“Who do we tell?” Ram asked, once he’d recovered from the shock. “Etana, or Piridur?”

“You can tell either,” Imbri said, “if you want, but I wouldn’t hurry to do it. It’s not like they can do anything with this information, after all.”

“Fair point.” They all knew that they more or less had to kill Mannagiri for life to return to normal anyway, and having one more reason to do it wouldn’t tell them how. “It does make the situation a lot more urgent, though. If he’s not out by the next bloom, we’ll have to kill a hundred innocent indwelt men, or let the Dominion die.”

“If only a hundred innocent people have to die to end this, we’ll be lucky. Your Dominion kills thirty innocent people every decade just to keep running, and that’s the ones the public knows about. As for urgency, one day won’t make a difference, and frankly I don’t feel like walking down all those stairs again just to have Etana bitch at us for bringing him bad news. It can wait. What else do we have to do here?”

“Well, it’s the end of the day now, I think.” It was hard to gauge from inside the Temple. “All the actual business will be over, and the handmaidens who work outside will be pouring back in to get to bed in a little bit. But, if you don’t mind climbing more stairs, I’d like to have you with me while I look around here.”

“I’m unlikely to have any new or valuable insights about the magic of this place.”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that I don’t want to do it alone. If that makes any sense.”

Imbri frowned. “I was under the impression that none of these women could hurt you. The acolytes can’t fight at all. Keeping Bal around for a bodyguard seems like overkill.”

“It’s not that.”

“Explain, then. Why do you feel the need to haul me all up and down this bloodstained brickheap of yours?”

“Because … there are parts of this building I know very well now, even though I’ve never set foot in them. They aren’t very large parts, and they’re all high up, but I know every inch of them. I want to go there in person, I can’t face it alone, and there’s nobody for miles around I can trust more than I trust you. I know you don’t like me, but you’re the closest thing to a friend I’ve got here.”

Imbri pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re a little old to be scared of the dark, Ram.”

“Imbri. Please.”

She sighed. “It’s not like I have anything better to do, I suppose. Lead on.”

“Thank you.” It was easy enough to avoid running into company; everyone who stayed in the Temple in the daytime was gathered together in one spot at present, a massive clump of haranuu not far away. On an impulse, Ram tiptoed in that direction, following his own spirit, the sound of low chatter, and the smell of, if he wasn’t mistaken, a very nice pigeon stew.

The refectory—he thought that was the word for it—was a huge square, big enough for four long rows of low glass-topped tables, each with at least a hundred little girls sitting at it on deep red cushions. One end of the hall was capped with a table full of grown (mostly elderly) handmaidens, while ten acolytes spread out at the matching table on the far side. In between was a mostly ordered scene of cheery domesticity, lit by a flickering constellation of tiny lights near the ceiling; the rule appeared to be that everybody provided their own light as they felt like it, each taking over for her neighbor when one got too distracted to keep it going and another got annoyed by the sudden darkness.

A short ways down from the shadowy entrance Ram was lurking in, a pack of tweens kept half an eye on a pair of toddlers while they chatted and picked at their own bowls. One two-bloom-old, evidently bored, started heating up her metal cup; the red glow alerted her nearest minder, who slapped her knuckles to make her stop. She promptly squalled, and the older girls rushed to comfort her. A few seats down, an eight-bloom-old had finished early, and was precision-burning an inscription into a tiny pigeon bone for her admiring friends.

Over their heads, around the midpoint of the hall, a lone scarlet napkin was sailing through the air, puffed hither and thither by covert updrafts. The game, Ram felt sure, was to see how long its hidden pilots could keep it up without losing track of it, crashing it into someone’s bowl, or getting caught. They weren’t really being that secretive, and Ram assumed the adults would agreeably fail to notice so long as the cloth never rose to a really offensive height. There was no way that flying napkins were a recent development, in this hall. Generations of women—including the old ladies at the end of the hall—had grown up playing those same tricks, and they would keep playing them for centuries into the future.

But Ram had no memory of this room, which meant it was no place for an ensi, even if he was still wearing his fancy layered coat. The sight of a bearded young man would terrify—or mortify—them, and they were likely to burn Etana’s nice present off his back before he could explain himself. So he moved on, with Bal guiding Imbri behind him.

He didn’t know the way to the high sanctum of his memories, but it was a simple matter of taking every stair leading up, pausing en route to commandeer a dulsphere from an empty bedroom. There were no false leads; every flight of stairs up led to a smaller set of corridors, with fewer ways up. Eventually he came to a place barred, like the tunnels out of Misishi, by a locked iron grate. Beshi cut it open in an instant.

“They put this gate here to keep nosy women from sneaking up here,” he explained as he passed through it, “or some of the healthier boys from escaping. They weren’t locked the last time I came up here, to see the Painted Room. At least, I don’t remember passing through any. They must have locked them since, to hide the evidence.” He coughed; the dragging iron door had stirred up dust from the floor.

“From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem like they’d need to.” She was a bit out of breath after all the stairs, but she’d avoided the dust. “Aren’t handmaidens terrified of the ens?”

“Most of them, yeah. And most of the boys were terrified of disobedience. But some of them might have been suspicious, after all the screwy stories they heard about me. And there were always exceptions.” A boy, thirteen, with a stutter and a harelip. A girl, twelve, sullen and lonely, friendless after her family lost its money. They meet one day, when he sneaks away from the acolytes and she needs a place to cry in private. They are scared, at first. Then curious. They talk a while. He makes her laugh. They agree to meet again—

Imbri’s cane thwacked into his ankles, and the memory released him at once. “Hey! Stop that!”

“What’s wrong? Are we there yet?”

“No, sorry. Just distracted. There’s another stair here.” The Painted Room was right down the hall, but he didn’t intend to go back there just yet. “There’s a lot of history here. Maybe not history. Bad memories.”

A boy holds his brother in the dark, the two of them squeezed together on a narrow cot. In a month, he will burn. Ten blooms later, his brother will follow. The acolytes have turned a blind eye to their special friendship, let his en come up the stairs to visit him every day. He doesn’t want to burn, doesn’t want to leave his brother behind. His en tries to comfort him; they’ll be together again in time. He isn’t sure if he believes it, himself. Can they meet again, beyond the fire?

Imbri hmphed as she followed him up the stairs. “I understand that you’re still angry about everything that’s happened to you. I can’t blame you for that. It makes sense that you’d be angry. But you need to understand that all those memories you have now, their lives have nothing to do with yours. You can be angry for them, but don’t get that confused with you feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I’m not.” Imbri snorted. “Really, I’m not! Gelibara should have been honest with me, and so should Jushur, and Shimrun, and everybody else, but they’ve all paid for it, one way or another. And I have to admit that Gelibara was right: if I had to make the choice all over again, knowing everything I do now, I’d still accept this.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Seriously?”

“Not all of it, obviously. If I’d had any damn idea what was going on, I wouldn’t have made the same choices. Mannagiri would still be safely locked away, or better yet decapitated, and hopefully Rumshiza would still be standing and Darun would still be pretty. I might have saved Urapu, even, though I can’t think how. A lot of things would be different, hopefully. But if I had to choose between burning for the pyre and having me, Father, and my baby brother die, and Mother wishing she had? That’s a pretty easy choice.”

Imbri’s face was a perfect picture of disgust, even by the poor light of the sphere in Bal’s free hand.

“I know, you’re a Moonchild. But I’d rather be an ensi than one of those poor bastards out working the fields, or in Ganteg’s quarry line. I get to live before I die, and when I die, it’ll mean something. Anyway, I don’t get to choose again, so it doesn’t matter. The important question is what to do moving forward. We’re here, by the way. No more stairs.”

“Great. Where’s ‘here’?”

“The ensis’ cage.” The rooms of the junior ens were on the same floor as the Painted Room, at the top of the Temple’s third tier. They’d left both behind them. The Ensi’s bedroom took up the entire fourth tier, with a door leading out onto the terrace so the master of the pyre could stroll around the building and get the best possible view of everything that depended on him dying.

The fifth tier, over their heads, contained nothing at all—it was a solid ten-foot-tall mass of masonry, topped with an immensely thick slab of pure rock crystal. There was a ladder of recessed rungs in its side, if Ram cared to go up, but he’d only ever need to go up there once, and not come down after. He doubted whether his haranu would even let him ascend now, with the fire still burning hot, or that he could force himself to make the effort.

A boy of sixteen stands at the foot of the ladder. He’s only been indwelt a single bloom, and the last ensi drove a smuggled knife into his own brain two days ago. It’s been a lot to take in, and he doesn’t understand half the things in his head. But today is the bloom—no, the kindling. The fire is a fading ember. There’s no time for questions, the acolytes say. He’s going to die, and there’s no use complaining about it. But first, they tell him, he has to climb up to the top of the ladder on his two club feet. They haven’t done all the operations they planned, now that he has the spirit to heal him. His haranu burns hot and urgent …

“There’s nothing left in this room,” he told Imbri. “There used to be a cot against the wall, but Shimrun had Pimna burn it. The chest for his clothes, too. He even smashed the old chamber-pot; he had no intention of ever living in this room. And that’s all this bedroom ever had. The walls are blank. The acolytes brought every ensi his meals. He could talk to them, sleep, pray, and think about death. Nothing else.

“Really, it’s even worse than the Painted Room. At least down there, they had each other. Here, there’s nothing. Nothing at all, except the memories of everyone who’s spent the last blooms of his life before you in this same place, sleeping in the same bed, thinking about everything he’s screwed up and why he deserves what’s coming to him and how much longer he’s got to wait until he can end it.” He was breathing faster now, though the stairs hadn’t winded him at all.

“Ram. You were talking about moving forward. This might not be the best place to get in the right frame of mind for that.”

“I need to be here, Imbri. At least once. I need to face this room.” A twenty-bloom-old man stands at the edge of the terrace, crying, while an acolyte pleads with him from the doorway. His legs are tired, and he’s scared of the drop, but he doesn’t want to step away. He didn’t mean to scare the ladies. He only wanted to see what was happening down there. Even when they warned him not to, he had to keep looking. He had to learn more. What did he do wrong?

Ram stepped out the door, onto the terrace. It was past sunset now, and the handmaidens were streaming back in from the fields and factories where they’d spent the day. It was past harvest, and there was little for the women to do in the fields, but a few skybarques were floating down to their landing-place to the east, on the roof of the acolytes’ school.

“We’re almost three hundred feet over the pyre here,” he called back into the room. “It’s not much of a view now, with the fire burning low and the sun down, but by day you can see for miles. Every Ensi spends most of his day telling himself stories about what he sees from this ledge. They don’t understand a bit of it, really, since they’ve spent their whole lives in here. They go inside, and ask the acolytes questions. The acolytes always turn the answer around to emphasize—“

“How much depends on the ensis dying. I get it, Ram. I get it. Moving. Forward?”

Ram took a deep breath. “That’s the thing. How do I move forward, here and now? Etana told me today that there’s nothing for me to do here. The acolytes and handmaidens do their work, and don’t need my help. Etana’s flamekeepers too. I can tell them what I want them to do, but they have no reason to listen. I wouldn’t listen to me either, in their place. I haven’t earned their trust.”

“Ram—”

“There are ninety-some thousand people out there, and I used to think that, if any one of them heard the Ensi needed a favor, they’d have dropped everything to obey. Just like I did.” Sort of. “If I’m going to accomplish anything, I need to be that kind of ensi, the kind of man you respect, the kind of man you love. But nothing I can do by myself—taking over handmaidens, throwing the fire around—none of that earns you respect or love. Only fear.”

“You’ve been here a single day. That’s a bit soon to expect any kind of loyalty or devotion.”

“I know. That’s how I used to think too, that I could win them over. Today changed that. I can’t afford to wait a long time, now that we’re at war. Mannagiri hasn’t given up, and I don’t think Etana can stop him. He might be the security expert, but he doesn’t know how to fight a priest.”

“And you do?”

“No. But I’m more likely to learn. I know what one of us can do, better than he does. I know our powers and our limits. I’ve met Mannagiri in person.” He paused to check—Ninshuma’s little spark was still where he’d left it, in one of the southeast slums. Etana had a small army of men staking the place out to catch her accomplices before they killed her, and Ram didn’t doubt she could get past every one of them if she felt the need. It was amazing what you could do, when you didn’t care who you had to kill. Mannagiri had none of Ram’s problems. Even by Haranduluz’s standards, it didn’t seem fair.

Ram sat down on the terrace. Dozens of handmaidens were walking up the stairs below, many of them hauling supplies on their backs. Usually bonded servants would do that kind of drudge-work; Nusun had apparently taken Ram’s instructions about minding the door quite literally. “If he can be beaten at all, they’ll need my help to do it. Help they don’t want.”

“That’s quite a problem. But it’s hardly unique.”

“Is that so? How many times have you run into this situation before?”

“Not this exact situation. But it’s the same problem everyone has in a new job: earning the respect needed to do respectable work. Blackbands deal with it all the time. Nobody takes a new blackband seriously until he’s done something worth noticing, which he can’t do until somebody gives him a chance at it, which they won’t because why would they trust something like that to a nobody?”

“So how do blackbands get started?”

“Usually they join onto existing outfits, like you did. You still have no idea how much money you threw in the seep when you wrecked the Damadzu name.”

“Joining a famous ensi gang isn’t an option for me, unless you know one that’s hiring.”

“That’s just the most convenient way. There’s also the more patient strategy of starting with very small jobs to build up a reputation, but you’ve ruled that out already. The last choice is doing something reckless, pulling it off, and getting props for sheer bravado. There are a couple of famous names who started off by pulling heists or assassinations that should have gotten them killed, but succeeded by luck and nobody expecting anyone to be stupid enough to try what they did. Like Rasha Dai.”

“Shennai killed Rasha Dai’s whole gang to get me out of this pyre, so that’s not very comforting. Anyway, I’m a little lost in this metaphor. What’s my big heist?”

“I thought that would be obvious. Kill Mannagiri. After that, every other problem is trivial.”

“After doing the impossible? Most things are.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible. It’s just not amenable to the kind of tools lugals are used to wielding. Your enemy can’t be overwhelmed with raw force, he doesn’t seem to care about diplomacy or trade at this point, and blackbands don’t stand a chance. But the way you put it, that’s almost a good thing. If it’s a problem only you can solve, so much the better. Maybe it takes an ensi to kill an ensi.”

“But … that’s …”

“I’m not suggesting it’s easy or obvious. Only that it’s going to take something radical, something unconventional, to win. If they can’t dislodge him with an army of flamekeepers, an army of flamekeepers with you leading them won’t do any better. So don’t start with ‘oh, if only I had help.’ Start with Mannagiri’s weak points, and ask yourself how you, and only you, can take advantage of them.”

“His weak point would be his reliance on his handmaidens. I’ve been trying to talk them over, through Shennai and Pimna. They’ve stopped listening.”

“Maybe that’s not it, then. But you should still proceed under the assumption that there’s a way forward. You have nothing to lose and a tremendous amount to gain. Mannagiri’s holding the entire upper half of the Teshalun at knifepoint right now. You couldn’t possibly buy more credibility than you’d earn by finding the way to take him down. So focus on that. Solve that problem, and you’ve as good as solved all the others. Fail, and all the others don’t even matter.”

“I didn’t expect you to be so optimistic.”

“This isn’t optimism, it’s pure practicality. I’m a blind half-breed orphan bastard. If I hadn’t assumed there was something I could do to help myself, I’d have died blooms ago. Instead I built up a pretty good life, before you wrecked it again. Your situation is easy by comparison.”

“Maybe you’re right.” The pyre was mostly dark below him, only a few twinkling lights of oil lamps or the odd dulsphere. The workshops were cold and dark without their women, lit only by the waning pillar of light above Ram’s head. Ten or twenty thousand people lived in those buildings, with several times as many spread out over the hundreds of square miles of fields beyond. And he could change their lives, all of them, for the better. All he had to do was face down a madman with the power of a god, and bring back his head for a trophy.