20 years later

Ciamon Kaltevus died three times a day within the Great Dome of Nymaut.

The ancient temple sat atop a thumb-shaped spire of rock out in the middle of a desert, crowned by a curved glass half-sphere that gave the Great Dome its name. Once, it had been a lighthouse in the middle of an ocean. The first mages carved a palace out of the rock beneath the glass. They discovered how to shape sunlight to grow gardens, and added mirrors to light the beacons of chapels hundreds of miles away. Through spell and science, the first mages brought light to the world, and boiled their ocean away until only a saltwater river remained.

Ciamon died his first death when he looked down from the Dome’s windows at the river in the mornings. He counted the ships that stopped at the inland port, sailing down from the Silver Sea or up from the Gulf of Sanchia. Fewer and fewer arrived each day. When he’d been a child, Ciamon used to look at the ships and dream of where they could carry him. It killed him to think now he’d never have the chance.

He died his second death in the salus of the Great Dome. This tiled wing was where mages offered prayers of the body through physical exertion. Ciamon went there each morning to one of its mirrored halls. The morning prayer for penitents started an hour after sunrise, when the room was uncomfortably warm. By the time service ended, the room would burn hotter than fevered skin.

Ciamon took his place by a mirror and avoided looking at his reflection. Even after two years, he found the sight of himself in a mage’s robes jarring. He unwound the fringed green palla and rolled it to use for a towel. He unbuttoned his sleeveless white cassock and folded it into a pillow in case he fainted. The drum shaped brass pocket watch from the chain around his neck went beneath the cassock so he would not be tempted to stare at the little hand as it counted out the sweltering hours. Last, he took his holy crescent from the cord knotted around his trousers and walked it to the altar at the far side of the room.

The salus altar was only a small table with three stone dolls to represent the Blessed Three — Mat the Speaker, Epoch the Listener, and Amidya the Seer. Effigies of gods in every shape and material littered the Great Dome, some wrought, some bought, and many stolen. The stone dolls in the salus looked as though they had been there when the ancient mages boiled the ocean. Matt’s face was worn nearly blank and both Amidya’s arms were missing. Ciamon shoved the curved edge of his blade into the bowl of salt that sat before them. He took a pinch of it and rubbed it on both ears in obeisance to Epoch, the patron god of bards, diplomats, and spies.

Ciamon bowed to the woman who sat cross-legged beside the altar. The archmage leading that day’s prayer was Leigh Diamonhands. A handsome gray-haired woman of about fifty, known for her rich singing voice and the strand of raw diamonds she wore around her neck. Rumor had it she’d used it as a garrote in her youth, when she’d served as Nymaut’s ambassador to the Imperial Court.

Diamondhands greeted him without looking up from the frayed prayer book in her lap. “You came. Rejoice for it means you did not give up today.”

Ciamon curled his tongue inside his mouth to keep from answering.

He folded his hands in a Penitant’s Triangle and went back to his place on the floor. Ciamon started to loosen his muscles by stretching his hands toward the painted ceiling. A tenebrous rendering of Hell spread across the curved surface — naked bodies writing away from a black fiery maw spewing scorpions, hornets, fleas, and snakes. Their desperate hands all reached for the glass skylights, giving the impression the sun would save them from the horror. Ciamon swept his arms down to touch his toes, thankful the floor was only plain brown tile.

As he stood straight, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. A gaunt, tired man of twenty-three glared back. Two summers under Nymaut’s sun had darkened his skin and ten pounds had fallen off his frame from prayer and fasting. The bitterness behind his eyes came from somewhere deeper than the longing for bread, beer, and meat.

I am Listener, born and blooded. I serve the Dome with all that I have — and look where it got me.

“Are you ready?” Archmage Diamondhands snapped her prayer book shut and rolled to her feet in one smooth motion. The fifty-odd mages sentenced to salus readied themselves, bracing their feet on the floor. “Too bad, it’s time. Arms forward, palms down.”

The tired man in the mirror reached for himself like the penitents in Hell reaching for the skylight. Ciamon felt the pull in his shoulders and a familiar, hated twinge start in his lower back. His muscles fought the first poses as Diamondhands called them out. Forty-two motions and two breathing techniques spread out across two hours. Ciamon knew them all by heart from childhood, but felt clumsy and slow having to wait for the archmage to command the pose before he could move.

As the heat built, the mind let go of what it could not do. His back bent further, his arms stretched wider. The floor around his feet slickened with sweat. Every muscle in Ciamon’s body obeyed as he contorted all six feet of him into the poses without thought for how the man in the mirror looked.

Maybe they want us to die here.

The thought cut across Ciamon’s mind as if someone said it aloud. Balanced on his forearms with his feet in the air, he noticed that the sweat from around him had spread to mingle with the mage’s next to him.

He Heard the woman’s thoughts through the puddle on the floor with Epoch’s blessing: If I have a stroke right now, I will die here — and the Dome can say it wasn’t an execution…

Archmage Diamondhands Heard it, too. She stalked between the penitents like a lion, coming to stand beside them. “There are worse ways to die, I promise you. A knife in the back, a rope around your neck… In Bocce, they have an infernal device that separates the head from the shoulders. Right foot back, straighten the arms! Offering stance, second form. Put your palms out and up. There, now you are a beggar — hold your hands out and beg!”

The archmage’s voice landed on them like a hammer to a dulcimer string. Ciamon’s whole body quivered with the force of it. Archmages studies for decades to master all of the Blessed gifts and the five Greater Curses. He wondered whether Diamondhands’ patron had been Mat the Speaker. She knew exactly when to berate, encourage, or command.

Diamonhands cocked her head at Ciamon, her hooded gray-blue eyes twinkling with humor. “What? You are too proud to beg?”

She placed her hands on his forward arm. Turned his elbow upward until the crook pointed straight at the sun. Her leathery fingers held him there while she called for the next pose:

“Altar stance, first form. Weight is on the front leg. Kick your back leg up into the unseen hand. Eyes on your beggar’s palm — is it full? No? You died a beggar, then.”

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Diamondhands tugged on Ciamon’s arm. He felt his shoulder pop and space opened up in his back enough for him to grab his slippery foot and assume the pose. His breath hissed out between his teeth.

“You feel sick, dizzy? You want to throw up? Good!” Diamondhands let go of Ciamon and walked the lines, reaching to touch other limbs and torsos. “This is what you came for. You think penance will hurt, and it hurts! Does that redeem you? Are you fit to stand beneath the Dome where the Word lives and the heart Speaks? Feet down, straighten the body. Go — drink your water.”

Ciamon dropped his foot and braced both hands against his back. He stepped over more puddles of sweat as he made his way toward the back of the hall where barrels held the drinking water. The mages queued in lines of three to take their turns at the ladles. Ciamon gritted his teeth at the flat, metallic tang even as his body sang with joy at the moisture. For a dizzying moment, he thought he was a horse drinking from a trough.

“This is bullshit. We shouldn’t be here. They should just put us in the pit with the murderers and the rapists… I’d rather gargle the Winze’s cum than do this everyday…”

Ciamon heard the words loud and clear from Omer Nitty, perched over a barrel to his right. He was twice Ciamon’s age and three times as heavy. Like Ciamon, he’d lived in Ammar long enough to acquire a taste for their beer — and done something there bad enough to end up in salus. No heroes’ welcome in the Dome for those who failed to carry the Word.

“Manifest patience,” said Noemi Kojan, waiting her turn behind Omer. She gathered up her hair and twisted it into a knot at her neck with a beaded thong. “Gentle punishments go with gentle crimes.”

“Manifest my dick,” Omer grumbled.

Noemi snorted with laughter and glanced at Ciamon. He avoided her gaze. The two of them had returned to the Great Dome at the same time, fleeing Ammar even before the archmages recalled its spies from the Witch King’s court. The beacons at the border still flickered with the warning cast from the Dome: Return or be Lost.

Ciamon knew Noemi had been a spy like him. It made him wary of her friendship. Spies had license to lie, cheat, steal, and defy nearly every other tenet of the Great Dome’s teachings in service of the Word abroad. That made him think Noemi only wanted to befriend him to find out which crime got him sent to salus, and if it was the same as her own. Omer had been in salus when they had both started their sentence. He wouldn’t say the reason why.

“You’re tired?” Archmage Diamondhands called out. She stood beneath the skylight where the sun now plunged straight down through the glass in a white-gold column. The archmage beckoned with three fingers. “Come and lie down. Knees up, back flat. Seek the stillness of a corpse. Salvation pose, first form.”

Ciamon went to where his mages' robes waited and got down onto his back. He rested his head against the pillow of his cassock and heard the pocket watch beneath ticking out time. The syllabant click of the handwrought gears matched time to his pulse. He died his second death there on the floor, drained of thought and feeling.

Diamonhands moved between them now like a cool breeze, silent and soothing. She reached down to massage shoulders, adjust necks. When she came to Ciamon, she interrupted his death long enough to press against his knees and pop another joint somewhere deep in his pelvis. The ache left his back, and he settled more deeply into his corpse. For a few precious minutes, he slept.

His third death waited for him there.

The nightmare was so familiar now, it felt like a memory. Ciamon crouched in Ammar’s royal gardens beside a girl with a broken foot. Smoke stung his nose and screams of the dying filled up his ears. In the dream, he pressed nine silver coins into her hand and whispered a prayer to Epoch in her name. Be safe, be happy — call me when you need me and I will come and carry you away. And when she bent her dark-haired head over that palmful of silver and opened her mouth, no sound came out.

Dread filled the silence. For seven hundred and seventy-nine nights, Ciamon waited to Hear the girl call out to him. And though he saw her lips move in the dream, remembered the exact shape of her mouth even now almost two years later, it wasn’t her voice that Spoke to him in dreams.

It was the cursed queen’s.

“You think the Dome will go easy on you because your clumsy blade is less sinful than mine? Think again.”

The small, tawny woman stood beside the corpse of the Lightning King, gowned and veiled as Eva, Ammar’s longest-serving queen. She hissed at Ciamon, her voice as powerful as Diamondhands’, imbued with all the knowledge of the Dome.

“I need not even curse you myself. You’ll dream of her every night and despair.”

He snapped awake in a pool of sweat, the echo of Queen Eva’s voice stinging his ears. Ciamon lay completely still and waited for it to fade. The murmur of other penitents filled the salus as they rose from the floor. He stared up at the painted Hell and pictured himself up there, crawling away from the black maw.

Beatrice of Sanchia. In his heart, Ciamon knew she was the reason why he died three times a day. Her father’s fleet ravaged Nymaut’s trade routes. Her husband’s reign challenged the Great Dome’s right to pronounce the Word. Her mother-in-law lived in defiance of both God and Nature, frozen in time at the age she should have died when her holy crescent failed. Worst of all, those coins — the archmages would never let him out of the Great Dome while Beatrice still held them. The spell he’d worked into the silver to Hear her call was too valuable a tie to the Ammarish court.

And she hasn’t used them. Not so much as a sigh in two years. Was she safe, was she happy? Ciamon wondered if he’d lost the right to ever know.

He peeled himself off of the wet tiles and held his head between his knees. Ciamon stayed that way while the penitents staggered from the sweltering room. When he was the last one left, he lifted his head to look at himself in the mirror. Now he knew why he found his appearance so jarring. It wasn’t just the horror of coming home to a prison sentence instead of a hero’s welcome. It wasn’t the weight he’d shed or the newly browned skin. It was that not all of him had come back.

“Drink more water,” Archmage Diamondhands called out to him. She stood beside the altar, holding her prayer book. Pink grains of salt littered the polished wood table around the brass bowl. The hilt of his surrendered crescent sagged against the metal lip, pointing at the archmage.

Ciamon obeyed and used an extra ladleful to douse his head. He toweled off with his palla and pulled his cassock back on before going to collect his crescent from the altar.

“Look at your face. You’re about to drown. No easy thing to do inside a desert.” Diamondhands stared at him with eyes as hard as the mirrors, shining with conviction. “Remember: No one in Nymaut is here for the asking, my dear. We sacrifice to be here. Not a day goes by when you will not think of what you gave up. A whole life I traded just to be here. When I look at your face, I see the son I left behind. And every day I see it here in salus, I say to myself, Thank God. ”

“You honor me, atelier,” Ciamon said. He didn’t realize he’d said the words in Ammarish until the echo of his voice bounced off the painted ceiling.

“Oh… Atelier, is it? You wish that you’d remained in Ammar then?” Diamondhands raised one eyebrow. “You could have run off with that girl. You had your orders: No wedding, no fleet. How did you suppose you were meant to accomplish this?”

Ciamon cringed inwardly. The Dome’s dispensation for spies went far, but its teachings ran deep. No murder, no rape. No malice, no vengeance. Never indulge a lover outside the law of half-and-seven even if they kiss you first… He licked the metallic water from his lips and muttered the only defense he’d had for himself at his trial: “Archmage, the lady Beatrice is married. But… the fleet has not sailed to Nymaut.”

“You’re sure about that? Go count up all the boats on the river.” Archmage Diamondhands tucked her book beneath one arm and collected the bowl of salt from the altar. “See you tomorrow, Ciamon Caelt.”