“Will I be a knight, Father?” Seth asked as they marched into the sea of sand and rock.
“You will,” Geldar answered from the depths of his hood. “The Hierarch has sent you here, and the knight’s path is the best means to show you are worthy of his trust and Hyperion’s mercy. Let your faith guide you and you will be rewarded with faith in return. Do you understand, my boy?”
“I think so.”
Seth was thirteen. He’d met the Hierarch in Ilium, kneeling, and tried to still his shaking bones the entire time.
The man wore so much gold that he glowed like the sun himself. Surely he could see into Seth’s heart, read his every thought.
The worry had eased when they’d left Ilium, heading north. With the ocean far behind, the air dried.
The fields of green wheat, apple trees, and grape arbors shifted to harder ground. Geldar led them around the great chasm that nearly split Aegea’s south from the north. He told Seth how it was a wound from the demon wars, the place where Helios had fallen in battle.
They trekked beyond its depths, passing into the red sands of Teshur.
The monasteries lay there, resting high atop five narrow mountains that rose like fingers from the desert.
The grit wore the skin inside Seth’s shoes. He took it as penance and did not complain.
They slept at night in the lee of stones that had soaked up the sun’s warmth, to fend off the sudden cold and hide from whatever dwelled here. The rocks were riddled with curving lines, carvings like the trails of worms through an apple.
Geldar kept his satchel unclasped and his hood raised. He must be sweating inside his robe, and Seth wondered if that was how he performed penance.
The sun lightened his hair to a golden yellow and reddened his skin. The linen tunic he wore did little to cover him, but he considered the sun’s fire cleansing. It had to be. It must be.
At night, the moon shone, a waning crescent that lit the waves of sand stretching out before them. In a few days it would disappear when she reached the Underworld, then emerge again when she returned, reborn and ready for her next cycle, her next death.
Seth slept with a blanket, his crooked arm his only pillow. He did not rest well without the sounds of the city around him. The silence felt too different, but he also felt free, like the two of them were alone in all the world.
After a few days of nothing but sand, Geldar pointed ahead.
“We must pass through Open Skies on our way to Teshur. It’s a trade village. I want you to stay close to me, Seth. Do not wander off. Do you understand?”
He understood. He wasn’t a child.
“It’s dangerous,” he said.
“Yes,” Geldar said. “In more ways than one. These lands are outside the bounds of a polis. No prince or priest rules here. Faith in Hyperion, in any of the gods, has not reached these people. Some still follow the demons and many a traveler has gone missing.”
Seth trembled at the mention of the gods’ enemies.
The ignorant, the lost, still worshipped the greater demons.
They’d bred with beasts, made abominations, the sort of monsters the Knights of Hyperion had hunted during the wars.
They should be extinct, but rumors always said they still existed in the wild places or on the continents beyond the horizon.
Seth curled against the rock and fell to sleep, but his dreams were strange. In them he fought beside the gods, battling a tide of monsters arrayed in fur and tooth, tentacles and so many eyes.
He saw Teshur, once a garden, burn to red, dyed with a god’s blood, when Helios fell from the sky.
Open Skies emerged from the sand and heat haze the following morning, a half-buried sprawl of tents and corrals set in a dry oasis. Crumbling walls and sand-blasted ruins peeked from the sand. A six-legged ox lumbered past. Seth ogled the rough people clothed in worn reds and blues. Many wore masks of caked and crackled mud.
“Little towns like this dot the red desert,” Geldar explained without prompting. “They give the wanderers and disaffected a place to gather, to trade and share news.”
Seth held in a shudder. The place was so bright to the eye, but also felt so dour. It had none of Ilium’s mica-capped obelisks or broad, clean streets.
Geldar led Seth onward, past vendors selling chunks of meat roasted on sticks. Seth’s stomach grumbled despite the swarming flies. They’d eaten sparsely on the road, the fasting meant to help prepare him for life in the monastery.
A voice rang over the sand-battered tents and stands. Seth cocked his head to better hear.
“Come, Seth,” Geldar said, gesturing that way. “Let’s see what this is.”
They came in sight of a man standing atop one of the riddled stones. His head, fully shaved, was marked with green and black lines, tattoos running in a rough pattern Seth could not follow. He was browned from sun and time, like a walnut shell left near a fire.
“The Twelve are a lie!” the man shouted. He jabbed his staff, a long-dead root, at the listeners. “They have destroyed us. We must return to the old ways, to blood, to sacrifice!”
“Observe, Seth,” Geldar said wryly. “He’s almost the last of them, a demon priest.”
“That’s heresy.” Seth felt glad for his empty stomach.
The only sacrifice the gods asked for was something you grew inside you, a feeling, like pain, or love.
This man raged, begging for goats and babies.
“Yes,” Geldar said, turning away from the man’s ranting to regard the passing people. “Yes, it is.”
Geldar paused at one of the sand-dusted trade tables. Several amulets, crude etchings carved on bits of desert stone, were laid atop a cloth so worn that it had no color. Geldar tapped a disk carved with an open hand. An angry eye was scratched into the palm.
“Should we do something?” Seth asked, looking over his shoulder at the ragged priest. The same symbol was tattooed on his chest.
“What would we do?” Geldar asked. “He is surrounded by ruffians, most of whom do not listen to him. I suspect they grew weary of his raving long ago, but they would defend him were we to act.”
Turning, Geldar walked away. “Do you know what Inquisitors are for, Seth?”
“No, Father,” he said, striding to keep up.
He could not read the man’s expression inside his hood, which was probably its point. Giving up, Seth turned to the ox splashing in the trade post’s shallow, filthy water. He envied them their bath. He felt so dry, so caked in sand and dirt.
“We are for what the knights do not do. You are to be a knight, to uphold our god’s laws and set an example to the people. My order has other work.”
“You’ll kill him?” Seth asked. His stomach tightened.
“Yes, but not at this time,” Geldar said calmly. “He’s doing little harm, and I would not delay us. The Hierarch has commanded me to deliver you to Teshur. I must obey him, just as you would.”
Seth could see the warning there, the thing left unsaid. Should it come to it, the Inquisitors would not hesitate to kill him either.
“Why does Hyperion not speak to us himself?”
“Hyperion is the light above. He is powerful, but removed from us, and so he anoints the Hierarch to speak his will. All of the gods like their mysteries. They are part of our world, and yet not so near that they speak to us directly, at least, not often. Perhaps in Teshur you will hear their voices.”
The waning moon vanished that night. Seth knew she would return in three days. She’d carried the souls of the dead to the Underworld. Now new souls would come forth, brought into the world by Rhea, Phoebe’s sister, the Harvest Mother.
They came to Teshur, to the five Sun Stones, great pillars rising from the desert floor like the fingers of a giant’s hand. They rose higher than the temples of Ilium, higher than even Phoebe’s Tower. Atop them, within them, were open squares, cut windows and doors, the monasteries where Hyperion’s most devout withdrew from the world to contemplate his light.
There were statues everywhere, many several stories tall. They depicted hooded figures, monks of the order, he supposed. Many were wind-blasted past recognition. Some had toppled to lie partially buried so only a single eye or half an enigmatic smile peeked from the red tide.
Seth coughed, hinting.
“No water yet,” Geldar said. “We must fast to reach the stones and make a sacrifice of our thirst to prove our resolve to the god.”
With a nod, Seth bit his cheek. He bundled his thirst in his belly, squeezing it tight. He would build and offer it, more penance for who he’d been.
Sunbaked, the air held almost no taste. He did not know how long he’d be here, how long he’d train among the monks. The Inquisitor could not say, but he promised that Seth would emerge a knight. He’d squared his shoulders to hear the priest’s confidence. He would make Geldar proud.
They finally came to the base of the largest pillar. Seth imagined falling from its height, from the structures he could just spy atop it. Father Geldar had warned him this place would call for silence, that the monks would require him to go days without speaking, so he did not ask how they would climb.
Geldar raised his arm. He held a knife, a small curve of polished bronze. Lifting it, he caught the sun, and flashed its gleam to a point high above. An answering flash responded.
A net, suspended from a crane, descended. Seth watched it approach, his stomach a stone in his belly. When it reached the ground, Geldar moved to open it, spreading its thick ropes into a circle. The gaps were wide. He’d need to hold tight or he might slip through.
“In you go, Seth. Cling tight. Be brave.”
“You will not come with me?”
“I cannot.” Geldar wrapped his arms around Seth and pulled him into a hard embrace. “I have my duty, as you now have yours. Be strong, and you will be a knight. Make me proud, and I will see you again.”
Seth would not cry. Though everything had changed so suddenly, he would not cry. Though these months with Geldar had come to an end, he would be brave. He would be a knight.
The net closed around him. It jerked, rising in spurts. Seth did not close his eyes. He wanted to watch the sky grow closer as the monks cranked the winch. The net twisted, and he spun inside himself, but he kept his eyes open. He would see. He would ascend.
At the top, the crane swiveled, its wood creaking. Seth landed hard in the light, on a stone floor laced with skeins of sand. Above him, statues of the sun gods—Hyperion, Helios, Eos, and Thea—loomed. Their outstretched, linked hands made arches over him as he climbed free of the net. Dressed in thin robes of sun-bleached linen, the monks approached.
Seth breathed deep. He opened his mouth to speak, but one of the monks lifted her finger to her lips and beckoned for him to keep silent.
“For the first year,” she said, “you will be whipped if you speak anything but a whispered prayer. Do you understand?”
Seth looked back to the door, the opening where the crane stood on a protruding rock. He knew Geldar would already have begun his trek back across the sand, to seek the demon priest and stop his heretical ranting. Seth closed his eyes, took a long breath, and nodded.
The moon did not rise that night.
Now Seth was at sea on another moonless night. They’d all been moonless since he’d gone to Teshur.
The ship drifted, bobbing enough that his stomach churned.
The Bishop approached, her boots loud on the deck.
“Chew this,” she said, passing Seth a bundle of green leaves.
“For my breath?” he asked.
“For your stomach.”
“Thank you.” He bit it and tasted mint.
She followed his gaze forward, to the east.
“How long?” he asked.
“A while yet still,” she said.
The cadre filled the ship’s meager barracks. Three of the hounds had come with them, including Argos. Lathan had seemed surprised, but the pup would not be parted from Seth. He’d whined and then howled when the cadre had tried to leave him behind.
“He has chosen,” the Bishop had said, and that had been that.
Seth refused to spend the entire voyage on his back, hand clutched to his aching belly, so he’d forced himself to his feet and climbed onto the deck. He ate little, which at least had stopped the vomiting.
There was only the sea around them, endless blue-black water. With the sails furled Seth felt better. The mint in his stomach helped. He was hungry, but feared he’d lose it all again if he ate a true meal.
“How is your control, Seth?” the Bishop asked, reading the doubt in his expression.
“I am afraid to test it,” he confessed. “I have not performed my penance.”
The ship would burn if he lost control.
“And yet you must.”
Her eyes were hard, and he knew she was thinking of the beach, of those he’d burned.
Nothing she said could equal the feel of the hard weight in his chest when he remembered that night.
“You will master the flame, Seth. That is required for you to stay in this cadre.”
“You still want me in the cadre?”
“You are part of my cadre,” she said, voice firm as stone. “You will master the flame.”
“Yes, Bishop.” She turned to walk away.
He would try. He had failed so far, but he would try. He would make up his penance when they reached land, when he would not endanger others.
“Father,” he prayed. “Let me be yours, or let me burn.”