“How are we today?”

Ciamon looked up from the long list of Ammarish births at Java, for the first time that day blessedly unaware of how much time had passed. He found the smiling face of Joachim Redbeard, seated right across from him at the library table.

The elderly archmage was more gray whisker and brown wrinkles than the blooded warrior celebrated in the Great Dome’s chronicles. The only sign of Redbeard’s past deeds was a crooked nose broken in some long ago fight. His wise eyes twinkled with humor as he regarded Ciamon silently, awaiting a response.

“Atelier… Archmage, good morning.” Ciamon tripped over his words again, lurching back from the place in his mind where he was still Caelt. Unlike Diamondhands, Redbeard indulged the lapse with a gracious tilt of his head to one side.

“Good afternoon,” the archmage corrected. Redbeard’s keen gaze went to the three pages of scrawled notes to one side of Ciamon’s working place. “I see today is an unproductive one, Kaltevus. Is something on your mind?”

“Only the words of the Annals, archmage.”

Ciamon gathered up his pages and passed them across the table for the archmage’s consideration. He sat up straighter in Redbeard’s presence, feeling the twinge in his back now that the languor of salus had worn off. A quick glance at the watch fixed him in time at just after noon, Nymaut’s hottest part of the day. Outside the Dome, the Unfinished would be shuttering their businesses and heading to the coolest room in the houses for the noonday prayer.

Redbeard skimmed his meager pages, his lined face as inscrutable as leather. It was not his way to berate or cajole like Diamondhands. In the fifty years or more that Redbeard had served on the High Court, he’d never once taken a turn as Speaker. For the current term, the archmage acted as the court’s Seer, calling on Amidya’s Gift in open session to scry at the Speaker’s request. Ciamon saw the Sight brighten Redbeard’s gaze as he reviewed the translation.

“You crowd your lines so that you will leave no room for correction. A clever mind protects itself,” Redbeard observed. He set aside the pages and settled his full attention on Ciamon, eyes returning to an ordinary distance. The weight of his gaze made it feel as though they were the only two in the vast library.

“If you cannot name the shadows in your mind, they have a way of lengthening, Kaltevus. Come, tell me what troubles you.”

Ciamon sat with the words a moment. He waited for Epoch to tease out words for him the way Archmage Redbeard used the Sight to read his words. Somehow the word name stuck to his ears. It conjured the images of mountains, hawks, and dragons.

“I don’t know what my place is,” he confessed. The words sounded raw for the amount of truth they held, as if it scraped back the skin of his heart. Ciamon covered his embarrassment by lifting his watch and fiddling with the crown that tightened the mainspring hidden inside the brass. “I have been back at the Dome for so long already and I still don’t feel like I am home. I dream about Ammar, and I dream about what I left behind.”

“We are haunted by the work we leave unfinished,” Redbeard answered. He wasn’t the sort to stroke his beard or make a show of pondering thoughts. When the archmage spoke, it was if he plucked the words from a holy text, its meaning already written down somewhere. “Both the good and the wicked are reborn on this rock again and again until they at last complete the task set for them in Heaven. Even the Ammarish know this, though they do not believe in rebirth. What is their saying…? If you find yourself on the same road twice…”

“Be sure to read the signs the second time,” Ciamon finished.

In spite of himself, he smiled. Ammar’s little sayings made all of life’s essential questions seem so simple. Not three Blessed but one God, not forty-two holy texts but twelve long poems, not an elected High Court but a hereditary monarchy stretching back only three hundred years. When he was younger, it charmed him. Now it made him think of how they made Bea wear a veil she hated.

“Did you dwell in Ammar once, too, Archmage?” Ciamon asked. It was almost impertinent to ask, seated there in the library. He could have easily gone down to the reference desk and asked for the records that detailed Joachim Redbeard’s comings and goings from Nymaut, dating all the way back to the day he won the name Redbeard from the High Court.

The archmage indulged him with that rare, precious nod Ciamon had hoped for. He placed his gnarled hand on the tabletop and pushed up to his feet, ancient knees buckling for a moment before Redbeard steadied himself.

“Perhaps a walk would clear your mind, Kaltevus. There is time yet in the day for revelation.”

Ciamon thrilled at the reprieve. He shut the Ammarish tome and placed the pages of his notes beneath its heavy, forbidding weight. The Ammarish wing filled up with black-robed clerks guiding the Dome’s acolytes to the reading table where their lessons would begin. The children among them stared at Redbeard wide-eyed as the archmage led Ciamon from the room. A few even curtsied or made little bows, still clinging to the customs of whatever lands they left behind to join Nymaut. No one looked at Ciamon, following the archmage at a slow and stately pace.

The temple grounds glowed a ruddy yellow-pink at midday. The Great Dome’s glass and mirrors shielded mages from the worst of the desert heat, but the air inside was hot and stiff. Ciamon tried to picture how it must have been in the days before the Breaking of the Dome. Seven decades before he walked beneath the glass with Joachim Redbeard, the Dome had been a green garden full of trees and flowers transplanted from all over the world with live butterflies alongside the Dome’s bees. Then the Lost Court spoke the wrong curse over the wrong witch, and the life-preserving glass cracked. The jagged hole above the old Astronomy Tower glinted in the noon sun.

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Redbeard moved slowly through the heat, preserving his energy. The forced near-stillness left Ciamon’s mind to wander to what lay beyond the Great Dome’s glass. The dizzying view of the shimmering desert below the temple made Ammar seem farther away than ever. Its tallest mountains were only a distant sliver of gray on the heat-blurred horizon.

“You dwelled there for six years. Tell me, in all that time, how did you fill your days?”

Redbeard spoke as if he’d read Ciamon’s thoughts. No shadows stretched between them with the sun overhead. Even so, Ciamon checked under his feet just to be sure the archmage hadn’t Heard his mind.

“Horses. Chores,” Ciamon answered. Safe from the archmage’s shadow, he let himself picture the green-and-gold kingdom. Lord Gruffydd’s lands were some of the most beautiful in Ammar with vast tracts of land for cattle and grain on the far side of the mountains. “I looked after the Silver Hoarder’s widowed aunt and sometimes his son when the court came out in summertime for hunting.”

“Ah, the Dorland Stretch. I know this place. The Sweating Sickness hit those lands hard when you were young. You survived.”

“I did. It was only a cold for me.” Ciamon rubbed his ragged ear against his shoulder, remembering. The plague had sank its teeth deep into Ammar the second summer after the Dome sent him off. The evil plague carried off one in every household throughout all the villages within Lord Gruffydd’s lands. Ciamon’s tutor died quickly, leaving him at sixteen to work out how to serve the Dome as an ear. He’d stuffed his ears with salted cotton to deafen the moans of the dying and nursed the Silver Hoarder’s family through the illness. “I broke Little Griff’s fever. Won his father’s favor. That was when I moved into the Silver Hoarder’s main house.”

The archmage let his words hang in the still, hot air. Ciamon felt a pang as though he had said something he shouldn’t have. An archmage’s unfathomable gaze made it hard to tell. They continued on through the Dome’s sprawling dry gardens. The path curled away from the shaded arcades into wispy paths between lavender bush and flowering cactus. Bees from the temple’s hives zipped across the path, heedless of the heat and happy at their tasks. Caimon felt the weight of his watch against his neck, swinging.

Their path took them through the Whispering Grove. The sand softened underfoot and the vivid greens and purples gave way to bleach-white stone markers. Brass plaques on each bore the name of a country -- every single country Nymaut had ever outlived. A thousand or more quiet shrines whose people became Nymaut’s people when the Blessed raised the temple.

Redbeard spoke again as they walked past the graves of forgotten lands. “You enjoy this work. Healing, saving?”

“I do,” Ciamon admitted. He felt only the briefest pang of humility. The Great Dome named pride a sin, but so too was lying to a Seer.

“Is that why you risked your crescent on an unconsecrated curse, then?”

The archmage asked his question so quietly, Ciamon almost mistook it for his own thought. Blessed Epoch grabbed onto the word curse and repeated it to him in warning. His hand went to his crescent on his hip, touching the leather hilt for reassurance. Vivid memory crowded his mind, picturing the razor tip gliding across pale flesh.

The blood like a streak of red across a starry sky. The tail of the comet, one long lock of bloody hair. The hair on her head, black and red, while eyes like the ocean plead with me…

A sharp crack snapped Ciamon out of the memory. Redbeard held one hand before his face, fingers pinched and ready to snap again. Ciamon became aware of where he stood and who stood with him when he met the archmage’s knowing gaze.

“Speak,” Archmage Redbeard prompted. His fingers snapped twice more, loud and close, next to Ciamon’s ragged ear. “Your mind is with a shadow. Give it a name, a shape.”

“Anryniel. A woman’s shape.” Ciamon flexed his fingers, remembering how sticky blood made them. He fought to stay present with Archmage Redbeard and remember the Dome’s demand of him now that he was back at temple. “Forgive me… The High Court bid I not speak of it…”

“And so you should not, to an unconsecrated ear. For a truth spoken too soon kills as quickly as a lie,” said Archmage Redbeard.

The rebuke felt heavy as a fist against Ciamon’s ears, and he bowed his head. He stood in silence under the kindly gaze and wrestled with his feelings. He’d served the Dome when he gave Beatrice those coins. He thought he’d served it still when he answered her desperate plea to save her new husband’s life. No one had known until that night what curse ensnared Ammar’s only heir. No one but the cursed queen who wrote it.

The wind whistled somewhere high overheard. Redbeard shifted his gaze, shielding his eyes with one hand to look upward. Ciamon followed where the archmage’s went to where the white stone wall above them gave away to black streaks of ash. They stood beneath the ruin of the Seer’s Tower, its jagged peak stretching toward the Dome’s glass. A silvery crack ran just above the top, singing its shrill note with each gust of desert wind across it.

They stood there in silence while the sun slid past the noonday mark. A thin sliver of shadow appeared at the foot of the broken tower. When it touched their feet, Ciamon felt himself settle into stillness, seeking Epoch within the darkness. A faint, mournful Sound drifted up through the ground.

“Do you know how this tower burned down, Kaltevus?” Redbeard asked. He did not wait for Ciamon to reply before continuing, “Neither do I. For when an archmage fails at their task, they are Lost. We remember their crimes rather than their names. Whoever they were, whatever they called themselves, is struck from the Nomina. On the night this tower broke, nine names vanished from Nymaut — and took a secret with them.”

Ciamon shivered. He felt as though he stood on the Dome’s own grave. That mournful cry came into his ears again and now he knew Redbeard Heard it, too. Somewhere beneath the tower, deep within the Dome’s dungeon, the witch he’d fetched back from Ammar the night of the massacre moaned in his sleep. Ciamon steeped his fingers in the penitent’s triangle. This time, he said the shadow in his mind aloud before the archmage prompted him.

“I thought I brought back a criminal to face trial,” Ciamon said. “I knew he was dangerous. I knew he started the fire in the city. I did not know… I didn’t…”

I didn’t know I might have fetched back the Dome’s doom.

Joachim Redbeard accepted his confession with a simple gesture, touching mouth, eyes, and ears. Ciamon got on his knees in the tower’s shadow to accept the archmage’s blessing. He felt the great Seer’s gaze settle on him, pulling at his spirit even as his flesh stayed kneeling.

“You hunger for destiny. You crave a new name. You shall have one, Ciamon Kaltevus, ere you stare into the void. Take care not to blink… when the void stares back.”