dark beyond the watch-fires with the tale of a forager dying of a Marakander patrol’s arrow, desperate for a final blessing.

The robe was a little sticky against her back, but in the dark the stain wouldn’t show.

She crawled, keeping low. Didn’t waste time checking on Istva. If he failed to follow, if he betrayed her now—

The sentry to the left was hers. She rose up behind him, hand over his mouth, knife slicing across his throat, all her strength in drawing it back. He struggled, briefly. Weakly. She let him down, looked, then, for Istva. Shadowy movement, that was all, at the far corner. No sound beyond a faint scuffling. Hard even to judge the direction of movement, but she thought someone moved towards her, so she went to meet him. Knife ready. But it was Istva. Good.

How long till the bodies were noticed?

Long enough, Nikeh most devoutly hoped and prayed, though her goddess was long dead.

She crouched, pulling the tent wall taut by its lower edge. Canvas, not leather, and big enough to house a family or two. Dimas wouldn’t be alone, but Istva had thought there might be a clerk and a serving-man, and perhaps a couple of child message-runners.

Nikeh wiped her hand on the grass, drew the heavier knife from her boot and began slicing. Not so easy as she had hoped; it took some sawing, made a faint sound. The handle grew slick with sweat. Her boots were a flaw in her disguise; no mere fourth-circle priestess would have such good boots, or would have managed to keep them, crossing the desert after Serakallash, when the camps by night became a brutal struggle for food, for fuel, for another blanket or robe to ward off winter’s bite. A nightmare, Istva had said. He didn’t talk of how he had survived. Murders were done. Dimas had let it happen. Only the strong would come to Marakand, he had proclaimed. The All-Holy disdained the weak. They could not serve.

“Hurry,” Istva muttered at her shoulder.

Shut up, she would have said, but enough cloth had parted and she was done. She returned that knife to its sheath, picked up the other again, long and sharp as she could make it. She slipped through the slit she had made.

Istva followed, so close she felt his breath on her neck. That wasn’t what they agreed. He was to stay outside and keep watch. He had the dead sentry’s short-sword in his hand and how did he think he was going to explain that? She scowled at him to say this was her affair now, leave her to it.

Greedy of her, to want this work for her own alone. Istva’s wife was dead, his children taken into some work-camp where they were being taught to worship the All-Holy as the emissary of the Old Great Gods, if they even lived at all. Istva was Westgrasslander, and his conversion only words of his mouth, not his heart. It had been that or burning, for himself and his children too.

A night-lamp burned, small, weak flame. That was a blessing Nikeh hadn’t counted on. A curtain divided the tent and they were in the larger half of it, the back. Proper bedstead and a man sleeping there, alone. Dimas was devout, too devout to keep lovers, no room in his heart for a wife. All for the All-Holy. Dim dark shapes that were chests containing what might be of interest to the wardens of the wall and the city— records, if they kept such, plans, treasury—but she wasn’t here to fetch and carry. Two low cots—they had come in at the foot of one. Two people in each. Servants. Soldiers. Whatever. She didn’t much care. Folk of the general’s service close to hand, anyway, and the rest, more lowly, beyond the curtain in the outer room. Nikeh rose to her feet, crossed to the bed, avoiding the little table with the lamp and a thick book. Devotions? It lay open on its spine.

Dimas lay likewise sprawled on his back, arms flung wide like a baby. Such a young man. Did he feel the weight of all the deaths he carried? Not only those he had commanded in the conquest of the south of the Western Grass and the desert town of Serakallash, but all those of his own following dead in the desert, hunger and sickness and cold and thirst, and the murders in the night, when love, friendship, kinship had become worth less than a piece of a blanket or a scraping of porridge.

Probably not. It was all as the Old Great Gods of his imagination decreed, the All-Holy’s will.

He slept beneath a good heavy quilt, flung half off, though the night was chill with lingering winter. Nikeh dragged a fold of it up over the prince’s face, pressing down to be sure of silence, kneeling over him, driving her slender knife in deep, finding its home.

“Emrastepse remembers,” she hissed. Dimas jerked only the once, dead before he could twist his head away, bring an arm up to grapple. She wished she could have seen his eyes as he died.

Nikeh was off him before the welling blood could soak through. None of the other sleepers stirred, no guard called out from the other side of the canvas or the entrance.

She wiped her knife clean, wondering whether the devil knew his folk, as the true Old Great Gods knew and valued every soul they called home to their embrace, or if those tattooed for the cult were only souls, a nameless tally.

A cry, then. A man sat up on one of the cots. Istva spun on his heel and slashed as if he carried a sabre, but the blade did the job. The man fell back with a cry. Istva and Nikeh shoved one another out their rip as more cries rose.

“Get rid of the sword,” she gasped as they ran.

“No!”

“Get rid of it—we’re a priestess and a bondman, we shouldn’t have a sword.”

“Your hands are bloody.”

They were. She had thought them clean.

A shout—sentries behind, giving chase. Cries, people in other tents. Little light, and the moon failing them, the cloud that had been thickening earlier in the night covering the stars now, the mountains. Istva whirled around and she should have run, she should have left him, but she wheeled back to him and wished she had the sword she had left in the fort. Hard to hide it under a priest’s robe.

A soldier almost upon them—he didn’t ask questions. He came sword first, a swift lunge, and Istva still fought as if he had something longer with a good edge to it, and he didn’t seem any too skilled regardless.

“Give me the sword,” she said, but he didn’t hear, or he still thought her the clerk she had seemed when they first met, scouts bringing him in, another captured enemy forager who might be turned to their service. Eager to offer himself, it turned out. He had been foraging for fuel high on the steep sides of the valley where it narrowed to the pass. More than a few Westgrasslander converts had come into Marakander hands that way; very few had been willing to go back. The Westrons realized their mistake and began sending soldiers to guard them. It gave the slingers of the Malagru hillfolk who patrolled the mountainsides something to do.

Now the Westrons did not venture up from the valley bottom at all.

Istva was no sword-fighter. Better at cutting throats. Farmer, Nikeh decided. She watched her moment, dodged around and slashed low, knife in each hand now, and the soldier stumbled, his calf opened. Istva stabbed at last, struck armour, swore by some Westgrassland god and stabbed again at the man’s face. That finished him. Kicked him between the legs for good measure. Nikeh shoved both filthy knives in the sash of the tunic beneath her robe and took the fallen man’s sword, dragging Istva away.

More shouting behind them and Istva stumbled, lurching against her. She kept her hold on his arm, half dragging him. He lost his sword. There—corralled camels. Nikeh squirmed through the hurdles, tugged Istva awkwardly after her, crawling. He gave a yelp as something scraped him. Once they were in he didn’t follow her among the furry mounds of the waking beasts. He just let himself down on the trampled ground amidst the dung and prickly leavings of fodder. Nikeh went back to him, grabbed him. “Come on.”

“Hurts,” he said, and it was more a gasp than a word. Bloody lips. Arrow in his back. Oh. It had broken off when she dragged him through the fence.

“Ah, Old Great Gods…”

Leave him. Run.

She felt for the wound. Middle of his back, just aside from his spine. His breath was making strange sounds now. Bubbling. Wheezing. She rolled him over on her lap.

“Istva—” Whispering. Horns were bleating an alarm. No one was paying this pen of camels any mind. Not yet. Soldiers mustering, but all the other folk too, the undisciplined, disordered rabble that was the bulk of the army, the devout who’d followed on the All-Holy’s word. But there were diviners, too, and ambitious priests and priestesses of the seventh circle, the primates of the cult, who would be eager to prove themselves the prince’s worthy successor, find the assassin, impose order. Present the All-Holy with a situation under control when he arrived, as rumour said he would any day now.

Istva seized her hand. “Run,” he said. “Go, girl.” Something more in his native Westgrasslander. Whimpering. Pain. A plea to his god, who might or might not be dead. Maybe not, if he was from the route of the southern march, but still, they were very far away. His god might as well be gone, for all the comfort he could give.

She seized Istva’s left arm, turned it to the fading moonlight, pushed his sleeve back. Tattooed, first circle, of course he was, the price of his life, and he didn’t know what it meant, none of them did.

“Istva,” she said. “Listen, I have to—”

No time. His eyes were fixed on something beyond. But the breath yet bubbled in him, weak, his heart still labouring.

“The tattoo,” she said. “I’m going to hurt you, I’m sorry.” Stupid. What greater pain could there be?

She took her fine knife, and pinching up the skin of the dark pattern on his wrist, sliced, sawing, as if she worked the skin of a rabbit free. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. He moved weakly on her lap. “Old Great Gods, I’m sorry, Istva. I have to, to set you free.”

He was still. He was dead. His wrist oozed and her fingers clutched a lump of skin. She hurled it away. Her gorge rose and she couldn’t stop herself, but she managed to lean over and not defile him further, vomiting on the ground. That did it for the camels. Too much noise, too much strangeness, reek of blood and bile. One rose and bellowed, signal for them all to unfold, awkward and massive, threatening—she had travelled with camels when she was younger, the journey to Marakand, but she didn’t understand them as she did horses. Looked like a threat. Bells about their necks clanging. Dimas’s own baggage train, that’s what these were. “Go to the Old Great Gods,” she choked out, and the words tasted of acid and blood, which latter was her imagination. She rolled Istva off her lap and remembered what else was due, scooped a handful of dampish earth, stinking of camel, and flung it over him. “Go to the road and may your journey be short. The Old Great Gods wait for you with open arms.”

She hoped they did. She hoped she had been in time.

She hoped he hadn’t felt it, what she did. Hadn’t hated her, in that one last breath of pain.

Camels scared her. They scared lots of people. Couldn’t see a gate, but the corral was made of hurdles lashed together and she had two knives.

They surged out, bellowing, and one more small priestess among the now-scores of crowding, clamouring people, yelling of assassins, shrieking and fleeing camels…who noticed? And the night kept thickening.

She didn’t run, except when everyone else did, and always humbly, at the back of the crowd. Let herself fall behind. Turned aside into squares where the camp still lay undisturbed.

The foot of the Western Wall was a deeper blackness in the dark, but torchlight marked its line, ancient work rebuilt in the days of the false Lady and repaired again in more recent years, barring the pass of Marakand. It was nearly dawn before Nikeh could find her way there. If the sun rose before she made it back, she would have to wait for nightfall, or very likely be filled with arrows, probably by her own side. She felt an absurd sense of safety just to be in the wall’s shadow, though, when finally she made it so far. Smooth, vast blocks, like a ruin of Tiypur’s imperial past. Broken stone below, and stubby bushes—Marakand had cleared all the brush and trees away in recent years, pulled down vines, built up the fallen lines of lesser walls and watchtowers that curved to the heights, the sides of the pass, relics of long-forgotten days of war with the Stone Desert tribes or the Great Grass invasions of the days of the seven devils. A little pomegranate was trying to come up from the roots here, buds showing tiny tags of pale leaf on last year’s knee-high shoots. A dirty white rag was tied there, just a twist of cloth hardly noticeable. Enough to tell her where she was, a quarter mile from the southernmost watchtower.

She swallowed, tried to find some moisture in her mouth. Still tasted of acid, her throat sore with it. She whistled like a starling greeting the dawn and waited, realizing how weak, how shaken she felt.

She could feel his weight on her lap still.

It wasn’t him she remembered, but her brother…

Whistled again. Oh Gods, if Lia could not hear…if Lia were not there…She might scale the heights, go around the wall, which was a barrier to massed horsemen out of the deserts and the Grass, not to those who could climb the mountain paths. Would she be able to persuade a patrol of hillfolk she was no enemy? She was Westron. Remembered what she wore and peeled off the priestess’s robe, with its sticky, torn back— she hardly remembered that deed, except the feeling of satisfaction, that indeed, it was easy to kill a priest, as she had always suspected. Nikeh bundled it up and buried it under some stones. She was about to whistle one last time when the knotted rope came whispering down.

Wiped her hands on the skirt of her Marakander tunic, took a deep breath. It looked a long way up, now. Started to climb. Hand over hand, foot upon foot, reach and jerk herself higher, push and catch. Sweating. Had to stop and simply cling. Hadn’t been so bad going down, had it? Should have done as Lia wanted, gone by the steep sides of the riven pass as she had done on other nights, meeting Istva, but that would have cost her far more time. Just a shadow, still, but movement, above. Wake up, fool. Climb. Hand, hand, feet. A welcome face peered over the parapet, strong arms reached to help her haul herself up, and she tumbled onto Lia Dur’s sandals. Shaking. Shivering so hard her teeth chattered together. Exhaustion from the climb, the sleepless night. Reaction.

“I did it,” she said. “Dimas is dead.”

“I knew,” the Marakander said, hauling up the rope. “I could see the torches. I was afraid they’d taken you, though. I thought about throwing myself off the wall so I didn’t have to tell Scholar Jang, when she comes back from whatever mysterious errand’s taken her away.”

“You didn’t.”

“I swear!” Lia offered her an arm up, pulled her into an embrace, squeezing her hard, which was not exactly comfortable, armoured as the other woman was. “A scout came in from the north,” she said. “Word came just after you went down. The All-Holy’s only a day’s march away.”

And that was an enemy against whom her knife would be no more use than a child’s fantasies had ever been.

His children were long dead, and lost, their souls bereft of hope, beyond any salvation. They had gone to the road unblessed, unsigned, and the road was broken. There was no way to the Gods for them, only a slow, sad fading.

It made Philon ill, to think how many would knowingly condemn those they loved to such a horror. It made him ill, to know he had done so, and not even out of ignorance or blind prejudice, mindless adherence to the old ways and the empty worship of a long-dead goddess, but out of policy, to keep secret his own faith, so that he might continue to be a voice of quiet persuasion in his cousin’s tower, counselling her against forbidding the missionaries when they came, She would not have listened to him, had he borne the tattoo—initiate, and then his secret rise to be a priest of the fourth circle. The priest who had first inducted him had counselled against it, promised him he could much better serve in secret, that the All-Holy had need of such strong faith as his to be secret in the lightless places, hidden till the time to burn bright had come. But his children’s immortal souls had been the sacrifice. If he had known…No one could have foreseen, not the All-Holy himself. They had been meant to have been saved.

Why did he think of them now? Because Dimas had been, in some manner, like a son to him? A man he might have hoped his little one would grow into, strong in faith, in virtue, steadfast. A commander of men as his grandfather had been. Perhaps. The soul of the prince at least was safe in the embrace of the All-Holy, who was, in himself, the bridge, the true and only, to carry the souls of his faithful to the Old Great Gods, when the end of all things came.

Long ago Philon had sinned, betrayed his faith, but only in order to serve it. Killed a holy man at his princess’s command so as to be later where he might do greater good. Save lives, Philon had thought. Win lives for the All-Holy, rather than deaths for dead gods. Better quick surrender, overrun, than slow dying holding their walls. Because who would not choose life given certainty of death? Too many, it had turned out. If the princess had surrendered the tower so soon as the gate of village was opened to her enemies, so many more would have lived. They would have been called upon to renounce their desperate and futile clinging to the hollow past, they would have acknowledged the All-Holy, even if, at first, only to save their lives…but they would have come to understand the truth, to find joy in their faith, in knowing themselves saved.

His children would have been saved. Should have been, even so. He had come to them too late, kept and questioned by the commander of the attack, who knew him faithful, and yet claimed doubts, mistrust, some trick or trap—until too late, he had come, and the house had been burned over them. The rubble was too much, stones and broken tile and crockery and charred timbers, ash, all filling the cellar. There were so many dead, and so many dying, defiant, damning themselves…

The body did not matter, once the soul was gone. He had not dug through the rubble for them. They were not among the living. It was enough.

His wife had survived the taking of the tower, gravely wounded, but died on the pyres, cursing him. He on his knees, weeping, cursing, begging her…So many chose death.

How could a man of the faith, as the Westgrasslander assassin must have been, turn his back on that, once having given himself? How could he not see, be so blind? Did he not understand the horror of a lost soul’s slow decay? Did the nothingness that awaited not terrify? That assassin’s body had been found, and he or his comrades had even cut away the symbol of the faith, as if to renounce it with his body as well as his heart. Such fanaticism, blind and deaf, when the All-Holy held out his hand to save.

It was consciousness of sin, of failure, that made Philon’s thoughts walk such paths, brought again his children’s faces, their very voices, to his ears, made him want to weep not for them but for all children yet living who were denied that salvation. It was not his duty to guard the prince’s sleep. He was risen from being a mistrusted and closely watched advisor in matters related to the folk of the new-conquered town to master of Dimas’s household and eventually, his counsellor, his confidant, his right hand. Almost, sometimes, he thought, a foster-father to the youth Dimas had been, and by his sacrifice an example of what faith should be.

“The sin was not yours,” Primate Ambert said. Philon, clad only in his drawers, knelt at his feet, though he himself was, honour far above his due, of the lower step of the seventh circle, raised by the All-Holy’s own decree after the crossing of the Karas range, before the armies divided. His chest throbbed and he felt weak, as if he might faint, but he knelt for humility, not for weakness, and to abase himself for his failure. The wound, shallow but long, was a slash that began above one nipple and ended below the other; it was stitched and salved, bound and blessed. “You should not have slept so heavily, but it was not your duty to wake through the watches of the night, and if not for you we might not know even their number. What penance, though, for those who should have watched, and were deaf and blind?”

“They should atone with their lives,” Philon said. Dimas was dead. What less could they offer? “He was among the best of us. Surely most beloved by the All-Holy. He brought all of us living—all of us who were blessed in our strength and the All-Holy’s grace, across the Salt.”

That had been a terrible time, worse than the crossing of the Dead Hills, worse than the mountains, and they had had the All-Holy with them then. Those who perished through their weakness at least died in the comfort of knowing their souls would be gathered safe by the All-Holy.

Even such sinners as these two soldiers, who knelt stone-faced, awaiting the primate’s judgement, had that comfort.

Primate Ambert nodded. “Yes,” he said, and there was sorrow in his voice. “Such a failure cannot be forgiven in life. In death, there is atonement. And there are the lives of their two faithful comrades, as well, for which they may be held responsible. Where two fell, four might have prevailed, if only they had not failed in watchfulness.”

“We heard nothing, Most Blessed Primate,” one man protested. “The heathen assassins came with wizardry, they must have. We heard nothing till the Blessed Philon cried out. We nearly took them, too, but by their heathen wizardry they escaped us, not just us, all the soldiers of the prince’s own company, all the servants, half the camp was roused and they weren’t taken.”

The other said nothing, but he wept, his sobs gulping, like a child. Weak.

“Take them out,” the primate told his own guards, and the fifth-circle knight who commanded them bowed, gestured. “Let the sentence be carried out straightway. Hang them.”

The weeping man bolted to his feet with a yell of denial. Philon, still on his knees himself, swung a heavy arm around his legs and brought him down, a savage lashing pain across his chest his reward. He gasped and panted, curled up over his knees.

“My brother,” Primate Ambert said in concern, and crouched to set a kindly hand on Philon’s shoulder.

He was able to straighten up again. New blood was seeping through the bandages.

“The surgeon must attend you again.”

He managed to murmur thanks. The coward soldier was being dragged away, thrashing and wailing. The other, with greater dignity, walked, though he was trembling and fell in the tent’s doorway, and had then to be held up by two guards.

Ambert crooked a finger, summoning a lesser clerk to aid Philon to his feet. “Come to my tent. Sister Floran can tend you there. There are matters of which we must speak.” And to other men and women of the blessed departed’s household: “One of you fetch Blessed Brother Philon a clean robe.”

They passed out of the tent into the morning haze. There was already a gallows. In the past days, converts had been taken trying to slip away into the mountains, and even among these blessed and desert-tried, there were thieves, mad and desperate murders. The influence, perhaps, of the wizards and gods or demons of Marakand, driving small discontent to brew up into greater sin. A priestess of the fourth circle was praying, a blessing that exhorted the condemned men to embrace their love for the All-Holy and seek his grace and forgiveness with their last breath and thought.

They stood them on a trestle, precarious balance. One fell of his own accord or weakness before the prayer was finished, and flailing, knocked the trestle away and so hanged the other. The crowd gathered beyond the barrier of soldiers to bear witness roared.

It was surely not laughter. He saw the struggle, the jerk, as someone, probably one of their own comrades, caught the thrashing legs and hung from them, to break the soldier’s neck. And then the other. Did they deserve that mercy? Perhaps. Their sin had been unwitting, not willed. He did not draw Ambert’s attention to it.

“A Marakander in a false robe may be difficult to find,” the primate was saying. “But Westgrasslander tattoos are harder to hide or to feign. Did you see the pattern on his face?”

“Unfortunately, no. Only the darkness, enough to know he was tattooed.”

“They won’t have acted alone. Their allies will be found.”

“Apostates,” Philon said heavily. “Or heathens who have infiltrated the camp. I wish—why are people so blind? Why can they not see? To die and damn your soul to wander till it withers away to nothing, lost to the Old Great Gods—to condemn your children to such a doom—” It made him sick. Sometimes he thought he should have taken his children and gone to some place where one might hold the faith openly, seen them initiated, saved. Abandoned all thoughts of greater duty.

Selfish sin, to think so? Perhaps.

He had sacrificed his children’s souls to better serve the All-Holy. He had murdered and lied, and made his life a lie. Others had been saved, by that sacrifice. Not all the folk of the village had resisted. Not all had burned. The All-Holy did bless him.

“There must be a new prince of Emrastepse,” Primate Ambert said. “You were kin of the former lords of that folk, were you not?”

“My grandfather was prince, and my uncle, before my cousin.”

“Did it never gall you, that the tower was appointed to Dimas, an outsider, when you were of the faith, and, by natural law and the laws of our land, its living heir?”

“I’ve only ever sought to serve the All-Holy how best I might. The folk would not have had me, then. They thought me traitor.”

“Even though they had seen the true road to the Gods and given their hearts and souls to the All-Holy?”

“Even then.”

“And now?”

“We’ve been long away. Only the Old Great Gods know who among us shall ever reach home. It will be as the All-Holy wills.”

“Indeed,” said Ambert.