Threatened from all sides as they are, the pyres of the Dominion must maintain a united front. Direct military conflicts between pyres are unheard of, and the use of holy fire against humans would be unspeakable. All matters of state which might lead to violence, such as the punishment of criminals, are delegated to the Lugal and his flamekeepers. Disagreements between pyres are to be resolved peacefully—and yet, humans being human, conflicts continue. When diplomacy fails, or when the rules are otherwise inconvenient, the Dominion turns to the men and women known as blackbands. They exist to solve the problems that cannot be spoken of, and to satisfy needs which cannot officially exist. They are utterly necessary, and necessarily unloved.

Ram was still tired and sore when they made their triumphal return to Dul Karagi. Something about the bazu’s spells seemed to linger in his body, making his fingers tingle and twitch, or his muscles tighten up, at random intervals. The headache, too, persisted for some time. It wasn’t a bad headache, only a faint tension from his jaw up to his temples that refused to go away.

It might have been aggravated by his surroundings. All the long march home, he was surrounded by jubilant soldiers, laughing and joking now that the war was done and they would live to see the next bloom. He gathered they’d all been there watching when the rookery was destroyed, and cheered it till the sky shook. And why shouldn’t they? They thought they’d been avenged, after all, that they were watching a whole fortress full of their enemies being burned alive.

Ram knew he’d done that bloody work himself, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He could hardly be proud of what he’d done, cutting down a pack of crippled freaks, then nearly getting killed by their master. Now that he’d had time to think it over, the whole thing stank. Whoever was paying Ushna had awfully deep pockets, and apparently wasn’t connected to any lugal or ensi. They could have done the same thing much more easily with a forced march on the evening of the battle. Somebody else wanted those bazuu dead, and was willing to pay dearly for it for some reason. Ram had a feeling that reason had nothing to do with preserving the human race.

There was a feast for the survivors at Dumenshina Beacon, with roasted beef and great jars of beer delivered via skybarque. Ram drank to the fallen with his sworn brothers, and tried to enjoy the best meal of his life without thinking of Beshi and the rest, their ashes mixed with the sand blowing over a line of glass in the wilderness. Beshi had been all right, after all. He was nobody’s hero, nobody special, but he hadn’t caused any harm. And nobody would remember him.

The handmaidens led the procession back through the north gate of Dul Karagi a few days later, clapping their hands and singing hymns. The flamekeepers came next, marching with their swords held high for the cheering crowds on the rooftops. The militia were last, hefting their crowhammers in their battle-worn coats—but, for once, they got their share of praise. Many more Karagenes had family in the militia than in the flamekeepers, or had once been militia themselves. They knew who the heroes were. It wasn’t much consolation, but Ram would take it.

With the harvest and the campaign both ended, the militia, like the rest of the pyre, had several months of relative liberty to look forward to. The bondservants would walk their fields alone for a time, weeding, mending their own homes, and killing anything that tried to snitch from the winter crop. They needed no supervision for that; they were guarding their own food now.

So Ram and the rest would have only brief daily patrols to keep them, and any other idle hands about the pyre, out of mischief. In between came long hours of rest at barracks, epic drinking sessions at the common hall where they served public meals, and casual strolls through the streets in their new veterans’ colors. The Karagenes knew those colors, and respected them; Ram got more than one free meal that way. He met Kamenrag once, but the flamekeeper avoided his eyes, and even moved slightly out of his way. Whatever Ushna’d said to him, it had worked.

It all added up to a pleasantly pointless way to live, and he could see how some of the others were already tempted to sign back up again for another bloom. Now that they had been through the worst once, the terror had receded, and all of them had the sense that they could look out for themselves now. Enduring a few hours of fear wasn’t so bad, was it, next to this easy life? Ram couldn’t deny the seductive appeal of this particularly masculine brand of stupidity, even as he knew the Lugal was counting on it. They weren’t getting their half-silver a tetrad to walk around with cudgels getting free food and cheers. This was recruiting season. Izilbeshi had signed up around this time last bloom.

All the same, he enjoyed it for more than a month, and pushed the battle and the rookery firmly to the back of his mind, the more so because he knew he’d already bound himself to a still more uncertain way of life, for an indefinite term. It was better to forget that, as long as he could.

It all came back one afternoon, near the nadir of the bloom, when he was lying down in his bunk waiting for dinner. He was on friendly enough terms with the men in his company now—he wasn’t “Urapu” anymore—and he was going back and forth on the idea on joining them for one of their celebrations for a change. From what little he heard, Mother and Father were getting on well back home; they’d had to cut back a bit, but Father had been keeping a low profile since losing the arm, and Mother got a lot more sympathy without his loud mouth annoying the Council. There was even talk of a small pension—

“Hey, Ram!” His new patrol-mate Busugarta stuck his head into Ram’s bunk. “You got a visitor.”

Ram froze. He never got visitors. “Ugly older guy, dirty coat, talks too much?”

Busu gave him a strange look. “No, it’s a girl, with a great ass, and she don’t mind you looking, neither. Asked for you by name. What, you don’t know her? Tell you what, if you don’t want to go, I can be ‘Rammash,’ just for today. You know, as a favor. I sure’s hell wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m coming,” he said, levering himself out of bed.

“Yeah, figgered you would,” Busu muttered. Ram ignored him.

A barefaced young woman in a long purple dress with slits up both sides stood in the street outside their barracks, brushing her hair and ostentatiously ignoring all the men gawking out the windows at her. The black sash around her hips only made her more intriguing. She smelled more like flowers than berries today, and gave him a radiant smile as he stepped out the door. “Hi! Are you Rammash? My name’s Darun. Ushna sent me to get you.”

Did she recognize him? Ram didn’t think so. No mention of his dumb face this time. Apparently putting her hands in a stranger’s pockets, and her tongue in his mouth, wasn’t the sort of thing that stuck in her memory. Ram was torn between disappointment, indignation, disgust, and irrational yearning. But now Darun’s smile was starting to fade, so he said, “Nice to meet you. Where’s he at, the Red Flute?”

“We wouldn’t stay anywhere else. Come on, it’s dinnertime. Our food’s way better than the junk they give you at the public trough.” She threw a companionable arm over his shoulder and dragged him off, chattering gaily. He couldn’t say what about, because all of his attention was consumed by the question of what to do with his own arm. Putting it around her waist was a highly attractive option, but not really “friendly,” while putting it on her shoulder would make walking a little awkward and leaving it to dangle seemed standoffish …

Ushna could easily have come here himself, Ram reflected. Maybe it was recruiting season for blackbands, too.

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The Red Flute wasn’t all that far from their barracks—both were on the south side of the pyre. Like most of the Karagenes, Ram diligently avoided getting near the place, even when he was on patrol; none of the local criminals were stupid enough to annoy the blackbands, and the blackbands themselves were the flamekeepers’ problem. The building was a full five floors, its front wall painted with an enormous dancing girl playing the namesake flute, twisting her body around the windows. The whole bottom floor was occupied by stables, so that they had to go up a flight of stairs to get to the dining area.

It was a larger room than Ram expected, crammed with customers reclining on fine but well-worn hardwood furniture. Not surprisingly, almost all of them wore black somewhere on their body, and few of them had any scruples about putting their feet, or other body parts, on the table. One whole side of the room was occupied by a real wood-fired oven—no handmaidens here—and a dozen or so men and women sweating away at or around it.

Bal and Ushna were sitting at a table in the far corner, together with an old man and a familiar, unsettling hooded shape. Darun threaded her way easily through the crowd, and threw herself casually down next to Bal, waving a hand at the one other free chair as she did. It happened to be right next to the sinister hooded girl, the one who’d been with Darun on Ram’s first day in the pyre; Ram settled down gingerly.

“So glad you could make it, Rammash,” Ushna said from the witch-girl’s far side, shouting a bit over the noise of discussion. “I’d like you to meet Imbri and Shazru,” he said, pointing to the witch and the old man in turn. The old man—he looked about sixty-five, but in good shape, with a long face and waggling beard that reminded Ram of a goat—nodded politely to him; the witch didn’t even turn his way. Ram gave them a brief smile, before Ushna went on:

“I assume Darun introduced herself; she’s not known for shyness. And that’s all of us—the Damadzus are a relatively compact organization, focusing on small-scale, high value operations. Mostly simple trade in articles of a politically delicate nature, typically of non-Dominion origin. Each of us has a specialized role—Shazru, for example, is our medic and liaison with the tinapi. Your precise place within this structure remains to be defined, and the question will be deferred as agreed.

“Now, on to unsettled business. I apologize for not getting to it sooner, but our other affairs occupied us longer than I had anticipated.”

He reached into his pocket and plunked three metal hoops down on the table, gesturing for one of the staff with his other hand as he did. Ram looked at them; they were yellow, but not copper. He stared blankly for some time before realizing that they must be gold. He’d never seen one in gold before. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen gold at all, in fact.

“What’s that?”

“Payment for services rendered,” Ushna said, showing his bronze tooth. “Your promised fee, plus share in bounties, the proceeds of the spoils, and of course a full gold for our friend the abizu.”

“The what?” Ram said, feeling quite lost. He was looking at more than triple the value of the loan Mother had gotten from her father, and the idea was taking some time to sink in.

“Abizu. You might recall it as the distinguished-looking individual with the variegated plumage and the penchant for thaumaturgical homicide. It would be simplest to think of it as a bazu lugal.” When Ram continued staring, he added, “I have deducted somewhat for the trouble about your problem Kamenrag; we had to explain the difficulty to his commander, who made rather a nuisance of himself. I can’t recall how much we had to give him, so we rounded down. Now kindly pick up your fee, we’ll be needing the table space.”

Ram took the tanbirs—they were wonderfully solid and heavy in his hand—but didn’t pocket them. He’d just been given a tremendous amount of money, somewhere in the area of a full bloom’s salary—certainly more than his life was worth to anyone who might see them. And what was he going to do with them? The whole point of taking on work here was to send money to Mother and Father, but this was far more than he could ever have saved up in the militia so soon. He didn’t care to tell them how he got three gold, but keeping it for himself didn’t feel right either.

“Rammash, do you want anything in particular? The kebabs are wonderful here.”

He looked up; a serving girl was standing over them, looking impatient. “Sure, kebabs sound good.” The tanbirs went in his pocket. They would keep the family afloat for at least a bloom; he could worry about the rest later.

To Ram’s surprise, there was no more talk of business—no more attempts to con him into desertion, or to extract favors from him. Ushna did bring up the rookery, but only to dramatize Ram’s role there for everyone in earshot. Ram ate his excellent spiced lamb kebab, and pretended not to listen. The rest of the conversation was about things he didn’t understand, and moved past him like the wind through the cedars: old war stories, bragging contests, the state of trade in places he’d never been, deals with people he’d never heard of. He gave up trying to follow it all. It wasn’t his world yet.

The Red Flute didn’t care how long its clientele stuck around after dinner; most of them would be sleeping there. At some point after the skewers were stripped clean—after he’d had three mugs of good beer, two bowls of herb-scented rice, countless raisins and dried figs, and some exquisite almond cookies—the small army of blackbands stood up en masse to shove the tables up against the walls, and broke out the pipes and drums.

The old man Shazru claimed his dancing days were behind him; Ushna said he was too full. Bal might not even have understood the concept. So Darun turned on Ram (who was feeling quite full himself, and more than reluctant, but couldn’t quite move his tongue to say so) and dragged him out into the center of the room.

He’d never seen or experienced such a thing; at Urapu, dancing was left to adults, for whom it was more social ritual than entertainment. If he’d stayed there, he’d have been introduced to the circle on the first full moon after his birthday, and taken his place in the community by holding hands with a girl of roughly equivalent age and rank and solemnly processing around the tower in lockstep with dozens of other couples.

Since coming to the pyre, he’d learned that there were other kinds of dance as well—the others in the militia went out from time to time—but he had a dark suspicion that those were all gateways to what Mother called “dissipation,” “iniquity,” or “social disease.” That he didn’t quite know what any of those things were only made them more unnerving.

Now he was caught up in a storm of stomping, clapping, and twirling such as he’d never witnessed or imagined. Skirts were raised and legs were thrown, men leaped and women laughed, and Darun was in the heart of it all, taut as harp’s string, quivering with the rhythm of the moment. It was all Ram could do to keep out of everyone’s way. He knew he looked stupid, and certainly felt it.

It didn’t matter. The beer was good, the room was dim, and Darun smelled like flowers and honey. By the third song the music had seeped deep down into his bones, and he could forget who and where he was. By the fifth he could put his hands confidently on her hips and feel her lean back against him at the end of a spin. She put her hands over his, and pushed them ever so slightly lower, before springing away with a laugh for the look on his face.

He was delirious, caught up somewhere between hunger, rage, and joy. This was a revelation, a secret window into a world without fear or shame or hesitation, and just knowing that there were people who lived their whole lives this way, who had never been Belemel the vagrant’s son, tinged it all with a desperate melancholy.

All too soon the music ended, Darun kissed him on the cheek, and he had nowhere to go but back out the door and down the steps, not so much a walk as a barely-controlled fall. The hours had passed him by unobserved; he could see that the moon was high. So this was dissipation? It seemed like it would be worth another try sometime.