One of the least pleasant ways to awaken was to a bucket of ice-cold water directly to the naked genitals. At least, so Marl discovered as the frigid water splashed over his now-flaccid member. He screeched unmanfully, which felt only fair to him since it felt like he’d just been unmanned. His stones ached and throbbed from the cold, and his stem tried to shrivel its way into his body in a vain attempt to escape the icy numbness spreading through it.

He bolted upright, blinking as the morning sun wafting through the cracks in the roof of the barn pierced his eyes. His long, silver hair, unkempt as always, swept across his face, and he spat and spluttered as it floated into his open mouth. He rubbed his clear blue eyes to free them of the dust and gunk that accumulated from a night of sleeping in a hayloft, then blinked in astonishment at the two rusty, dirt-coated tines hovering just past his arm’s reach and pointed at his bare chest. His eyes tracked up along the pitchfork’s shaft to the pair of grubby, gnarled hands gripping it, then to the grizzled owner of those arms.

“Filthy half-breed,” Kelwat the farmer growled. The man stood a bit over a reach in height, the length of a man’s outstretched arms from fingertip to fingertip, but a back bowed from decades of labor made him a span shorter, the length of Marl’s thumb to pinky with his hand outstretched. He wore coarse overalls of poorly dyed blue denim, the tough fabric preferred by most laborers for its durability and resistance to staining. Scuffed leather boots, unlaced in his obvious hurry to put them on, enveloped feet that Marl suspected were horny and gnarled – and probably covered with the same graying hair that slowly receded from the old man’s scalp.

“Da!” Marl winced at the soft, feminine voice beside him. He’d have preferred that Elmra remained asleep. She wore no more than he did, and as she sat up, her generous and noticeably female assets swayed and bounced on her chest. He tried not to look, but his eyes seemed to drag themselves to the paler olive of her breasts and the dark circles of her nipples. His libido, he’d long suspected, had something of a death wish, a fact doubly proven as his icy member began to warm at the thoughts of those breasts and the things he’d done with them during the night of passion he’d shared with the young woman…

“Don’t ‘Da’ me, Elmra!” Kelwat’s snarl quickly drew Marl’s attention back to where it belonged. “I warned you about this – this ishtai! I told you to stay away from him…”

“Look, I can see that the two of you have a lot to discuss,” Marl spoke in as reasonable a voice as he could. He’d long ago stopped taking offense at being referred to by his caste, even if it were the lowest one a person could possess without being a branded criminal. “I should go and let you talk…”

Even as he spoke, though, his traitorous eyes once more darted down to glance at Elmra’s curved body and the dark patch of hair nestled between her thighs. His treacherous member continued to respond, and he subtly shifted his hands to cover it before the farmer could notice. Sadly, he’d moved too slowly for that.

“You’re not going anywhere!” Kelwat barked. The old man leaned forward, poking Marl in the chest with the tines of his pitchfork. “You think I don’t know about you, Marl Tem? That I don’t know the stories about your philandering ways?”

Marl barely kept from rolling his eyes. “Wait, you know me, Kelwat?” he asked incredulously. “What a shock! I’m the only hizeen in a village of maybe five hundred of you naluni; what are the odds you’d recognize me?”

“Quiet your acid tongue, boy!” the old man snapped, poking Marl in the chest once more.

“Da, it isn’t what it looks like,” Elmra spoke up, and Marl couldn’t help but snort at that. The old man had walked in on the pair of them naked, in his barn’s hayloft, wrapped around one another. About the only way things could be more obvious would be if Kelwat came in during the actual act. The farmer would have to be an idiot not to realize instantly what they’d been doing. Kelwat was many things – narrow-minded, short-sighted, stubborn, and maybe a bit lax about his body odor – but he wasn’t an idiot.

“I’m not a fool, Elmra,” Kelwat agreed unwittingly with Marl’s assessment, which the young hizeen took as confirmation that everything else he’d thought was equally true. “I know what you two were doing.” He looked back at Marl. “And now, you’re going to pay for it, boy!”

“Pay?” Marl swallowed nervously, fidgeting his feet as he did. “What do you mean, pay?”

“I mean, you owe me a maidenprice,” the farmer growled. “You took something from me, and…” The farmer broke off irritably. “Don’t laugh at me, half-breed!”

“S-sorry,” Marl gasped between breathless chortles. “But – maidenprice? Are you serious? Ow!” He winced as Elmra punched his shoulder. The girl was young, only two years older than his fourteen, but she’d spent her childhood laboring in her father’s fields and handling his animals. She was strong, and she knew how to hit. He rubbed his shoulder; he’d have a bruise there, he just knew it.

“Elmra?” Kelwat said a bit uncertainly. “Is – what’s he saying?”

“Ignore him, Da,” she assured the older man. “He’s just trying to get himself out of trouble.”

“Now, it’s REALLY obvious that you two have some things to talk about,” Marl snorted, shifting his weight so he wasn’t resting on his hands. “Like Proll the carpenter’s apprentice, or Drack the merchant’s son, or – ow!” He winced again, rubbing his shoulder. “Seriously, stop that! It hurts!”

“Shut up,” she hissed at him in reply. “Or the next one will be somewhere that hurts a lot more!”

“Elmra, what’s going on here?” Kelwat demanded. “Tell me the truth…” The old man turned his gaze away from Marl, gazing a bit forlornly at his daughter, and in that moment, Marl struck. Kelwat howled as the stick Marl had found scrabbling around in the straw swept up and caught him directly between the legs. Marl wasn’t large – he stood a span and a couple fingerwidths shorter than Kelwat would standing fully erect, and his iron-gray body was lean and lanky compared to the average nalu – but his half-spirit heritage made him strong and quick, and the blow landed with surprising force. The farmer dropped the pitchfork and fell to his knees, his hands clutching his stones as he swore and moaned, curling around his wounded genitals.

“Marl!” Elmra gasped in astonishment, her face horrified, but the hizeen didn’t bother to stay and explain to her. He sprang to his feet, scooped up his clothes, and rushed to the edge of the hayloft. He slid nimbly down the ladder, landing easily at the bottom, then raced out of the open door into the morning sunlight.

Churl, Kelwat’s hired hand and apprentice farmer, stood ten paces before Marl, his hand holding the lead to one of Kelwat’s draft horses. The dun-haired man, tall and thick bodied with a faint greenish tinge to his skin that marked the presence of half-giant blood somewhere in his ancestry, stared at Marl’s nude form in astonishment. Marl hoped that the part-vadnik was simply amazed and not admiring; he was fairly ecumenical in his passions, but coupling with an imbecile like Churl was stretching even his limits.

He ran up to the stunned young man and slipped the horse’s reins from his hands. “Thanks, Churl,” Marl said as he mounted the tall beast somewhat awkwardly.

“Wait – what?” Churl stammered, still gawking. “What are you – that’s Kelwatirika’s!” The man’s eyes tracked down below Marl’s waist, and the hizeen rolled his eyes, although he wasn’t sure if it was at the vadnik’s use of Kelwat’s full name – no one used full names of adults, they were simply too long – or at his obvious interest in Marl’s member.

“It won’t be the first thing of Kelwat’s I’ve used today,” Marl said gleefully as he turned the horse away from the farm and toward the village. “Tell him I’ll send the horse back when I’m done – but the other thing I took is mine to keep!”

Churl sputtered a protest as Marl rode awkwardly away, but he didn’t offer chase. There wasn’t much point; Churl was very strong but slow and awkward, and even though the horse was a draft animal meant for power instead of speed, it would have left the farmhand behind in the dust.

The trip to the village only took fifteen minutes or so, although part of that was when Marl stopped to put his clothes back on. Tem wasn’t a town or city, walled and with guards at the entrances, but it was filled with curious people. If he’d entered the village naked, the story would be all over the place within minutes. He had enough tall tales spreading about him; he didn’t need any more. As an orphan and a half-spirit, he was barely tolerated as it was. He couldn’t be sure what straw might crack the hayloft floor at last.

Which was why instead of riding into the village, he dismounted out of sight and smacked the horse on its flank. It obediently turned and began trotting back to Kelwat’s farm. The animal knew where its food was, and it was probably eager to return there. He walked the remaining five minutes, gazing up at the peaks of the Silverband Mountains to the west with a palpable longing. His mother had come to Tem from those mountains, appearing one morning in the mining village with enough money to pay for a small house at the edge of town and no questions asked. She’d died when he was but a babe, leaving nothing behind for him, not even her name. One day, he knew he’d leave Tem – or be kicked out, he admitted candidly – and when he did, he’d follow the mining road up into the peaks to see what lay beyond and maybe learn where he’d come from.

He shook off his musings as he entered the village proper. Like most villages, Tem was built along a single road, the mining road that led up into the mountains to the west and wound past farmsteads to the east. He knew that eventually the road, little more than a dirt wagon track really, joined the central highway that started at Lepild far to the north nestled beneath the Northwall Mountains and wound through the provinces of Lepild, Aggath, and Nemmbar to the city of Nemmbar on the Gulf of Danaru far to the south. He’d never seen that road, of course – Marl had never been more than five walks from the village in his life, each walk being about two hours’ travel by foot – but he’d heard stories about it from the wagoners and traders who came to Tem to buy and carry the tin the miners dug from the nearby mines. He didn’t know how accurate those stories were, but he intended to find out one day.

“Tem’s getting too small for me,” he thought ruefully as he walked along one of the paths winding into the village from the south. “Or I’m getting too old for it. That’s probably it. Tomorrow is Naming Day, and I’ll be fifteen then, an official adult and free to leave this place without being sent back. Maybe that’s the time to leave at last.”

He idly entertained himself for the next few minutes by imagining his departure from the village. He didn’t own much, but he could steal what he needed. Tem’s locks had yielded their secrets to him long ago. He’d march out triumphantly – no, ride out on a horse he stole from Kelwat. One of the merchant Brezam’s traveling ponies would be better, of course, but Brezam would chase Marl over a horse, while Kelwat wouldn’t. The farmer would be too happy to see the hizeen leaving.

All the women of the village would mourn his departure, of course. Well, probably not all the women. A handful of the village’s matrons had yielded to his charms, but most of them saw him as a pest at best and a threat to their daughters’ virginity at worst. Not that they had anything to worry about with that. Marl had never slept with a virgin; he wasn’t remotely willing to risk their family finding out and demanding maidenprice that he couldn’t pay. That would land him in indenture for five years, and he wanted to be long gone from Tem well before that.

Personally, he thought the whole concept of maidenprice was stupid. Intellectually, he knew that innocent women typically had a larger group of older, more successful men clamoring to marry them, but he had no idea why. He knew from experience that older women had far more skill, and even better, they knew exactly what they wanted and weren’t shy about going after it. Wooing younger women was work; older women did half the work for him. Still, it was the custom in Umpratan that a man who lay with a virgin outside of wedlock pay her mother for the loss of potential husband options, and Marl had very little money to speak of.

He made his way to the baths, where he paid a single ak, the smallest coin in the Empire, for the privilege of getting clean in warm water with soap rather than heading to the stream and scrubbing with snowmelt and gravel. Normally, he didn’t mind, but the memory of the bucket of water on his crotch was too fresh, and he luxuriated in the wooden tub of lukewarm water and bit of coarse soap. When he finished, he dressed and headed for the main street, stopping before a white-painted house with elaborate flowerbeds in front. Like most homes in Tem, the building was built from stone taken from the nearby mountains; unlike the others, though, the smell of baking bread and sweet pastries wafted from the open windows.

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Marl opened the door and took a deep breath before stepping inside to the jingle of a bell. He loved the smell of Helowa’s bakery. It was one of his favorite places in Tem, and it was one of the reasons he hadn’t left the village long ago. The main room of the house was warm and homey, with dark walls and wood everywhere. Wooden shelves behind glass dominated one wall, all stacked with fresh breads and pastries. A door in the back wall led deeper into the house, to Helowa’s kitchen, living room, and sleeping chambers.

That door opened, and a woman of about forty years with dark hair streaked with blonde stepped into the room. She wore a simple dress of white cotton, the light fabric cooler in the heat of the bakery and less likely to show flour and sugar spilled on it. The dress couldn’t hide her lush figure, ample curves, or round bottom, though – either that, or Helowa was deliberately trying to emphasize those traits. Plenty of male workers and laborers came to Helowa’s for breakfast each day, and while they certainly appreciated her baking, Marl was certain they stopped by to admire more than just the smells. He wouldn’t blame the baker for encouraging that sort of behavior. It made her money after all, and while she hadn’t chosen to remarry after her first husband died in a mining accident, if she ever wanted to, half the single men in the village would come by to woo her.

“Good morning, Marl,” she said warmly as she recognized him, a genuine smile lighting up her olive-skinned face. “You made it after all. I thought you might have forgotten that you’d agreed to come help me this morning.”

He gave her a grin that was deliberately sly. “Forget you, Mistress Helowa?” he asked with a grand bow. “No man in his right mind could ever forget you, I assure you.”

“Ah, your silver tongue strikes again,” she laughed, her brown eyes sparkling as she looked at him. “You forget, though; you aren’t officially a man yet, are you?”

“I’m as much a man as I need to be,” he replied archly. “And besides, tomorrow is Naming Day. I’ll officially be a man then – not that it makes any difference.”

“No, not really,” she agreed, walking out to stand before him. “You won’t be any different tomorrow than you are today, after all.” She laid a hand affectionately on his shoulder, tracing her fingers down his arm. “And I’m not complaining about what you are today, either.”

“I hope never to give you reason to complain,” he assured her.

“I’m sure you won’t.” She gave him a smile, then stepped back. “However, work first. I’ve got breads to make for the Naming Day feast, and that means I need someone to clean and watch the shop. I’ll pay you two aks, plus your choice of pastries for breakfast and lunch. As for dinner…” She smiled at him seductively. “That, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

The day passed much as every day in Tem did for Marl. Without parents to get him into a trade or pay for an apprenticeship, he was doomed to the life of a common laborer. That meant he either had to work in the mines or take whatever odd jobs made themselves available. His typical pay was an ak a day; the small bronze coin could buy him a simple meal, a bath, or a hayloft or attic to sleep in when the weather turned. Helowa always paid him extra, but he suspected that was because he helped the widowed woman deal with her loneliness in addition to his other, more mundane duties.

After the shop closed – and he and Helowa had seen to his other, far more pleasant duties for her – Marl walked outside into the cool air. He resisted taking a wistful glance backward at the building. Helowa was a skilled lover, and her bed was warmer and softer than whatever he’d find to sleep in that night. However, it was one thing for her to sport with the young hizeen; it was another to invite him to stay the night with her. No one begrudged the woman her pleasure, and Marl knew he was about as harmless a diversion as possible. He had no family to worry about; as an orphan and member of the ishtai, the lowest caste above criminals, he had no standing to be concerned with; as a hizeen, a half-breed product of a nalu and a spirit made flesh, he was unable to produce children, so she didn’t even have to take precautions against pregnancy.

However, if he spent the night, tongues would wag. Rumors would spread about her falling for him, a mostly useless orphan of the lowest caste. Like practically everyone in Tem, Helowa was of the akorai caste. That caste was only a step above his own, but it was a large step. Consisting of simple laborers, farmers, miners, soldiers, and crafters like Helowa who didn’t have to go through a full apprenticeship, akorai was reportedly the largest caste in the Empire, and the first one who could own property, and the first ‘respectable’ caste. Doing more than dallying with an ishtai, one without status but also without the outcast status of the criminal annatai caste, would hurt her standing and make any man who she might have considered taking as her husband think twice about accepting. Having a lover for pleasure was one thing; falling in love with them was totally different.

When he was younger, he’d railed against the caste system every chance he got. It was a patently unfair system; just as a person inherited their mother’s name, they were also born into her caste, and nothing could change that. No one in the village knew anything about his mother – she’d spoken to no one about her past, not even revealing her name or family name for the Head Bureaucrat to record in Tem’s annals – so he had no status in the Empire, and nothing he did would change that. Becoming a successful merchant wouldn’t let him join other merchants, peddlers, and magic-wielding haros in the tagarai caste; mastering a trade or becoming a priest or artist wouldn’t grant him the umanai caste; joining the Bureaucracy or becoming an officer in the army wouldn’t even land him in the shalai caste. Theoretically, he supposed, if the Shashana, the ruler of the entire Empire, granted him a noble title, he’d join the rest of the nobility in the zahai caste, but that was obviously never going to happen. Even if he one day discovered that his mother came from that caste herself, as a half-spirit hizeen, he couldn’t claim it.

He’d given up on the entire concept of fairness long ago. The Empire of Umpratan wasn’t fair, and that was all there was to it. It was a hard place, and according to the stories he’d been told for as long as he could remember, it had to be. Once, eons ago, the Empire had been part of a larger world, a world where spirits roamed freely in the flesh rather than subtly invading and taking the bodies of others to wreak their harm and havoc. Back then, according to the stories, all the mortal races lived as slaves under the yoke of the spirits, cattle and servants to the more powerful creatures. That lasted until the rise of the ithtaru, the legendary defenders of the Empire, who waged war against the spirits and drove them from the world. In return, the spirits unleashed the Sundering, shattering that world into fragments that drifted separate from one another, each surrounded by the world of the spirits. Although they’d been banished, those spirits still slipped into Umpratan through the boundary between their world and the Empire, and someone like him who’d been touched by their hands was seen as unlucky, untrustworthy, and possibly dangerous.

His mother had been the one who let herself be seduced by a spirit-possessed – or gave herself willingly to one – but he was the one to suffer for that. He’d been called ‘half-breed’ and ‘dirty blood’ his whole life. Ak-lahat, the god above all others, decreed that all must care for the lowest in equal measure, and no one wanted to risk the high god’s curse, so the villagers took just good enough care of him to keep him dying. That didn’t mean they welcomed him. He’d never been allowed to play with the other children his age when he was younger; he’d never be given the chance to learn a trade or apprentice with one of the childless crafters; no woman would ever select him for marriage from her crowd of suitors. He couldn’t even run away; as a member of the ishtai, he was considered the property of Tem until he reached his fifteenth year, and if he fled, the first settlement he reached would ship him back to the village. It was utterly unfair, but then, nothing about life was fair. He’d decided that accepting that was easier than trying to fight it.

Of course, the Empire’s inequalities didn’t just affect him. Everyone in Tem suffered from them in some small part. The province of Aggath, in which Tem stood, was a minor province of no real standing or importance, valuable only for its iron and silver mines. Anyone from here was automatically less important than someone from, say, the fabulously wealthy province of Dairon far to the south, or the politically important province of Menith just across the Silverbands. A crafter in Tem would never be accorded real status anywhere else in the Empire; the traders who came to Tem did so because they weren’t important enough to make a living in places like the city of Aggath or a large town like Mala. From what Marl had picked up by listening to those traders in the brewer’s beer garden, Tem was ridiculously backward compared to the rest of the Empire, and the village and its people were barely considered worthy of being called Imperial citizens.

He stepped outside into the encroaching evening and walked to the well just past the village, along the eastern wagon trail. The villagers mostly ignored him as he strolled past. In another village, his ancestry might make him an object of curiosity, but the people of Tem had watched him grow up. He’d stayed in many of their homes when he was younger, before he turned ten and was deemed fit to work for his living. The few glances he got were either appraising ones that he returned with a sly smile or flat ones that he blatantly ignored. Not every woman who’d taken him into her bed was a widow, after all, and every young woman he’d slept with had a mother and father. He wasn’t worried about the looks, though. None of the husbands were willing to risk their wives’ displeasure, and if the parents were going to do anything, they would have long ago.

He stopped before the well and stripped off his shirt. He pulled a lever beside the device, and with a grumbling squeal, pumps deep below activated, bringing water from the depths and pouring it out a black iron spout jutting half a reach above the ground. The well and pumps were some of the few bits of technology the village could afford, and most of those went into the mines to keep them well ventilated and drained of water. He hefted the bucket, intending to rinse off the accumulated flour, sugar, dust, and sweat from his body, but he froze as a rumbling noise to the east drew his attention.

Marl turned and stared at the horizon as a dark shape appeared in the distance. It was wide as a wagon but higher, looking almost like an enormous carriage. A plume of gray smoke drifted behind it as it rapidly approached the village, moving faster than a galloping horse. It grew larger as it neared, resolving into a wide, ornate wooden carriage carried on six steel wheels, with an unwieldy engine of steel and iron roaring behind it.

Marl stepped back as the steamwagon neared, marveling at the contraption. From what he knew, the steamwagons were twice as fast as horses, far more secure than wagons or carriages – and notorious for refusing to yield to those in their way. Wagoners told tales of crushed horses, pulped nalu bodies, and broken wagons driven off the road by the machines. Of course, Marl realized, those wagoners probably had no love for the vehicles that hauled several times the load at much faster speeds than they could manage, so he took those stories with a large helping of salt.

He’d heard that such wagons roamed freely on the highways, but Tem hardly rated a regular visit from such a rare and costly machine. He’d seen one twice before when important merchants came to the village, but that happened very, very rarely. Someone once said that booking passage on one cost actual akats, the larger bronze coins each worth seventy-two of the handful of aks in his pocket. He’d never even seen an akat, much less possessed one, and he doubted there were more than a few dozen of them in total in the entire village.

The wagon screamed as steam blasted from its rear, jetting into the sky, and sparks flew from the wheels as vehicle slowed noticeably. Marl winced and forced himself not to cover his ears at the piercing, fairly awful sound and decided at once that he much preferred nice, quiet horses and wagons to the metal monstrosity. The steamwagon rolled to a stop before him, and the glass window in the rear of the carriage swung open, revealing a face hidden in shadow in the twilight.

“Boy,” a woman’s voice spoke imperiously from the depths of the carriage. “Where can we find the Head Bureaucrat of this village?”

“I – he…” Marl stared at the woman, his glib tongue suddenly silenced for perhaps the first time in his life. He couldn’t see her in the darkness of the carriage, but something about her drew his eyes to her. He felt an almost palpable aura surrounding her, an energy that he’d never felt before and that threatened to overwhelm him with its intensity.

“Great,” a male voice muttered from the darkness. “The first person we meet in this hole is an idiot.”

“Quiet, Herel,” the woman spoke softly and coldly, and the voice in the dark fell silent. His words, though, were enough to shatter whatever paralysis gripped Marl, and his thoughts flowed once more.

“Forgive me,” he said with a smile to the unseen woman, one that he’d found particularly effective against older women in the past. “I was simply overwhelmed by your presence, my Lady, and needed a moment to recover myself.”

The woman snorted. “Keep it in your pants, hizeen,” she said shortly. “The Head Bureaucrat?”

“He lives in the largest house in the village, of course.” Marl’s smile grew wider. “If you’d like, I could climb up with you and guide you.”

“Directions will be fine,” she replied in an even voice. “I’ve got enough problems in here as it is, thanks.”

“As you wish, my Lady,” he bowed slightly to her. “The house is along this street, on the southern side of the main square in the village center. It’s painted blue, and as I said, it’s the largest one on the street.”

“My thanks,” she said. Her hand appeared, and a moment later, a glittering disc spun through the air toward him. He snatched it deftly without looking at it and slipped it into his pocket. He opened his mouth to thank her, but her window slammed shut, and a moment later, the engine behind the steamwagon rumbled as it rolled into the village.

As the carriage pulled away, Marl slid the coin from his pocket and examined it. An aka, as he’d suspected; smaller than an akat, the bronze coin was worth six aks, three days of work at the bakery or six of most jobs, and he’d gotten it for giving the woman the simplest information. It was a ridiculous amount of money for answering a question, and part of him wondered if he could make himself more useful to her during her visit.

He stared at the woman, bemused and somewhat mesmerized. He never heard the dark shape that crept up behind him until something harder than flesh cracked into the back of his skull. A bright light flashed across his vision as he hurtled forward, catching himself on his hands and knees as pain blossomed in his head. A foot slammed into his stomach, knocking him onto his back, and his vision began to tunnel as the large, curly-haired figure of Churl appeared above him, holding a heavy stick.

“This is from Elmra,” the farmhand said gruffly. “For what you told her father. Learn to keep your mouth shut, half-breed.”

“Oh, that’s rich coming from your half-giant ass,” Marl thought briefly before the stick slammed into his stomach, doubling him up around it. Another blow fell across his back, and mercifully, darkness reached out to welcome him in its embrace.